The Mandelbaum Gate

by Muriel Spark

  ‘You could have been arrested by the Israelis,’ Matt said. ‘They’re extremely strict about what goes into their soil.’

  Barbara got ready to leave. She said she had an appointment with a guide.

  ‘Which guide?’

  ‘I went to a travel agent called Ramdez. They’ve got —’

  ‘You mustn’t use Ramdez,’ Freddy said.

  ‘Don’t take on a guide,’ Matt said. ‘We’ll take you round. Don’t waste your money.’

  ‘I’ve engaged one, though. This afternoon he’s going to take me to see what he calls “the tomb of Solomon, son of David, the ex-Jewish king”.’

  Joanna said, ‘Matt will go and pay him off. Stay and look at my puppets instead, then when it’s cool we’ll go for a drive round.’

  ‘You see, you mustn’t,’ Matt said quietly, ‘go round here alone. It’s a question of your Jewish blood.’

  ‘Nobody will know anything about my Jewish blood unless you talk about it.’

  Freddy said, ‘Actually we’ve discussed your position in Jordan quite a bit. Because, you see, it’s more dangerous for you here than I thought it was. I intended to beg you not to come. Anyone with Jewish blood is automatically arrested as an Israeli spy.’

  ‘My passport’s all right,’ Barbara said. ‘I’d call for the British consul if there was any trouble.’

  Their island was beginning to disintegrate. Having said his piece, Freddy felt, in reality, that Miss Vaughan was not in such danger as she had seemed to be in their imagination. Here she stood, calmly, in flesh and blood. As for her being, in fact, a spy…

  ‘I think it would be a bit unfair,’ Joanna said, ‘to involve the British consulate in an incident of that kind.’

  ‘Why?’ said Freddy. Perhaps it was the heat, or his age — he could not fathom it afterwards, although he had no regrets — but Freddy felt much the same irate urge to declare something at this moment as he had felt the day before in the shop when the woman customer was being tiresome with Alexandros. ‘Why, Joanna?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t she appeal to the consulate in the event of her being molested in a foreign country?’

  ‘It’s so much a matter between Arabs and Jews,’ Joanna said. ‘We can’t officially take sides, can we?’

  ‘It’s a blood-feud between Semites,’ Matt said, ‘that’s all it is.’ Joanna said, reproachfully, as if both men were at fault, ‘I’m sure this must be a very embarrassing conversation for Barbara.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be about me,’ Barbara said. ‘You are talking about a situation that’s outside the scope of the consulate.’

  ‘Won’t you sit down, Barbara, while we’re talking?’ Joanna said. ‘What I mean,’ she said to Freddy, ‘is that Barbara’s Jewish blood is outside official range, in a sense.’

  ‘Jewish blood or not,’ Freddy said, ‘the point is, it’s hers, and it has got to be protected by her country.’

  ‘Yes, well, to get back to the individual case,’ Matt said, ‘we know Ramdez. He’s a snooper for his government. He probably knows already about the Jewish part of Barbara’s origins, through his son in Israel.’

  ‘The son is a hostage, then,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Now I think that’s a bit unfair,’ Matt said.

  ‘There is too much talk,’ Barbara said. ‘Everything would be easy if people didn’t talk so much.’

  ‘Why is it unfair?’ Freddy said to Matt. ‘I think it’s a very good point, that Ramdez can’t very well move against Miss Vaughan while his son is in Israel. Young Abdul is a hostage.’

  ‘Because, mad as it sounds, Jewish blood is illegal here. I —Joanna and I — we think it’s a lunatic situation. But it seems a bit unfair of Barbara to tempt the law and risk involving a young Arab in Israel.’

  ‘The trouble with you,’ Freddy said, fully conscious and rather astonished that he was wrecking the delightful atmosphere, ‘is that you blow neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm — What was that passage in the Bible, Miss Vaughan? Can you recall it? — It goes something like, you blow neither hot nor cold and I will spew thee out of my mouth. Something like that. Very apt.’

