O Jerusalem

by Laurie R. King

  “You are in a storage room in the top of our house. My name is Sarah.”

  “And where is this house, Sarah?” I asked patiently. The child was even younger than I had thought.

  “In Ram Allah,” she replied, which meant nothing to me at the moment.

  “Where are my friends?” Much as I wanted the continued bliss of ignorance, memory was pushing against my mind with increasing urgency.

  “Uncle Mahmoud went away after he brought you here, but he said he would be back. Ali went with him.”

  And then it was all there, the car, the crash, and blood. My mouth, already dry and foul tasting, turned slowly to shoe leather and the cold began to trickle down my spine. “What about the other men?” I demanded in English, and when the child looked at me nervously, I put the sentence together in Hebrew.

  “There were no other men,” she said, puzzled.

  “A car?”

  “It was wrecked. That’s how you got hurt, Uncle Mahmoud said, but we weren’t to let anyone find you, so that’s why we put you up here. It isn’t very nice,” she confided, wrinkling her nose and glancing at the cobwebs.

  None of her speech registered, only the fact that Holmes was not here. And hadn’t there been a driver? I couldn’t seem to remember what we had been doing and where, but I knew Holmes had been with me, and now he was not.

  I could not lie here, not knowing; I had to know, and the first step was to move. Pain came with motion, but no agony, nothing broken or dislocated, as I shifted over onto my right side and began to slide my feet over the side of the low bed. I set my left hand against the coarse sheet in front of my chest, glanced down at it, and froze: It was caked with some dry and flaking red-brown substance. I lay back and brought my hands up before my eyes in the feeble light, and saw on both hands the same cracked brown stain smeared across skin, palm, fingernails.

  There was blood on my hands.

  “We were going to wash you but Uncle Mahmoud said it was better to let you sleep. It isn’t your blood,” the child said, trying to comfort me. I closed my eyes and, putting my hands beneath me again, slowly levered myself up until I was sitting. My head gave a violent throb, my stomach heaved, but my feet were on the floorboards and I did not actually pass out, just sat with my head collapsed forward onto my knees, waiting for the worst to fade.

  There was an exclamation from the doorway, and the child Sarah scrambled to her feet and flew across the room. I could not summon the reserves to raise my head, so my first sight of Rahel was her bare feet.

  “My daughter, I thought I told you to come and fetch me when our guest awoke.” Her Hebrew was sweet on my ears; for a brief moment she sounded like my mother.

  “Sorry, Mama. I was just going to come.”

  The woman had a lovely voice, and her hand on the side of my neck was cool. She did not seem to be feeling for a pulse or estimating fever, but rather was conveying sympathy and comfort, and I could have slumped on that pallet with her hand on my neck and her words in my ears for the rest of my life. Instead I asked her a question.

  “There was another man in the car. Two other men. What … happened to them?”

  “One is dead and one missing.”

  “Which?” I had to force the question out, past my closed throat and the pounding in my head.

  “The driver was killed. That is his blood you have on your—” She made a startled noise and caught my shoulders, said something rapid and urgent to the child, and held me firmly as her daughter scurried out of the room and came back a minute later carrying a bottle and a glass.

  The brandy steadied my head and brought my stomach back to earth, and after a while, moving with great caution, I sat straight up. The oil lamp on the tea-chest stopped whirling. My head continued to throb, but I thought perhaps it would not actually come off my shoulders.

  “Where have Mahmoud and Ali gone?”

  “They went to look for your friend. He was taken away by the men who attacked your car.”

  “When?”

  “You were set upon at about noon. It is now ten o’clock at night. They left you here perhaps seven hours ago. How are you feeling?”

  “I will live.”

  “Nausea? Dizziness?” she asked in English.

  “Not too bad.” It seemed more natural to remain in Hebrew—the switching back and forth made me feel dizzy.

  She reached behind her and took up the lamp. “Look at me,” she ordered, and held the flame up between us, moving it slowly back and forth while she stared into my eyes. She was not satisfied with whatever she saw there, or didn’t see, and paused with the lamp in her hand.

