by Muriel Spark
‘My father, blah, blah. Long live Ben Gurion! Long live Nasser! Long live Islam! Long live all fat men! Israel! My mother goes quack-quack all day.’
‘Recall Judith the beautiful, who killed the captain asleep. My son, my son. Tittle-tee.’
‘It’s all a long time ago. Great is the God of Israel! Mighty is Allah! We dance and sing and make love with each other, it is better than all that religion and hatred all the day long.’
‘The Arabs have been neglected by history.’
‘The Jews have been rejected by history. Write it down. You might forget it.’
‘We want Freedom.’
‘Self-government is better than good government. Write that down too.’
‘Hussein went to school in Harrow which is in England.’
‘Everything is different now. Please all come to the party. My mother makes a party for the girls to do the Twist.’
‘Yes, everything is changed. I speak French and English. We all make love together.’
‘Come and live in Abdul’s orange groves, and pick as many oranges as you like all the afternoon.’
‘Come along to Abdul’s orange groves.’
5. Via Dolorosa
On Saturday the 12th of August 1961 when Barbara Vaughan had last been seen, Freddy had accompanied her from the Cartwrights’ front door to Matt’s car outside in the roadway. Freddy remembered the afternoon that Barbara had spent with them, he remembered it vividly. Matt was going to drive Barbara back to the convent. Joanna had come out to the car, with a parcel in her arms, and had bundled into the back; she wanted to be dropped somewhere. Freddy had waved them good-bye. He had returned to the house. It was empty.
This was the last thing he remembered until he was walking along his usual route from the Mandelbaum Gate to his hotel on the following Tuesday, which was the 15th of August. Only he had thought it was Sunday the 13th of August. Tuesday at 4 o’clock instead of Sunday at 4 o’clock, his usual time for returning to Israel after staying with the Cartwrights in Jordan. Freddy went over and over the facts in his mind. He had come . out to wave good-bye … he was bareheaded under the hot sun … he had returned to the house … it was Saturday the 12th of August … the house was empty … then Freddy was following his usual route to the hotel … he was tired and hot. He had gone to bed. The manager had come up to his room and inquired if Freddy was all right … the ambassadors had been looking for him. Which ambassadors,’ said Freddy from his sleepy pillow, ‘what do you mean?’ It turned out that he meant Freddy’s colleagues from the legation. It had turned out that this day was not Sunday the 13th but Tuesday the 15th.
‘A touch of the sun,’ Freddy said.
Amnesia, was the doctor’s conclusion. Some mental disturbance.
Nonsense, I’m suffering from sunstroke.
Had he been drugged by the Arabs? Had he been robbed? There was no evidence of either. In any case, Freddy said, I would be sure to remember if I’d been drugged or robbed. It was very confusing. Begin again. The manager appeared. ‘Are you all right, Mr Hamilton?’
Freddy said he was, and closed his eyes.
The manager said that the ambassadors had been on the telephone two or three times.
Freddy opened his eyes. ‘Ambassadors?’
It appeared that the manager was referring to Freddy’s colleagues at the legation.
‘The ambassadors … Are you all right … the legation.’
‘What do they want?’ Freddy said, lifting his head off the pillow.
‘They want to know where you are. All day yesterday, and all this morning, you didn’t come. They say your friends where you stay in the Jordan Embassy don’t know where you have gone since Saturday. They look also for Miss Vaughan, who was a guest in this hotel, and went to Jordan.’
‘I don’t stay with anyone in any Embassy,’ Freddy said. ‘The Jordanian Embassy is in Amman. I stay with friends in Jerusalem who are part of a welfare relief mission. Everyone knows them.’
The manager said, ‘Now I phone your office and tell them you are safe. Do you like some tea, coffee?’
‘There won’t be anyone there,’ Freddy said. To the Israelis Sunday was a week-day; they always forgot that the Legation offices closed on Sundays.
Freddy said, ‘It’s Sunday. There’s no one there.’
‘Sunday?’ said the manager.
Freddy leaned up on his elbow.
‘What day of the week is it?’ he said.
