A Palestine Affair
Page 28
38.
Ross and Kirsch sat on the enclosed veranda that gave onto the garden.
“The yellow stone is traditional here,” Ross said, gesturing toward the Gothic arcading that formed a low, narrow gallery about a hundred feet long.
Ever the instructor, Kirsch thought. He had taken the ferry from Haifa and arrived, as Bloomberg had on his final journey, by taxi from Famagusta. The driver, supervised by Kirsch, had roped Bloomberg’s painting to the roof of his car in such a way that it could not be damaged. Currently, the work, still in the gray sacking wrap that Bloomberg had provided in the desert, stood propped in Ross’s lofty new drawing room.
“A drink first?” Ross had said, and Kirsch had been surprised by the governor’s ability to defer viewing the fruits of his commission. A drink first, though, seemed to be both a mark of respect and an act of homage to Bloomberg.
Ross sipped at his scotch and soda and waved his hand in the general direction of the gardens. “If the soil were richer and the water adequate . . . it’s regrettable.”
Kirsch looked over the barren expanse with its scattered trees; he could see why the possibility of roses appeared unlikely.
Kirsch lifted his glass of lemon water to his lips. No whisky for him. He needed to keep his wits about him.
“We’ve had a heck of time locating a Jewish cemetery,” Ross said. “There is only one. It’s in Ercan. They tried to establish a settlement there about twenty years ago. Money from a French baron, Maurice de Hirsch. Heard of him?”
Kirsch shook his head.
“Well, what made him try Cyprus God only knows.” Ross lifted his tumbler of scotch and turned it around in his fingers. “You’ll accompany us there, then?”
“I promised her I would.”
“She didn’t . . . didn’t want him brought back?”
“No. She thought he’d have had no preference for Jerusalem. Or home. I think she almost liked the idea of being able to come here at some future time, and entirely alone, to visit the grave. She’s asked me to pay someone for the upkeep.”
“For all those years? I wonder if you’ll be able to find an individual whom you can trust.”
“Yes,” Kirsch said. “The years. That’s something I’d like to talk you about.”
“I thought you might.”
“Is there anything that can be done?”
“Not if she won’t talk.”
“But what if I were to talk?”
Ross stared past Kirsch. Now that the prospective governor was in residence, a subaltern was preparing to run the Union Jack up on the flagpole at the foot of the garden.
“About the boy? I sent him away for his own good. Turned out I was right. I don’t think you’ve got much to go on there. As for the rest, the missing Sergeant Harlap and his missing buttons, well, that’s for you and my successor to deal with.”
“And Frumkin?”
“Well, you’ll pursue him, no doubt, even without Mrs. Bloomberg’s assistance. But you’re not going to have any easy time. There’s nothing to go on, except that he lent Joyce a car. I imagine he’s back in California. He’s a powerful man. Good luck to you.”
“And her confession, doesn’t that count for something?”
“It will reduce the sentence by about five years. Look, Robert, you’ve done all that you can. And so have I. Shall we look at that painting?”
Ross eased himself out of his chair. He looked to Kirsch as if he had lost weight, but perhaps it was a loss of authority that made him appear less imposing. Kirsch followed him into the drawing room. The painting still had one corner exposed where Bloomberg had ripped the sacking outside Government House in Jerusalem.
Kirsch cut through the rope with his knife and revealed the painting.
Ross stood a distance away. His face took on a look of hard concentration. He walked forward until he was only two or three feet away from the surface of the canvas; then he removed his glasses. It was a few minutes before he spoke.
“Well,” he said, “I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t disappointed.”
Kirsch looked at Bloomberg’s swirling browns, pinks, and reds. The place of sacrifice that the artist had been sent to paint was not distinguishable.
“Do you know,” Ross said, “I don’t think I want to keep this. Why don’t you take it?”
“If you don’t want it . . . then surely Joyce.”
“Well, as the owner, I believe that I can pass it on to whomsoever I please. And in any case, I don’t think that Mrs. Bloomberg is going to have the wall space. But if you feel that way, perhaps you could look after it for her.”
“I will,” Kirsch said.
Ross was still looking at the painting, as if he were trying to puzzle it out.
“I suppose we should be on our way,” he said finally. “I’m sorry to rush you.”
“Can she at least serve her sentence in England?”
“I shan’t have a problem speaking for that. But are you sure that’s where she wants to be?”
