Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  “My dear David, surely you don’t think I doubt Jewish courage in this day and age? I simply meant that, however much we disagree, we are still comrades-in-arms.”

  “Still,” Abu Tisein repeated. “Still. Yes, I think so. But the bond is weak. I will go alone and I will get Montagne for you.”

  “I can’t do that, David.”

  “I am not altogether a civilian, you know.”

  “I should say not! You’ve risked your life more often than any of us. But I could never face Josh if I let you go alone and there was an incident.”

  “Yes, I understand. Then we must all go together.”

  “Orders, bo?” Prayle asked his senior, tapping the service .45 at his hip.

  “Remember King’s Regulations, Dion. I forget the precise and beautiful wording of the War Office, but, roughly speaking, if you plug a civilian before he plugs you, it’s murder. And you won’t be plugged. Am I right, David?”

  “Yes,” answered Abu Tisein. “But I am not sure that you will get Montagne.”

  “Why not?”

  “You could never have followed him to this meeting unless you had known all his movements from the start.”

  “We certainly couldn’t!”

  “Then what,” asked Abu Tisein, throwing open his arms as far as the surrounding thorn permitted, “will they think of Montagne?”

  “I see. Then we’ll have to make the interview snappy,” said Fairfather. “Dion, it might—it might just be necessary to cover them to get Montagne away. But we’ll go in peaceably.”

  Abu Tisein led them along the angle of two walls, bending low behind the roughly piled stones; they came out on a slope of sunburned, tussocky grass which led directly down into the camp, and gave silent and easy access to the closed hut on its windowless southern side.

  Dion Prayle felt more and more dislike for the whole business; it was too full of psychological intangibles. To surprise a bunch of potential assassins, in blind confidence that they meant, as yet, to avoid trouble with the army, was hazarding too much on being able to fix one’s exact position in the everchanging fog of Jewish politics. This expedition of three was all wrong. They should either have called in a carload of police prepared to overwhelm all resistance—though in that case there would have been nobody to resist, for the police always managed to give ample warning of their coming—or else they should have left the job to Abu Tisein. And that, though logical, was, by any standard of behaviour, impossible.

  They reached the door of the hut unseen and unchallenged. Laurence flung it open and went in. There were four men seated at a table talking to Montagne. They were dressed as Arab soldiers of the British Army. All had their Arab headcloth drawn lightly across the lower part of the face. On the table was a small, open attaché case stuffed with bank notes, Egyptian and Palestinian. During the first two seconds of amazement and a third while hands moved down to pockets and up again with pistols, Abu Tisein was speaking quietly in Hebrew.

  A man wearing a red and white checked headcloth, who sat next to Montagne, said in English:

  “Put your arms on the table.”

  Facing four pistols at a range of two yards, there was no option. The leader unloaded the two service revolvers and handed them back again. Another man ran his hands over the three of them, looking for additional arms. Prayle’s still neutral opinion of David Nachmias changed to admiration on seeing that he carried no weapon at all.

  “What do you want here?”

  The leader spoke a cultured English with some trace of a Slav accent.

  “Not you,” Fairfather answered in a friendly tone. “I’m not a policeman. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. My business is with Mr. Makrisi.”

  “A rescue party. No, Captain Fairfather.”

  “You know me then?”

  “By sight and reputation. They say you are fond of justice.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Watch it!”

  Mr. Makrisi was seated at his side, silent and uncaring. With a smooth, efficient, horribly merciful flow of hand and arm, the leader shot him through the back of the skull.

  Dion Prayle felt his knees trembling and tried to control them. He was no more afraid than one who sees a deadly accident in the street, but the shock of this coldblooded execution surpassed anything his emotions could endure without some physical reaction. Montague, so vividly alive, for the madder the man, the more alive, was sliding off his chair on to the floor and kicking when he got there. Kick. Twitch. Kick. Twitch. Impersonal as a clock. Prayle pulled himself together with deliberate thoughts of half-dead matter that he had seen and trodden in around Dunkirk. None of it had the horror of this clean bullet. Germans, Russians—they did this sort of thing. God knew, perhaps everybody in occupied Europe was doing it! Where could they find the men to do it? And how? How?

