by Colin Smith
She got there first and waited for Joseph who had decided to make one last patrol of the grounds to make sure nobody was about. Twice in the last month they had had intruders at the agricultural experimental station. They told each other the most likely culprits were deserters, but they knew that if the station wasn’t already under surveillance it soon would be. It was too near the coast, and the Turks were getting jittery.
‘Nili?’
Joseph arrived as he often did, each noiseless step a triumph of planning, pleased to startle her with his sudden, gratuitous whispering of their password.
She swung around, hurricane lamp in one hand with the wick turned right down. ‘Yes, and also the glory of Israel will not lie, ‘she said, surprising herself as well as Joseph with the bitterness she put behind the words.
Yet it was almost certain that what they were about to do was futile. It was coming to an end, she could feel it. Police and soldiers had been hammering up their reward notices for a week now. It seemed that there wasn’t a telegraph pole in southern Syria that was not wearing a trilingual poster informing Arabs, Jews and Turks that ten thousand mejdi would be paid for information about a person or persons secretly keeping homing pigeons. And there were those around who would persuade themselves that it was their moral duty to inform ‘for the good of the Yishuv’.
For the last two days they had been displaying both a white sheet and a red sofa cover over their balcony. But the British monitors had either not spotted their agreed distress signal or would not risk sending a whaler party ashore to investigate it. If it wasn’t for the fact that her brother was there Sarah would have believed that Cairo had abandoned them. As it was, she suspected the smoke was from French ships. When it came to Intelligence, the Entente went their separate ways.
It was one of those illuminated Mediterranean nights when an almost full moon and a great dome of stars made the lamp redundant until they got into the conifers. Joseph had built the loft on a platform like a children’s tree house. It was positioned between three trunks and reached by the short ladder he was carrying. Joseph went first and then waited at the top while she climbed after him. She heard him snick the first of the bolts he had fixed to the door.
The first bird was easy. One strong hand pinioned its wings to the body and thick fingers briefly stroked its breast before they went up around the neck and twisted. The second bird also suspected nothing and obliged by dying without a fuss. But the third emerged with her wings flapping, obviously aware that something was amiss, and she took longer. The last bird was a cock and it came out fighting. Joseph could not get a firm grip of it and it broke free, clattered madly about the interior and then escaped through the open door. ‘Pigeons don’t fly at night,’ thought Sarah – but this one did.
Joseph had prepared a shallow trench in the vineyard that afternoon and they buried the three dead birds there. It was dark under the vines, which were heavy with grapes. Sarah, who had been fasting that day for Yom Kippur, picked one. It was heavy with juice, slightly sour. She had another and another, swallowing the pips. Aaron wanted to make wine from these vines like the Christian monks did at Carmel. What dreams! What crazy dreams!
‘Light,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I need to see what I’m doing. Light your lamp again.’
The big lucifer match she produced from the box in her sleeve seemed to light up like a flare. She turned up just enough wick to show the broad, powerful shoulders at work, notice the faint sheen of sweat on the thick neck: the thick, vulnerable neck.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, patting the spoil down. ‘In the morning I’ll take the loft apart. Get rid of the netting, the feeding-bowls – everything.’
‘And then?’
‘And then what?’
‘You know very well what,’ said Sarah. ‘You must go. Hide out for a while. Wait for the English to come.’
‘You don’t want to come with me?’
Did she detect a note of relief? Sarah dismissed the idea as unworthy almost as soon as she thought of it. ‘It’s impossible, you know that. If I disappear it will be proof of my guilt. They could burn the whole settlement down. They might even hang my father. They’re already highly suspicious about Aaron’s absence.’
‘I thought Ponting was going to arrange to have some mail sent from America saying that he had got stuck there and was trying to come back?’
‘Yes, it was Meinertzhagen’s idea. But it’s probably too late. I’m sure somebody like Krag has dozens of spies in Cairo. The British have allowed Aaron to become very visible. He’s probably been spotted.’
Sarah preferred to put the blame on their patrons rather than her brother. She was not going to give Joseph the satisfaction of knowing that Aaron was almost as big a fool as he was, playing at soldiers in his khaki and his Sam Browne belt. ‘The best thing is for me to stay where I am,’ she told him. ‘They sometimes have a certain gallantry towards women.’
‘I wouldn’t rely on that.’
Sarah very nearly snapped back, ‘You don’t have to.’ But she held her tongue. That sort of remark would be the end of the argument. He would stay.
‘Anyway, why must I be the one to go?’ he said. She sensed the stubbornness swelling up, that contrariness that could make him so damned unpredictable.
‘There are good reasons and you know them. There are people at Zichron Jacob who are not on our side. They resent you. An outsider making trouble is the way they look at it. Some of them would probably tell the Turks you were a rebel whether they believed it or not. Better to inform than to be sorry.’
‘I’ll see,’ he said. ‘I’ll see how I feel in the morning.’
Sarah knew better than to press him, not now.
