“How long will you stay here?”
“I really don’t know. Until the work is done, I suppose.”
There was another silence that seemed as if it might, for all three of them, last beyond embarrassment and on into some speechless perfect destiny, but then the quiet was shattered by the backfire of a car exhaust echoing across the desert, and the noise ignited the conversation.
“And the two of you?” Bloomberg continued. “You mentioned ‘peculiar circumstances.’ ”
Michael Cork looked across at his wife.
“We came out to Jerusalem six and a half weeks ago because my cousin was shot,” Sarah said. “He’s a policeman, Bobby Kirsch. My uncle and aunt would have made the trip, but they’re not quite up to it, I’m afraid.”
Bloomberg expressed nothing, but felt an inner jolt, as if an electric current had run through him. He collected himself by staring hard at the green groundsheet and smoothing a few crinkles with a pass of his hand.
“Shot dead?”
“No, thank God. In the arm. But it wasn’t the bullet that did the damage. He was on his motorbike and he crashed.”
Bloomberg looked at Sarah. She returned his stare. He thought he saw something in the way that she was regarding him, some recognition beyond the admiration that had already been expressed, but he wasn’t sure.
“He’s a mess,” she concluded.
“Bobby sent us away,” her husband put in—fearful, it seemed, that Bloomberg might imagine that they had been derelict in their duty to the sick. “I mean, gosh, Sarah was at the hospital every day. She’s been wonderful. But he sent us away, he said Sarah deserved a holiday and he just couldn’t stand our miserable faces around any longer. And he is on the mend, although it will be at least another fortnight until he’s out of the wheelchair.”
Bloomberg couldn’t quite process the image of Kirsch in a wheelchair. The picture blurred in his head. This wasn’t the fate that he had intended, or even imagined, for his wife’s lover when he had left Jerusalem.
“Does your cousin have a lot of visitors?”
Bloomberg knew that the question must have seemed strange, and he wasn’t surprised to see the Corks turn to one another with a shared look of puzzlement on their faces.
“Well,” Sarah began slowly, “there’s Sir Gerald Ross, he’s been terribly concerned. He visits the hospital three or four times a week, and the nurses told me that at the beginning, when Bobby was first brought in, he was there every day.”
“Ah yes, Sir Gerald. He can certainly be relied upon to do the right thing.”
“Oh, do you know him?”
“Know him? He’s the reason I’m here. All these vast worldly belongings that you see around you, including my goodly tent, the whole lot comes courtesy of Sir Gerald. He is, if you’ll pardon the expression, my patron.”
“So perhaps you’ve met Sarah’s cousin,” Michael offered enthusiastically, either choosing to ignore or simply missing Bloomberg’s comic register. “Bobby’s stick-thin and his hair’s sandy, but otherwise his face is remarkably like my wife’s.”
“That’s not true,” Sara corrected. “Bobby’s much better-looking than I am.”
Michael Cork blushed again but responded immediately, “That’s nonsense, Sarah.”
Despite his better instincts Bloomberg admired him. Mr. Cork was clearly willing to battle two strong opponents—shyness and English reticence—on behalf of his true love.
“Yes,” Bloomberg replied, directing his remarks to Sarah. “I have met your cousin. He was investigating a murder in which I played a strange part. I danced briefly with the corpse.”
“Oh God, it was you. How extraordinary. But Bobby didn’t mention your name. I think he simply said ‘a local British couple.’ He’s quite changed. I don’t know how well you became acquainted, but he’s silent a great deal of the time now. Terribly depressed, of course. If you saw his leg you’d know why, it’s half its previous size, as if someone had sliced it down the middle.”
“I’m sorry.”
The air in the tent seemed to have stopped circulating. Michael Cork removed his jacket: the sweat stains on his shirt matched those on the jacket. Sara, whose own clothes, a long loose cotton skirt and thin cream blouse, seemed far more appropriate to the place, wiped the back of her hand across her brow and rolled up her sleeves.
“And do they know who shot Captain Kirsch?” Bloomberg continued.
“No one knows anything,” Michael Cork began, “but the city’s a tinderbox. Everybody says so. There are rumors flying all over the place. We met a chap at the Allenby bar who once worked with Bobby, and he told us that all of a sudden Jerusalem is full of guns. No one knows where they’re coming from, or who exactly has them, but they are there. And you must have heard about the riot.”
“What riot?”
“Three weeks ago. Near the Wailing Wall? The news didn’t reach you?”