  “That is what will happen to your agents,” said the man in the red and white checks.

  His voice carried no threat. It was a tone of regret, as if asking why they did not accept the inevitable.

  “He was nobody’s agent but yours,” Prayle retorted fiercely.

  “No? Not in Egypt?”

  “Didn’t even know he was suspected! Isn’t that proof of it?” asked Prayle, pointing to the money on the table.

  “It is proof of nothing.”

  Abu Tisein let loose a flood of Hebrew, through which his sultry anger rumbled, courteous and incalculably dangerous. He stood square to the table, not tense as a European, but with all the muscles of his powerful body relaxed in the contempt of the stronger for the weaker.

  “I am sorry,” he said, turning to Prayle and Fairfather from the table he had so completely dominated. “I was telling them merely that they are unworthy to be Jews.”

  One of the four men called him some insulting name; the voice was shrill and unsure, and Prayle gained the impression that the speaker was very young. It was hard to tell his age from the burning black eyes above the headcloth, but the slight figure, the clear, ivory forehead, suggested a boy of not more than fifteen. He was playing with his pistol. Prayle hated carelessness with arms.

  “I wish you’d tell that boy to leave his gun alone,” he said.

  “Afraid Englishman?”

  “Of course I am,” answered Prayle testily. “So would you be if you had any sense. He’s pointing it at you now.”

  “Lunatics who fight with children!” scoffed Abu Tisein.

  “Rak Ivrit!” ordered the leader.

  “No! To you I will not speak Hebrew.”

  “Ashamed, you spy?”

  “Yes. Ashamed. I and my father and our fathers before us, they spoke Hebrew while you gargled in your Yiddish like—like sick sheep. I speak the language of these officers because they are guests in my country.”

  “And because you take their money,” the man sneered.

  “David Nachmias,” said Fairfather firmly, “has no more taken our money than you did—if any of you are really in the army.”

  “I have no quarrel with you. I know that you do not wish to be here,” the leader declared, as if repeating a slogan of faith. “You would rather be at home.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Fairfather replied, “I would rather be here than anywhere else. But I suppose that is hardly a shooting matter?”

  The man seemed disconcerted by this reasonable reply.

  “So long as you go when we require it,” he answered.

  “Good God, bo!” Prayle exclaimed. “Can’t you see that attitude will bring more of us?”

  “The worse for them!”

  “And for you!”

  “We accept that,” answered the man in the red checks proudly. “For us, in our fight for freedom, death is nothing.”

  “Hell!” said Dion, exasperated. “So I see! But does it do any good?”

  “Be quiet! I have not finished with your other spy yet.”

  Prayle gave Abu Tisein a half smile, involuntarily expressing his sense of the absurdity of the ch
arge. Spy David Nachmias had certainly been, except on his own people; but the word when applied to that bold, quadrangular figure was so small, so emptily dramatic.

  The leader again attacked in bitter Hebrew. David Nachmias calmly heard him out.

  “Crawl to them?” he said reflectively. “Crawl to them? Is it crawling to speak a language that all can understand? Because our manners were too gracious when we were slaves, as you call us, is it a reason for having none in our own country?”

  He was silent for a moment, then began to defend his courage, boastful yet dignified as an old Emir justifying his leadership to his followers.

  “I, Abu Tisein as they name me, I have gone out to my death too often to believe I am a coward. I have dealt with the Gestapo face to face. Sometimes they knew I was a Jew, but I brought money. Sometimes they thought I was an Arab, and gave me money. I served the British, and I led out those of our people whom I could save.

