In the middle of the room was a round wooden table mounted on a wooden base but also supported by two stone blocks. A single low-backed chair was set against one of the walls. Five or six rectangular straw mats covered the cement floor.
The boy gestured for Bloomberg to sit in the chair, and then he disappeared into a back room. Sunlight sieved through motionless curtains. Across from Bloomberg someone had piled about a dozen thin checkered mattresses onto a narrow bed: they were kept in place by what looked like the frame of an old walnut bookshelf. On the floor stood various skins and jars, vessels for carrying wine, water, or milk. On the table there was a small copper bowl that held cactus fruit.
A few moments passed until the boy reappeared holding a copper coffeepot which he set down on the floor. Soon after, a woman came in, bringing with her a small plate of figs. She wore a long-sleeved black muslin dress, but her head was bare. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and tied into plaits. Was this Saud’s mother? Bloomberg had expected an older woman.
“Mark,” he said pointing at himself in a way that he knew was unutterably foolish, “Mark Bloomberg.”
“She is Leila,” the boy replied on behalf of his mother, “and I am Ahmad.”
Bloomberg tried as best he could to explain who he was and what had happened to Saud. The woman and the boy both spoke a few words of English, and understood enough for Bloomberg to be able to communicate that Saud had been working for him, that he was alive and well and traveling to Cairo. More than once the mother got tears in her eyes. Bloomberg felt frustrated by his lack of Arabic. He had been a fool to come alone. He should have brought someone to translate for him. But whom could he have trusted to do that?
He drank the sweetened coffee, embarrassed that he had come empty-handed into the home. Was there nothing that he could give these people except difficult news?
Bloomberg smiled at Leila. “Thank you,” he said.
There was a half-embroidered blouse on the floor, and nearby a small pile of linens waiting to be worked on. Bloomberg thought of his own mother sitting in weak light in the front room of their house on Christian Street, squinting, her fingers callused from sewing. And yet he could rarely imagine or remember his mother as young as this woman. For Bloomberg, his mother was almost always gray-haired, if still compact and resilient, like some tiny Atlas holding up her corner of the world. He had an overwhelming impulse to let Saud’s mother know that he too came from a family who worked with buttons and zippers and spools of thread, but his yearning to communicate this connection would have to remain locked in his heart.
He stayed for perhaps an hour, desperately trying through repeated sentences and exaggerated gestures to reassure Leila of her son’s well-being. He knew from Saud that the police must have visited their house, knew too that, for whatever reason, Ross had decided to let Saud go.
It was cool in the room. Bloomberg fell silent. Leila offered him the plate of figs and he took one. Instead of returning the copper bowl to the table she placed it on the floor, then she knelt by the table and gave a twist to the top. It shifted slightly to reveal that the wooden base was hollow. She said something to Ahmad; the boy reached in his hand and, one by one, retrieved four battered-looking books and one that was in better condition. Ahmad stacked the books in a pile and handed them to Bloomberg.
“Please,” Leila said. “For Saud.”
She spoke in Arabic to Ahmad.
“She wants you to bring them to Saud,” he translated.
“But I’m not . . . ,” Bloomberg began, but cut himself off in midsentence. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ll get them to him.”
He looked at the spines: a geometry textbook, an English grammar primer, a poetry anthology, and two thin volumes entitled Weespraak and Beemdgras. Bloomberg opened to the flyleaf of one of the Dutch books. There he read an elaborate dedication from De Groot to Saud, not exactly a declaration of love, but close enough in feeling; certainly there was warmth, friendliness, and encouragement.
Bloomberg flicked through the anthology of English poetry. The dog-eared pages posted its reader’s favorite places: “I met a traveller from an antique land,” “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Bloomberg put down the poetry and picked up the other book of Dutch poems. It didn’t look as if it had been read. As he opened it a folded piece of paper fell out. Bloomberg spread the sheet; it was the carbon copy of a letter addressed to the Colonial Office in London and signed by De Groot. Bloomberg glanced quickly at the contents, read through the letter more carefully, then refolded it and put it back in the book.
