A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  “De Groot ripped it from the tunic of his assassin. Saud found it in our garden.”

  Joyce took the button, held it for a moment in the palm of her hand and then handed it back to him along with the letter. Bloomberg wasn’t sure if she had been about to burn the letter or not.

  Joyce sat on the bed; the flames from the lamp threw tall leaping shadows on the wall behind her.

  “Will you help me find Robert Kirsch? Please, Mark, I don’t know who else to ask. And it’s important.”

  Bloomberg thought for a moment; then he reached to the floor and scooped up a loose page from an old Palestine Bulletin that he had used to wipe his brushes. He held the paint-scored newspaper up so that the light ran through it.

  “HUSBAND SEARCHES FOR WIFE’S MISSING LOVER,” he read.

  They fell asleep in their clothes, only to wake and tear them off in the middle of the night in a frenzy of lovemaking that by morning was remembered by them both more as a vivid dream than an actual event. Bloomberg didn’t know if the first time he had made love to his wife in months would also be the last time in their marriage. They fucked as strangers, desperate and excited, tugging at each other’s hair, a confusion of mouths and juices as if they might lick and suck each other into oblivion. They lay bonded by sweat and come, first Joyce’s head on Bloomberg’s chest and then his face at her breast. Toward dawn Bloomberg pulled a thin blanket over them and when, in her sleep, Joyce turned her back to him he spooned into her and gently kissed the back of her neck.

  They were woken by someone banging at the door. Bloomberg pulled on his shorts and walked across the room through shafts of light that darted like yellow birds across his path.

  Athill had returned with two other policemen.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Mark, “but we’re going to have to bring Mrs. Bloomberg in to answer some questions. Please don’t make a fuss. I’m hoping this won’t take long.”

  “Questions pertaining to what, may I ask?”

  Joyce had sat up in bed, the sheet pulled around her. “I’ll go,” she said, sounding almost relieved.

  Athill took his men outside in order to allow Joyce to get dressed.

  “Tell me,” Bloomberg said, “tell me quickly what is going on.”

  “I can’t,” she replied, in her confusion pulling on the stained white dress that she had worn the day before. “But find Robert Kirsch. Please, Mark, I know he can help me and there’s something that I have to tell him.”

  “Why do you need help? What have you done?”

  Athill banged on the door and pushed it open an inch or so. “Ready, Mrs. Bloomberg?”

  Joyce kissed Bloomberg on the lips.

  “Find him,” she said, then she almost rushed out the door and into the custody of her escorts.

  Bloomberg followed down the path while Joyce hurried toward the car ahead of the dallying policemen; a reversal of intention that was almost comic. Bloomberg shouted after her but she ignored him. Then he turned on Athill, and tried to push his way past the two broad-shouldered policemen who blocked his way.

  “How dare you! What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Joyce! Joyce! You fucking bastards.”

  Athill whispered to one of the men who stopped in his tracks to restrain the flailing Bloomberg. The others got into the car. Finally the policeman shoved Bloomberg to the ground, then jumped into the front passenger seat.

  Athill reversed the Ford down the road. Bloomberg rose and gave chase as best he could, stumbling with his slight limp into the high grass along the beaten path, but in the end all the opposition that he could muster was a large stone that he grabbed and threw into the cloud of dust that the car kicked up. He went immediately to his car and turned the key in the ignition. The engine stuttered and died. For a moment, in a state of baffled exasperation, he sat taking deep breaths. What could Joyce have possibly been up to? Had he missed something so egregious that it had been staring him in the face? Had her affair with Kirsch led her into some dark place? It was impossible for him to imagine that such was the case. He took out the starting handle from the toolbox, went around to the front of the car and gave three quick cranks; the engine emitted a long snore, then fell asleep. Ten minutes passed before Bloomberg realized that there was no petrol in the car.

