A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  By the time they reached Haifa it was dark. Near the port, the looming warehouses along the shoreline seemed to lean together like conspirators. The air was humid and brackish; Joyce felt as if her arms, legs, and face were covered in thin layers of oil and salt. The hair on the back of Aron’s head glinted with sweat. In the beam thrown by the car’s yellow headlights she saw a mangy dog rush into the road. Aron slowed to let it cross; then he pulled into an alleyway and turned off the engine. They were close enough to the sea that Joyce could hear water lapping against the concrete quay. Aron got out and opened her door. Her legs felt heavy but she stood and followed him down the alley. After a hundred yards or so he turned abruptly into a narrow passage not visible from where they had parked. He approached a metal door set two feet off the ground in an otherwise uniform high brick wall. Aron banged twice with his fist. Joyce heard a bolt slide back. Frumkin looked out; the moon, murky and veiled, threw a dim light across his face. When he saw Joyce he smiled and extended a hand to help her up.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  “Then you knew more than me,” she replied.

  When Frumkin lit two oil lamps the storage room revealed a stack of low flat crates all stamped PROPERTY OF METROPOLIS FILM CORPORATION. In addition, piled up against the far wall, there were many smaller boxes with Hebrew lettering stenciled on their sides.

  Frumkin gestured toward the crates. “This is what you have to deliver. The props. And here’s a list of the actors to whom they have to be distributed.”

  Joyce took the sheet of paper. She looked down at the neatly typed names and addresses.

  “What’s in the crates?”

  Frumkin gave her a long look.

  “You said you wanted to help, didn’t you? ‘In any way that I can.’ Isn’t that what you said? I assumed that you understood.”

  “I do want to help.”

  “In any way that you can. Right?”

  Joyce was shivering a little.

  Frumkin walked over to one of the crates and lifted the lid. Joyce froze. Frumkin began to talk fast.

  “You’ll have to move them piecemeal. A few crates at a time. Not in the vehicle you came in, by the way. I don’t want you seen again with Aron. If anybody asks, and I know you know someone who will ask if he should happen to get hold of you, I left you the old jalopy to run around in because you’re doing all kinds of wrap-up business for the corporation. Kirsch, if he finds you, which he won’t, will think that’s bullshit. But if he does, he’ll imagine I gave you the car simply to impress you with my wealth and beneficence, and obviously because I want to get you into bed. That’s fine. Don’t put him right, and don’t try to come here to Haifa more than once every ten days or so. If it takes six weeks to get everything out, so be it. We can wait. The bullets will be easy. Take at least two boxes for every large crate.”

  Joyce stared at the guns.

  “But Leo never said anything about guns.”

  “Leo? Who’s Leo?”

  Joyce looked at Frumkin; shadows from the flickering lamps danced behind his head. A terrible awareness shook Joyce and she began visibly to tremble. She was terrified but also disturbingly excited.

  “Leo Cohn. From London.”

  Frumkin stared back at her, an expression of contempt on his face. “I don’t know any Leo Cohn.”

  “A teacher. I was going to be a teacher.” She was talking to herself more than to Frumkin.

  “Look, you’re in this thing now and you can’t turn back.”

  Joyce’s eyes searched wildly around the room. Her heart was pounding. There was nothing here of orchards to be planted or songs to be sung with needy children. The only desperate child was herself.

  Frumkin continued to talk in a low, urgent voice.

  “Before you drive up from Jerusalem, you’ll call Shako Brothers, the tour service in Haifa. The number’s 240. It’s run by Aron’s brother Motti. He will meet you and help you load up. You can start deliveries tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Joyce didn’t know what she was saying.

  “Why bring you here otherwise?”

  “But I have no idea where I’m going,” she stammered. “I’ve never driven here.”

  Frumkin put his hand on her arm. “Are you serious or not?”

  “Serious. Yes, I want to be serious.”

  “Do you think we’re not going to help you find your way? Everything will be made easy. All you have to do is follow a car for a while, then branch off on your own and make a few quick deliveries. The first one’s in Ramleh, on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem; then you’ll follow someone else, and after it’s all done you’ll go back to Jaffa. Everything will be provided for you there: money, clothing, food. You’re not to return to Jerusalem. Not until you hear from one of us that you can.”

  “And what if someone comes looking for me?”

  “A room has been set up for you. No one will find you. And the movie wrap-up took longer than expected. You understand that?”

  There was a faint smell of mildew in the room. The yellow light emanating from the oil lamps swirled suddenly green and black. Joyce felt she was drowning.

  “I need some air,” she said.

  Frumkin pulled himself up to his full height and took a deep intake of breath, as if to accentuate Joyce’s weakness: Producer of Movies, Director of Operations. He was enjoying himself.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. “Here, put this on.”

  He handed her a wavy brown wig of the sort worn by Palestine’s Orthodox Jewish women. Joyce pulled it on too low, the way she used to tug on her wool hat on cold days in London and New York. Frumkin took a quick step forward and made the necessary adjustment.