Leila and Ahmad watched him but out of either fear or trust, Bloomberg couldn’t tell which; neither of them spoke.
“I have to go,” Bloomberg said.
He patted the cover of the book. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s nothing.”
Saud’s mother stood. Bloomberg held out his hand but she modestly lowered her eyes. Impulsively, he took two steps forward and hugged the little boy.
Bloomberg descended the stone stairway and turned into the suq. The alleyways were still more or less deserted. He hurried toward the Jaffa Gate, holding the books to his chest. De Groot had information so dangerous that it had got him killed. And now Bloomberg knew it too.
32.
“Come on, hop in,” Lipman shouted cheerfully. “We don’t want to miss the first race. It’s the most important.”
His voice had the timbre and inflection of Mark’s. They probably hailed from the same part of London. Over the years Joyce had become fairly adept, if not expert, at identifying English accents, so finely discriminated by class, region, district and even, so Mark always claimed, religion.
She walked down the path, and there was Johnny Lipman, her stooge, standing by his car, grinning. He rushed around to hold the passenger door open for Joyce, performing an exaggerated bow as he did so.
“Milady,” he said.
Joyce got in.
Lipman was almost six feet tall but didn’t look it because while his torso was elongated, his legs were surprisingly short. He had a large head topped with thinning brown hair, a fact that he seemed to find amusing (the previous night he had encouraged Joyce to touch his bald spot—as if the experience might excite her!), but his gray eyes were rather hard and Joyce didn’t altogether trust him. Of course, it should have been Lipman worrying about her dependability, and not the other way round. He had also brought to her attention a scar on the bridge of his nose, as if his face and head were fascinating old maps: “Walked into a greenhouse door when I was five. At least it wasn’t a shithouse.”
Joyce had hoped that the morning following her “date” with Lipman would be fresh and springlike. She had wanted to wake up to air that had been scrubbed clean of every scent except the wash of dawn showers, but instead there arrived the inevitable hot, oppressive August day, sun beating down, her body already soaked in sweat, and the cottage that she was newly returned to pervaded by an extraordinary mixture of smells, the most powerful of which seemed to join goat shit and excrescence from a drain sunk in the road a hundred yards away. Clearly, the weather was not going to provide a symbolic negation of her night’s work, and as a result she felt obliged to put on a clean white dress.
At the end of the evening Lipman had tried, in a halfhearted, firstdate “I know you’re not that kind of woman” way, to get her into bed, and no doubt Frumkin would have been pleased if she had let him do so, but Joyce had murmured a half sentence about the “time of the month” and he had quickly retreated, happy to set up a second rendezvous for this morning.
It hadn’t been hard to pick him up. Frumkin had told her that Lipman liked to take an early lunch at the International on Fridays and that’s where Joyce had “bumped into” him. They had spent the afternoon walking in the Old City (Joyce’s eyes had darted everywhere, half expecting, half hoping that she would see Robert Kirsch) and it was there, toward dusk, as they watched the Jews in fine cloaks and sable hats make their way to the Wall for
evening prayers, that Lipman had come up with the bright idea of a trip to a race meet in Lydda scheduled for the following afternoon. If he was surprised by the alacrity with which she had accepted his offer so soon after meeting him, he hadn’t shown it at the time. Perhaps he thought of himself as an irresistibly charming man. If so, that was all to the good.
As they began their descent out of Jerusalem a black Ford, identical to their own, pulled in behind them. It was there as Lipman slowed to negotiate the hairpin turns cut into the Judean hills, and still there when they crossed the valley of Ayalon. Near Ramleh, as the town’s square Lydian tower came into view, the Ford disappeared in the direction of the English camp, only to reappear moments later from behind some sheds at a place where the road ran parallel with the railway track that linked Jerusalem and Jaffa.
“Look who’s back,” Lipman said, glancing into the driving mirror. “They are going our way after all. I knew this race would pull a few from Jerusalem. Andrew Nathan hasn’t lost yet, and I’m sure there are chaps who can’t wait to see him get his comeuppance.”