  “You look bad,” she said frankly.

  I couldn’t assemble enough coherent thoughts to come up with a lie, so I simply gave her the truth. “I am beset by memory. I was in a motorcar accident some years ago, and this one has brought back … unpleasant things. It’s not a concussion,” I added, using the English noun. “I’ve had one before, and this is not as bad.” My hand went up to explore the outside of my skull.

  “Good.” She put the lamp back on the tea-chest. “Could you eat?”

  “I don’t know. Tea would be a blessing.”

  “I will send Sarah up with some, and bring your supper in a short time. My name is Rahel. I ought to warn you, do not make any noise if you can avoid it. Mahmoud thought you were best hidden away.”

  My two hostesses left me. Further explorations revealed one large and tender lump behind my right ear, an abraded shoulder, a scraped elbow, and many amorphous aches. Whatever had hit us, I seemed to have been fortunate. Even my spectacles, which I picked up from the table, were relatively undamaged, aside from two parallel scratches on the side of the right lens and a certain wobbly feeling as I put them on.

  I was considering the risks of being on my feet when Sarah came back and saved me from immediate action. The tea she poured with great concentration from the brass beaker was mint, and sweet, and although it was not what I had in mind, it continued the work the brandy had begun. By the time Rahel returned with a tray, I was positively ravenous.

  A light soup, a piece of bread, a small glass of harsh red wine, and I felt considerably more real. The next goal was to be upright, and with Rahel’s assistance I achieved that, keeping a wary eye on the low rafters.

  “Where am I?” I asked her as I hobbled up and down experimentally, her hand on my elbow.

  “Ram Allah. About ten miles from Jerusalem, just off the Nablus road. You are in the attic of the inn. I am the innkeeper.”

  “It is very generous of you to take me in,” I ventured. It was difficult to know precisely what arrangement Mahmoud had with this woman, and surely not wise to make assumptions.

  “Mahmoud has helped me; I help him. He saved my life and the life of my daughter in the war. You have heard of the Nili?”

  The name popped an immediate reaction into the front of my mind, loosed from some dim corner. “Netzach Israel lo Ishakar,” I said promptly. “‘God will not forsake Israel.’ The spy operation run by … the Aaronsons?”

  “Yes. My husband and I had an inn in Nazareth until the spring of last year. Men talk in inns, and we sent a great deal of information to your government, until we were betrayed to the Turks. I was a dear friend of Aaronsons sister, who … died after being tortured by the Turks. A week later, they killed my husband. Mahmoud rescued Sarah and me, and brought us here. He can ask a great deal more from me than hiding a friend in the attic.”

  I moved free from her support and walked slowly down the length of the room. “I cannot stay here.”

  “Where would you go?”

  That was indeed a poser. Still, I could not simply sit. With every degree of returning energy came two notches of anxiety for Holmes. Who had taken him, and why? I found I was standing in front of Rahel.

  “Did they tell you nothing?”

  She put out her hand and took my shoulder. “Those two have more soldiers in the field than the British Army. They will find your fri
end, and they will come back for you.”

  She was right, of course. It would be senseless, and no help to Holmes or myself, to go out into the night, in an unknown city, and lose myself as well. But it was very hard.

  And I had no wish to stay in the confines of the attic.

  “Do you have guests in the inn?”

  “The last customers are just leaving.”

  “Servants you don’t trust? Any reason to think there is someone out there looking specifically for me?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  She helped me dress and secure my turban over the lump on my skull. Leaning heavily on her arm, I lurched my decrepit way down two flights of narrow stairs, used the privy, and was given soap, water, and a stiff brush to scrub my hands. Sarah was sent to bed, I was settled on a bench in front of the fire with a rug wrapped around me, and Rahel, after throwing wood onto the coals, went off somewhere. I decided that she was hoping if she left me alone, warm and quiet, I might go back to sleep.