  Bloomberg arrived at the police station almost two hours later, having walked almost all the way into the center of town; he was sweating profusely and his throat was dry. The waiting room contained a noisy crowd debating in three languages; heated, accusatory, gesticulating individuals, Jews and Arabs alike, threw themselves against the desk with angry demands and tearful pleading. They waved papers and shouted requests. Bloomberg could barely make himself heard above the din. When he finally managed to shove his way to the front the desk sergeant, surly and indifferent, claimed to have no knowledge of either Joyce’s arrival or her whereabouts. He suggested that Bloomberg take a look outside for Athill’s car, but when he did so the vehicle was nowhere to be seen. Bloomberg returned to the melee and once again maneuvered his way forward.

  “Where’s Captain Kirsch? At least tell me that.”

  “Kirsch? I have no idea. In the Jewish hospital, isn’t he?”

  An English voice from far back in the room called out, “Hey, Matthews, how’s the Monday crush?”

  The desk sergeant replied by waving two fingers in the direction of the speaker.

  “Is there anyone here who knows where he is? Or where my wife might be?”

  Matthews, faking exasperation, shouted across the room to the policeman who had just come in. “Charlie, any idea of the whereabouts of our beloved Captain Kirsch?”

  “Heard he’d gone to Cyprus with a nice-looking nurse.”

  “Reliable source?”

  “In this fucking place?”

  Matthews turned his attention back to Bloomberg.

  “There you are then, there’s your answer.” He winked at Bloomberg. “Worth taking a bullet sometimes, I suppose.”

  The man pressing into his back had managed to slip his arm under Bloomberg’s and was proffering a sheaf of papers to the sergeant. There was more jockeying for position and Bloomberg looked momentarily like an octopus, his tentacles the waving, beseeching arms of the strangers who surrounded him.

  He extricated himself from the crowd and forced his way outside. Where had they taken Joyce? Perhaps she had been quickly released, all a misunderstanding; while he was walking and hobbling in from North Talpiot, she was on her way back home. But wouldn’t she have passed him on the way? He couldn’t remember seeing a single car on the road. He walked in a daze down and across Jaffa Road. Without noticing where he was going, he wandered into the midst of an open-air art class. Two dozen students had set up their easels, the men in long khaki shorts and white open-necked shirts, the women in cotton dresses. Without at all expecting to be, he found himself distracted by their work: even as he negotiated a path through the cluster of aspiring artists he wanted to stop and correct a line or suggest an adjustment. It was madness. On Jaffa Road he bought a fruit ice at a kiosk and sat for a moment to collect his thoughts. A tattered poster on the opposite wall showed two smiling pioneers, a man and a woman, one holding a rake, the other a pickax. The man was dressed rather smartly, a Sunday stroller in the English countryside; the woman, in knee-length skirt and blouse, wore a kerchief on her head. The rolling fields behind them were green, neatly furrowed or dotted with sheaves of corn. In the far distance a village of sparkling whitewashed homes nestled in a valley. The caption was unequivocal: REBUILDING THE LAND OF ISRAEL. It was the theme that Bloomberg had been paid to come and paint in Palestine; what would the serious students on the other side of the road have thought of him?

  He was contemplating his next move when Athill sat down beside him. “I’m glad I found you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be like that this morning.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At the governorate. She’s fine there. We didn’t want to treat her like a common
criminal, you know. I’m Francis Athill, by the way.”

  The members of the art class were washing brushes and packing their materials into wooden crates. Their model, a tall, skinny woman with bobbed black hair, relaxed her pose and stretched her arms to the sky. Bloomberg would have given anything to be among them: to begin again.

  “Why have you got her?”

  “We believe that she’s involved in helping the Zionists run guns.”

  Bloomberg suppressed a laugh. “Joyce? You’re mad.”

  “If she cooperates I’m sure we can work something out. We’re after bigger fish than your wife.”

  “And what is your evidence of my wife’s involvement?”

  “She hasn’t been charged with anything as yet. But I would suggest that in the near future you think about finding her some legal advice.”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll get Sir Gerald Ross to have her released this minute.”

  “It was Sir Gerald who ordered me to keep an eye on Mrs. Bloomberg.”