“Happily, not.”
“It started, if you can believe this, over an errant whack at a football in a village outside Jerusalem. A Jewish boy kicked it into an Arab family’s tomato patch. A little girl grabbed the ball and hid it in a pile of laundry. When the boy came to retrieve his ball, the girl started screaming. Out comes her father, or maybe it was her brother, with an iron rod and smashes the boy’s skull. Well, in these parts, as I’m sure you know, it’s all an eye for an eye, so two hours later there’s a young Arab boy out taking a stroll and suddenly he’s getting smacked on the head with a blunt instrument. News spreads into the city and by nightfall everybody was going at it in the area by the Wailing Wall. Luckily for Bobby he was already in the hospital, because the district commissioner sent in ten chaps in steel helmets to take on four hundred Jews and Arabs going crazy, and only one of the policemen managed to escape a wound.”
Sarah Cork gave her husband a harsh look.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I have an occasional tendency toward the foolish. Even had the misfortune to be born on April Fool’s Day. I don’t know how Sarah puts up with me. Of course, it’s not lucky that Bobby wasn’t there.”
“Listen,” Bloomberg said, “I have to get to work. But why don’t you two join me tonight for something to eat? Or is the tour moving you on?”
“Not yet,” Sarah replied. “Three days here, then a night in Al Aqaba, followed by Santa Katerina and journey’s end in Cairo. But why don’t you join us tonight? We do have a cook traveling with the group, he’s been coming up with some marvelous meals, and we’re not short on provisions.”
“Thank you, but no,” Bloomberg replied.
Sarah stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe, then immediately reached for Bloomberg’s Player’s and lit another one.
“This is really too strange,” she added, “sitting here with my absolute favorite artist.”
Her husband smiled. “Gosh, Sarah,” he said, “you’re sounding just like an American.”
“My wife’s American,” Bloomberg said.
The blood rushed to Michael Cork’s cheeks again.
“Perhaps you saw her in Jerusalem. Her name is Joyce. She knows your cousin better than I do. They became quite good friends during the murder investigation.”
The Corks looked at one another but said nothing.
“I’m afraid not,” Sarah replied, but once again Bloomberg had the impression, perhaps utterly false, that she knew more than she was about to let on.
Was he finished with the painting? He thought he was done awhile ago, but in the mornings the painting seemed to be laughing at him for imagining the end. When would it be over? There was no plan, there were no stages. When the end came he would be able to smell it, touch it, and always, for some reason, the last brushstrokes came in the top right-hand corner, sometimes hours or days after the “original” last touches. He had represented the rocks, if they were still rocks and not the hard places of his own mind, in pink and blue, but now he saw that the top right-hand corner needed brown. Otherwise, the painting wa
s boring. But brown in the place that he wanted to put it could lead to an entire reconfiguration, a new beginning. Of what Ross had requested nothing was left, no Tapering Columns, no Temple of Isis, no altar, pool and court, only the path to the place of sacrifice and the terrain that surrounded it.
Bloomberg worked in blazing heat as the red disk of the sun climbed through the brilliant atmosphere, tinged the peerless hues of the sandstone, crossed the impassable ravine, hid behind the towering cliffs, then emerged to occupy fragments of blue sky above. The effect of this experience on his mind, Bloomberg thought, would be enduring.
He painted for three hours until the sweat on his hands began to accumulate so fast that it was impossible for him to hold the brushes any longer; then he returned to his tent. At some point in the afternoon, while he was sleeping, Saud showed up. Bloomberg would not have known that he was there but for a stray camel that decided to stick its nose into the tent to sniff out food. Saud loudly shooed the animal away and Bloomberg awoke. He pulled his shirt over his head. His torso, while well muscled, was almost as skinny as the boy’s, but Bloomberg’s chest showed a crucifix of white hair. He wiped his perspiring face with the shirt then rolled it into a ball and threw it into a corner of the tent.
“I must go back to Jerusalem,” he said. “The painting’s finished. I have to deliver it.”
Saud put his arms around his knees. His face took on a hopeless expression, as if he were an animal gazing through the bars of his cage.
“But you’ll be perfectly safe. I’ve found some people who I think will take care of you, at least for a while. It will mean your traveling with them.”
“And then?”
“Well, eventually, when all this is cleared up, I hope you’ll return to Jerusalem and see your family. Perhaps I can make it happen. At any rate I’m going to try.”
