A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  Ross paused for a moment as Mayan wheeled past a trolley laden with medicines. Without thinking, Kirsch shifted in his seat, as if to turn his wasted leg away from her.

  “A week ago, about two a.m., one of our your fellow officers, Francis Athill—he’s out of Jaffa, but perhaps you’ve met?”

  “No,” Kirsch said.

  “Well, he stopped a car in a Ramleh back street out near the cemetery, vehicle rolling along with no lights: the driver, to his and my surprise, was Mrs. Bloomberg.”

  Kirsch felt as if someone were choking him, but he managed to get out a derisory “And?”

  “Well, ‘and’ not a lot, really,” Ross continued somewhat sheepishly. “Said she’d been to a party or something. As it happens there are not a lot of parties going on right now. Still, perhaps she’s lonely, both of you away, so to speak.” Ross said this without the irony that Kirsch had anticipated.

  “And were there guns in the car?” Kirsch said, laughing.

  “Absolutely no idea. Athill decided not to take a look.”

  There was an awkward pause. Kirsch raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “End of story?”

  Ross ran his hands through his thin gray hair, accentuating his widow’s peak. “Well, I’m not being entirely forthcoming. In this kind of situation Athill was under instructions not to search. We know there are couriers, but what we really need to know are their points of departure and destination. Look. I know this sounds like rubbish and I’d be happier than anyone to learn that Mrs. Bloomberg has nothing to do with any underground activities.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe so, but not ridiculous that you were almost killed. The bullets fired at you came from an M17. They don’t make those weapons here, and they’re not ours either. It’s a U.S. Enfield out of Ilion, New York. Our latecoming allies stored away about a million of these rifles in their government arsenal at the end of the war. Not surprising that some are going astray.”

  “Oh, and Joyce took a little detour and picked a few up on her way over from Southampton?”

  “I understand that you’re angry. And listen, as I said, there’s no strong evidence to suggest that she’s mixed up in any of this. Nevertheless I’ve had to keep a watch on her. She is a Zionist, you know, Mark made that quite clear to me. She’s far more committed than he is.”

  “And what has your surveillance come up with?” Kirsch asked disdainfully. He had never talked to a superior this way before, but what did he have to lose?

  “Nothing at all. And you may not think so, but I’m glad to be able to tell you that. Look, they’re friends of mine. For God’s sake, I’m probably her husband’s biggest admirer in Jerusalem. And by the way, has she been here?”

  “I’m not sure I’d tell you if she had. But I imagine the nursing staff can fill you in.”

  “They say you’ve had only one female visitor. Your cousin Sarah, I believe. But perhaps there was an occasion when they were mistaken.”

  Kirsch gave Ross a look of absolute disgust.

  “I’m sorry, old chap. I had to ask. Cartwright’s dead. You nearly swallowed a bullet. I’m trying to do the best for my men, for now and for the future, and what’s more this thing is already out of hand, and we have to close it down. The PM’s extremely unhappy with these bloody riots, the Americans are leaning on him about the Jews, the Foreign Office is over at No. 10 arguing for the Arabs. Joyce Bloomberg may be a small cog in a large machine, or no cog at all, but I have to follow through.”

  “So you had your riots after all,” Kirsch muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “De Groot. Surely you haven’t forgotten, sir. You shut down the investigation so we wouldn’t have an eruption on our hands. And now you have one anyway.”

  Kirsch’s leg throbbed. The pain came less frequently now, but when it did he felt sick to his stomach.

  Ross measured his words carefully before responding. “I think,” he began, “that once you are released from here you might consider taking a week or two off. Convalescence would do you good. You’ve been through a lot.”

