Conversation was all but impossible over the roar of the unmuffled Rolls and the noise of the wind in our ears. Only once did I try to ask a question, when we passed the first of several startlingly green enclaves amid the scrub and thornbushes. “What’s that?” I yelled, pointing.
“Jewish settlement,” he yelled back.
Halfway up the coast, he pulled the car over and fishtailed to a pebble-scattering stop near the shade of an olive grove. For a while, there was no sound except the clicking of hot metal. His face alight, Lawrence turned to me expectantly, and to please him, I said, “That was fun!” To my surprise, I found that I meant it, and when he saw that, he gave a full-throated shout of laughter. That was when I realized that he had lost the giggle in my presence. It was the nicest moment of our time together.
Cross-legged on the ground and comfortable in khaki trousers and a white knit shirt, Lawrence shared out a picnic lunch. We ate flat bread, salty goat cheese, and succulent oranges while gazing at the waves of the Mediterranean as they raced one another up the beach below. If the low mountains and gaunt hills of Palestine were naked and stony, the soft green of the Lebanon reminded me of home. Much of the land around us was cultivated, and I could see why Lillian loved this place. Lemon and almond and fig trees scented the more prosaic stands of ash and cypress nearby, and there were flowers everywhere! Early spring anemones were just past, but lupines were in full bloom: blue and white and yellow. I picked out pink stock and mauve vetches. Blue borage and iris. Lavender clover, and alliums of many varieties. Blood-red poppies, with their sad associations. Pink bindweed, cheerful white daisies.
When he was finished, Lawrence wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and waved toward the countryside. “Your sister brought me here once,” he told me. “ ‘So many blossoms,’ she said, ‘seen in a single glance on a single hillside, with God alone the Gardener.’ She had a way with words.”
“And do you share her belief in the Gardener?” I asked.
“I did once.” After a while, he said, “Saint George slew his dragon here. Exactly when and where remains unknown, but no dragon has been seen since.”
“So George must have bagged him!” I agreed.
He smiled, his eyes on the sea. “This coast was Phoenician once. Then Greek, then Roman. That tower?” he asked, nodding toward a tall ruin across a broad ravine. “Crusader. Eleventh century.”
Larks were singing hard overhead, and we watched a cloud of martins gathering to nest in the shelter of the ancient walls.
“Fifty-second Lowland Division took that beach in ’17,” Lawrence told me. “It’s French now, I suppose.”
I could hear the resignation in his voice. “And who knows what comes next?” I remarked. “One thing about the Middle East seems certain: another army is always waiting, just around the bend.”
For a time I listened to the birdsong and enjoyed the scenery, but Lawrence was somewhere else. When he spoke again, his tone was strangely dispassionate. “When the war was over, a shepherd boy— eight years old—was brought before the military governor in Ramallah. He was charged with bomb throwing.”
“Good gracious! An eight-year-old?”
“His defense was that he found lots of those smooth round things out in the fields along the Nablus road—the place was littered with unexploded ordnance. One day when his sheep were loitering, the boy picked up one of the bombs and tossed it at them. The results were splendid. It made a big noise, he said, and the sheep hurried after that.”
Caught between amusement and horror, I asked, “Was he convicted?”
“Sent home with a warning.”
War after war, I thought. Generations of boys growing up with weapons as toys and no one but warriors to admire … “Where is Trans-Jordan?” I asked. “I heard the name mentioned last night, but I’ve never seen it on a map.”
“The maps haven’t been drawn yet,” he said. “We’re still sorting it out. Most likely, we’ll split the Palestine Protectorate. West of the Jordan River will be called Palestine, and it will include a national home for the Jews under Arab rule with British administration.” How will that work? I wondered, feeling like an old hand, but Lawrence continued, “Across the Jordan—Trans-Jordan, you see?—Feisal’s brother Abdullah will rule.”
“So much of what you hoped for has come to pass.”