  4. Abdul’s Orange Groves

  ‘I’m a man of passions and enthusiasms, Mr Hamilton,’ said young Abdul Ramdez. ‘That is to say, I’m passionate in general, but I don’t get worked up about any particular thing for long. In this way I avoid the great Arab mistake, as we have obsessions that leave us exhausted and incapable of action when the time for action comes. Do you know what I say to my Arab friends and also to the friends of my father when they tell me too much, do this, do that, Abdul, in the name of freedom, revenge, unity? I say, okay, okay. But do you know what I say when they ask me again, too much? Do you know what I say then to freedom and revenge, and to Nasser and to Hussein and to the national spirit? Like I’ve told you before, I—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Hamilton, who was plainly enchanted, ‘but don’t say it here, Abdul. There are some terms we English don’t use a great deal of.’

  ‘In childhood I hear many terms by the English army,’ Abdul said.

  ‘Well, of course, the army.’

  ‘Is it me teach you Arabic or you teach me English?’ Abdul inquired.

  Abdul took for granted the fact that he enchanted Frederick Hamilton, because he enchanted everyone, even those who were suspicions of him, except for the high-minded Israelis and Arabs who disapproved of anyone like him on principle, or the police forces of both allegiances. He observed the man who sat in the other arm-chair in this hotel sitting-room. ‘Say me some poetry,’ Abdul said.

  Mr Hamilton sat a little more upright in his chair and recited across the space between them, lit as it was by sunlight dustily filtered through the mosquito-wire window:

  As I ride, as I ride,

  With a full heart for my guide,

  So its tide rocks my side,

  As I ride, as I ride,

  That, as I were double-eyed,

  He, in whom our Tribes confide,

  Is descried, ways untried

  As I ride, as I ride.

  Abdul was amused by this. Earlier in the afternoon he had been going over with Hamilton the rudiments of Arabic versification, which, as Abdul put it, had been handed down unchanged from the eighth century: ‘… only we could begin to make changes now like we could make changes in government, and later on we could change the desert wastes and the sky even, if we could first make changes in ourselves.’

  Hamilton more or less belonged, in Abdul’s view, to that total category of the human race known to Abdul and his companions as the System. It included their fathers, the Pope, President Nasser, King Hussein, Mr Ben-Gurion, the Grand Mufti, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the English Sovereign, the civil servants and upper militia throughout the world and all the other representatives of the police forces of life who, however beneficent, had absent-mindedly put his generation as a whole in difficulties. Abdul spoke often of his ‘generation’. As he was a good deal older than he claimed to be, he meant by this to measure his state of mind rather than his years. He had come early to the conclusion that the easiest method of dealing with the situation, and the one that best suited his personal constitution, was to act with inscrutable folly, to mix up his elders as to his motives, to defeat and exasperate them by transparent guile and hypocrisy, to have no motives at all, but to be enchanting throughout his days. It was not a lonely course; he had many like-minded friends. It had been found and declared by an analytical witchcraftsman that Abdul’s character contained intelligence among other ingredients; he knew largely what he was doing. He had reflected upon himself as an Arab, and decided upon a course. His friend, Frederick Hamilton, who sat with Abdul in the sitting-room of his hotel in Israel, was part of the System. Nevertheless, Abdul liked him, as he was easy to manage and did not make demands for his full money’s worth of Arabic lessons, but rather seemed pleased to sit and talk in English to Abdul, at his appointed hours, for himself alone. In a way, it seemed to Abdul, Hamilton was not aw
are that he was part of the System.

  ‘Say that poem again.’

  As I ride, as I ride—

  ‘It is a fine poem, Mr Hamilton,’ Abdul said when Hamilton had finished.

  ‘It isn’t considered to be so. But it’s interesting because there are forty lines with the same rhyme. It’s by Browning, a famous Victorian poet.’

  ‘I have seen “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” about Robert Browning. It was popular with the Arabs as we have many stories in Arabic like that, where the father forbids the marriage to the daughter and the lovers escape.’

  Mr Hamilton looked at his Arab grammar and said, ‘I suppose we should get on with our work.’

  Abdul did not see any need to reply for a moment or two. He was smelling the room and Mr Hamilton. There were Miss Vaughan’s geraniums, now, in addition to those which Hamilton had always had. Abdul could never smell anything from Hamilton himself, which was just as typical of the man as certain odours were typical of other people. Abdul’s father had always deplored his son’s highly developed sense of smell from his youth up. Joe Ramdez had considered it to be an atavistic trait in Abdul, and thought it was uncivilized of him to cultivate this habit of smelling people in rooms. Abdul claimed that he could ‘smell an enemy’, but his father discovered that Abdul’s enemies were not his enemies, and denied Abdul’s claim to any smelling talent in this direction.