  Then she was out in the salt-stained air, the stars whirling above her like crazed gulls. She managed to steady herself and slide into the driver’s seat of Frumkin’s car. The crates were speedily loaded in the back and before she knew it Aron had started the car in front of her and was signaling out of the window for her to get going. She turned the ignition and crashed the gears twice before the clutch caught and she began to move forward.

  Hours later, in the first moments of a damp, blurry dawn, when night and day were confused in a gray-black cloudscape over the Mediterranean, Joyce pulled Frumkin’s car into the protective shelter of a corrugated shack next to a small dilapidated house. Her mind was clotted with images and remembered odors: two men who had greeted her sullenly and with hardly a word, both wearing high-collared Russian-style shirts, but with Arab kaffiyehs on their heads to deceive any onlookers; back streets that she had followed to different destinations, each one shabbier than the next; the stench of a ditch she had crossed that led to a cesspool that a gloomy boy had helped her circumvent; figures that had emerged from nowhere to unload her crates and pack her boxes of bullets first into tins labeled THIN SOCIAL BISCUITS, and then into the bottom of straw baskets with sturdy handles, where they were quickly hidden beneath an array of fresh vegetables; vineyard supports that, stacked against a palm tree, threw the silhouette of a dark crucifix in the moonlight; and finally, at the last place she stopped, a corrugated lean-to at the back of a farm-house barn, where suddenly the scent of wild honeysuckle overwhelmed her, as if to confirm her newly acquired hope that sweetness might emerge from violence.

  Joyce entered the house and threw herself, utterly exhausted, on the closest piece of furniture, a long, narrow couch with a thin unadorned mattress. What would Mark have thought of her activities? Probably not much more than he had of her painting: the work of a desperate dilettante. And what did she think of them herself ? She wasn’t sure. Somewhere inside, a private heresy, she felt that she had betrayed herself. The gap had widened too far between her way of living and her feeling of what life should be: first bitter talk with Mark on a tumbled bed, and now her entry into a darkness where she discovered herself willing to do the dirty work for those who labored in the service of a great idea. And perhaps, after all, what she wanted was simple: love, peace, and
quiet.

  Joyce roused herself enough to pull off her clothes. She lay back naked on the couch and fell asleep as the birds began to sing.

  August

  28.

  In the mornings Saud set up a bleached white linen tent in the spot where Bloomberg wanted to paint. They had bought it from a man returning to Amman from Mecca. Other travelers—pilgrims and tourists—passed through almost daily. Habobo Brothers ran a weekly motor and camel service from Jerusalem and Haifa, and Saud used Bloomberg’s money to buy tobacco, needles, and soap from the company drivers. Bloomberg could have sent a message back to Ross at any time, but he chose not to. In fact, he had heard twice, in polite notes, from his patron, but he had chosen not to respond. He certainly didn’t want replacement bedouin sent down to “rescue” him, and then there was the far more important matter of De Groot’s murderers, but that was an issue that Bloomberg needed to think through; a solution that was safe for the boy—other than the current situation, that is—had yet to present itself.

  At first, Bloomberg worked far away from the rock face; the distance was necessary in order to secure the “accurate views” that Ross desired. But, sketched in this way, the massive temples and vast Necropolis looked tiny and unimpressive. By the end of two weeks Bloomberg had begun to move his position forward. Now, more than a month later, the effect of his work was reversed: The Temple of Isis, the amphitheater and the banquet hall lost their contours and became indistinguishable elements of the crimson rock from which they were hewn.

  Bloomberg painted in purple, pink, red, and brown. He worked on a large canvas that Saud had helped him to stretch: his brushwork loose and expressive, he dragged the heavily loaded pigment across the canvas, his mind both free and utterly concentrated. For ten days he had worked at night and on into the early morning, sleeping through the heat of the day and asking Saud to wake him for dinner. But then, suddenly, he had altered his routine. Now he spent the mornings clambering over the rocks, treading paths that the Nabateans had cut and that, two thousand years ago, had brought them to the high spots that were their places of sacrifice. Bloomberg liked to touch the rough-hewn facades of the ancient buildings. He saw Saud watching him with amusement as he stretched his arms, like Samson, between two giant pillars, or placed his hands, as if attempting to make an impression, on the surface of a pink-and-white wall. Then, against Saud’s better judgment, he began to paint at the hour of the day when the sun was most fierce. He wore his wide-brimmed hat, but even so the heat was intense and he frequently felt himself on the edge of fainting. But this was a precipice where he wanted to stand: unmoored in the blinding light, his head throbbing. He could paint at this time of day only for an hour or two. The problem was technical as well as physical: the oil dried too fast in the heat and he preferred it when the paint stayed wet and he could work it. But it was worth losing time for the magnificent abandonment that he was at last able to feel: a sensation of possibility leading to an honesty of expression that, he thought, he hadn’t managed to accomplish since his student days at the Slade. Sometimes the wind whipped a hard rain of sand onto his canvas but, instead of despairing, he simply mixed it in; more than once he removed the canvas from its easel and placed it on the ground; then he scurried around it on all fours, painting with his back to the rocks that were ostensibly the subject of his work. Kneeling beside his wet canvas, his face, hands, and clothes stained with sweat and paint, Bloomberg felt transported: the overwhelming misery that had gripped him for more than a year had lifted, or at least it was in hiding. Here, as the weeks passed under the obliterating desert sun, he let the past go.