They were walking back towards the station house when a sudden movement froze them both. It sounded like the kind of furtive scurrying made by a small animal or bird being disturbed.
As Sarah turned her lamp off she heard a faint click besides her and saw that Joseph had put down the ladder and cocked the old Colt revolver he liked to carry. He was holding it with his thumb on the hammer and the long barrel pointing upwards. They heard the noise again, a kind of scrabbling high up in the conifers. ‘It’s the last pigeon,’ she said. ‘It’s come back.’
He motioned her to stay where she was and went towards the ladder. Before he climbed it he eased the hammer back on the Colt and returned it to his waistband. Sarah watched him climb into the watchtower and then heard some sharp, definite movements. For a moment she thought it might not be the pigeon and began to hitch up her skirt in case she had to run. Then something dropped out of the door of the tower and landed with a little thud besides her. A breeze twitched the bird’s wing feathers and for a moment she thought that Joseph had not done the job properly until he came back down the ladder and picked it up. She could see that the neck was properly broken then, the way she had been told a good hangman did it.
‘I wonder why it came back?’ she said. To escape from the condemned cell and then make a voluntary return – what a dreadful thought.
‘They mate for life. Perhaps it didn’t want to be anywhere else,’ said Joseph, who turned away from her and walked towards the trench he had just filled in. As he lifted the spade he added in a low voice, but not so low that she could not catch the words, ‘Didn’t see the point of running away, did you?’
***
Yet he was gone the next morning. Sarah checked the loft. He had dismantled it as promised. He could not have had more than three or four hours’ sleep. With him had vanished a dun-coloured gelding in much better condition than the mount he had left behind and a well-maintained Mauser ‘98 pattern rifle belonging to the settlement watch. Once the thefts had been discovered some of the men, including Sarah’s father, Ephraim, were outraged and one man wanted to report the matter to the gendarmerie. ‘Why get a fellow-Jew into trouble?’ begged Sarah. ‘In a few days we’ll probably have to hand over all our registered weapons to the Turks anyway.
’
‘And the unregistered ones,’ said the man who wanted to go to the gendarmerie. ‘I’m not paying the baksheesh to get you off a hanging charge.’
‘Swine,’ thought Sarah. Not for the first time it occurred to her that she probably had more hatred for some of her own than for any Turk or German.
***
But when the Turks did come to Zichron Jacob it was, as Sarah knew it would be, not weapons they were after.
They arrived at about noon on the third day after Joseph’s departure from Athlit – a squadron of Kurdish cavalry with a hashish addict called Hassan Bey at their head. Riding at his side was the Moudir of Caesarea, who had been invited to accompany them as a reward for his vigilance and had been loaned a particularly boisterous chestnut mare for his ride down from Haifa, which had left him tired and chafed and eager to see somebody in pain.
They headed straight for Aaron’s wooden house where Sarah was staying. It was a comfortable place, to the Kurds practically a palace. It was furnished in a style that was a happy marriage of Europe and the Levant so that crammed bookshelves, a gramophone and gateleg tables co-existed with high backed chairs that might have been European except for their Damascene marquetry, and Persian rugs laid on floors of decorated tiles.
An NCO and six men were detailed off to go and get Sarah’s father and Joseph Lishansky. They returned with Ephraim but told the Bey that Lishansky was not to be found. The Bey took from his gold case one of the special cigarettes he bought by the gross in Beirut. They contained the best Bekaa valley hashish, bought at half the usual price now that the war had separated the Maronite Christian farmers there from their traditional Egyptian market.
He was a handsome, grey-eyed man with high cheekbones, a waxed moustache and a well pressed and brushed fez, for his servant worshipped the Bey’s uniform with the fanaticism of any man with a sane aversion to deserts and shellfire. The servant was carrying the Bey’s saddlebags, one with a handle for something sticking out of it, which he placed reverentially in a corner. The Bey waited for his servant to light his cigarette before seating himself in one of the high-backed chairs.
When at last he spoke Hassan Bey chose to do so in French – a language he much preferred to German, which he also spoke tolerably well. ‘Perhaps you two will find it difficult,’ he said in a conversational tone, ‘to remember what became of Monsieur Lishansky? We know he’s not at your experimental station because we’ve searched there and although we found much of interest your friend was not among them. Nor, I suppose, would you much care to discuss things like the migratory habits of the pigeon – a greedy, undiscriminating bird, quite likely to make unannounced calls at the most unsuitable houses if there’s a chance of a free meal. Perhaps you feel that this is an unfair assessment?’
Judging by his face the Moudir did. You really couldn’t compare a good bird to that misshapen interloper.
‘We know nothing of pigeons, your honour,’ said Ephraim Aaronsohn in a firm voice. Pigeons? What nonsense was this? He didn’t know anything about any pigeons. It was all a dreadful mistake. There was hope.
‘Bring that sack in,’ said the Bey.