“The Zionists murdered Yaakov, they will do the same to me, and if you interfere, they will kill you too.”
This was the first time since Saud’s initial revelations and the discussions immediately following that either one of them had mentioned the murder. And yet it felt to Bloomberg, because he had thought about it so much, that they were retreading old ground.
“They won’t find you and don’t worry about me, unfortunately I’m indestructible. In the best of circumstances for the job not even the Germans or my own superiors managed to do me in. But listen, do you know anyone in Cairo? Any family there? Anybody at all?”
Saud shook his head. “Why Cairo?”
“That’s where these people are headed. It’s all right, they’re trustworthy.”
“And what will you tell the governor?”
“That I’m returning to Petra. That you’re still there.”
Saud closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to them.
“Then you go and see my mother,” he said.
“I will. I promise I will,” Bloomberg replied.
Was Saud a skilled rent boy, as described by Rachman, or De Groot’s peculiarly precocious ephebe? Either way it didn’t matter. Prostitute or poet, or both, Bloomberg was absolutely convinced that he was innocent of murder. And beyond the boy’s word he had his hard evidence—the silver button with the royal crest that De Groot had ripped from his assailant’s tunic. Not that that would convince anybody of anything.
“Well, look . . .” Bloomberg reached for his hat, retrieved from its headband what remained of the money that Ross had given him and started to count it. “If this works out, and it will, I’m going to give you the whole lot minus enough to get me back to Jerusalem and in for a couple of drinks. British pounds work as well in Egypt as they do here. You should be fine for at least three months. You’ll send me your address, and if the time is right, I’ll come down and get you myself. Oh, why don’t you just take the money now?”
Saud stretched out his hand for the notes; then he rose, walked over to Bloomberg and kissed him on his forehead.
When night fell, the Corks turned up, “bobbed up,” Bloomberg thought, as invited. They had spent the day wandering in Zibb Atuf, which contained the oldest tombs in Petra, and finished up farther north at the Tomb of the Governor: a place Bloomberg knew well because the mausoleum was constructed like a temple, adorned with four huge columns, as if death were the finest thing on earth.
The three of them sat outside the tent. Bloomberg opened a bottle of arak and, because of the cup shortage, simply passed it around so they could take swigs. The night was clear and stars gathered and clustered in an abundance that the Corks had never witnessed before.
“What a magnificent place this is,” Michael said.
Bloomberg noted that both husband and wife had received mild sunburns during the day; the tip of Sarah’s nose, in particular, glowed red and looked as if it must be causing her at least a minor discomfort. She did look like her cousin. It was their eyes, deep-set and remote, that created the resemblance.
There wasn’t much to offer in the way of food. Bloomberg had opened two tins of beef and was heating the contents over the fire. There was fresh flat bread and onion to stuff in it along with the meat. On the pretext of needing something to make the meal more palatable Bloomberg had sent Saud off to one of the tourist camps in search of a bottle of wine. He planned to use the time the boy was gone to broach the subject of Saud’s journeying to Cairo with the Corks. However, before Bloomberg could begin, Sarah Cork, her tongue loosened a little by the arak, or so it seemed, began to talk about her cousin.
“I think he’d recover much quicker,” she said, “if he weren’t so sad.”
“Injuries like that can take a toll in lots of ways,” Bloomberg replied.
The injured and the lost were all over Europe, he thought. Young men missing arms, legs, eyes—and worse, men who’d never make love to a girl again. Bloomberg had got away by giving up one toe—and he’d done it to himself. There they all were, a long sick serpentine line curling out from London into the countryside and on, all the way up to the gray cities of the north and beyond to Scotland; the half-blind and half-deaf limping along, and now Kirsch, only a few years late, had joined the ranks. You couldn’t talk about physical suffering, of course, without thinking about the war. The Corks must have been thinking about it now. Half of Bloomberg’s friends were dead, Kirsch’s brother was dead. Who knew if this cheery young Michael Cork hadn’t lost someone in his family?
But Sarah, as Bloomberg quickly became aware, didn’t have the war on her mind. Her subject was closer to home, and at this point in time, even more compelling.
“No,” she said, “it’s not the injury. He’s got a broken heart.”
Bloomberg paused, he tried not to ask the inevitable question, but in the end he couldn’t resist doing so:
“And who has broken it?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied. “He won’t say. He’s being very secretive. When we were young he used to tell me everything. Our families were very close. I was more like a sister than a cousin.”