‘Today is Tuesday the 15th of August. They look for you in the office two days. Where you have been is not my business, Mr Hamilton, all right? As I say to him, we can put you through to his room. He says, I been put through to his room but there’s no answer from his room. Then another gentleman calls me to speak—’
‘It can’t be Tuesday. It’s Sunday. I always come back on Sunday evening,’ Freddy said, and lay back among the pillows. The manager departed. Freddy decided to compose a very special set of bread-and-butter verses for Joanna, to compensate for his boorishness. There had been a slight fuss about Barbara Vaughan in the garden. You blow neither hot nor cold. He decided to have a rest first, and get up for dinner, by which time he would have accumulated some executive energy to apply to the verses.
His younger colleague, Rupert Gardnor, anxiously disposed to laugh it all off as a lark, arrived that evening with Dr Jarvis. Freddy sat up, fresh from sleep, and began again. From what Gardnor told him, it appeared today was Tuesday indeed. Freddy believed Gardnor. ‘I must have lost my memory,’ Freddy said. ‘I couldn’t tell you where I’ve been. Hand me my wallet, like a good chap. I hope I haven’t been robbed.’
They decided Freddy had not been robbed. He said, ‘I must have had a touch of sunstroke.’ Gardnor said, ‘I’ll wait downstairs.’ It was uncertain whether he meant he would wait to see Jarvis or Freddy. Jarvis gave no response; he was busy with Freddy.
Jarvis said he would look back tomorrow and make a more thorough examination; the pulse was a bit unsteady; the temperature was normal.
‘I’ll be at the office tomorrow,’ Freddy said.
‘On no account.’
Freddy didn’t like to think of them discussing him down there. He got up and dressed quickly.
He expected to find Gardnor still in conference with Jarvis when he came down. Instead he found Gardnor drinking in the courtyard.
‘The vet gone?’ Gardnor said.
‘Yes, he’s coming back tomorrow. But I’ll be in the office tomorrow.’
‘I’d follow his advice,’ Gardnor said. ‘You might have a relapse. ‘How does he know what his advice was? Freddy thought. He said, ‘It must have been sunstroke.’ He ordered a drink and tried to be fair to Gardnor.
They dined together. Gardnor said, after dinner they must find some quiet spot where he could tell Freddy the latest. ‘The latest is rather amusing.’ By the latest he meant some secret matter in the office.
Freddy expressed himself keen to hear the latest. He said he didn’t feel very hungry. ‘And the point is,’ Freddy said, ‘where did I stay? I must have slept. I must have shaved.’
‘Well, you didn’t sleep and shave on this side of Mandelbaum,’ Gardnor said. ‘It must have been on that side. We’ve checked at the Gate, and you came through at 5.18 p.m. today.’
‘It passes my understanding,’ Freddy said.
‘Could you have been drugged? How do you feel?’
‘A bit upset,’ Freddy said, ‘but I haven’t been drugged. Jarvis had a look at my eyes with his torch and said, “well, at least you haven’t been drugged” — I suppose he’d know.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Sunstroke,’ Freddy said, and accompanied his friend to a quiet corner of the public lounge where Gardnor, in a quiet but gleeful voice, described the latest. This was an involved story about an Israeli counter-intelligence ruse. Freddy felt very drowsy and wished Gardnor would go home.
‘The Israelis,’ Gardnor breezed on, ‘are anxious about an intelligence leakage that they
’ve traced to Beersheba …’ Freddy felt his eyelids droop, and propped them open as it were with invisible matchsticks. Gardnor’s story was connected with the water-pipe-line project, planned by Israel to stretch from Galilee to the Negev, and, branching beneath the desert scrub, to blossom there. This plan had already aroused wild hostility from the Arab States, as much by its symbolism as by its practical advantage to their enemy, Israel. The Arab Press and radio presented the plan as one designed mainly to deprive their people of their own rivers and so kill them off. It was no secret either, in this year of the Eichmann trial, that the pipes were already being laid. In the Israeli press the exact diameter of these huge water-pipes, 108 inches, had been published, but many Arab agencies, prompted both by the accepted rules of propaganda and by genuine suspicion, had reported these monstrous sucklings of Arab life-blood to be the largest known, although, they said, the exact dimensions were as yet withheld by the Israelis.