“It might. Some of it.” He lay back, his long Nordic head cushioned on his hands. Watching the sky, he said, “Nothing here is easy. Blood feuds are never settled or forgotten. Compromise is all but impossible. If a tribe is weak, they say, How can we yield anything to our enemies? If a tribe is strong, they ask, Why should we yield anything to our enemies?”
“And where will the tribe of Israel fit, among so many foes?”
He sat up again, and when he spoke there was more energy in his voice. “I have great hopes for the Zionist influence in the region,” he said. “The Jews can be a bridge, I think, between East and West. They are an Oriental people with Occidental knowledge. And you saw their kibbutzim—their farm cooperatives, those green patches we passed?
Remarkable progress in a very short time. We visited a settlement a couple of days ago.”
Thompson had mentioned that to me. “Fine, clear-eyed men,” he’d reported. “Women of strength and calmness. Beautiful children.”
“They have financial support from outside the region,” Lawrence said, “and they’re experimenting with scientific farming methods. If they can make the desert bear crops, they’ll bring prosperity to the whole area. Feisal agrees.”
I was surprised by his optimism, given Karl’s doubts, but before I could ask anything more, Lawrence uncoiled from the ground in a single fluid motion. He was wearing a wristwatch, but he studied the sun’s position on the horizon instead. It was getting late.
“Shall we spend a night in Beirut,” he asked, “or push on to Jebail?”
“Push on,” I said, and received a toothy grin as my reward.
Traffic in Beirut was terrible, and we reached the American Mission long past the time that visitors would ordinarily appear. The school’s porter was amazed to see us, and I gathered our unexpected visit was one of Lawrence’s unannounced guerrilla raids.
Word spread. Soon the parlor was filled with staff members, including my sister’s beloved friend Miss Fareedah el-Akle. Once everyone got over the shock of our arrival, we were welcomed with much rejoicing and even more food. There were half a dozen bowls of hot and cold salads; a walnut paste spiced with chilies; a mixture of mint leaves and tomatoes with cracked wheat berries and onion called tabbouleh; minced lamb with pine nuts and onion. Piles of chicken kebabs and lamb kebabs and two big platters of rice. Finally, when we swore we could eat no more, there were bowls of grapes and apples and oranges, and honey-drenched pastries filled with pistachios.
Naturally Lawrence was made much of, and after heartfelt condolences on the loss of my sister and her family, I was regaled with many stories about Lillie and Douglas, and the pranks of my two nephews. The children did not live long, but I was gratified to know that they must have had a grand boyhood. That night, in fact, we were surrounded by children; they piled in around the adults, listening to the stories while nibbling on fried falafel or dipping flat bread into a grainy paste that looked and tasted something like peanut butter. No bedtime was enforced, but neither were there tantrums or demands for attention. Sometime after eleven, a sweet little boy, not quite two, climbed onto my lap with a perfect confidence that he would be cuddled, and I was happy to fulfill his expectation.
For the delighted Miss el-Akle and her Muslim assistant Omar, Lawrence demonstrated the rough-and-ready Bedouin dialect he had added to the literate Arabic they’d taught him ten years earlier. There were many reminiscences of his stay back in 1911. “Do you remember?” he asked. “There was snow on the beach.”
“The worst winter in years!” Miss el-Akle exclaimed. “We begged him to stay longer, Miss Shanklin, but he insisted he had to leave.”
“No matter how we argued, he would only say, ‘I must go, even if I have to cross the snow on a sledge!’ ”
He leaned over and confessed, sotto voce, “I got a ride from two English ladies going north in a carriage.”
“Whose little boy is this?” I asked, looking down at the small, warm bundle now blissfully asleep in my arms. And I astonished myself by asking, as well, “Is he an orphan?”
The question was translated. A short, plump woman of great dignity smiled proudly. Wearing a transparent white veil draped loosely over her graying hair, she introduced herself as Um Omar—Mother of Omar—and informed me with shining eyes that in addition to the young man who worked for Miss el-Akle, she had five other sons, and two daughters as well. The boy in my lap was her youngest.
