A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  She had to admit it was nice to be with Americans again, especially Californians. She needed their light banter and easy friendship. The other senior members of the Titus production crew were both, like Frumkin, men in their late twenties. The three of them, Frumkin, Rex, and Harvey (Joyce could remember only Frumkin’s last name), were full of jokes and, she guessed, loaded with money. On the first night she had largely observed their proceedings, and said little. They hadn’t prodded her about De Groot, and she hadn’t spoken of him. Tonight she felt loosened a degree, like the second day home after a long journey. Frumkin, to whom the others clearly deferred, had ordered a third bottle of wine and then a fourth. Everybody toasted the Volstead Act. Joyce, more than slightly tipsy, thought she saw a sliver of her face flash distorted in the restaurant’s polished silverware, her throat on a knife edge.

  “So listen to this, Joyce . . .” Frumkin had placed his hand on her arm. “We’re on this desert plain fifty miles south of Jerusalem and we’re going to do the bedouin camel charge. I’ve got three hundred of these guys, they’re all mounted, obviously we don’t need costumes but we’ve given them each a gilt javelin. Harvey over here has measured the ground, the cameras are placed. ‘Roll ’em,’ he yells. The bedouin charge: it’s great. They charge right across the plain, waving the fucking javelins and yelling: spectacular—the only problem is they keep going. The camera crew’s going nuts, the director’s having a heart attack and the bedouin just disappear into a wadi between the hills. The whole lot of them.”

  Joyce laughed along with the others.

  “Then we’re worried that all we’ve got on film is a dust storm. We’ve got to do it again. But there’s no one to do it with! Not a fucking one of them. And they don’t come back.”

  The days in the desert had tanned Frumkin’s skin nut brown and blanched his thick fair hair. His teeth were movie-star white, even though he was only the producer. The previous evening Joyce had already sensed that he liked her, and she had to make sure not to encourage him. Robert Kirsch was quite enough for now. But what a pleasure Frumkin was: easy, fun, not at all like her intense Brits.

  There was a short silence as the table was cleared of dinner plates. The three men looked at her—only Frumkin, she thought, with a trace of desire. They were from Hollywood and used to the company of stunningly beautiful women. Whatever interest she had for them would come from her personality, not her appearance. In a way, this was a relief. Robert Kirsch had stared at her as if he would never be able to tear himself away from her face; his doing so wasn’t unpleasant, but adoration could quickly become oppressive. The waiter brought coffee and they all lit cigarettes. Joyce felt the moment coming when she would have to sing for her supper, relive once again De Groot’s death rush into the garden. Of course she could demur if she wished, refuse to tell the story, retreat behind the shield of her ladylike sensibilities: “Too awful to speak of.” But that was precisely the reason to speak: it was Mark who had shaken and cried after the event, not her. She adjusted the sprig of jasmine that she had pinned to the lapel of her jacket; the same scent had surrounded her in the garden as she sponged the blood off Mark’s chest.

  “So,” Frumkin said, “we hear you’ve had a hell of an experience.”

  Joyce readied herself to respond, but before she could begin, the waiter—curt and aggressive like all the local Jewish service staff, or so it seemed—called Frumkin away. She watched him skirt two tables and walk a few yards toward the wide entrance doors where two uniformed policemen stood waiting for him. Joyce recognized one of them immediately; it was Harlap, the officer who had sat insouciantly on her bed a few nights ago and interrogated her about De Groot’s last words. Frumkin touched the policeman’s back and guided him through the doors. Joyce sipped her coffee.

  “I guess I’ll wait,” she said.

  “Might as well. I don’t think Pete wants to miss this story,” Harvey replied. “He’s probably already wondering who he can get to play you.”

  Joyce smiled. “How about Zasu Pitts?”

  “Not Lillian Gish?” Rex put in.

  “And who for my husband?”

  “Who would you like?”

  “Ivor Novello.”