Gardnor now described to Freddy how the Israeli Intelligence, keen to track down the spy who they knew was operating from Beersheba, had arranged to spill from a rail truck two sections of the metal pipes. For several weeks they had lain by the side of the track gleaming in the sun for all to see who passed on the parallel motor road, and then were explained by government press officers as having fallen accidentally from one of the goods wagons which bore these pipe sections regularly to their destination. The pieces of pipe-line were even pointed out to tourists by the guides, to show off the great engineering plan by which the wilderness of the Negev would open like the rose in a few years’ time. Those pipes over there, the guides would say as they drove slowly past the spot — our water-pipes, to bring water from the north to cultivate the desert; they are 108 inches in diameter; look at them!
Gardnor said to Freddy, who sat round-eyed with the effort to keep awake, ‘… and in fact, I happened to see them myself when I was down there last Sunday week, and I thought at the time that they looked rather big, you know. Of course, one can’t actually judge these measurements if one isn’t an expert, and, of course, I only saw them from the road, which was about two hundred yards from the place where the pipes were lying. But anyhow, it did cross my mind at the time that those sections of the pipe-line did look a bit bigger than I’d expected, from the official description. And of course 108 inches in diameter is a lot, anyway. Well, anyway, what the Israelis had done —Oh go home, Freddy thought, sitting with his eyes forced wide.
He began to close in on his ordeal, and to consider his own dumb sufferings, a course of mind which Freddy normally abhorred. Gardnor’s hushed confidence continued to scorch Freddy’s eardrums, and he sat and put up with it, not caring whether he followed the story or not.
‘… The Israelis, you see, were after the spy chap operating in the area. And what the Israelis had done,’ Gardnor assured Freddy, ‘was to build a special couple of pipe-line sections far bigger than those they’re actually going to use, and to plant them beside the track. Great huge fellows they were — as I say, I saw them myself and they looked enormous, as I say. And of course, they kept a watch on the spot. Well, last Sunday night —’
‘Last Sunday, the 13th?’ Freddy said. His eyes moved to Rupert Gardnor’s face, which had faintly checked its expression at this interruption. Freddy’s mind was fixed on last Sunday and its adjacent days as on an aching tooth and its touchy neighbours. Freddy said again, ‘list Sunday, Rupert, did you say?’
But Gardnor was mercilessly intent on cheering up a colleague in his misfortunes. ‘Last Sunday,’ Gardnor said more clearly, moving closer in the evident assumption that Freddy had not heard his lowered tone. ‘Yes, last Sunday night, apparently. Well, they kept a watch …’ Freddy was touched and soothed by the man’s polite implication that there was nothing really the matter with him, and that nothing really had happened. The man was behaving exactly as he himself would have done, of course; that was to say, one would naturally take the line that a few days’ lapse of memory suffered by a chap in one’s own department was different from what it would be if it happened to anyone else. He allowed his eyes to relax from their propped-open fixedness.
‘… kept a watch on those pipe sections. Eventually, after a couple of weeks — as I say, last Sunday night — they spotted a man hanging round the place. He got over to the rail track and started measuring the diameter of the pipes. Well you see, these were the specially planted ones, not the real ones, which are in fact 108 inches in diameter. These were much bigger. And as expected the Arabs got the information within the course of the night. It was also received by an Israeli agent over in Jordan, who signalled back the news over no-man’s-land at dawn. The size of the fake pipes was, I think, something like 195 inches, but that isn’t the point. The point is, the Israelis have got their spy over here — the man who was measuring it. He’s an Israeli employed by a quite innocent detective agency in Beersheba — and the Arab Intelligence, of course, are now in a stew as to whether the diameter of the fake pipes, I think 195 inches, really is the size, or whether the official size —’
‘The size of those fake water-pipes,’ Freddy said suddenly, for no reason that he himself could think of at present, ‘is 185 inches, not 195. The size is 185 inches, that I know.’
Gardnor’s immediate reply was a long silence, which was the first of the silences in conversation that Freddy was to encounter. and which now woke Freddy out of his half-doze. Then Gardnor said, ‘How do you know?’
