A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  “Very well,” Athill replied, as if he knew exactly what Joyce had been about to say, “I’ll take you.”

  They drove in Athill’s Ford. Lipman hadn’t put up any resistance to Joyce’s departure; in fact he had been glad to get rid of her. Now she sat with her head leaning back on the leather passenger seat. Her eyes were closed.

  From time to time Athill looked across at her. Was she feigning sleep so she wouldn’t have to talk to him? Perhaps. Either way, he decided to let her be. There had been nothing false in her response to the news about Robert Kirsch.

  They had begun the climb to Jerusalem when Joyce awoke.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

  Athill reached into his tunic pocket, removed a Turkish pack that featured a picture of a harem girl on the cover, lit a cigarette himself, then passed Joyce matches and the pack.

  “You know, before the war I never saw any women smoking—and now you all do.”

  Joyce lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She couldn’t conduct any small talk. All she wanted to do was get to Robert.

  The automobile climbed, its engine gasping with exhaustion, as Athill zigzagged through the arid landscape: boulders and scrubby vegetation, relieved on occasion by a coppice of cypress trees or a block of houses that appeared to be clinging to the rock. The sky, blue over Ramleh, was parchment white on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The elevation should have relieved the burning heat of the afternoon, but a khamsin was blowing in from the desert, a wind that was no wind, blowing a suffocating stillness and dropping a rain of yellow dust.

  Athill wiped the back of his hand across his brow. “How long have you known Robert Kirsch?” He tried to maintain a neutral tone, but they both knew, he was sure, that he wasn’t asking out of mere curiosity, and that this was the first of many questions to come.

  “I met him at the beginning of summer, not long after we got here,” Joyce replied.

  She drew on the cigarette. The “beginning of summer” felt to her aeons ago. Mark on his bicycle coming up the path gingerly holding his still-wet canvas, her heart in hiding, and then, before the cottage had become much more to her than a borderless agglomeration of treats for the eye, visual pleasures that were in any case inadequate compensation for her inner state, the rough mad arrival of the stabbed and dying man. Then Robert Kirsch. She couldn’t begin to explain to Athill, and why should she?

  “And Major Lipman is a more recent acquaintance?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You seem to have a lot of friends in the police and military.”

  “As do you, I imagine,” Joyce replied.

  Athill smiled.

  Joyce looked straight ahead at the desolate hills; they looked like skeletons of places that had once been green. How could anyone call this a land of milk and honey? Frumkin! Peter Frumkin knew about Robert and he hadn’t told her. “Hardly a surprise,” he’d said when she’d commented on Robert’s absence. If there had been more moonlight in the room, or the oil lamps had been turned up, she would have seen his face clearly and she would have known. Frumkin knew Robert had been shot; everyone in Jerusalem must have known, but she was ignorant because she had been either stuck in Jaffa or out delivering Frumkin’s guns. She was the fool of fools, and Robert Kirsch had lost his leg, that poor lonely man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. And who had shot him? An ocean crashed the flimsy seawall inside her.

  “Stop, please stop,” Joyce begged.

  “There’s nowhere to stop here, it’s too dangerous. We’re on a hairpin.”

  Joyce’s face turned white as her dress.

  “Then slow down!”

  Athill brought the car to a crawl. Joyce leaned out of her window; the petrified world turned circles beneath her as she retched and vomited.

  A quarter of a mile farther on Athill hit a stretch of smooth straight road and brought the car to a halt. He reached onto the backseat, knocked a kit bag to the floor, and came up with a canteen of water.

  “Here,” he said.

  Joyce’s white dress was spattered with vomit. She put the canteen to her lips.

  “Not too much,” Athill urged her, “a little at a time. You probably went too long without drinking. Have to drink all the time here.”

  “Yes,” Joyce replied. “Thank you.”

  “And this road, twists and turns enough to make anyone sick.”

  “I’m all right now.”

  Athill searched again in the back of the car and came up with a dry rag. Joyce took it, folded it over to avoid an oil stain, poured on a little water and began to dab at her dress, wiping off flecks of vomit but leaving small brown stains.