  Bloomberg took this information in with a sigh as if he were inhaling smoke, and indeed he began to cough uncontrollably. Athill poured him a glass of water.

  “And what did your eye see?” Bloomberg asked.

  Again Athill declined to answer.

  “Let her go,” Bloomberg said. “It’s preposterous.”

  “I can’t do that unless Sir Gerald orders her release.”

  “And he’s in Damascus.”

  “Not any longer.”

  “Then he’s back?”

  “No, Sir Gerald has traveled on to Cyprus. He has some matters to take care of there.”

  “Yes,” Bloomberg said, “I heard. He’s going to be the governor.”

  Athill furrowed his brow but decided not to ask about Bloomberg’s sources.

  “And when is he due back?” Bloomberg continued.

  “In a week. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to your wife while she is being detained. Only questions.”

  Nothing fitted. Was it possible not to know someone at all as you thought you did? Joyce in London: snags of memory, insubstantial as the blue smoke wafting from autumn braziers on the allotments behind the railway lines near their flat; half-heard names that she had mentioned in passing, her acquaintance with Jewish activists, thinkers and writers, journeys that she had taken, her Monday-evening outings, her long enthusiasm for Zionism (muted for him!), which he had deemed foolish but insignificant. And if it was true that she had been running arms, was he proud or ashamed of her? In any event, she had evaded him; her character, which he thought he understood to its core, had proved elusive— but how could it not do so when for years he had been so severely concentrated upon himself?

  Bloomberg looked wildly around at the traffic challenging the narrow confines of Jaffa Road: horse, cart, car, and bus; one of the carts piled high with parsley, the bunched and piled greenery like the waving head of a tree, the cart’s driver flashing his whip at the skinny blinkered animal plodding to market before him. Too much charged information clogged Bloomberg’s brain: Joyce and De Groot, guns and murder. He heard the blast from his own revolver and winced at the memory of wrenching pain, his toe blasted to the bone, blood seeping through his sock, the stench of shit and death in the trench. Two men lying next to him, dead as doornails.

  “Who did she mean this morning,” Athill was asking, “when she urged you to ‘find him’?”

  “Robert Kirsch,” Bloomberg murmured, drawn back into the present.

  “Yes. We went to the hospital to look for him. He wasn’t there. And your wife thought he might be of help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps you had better seek him out.”

  “I’ll do that,” Bloomberg said.

  35.

  Kirsch sat on the manor’s wide terrace looking over a tree-filled sloping garden. He had begun his climb well before the heat of the day, confident that he could manage the ascent. He had been in Rosh Pinah for four days. Mayan had divided her time between nights with Kirsch and days working to help her friend Rosa. This seemed to be her idea of a holiday. Kirsch could understand the nighttime part; her choice of daytime drudgery he found somewhat excessive, although not out of keeping with the pioneer spirit of the place (regnant in Jewish Palestine), in which labor was revered as an end in itself as well as a means to an end. He also had a sneaking feeling that despite the latitudinarian zeal that was often the cream on a Zionist worker’s coffee, Mayan had not told Rosa where she was sleeping.

  Kirsch had intended his walk up the hill to surprise Mayan, but on his arrival at the manor neither she nor anyone who might resemble Rosa was visible among the small staff of middle-aged men and women who, thanks to the beneficence of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, hustled through rooms looking busy and purposeful.

  At this moment, out of breath and with the muscles in his good leg sore and aching, Kirsch didn’t have the strength to do more than take in the view; he stared past the narrow trunks of the garden’s small black cypresses with their dusty, curled foliage, and down the narrow trench occupied by a brown and unappealing trickle of stream. In the far distance, no more than a white point on the horizon, was the city of Safed. Kirsch wasn’t unhappy: how could anyone be who had spent the last four nights as he had? He thought of his lovemaking with Mayan as both a triumph over his physical awkwardness and a tribute to her patience. The accommodations that they had made for his condition, and the tentative movements inspired by those accommodations, had supplied a virginal aura to their fucking, an atmosphere which had its own pleasures. Thus far Kirsch hadn’t plucked up the courage to ask Mayan about the scars on her back, perhaps because he wasn’t yet ready to relinquish his status as “the wounded one.” This was a thought that he wished would go away.