  “I have founded colonies. I have filled Eretz Israel with men and women, and arms for their defence. I have fought all my life against Turks, against Arabs, against British. And all of them were my friends. You—you have stolen our sword and refused our wisdom. You hide there in those British uniforms, and who taught you? I did! But I never put a man in their uniform to make war on them. When we fight, it shall be under our own flag and in our own uniform. And never—I tell you, never—whatever threats may be made, whatever words may fly in anger, never will we murder the British. What do you gain by your childishness? That man who lies there, whom you shot, I killed him long ago. I killed him by making a mistake. His blood is on my head, but what leader of men cannot say the same? It was only a crime against my brother. But also, for the sake of my people, I did not bear witness when I could have done so. And that is a crime against God.”

  Abu Tisein grimly regarded Montagne’s body, now only a shapeless mass on the floor of the darkening hut.

  “Without law! Without law!” he cried, as if in a lament. Then with the first gesture of his whole speech he stabbed a finger towards the table.

  It was clear that only the leader and the youth understood his slow English—understood so keenly that they listened. Of the other two, one leaned forward puzzling out the alien speech, and the fourth, probably a newcomer to Palestine, sat dully awaiting orders and scratching the sand-fly bites on his arms.

  “When will you understand that we have law? I am not the servant of the British Government. I am the servant of your government, of our government. We are the representatives of the living, and of the dead who longed to see us here. And Eretz Israel is ours. We have won it by our work, our blood, our cunning, and with the friendship of the British. You—where were you when I was dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv? Yes, I dancing—for joy that at last we had founded our city. The police whom you kill, I kissed that day. I cannot forget it. I hate them as you do. But I cannot forget it. When will you understand that you have your leaders, freely elected? When will you understand that we know all you know, feel all that you feel? You talk of freedom and democracy. But you do not know what they mean. The people can have no freedom if their will is not obeyed. Obey your government, your own Jewish Government. And if still you do not understand, then remember what you heard as children: You shall not separate yourselves from your people.”

  “We do obey,” said the leader, impressed to the point of argument. “But your methods are futile and useless. We only do for you what you dare not do for yourselves.”

  “Dare not? And with ten thousand trained men instead of your handful of hysterical, suicidal … Bah! And with our own money! Where did that come from?” asked Abu Tisein, pointing to the case of bank notes.

  “I do not care where it came from. I shall use it in our fight for freedom.”

  “Your fight!” cried David Nachmias ironically. “Your little fight, when all the power of Jew and Gentile is strained to the limit against the greatest enemy our race ever had! What do you know? What do you care? For you Hitler and the British are all one. Have none of you lost parents, wives, children? Have none of you seen what I have seen”

  “And what have you seen, safe here in Palestine?” cried the boy. “My father was killed. My mother was killed. Taken away by police like these police!”

  “Then let us tell you how to take revenge. Revenge is not this way. Look, boy! There is that money, and you are told not to care where it has come from. Can you not see that you are mad not to listen to us who know? That money—it could be from the teeth of your mother.”

  The boy jumped up. He was shorter and slighter than he had seemed at the table. He waved his pistol, pointing it wildly at himself, at enemies imaginary, real; shouting defiance and misery in the raucous Hebrew of his half-broken voice. His rancour seemed to find its outlet in the compassionate face of David Nachmias. He gesticulated towards him with wild reproaches, the pistol in his hand a power, a talisman against further hurt and further pity. It went off.

  Prayle and Fairfather jumped forward to catch Abu Tisein’s body, and were stopped short by guns jammed hard into their stomachs. The boy looked at the blood with timid curiosity; then raised his eyes, flashing. They could see him forcing pride into his eyes. The leader took away his pistol, and wiped it carefully; he closed Abu Tisein’s hand around the butt, and placed his limp finger within the trigger guard.