  “I’m all right,” she repeated.

  “I had the feeling,” Athill said, “that you were about to tell me something.”

  Joyce continued to touch at the blemishes on her dress.

  “Perhaps,” she replied, “but it’s gone now.”

  The hospital, when they arrived, exhibited a late-afternoon torpor. A few members of the Sabbath staff were visible in the corridors, but Joyce felt as if the airless whiteness outside had penetrated the building and brought with it a sleeping sickness. It seemed, running up to the front desk, as if she were wading through water. A middle-aged woman with bright red hair and freckles all over her face was writing in a ledger.

  “I’m looking for Robert Kirsch. Captain Robert Kirsch.”

  “Wait a minute. I have to finish with these people.”

  Joyce looked around. On a nearby bench sat an Orthodox Jewish couple. The woman had her face buried in the side of her husband’s coat. She was sobbing, and he was trying to comfort her.

  “Please go and sit down.”

  Joyce sat for less than a minute, and then she was up, walking fast through the hospital, stopping whoever she saw and asking for Robert. Athill trailed behind, apologizing to bewildered nurses as Joyce hardly waited for their replies before moving on.

  She turned down a dimly lit corridor; several figures, doctors and nurses she assumed, were gathered at its end. As she approached them, a narrow bed was wheeled from a side room into the corridor. One of the nurses had tears in her eyes. The body on the bed was covered and took up only a little more than half the length of the mattress.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Joyce said, “but I’m looking for Robert Kirsch.”

  One of the doctors turned to her, his face showing both anger and surprise. He took two steps away from Joyce and continued his conversation with a nurse, which Joyce had interrupted.

  “Yes,” he said, “of course I’ll talk to them. Where are they? In the front?”

  He turned back to Joyce, taking in Athill with a quick glance.

  “Now what do you want?”

  Joyce repeated her question.

  “He’s not here. He was discharged by Dr. Bassan yesterday. He’s been sent home.”

  “Home? To where? To England?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Wherever his home is.”

  A porter had arrived to wheel the body away.

  Joyce looked wildly up and down the corridor as if Robert might appear walking toward her.

  Athill watched the porter push the bed away. “How old?” he asked.

  “Nine,” the doctor replied. “A little girl.” He raised the palms of his hands in a gesture of futility.

  33.

  The bus carrying Kirsch and Mayan pulled over to let an armored car overtake. In the open back sat half a dozen Hindu soldiers on their way to the camp at Rosh Pinah. They had been brought to Palestine as reinforcements in case of further unrest. Kirsch leaned slightly over Mayan to look out of the window. The soldiers stared straight ahead. In Nablus the charabanc had burst a tire and they had not restarted their journey until dawn. Between his cramped leg and his attempts to remain upright and not fall asleep on Mayan’s shoulder Kirsch had spent the long night in a state of great discomfort. He remembered a lot of shouting and small fires burning by the roadside. All the disturbance had been related
to the bus, but in his dreams, when they finally came, a full-fledged riot had been in progress, one that he was powerless to prevent. Now, it appeared, he had slept again. He did not know how much time had passed. Mayan in her thin blue dress looked as fresh as when they had set out from Jerusalem. She held on her lap a broad-brimmed straw hat with a red ribbon. Kirsch’s walking stick, provided by the hospital, lay on the floor beneath their seats.

  The bus trailed the armored car until it veered off toward a barracks on the right. Kirsch saw one of the soldiers clasp his hand to his head in order to prevent his hat from blowing off.

  “We’re here,” Mayan said.

  “Thank God for that,” Kirsch replied.

  The driver brought the bus to a halt. Ahead of him Kirsch could see the pioneer colony spread out on the slope of a hill, its small stone-block houses surrounded by eucalyptus saplings that threw off scent but, as yet, not enough shade. He took in the narrow path that snaked up the incline. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to make the climb in the blistering midday heat that, since the bus had stopped, seemed to advance in ten-degree jolts.