  After Ross had left the hospital Kirsch, dizzied by the information that he had received, made his way outside, returned to the edge of the walled patio and sucked in a few deep breaths. He looked down: the idyllic room and roof garden below all of a sudden seemed horribly pinched, the flowers in the jam pot signaling a pathetic attempt to enliven incontrovertibly cramped quarters. Behind him Rachel woke and immediately began to cry. A nurse, less regarding than Mayan, ignored the child and walked swiftly across the gravel to attend to another patient. Kirsch touched his hand to his leg. Had Joyce provided the gun that had crippled him? Was it possible? It couldn’t be so. Rachel’s cries grew louder. As if in response a dog began to bark in the street. Kirsch stared down at the room. A woman entered, she put down a bag of groceries, took two steps, and sat on the edge of the bed. There must have been a mirror on one of the walls that Kirsch couldn’t see, for the woman adopted the posture of someone who was looking at herself. She was middle-aged, wearing a long black dress, plump but not unattractive. He watched her raise her hands to the back of her neck and then, to his astonishment, she lifted off her hair. Under the wig she was completely bald. He felt a moment’s revulsion. Nothing in this bloody place was as it appeared to be.

  Thursday, and it was almost time for Dr. Bassan’s late-afternoon round. A parched light filtered through the shutters. The other denizens of Kirsch’s ward, three men—two Arabs, one Jew—who had been involved in the same traffic accident on the Jaffa road involving a donkey cart and a motorbike, lay dozing under their tented mosquito netting. Kirsch, who usually slept at this hour, was wide awake. He sat up in his bed and stared at the oil lamp that hung low from the center of the ceiling. When night fell it threw deviant shadows onto the tiled floor. In his first days at Shaarei Zedek, running a high fever from his infected leg, frequently delirious, and, as Bassan had later informed him, close to death, he had spent hours watching these shadows perform their danse macabre. They took him out of Jerusalem and ran him smartly back to his bedroom in London. He was six years old and in bed with the measles in the attic room that he shared with Marcus. Their father’s battered old gardening hat hung on the back of the door and became by turns a grotesque face and an executioner’s mask. Robert couldn’t fall asleep until his mother removed it. His nice, softhearted mother who sang to him, stroked the hair back from his forehead, and brought him oranges that she peeled around the middle before slicing the fruit in two so that her younger son could suck the juice more easily. It was almost worth being ill to have your mother act this way.

  And yet quickly, within days, both his dark shifting visions and the dream of maternal protectorship that they engendered had gone. In their place Kirsch had indulged a developing fantasy, fueled by Joyce’s absence, of a life with her that was perfectly balanced between passion and domestic bliss. In this version, utterly predictable, he knew, the contained Joyce lost nothing of her wildness. (Where were they living? A flat in London—on that new road he had once ridden down on his bicycle near Wandsworth Common? Or perhaps a cottage in the countryside? That village beyond Ledbury out in Gloucestershire where, out on a ramble with friends, he had met some Americans—his first!—in the local pub?) Kirsch even found himself imagining introducing Joyce to his parents and being proud of the facts that she was divorced (which, of course, she wasn’t), without direction, and older than he—all signs, certainly from his parents’ point of view, of her complete unsuitability for their son. But now Ross’s visit had all but put paid to these consolatory daydreams.

  Dr. Bassan hurried into the ward accompanied by the head nurse. He wore a soft cotton shirt with a wide-open collar. The heat that exhausted everybody else never seemed to bother him. During the war he had worked at the old Anglican Hospital, sporting a Turkish crescent on his sleeve and a skullcap on his head. Kirsch had seen the photograph in Bassan’s office. The bedspreads at the Anglican, Bassan had tol
d Kirsch, were magnificent: “They decorated the ward like a concubine’s palace— wall hangings, plants, glass decanters for your water.”

  The nurse roused the sleeping patients, who grunted and yawned into wakefulness. Bassan approached Kirsch’s bed.

  “You’re not looking too happy.”

  Kirsch tried to smile. He liked Bassan, and it wasn’t only the inevitable gratitude of the patient that drew him to appreciate the doctor, but also the straightforwardness of his personality. Bassan came from an old local family, brought from Vilna to Jerusalem by his great-grand-father more than a century ago, and his rootedness in this city of errant Jews and noisy new arrivals seemed to manifest itself as an engagingly quiet self-confidence. Bassan was of the place; even the Arab patients seemed to recognize this. And whenever Kirsch talked with him he felt calmed, shaded. Kirsch was well aware that, to a degree, he must have romanticized Bassan, and that in all probability the doctor’s sterling character had nothing to do with his family past. Nevertheless, every time Kirsch saw Bassan approach the ward he succumbed to the notion, real or illusory, that in the doctor’s powerful, squat figure the generations had molded a golem of kindness and integrity.