  ‘You could try the next exercises on page fifty-three,’ Abdul said to scentless Mr Hamilton. But he smelt again, and suddenly, holding up his index finger, said ‘Oh!’

  What’s the matter?’ said the Englishman, looking up from page fifty-three.

  ‘I smell your new suit, the fabric.’

  ‘No, it’s an old suit.’ Mr Hamilton opened the jacket and squinted inside the inside pocket. ‘1934,’ he said. ‘It’s marked 1934, so that means I’ve had it for twenty-seven years. It’s older than you, Abdul.’

  ‘It smells,’ Abdul said, groping for the association of the smell, not remotely reflecting that he was, in fact, older than the suit.

  ‘I’ve had it in moth-balls during the summer. I’ve just got it out as the nights seem to be getting chilly.’

  ‘I like moth-ball scent,’ Abdul said. ‘When I served at the altar in Cairo, the Coptic priests smelled of moth-balls as they kept moth-balls among their fine resplendent vestments.’

  ‘I thought you belonged to the Armenian Church.’

  ‘No, the Coptic Church.’ Abdul did not see any need to explain why, a few weeks ago, he had given Hamilton a long account of how he had broken with the Moslem faith to run away with an Armenian girl, to further the wooing of whom he had adopted Armenian Christianity. He did not see any need to refrain from so enjoyably muddling up his friend and he continued to talk of the Coptic Church in Egypt: ‘You see, my father sent me to school in Cairo when he saw that I was too far advanced for any of the schools in Palestine. Many of my friends were sent to school in Beirut but I was sent to Cairo, where I was baptized a Christian in the Coptic Church.’

  ‘What I am not sure about —’ said Mr Hamilton. He was flicking through the notebook on which he had been writing his Arabic exercises for four months since April last.

  It occurred to Abdul that Hamilton was not well. He had already perceived this when he had come into the room, but had immediately veiled the idea from his thoughts, since Hamilton had behaved normally, had said, ‘Well, Abdul, how are you ?’, had got up, smiled in his usual way and sat down, partly distrustful, as usual, and partly enchanted. In the meantime Abdul had sat down, too, and then started to talk about himself, so that the sense of Mr Hamilton’s being not well had passed from him. Abdul noticed now that the man’s hair was not combed well, as it usually was. Otherwise, he looked the same.

  ‘What I’m uncertain about,’ said Hamilton, flicking through his notebook, ‘is whether I’m getting anywhere. It took me a month to learn the Arabic characters. By the end of May I could read and write “The house is small,” “The king is angry with the doctor” and “Is the bride ready? No!”‘

  Abdul laughed and Hamilton smiled eagerly, as If surprised at the success of what he had said.

  “‘News about the experiments reached the upright princes yesterday,”‘ said Hamilton, reading aloud from the textbook. ‘That was last month. Since then I’ve done “Mohammed (may God pray for him!) was a good man”, “Your speech was delightful but you did not mention the blood which flowed in the Arabs’ battles” and so on.’ Abdul laughed again, which Hamilton seemed to appreciate. ‘But I never have occasion to use phrases like that,’ said Hamilton, putting on a sad air; ‘I ought to learn some vocabulary and understand what the Arabs around me are saying, and talk to them, perhaps.’

  Abdul said, ‘The Arabic for the street you learn later, Mr Hamilton. I’m laughing at these exercises as you read them in English, as you make them sound like poetry that means much. Read some more.’

  Hamilton said, ‘What does it mean, that phrase “May God pray for him!”? Do the Moslems ask God to pray? Who does God pray to?’

  ‘It’s only a saying,’ Abdul said, ‘of the elderly people. They say “May God pray for him and save him!” all day, as they speak of their dead relations all the day long.’

  He was watching the Englishman to see how unwell he was, and in what precise way he was afflicted. Hamilton read another exercise: ‘“The students of Damascus University have arrived in Cairo for an important meeting with their Egyptian brethren.” Of course,’ he said, ‘it isn’t true to say I’ve made no progress, but I can’t say that I’m learning enough to mix with ordinary Arabs. I don’t want to master the language like a scholar, I only want to he able to make myself understood while I’m out here, during the next few years. Now I managed to pick up enough Hungarian to get along with when I was posted to Hungary, and I did that by means of conversational lessons rather than schoolroom stuff, and I’m wondering if our best plan isn’t to adopt that method, and —’

  ‘You wish to spy among the Arabs of Israel to report their pro-Israel activities in Jordan,’ stated Abdul, ‘or else you report them to the Israelis for anti-Israel talk.’

