by Muriel Spark
When he had turned seventeen he took on the teaching of Arabic to an Englishwoman who was an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary. She lived at the big hotel, where Abdul called three times a week. She was twenty-seven years old. She had the use of a friend’s empty flat where, after a few weeks, she slept with Abdul. It was as near a love-affair on both sides as could be. On her side, it was a desperate reaction to grief; her husband had not long since been killed in battle. On his side, it was an impact with self-knowledge in many forms. He had already had sexual relations with young Arab girls in Cairo. But even physically he realized himself more acutely as a man with this Western woman, discerning at the same time, by a process of reflection acquired from her, that he had hitherto regarded all Westerners, both male and female, as a masculine type of race.
Every time he slept with this girl he found himself with a problem which for want of a more precise definition, he termed ‘spiritual’; he was afraid of her. When he spent days and nights at the flat without sexual relations with her, as he frequently did, he found himself with a physical problem; for he wanted very much the physical contact with this bold foreigner. That she herself was taking some sort of risk in carrying on this relationship did not occur to him, until she was suddenly unavailable, detained and being questioned pending a court-martial; Abdul lay low. He started attending to his studies, lie did not go near the flat or any busy part of Cairo. He remained in the college precincts, attending lectures and reading his books from early morning to early evening, when he went to bed and lay listening for the footsteps of the police. Within three weeks he heard that the English girl had been recalled to headquarters in Britain pending her release from the forces, on the recommendation of one of those psychiatrists whose main job in war-time was to smooth over such events as this, and Abdul realized, with relief, that her lover’s identity was unknown.
Meanwhile, Abdul had acquired from the woman something ineradicable, and which was so much part of her nature that she had been herself totally unaware of it: self-humour. It was a form of endowment at the same time that it was a form of corruption. It undid him as a middle-class Arab enemy-hater with a career in the army or a position in business.
‘I am an Arab Nationalist,’ he had announced to her. ‘I despise the British.’
‘Nationalist of what nation?’ she had said, quite innocently. ‘What place, what territory?’ He made these responses his own and used them for years afterwards.
‘Islam is united.’ But he knew it was not.
This was not the only innocent remark the girl had made which affected him. From the histrionic or dramatic point of view he was henceforth a spoiled Arab. He could not take any propaganda seriously. And she had unwittingly instilled scepticism into him, had taught him to be a doubter and, at the same time, a faint-hearted hater. He was by no means the only Arab of his generation to react in this way to the fervour of the resistance movements at Cairo while the big war was going on outside. Many were influenced by the Lebanese who mostly considered themselves to be a different cultivation altogether from the rest of Middle-Eastern humanity. Many joined the Allied forces.
Abdul, then, joined all the student factions, merrily uncommitted at heart and, in the same spirit, out of the sheer desire for discovery and scope, would have joined the British army had they accepted him. He was found to have tuberculosis, was sent back to Palestine and, within a few weeks, to a sanatorium in Lebanon. There, his sister Suzi, the blue-eyed one, came to visit him at various intervals, sometimes accompanied by Mme Ramdez and sometimes by black-veiled Kyra, smelling like her usual self with the addition of eau-de-cologne which she had applied to her forehead in consideration of foreign travel.
It was at this time that the secret affinity ripened between Abdul and Suzi. She was then fifteen, Abdul nineteen. He talked of new ways of life and outlook, undreamt of even by their modernized parents. His imagination went wild in most particulars, but Abdul conveyed to her, as only tubercular patients can, the excitement of what was in his mind. He said that the modernization of Joe Ramdez was simply a new form of the old exploiting mentality. In this way Suzi discovered the future as an idea, and together the brother and sister merged in a pact of personal anarchism; they started to fool everyone; they conformed to outward demands and resisted in spirit, the Arabic mysticism in their nature easily adapting itself to this course. Suzi, on one of her visits with Kyra, had a love-affair with a French officer and managed to convince her suspicious chaperone, and later her mother, that she was merely cultivating his acquaintance in her role as a spy. To be a spy of some sort was the respectable thing for any literate Arab, even if it only involved spying on each other. To spy on a Westerner was a matter of special commendation. The girl noticeably handed a note to Abdul in his hospital bed, every time she visited him. These were really love-notes from herself to Abdul; and they were partly sincere, for the temperamental sympathy between the brother and sister was not unlike an erotic passion, so new to their Palestinian lives was their liberation of spirit; Abdul’s attitude to her as a woman was not to be found in any other Arab of her acquaintance, and only superficially in the French officer, who very soon left with his regiment for other parts. Abdul treated her as a girlfriend, and she was bold and merry with him; it delighted him, even more than had his encounter with the Englishwoman in Egypt.
He read her notes, when they began to reach him by messenger three or four times a day, with enormous secret amusement, returning similar messages even before old Kyra’s eyes. He explained to all Arab personnel at the hospital who might be concerned, that these notes were in aid of ‘the Arab struggle’. This was highly acceptable, and nobody inquired what sort of struggle to what precise end.
