A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

“Ask her,” Bloomberg said.

  The sentry was at the window of the car. Recognizing Kirsch, he waved them on. Kirsch wanted to press Bloomberg further, but Bloomberg was drunk, and in any case, as soon as Kirsch parked the opportunity was lost as the car was surrounded by a working party of men who stripped the boot and the backseat of their contents and transferred them to another, larger vehicle.

  Ross appeared, coming down the concrete stairs at the back of the kitchen. If he had troubles on his mind he was doing a good job concealing them. Ignoring Kirsch, he turned his full attention to Bloomberg.

  “Mark. So good of you to do this.” He shook Bloomberg’s hand energetically. “Apologies for the unforgivable rush. I’ll have to explain it all to you when you get back. But do take my word, no way to avoid this. Listen, it’s going to be two cars over to Amman and I’ve arranged a night’s stay for you at Freddie Peake’s place. The following morning you’ll go on to Kerak and from there it’s horseback and camel all the way to Petra. You’ll have five Arab Legion chaps at your disposal. Muhammad Rachman’s the N.C.O. He’s absolutely reliable. Knows the desert like the back of his hand. You’re going to be in the lap of luxury down there, no fetching firewood or water for you. Leave it to them. You get on with the painting, let them pitch the tent and make the beds. Take a look here . . .”

  Ross produced a pocket torch and spread a copy of the order sheet on the bonnet of Kirsch’s car for Bloomberg to inspect. By the light’s thin beam Bloomberg read: Always detail one man to be with the painter at the time he paints.

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Hardly. And let’s not have an argument. Yours is going to have to be a guarded camp. Oh, and by the way, there’s a boy going along to be your assistant, name of al-Sayyid.”

  “I don’t need . . .”

  “Come, come. All the Italian greats had their apprentices. Giotto’s boys on their ladders. Why not you? Think School of Bloomberg.” Ross laughed and patted Bloomberg on the back. “Well, let’s not delay. Can’t wait to see what you do with the place. Terribly excited. ‘Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime: A rose-red city—half as old as time.’ ”

  Kirsch, who had heard these lines about Petra quoted to weariness since arriving in Jerusalem—rumor had it they were from someone in the military administration’s (Harrison’s?) Oxford prize poem—turned away and pretended to supervise the packing of Bloomberg’s rolls of canvas into the boot of one of the cars. In the high pines and eucalyptus trees cicadas beat and whirred their invisible wings. Kirsch felt himself momentarily transparent, as if his own inner workings, the machinations of his mind, were visible to everyone in the courtyard. He shook himself free of this awkward sensation by yelling at a young subaltern to be more careful with Bloomberg’s supplies.

  Within half an hour the party was ready to leave. The group, absurd to most of its onlookers, and to at least five of its participants (a handful of armed men to protect a painter!) divided in two. The lead car, a large black Ford, was driven by Muhammad Rachman. Bloomberg sat up front next to him, sweat running down his face, while Salaman, one of the Arab Legion soldiers, a squat individual with a bushy black mustache, occupied the backseat; he was squashed in next to a cardboard box that stank of turpentine and contained Bloomberg’s brushes and rags. At the last moment Saud was hurried out of the house and into the second car, where he sat in the rear flanked by the taller two of the three remaining Arab Legion men. Kirsch approached the car but Mustafa, the driver, waved him away and started the engine. Kirsch peered through the side window. Saud had been oddly disguised in some cast-off British schoolboy’s outfit: a white shirt with an utterly incongruous red-and-black striped tie, and gray trousers; his hair had been combed back and a bandage was loosely taped on his forehead. If Saud caught Kirsch’s eye he didn’t show it, but stared blankly ahead of him. As the cars pulled around from the back of the house and away east down the Hill of Evil Counsel, Kirsch put his hand in his tunic pocket and came up with the silver button that he had collected outside Bloomberg’s cottage. He had forgotten about it. He spread the palm of his hand, examined the button, then clenched his fist and, ignoring someone by the open kitchen door who was calling his name, got in his car and drove back in the direction of the police station. Half a mile down the road Kirsch changed his mind and veered off toward the Bloombergs’ house.