I felt an unexpected pang but shook it off, rising to the occasion. Lillian had told me about meetings such as these, and I tried to remember the correct response to a woman’s declaration of prodigious progeny. “Ma shallah!” I said. The phrase meant “What Allah wills, happens!” Everyone clapped with surprise and pleasure. There was more to the formula, but I couldn’t remember the Arabic and said it in English instead: “May Allah keep them in good health.”
“Allah ichallik yahum!” Lawrence supplied, and once more there was a round of applause for my small gesture of courtesy. “Omar,” Lawrence said then to this lady’s eldest son, “how much for Miss Shanklin, who is so learned and polite?”
Omar looked at me and shook his head. “No good,” he decided. “Too old.”
All the women participated in the howl of expected indignation, so Lawrence continued teasing. “And how much for Miss el-Akle?”
Miss el-Akle was rather younger than I, and quite beautiful. “One cow,” Omar declared judiciously. “Too old for two cows.”
“Neddy, you are incorrigible,” she said.
His eyes dancing, Lawrence continued: “Omar, I think you are mistaken, for a schoolteacher is the mother of minds, and each has many children. These ladies are worth ten camels apiece!”
“Ah, Neddy,” said Miss el-Akle affectionately. “Now you are forgiven.”
The evening went on like that until well after midnight. Reluctantly, I ceded the small, sleeping boy to Um Omar; I was surprised to notice how cold and empty my arms felt when I let him go. When I was alone in the guest room, Omar’s judgment echoed in my mind. No good. Too old. But was that true? His own mother must have given birth to the little boy when she was my age, or even older. Back in Little Italy, many of the students were the eighth or even ninth in their families, born to mothers no longer young …
That first night in Jebail, a plan began to take form, one that I hoped would change my life permanently and for the better. I grant you, it was not well thought out. In my defense, I can say only that I had lived too much in my mind, too little in my body until then. I was finished with being sensible and too old to wait much longer, but the moment I so much as thought about it, I heard that awful, inward chorus of objection:
What if he doesn’t—?
—raised you to be a lady—
What will people think?
Conscience makes cowards of us all, the Bard wrote, but these were not the voices of my own conscience. They were the voices of my mother, and her mother before her. It was time to stop listening to the inner doubts that so undermined my confidence. The world had changed. I had changed. When objections rose within me, I ignored them or dismissed them.
Oh, Agnes, you don’t want that! Mumma said, pleading with me.
Yes, I realized. Yes, I do. I want. I want!
There was no one left alive to tell me no. Karl was waiting for me in Cairo. And he had promised me the Nile.
At breakfast the next morning, Lawrence told us all he would be driving on that day, to his meeting with Emir Abdullah. This was going to be good-bye. The thought made me very sad indeed, but before he left, Lawrence suggested a walk; naturally, I agreed.
He ushered me out the back door, walking past the school buildings and up a hill near the rear of the compound. “The American missionaries here understood that it was death for a Muslim to convert, so they didn’t proselytize,” he told me as we climbed. “They opened schools like this instead and welcomed any student who wished to attend. Simply by giving classwork in English and French, they brought important Western ideas to the region. Prosperous families began to visit Paris on holiday. For poorer ones, contact with Americans promoted emigration. There’s hardly a family in Syria without at least one son who’s been to America for a few years. Those men came home eager to reform the government here.”
All this seemed merely informative, something that an academic like Lawrence might suppose a teacher like me would find interesting. Then I saw that he had led me to the gate of the mission’s small cemetery. “It wasn’t only Syria that was affected,” he continued, leading the way along a path that wove through crowded headstones. “One of the Young Turks—secretary for the Lebanon, before the war—he told me that the progressive changes in the Turkish constitution were entirely due to the influence of the American Mission School.”
On the far side of the cemetery, we came to rest in front of a small grave surrounded by roses, near the fence on the far side. “Your sister paid a price,” Lawrence said quietly, looking down at the stone, “but I think it was good that she and Douglas came here.”