  The painting was almost completed. He had poured his heart and soul into it, and it was, he thought, the first work of any significance that he had managed since his arrival in Palestine. He knew things were going well because he had lost track of the days, and because he was avoiding contact with others as much as he could. From time to time a tourist, usually British, took the long walk out to Bloomberg’s perch in the rocks and hovered nearby, as Ross had done on the roof of his house in Jerusalem. Only one fellow had braved Bloomberg’s hard stare and tried to engage him in conversation, but Bloomberg had firmly requested that he go away. The only person he spoke to was Saud. And what did they talk about? Nothing but daily things, and Bloomberg was completely happy with the quotidian: he wasn’t ready yet, and neither was the boy, for any meditation on the future. They were like an old married couple, nothing much to say except, “What’s for dinner tonight?”

  This morning—he had been in Petra for perhaps two months; the moon, fat when he arrived, and full on one occasion since, had swollen again and was nearing the completion of her cycle—Bloomberg was planning to have Saud help him set up, and then he was going to put the finishing touches to his painting, but when he returned from his daily walk among the ruins Saud was nowhere to be seen. In his place Bloomberg found two visitors waiting in his tent.

  The young man, who was dressed in a crumpled white suit that exhibited dark sweat stains under the arms, stood to introduce himself and the woman. He was prevented from reaching his full height by the confines of the tent. His hair, a wild mop of black untamed curls, brushed against the canvas roof.

  “Michael Cork. I hope you don’t mind, and this is my wife, Sarah. I’m so sorry but we couldn’t help coming over and barging in. You see it’s just an incredible coincidence. We’ve been on this tour, under rather peculiar circumstances, I’m afraid, but no need to go into that now. You probably don’t know it, but you’re, how shall I say this, you’re a sight. All the guides mention you. And we are, well, admirers, and more, we’re, well, thanks to Sarah here, we’re owners. We possess a Bloomberg. Got it last year after we came back from Germany—that was our last trip, walking the Black Forest and then three nights in Heidelberg. Altogether happier times. Our honeymoon actually. God, I’m sorry! Anyway, your painting, I mean, the fact that you’re working right here. You can’t imagine how excited we are.”

  Bloomberg listened, but the words circled him like wheeling birds. The desert had thrummed its extraordinary silence deep into him, and the patter and speed of ordinary English conversation, sentences that rattled, squealed and swerved like a London bus, sounded alien, almost incomprehensible.

  “Barges on the Canal, Sarah fell in love with it. She grew up near a lock. Iffley Lock in Oxfordshire? I don’t suppose you’ve ever, by any chance, been there? There’s a pub right over the bridge, the Green Man. At any rate, we had a choice between furniture for the new flat or your painting and I’m happy to say we made the right decision. God, I think she’d eat off the floor to own your work! Well, I should really”—Cork’s voice trailed away—“shut up and let Sarah speak for herself.”

  He flushed red and turned to his wife, who rose from where she had been sitting cross-legged on the groundsheet. She offered a broad smile and extended her hand to Bloomberg.

  “Sarah Cork. I’m so honored to meet you.”

  Bloomberg wiped his hands on his shirt. The young woman’s face wasn’t pretty, not in any conventional sense—her nose was too long, her lips too thin for that—but it was an open and attractive face. Her auburn hair was cut short in a bob, and her brown eyes had a somber quality that he immediately liked. Or, and the thought flashed bulletlike through his brain, did he already admire everything about her simply because she had purchased one of his paintings?

  There was an awkward silence—that London bus halted at a red light—and then Bloomberg, remembering his tribal manners from some far-off place, asked: “Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?”

  Every morning Saud collected a few twigs and set a niggardly fire a few paces from the tent. He heated coffee in a small blackened pot, holding it over the flames by its long copper handle. As usual, Bloomberg had noted the fire on returning from his walk, so Saud couldn’t be too far away, but Bloomberg had no intention of calling out for the boy. Any visitors were potential trouble. And moreover Saud was his assistant, not his servant.


  “Tea would be lovely,” Sarah said enthusiastically. She might have been at a tennis tournament.

  Bloomberg stepped out of the tent.

  He heated water over the fire, and when it boiled he poured it into two cracked floral-pattern china cups (Saud had scrounged them from a party of Dutch tourists—the handles had snapped off) and added sprigs of nana leaves.

  He brought the steaming mint tea in to his visitors.

  “Aren’t you joining us?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m not thirsty,” Bloomberg replied. He didn’t want to admit that there were only two cups, although that was hardly something to be ashamed of.

  Bloomberg removed a box of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and proffered it to Michael, but it was Sarah who reached for it. Bloomberg pushed the box across to her.