  Dion Prayle assumed that he and Fairfather would be the next. With his hands up he stood there, to his astonishment, thinking Prayle, observer, watched events happening to Prayle, alien body. The pair of eyes that faced him were completely expressionless, neither hard, nor fanatical, nor pitying. No British soldier had eyes like those. The man was an automaton, obeying, and sacrificing all his emotions for the satisfaction of obedience. The best chance for Prayle, body, was to stand still. Commandos might have some trick for being quicker than the human finger, but a surer safety lay in those political intangibles. Dion looked across at the man opposite Fairfather. That one was more human; he seemed pleased to have something better to do than scratch himself.

  The red and white headcloth gave out its orders. Prayle strained his intelligence to guess the meaning of the Hebrew from its faint resemblance to Arabic. Then the man spoke in English.

  “Captain Fairfather, I shall lock you both in this hut while we go. I hope you will realise that we too can be merciful to our enemies, and that you will be grateful.”

  “If you think I’m not going to try to bring you to justice for these bloody murders …” stormed Fairfather.

  “Captain, I am sure you will try. But what you British believe I do not care. And what the Jews believe—you will see.”

  “They’ll believe anything!” Fairfather exclaimed contemptuously.

  “Yes,” said the man, “a people in utter misery will believe anything. I am now going to cover you myself, while my friends take away the bodies. One against two—so if you make the slightest movement I shall shoot.”

  His three companions picked up the body of Abu Tisein, carefully resting on his chest the hand that held the pistol, and carried it out. Then they returned for Montagne.

  “Keep looking straight to your front,” ordered the leader. “I am now going to the door, but I can kill you just as easily from behind. When you hear the door shut and locked, you may move. Try the windows, if you like, but they are steel and rusted up.”

  He closed the suitcase, picked it up and passed out of their field of vision. They heard the clicks of latch and lock. The engine of the lorry roared.

  Prayle put down his hands, and felt in his pocket.

  “Cigarette?” he said, offering his case to Fairfather.

  “Thank you, Dion.”

  They lit up.

  “That’s better,” said Fairfather. “I was feeling slightly sick.”

  “So did I when they shot Montagne. After that—well, it was all a solid piece.”

  “Poor David! Poor, dear David!”

  “Do you think the little bastard meant to shoot him?”r />
  “Dion, I don’t know. I didn’t mean it—it’s what they all say from Hitler to some moron who waves a pistol at his girlfriend. God, how David let ’em have it!”

  “Not a man to be angry.”

  “Never saw him angry before.”

  “I’ve got the number of the lorry.”

  “It’s quite certainly a different one now,” said Laurence.

  “Yes. Efficiency on the scale of modern industry. Shall we have a bang at the door, bo? I think he was right about those windows.”

  “Let’s swing the table at it, and save my aged shoulder.”

  The door gave at their second charge. They were outside in the cool darkness of the Galilee hills. There were no sounds but the evening breeze stirring the scrub, and the munching of Montagne’s donkey in the deserted garden.

  Epilogue

  “I am leaving Field Security,” he wrote. “Open for business shortly at G.H.Q.”

  It meant months of Dion—no more fantastic, unexpected evenings splitting the bearable continuity of life into meaningless sections of before and after; no more separations to be followed by those damnable days when Armande felt that he had vanished, when she was convinced that his life or health was in danger, when she was terrified by the sudden mobility of his army life. Her obsession was that he might be posted to India. She feared India for its distance, for his possible infidelities.

  At G.H.Q. All his free hours for her. She longed for him so, for again loneliness threatened her in this world of men. The government flat would be hers for another month, and then the present job was over. Guy Furney’s manner had been abrupt. He told her that Montagne had disappeared and was presumed dead.

  She put the precious letter in her bag, and went out, idly and happily, into the streets of Cairo. In the shops the display of intimate garments and summer frocks was alluring, though too expensive for any but Egyptians. She needed nothing and reminded herself, when she hesitated before an occasional temptation, that she was wondering what Dion would think of her choice.

  She wandered into that garden café upon which she had looked down during her first morning in Cairo, where, weeks later, she had taken her decision to dance with Floarea. Over strawberries and cream she considered and tried to plan the months ahead with Dion. Her mood changed to severe responsibility.