  Kirsch and Mayan waited while the other passengers—two nuns and a large Arab family—got off; then Kirsch rose slowly to his feet. He winced as he straightened his leg. Mayan preceded him off the bus. She offered her hand to help him down but he ignored it. Nearby, they could see a white-walled hostelry shaded by pine trees. Mayan pointed toward it.

  “You can stay there tonight,” she said, anticipating Kirsch’s problem in ascending the pathway. “In the morning, when it’s cool, I’ll come and help you up the hill.”

  “And you? Where does your friend Rosa live?”

  “She works at the Manor”—Mayan gestured toward a large house at the top of the hill—“in the administrative offices of the colony, and for now they let her live in one of the rooms. But if you’re a rich tourist you can still sit on the terrace and have tea.”

  “Good,” Kirsch replied. “If I can get up there, that’s what I’ll do. In fact I’ll make it my business to make that climb before we leave. And because I’m so wealthy you can come along as my guest.”

  “I’d like that,” she replied.

  Now that the enforced intimacy of their bus ride together was over, Kirsch felt a little uncomfortable. It had been a rash decision to accompany Mayan, and the oddity of what he had done was made stranger by his arrival in this pioneer outpost. Although everything in Rosh Pinah was clearly committed to the future, he felt as if he had taken a step back in time, or out of time. Even so, he was terribly glad of Mayan’s company, her nice open face, her keen intelligence. She seemed like someone who might erase the complications from his life—although, of course, she couldn’t.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll walk with you to the hotel.”

  Mayan lifted both her bag and Kirsch’s. He protested mildly, but she acted with the authority of a hospital staff member, and he had been conditioned for weeks to obey.

  She put on her straw hat and they walked a hundred yards down a broken path toward the entrance of the hostelry.

  “Do you cheer everybody up,” Kirsch asked, “or is it just me?”

  Mayan put the bags down between two large pots of pink and white mimosa.

  “Are you flirting with me?” she said.

  “I’m not sure,” Kirsch replied.

  The walls of Kirsch’s room were chalk white, too much like a hospital room for his taste, but he didn’t have a choice. In any case, the place was clean and the bed was not uncomfortable. He had been shown in by a young girl with long plaits who might have stepped out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. She was the daughter of the proprietress, a diffident Polish-Jewish woman with an unusually long, thin face and pale green eyes. While Kirsch had signed his name in the register, the girl’s father had sat on a stool in a corner of the room noisily munching a pickled cucumber. Opposite him a middle-aged Arab man in black turban and kaftan sat at a table half covered with porcelain plates and sipped at a tiny cup of coffee. It seemed that Kirsch might be the only guest.

  He lay on the bed and waited. Mayan had gone to find Rosa; if Rosa was available the two young women would return to have dinner with him, otherwise Mayan might come alone. Kirsch had taken off his shirt and trousers and hung them over a chair. He almost fell asleep but a mosquito buzzing in his ear kept him awake. Kirsch slapped at the side of his face and the noise stopped, only to begin again a moment later. He sat up and looked at his withered leg, twig-thin and bone white. The wrenching thought crossed his mind that perhaps injury and hurt were what he had been searching for when he came out to Palestine, not escaping his brother’s fate but trying to replicate it. Well, if so, he had got what he wanted; and now he knew, as everyone who went into the war had quickly learned, that the experience wasn’t worth it. He lay in the room fighting a losing battle with self-pity: Philoctetes and his suppurating wound. He pulled the white sheet over his body and up to his chin, as if it might obliterate everything that had happened in the last months.

  Before undressing he had deposited the contents of his pockets in a glass ashtray on his bedside table: the key to his Jerusalem flat, a few coins, and the policeman’s tunic button that he had found in the Bloombergs’ garden and which he kept now almost more as a talisman than as evidence. A nurse at Shaarei Zedek had taken it from a pocket of his trousers after she had cut away the cloth from his leg. Now he stretched out his arm, picked up the button, examined its crest, then set it down again. It was possible that Joyce had lied to him from the very beginning. The image of her in the front of the car stroking the back of the soldier’s head returned to him, and once again he felt his face burning.

