A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  By the time that Bloomberg and Saphir had disembarked the Evresis it was too late to find a ride to Nicosia. Both men were in a state of agitation, eager to reach their urgent destinations, and for more than an hour they plied the lobbies of the small tavernas close to the harbor in search of a driver willing to test his skills by moonlight against the narrow inland roads. Eventually, they were obliged to admit defeat, but rather than find a soft bed for the three or four hours that remained of the night they determined to wait outdoors until dawn. They found a bench close to a garage, Fotis Brothers, that offered a motorcar service, and steeled themselves for the journey by consuming a small bottle of ouzo that Saphir had purchased on the ship.

  Bloomberg was exhausted, he had a sharp pain in his shoulder from heaving his bag, and his entire body ached. The ouzo burned his throat and, by the third or fourth gulp, had set his mind reeling. He sensed that he was at the end of what had been almost a decade of futile travels, beginning with his sailing from Folkestone to join the fighting in Flanders and culminating here on this hot little island. He had made so many attempts at escape, without precisely knowing what he was looking for, and without conviction.

  Bloomberg stood up and immediately Saphir dropped down full length on the bench, half drunk and half asleep. Bloomberg walked with his back to the sea. Not too far away, made visible by the bright moon, he could make out the contours of the town’s vast Gothic cathedral. He set off in its general direction, past a train station and through a warren of narrow cobblestoned streets that brought him to his destination. The great wooden doors of the cathedral were closed. Bloomberg sat on the steps in order to catch his breath. And now Joyce occupied all his thoughts; the image of her face glowed like an icon. He pictured her seated in front of the mirror of her dressing table in their West Hampstead flat, brushing her hair back, her lips slightly parted in concentration, an occasional grimace as she pulled through a knot. Her hopeful American face and lively gray-green eyes. The very picture of a Zionist terrorist. Life was mad.

  The taxi took Bloomberg and Saphir past Othello’s Tower, through Famagusta’s medieval fortifications and into a fertile plain that, their driver informed them, stretched between two mountain ranges. There were small tree-covered hills and the occasional river. Two hours later the outskirts of Nicosia were announced by the presence of Greek flags that seemed to hang everywhere from balconies and windows of white-walled houses. Saphir pointed out the profusion:

  “It seems we’re not wanted here either.”

  “We?”

  Saphir’s face reddened. He had slipped back into his British self as easily as putting on a change of clothes, and his embarrassment was profound.

  “Where shall I drop you?” he asked.

  “I’m going to Government House.”

  Bloomberg leaned forward. “Do you know where that is?” he asked the driver, who nodded his assent.

  The car passed through a series of plantations that after Palestine seemed to Bloomberg almost like an English park, except that the light that the sun threw on them was so intense. In a few moments a long, low barnlike building came in sight.

  Saphir and Bloomberg looked at one another.

  “There must be some mistake here,” Saphir said. “Where are you taking us?”

  “No mistake.”

  “But these are stables.”

  “No, sir.”

  The car pulled up fifty yards from a sentry gate that guarded what could now be seen as a small house with white-painted plank walls. There was a flagpole in the garden but, as yet, it seemed, no Union Jack. Bloomberg got out of the taxi.

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said. “I hope you get your scoop.”

  “Oh, I will,” Saphir replied. “It’s not too late.”

  Bloomberg watched the car turn on the driveway, and then he was alone. His clothes were rumpled and stained with the grime of his long journey: red-brick dust from the lorry, grease and oil from the deck of the boat. He could still smell the urine from the ship’s toilet, which despite his precautions, had soaked the bottom of his trousers. He stood for a moment in a shaded grove of silver-stemmed poplars. The heat, if it was possible, seemed greater than in Palestine, although the same antiseptic odor emanated from the eucalyptus trees. He knew exactly what he had to do here: bargain his silence for Joyce’s release. De Groot’s murderers would go free, but so would Joyce. Bloomberg gathered himself and moved toward the sentry gate where, before anyone could come to his assistance, he collapsed, clutching his chest, and lay motionless on the dirt path.

  37.