Joyce stared out of the window. There, hidden in a grove of olive trees, was the white cemetery where she had made one of her gun deliveries. It made her shiver to think of it, even if by day the place was empty of atmosphere. Increasingly, Joyce experienced the vacant feeling that she knew well from the times when her previous enthusiasms, whether art, dance, or even love, had begun to decline. She didn’t will these moments, but they came nevertheless, a horrible falling-away that she tried to resist but couldn’t; there might be years of dedicated commitment, and then, dramatic as a leap from a high precipice, came the dreadful realization that nothing she did held any meaning other than its value as an antidote to her own chronic boredom. It was awful to have to admit to herself that she was a chameleon, her beliefs thin as tissue paper, and this time around she had truly convinced herself that in Zionism, even though she wasn’t a Jew, she had found something that might turn into her life’s work. But the warm stones in Ramleh’s cemetery seemed to be telling her otherwise. Was it time then to stop her involvement with the Zionist cause? Frumkin had indicated that she had almost done enough. She would soften up Lipman, try to tease out the extent of his Zionist sympathies, then turn him over to Frumkin. That would be that.
They drove for another fifteen minutes down a bumpy stone road. By the time they reached the club the trailing motor vehicle was once again nowhere to be seen.
The meet had not yet begun. A military band, midway through a selection of patriotic tunes, broke into “What is the meaning of Empire Day?” Lipman, in high spirits, jumped out of the car and began to sing along: “Why does the trumpet sound?”
He turned to Joyce.
“They’re the Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers,” he said admiringly, “best band in the Middle East.”
Nighttime parties in Jerusalem may have been suspended, but from the cheerful attitude of the circulating members of the Ludd Hunt, and the intense demeanor of the officers who were about to race for a cup to be presented by no less a personage than Air Commodore E. L. Gerard, you wouldn’t have guessed that anything was amiss in this hot corner of the British Empire.
“Lipman,” a voice called out from the paddock. “Want to make a wager?”
“Frankie! Was that you driving behind us? I thought I recognized your ugly mug.”
“How about a tenner?”
“Do you think I’m made of money?”
“Alright, a fiver that Goggin brings in Ladybird ahead of your pal Nathan.”
“Who’s Andrew on?”
“Scots Grey.”
“A fiver it is.”
Lipman couldn’t hear the note of condescension in Frankie’s voice, Joyce thought, or if he did he chose to ignore it. Or worse, now that she thought of it, Joyce was certain that Lipman had given Frankie exactly what he wanted. For, unless she was mistaken, Lipman had allowed a little Stepney to slip into that “Do you think I’m made of money?” and his Jewish intonation was like a cat offering its throat in mock submission. “That’s right,” Lipman had said. “I’m a Jew, let’s leave it at that.” And suddenly, despite the inner landslide of misery and indifference that had afflicted her only twenty minutes previously, Joyce felt unambiguously glad that she had engaged in her subversive activities. The smugness of the British, bad enough in England, was unbearable here. What on earth did they think they were doing at this club, sitting on lawn chairs with their G and T’s, and their week-old daily papers from London, slapping each other on the back and oh so happy to be set apart from the locals, whether Jews or Arabs? She couldn’t understand why their attitude of exclusion didn’t bother Mark more, or why it didn’t appear to trouble Robert Kirsch much, or affect this new chap, Johnny Lipman, at all. The English Jews, unless they were here to settle Palestine, all wore blinkers, she thought. It was easier for them that way. The English hated them. Frumkin, for all his pumped-up self-importance, had got that right.
“The first race will be the Members Heavy Weight Race. Distance two-and-one-half miles over the point to point course. Catchweights thirteen stone seven pounds. In lane one, Colonel A. J. MacNeill on Sweep. In lane two, Lieutenant Colonel G. R. E. Foley on Jimmy James. In lane three, Squadron Leader J. S. Goggin on Ladybird . . .”