“I haven’t asked her, but I know that she has friends in London. At least she’ll have visitors.”
“Will you be one of them?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided what to do.”
They walked through the dining room. Two servants were unpacking boxes, removing plates and glasses, then gingerly setting them on the floor.
Kirsch and Ross made their way to the front of the house. Outside, a car was waiting for them behind the hearse, its engine idling. The sky held the color of bottled glass. Unlikely though it was, it felt to Kirsch as if it might rain.
They drove for hours, the sky darkening ahead of them. By the time they reached the cemetery a heavy rainfall was in progress. With no trees to resist its passage the water coursed across the ground in a dull yellow streak that stretched as far as the eye could see.
Kirsch and Ross stood by the grave as Bloomberg’s coffin was lowered in. When it had come to rest Ross turned to Kirsch.
“I thought you might like to say something,” he said.
Kirsch didn’t reply immediately. The rain beat down on his head. He looked at the grave next to Bloomberg’s. A star of David adorned a simple stone that memorialized Artur Niederhoffer 15.12.1886– 2.11.1921. Bloomberg was the colony’s last member.
“No,” he told Ross, “I don’t have anything to say.”
December
39.
The day dawned bright and evangelical, and it was hard for Kirsch to resist its redeeming light, its broad white shimmer. The city offered its early seductions: morning bells striking down upon the old walls, newly constructed dwellings and building plots, the nasal call of the muezzin, and, as if to adjust the spirit and bring it to back to earth, Jerusalem’s domestic display erupting in color: a woman on the opposite balcony shaking out a big blue-checked tablecloth, and beneath her another woman holding a bunch of blood-red late-blooming roses, flowers that Kirsch suspected she had stolen from the garden at the corner of his street and that she would undoubtedly offer for sale later in the day.
As was habitual since his return from Cyprus three months ago, he had been up for most of the night, kept awake by his ferocious regret. He had paid weekly visits to Joyce. The first time he had simply described the place where her husband was buried, but in their subsequent meetings he had tried desperately to convince her to tell everything that she knew, otherwise her fate was inexorable. She refused to say more than she already had. She believed, Kirsch understood, that she had got what she deserved, and she was prepared, or so she imagined, to spend the next twenty years in what was from his point of view an utterly wasteful atonement. All that was required was her cooperation, and a new life was hers for the asking. In recent weeks he found that her stubbornness made it almost unbearable for him to be with her. He had told her once that he couldn’t forgive her for what she had done, but it wasn’t so. Long ago, it seemed, she had offered one name, “Saud,” and now even a half-whispered dreamlike murmur of the
second name would free her. Her silence and her equanimity in the face of her sentence were both incomprehensible to him. In a week, through Ross’s intervention, she would be taken back to London to serve out the remainder of her term.
At the first sounds of traffic on the newly opened road near his house, Kirsch rose from his seat on the balcony and went back into his flat. He wasn’t alone. As he entered, Mayan’s dark form, her belly already slightly swollen, moved across the room. She crouched over the chamber pot and peed into it. She stood, pulled down her nightdress, and returned to Kirsch’s bed. He sat beside her on the edge of the mattress. She stretched out her arm and laid her hand, palm up, on his thigh.
“Do you think I’ll like England?” she said.
“Do you like dullness and rain?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll like England.”
“But if I hate it we can come back here.”
Kirsch didn’t reply. Instead he put his hand under her nightdress and caressed the stretched skin of her stomach.
Mayan held his wrist.
“Are you going to see her today?”
“I’ll give it another try, yes.”
She shifted uneasily in the bed.
Kirsch stared over the top of Mayan’s head toward the green-silver olive tree outside his window. Mayan drifted back to sleep. For a while he kept his hand on her stomach, and then he withdrew it.
After a few minutes she opened her eyes.
“Was she the great love of your life?” she asked.
“No,” Kirsch said. “You are.”
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Jonathan Wilson
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Wilson, Jonathan, [date]
A Palestine affair / Jonathan Wilson.
p. cm.
1. Palestine—History—1917–1948—Fiction. 2. Jewish-Arab relations—
Fiction. 3. British—Palestine—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.
5. Zionists—Fiction. 6. Artists—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6073.I4679 P35 2003
823’.914—dc21
2002035499
eISBN : 978-0-307-42448-8
www.anchorbooks.com
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