A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  “I’m sorry. I don’t quite follow.”

  “What do you think? Yaakov De Groot, a wonderful man in case you didn’t know. A great speaker on our behalf. Our enemies wanted him quiet as the grave, and now he is.”

  “Your enemies?”

  “Who do you think? These murderers. Do you see the depths to which they have fallen? I’ve told my congregants again and again, ‘Separate yourselves from this evil community of Zionists.’ I advise you to do the same thing.”

  “Well I have some news for you. On information received from one of our witnesses we have rounded up a group of young men.”

  “Good.”

  “Young Arab men.”

  The rabbi opened and raised his hands in a gesture of exasperation. It was the kind of exaggerated motion that Kirsch’s father would imitate when poking fun at London’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.

  “Then you have made a serious error.”

  “We think probably not.”

  The oil lamp suspended from the ceiling, symbol of God’s eternal flame, emitted a subdued red glow. There was a rustle behind the curtain and then a kerchiefed woman emerged sweeping dust before her and out of the door. Kirsch remembered standing in Canterbury Cathedral with his father—a stopover point on one of the family summer drives to the south coast. “Look at this place,” his father had said, throwing his head back to gaze at the vaulted ceiling. “It’s an absolute wonder more of us didn’t convert. Can’t believe I didn’t.” He spoke like this in order to provoke and annoy Kirsch’s mother. Still, in this claustral synagogue and its vista of enclosing rock, Kirsch saw how his father might have had a point.

  “Give me a reason,” the rabbi continued. “Explain why an Arab boy would want to do such a thing. Do you think the young Arab men simply kill a Jew whenever they take it into their heads?”

  “The clothes. I hoped perhaps you might explain the clothes to me?”

  Sonnenfeld shrugged.

  “I’ve already told you the murderers, do I have to do all your work?”

  “Would you care to be more specific about Mr. De Groot’s enemies?”

  The rabbi looked directly at Kirsch but without speaking. Outside, a bicycle bell rang, quickly followed by the skid of thin wheels, then came voices raised in anger.

  “Mr. De Groot prayed here last Friday night?”

  “This you know already, so why do you ask me?”

  “And then he went home?”

  “Ask the woman.”

  “The woman?”

  The rabbi stood. He was taller than Kirsch had gauged him to be, only an inch or so shorter than Kirsch himself. Sonnenfeld took his hat from the coat peg. He moved toward the door of the synagogue, calling out in Yiddish to the woman sweeping in the back room. Kirsch laid his hand on the rabbi’s arm.

  “There are appetites that not everyone has the strength to control, Captain Kirsch, and that includes those amongst us, like Yaakov, who seek to do good.”

  “Where will I find her?”

  “Not among us.”

  “Sit down, Rabbi,” Kirsch said firmly. The rabbi glanced where Kirsch’s hand lay on his forearm. Kirsch withdrew the offending touch, and reached into his tunic pocket for pencil and pad. He offered them to the rabbi.

  “The name and address, please.”

  The rabbi sighed and moved back to his bench. He scribbled one word in the notebook.

  “This is all I know.”

  Kirsch glanced at the paper.

  “And the address?”

  “Ask here.” Sonnenfeld wrote again.

  “Thank you.” Kirsch tried to sound both policeman-like and conciliatory.

  Rabbi Sonnenfeld looked up.

  “British and Jewish Captain Kirsch, you’re an interesting combination.”

  “I’m not sure that’s how most people look at it.”

  “Then how do they?”

  “More, I believe, as a suspicious combination.” He was thinking of Joyce and how she had accused him of being on the “wrong side of the stockade.”

  Sonnenfeld smiled and immediately Kirsch regretted having let the rabbi draw him out.

  “To the Jews, British; to the British, a Jew; and for the Arabs, the worst of both worlds. Is that what you mean?”

  “Something like that.”

  Kirsch didn’t like the way the conversation was turning and abruptly shifted direction.

  “Did you know that Mr. De Groot was planning a trip to London?”

  The rabbi returned a blank stare.