The voice boomed on through the megaphone until all seven riders had been announced. Joyce watched the officers jostle their horses into line. Twice, when they were settled, one of the horses made a false start and they had to begin again. The crowd, which must have numbered over two hundred, began to get impatient, but at the third attempt the starter fired his pistol and they were off in a thud and swirl of hoofbeats and particolors.
Lipman had disappeared somewhere farther down the course to get a better view of its only water jump, an artificial shallow brown pool under a low bank, its singularity a concession from the course designers to the water shortage that was afflicting the entire country. Joyce stood alone. She followed the race as the field spread out, but her mind was elsewhere. In this little colonial enclave she felt uniquely uncomfortable and homeless.
“If friend Andrew holds that lead I’ll be out a fiver.”
Joyce turned.
“Francis Athill. Old mate of Johnny’s. From the station in Jaffa.” He held out his hand.
“Joyce Bloomberg.”
They looked at each other.
Athill laughed. “You don’t remember me, then? Not surprising, I suppose. You were in rather high spirits.”
Joyce stared at Athill’s ruddy, smiling face. She was quaking inside. “Oh yes,” she said, “Ramleh. It was kind of you to let me go.”
“If I’d known you were tied up with Johnny Lipman I’d have arrested you on the spot.”
Athill laughed. But not before Joyce had stuttered, “I’m not, I’m not tied up with him.”
She felt herself audience to her own bad acting.
Half a mile away the horses, lengths apart from one another, rose heavy and silent, chestnut and gray against the blue sky, and splashed down into the water.
In the distance Joyce saw Lipman turn at the head of a small group and begin to run back toward a loose ring of spectators that had formed near the finish line.
“Shall we go over?” Athill asked.
Joyce walked beside him over the dry yellow grass. Athill chatted on about his yearning to see America, his cousin in Chicago, and where was Mrs. Bloomberg from? Ah yes, New York. Something was wrong, Joyce felt it with every bone in her body. Something in the way this sunny young man kept the conversation so unobjectionably upbeat and superfluous.
Joyce touched his arm.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment.”
She walked in the direction of a small tent that had been set up as the ladies’ toilet. Inside, she splashed her face with water from one of four large canteens that had been placed on the ground. A small shaving mirror attached to an air vent with a piece of string showed Joyce her face; the bags under her eyes were darker
than she had hoped. She heard two men enter the adjacent tent.
“They say he lost the leg.”
“Did he, now? Poor old Kirsch. Poor bastard. I liked him. He wasn’t . . . you know.”
“Like the rest of them? Well, given half a chance.”
“Yes, you never know, I suppose. Still, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
Joyce felt her heart beat fast and the blood rush to her head. She ran out of the tent and sprinted back toward the finish line. The horses were coming down the straight at a gallop. The crowd cheered wildly. Joyce grabbed Lipman’s arm and almost spun him around.
“Robert Kirsch. What happened to him?”
“What’s that?”
Lipman tried to turn away. The lead horses were neck and neck. You could hear the thwack of whip on flank.
Joyce dug her nails into his arm. “Robert Kirsch, you know him, don’t you? You must. Where is he?”
“For God’s sake!” Lipman stared at her as if she were a madwoman.
“Come on, Andrew!” he shouted in Joyce’s face, then he wrested himself free, turning in time to see Ladybird win by a head.
“He’s in hospital in Jerusalem. He’s been there for weeks.” The voice belonged to Athill, who had been standing nearby. “He was shot last month in Abu Tor.”
Joyce tried her best to remain composed, but she felt a scream rising within her.
“Which hospital? Where?”
“Damn and blast,” Lipman said to no one in particular, “and here’s your bloody money.” He reached into his pocket, but Athill grabbed his wrist.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
Joyce felt her head spin. She looked hard at Athill.
“Take me there,” she said. She wanted to say, “Whatever your business is with me, I’ll cooperate, just take me to Robert,” but somehow she managed to keep the words from bursting out.
“What the hell?” Athill had let go of Lipman who had begun again to try to pull a five-pound note from his pocket.
A Palestine Affair Page 21