  Joyce wasn’t there. He knocked hard, a policeman’s wake-up call or a desperate lover’s, unnecessarily loud for so small a house; then he peered in through the windows: an oil lamp had been left burning low, there were clothes strewn over the floor, the bed remained unmade. It looked as if Joyce had left in a hurry. Kirsch described a circumference of about twenty yards around the house calling her name as he walked. He returned to the spot where he had found the button and poked indiscriminately around in the long grass and adjacent flowerbed. What was it that Ross had said on the telephone about local Jews not liking what Kirsch was up to? As if, weirdly, Ross didn’t like it either. And yet—contrary to Kirsch’s expectations—in Palestine, thus far anyway, his Jewishness had been more or less irrelevant. He recalled his father’s standing in the drawing room addressing Marcus on the day before he had set off for Aldershot. “You will be surprised by the irreticence of army life— particularly where Jews are concerned. I have sheltered you boys, too much no doubt, under the dark gray skullcap that covers this rather comfortable neighborhood.” That was Kirsch’s father, good-natured but endlessly ironic, although after Marcus died he wasn’t ironic anymore.

  The moon hid under a cover of black cloud. It was too dark to see much in the garden, not that Kirsch was really looking; rather he listened for Joyce’s step or the tick of her bicycle wheels. The heat of the night was oppressive; earlier in the day a khamsin had moved in from the Judean desert, settling fine yellow dust on windscreens and windowsills. Now Kirsch felt his hair, regimentally short though it was, matted to his head. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead to rub the sweat away. Where could she be at this time of night? He hung around for almost half an hour, then drove away.

  20.

  The two cars headed down the old Roman road out of Jerusalem. The heat, stifling enough in the city, only grew worse with their precipitous drop toward the Dead Sea. Bloomberg shifted in his seat and tried to get comfortable. He was sweating off his drunkenness, his shirt and trousers were damp and clung to his body; his mouth was dry and he could almost taste the salt air on his blistered tongue. In the absolute madness of this moment, on his way, guarded by a bunch of armed men, to paint a place that meant less than nothing to him, and that he hadn’t even heard of until a couple of days ago, Bloomberg couldn’t for the life of him remember why he and Joyce had left London. Although that grand city was where he could have done with the armed men. Station a couple inside the Ransom Gallery. Wake the critics right up. Don’t like what you see? Try this bayonet up your arse.

  But had things really been so bad there? Well, yes, they had: no money, nowhere to show his work after the last disaster, no mother, no friends to speak of, half of them gone in the war—Jacob, Gideon, Norman Taylor the sculptor, his little group from the Slade blasted to pieces. The stupid war: he was working in the drawing office a few miles behind the front when a brigadier came into the room, looked him over, then started talking with the officer in charge. “What’s he doing?” the brigadier had asked. “He’s doing section mapping, sir. That’s why he was brought in. He’s an artist.” “What’s his name?” “Bloomberg, sir.” And the brigadier had responded: “We can’t have a man with a name like that doing map drawing.” On the spot, Bloomberg was dispatched back to the front. Hard to believe, you could die for your country if you were a Jew, but you couldn’t map for it. Even so, it was his country, and this place, with its lunatic Jews and Arabs, certainly wasn’t.

  The car hit a bumpy patch of road and stirred Bloomberg out of his reverie. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Rachman, looking straight ahead at the road
and navigating its dusty craters, replied in better English than Bloomberg had expected, “In a half an hour we will pass through Jericho, then cross the Allenby bridge into Transjordan.”

  Bloomberg slumped back in his seat. Rachman checked his rearview mirror; the headlights on the other car shone a hundred yards back, then disappeared and reappeared as the drivers negotiated the long serpentine curves that led, far too suggestively, Bloomberg thought, to the lowest point on earth.

  In the rear of the second car Saud sat motionless between the two legionaries. The air in the vehicle reeked of stale tobacco and sweat. Suddenly, the driver pulled to a halt at the side of the road. The lead car sped on down the hill. Saud’s blood froze. Mustafa got out of the car, he opened the rear door and the men climbed out, the last pushing Saud in front of him. Mustafa took Saud by the arm and led him to the edge of a small ravine. Saud heard two clicks behind him. The other men had loaded their rifles. The stars spun overhead. Saud turned wildly to see where he might run.

  “Kneel down,” Mustafa ordered him. “Now close your eyes.”