  “Do you have any idea why he would be going? Was this trip the usual stuff, or something more?”

  “The usual stuff being that all Jews, or maybe I should say most Jews, are not Zionists and that the British government needs to be reminded of this.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Should there be something else?” Rabbi Sonnenfeld shrugged. “And you, Captain Kirsch. What’s your position? Are you a Zionist sympathizer?”

  “I don’t have a position,” Kirsch replied, again regretting instantly that he had spoken and then, despite himself, wanting to add, as if in explanation for his political naiveté, “My brother . . . my brother was killed.” He stopped himself, however, and instead announced to the rabbi, “We’ll talk again.”

  “Perhaps you’ll come to pray with us,” Sonnenfeld replied.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The one-room synagogue had grown oppressively hot. Or perhaps Kirsch was simply feeling claustrophobic. Kirsch’s father had got that way in synagogues of any size, and nothing worked him up more than a congregation at prayer. Communal prayer offended him. He considered it the bleating of sheep, atonal blows from the thoughtless flung against the only edifice that Harold Kirsch valued: the shrine of individual personality. Kirsch tugged at his collar. He had to get out, away from this stick of a rabbi and his yellowing teeth.

  “If you should hear anything that you think might be of use, please let me know.”

  The rabbi nodded and somehow managed to convey that he was unimpressed by Kirsch’s air of self-importance.

  Kirsch left the synagogue. His car was in the garage to be fitted with a new exhaust, a part that would apparently take a week to come in, and he had borrowed a motorbike from a friend in the constabulary. He kick-started the engine, looked again at the rabbi’s note, then rode off in the direction of the Order of St. John Hospital. By the time he arrived it was dusk. Kirsch wandered down corridors whose walls were the color of tea, and on through the wards, past iron bedsteads where patients lay under tented mosquito nets as if in giant cribs. The nurses’ black-and-white clipped-wing caps made them look like nuns—and perhaps some of them were. Although not De Groot’s woman by the sound of it.

  Kirsch didn’t find her. The matron, a robust figure all in white who anachronistically still wore the old prewar Turkish crescent on her uniform, told him that Alice had gone to Nazareth to meet with friends of hers who were visiting from England. She was due back for the afternoon shift on Sunday, so perhaps she would be in Jerusalem tomorrow night, or on Sunday morning.

  “Do you have an address for her in Nazareth?”

  “Only in Jerusalem.”

  “May I have it?”

  The matron stood up from behind her desk, took two steps to a wooden file cabinet and produced a sheet of paper. In large, hopeful, forward-leaning cursive letters she copied the address for Kirsch.

  “Is Alice in trouble, Captain?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  Kirsch asked her about De Groot. Had the matron ever met him?

  “He came to the children’s ward once,” the matron replied. “He brought small presents and we greatly appreciated his doing so.” Kirsch sensed that she had had no idea, until now, that De Groot was connected to a member of her staff.

  “Didn’t you think it strange,” Kirsch asked, “an Orthodox Jewish gentleman carrying gifts to Arab children?”

  “Not at all. In true charity we find no religious ba
rriers, Captain.”

  On his way home Kirsch stopped to buy almonds from a woman squatting by the side of the road. It was late when he came into his flat. He sat on his veranda and shelled the nuts. The night was clear and the distant stars appeared to invite a compact with loneliness. The smells of the hospital, of camphor and iodine, were still with him. He remembered an air raid in London during the war. He and his mother had been caught in East London. Why were they there? Something to do with a jeweler. Kirsch was sixteen at the time. He had pulled his mother in the direction of the crowd moving in haste down the Mile End Road toward the London Hospital. They clattered downstairs into the basement and sat on the floor there. His mother folded her elegant red coat and used it for a seat. Patients in thick pajamas held each other’s arms in order to remain ambulatory. Nurses lifted those who were in wheelchairs. Kirsch remembered an incessant coughing and the rank air. He was tall for his age and he sensed people looking at him with the special disdain reserved for those who did not serve. He wanted to blurt out, “I’m too young.” After an hour or so the German zeppelins passed by and an all clear sounded.