  When Kirsch entered the room Joyce stood up and took three quick steps toward him, but Kirsch was not alone, so instead of embracing him, as she had intended, she returned to her narrow bed with its rough brown blanket and sat on its edge.

  For what felt like an age, but was probably only a matter of thirty seconds or so, he stared at her without speaking. Her hair was tangled and knotted, her eyes bleary and circled black from lack of sleep. The staff sergeant had informed Kirsch that Joyce had been treated very well, and offered every chance to “perform her ablutions,” but she had passed up opportunities to bathe, just as she had rejected most of the meals prepared for her. In deference, it seemed, to the fact that this was a woman’s room, someone had placed a vase of yellow crowned daisies on the windowsill.

  “It appears that we have to talk,” Kirsch said stiffly.

  Joyce looked at Robert, took in his skinniness, his sunken cheeks, his walking stick and the awkward way that he leaned upon it. She felt light-headed but tried to keep her gaze steady. For a moment she had an impulse to play the deranged woman, but if this meeting was to mean anything at all she had to face the consequences of her actions head on. After all, here was Robert, her victim, right in front of her, with his righteous anger and his broken body. Even so, when she opened her mouth to speak, the words of apology that she had planned to utter got stuck in her throat and emerged as a nervous cough.

  Athill, who was standing slightly behind Kirsch, stepped forward and stretched his long frame to proffer a half-empty glass of water that stood on the chair beside Joyce’s bed.

  She drank; the water quelled her cough but couldn’t help her speak.

  Athill turned to Kirsch. “Perhaps I should leave,” he said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Kirsch replied.

  Joyce’s face showed no reaction. She was wearing, Kirsch noticed, with a feeling of disgust tempered by a residue of desire that he could hardly bear to acknowledge, the same white dress that she had worn on their first motorcycle ride into the Jerusalem hills.

  “They say that you asked for me. Here I am. What do you have to tell us?”

  She was hurt, but she knew that she had no right to expect civility from Kirsch.

  “Come on”—he was working himself up into a fury—“Francis here meets me outside and says, ‘She’ll only talk to you.’ He tells me you specifically requested my presence, that you’re willing to spill all your secrets to me, but not to anybody else. So let’s hear them, right now. The games, the deceit, the lying, who you’ve fucked, who you’ve bought off, who gave you the guns, where they come from, who pays you, who gives you your orders?”

  Athill put his hand on Kirsch’s shoulder and he stopped his tirade.

  “You,” Joyce murmured. “I fucked you, that’s all.”

  He was a boy. She saw it as she had never allowed herself to during their intimate relationship. He was an English boy, out of his depth. The short trousers that he had worn when he arrived at her door should have told her, but she had misread the sign and seen a policeman instead.

  Joyce sat back on the bed. Whatever she might say was going to be utterly inadequate. Perhaps, she realized, all that she had wanted was to see Robert alive. She hadn’t killed him after all.

  She heard herself speaking, but it was almost as if the words were coming from someone else in the room. “The ballet,” she began.

  “The ballet? Wha
t are you talking about?”

  Athill coughed and, once again, Kirsch relented.

  “My father,” she said, and paused again; her shoulders dipped as if the weight of the air in the room was too much to bear. “Well, he drove me to Miss Nugent’s classes.”

  Kirsch glanced at Athill, who seemed riveted by Joyce. He felt a pang of jealousy and, for a moment, dropped his air of impatience. The two men waited for Joyce’s explanation to take on meaning.

  “My feet began to get distorted, like a geisha’s. But I wouldn’t stop. My parents tore their hair out. ‘It’s over,’ my father said. He said he had to be cruel to be kind. The lessons were over.” Joyce paused again. She made an effort to look Kirsch in the face. There were tears running down her cheeks. “I can never stop myself. Someone else has to do it.”

  “Is providing Enfield rifles to anybody who wants to shoot a British serviceman being cruel to be kind?”

  Joyce closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. She caught the smell of her wool coat after the rain as she crammed into Toynbee Hall with the others. A speaker with a German accent. In dreary London it was Palestine Flower Day, someone tagged a miniature flag with a small artificial flower to her lapel, “I am the Rose of Sharon, the Lily of the Valleys.”