  Hamilton said, ‘Good gracious me!’

  Abdul said, ‘I don’t think you are a spy.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ the man replied.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t entertain suspicions of me.’

  ‘Why, Abdul! Why, of course I simply never —’

  ‘I’m difficult for you to understand,’ Abdul said. ‘And we should be turning to page fifty-four.’

  Hamilton translated, ‘Despite what the unbelievers say, the righteous are under the protection of Allah.’

  ‘It’s boring,’ Abdul said. ‘We should make our own exercises, and you could talk better with the Arabs in the street.’

  ‘Entirely what I’ve been thinking,’ said Hamilton. He looked so unwell that Abdul wanted to give him some kindness or make him laugh as one would do a sick child.

  ‘Let us try, for the next lesson, before we come on to particles and conjunctions, some exercises with new words in them. Bad words.’

  This sort of suggestion usually cheered Hamilton up although he always refused to let Abdul go further than that. Once, Hamilton had said, ‘Where did you learn English?’

  ‘Some from my father, some from my mother, but most from a beautiful English schoolmistress that I had when I was fifteen. Her father was a colonel in the British army.’

  Mr Hamilton had said, ‘Did she plant English wild-flower seeds in the countryside, by any chance?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Abdul said. ‘But I planted Arab wild-flower seeds in her. She was my first woman.’

  Hamilton had said, ‘Now, now, now,’ but nebulously smiling meanwhile, as if at some reflection of his own which Abdul could not share. Hamilton had then seemed to realize with sudden alarm that Abdul’s words had been uttered in the presence of the geraniums, for he looked at them in a guilty way and said, ‘I ought not really to perm
it such things to be said about an English girl.’ But Hamilton was not making any big issue out of it and seemed to be cheered up, on the whole.

  ‘Bad words,’ Abdul now said. Hamilton smiled faintly. Plainly, he was not well. Abdul was neither glad nor sorry, partly because he had become unaccustomed to having any emotions during the hours of daylight. For that, he needed his company of friends at Acre, and some dancing with a little howling maybe, with the long chants going on in the background.

  In the meantime he said with a giggle. ‘Bad words next week. You could throw away your grammar book if it bores you.’

  ‘I don’t want bad words,’ said Hamilton, looking round the room in a disorganized way. ‘What I must do, obviously, is master a larger vocabulary.’

  ‘True,’ said Abdul. ‘Take a set of conversational sentences, then, like for instance, “I am an honest man, but you are a deceiver.” “Why do you call me a deceiver ?” “Because you have promised me to take out a life-insurance policy through my father’s agency, and you have said to your English friends in Jordan that you do not intend to do so.” “How do you know of this?” “Because the servants of your English friends are spies for my father.” Of course,’ Abdul said, ‘this group of sentences would be better expressed in conversational Arabic, but you might as well try to put them together in the formal style.’

  Hamilton said, ‘I have not promised to take out any life-insurance policy.’ But his voice was tired.

  ‘My father,’ said Abdul, ‘sends messages to me at risk to his life to persevere with you about the policy. So I fulfil a pious duty to my father, and finish. I do not care personally about insurance policies, they’re crazy things.’

  Hamilton’s head rested on the back of his chair, since he was slumped low in it this afternoon, not, as usual, sitting alertly. He let his head rest back, as if about to close his eyes which, however, remained half-open, focused on Abdul between their lids.

  Abdul sat in silence, experiencing the torpor and boredom of afternoon life, much as he had very often done in the presence of his elders during his childhood. It seemed reasonable, after a while, to suppose that Mr Hamilton had fallen into a kind of doze, for although his eyes were not entirely closed, his breathing became more rhythmical and loud, as one in sleep. Abdul’s eyes slid to the round table beside him, where Hamilton had been writing letters. Two were sealed in envelopes, ready stamped for posting, they lay one on top of another at an angle, the top envelope concealing the address on the lower. The top envelope was addressed to Professor M. S. Dexter, All Souls College, Oxford, England. Beside these sealed envelopes lay some pages of unfinished letters which Abdul had already noticed in a contributory way to his sense of Hamilton’s being out of sorts; usually Hamilton was a man who finished doing one thing before starting another.