“So I take it there have been no visits?”
Once again the Corks exchanged glances. Bloomberg’s obsession with Kirsch’s hospital visitors was utterly mysterious.
“Not that we’re aware of,” Michael put in, “but who knows who came to the ward when we weren’t around?”
Bloomberg both did and did not want to pursue the topic of Kirsch’s broken heart, but either way, time was short. Saud would return soon with the wine. Hurriedly, he launched into a quick description of the plight of his assistant, who needed to get to Cairo in order to visit a sick relative. Could the Corks squeeze him in with their party? Naturally Bloomberg would cover the costs. The boy was an excellent companion, quiet, but if you got into conversation with him, preternaturally bright, he seemed to know a hundred English poems off by heart. He’d had a tutor in Jerusalem.
The Corks, as Bloomberg had expected, were generous and accommodating. They would absolutely arrange things. Bloomberg could count on them.
But in the meantime, wher
e was Joyce? And where was her sympathy for poor Bobby Kirsch? How had her interest in him evaporated so fast? Was it Bloomberg’s fault that she couldn’t even show up at his hospital bed with a bunch of flowers? Had he drained all her passion away, left her empty and incapable of feeling?
Two more gulps of arak and the burning stars annihilated his questions. Michael Cork chatted on, and Bloomberg tried, as best he could, to pay attention to the young man’s earnest and well-meaning assessment of the situation in Palestine. Then, in the space of an hour, Bloomberg fell in and out of love with Sarah Cork. By the time that Saud arrived clutching two bottles of cheap red wine, Bloomberg, more than half cut, was barely able to make introductions without slurring his words. Still, he wasn’t about to let the boy down. He roused himself to the task at hand and outlined the plan. The Corks would play Saud’s guardian angels all the way to Cairo. As for Bloomberg, he would return to Jerusalem with his painting.
“When you see Bobby,” Sarah said, as if there was no doubt that Bloomberg, given his interest in “visiting,” would indeed call in on her cousin, “would you give him our love, and tell him we’ll be back soon?”
She rose and dusted the sand off her dress. “It’s been wonderful to meet you. When we’re all back in England I hope you’ll come and visit. Or perhaps we’ll see you in Jerusalem when we return.”
Bloomberg stood and advanced shakily toward her. Sarah wasn’t expecting him to hug her, but he did.
Barges on the Canal: the lugubrious vessels bumped into one another on the dark water; Bloomberg had stumbled down the bank side, sketch pad in hand, drawn by God knows what. He’d taken off his shoes and socks and sat on the quay, dipping his feet in the cool water.
“And your wife,” Michael Cork added, “I hope we can meet her too.”
“Yes,” Bloomberg replied, “my wife.”
29.
For almost two months Joyce traversed the country delivering wares from her supplier in Haifa. She knew, by moonlight only, the scented orange groves of Petach Tikva, and the clustered vineyards in Rishon Le Zion, and to each place, the homes of fruit and wine, she brought her own lethal diet of guns and bullets. She knew too the ragged shoreline from Tel Aviv to Jaffa, the silicate factory of the former, where camels crossed the dunes loaded with bricks, and the narrow bazaar of the latter with its meretricious offerings. On the outskirts of Jaffa, where she lived in a tiny, balconied house in the Jewish neighborhood, she knew precisely where to cross the tramlines and where to meet the messenger who came to give her the all clear. Mostly she stayed indoors during the day and slept, but one afternoon, stirred toward an antidote to the excitements of her nocturnal life, she wandered in the town by day and discovered to her surprise that the walls of some of the houses she had known only as looming shadows were plastered in ochre, sky blue, rose, and a kind of squashed strawberry. At dusk she walked to the shore and sat opposite an old, empty building that the sea filled with the tumult of its swell. She watched the local fishermen wade into the surf and cast, their djellabas bundled up above their knees: a day off for the conspirator, and she was perfectly content. It was madness, but she had to admit that, impossible as it seemed, she felt as if she had discovered her true vocation. For weeks her senses, intensified by fear, urgency and danger, had provided her with the kind of vivid experience that she had tried for so long to achieve, first through dance, then through painting, and ultimately, she supposed, through love and sex. Frumkin must have known what he was doing when he picked her. He had spotted that while her commitment to the Zionist cause, authentic though it might be, was sporadic at best, her allegiance to the temptations of excitement, and the excitements of temptation, while well masked for long periods of time, was absolute.
A Palestine Affair Page 17