  I did not wish to sleep; I was, in fact, leery of sleeping. My bruised brain could not yet piece together what had happened on the drive down from Haifa, but there was a car, and an accident, and a death, and every time I closed my eyes the images that seared across them were those of the automobile accident that had taken my family four years before: vivid, terrifying memories, of my brother’s face and my mother’s scream and nothing at all of my beloved father who was driving, over a cliff and gone in flames, the guilt-saturated stuff of the nightmares that haunted me still. I had never spoken of the accident to Holmes, had told no-one of the death of my family aside from one long-ago psychotherapist. I could not think why I had allowed it to slip out in front of Rahel, but no, I did not wish to risk sleep.

  So I sat propped against the rough plaster wall, watching the flames die down in the hearth and alternating between drowsy half-sleep and abrupt, heart-pounding terror when it was all I could do to keep from tearing open the outer door and shrieking the name of my lost companion and mentor into the night.

  This cycle went on for a couple of tiresome hours, and I had just twitched my way back down into a state of torpor when a stealthy movement somewhere in the building brought all my nerves jangling to life.

  Gritting my teeth, I lifted my head to look into the room.

  Mahmoud stood there; behind him Rahel, with a rifle in her arms and looking very comfortable with it there. The intensity of the joy I felt at seeing him, this phlegmatic, uncommunicative, and utterly trustworthy Arab, took me by surprise. I gulped back the tears of weakness, and murmured, “Salaam aleikum, Mahmoud.”

  “Aleikum es-salaam, Amir,” he replied. “Your injuries were not serious, I am pleased to see.”

  “Have you found Holmes?”

  “We know where he is.”

  “Thank God,” I said explosively in English. I let the rug drop from my shoulders and tried to stand up. Mahmoud instead pulled a stool over in front of me and sat down on it. His dark eyes probed my face.

  “You are in pain,” he noted.

  “It will get slightly worse, then better,” I said. Little point in denying its existence, not with those eyes on me. He thought for a minute, then seemed to make up his mind.

  “You are Inglezi, firengi,” he said: English, a foreigner. “But you are also not firengi. If you were only firengi, if you were nothing but an Englishwoman, I would not have returned here tonight, because the Inglezi have no—they have a different sense of what is honourable. What was done today is a blood insult, you understand? You and your Holmes have eaten our salt, shared our bread. Blood ties exist, you understand?” He was speaking English, but a much simpler English than I had heard him use before. It occurred to me that he was thinking in Arabic and translating as he went. I assured him that I understood what he was talking about, and that I agreed. He continued. “If those ties did not exist, the exercise of retrieving him would be only a task, a service to the English government. Ali and I would do that as we have done other jobs. But this is a matter of honour, and I believe you have the right to be there with us, if you choose.”

  Were I in his shoes, I reflected, I should be asking how badly I in my feeble state might handicap them, but he asked no such question. I met his eyes evenly.

  “I will come, if you will have me.”

  He nodded, and stood up. “There are arrangements to be made; I will return for you,” he told me. After a brief consultation with Rahel he went out. She followed, to return in a couple of minutes with another glass, this one containing two inches of a clear, brownish liquid.

  “This will help you to ignore the pain. It will not remove the pain, but neither will it cloud your mind or slow you down.”

  I drank it, and sat until Mahmoud came and led me away.

  Since desert life is clearly the source of bravery, the more savage the group, the more brave, and the more able to defeat other peoples and take from them their possessions.

  —THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

  felt remarkably well physically, for a person who had been bashed about in a motorcar accident. The bruises were going to be spectacular and my head throbbed mightily, but I was all right, as long as I did not move suddenly or think about the crash. Thinking about it brought on a rush of cold sweat accompanied by dizziness and a roiling stomach: hard, cold panic. So I did not think about it, just pushed it implacably away from me, with such success that I never did remember the details. Instead, I gave all my attention to what Mahmoud was doing, and concentrated my entire being on the thought of Holmes and getting him back.