  Saud obeyed: the strangest anxiety entered his mind that he mustn’t get the British schoolboy trousers dirty. Then there was his uncle, his apron stained with sesame oil, demanding to know where the policemen were taking the boy, and his mother, her face tearful in the angry crowd on the street, her arm reaching out to him. Much closer he heard loud laughter. Saud opened his eyes. In the glare of the car headlights Mustafa and the other two were pissing on the rocks a few feet down the hill. Saud rose and brushed off his trousers at the knees.

  “Did anyone say you could stand up?”

  They started laughing again.

  Mustafa made a clicking sound with his tongue.

  Saud cursed them out. They stopped laughing and told him to get back in the car.

  “You think we’d shoot you? We’d rather shoot him.” Mustafa grinned and nodded in the direction where Bloomberg’s car had vanished at the base of the hill.

  At dawn, as they passed the Ghor, Bloomberg woke with a pain in his left shoulder. He adjusted his position and looked out of the window to see a rushing stream bounding over rocks by a chasm of the Jordan. Then, as the highway turned through bare mountainous slopes on either side, he saw, a hundred yards ahead, what looked like a huge black upturned plow. As the car approached Rachman slowed and pointed.

  “Jericho Jane,” he said. “German present to the Turks.”

  “What?”

  Then Bloomberg made out a giant howitzer rising behind fragments of barbed wire, rough patches of oleander at its feet.

  “Is that what we called it?”

  Bloomberg had almost forgotten that the war had been here too.

  Rachman brought the car close to a halt.

  “Allenby came here”—he gestured to the right, swinging his arm— “and the Turks ran away there.” He pointed to his left.

  Rachman looked slightly disgusted, as if, so Bloomberg imagined, the Turkish flight, desirable though it had been at the time, was a cowardly disgrace upon the whole region.

  “And you,” Rachman asked, “you were in the British army?”

  “I was.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Flanders. They brought me in to draw maps. I was thirty-eight, already a little old for the trenches, but in the end I was sent to the front.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “For a while, and then I didn’t.”

  “You were wounded?”

  Bloomberg had no need to have this conversation, and yet he felt that he wanted to. If Joyce wasn’t around, Rachman was a useful wall to bounce off. And why not go over it all again? One more run-through to see if he had been a brave man or a coward. Although, of course, he already knew the answer.

  “I wounded myself. Shot my toe off. Deprived His Majesty of the services of a sworn member of his forces. Treason, in other words.”

  “Why didn’t they shoot you?”

  “They thought about it,” Bloomberg said, and laughed. “Then they decided it would be crueler to let me live.”

  Rachman smiled. No one in this car, thank God, was going to feel sorry for him.

  “Then what was your punishment?”

  “Three weeks without pay, then light duties until the wound healed.”

  “And after that?”

  “Back to the front with a vengeance, me old mate. Runner for the unit. Sketched the enemy positions.”

  Rachman nodded.

  “You were lucky. Here they would have shot you for sure. If you were an Arab and you had put a bullet in your foot to get out of battle . . .” Rachman closed one eye and set his gunsights. “Firing squad.”

  “And if I were a Jew?”

  “I believe that you already are a Jew.”

  Bloomberg laughed. All over the world there were fates more bitter than his, and they didn’t make a damn bit of difference to his own stupid misery.

  They drove south past small, sleepy Arab villages and on through a fair rolling plateau that seemed better wooded and better watered than any place Bloomberg had seen in Palestine. A castle appeared out of nowhere, rising on a rocky cliff above the river. Unlike the howitzer, however, Rachman didn’t seem to think this construction worthy of comment. Bloomberg stared hard at the landscape, then looked down at his hands: they were trembling a little, he couldn’t get them still. What would Joyce do without him? Be happy, perhaps. If happiness was an option for anyone—although Americans, whose culture assisted every illusion, seemed to believe in it. What he had done to her . . . The offer of love, the withdrawal of love; the encouragement of her work, the devaluation of her work; using her to vent his anger, spending her money: all this was despicable. In London, when he’d first met her, Joyce was spirited and adventurous, and to his enormous pleasure she had remained so despite the difficulties that he sometimes set in her path, but the last year in the West Hampstead studio had tested her sorely. He couldn’t explain to her what had happened to him. He thought that she knew anyway, and she had done everything to accommodate him. All he hoped was that time would grant him an opportunity to make restitution to her before they parted for good. Or had they already done so?