  Kirsch’s voice, relentless, unforgiving, returned her to the room.

  “And the end justifies the means, I suppose? They justify Cartwright getting his face shot off and Lampard losing his arm, and God knows how many deaths to come, and . . .” Kirsch’s voice trailed away.

  “And you. You nearly died.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Kirsch snapped.

  “Then nothing does,” Joyce replied.

  Kirsch felt a surge of love for her. It rose in him unbidden and against all his better instincts. He wanted to take her in his arms, just as on the first time that she had opened the door of her cottage to him. He might actually have embraced her, but Athill’s presence held him back. And best that it did so.

  Athill had moved to the room’s single window and was staring out toward the Damascus Gate. The moat that ran alongside it had been entirely filled up with rubbish. In the open square in front of the gate, where four roads met, a larger crowd than usual had congregated for this time of day. It was late afternoon and the hubbub of the throng grew and grew to a positive pandemonium. Athill didn’t notice that the women who usually hunted for cheap goods at the close of shopping hours were conspicuously absent. He saw what he imagined to be impassioned bargaining, the wild song of the city, at once its color and commerce. He looked across to the high chambers above the gate, the arches with their machicolated balconies and narrow coupled windows surmounted by stone cupolas; the wild capers that grabbed at the stones with their mole claws. He closed the window against the tumultuous din and the rank stench of open sewers and rotting vegetables, and turned back to face Joyce and Robert Kirsch. He was about to speak when the first stone shattered the glass behind his back.

  Athill instinctively raised his hands to cover his head. Rocks were thudding against the outside wall and then more glass shattered onto the floor of the room. A gunshot blasted through the air.

  “Get her out of here!” Athill yelled.

  Kirsch, who had been frozen momentarily by the gun blast, as if he had taken the bullet himself, tried to run forward. He stumbled but managed to grab Joyce around the waist and drag her to the ground. Together, they crawled toward the door. Athill too was down on the floor, but crawling in the other direction, back toward the broken windows. He stood against a wall, removed his revolver from its holster, and leaned quickly forward to peer through the glass. The gunshot, which seemed to have come from within the governorate, had panicked the crowd. Men and boys scattered in all directions, only for a large number quickly to reassemble in a rough circle. Athill heard a great ocean roar and then saw a body at first cradled, then almost lifted into the air. A child! It was a child! Athill saw the bloodstain spread on the boy’s shirt, but by then he had looked too long: a rock thrown aimlessly caught the edge of the stone window and ricocheted into his face. He screamed with pain and put his hand to his eye, which had turned to a bloody mess.

  Kirsch and Joyce descended two flights of stairs as fast as they could. Kirsch had lost his stick, and it was he who needed Joyce’s assistance. She shouldered his weight and they exited the building through its basement cafeteria. They headed north, took two turns down streets that were empty and, ten minutes later, emerged into a blind alley that ended at a wooden door that was slightly ajar. Kirsch pushed through and Joyce followed. They found themselves in a garden, but one that lay at the foot of a tomb-covered green hill. Kirsch sat down on a grassy knoll to catch his breath. Joyce stood with her back to him staring at the cliff of the hill where, to her eye, the cavities in the rock seemed to form the eyes, nose, and mouth in a rounded skull. At this distance the sounds of the riot were diminished but not extinguished.

  Kirsch’s chest heaved and his lungs felt as if they were about to burst. Joyce knelt beside him. He wanted to put his arms around her, or rather, have her encircle him.

  “Am I still your prisoner?” she said.

  “I don’t know what you are.”

  The air was hot and honey-thick, and the late afternoon seemed to be choking on itself, gasping for breath.

  Kirsch gestured toward the wooden door.

  “Go,” he said, “I can’t stop you.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Oh, you will? Well, I’ve met someone else.”

  Kirsch had intended these words for another, quite different, conversation, but they had spilled out now, childishly, unnecessarily. He rose clumsily to his feet and took a few steps away from her.

  A shot rang out. The faint noise of the distant crowd subsided, then rose again and seemed now to be coming closer.

  “We can’t stay here,” Kirsch said.