  We slipped out of the back entrance to Rahel’s inn into the stillness of a Palestinian town at midnight. A third figure fell into place behind us as we passed the back of a shop—not Ali. I thought he carried a long rifle in his arms.

  The town did not take long to leave behind. Mahmoud marched ahead, his swirling robes casting wild shadows in the bright light of the full moon. The road stretched palely on ahead; the lights of Ram Allah dropped behind us, and Mahmoud slowed his pace. When I was beside him he began to speak—in English again, that there might be no misunderstanding.

  “There were three men in the ambush. The car slowed to climb the hill, and the minor land-slide they had engineered across the road ensured that we should slow even more. They shot the driver from the hill behind us and over our right shoulder, and we went straight into a shallow ravine. Very neatly done.

  “The driver was killed. You hit your head on the side of the car when we went off the road. Ali pulled you out. I followed him into the rocks. We waited for Holmes to come, but he did not, and when I went back for him, two men had him in another motorcar that had been hidden around a bend in the road. The third man was still above us with his rifle. An extremely good shot, he was. Had we not left our equipment in Jericho, if I had my rifle, I should have gone after him, but I did not.” He shrugged, as close to an apology as he could come, and I gave him the Arabic hand gesture that said maalesh.

  “You know where these men went?” I asked.

  “Now I do. We have people in that area.”

  “Was he hurt? Holmes?”

  “There was no blood on the road,” he said, a clear equivocation.

  “Was he on his feet?” I insisted.

  “He walked to their car under his own power. They held a gun to his head.”

  “How did they do it? How did they know we would be there?”

  Mahmoud sighed deeply, a sound, I thought, of shame, but did not answer me directly. “I ought never to have submitted to a driver. A car is big and noisy and suited for conquerors in times of peace, not for scribes. I am a man who goes about on foot, and leaving that path was a foolhardy act.”

  “Do you know why?” Why the ambush, why Holmes, why—

  “Not yet,” he interrupted grimly, and then, shifting to Arabic, said, “That is enough of the foreign tongue. We will go quickly and in silence to the house where he is being kept. If we are seen, we may have to kill. It is to be hope
d that the deaths will be few. I, myself, take no joy in death. I am not a believer in the blood feud. If it is done correctly, there will be no killing, but with so little time, it is difficult to lay careful plans, and things may go wrong. I hope, at this time of the night and so soon after he was taken, only a sleeping house will await us, and you will have no need to act. If the house awakes, we may need you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Can I depend on you?” he asked in English.

  “To …?”

  “… Kill,” he finished the phrase. I felt his eyes on me, probing in the moonlight. I stopped, and then I looked at him. His eyes were dark holes surrounded by darkness.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  To my surprise he nodded, in agreement or satisfaction I could not tell, and began to walk again.

  “You will tell me if you begin to feel ill,” he ordered.

  “My head hurts,” I admitted.

  “Of course.”

  That seemed to be the extent of his concerns. We walked perhaps four miles altogether after leaving the town, with the rifle-bearing man trailing behind us, until Mahmoud touched my elbow and led me off the road into an almost imperceptible path through a thicket of some Palestinian cousin of the gorse, all spine and grab. At the bottom of it was a tiny mud hut; in the hut we found Ali. He greeted my arrival with a sour look.

  “You brought him, then,” he said to Mahmoud.

  “She has earned the right,” Mahmoud replied evenly. His deliberate use of the feminine verb ending was reinforced by the optional pronoun, to force Ali into a recognition of my identity, and my presence. The disgusted look on Ali’s face did not change, but he said no more, merely ladled us each a mug of soup from the pot. It was hot and tasted of meat and onions, and I was quite certain Ali had not cooked it.

  “Thank you, Mahmoud,” I said. When my cup was empty, Ali filled it again with soup, laid a piece of flat bread on top, and carried it to the leather flap that served as a door. He knelt down to put it on the stones outside, and came back to the fire. A moment later we heard a faint scrape of shoe-leather on stone as the man out there picked it up and returned to his guard. Ali took out his knife and explored the point with his thumb.