  “Let’s see if I can cheer you up,” Bassan said. “First, I hear you’ve been walking all over the hospital, and second, that you have been holding hands with the nurses. These are both signs that you are ready to go home.”

  Kirsch laughed. “Only one nurse,” he replied. “I don’t have the courage for more.”

  “Ready?” Bassan asked.

  A nurse came over and drew the screens around Kirsch’s bed. She turned down the sheet. Kirsch pulled up his robe and exposed his left leg: thin as a celery stick and scarred from ankle to thigh. Bassan took a long, slow look and then proceeded to test Kirsch’s range of motion, stretching and bending the leg. Kirsch grimaced, but the pain was bearable. For weeks Bassan had performed operation after operation to save Kirsch’s leg. He had scraped away at the devitalized tissue, removing layer after layer. Without Bassan’s meticulous surgery Kirsch would undoubtedly have succumbed to tetanus. There were other doctors, Kirsch knew, who had recommended immediate amputation.

  “Let’s see you take a walk,” Bassan said. “Can you try without the cane?”

  Kirsch swung his legs off the bed, rose and took a few halting steps across the ward.

  “Don’t worry,” Bassan told him. “You’ll wind up with a slight limp, that’s all. Considering the alternatives when you came in here, that’s not too bad, is it? Right now, it’s your muscles that need strengthening. And to do that, let’s get you out of this place. It’s been a long road. Now it’s up to you. The more walking you do the better. You can start this Friday night, walk over tomorrow from your house to mine for Shabbat dinner.”

  “That’s so very kind of you. I owe you so much.”

  Bassan dismissed Kirsch’s gratitude with a wave of his hand.

  “That’s settled, then. Come as close to six as you can. My wife lights the candles on time. If you see three stars in the sky, you’re late.”

  The doctor moved across the room where his three other patients, victims of the clash between modernity and its enemies—was it the motorbike or the cart that had done the damage? Kirsch had been unable to ascertain the details of the accident—lay waiting for him.

  Were it not for Joyce, Kirsch would have been in a state of high elation. After all, he had been in the hospital for almost two months. Seven weeks of waiting for her. Could he even remember what she looked like? Her lovely face, which had seemed to Kirsch a pledge of Joyce’s inner self, was blurred in his memory. But what was that inner self? As soon as he was dressed and packed he would go straight to her cottage, warn her that Ross was after her, hear her side of things. The story had to be nonsense.

  In the dusty rose twilight Kirsch walked with care through the hospital courtyard and out into the street. He navigated a pathway overgrown with burdock and nettles and skirted a dilapidated building with a rusty roof and half-collapsed chimney. After weeks indoors, the first blast of a nearby car horn came loud as Joshua’s trumpet. Kirsch started, then steadied himself against the slats of a gray wooden fence. And then he remembered Frumkin’s limousine driver parked down the road from Bloomberg’s cottage gate, honking the horn. It was the last time that he had seen Joyce. She was going off to the desert to work as Frumkin’s prop girl. Or was she? He had to find her now.

  But Kirsch had no strength to get to Talpiot. As soon as he was back in his flat he collapsed onto the bed and slept. He awoke at mid-morning the next day covered in sweat (there was no fan above his bed to cool him, as there had been in the hospital), only to fall back asleep almost immediately. By the time he woke again it was late afternoon. The air rang with what sounded like gunshots, but the noise emanated from soldiers in Jerusalem’s domestic army: Friday-afternoon housewives out on their balconies beating carpets, cleaning house before the Sabbath. Kirsch’s throat was dry. He got out of bed carefully, walked into his kitchen, bent over the sink and turned on the tap. The water dripped out brown. Kirsch let it run until the color had improved to cloudy white and then he drank, stopping from time to time to let the water run over his head. There was no food in the flat, but no matter, he had an invitation for dinner, if only he could make it to Bassan’s house.