  “No hesitation there. I take it you’ve seen The White Rose ?”

  “We saw it in London. Two nights before we left for Palestine.”

  “Well, he’s handsome, even for a Brit.”

  “So is my husband.”

  Frumkin returned to the table. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “All set up for tomorrow,” he announced. “We’re going to shoot the assault outside the walls at daybreak. Those guys will keep the inquisitive public at bay.”

  “I thought you’d already spoken to the cops,” Harvey said.

  Joyce looked across at him. Harvey was wearing a slightly baffled expression.

  “Right,” Frumkin replied. “They just wanted to check up on a few details.”

  “So no change of plans?”

  “No change,” Frumkin said firmly. “Let’s just hope this lot stays put.”

  He turned to Joyce. “We’re borrowing half the British legionaries in Jerusalem and turning them into Romans. Perfect, don’t you think? One imperial army playing another. Paying them, of course, and for Sir Gerald”—Frumkin looked around the restaurant to make sure that he wasn’t being overheard—“a substantial dollar contribution to his Pro-Jerusalem Society.”

  They headed back to the Allenby Hotel, where the Metropolis Film Corporation had taken over two floors. Frumkin and Joyce walked slightly ahead of the others.

  “What are your plans for the next few days?” Frumkin asked.

  “I’m waiting,” she said. “I’m supposed to be doing some work here. Possibly in one of the Jewish schools.”

  “Well, while you’re waiting is there any chance that you’d like to help us out?”

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, there’re a million things to be done on a film set.”

  “Well, that’s kind of you,” Joyce said. “I’ll certainly think about it.”

  They approached the lobby of the hotel. Frumkin whistled and, like an obedient dog, his chauffeur responded immediately, pulling the hired company limousine to the front of the taxi line. Harvey and Rex shook Joyce’s hand and said good night. Frumkin leaned over to speak to his driver, then opened the car door for Joyce.

  “Aron here will take you home. I’m sorry I can’t escort you back but I’ve got quite a bit of work to do before we start shooting.”

  “If it’s all the same I’d really rather walk.”

  “Inadvisable to say the least. Too far, and too dangerous.”

  “Not at all,” Joyce replied. She felt that she had fallen into her English self: overpolite to the point of self-mortification.

  “Don’t make me come with you,” Frumkin threatened. “If you do, you’re going to be responsible if we have a late start tomorrow. Do you have any idea what an hour of filming costs?”

  He reached out and grabbed her hand, then leaned in and kissed her gently on the cheek.

  “Good night, Mrs. Bloomberg.”

  Joyce got into the back of the limousine. The chauffeur closed the door and came around into the driver’s seat. Joyce leaned back into the soft leather. Aside from the governor’s, this was probably the most luxurious car in Jerusalem: rags to riches. Mark would be appalled. But there was something fresh and hopeful about these film boys. Joyce knew why: the war hadn’t touched them. What was it Peter Frumkin had said during dinner last night? “We had the overseas caps but didn’t make it overseas.” The war had ended before they could set off for France. Three lucky American boys serving their time at Camp Taylor. Of course they didn’t see it that way. They had, all three of them, wanted to be heroes. Mark could have told them all about that, or even Robert Kirsch, who had lost his brother.

  The car pulled away smoothly from the hotel. The moon over the Mount of Olives appeared swollen and the hills
seemed to falter beneath it. The place took her breath away, so much so that, along with her Zionist involvement, Joyce almost wished that she had religion to provide a home for her excess of feeling. And she so much wanted to do something here. It was frustrating. She missed the London meetings with their thrilling sense of urgency and companionship: raised voices, argument, and crowded rooms. And Mark, even though he didn’t know it, had led her there. He had told her about Jacob Rosen, had shown her his poems and she had read them again and again until Jacob’s hopeful, pioneer-proud, godless Jerusalem was hers. It was Jacob who had taken her out into the street and down to Toynbee Hall where a hundred black umbrellas were stacked up in the corner but the walls were covered with posters of sunny Palestine. But here she was, in the place, and her Zionism was quickly becoming a lonely thing.