Frowning and uncertain, I looked more closely and read the inscription aloud. “Agnes Louise Cutler, beloved daughter of …”
I had forgotten: not merely that my tiny niece had been named for me, but that she had lived at all, if only for a few hours. Isn’t it terrible, how time goes by and something so important fades from memory?
Lillian had told me, of course, in a tearstained letter, when a pregnancy had ended weeks before her time. “For days I was terribly ill,” she wrote, “and did not want to go on living. Then one morning, Neddy Lawrence came up to see me. He sat at my bedside. ‘You must be feeling very miserable,’ he began, ‘as if you’d failed in the most important job in the world. You must be afraid you’ll never get over this loss, that you never should have come to Jebail.’ On and on he went, describing me to myself, clarifying all my nightmare fears by speaking them aloud, and from my point of view, not a man’s. He seemed to know everything that miscarriage could mean, even down to the shame of it. As he talked, warmth and life began to come back into me, instead of flooding out of me, as it had.”
He didn’t pretend to Lillian that nothing of importance had happened. He didn’t try to jolly her out of her grief, as others had, by telling her, “Don’t worry. You’ll have another.” She marked the beginning of her recovery from the day of his visit, and wrote, “Of course, after that, I simply loved him.”
With tears in my eyes, I turned to thank him for all he’d done for Lillian and all he’d done for me, but he had already left, noiselessly, while I stood mute, remembering these things. Down the hill, in the mission driveway, the Rolls-Royce engine roared to life. With a spurt of gravel, he was gone.
I never saw him again.
The American Mission School was a comfortable and comforting place that combined Western amenities (the London Times) with Eastern luxuries (oranges ripened in the mission’s own grove). Even so, with Lawrence gone, I had thoughts only for Egypt. Just under a week had passed since I’d left Karl and Rosie, but it seemed far longer. I left Jebail only a day after Lawrence’s departure.
Staring out at the turquoise sea, standing on the deck of the steamer that chugged from Beirut to Alexandria, I felt myself a seasoned traveler, a new woman ready for the new era, with no one to answer to and no one but myself to please. At the same time, I remembered what Karl had said: To be enjoyed, life must be shared. I missed our daily walks and evening conversations. I missed him, and yearned to share all that I had seen and heard and thought.
After the verdant beauty of the Lebanon and the bracing sea ai
r of the voyage, Alexandria’s flies and dirt and noise were disgusting, but not shocking or frightening as they’d been a few weeks earlier. Familiar now with how to engage a taxi, how much to pay, what and when to tip, I took a cab to the train station. There I wired ahead to the Continental, apprising them of my arrival and asking that my room be prepared. On the trip south, mirages no longer delighted me, but neither was I depressed by the arid countryside along the railroad. The heat was growing more oppressive, but I ignored it. I knew where I was going, and who was waiting for me, and what I would do when I arrived.
It is a great pleasure to return to a hotel where your name is known and your reservation secure. My welcome at the Continental felt genuine, not merely businesslike, and seemed almost a homecoming. The bellman chatted with me as he carried my bags up the stairs to the same room I had occupied before. He went to put the key in the door, but it was already unlatched and opened at a touch.
When I stepped into the room, Rosie was circling on the bed, about to assume the doughnut position, nose to tail. Karl was there as well, standing near the double doors that led to the balcony. He had a bouquet in one hand, the faience vase in the other. “You’re back!” he cried. “I just found out! Why didn’t you—?”
“Those must be imported from the Lebanon,” I said, recognizing blossoms Lawrence and I had seen on the hillside.
“Yes,” Karl said. “There is a flower shop that caters to Europeans—”
Anything else we wanted to say was lost in the overwhelming onslaught of a rapturous dachshund reunion. I dropped my handbag and knelt by the bed to receive more wiggling, jubilant, delirious kisses than could possibly be counted. “Yes, I came back!” I told Rosie over and over. “I’m here, Rosie. I came back.”
Dreamers of the Day Page 24