After the end of the war, Abdul, partially cured in both lungs, returned to Palestine where the huge Jewish immigration had turned the old Arab hostility to the Jews into hysterical hatred. The British military were active everywhere, unable to cope with the illegal immigrant shiploads that managed to come ashore, week by week, in spite of the vigilant army and air force in Palestine and their ships off the coast. The British were hated by the Arabs for not killing all the Jews.
Joe Ramdez had opened at Haifa a small branch of his travel agency which was one of the main British sources of secret intelligence concerning the illegal immigrant ships. Abdul was now placed in charge of this establishment, where he gaily accepted payment by both British and Jewish agencies in the matter of illegal immigrants. One way and another he had a bright time of it, distrusted on all sides, yet frequently confided in on the mere hypnotic strength of his attractive personality, and was eventually retained by various intelligence agencies more from fear of what he could divulge than from his usefulness as a spy. Joe Ramdez took his son’s duplicity for granted, the only difference between the two processes of thought, father’s and son’s, was that, whereas Abdul knew and joyfully recognized his double-dealings for what they were, the father took a double course of life to be a single, natural line of human proceeding and would have been wild with anger if anyone had openly called a lie of his a lie, or suggested some moral defection on his part: and he expected the same treatment from everyone outside his own family. But when a British officer said to Abdul, leaning over the desk at the travel bureau in Haifa, ‘Ramdez, what a frightful, bloody young liar you are!’ Abdul replied, ‘I know,’ with his quick, young smile. In any case, he was not quite twenty-one at the time, which alone was very disarming. Abdul adored life, the Mediterranean waters, the sun, and his sister Suzi.
Bullets were flying from all quarters. Abdul closed down the agency in Haifa. He took off his smart-cut suit of clothes and put on a white shirt and khaki shorts. Bullets from the small black window apertures of the Arab quarters sang about his ears; the bullets pelted down from the mountains of Carmel. Abdul did not return to his lodgings. He waited in an upper store-room of the travel agency until this local rising had been put down, then he emerged one night, thin from lack of food, and closed the door
s of the travel agency at Haifa for ever. He got to friends at Acre, where he obtained a birth certificate dated 1931, which made him a plausible sixteen years of age. There, too, on the strength of some knowledge of the Catholic religion that he had picked up while in hospital in Lebanon, he persuaded a simple and ancient Franciscan monk to baptize him before witnesses and sign a baptismal certificate. Abdul did all these things without any distinct notion of their subsequent usefulness, but merely on the prompting of an instinct for self-preservation. By no means did he wish to fight in an Arabs’ war with the Jews or anyone else. A careful copy of the baptismal certificate was made for him by his friends, with the substitution of Suzi’s name, and this copy was conveyed in secret to his sister in Jerusalem. Certificates of baptism were useful for crossing borders in this pilgrim territory, they were useful for many things. He began to love Acre, with its band of friends and its crowds of poor.
Presently he set off for Nazareth where Christian Arabs were mostly congregated. He begged lifts all the way from the British military, explaining that he desired to get to the hospital at Nazareth as he had been spitting blood and was afraid of being sniped at by the Jews. How old was he? Sixteen. He had, in fact, developed a short, recurrent cough. The British soldiers searched him for bombs, found five pounds in his pocket, his birth certificate and baptismal certificate; that was all. He had not changed his name. Abdul Ramdez, a fairly common name, was as good as any. He coughed frequently. ‘Hop in,’ said the Englishmen. On the second lift that he got in a military jeep, which took him all the way to Nazareth, he found himself coughing less controllably than before, and towards evening he did indeed spit up blood.
At the tubercular sanatorium in Nazareth, after he perceived how the war was going, he took lessons in modern Hebrew. He now had assurances that his lung disease, in spite of long neglect, could be quite cured. He got modem Hebrew lessons from a Baptist missionary woman who visited the hospital, and explained to the suspicious Arab patients that a knowledge of Hebrew would enable him to continue his profession of spying on the Jews when he should be discharged. Once or twice his textbooks were destroyed in hostile rage by one or another Arab, but on the whole he managed to convince almost everyone of his nationalistic loyalty, by almost daily renewals of vows of hatred against the Jews. He felt no hatred on so large a scale, since all his energies went into his will to live well in the world, to get the best he could out of Palestine and to be free to say any frivolous thing that came into his head regardless of the impression it might make. At night, when he lay among the row of sleepers, he felt the security and comfort of being together with his own people. By day, he surged with individuality again.
The state of Israel was three years old and was warily at peace, separated by an armistice line from Jordan, when Abdul left the sanatorium. Jerusalem was now divided; his father’s home and business establishment were in the Jordanian sector. Infrequent messages, mostly verbal, had passed between Abdul and his family while he was in hospital, carried in secret by various individuals — a foreigner, a Red Cross officer, an Arab spy, a Church of Scotland minister.
Abdul was aware that none of the family except Suzi had any conception of his mind and how deeply bored he was by the mentality that now presented to every Arab in Palestine the blood-duty of becoming a professional victim. Abdul saw years of futile service ahead in this uninteresting cause. He knew of the homeless Palestinian refugees massed along the frontier, and he discerned then what a foreigner could not so accurately foresee, that there was a living to be made out of the world by preserving a refugee problem. Abdul guessed, and was presently proved right, that his father, for one, was doing his big bit on the refugee question and would in time make a fortune out of it. Joe Ramdez was in fact already active in newly established agencies for negotiating contracts with merchants for supplies bought by foreign relief funds.