  The car moved forward. After fifteen minutes or so they arrived at the narrow, bumpy track that led to the Bloombergs’ cottage. The driver halted twenty yards from the gate.

  “Thank you, Aron,” Joyce said.

  The driver turned around in his seat. His chauffeur’s uniform consisted of a white singlet, brown shorts, dark socks and scuffed leather shoes.

  “Do you like Mr. Frumkin?”

  Joyce was a little taken aback.

  “Well enough, yeah, sure.”

  “He is a powerful man. And strong for the Jews.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Aron raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as if to convey that he was privy to secret information.

  “Not like the British Jews. They like their teatime too much. They can’t change. One hundred and five percent English. All they think about is to be fair. No one is fair in the Middle East. Mr. Frumkin understands what has to be done here.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Ask him. We’ve had a lot of talks.”

  Aron’s response was locally typical: to lead you somewhere and then clam up. The British were similar. Joyce thought it might have something to do with the proximity of borders in small countries. Americans were expansive in conversation, they would tell you anything, the talk was continent-wide.

  “All right, I will.”

  Joyce got out of the car and swung the door shut. She waited until Aron reversed and the purr of the engine had died away; then she walked up the path and stepped through a gap in the wall. The heat, if anything, seemed to have increased as the night wore on. There was a smell of ripe figs in the air. Nearby a branch cracked and she heard what sounded like a small cascade of stones. Joyce stopped short. Was someone watching her? She looked around. The fat moon had disappeared and the stars, usually so brilliant, were veiled with mist.

  “Hello!” Joyce called out, but there was no reply.

  It sounded as if a thousand locusts were singing in the trees. Joyce, refusing fear, walked slowly through the garden and unlocked the front door. She pushed it open, locked it behind her, and then, without turning up a lamp, flopped down on the bed without noticing either the folded note that Robert Kirsch had sheepishly pushed under her door an hour or so earlier, or the canvases and clothes that, at some other point in the evening, had been trodden on, split, and ripped, either by accident or intent, while someone, in haste, had searched the room.

  22.

  A huge pool of liquid sewage lay in Wadi al-Joz, the otherwise lovely valley that ran between the large house that belonged to Shaikh Isma’il, Jerusalem’s grand mufti, and Clive Barker’s altogether less impressive abode. The priciest Moslem residential area in the city had been flooded with the drainage from Mea She’arim, one of the poorest Jewish neighborhoods. The local property owners, all Moslem, were up in arms. Kirsch couldn’t fathom why Ross had sent him to deal with the problem; surely it was something to be worked out between the Zionist Commission, which had funded the Mea She’arim drain work, and the administration, which was supposed to have carried it through effectively. Settling down angry but nonviolent Arab petitioners wasn’t police work, unless Kirsch’s duties had been restructured without his knowing it. He should have been investigating Cartwright’s murder. He had spent the previous morning composing a letter to follow up the telegram that he had already sent to Cartwright’s parents, while phrases from the official missive that his parents had received about Marcus had danced through his brain. He was preparing to leave his office and drive out to take a close look around the site of the shootings, when Ross had called to tell him that as Cartwright’s death and the wounding of Lampard and Dobbins was, so he believed, an exclusively military matter, he would be taking the investigation under his own wing. This was patently nonsense—even if Cartwright had been the victim of a terrorist act, or a political assassination, it was still police business—and Kirsch knew that Ross was covering something up, but as yet he couldn’t figure out what that something might be. So instead, here was Detective Kirsch hard on the Case of the Overflowing Drain. Ross must have known that Kirsch felt like shit, and that must have been why he had given him shit to deal with.

  It was nine in the morning and the sun was already too hot to bear. All Kirsch really wanted to do was find Joyce and pour his heart out to her; instead he was stepping through a foul-smelling, fly-ridden black pond of decomposing turds and other rotting sewage.