  One of the legionaries in the backseat woke and said something to Rachman, who drove on for a short distance and then stopped the car in the shade of some nearby trees. The men all got out to stretch their legs. After a few moments the second car pulled up and its occupants spilled out. Saud stood stiffly by the boot of the car looking back in the direction from which they had come. He had undone the top button of his white shirt and loosened, but not discarded, the school tie that he had been given at Government House. The stained bandage on his head flapped loose and dried blood was visible on his forehead.

  Bloomberg walked over to the car. “What happened to you?”

  The boy took a breath and surveyed the group of legionaries who were crouched in a tight circle looking at a map. He was about to speak when Rachman rose from the circle and spoke sharply to him in Arabic.

  “An accident. Nothing,” Saud replied.

  “Well, I’m Mark Bloomberg. I believe you’re going to help me with a few things.”

  “Yes,” Saud replied, “I’ll help you.”

  “You won’t have too much to do. I work alone and I mix my own colors!” Bloomberg meant this as a gentle joke and was surprised when the boy responded, “How could anyone else do that for you?”

  “Right,” Bloomberg said. “They couldn’t.”

  The boy looked down and kicked his heel into the dirt. When he looked up again Bloomberg had the feeling that he’d seen him before: that lanky frame, thin face and shadow of a mustache on his upper lip were all familiar. He had seen him before, he was certain of it. But when and where? And the boy was looking at him strangely—but why not? He was strange.

  Rachman folded the map and hustled the men back into the cars.

  “I’ll see you later,” Bloomberg said to Saud.

  The boy didn’
t reply.

  From a hill on its outskirts Amman looked no larger than an expanded village; closer, Bloomberg saw that it sprawled somewhat, and was perhaps the size of a small London neighborhood. They drove past the royal palace, a building of incongruous Swiss architecture, and on through a railway junction that displayed signs pointing to the HQ of the Transjordan police force, and the camp of the R.A.F. Eventually they came to a halt in front of a faux castle that was the temporary home of Freddie Peake, who, to Bloomberg’s amusement and marginal consternation—he hadn’t voted Labour all those years for nothing— Rachman kept referring to as Peake Pasha. But in any case, Peake Pasha was out, away for a few days on government business.

  Bloomberg’s large room was lavish by the standards to which he had become accustomed in Jerusalem. The dark highly polished furniture appeared outsized, and a glorious red-and-ochre kilim ran the length of the floor. Bloomberg stripped to his underwear and lay on the broad bed under a huge slowly spinning fan. Morning light blazed through the windows’ thin white curtains. Bloomberg closed his eyes. He was on the point of dozing off when he remembered where had seen the boy before—at the edge of his garden in Talpiot. Bloomberg had at first taken him for Joyce. But what had the boy been doing there? Come to rob the house perhaps? He would have been a disappointed thief. Bloomberg got up from the bed and walked to the window. Out on the street an old woman in a frayed black dress squatted with a wicker basket of grapes, or perhaps it was figs, at her feet. Not so long ago Bloomberg would have wanted to draw her, but that impulse was gone. He was after something deeper now and sought less and less of the world.

  21.

  For the second night in a row following two humid, insufferable days, Joyce sat with Peter Frumkin’s party at a table in one of the tearooms in the Municipal Gardens. Frumkin had come by to invite her and Mark for drinks late on the previous evening, arriving with his lanky chauffeur, who looked more like a bodyguard, about forty-five minutes after Kirsch and Mark had set off for Government House. Frumkin had found Joyce sitting in the dark. When he called out, “Mr. and Mrs. Bloomberg,” she had pretended to be asleep and kept silent. Her head was spinning. In a few days everything had turned upside down, mostly because of her. She wished that she had hated going to bed with Robert Kirsch, but that wasn’t the case. She wished she had felt relieved when Mark had left— able to breathe, unburdened—but that wasn’t the case either. Frumkin had called out again, and then, indifferent to the shocks that he might be sending through her system, he had entered the cottage and turned up a lamp. “I heard there was an interesting American couple in town,” he’d said after introducing himself. “Only half right,” Joyce had replied, trying hard to collect herself. “My husband’s a Londoner.” The floor was strewn with her own clothes and those that Bloomberg had left behind. She regarded them without embarrassment and did not rise to clear up. She knew that Frumkin’s “interesting” was a reference to her and Mark’s involvement in the murder hunt. Tout Jerusalem wanted to hear the story, and most already had. Still, she picked herself up and went with him.