Just before he had left hospital, Abdul had got a brief note in Suzi’s handwriting. ‘How are Abdul’s orange groves thriving?’ He puzzled for a few moments, then smiled. The displaced poor were already being urged to recall the extent of the lands and possessions from which they had fled before the Israeli? onslaught. More and more, the bewildered homeless souls, in thousands and tens of thousands, agreed and then convinced themselves, and were to hold for long years to come, that they had, every man of them, been driven from vast holdings in their bit of Palestine, from green hilly pastures and so many acres of lush orange groves as would have covered Arabia.
Abdul had earned some money by teaching the children while in the sanatorium. On his discharge he bought a car on the instalment plan and drove to Acre, passing through the green hills and battered villages of Judea. He said to himself, at times when he sped past some fruitful plantation, ‘There go Abdul’s orange groves.’ He was bored far beyond the point of fury with his elders, he was bored with the fervent industrious Jews bursting with their new patriotism. It had been necessary for him, a Palestinian Arab, to obtain a permit before he could leave Nazareth. He was an inferior citizen still; the Jews had only replaced the British. The officious Israeli policeman who issued the permit, a man younger than himself, made Abdul feel sick. He was beyond fury. He laughed. The Israeli guard called a fellow-officer to his side and then asked Abdul what there was to laugh at. Abdul explained that he was newly out of hospital and it was a nice day. He was allowed to go. He did not want to grow older than he was then, in 1950. At that time he was twenty-three.
At Acre the people he had known were gone, but as happens, the place itself, by some invisible influence or tradition, had drawn the same sort of people, the young or the young at heart who belonged to nothing but themselves, for whose temperament no scope existed in any society open to them, and who by day enacted the requirements of their society. These were lapsed Jews, lapsed Arabs, lapsed citizens, runaway Englishmen, dancing prostitutes, international messes, failed painters, intellectuals, homosexuals. Some were silent, some voluble. Some were mentally ill, or would become so.
But others were not. Others were not, and never would become so; and would have been the flower and pride of the Middle East, given the sun and air of the mind not yet to be available. They met in a cellar at Acre, lined with wooden benches, lit with oil lamps and cleared for dancing. Abdul would have preferred the beaches or the cafés, and the open sky, but at least in the cellar an Arab could laugh at the Arabs or mimic the solemn Israeli guard without being knifed or shot. Three knifings were to occur within this little community over the next ten years, but they were not political; they were to do with sex or drugs, and in two cases the wounds were slight; in the third the body was successfully disposed of from a fishing-boat.
Nothing much had changed by 1961, the year of the Eichmann trial, when Abdul Ramdez drove to Acre, the golden city of the Crusaders on the Mediterranean. At Christian festivals, Easter and Christmas, he was able to pass over to Jordan openly with mass pilgrimages to visit the Christian shrines, on the strength of his baptismal certificate, acquired with that good foresight before the war with Israel. Suzi, with the certificate he had obtained for her, got past the officials to meet him at the churches. She was still unmarried at thirty-one. She was unhappy, and only Abdul knew it. Sometimes he crossed the border illegally, but he did not always see Suzi on these occasions. He had contrived to meet his father several times since the partition of Palestine. ‘Are you a nationalist? … A Nasserite? … What party? …’ But messages between Joe Ramdez and Abdul passed frequently. They were comparatively easy to smuggle back and forth across the border.
Nothing much had changed at Acre over the years except the place of rendezvous and Abdul’s real age. He was now thirty-four, but he kept himself lean, was strict with himself and looked no more than the age he had decided on. He did not trouble about the future. Twenty-five. Foreigners like Hamilton were puzzled at times by Abdul’s maturity of knowledge.
‘But surely, Abdul, you must have been a young infant at that time. How could you remember King Faro
uk before he grew fat?’
Abdul piled lies upon truth, without attempting to convince. He felt he was making an almost poetic effort. He derived huge pleasure from mixing everyone up so much that they saw through it in the end.
‘Sometimes, Abdul, I wonder if you’re just treating me to a big leg-pull.’
Hamilton had said this one day. Abdul thought it intelligent of him. He said, “Well, what have I got to lose, Mr Hamilton? You know that all the Arabs in Palestine are dispossessed. There’s nothing to lose, now that Abdul has lost his orange groves.’
‘Did you possess orange groves?’
‘Vast groves.’
‘I don’t believe it. Come, Abdul!’
‘I am an Arab,’ said Abdul, looking fierce, ‘and you may not accuse me of a lie. Anyway, I have lost a good travel agency business in Haifa. The Jews have got it.’
Hamilton had laughed and regarded him fondly.
Abdul drove to Acre on the following Sunday and thought for a while of the Hamilton he had seen a few days before, unwell, bewildered. Someone at Acre would know, or find out, what had happened to the Englishman over in Jordan and what had happened with Miss Vaughan. It would be a pity if Hamilton started to make trouble, and stopped being friendly.