  Inspired by this memory, Kirsch began a letter home, but having collected pen and paper from the drawer in his kitchen table, he lost the energy of his good intention. The past was replaced by a fantasy of the future. Traveling somewhere with Joyce, her husband once more out of the picture. Kirsch conjured Joyce’s face, her gray-green eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows, her white hair pulled back away from her face. Her slightly fleshy nose and full lips. He thought he was probably in love with her. It was absurd.

  10.

  “A hundred pounds?”

  “Do you doubt the word of our governor?”

  Bloomberg retrieved a crumpled envelope from the pocket of his trousers. He extracted a thin sheet of paper and read, as if he were barking orders:

  Commissioned from Corporal M. Bloomberg, formerly of the 18th King’s Royal Rifles, for view of the Mount of Olives. One hundred pounds. Half to be paid now, half on receipt of said masterwork.

  Joyce laughed and grabbed the letter. It was as he had said, without the army references, of course, and without the last three words.

  “And what will happen to ‘Jewish Life in Palestine’?”

  “It will continue without me.”

  They were sitting in the garden close to the fig tree and near the gap in the hedge that De Groot had burst through. Across the valley, the stone houses of an Arab village, half hidden in shadow, merged into the darkening landscape.

  “You’ll tell them I’m ill,” Bloomberg added.

  “Tell them yourself.”

  Bloomberg got out of his chair and kissed her on the lips. He sensed her disapproval but was unmoved by the content of her opposition. Instead he responded only to her manner, to what he liked to think of as her American feistiness, a characteristic that greatly appealed to him.

  “When do you start?” Joyce asked.

  “I’ve already begun. Ross has set me up on the roof of his house.”

  “Are you sure that this is what you want to do?”

  Bloomberg didn’t reply immediately. Instead he walked down the garden path to the front gate, swishing the high yellow grass with his hand, then he turned to face Joyce.

  “I’m not going to paint picture postcards for government officials, if that’s what you think.”

  Later, they lay side by side in bed, not touching. Bloomberg stared at the ceiling. There were brown patches left by the winter rains, a topography of stains that he found somehow reassuring. He should have remained silent but a desire to provoke her overtook him. When he spoke his voice was misleadingly gentle.

  “How was your drive with Captain Kirsch?”

  Joyce opened her eyes. “Oh, you saw.”

  “Was it exciting?”

  “If it was, I didn’t notice.”

  “He must be about your age, or perhaps appealingly younger.”

  Joyce raised herself onto one elbow. She was naked under the sheet. Bloomberg touched the back of his hand to the side of her breast.

  “He lost his brother in the war.”

  “Careless of him.”

  Joyce turned away on her side. Bloomberg spooned his body into hers and reached his hand over her face, following the contours of her lips and nose as if he were a blind man.

  “Now, when I was in the trenches . . .” Bloomberg adopted the story voice of an old soldier about to begin a long and resistible tale.

  “Yes.”

  “There were demons dragging strangling wire.”

  “ ‘And you were stricken dumb.’ Why do you have to make fun of yourself?”

  Bloomberg had scribbled the poem on a sketch in blue crayon— the only work he had brought back from the war.

  He let his hand drop between her thighs and rest there, then he touched his lips to the arch of her back and whispered:

  “Put the gun to my foot and pulled the trigger.” For emphasis he rubbed his left foot, with its missing toe, against the back of her leg.

  “Oh, stop.”

  He touched his hand to her cheeks. If he was checking for tears he was going to be disappointed.

  “What’s going to become of us?” His voice was strained toward tenderness.

  “I don’t know,” Joyce replied.

  “You should leave me,” he said.

  “Perhaps I will,” she whispered.