  Barker was waiting at the front door of his own house, his commonly pale face beet-red under his broad-brimmed sun helmet. He was fuming.

  “And pat he comes,” he yelled, as Kirsch picked his way across the semiflooded garden, “like the Catastrophe of the Old Comedy.”

  “Now, now,” Kirsch responded. He had never had much feeling for Barker, who carried his “civic advisor” title as if Jerusalem were his personal fiefdom.

  “Now what? I spend from dawn until now sticking my knife up some worm-eaten timbers in the Al Aqsa trying to figure out some way to preserve the fabric of this city’s most beautiful places, and I have to come home to this. It’s a bloody disgrace. And I don’t mind who hears it, you can tell Lord bloody Samuel for all I care, but I tell you if the situation were reversed and the drains of a Moslem slum voided into the best Jewish quarter there would be such a bloody outcry you’d be able to hear it on Wall Street and Park Lane.”

  A few months earlier a poem had circulated among the gentile upper-echelon mandate officers, and someone, ignorant of Kirsch’s allegiance to the faith that the poem mocked, had passed it on to him:

  Benjamin, and Levy, Cohen and Sassoon,

  Lewis, Mond, and Meinertzhagen moaning all in tune,

  Franklin, Montefiore, and Harrari in between,

  Isaacs, Fels, and Israeli baying at the moon,

  Ladenburg, and Schlezinger, and Trier, and Duveen,

  All the tribes in harmony from counter, pale, and dune—

  Was such sorrow ever known, or such a scandal seen!

  Samuel, Schiff, and Rothschild twined in richer chords,

  Mourning all together in a cry that is the Lord’s.

  Kirsch was sure that Barker had been the author; a second verse, apparently far more vulgar in its conception, and detailing the “scandal” alluded to in the first, had followed a week or so later to much local hilarity. Kirsch heard about it, but by that time his source had realized his mistake and wisely chose to leave Kirsch out of the readers’ loop.

  “Listen, Barker, Ross sent me down here because you told him things were about to blow. I don’t see any street activity. What exactly is it that you think’s going on here?”

  The stench from the sewage was overwhelming. Kirsch stepped into the house and closed the door behind him. Barker had shut all the windows in an effort to keep out the smell, which simply meant that he was now suffocating.

  “A story,” Barker began, without making even the minimal overtures of hospitality—tea or coffee—that were common among the expats. “I get a request for a building permit and I refuse it as premature. It is followed by a petition. I go out to look at the site and I find the petitioner, a long, hungry-looking Germanized Jew who it turns out
has been stealing his neighbor’s boundary stones. The neighbors, all Moslem, are sitting around, some six of them, in the garden. In the usual Moslem way they had started to build without counting the cost, and then left their great stones lying around for heaven and the British administration to care for. So this Jew, a religious fanatic by the way, had conceived the idea not only of adding a wing to his house but also a foot or two to his land. The Moslem neighbors entered an injunction, but they were very kindly folk, and when I came into the garden tapped their foreheads significantly and said, ‘Majnun’—you don’t know Arabic, do you, Kirsch? ‘Quite mad!’ ‘Etfaddal!’ ‘Pray be seated.’ There was a great Kalam when the Jew who had it in mind that his was a prescriptive religious right sprang up at me and spread his great and very dirty paws, all the ten fingers extended, over my face. What did I do, Kirsch? I whipped out my little cane and rapped him soundly upon the knuckles. The Moslem claque on the garden wall shouted with fun at the play, but a fortnight later along came another petition, this time addressed to the chief administrator and passed on through the governor, asking for an investigation as to the reasons why a British official had maltreated an unfortunate Jew, and ‘stricken him bloody’ over the backs of his hands. Why am I telling you this? Because I have had it up to here. I can’t stay in this house now— who could? And I’m about to be investigated by you people for defending myself against, against . . .”