  Kirsch, washed, shaved and dressed, all without too much difficulty. The stairs down to the garden offered a challenge, but he made it safely. Once there, he paused in the shade of an olive tree whose uppermost branches reached the windows of his room. His downstairs neighbor, Dr. Klausner, a retired theologian from Germany, had planted hardy climbing roses in the narrow patch of earth that led up to the fence. The pink flowers were blooming, weakly, for the second time this summer, but Kirsch could still smell the heady scent that always seemed strongest at this time of day. Looking around, he felt as if he had been away from his place for years rather than weeks. Already out of breath from his awkward descent, he wondered if perhaps he had been wrong to send Sarah away. She could have helped him with shopping for a few days, got him back on his feet. But of course, he hadn’t wanted Sarah and Michael to get in the way of his relationship with Joyce, and Michael, good-natured though he was, had been getting on his nerves. The Corks had been too polite, naturally, to ask about his love life. Or perhaps Sarah was being delicate; after all, the last time she had seen Robert at home in England he was engaged to be married.

  He thought that he had given himself plenty of time for the walk to Bassan’s home, which he estimated at only half a mile or so, but he found it necessary to take frequent rests, more than he had imagined, and by the time that he found the house on Habashim Street daylight was failing and the sky was dark with the first bruises of night.

  The dinner table was set for four but Kirsch and the Bassans were the only people present. Bassan had given Kirsch a warm hug as he came in the door and then introduced his wife, a robust-looking woman whose long black hair was coiled into a smooth bun on the top of her round head. Kirsch watched as Bassan poured water from a pitcher over his hands and murmured a blessing. The walls were hung with dark framed photographs of family members, and a series of brightly colored whimsical primitivist paintings of the local milieu: swarthy goatherds in brim-less pioneer hats, scattered red-roofed houses in Tel Aviv, each with a vivid blue door.

  “We collect this artist,” Bassan said.

  There was an upright piano in one of the corners, and next to it a spider plant on a wooden stand. Kirsch had imagined a richer tapestry for the doctor’s home life, but the only striking element in the room was its burnt-orange floor tiles.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Ah,” Bassan said, “she’s here.”

  Mayan entered. She was wearing a very up-to-the-minute low-waisted white chemise, a cheaper version, Kirsch guessed, of the dress that Joyce had on when he had first taken her on his motorbike. The incongruities of fashion in Jerusalem never ceased to amaze him. With the
addition of a long string of pearls Mayan might have been on her way out to a dance in London. And, God, Kirsch might have been accompanying her if he hadn’t set his sights so firmly to the east.

  “You look surprised,” she said to Kirsch.

  Bassan and his wife both laughed.

  Kirsch looked at them, and then back at Mayan.

  “No, no, Robert, she’s not our daughter. But she is a newcomer to Palestine.”

  Mayan extended her hand and Kirsch, wanting to avoid a repeat of their rooftop confusion, gripped it far too hard, as if he were shaking on an important business deal.

  Mayan laughed. “I’m happy to see that you have your strength back,” she said.

  Bassan handed Kirsch a skullcap. Kirsch put in on. He hadn’t worn one since the day of his bar mitzvah; then as now the covering sat uneasily on his head. Bassan intoned the blessings over the bread and the wine. From time to time Kirsch’s father, guided by a moment’s nostalgia, or a desire to please Kirsch’s mother, had engaged the family in Friday-night rituals, but they were always performed with a nod and a wink to the boys. Rain on the windowpanes and the taste of sweet wine. Jews in London, halfhearted, but still Jews. Would Kirsch have had it any differently? That great pillar faith, on which you could lean your misery and get support, had thus far eluded him, but so it seemed had a number of life’s other familiar consolations: politics, art, business. To all outward appearances a young man who knew where he was going—uniformed, authoritative, composed—Kirsch most frequently apprehended himself only as a fool for love. How on earth had he got this way?

  Kirsch looked across the table at Mayan. She was responding to a question from Bassan’s wife about her family in Odessa. Her face grew serious. The news wasn’t good: postrevolutionary Russia was turning out to be as bad for the Jews as life under the czars had been. Her Uncle Isaac, a small-time trinket merchant, had already been labeled a parasite by the Bolsheviks. Her father, a mild-mannered bookseller, now found himself in perhaps the most dangerous job of all.