  Since his arrival in Rosh Pinah he had passed the days in desultory fashion, mainly in the dull company of the family who ran the hostelry. But the general air of boredom suited his mood, and he was glad that the family tended to leave him to himself. If the proprietors, who were both, so they told him, from the Polish town of Lodz, were disturbed by Mayan’s nighttime visits they certainly didn’t make Kirsch aware of their discomfort. In the mornings they greeted him with friendly smiles and busied themselves behind the desk, while he drank tea and read the Palestine Bulletin. He found that he was not much interested in the news. One afternoon the small group of Hindu soldiers from the local camp made their way into the bar, unaccompanied by Kirsch’s nemesis with the red hair. Their drinking and socializing led to an impromptu cricket game held on the patchy grass that passed for a lawn, close to the hostelry’s laundry room: an upturned wastepaper basket for a wicket, a tennis ball, and a battered half-strung racquet for the bat. The soldiers had roped Kirsch in as umpire and he had enjoyed himself until they had urged him to take a turn at bat (“Let’s see what England can do”). He had declined on the unassailable grounds that he “couldn’t run.”

  “If you’re injured, then you’re eligible for a runner,” one of the soldiers said. “Make the shots and have someone run for you. That’s a perfectly legitimate part of the game.”

  Kirsch had shaken his head no. He knew that he was being absurd: the game they were playing was fun and improvisational, but it had exposed the gap between the person he had been before the shooting and who he was now, and once he looked into that black pit he was susceptible to a paralyzing self-pity.

  In the early evening while he waited for Mayan to arrive he sat on his bed and composed a letter to his parents. When he put pen to paper he was surprised to discover that he no longer felt the need to reassure them of his well-being. And why shouldn’t they hear the truth? After Marcus’s death he had tried to protect them from his own troubles; there wasn’t room in the house, and rightly so, he supposed, for anything less than great tragedy. But now he poured his heart out and did not spare them his misery of the past few weeks. Was he angry that they had sent Sarah and Michael out to visit him in the hospital rather than make th
e long sea journey themselves? He didn’t think so, but there was a wide space in him now that they couldn’t cross. The space was enough; he tore up the letter.

  And where was Joyce? She still haunted his imagination, but the force of her betrayal, like the force of their affair, was rendered increasingly spectral by the presence of Mayan. It was Mayan who stamped Kirsch’s days with the indelible memory of her voice, arms, legs, face, hair, lips, breasts and cunt, so that whatever domestic banality he practiced—tea and the newspaper, a game of chess with the local sheikh in his black turban—the scent of sex from the previous night embraced and surrounded him.

  He watched from his high-backed chair on the terrace and saw Mayan moving with her characteristically determined walk through a far corner of the garden. She was wearing her straw hat with its brim pulled down over her eyes. He waved even though he knew that unless she looked up she wouldn’t see him. He was going to call out to her but then decided to wait. He followed her progress as she disappeared around the back of the manor.

  Ten minutes later, hatless and wearing a rose-patterned apron, she was standing at Kirsch’s shoulder.

  “Would you like tea, sir?”

  Kirsch twisted around.

  Mayan laughed. She pressed her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the neck.

  “You climbed the mountain,” she said.

  Kirsch looked down the path, which was no more than half a mile long. A week before his departure for Palestine he had taken a train to Wales and traveled alone on a two-day walking excursion in the Brecon Beacons. It had poured on both days, the rain coming down in sheets as Kirsch made his way through flocks of grazing sheep up to the sandstone peak at Pen-y-Fan, but despite the weather, or perhaps because of it, Kirsch had enjoyed his outing, and what is more, he now thought, it was the strength of his own body taking on the elements that he had appreciated the most.

  Mayan sat down in the chair facing him.

  “Where’s your friend Rosa?” he asked. “I’m beginning to think that she doesn’t exist.”