  After a while he got up from the bed and walked over to a window. At the outset of their bus journey Mayan had told him that in spring the hills here were covered in red flax and blue sage and that on her first visit, only days after her arrival in Palestine, she had seen fields of grasses crisscrossed with ivory and yellow flowers; looking at the dried-out landscape before him, stone and dusty oil-stained ground shimmering under ripples of heat, Kirsch found it hard to imagine such an abundance of color. But perhaps his ability to conjure beauty or the joy that it could bring had evanesced. Since the accident he was always looking for patches of darkness, not only in his own soul but also in the lives of the people he knew. He suspected anyone who, like Mayan, displayed a sunny exterior, of masking layers of trouble.

  From his window he could see out to the main road. Where the bus had deposited its passengers a solitary stork had taken a dignified stand, as if waiting for the next ride into town. While Kirsch was watching, the armored car that he had seen earlier pulled in next to the hostelry. Kirsch assumed that the Hindu soldiers had been dropped off at the camp and only their driver was left. To his surprise, he suddenly felt desperate for conversation with someone from England. He pulled on his trousers—no easy task given the difficulty he had in bending his leg—threw on his shirt, and stepped barefoot from his room. He crossed toward the hostelry lobby, using his stick and moving as quickly as he could, but by the time he arrived, the British driver, a short, wiry man with a shock of curly red hair, was already making his way back toward his vehicle. In each hand he carried an open bottle of beer from which he took alternate swigs. From the high color of his cheeks it looked as if they weren’t his first drinks of the day.

  “Hey,” Kirsch yelled, “are you from the camp?”

  The driver turned in his tracks, held the beer bottles behind his back, and gave Kirsch a hard stare. Kirsch noted the sergeant’s stripes on his shirt.

  “What’s it to you if I am?”

  “Oh, nothing at all. Just looking for someone to have a drink with.”

  The sergeant looked suspiciously at Kirsch. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Look,” Kirsch said, “I couldn’t give a damn about . . .” He indicated the hidden bottles with a nod of his head.

  “And why should you ‘give a damn’ ”—the sergeant did his best to
imitate Kirsch’s accent—“to begin with?”

  Kirsch shrugged. There was no way to explain his yearning for companionship and then to introduce himself as a member of the Jerusalem constabulary.

  “Listen, gimpy,” the sergeant said, “whoever you are, why don’t you just fuck off?”

  He took two steps toward the armored vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Wait a minute,” Kirsch called out, “I think we’ve met before. Didn’t you come into the station in Jerusalem? Weren’t you a friend of Sam Cartwright?”

  The sergeant had been about to turn the key in the ignition, but he stopped and looked across at Kirsch. A thin smile of recognition crossed his swollen face.

  “And you’re the sod who got him shot,” he said. “What the fuck are you doing up here? Not that I give a shit.”

  “Got him shot? I certainly . . .” Kirsch wanted to say, “I was shot myself,” but the case was already closed.

  The sergeant turned on the engine.

  “Bastard,” he yelled at Kirsch. “I’d rather have a drink with my nig-nogs.”

  Kirsch went back to his room, propped himself up on a pillow against the tubular metal headboard, and waited for Mayan to return. He hadn’t even thought to bring a book with him. Somewhere nearby a hostelry worker emptied a rubbish bin. The scent of mimosa that had faintly wafted through the open window was quickly overwhelmed by a bitter odor: someone smashing beer bottles outside a London pub.

  In his dream there was an old Jewish woman with a satin peruke and cashmere shawl. Her face was something like his mother’s and, from her seat in the snug of the pub, she was explaining her plans to set up a flycatcher factory in Palestine. It couldn’t fail, she said, because the country was full of flies. Kirsch, who at first seemed excited by the idea, soon found himself urging her not to go. Who would be left to look after him and his brother? They were only children. How were they supposed to fend for themselves?

  A persistent knocking at the door of his room brought him out of sleep. Mayan was calling his name.