‘What?’ said Freddy.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Gardnor said. ‘Only the information didn’t reach Jordan until Sunday night, and there was nothing about it in our office until after they’d arrested their spy. We got a memo, Monday morning, from the Israeli Intelligence, and I suppose the Americans are in the know as well, in case we took the ruse seriously and started making inquiries and representations and so on. But you weren’t there in the office, Monday morning. That’s why I’m wondering how you know anything about the affair.’
‘I don’t know anything about it. At least, only what you’ve told me,’ Freddy said, in distress. ‘But you’re right … my dear Rupert, I honestly don’t know where I’ve been since last Saturday afternoon. It will come back. A touch of sunstroke —’
Gardnor smiled in an embarrassed way and said, ‘Oh yes, I know, but you do seem to have heard something about the fake water-pipes, and you seem to be informed about the exact size. And all this stuff, you see, came to us as Top Secret, of course.’
‘I’ve heard of Topper Secrets,’ Freddy said.
‘That’s true. It isn’t so very significant. But one wonders … it’s rather as if you’d picked it up somewhere, and one wonders … well, Freddy, do you mind if I mention this at the office? I mean, if I don’t, it wouldn’t be quite the thing, you see, Freddy. What would you do?’
‘I’d put in a report,’ Freddy said. ‘You’ll have to do so.’
‘I know.’
Freddy said, ‘I think if I could get some sleep it would all come back.’ Gardnor was really in rather a hurry to observe his duty.
‘Of course,’ Gardnor said. sitting upright now, very tense and anxious, ‘it would be better if you put in a statement yourself. I prefer it, quite honestly. Could you write it tonight?’
‘No,’ Freddy said. ‘It’s your job, if you feel it’s so terribly pressing. You know you’d be questioned, anyway.’
‘Well, I’ll say it’s done with your approval, and I’ll send you a copy. Do you mind if I have another drink? Makes you feel like the bloody Gestapo when you’ve got to do a thing like this and report an ordinary conversation with one of your own chaps.’
Freddy said, ‘Oh, come!’ He sat back with closed eyes while Gardnor ordered his drink, and shook his head when Gardnor asked him if he wanted one.
When Gardnor’s whisky arrived with a tinkle of glasses and loose change Freddy opened his eyes again. Gardnor said, ‘There’s another point, Freddy, that may have escaped you. It isn’t so much a question of what you’ve heard
in the missing days, as a question of what you might have said, presuming you’ve been in the way of hearing things of a security nature.’
‘The point hasn’t escaped me,’ Freddy said.
Gardnor’s face, which was normally placid and healthy from a recent sun-tan, looked pasty, as if he had eaten something that disagreed with him.
‘I’m sure I said nothing out of place,’ Freddy said. ‘Sure of it.’
‘So am I.’
‘But I agree, that’s a question that is bound to arise. Well, it’ll all come back, anyway. A good night’s sleep —’
Gardnor now took the hint, swallowed down his drink and left. Freddy, on that first night of his return from oblivion, pondered for some hours, lying awake in his exhaustion. He had a sense of having exerted himself a great deal, of having been to a number of different places. But what had he done and where? His memory gave no answer. Freddy gave up for the night; he let his mind murmur ironically to itself the boast: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and he fell asleep, turning his mind’s tongue on Hotspur’s reply: ‘But will they come when you do call for them?’
‘I am told very privately,’ Freddy said, ‘that she is hiding somewhere in Jordan, and is safe so far. Where exactly she is, or whether she will remain safe is another question. I don’t know. My informant could say nothing about that. I intend to mention nothing to the authorities until she’s .out of the country, and I know of course, Joanna, that you won’t either.’
‘We won’t breathe a word,’ said Matt. ‘Who told you she’s still in the country?’.
‘I’m not in a position to say who my informant is.’
Abdul Ramdez had in fact come to Freddy at the hotel, the day after his visit to Acre, to give him the information that Freddy had asked for. ‘She’s still in Jordan, she’s in hiding. She’s safe so far. But you will not inform the authorities, Mr Hamilton, or she will no longer be safe, and moreover, someone very close to me will be in danger also. I can say no more.’