  Joyce sat up in the bed and froze. There was someone outside in the garden, she was sure of it. There were footsteps, a flowerpot knocked over. She put her hand on Bloomberg’s shoulder to wake him, then waited. The steps had moved and now seemed to be coming from the derelict piece of land at the rear of the house. Then there was silence. She laid her head back on the thin pillow. Perhaps she had been mistaken . . . A stray dog—she had seen so many—or a goat; the animals wandered loose, foraging everywhere, blocking traffic. She looked at Bloomberg lying on his back, the white sheet covering his striped pajamas and pulled almost over his face, like a shroud. She tugged it gently under his chin. Sleep softened his features. The look of injury was temporarily gone. Ten minutes passed, Joyce was on the verge of dozing off again, but this time the steps were very close. She turned in the bed.

  “Mark!”

  At the heavy knock on the door Bloomberg woke, startled, while Joyce plucked her nightgown from the floor and pulled it on.

  “Who is it?” Bloomberg called.

  “Police. I’m sorry to come so late.”

  Joyce lit one of the oil lamps by the bed.

  When Bloomberg unlocked the door a man in uniform entered the room.

  He introduced himself as Sergeant Harlap. He had been on a routine patrol, he said, but had been asked to pay special attention to the Bloombergs’ house as he passed it. And indeed he had heard someone scrambling around nearby. Someone who had run off when he approached. Had Mr. or Mrs. Bloomberg heard anything?

  “I did,” said Joyce, “but I was half asleep.”

  As he spoke, Harlap had moved to the far end of the room. He tipped back a canvas that was leaning against the wall and looked at the work.

  “Interested in buying?” Bloomberg asked, then added firmly, “If not, put it back.”

  Harlap turned.

  “We have many wonderful Jewish artists in Palestine, Mr. Bloomberg. Perhaps you’ve met some—Zaritsky? Rubin?”

  Bloomberg tried not to look surprised.

  “I haven’t yet had the pleasure.”

  Harlap laughed.

  “You think a simple policeman shouldn’t know about art? Not the kind of thing a London bobby generally understands?”

  “I would think, given the chance, that your average London bobby would know a hell of a lot more than your average London art critic.”

  Harlap turned to Joyce.

  “I know you’ve been asked before,” he said, lengthening the syllable on the “ore” in the marginally singsong way of the Jewish Palestinians, “but would you mind if I asked again
if you saw or even heard anyone else at all in the neighborhood on the night of the murder? You see, perhaps whoever was around here tonight was here before. They may be looking for something.”

  “I saw nothing except the victim. I heard nothing, except the name the victim spoke.”

  “And that name was Saud?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It couldn’t have been anything else?”

  “Perhaps.” Joyce thought for a moment. “But I heard ‘Saud.’ ”

  Harlap smiled. He seemed pleased with the result of his little interrogation.

  The oil lamp on the bedside table burned low. Joyce adjusted the wick, and the flame shot up momentarily, illuminating the entire room until she brought it under control.

  Harlap moved to the bed. He sat down on Joyce’s side and spread his fingers in the indentation that her head had made in the pillow. The gesture held a peculiar intimacy.

  “And your husband,” he continued, turning to Bloomberg, who had sat down on one of the empty trunks, “saw two Arab men earlier in the evening.”

  “I saw two men in Arab clothes.”

  “Ah, yes. One a Jew who liked to play dress-up, and one Saud.”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Mr. De Groot had some money dealings with the Arabs. You know this, of course.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Perhaps he had other dealings too.” Harlap had swung his feet up and was lying outstretched in a most unpolicemanlike manner.

  There was silence for a moment.

  “I may seem naive . . . ,” Joyce began, but Bloomberg touched her arm and she paused in midsentence.

  “Oh,” she finally said, “lovers. Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

  “No, not lovers, a boy fucker and his boy. With lovers no one pays.”

  Bloomberg, on the verge of telling Harlap to shut up, bit his lip.

  Harlap swung himself heavily from the bed.

  “Don’t worry. Sleep in peace. We will catch him.”

  After he had left, Joyce dimmed the lamp and returned to bed. Bloomberg lingered by the paintings that he had leaned against the wall. The brandy bottle was on a blue stool beneath the window. Bloomberg picked it up and swallowed a quick gulp. The cheap local liquor burned his throat.