  He walked over to Joyce. She rose and brushed the grass off her dress.

  “I’ll take you somewhere safe,” he said.

  They passed down narrow half-built silent streets that were strewn with debris and construction materials. As much as he could Kirsch sheltered Joyce with his body and kept her tucked in, barely visible, against the walls of the new buildings. After twenty minutes or so they paused in shadow at the rear of the hospice kept by the French friars. They stood side by side with their backs against the wall. Joyce’s mouth was dry and her legs were scratched and bruised.

  “We’ll go to a hotel,” Kirsch said. “Hensman’s. The proprietor knows me.”

  Joyce nodded.

  Kirsch took a deep breath.

  “I can’t forgive you,” he said.

  “No, but there is someone who needs forgiving. The boy, Saud. He didn’t kill anyone. Ross sent him into the desert with Mark. He told Mark everything. Mark showed me a letter. De Groot knew that he was in danger. We did it. Your men. Your policemen. The Jewish police. Mark has a button from one of their tunics. De Groot ripped it off in the struggle, then carried it in his fist. He must have dropped it in our garden.”

  Kirsch stared straight ahead. He watched a stray cat searching for food on the other side of the street.

  “There’s a second button,” he said. “I have it.”

  They sat in the candlelit lobby of the hotel, each cradling a whisky.

  “There must be people out looking for you,” Kirsch said. “I can’t decide what to do.”

  Joyce shrugged. “It’s up to you. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

  Kirsch took a gulp of whisky. “Tell me the truth. Was it you? Was it a gun you brought that I was shot with?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t be sure.”

  Kirsch stared at her. Her face, after weeks indoors, had grown pale, but her gray-green eyes still blazed.

  “Will you tell me who you worked for?”

  The lobby was a sea of shadows.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” Joyce said.

 
She woke far into the night. Kirsch lay sleeping beside her, his body shaped uncomfortably to the deep indentations in the mattress left by former travelers. He hadn’t wanted to make love to her, but had laid his head on her chest. She had offered him her breasts but he had fallen asleep, like a baby, with his open mouth and dry lips at her nipple. She rose from the bed, pulled on his shirt, left the room, and pattered barefoot down a narrow corridor toward the communal toilet at its end. Why hadn’t she told Robert that she worked for Frumkin? She wasn’t quite sure. She had told him that, despite everything that had happened, she still believed in the Zionist cause, but she wanted nothing more to do with violence. It was too late, of course, for that declaration, too late for her remorse, too late for everything.

  She sat on the toilet and shivered. A medley of coughs and snores penetrated the thin doors of the other rooms on the floor, and then came the raw cries of a couple at love.

  Where was Mark? She had sent him off to find Robert Kirsch, but Athill’s men had located Kirsch first. If she told them about Frumkin there was a chance she wouldn’t be shot, but even though she hated him she couldn’t surrender his name. Why not? She had already betrayed Mark by making love to Robert Kirsch, and betrayed Robert Kirsch by running guns for Frumkin. What would be the point of a third betrayal? Would it stop more men from dying? The guns were already here, and Frumkin, she was certain, must have left the country by now. As to the urgent notion that Peter Frumkin’s name could be exchanged for her own life, she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to live; she certainly didn’t deserve to.

  She pulled the rusty toilet chain, water gushed then gurgled in the pipes. Close by, so close that it seemed to come from deep within the building, a church bell tolled for matins. In the interstices between the sonorous strikes of the bell tongue, someone was calling her name. It was Robert’s voice, devoid of fury now, but tuned to the urgency of a parent searching for a lost child. Joyce was on a train. It was winter and the snow packed up high on the railroad embankments. Outside, the sky was smoky blue and the Hudson snaked beneath it like smooth white stone; a lone skater twirled and was gone. She wanted to see him again and ran down the corridor. Instead of the skater she had found the caboose, and scrunched herself in between two giant mailbags. After a while she heard her father’s voice, distant at first, but growing ever closer. She couldn’t decide whether to stay in hiding or to reveal herself, but at the last minute, when it seemed that he might turn away, she had leapt out and into his arms: “I’m here, I’m here.”