They scattered them over the best rug, filthy and stinking – the birds the Turks had exhumed at Athlit. Sarah remembered the intruders, and guessed that somebody had watched Joseph dig the trench.
Hassan Bey allowed the Moudir to take one by its tail feathers and hold it next to her face so that its decay filled her nostrils. ‘You see, Sarah, we know everything.’
She tried to turn away but the Moudir grabbed a hank of hair and pulled her head around so that she had to face the awful thing again.
‘Look at it, Sarah,’ he whispered. ‘Death. How long ago? Two days? Three days? and already rotting. Think of it. An old friend. A loyal friend. A fine bird. Feathers, beak, eyes, heart. Magnificent heart. Why couldn’t you be merciful, Sarah? Why didn’t you let them fly home to El Arish? Why did you have to murder them? Why Sarah? Why? Do you know what happens to murderers, Sarah? Do you know what happens to murderers, Jew?’
The Moudir pushed her away and flung the bird into a corner of the room. For a moment Sarah fiddled with her hair, tried to put it back up into its bun, then gave up and allowed her hands to fall my her side. ‘My father knows nothing,’ she said.
The Bey muttered something to his servant who went to the corner of the room where he had placed the saddlebags. He opened the one with the cylindrical object protruding and returned with it to his master. The Bey faced Sarah. ‘Permit me to introduce you to a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Monsieur Kourbash.’
The whip was coiled against the black cylinder of its wooden handle. Sarah thought it looked like a basking snake and began to back away but now there was a Kurd on each arm, pushing her towards the Bey. Still coiled, she felt the hippopotamus hide against her left cheek. The soldiers had twisted her arms up and one was running his free hand around her buttocks and the backs of her upper thighs. She couldn’t speak. He scraped the whip down her cheek. She knew that even this small movement had grazed her, possibly drawn blood. It felt like emery paper. ‘Please, Sarah,’ said the Bey. ‘The truth.’
6
Much to his annoyance, Krag learned of Sarah Aaronsohn’s arrest from von Papen. The jaunty Westphalian breezed into his office at the Hotel Fast where the intelligence officer was tortured by von Papen’s habit of knocking and entering in one fluid movement.
‘Well, it seems they’ve caught our pigeon-fanciers,’ his visitor announced. ‘Some Jews up around Haifa somewhere. Believe one of ‘em is a woman.’
Krag ostentatiously turned over his assessment of what could be deduced from reports of increased British cavalry patrolling on the Beersheba flank.
Von Papen registered this with the ghost of a smile and then went on with his news. ‘I heard it from one of Mustafa Kemal’s staff this morning,’ he said. ‘Seems that they’re, hmm, interrogating the woman now.’
‘Well, of course, after that she’ll admit to anything. She’d tell them Kress was Daniel if she thought it would make them stop,’ said Krag. ‘I wish we’d got hold of her first. Did you get her name?’
He told him and Krag nodded and said, ‘It had to happen sooner or later.’
‘Well known?’
He told von Papen about the missing big brother, the man who had been so very close to Djemal Pasha.
‘And where is this brilliant agronomist now?’
‘That’s a matter of opinion. Some say he is stuck in America, can’t get back. There have also been reports that he has been seen in Cairo in the uniform of a British officer.’
‘What do you believe?’
‘I wouldn’t like to have to make a decision on the matter. The agents who report this to me are either Arabs or Egyptians, and both are very unreliable. Some Arabs welcome the Jews because they think they’re very rich and clever and that somehow their money and brains are contagious. Others don’t think they’re worth it at any price. They’re the ones who think the Jews are here to steal their land and in a way they’re right. They want to get them into trouble. Of course, they don’t have to try very hard. In times like these all non-Muslims are enemies of the true believer.’
‘I thought the Jews were accepted here, more so than the Arabs?’
‘They may be in Constantinople, but not in Palestine. They’re a different breed here too. They haven’t lived among the Turk long enough. Most of them are Germans or Russians – or at least they would be if language was all that was required.’
‘So you’re not surprised that they’ve arrested this Aaronsohn woman? They’ve just moved against someone they were watching anyway?’
‘Perhaps. We shall have to wait and see whether they come up with the kind of proof that has more behind it than Herr Kourbash.’
‘According to my informant they’ve dug up some dead pigeons.’
‘I wonder who put them there?’ said Krag.
But von Papen could see he was impressed.
‘Oh do you think so?’ von Papen lent forward on Krag’s desk, taking his weight on mottled knuckles. ‘Surely she’s bound to know something, lead somewhere?’
‘Not necessarily. As I said, she’ll talk; she’ll probably talk a lot. But I doubt if much of it will make any sense.’
‘Would they really be that bad – to a woman?’
‘Yes,’ said Krag. ‘They will do the things even the worst scum of Europe only ever dream of doing and then wake ashamed.’
‘Some people say this city is full of spies. Do you think that’s true?’ asked von Papen, anxious to change tack. His natural buoyancy could not take the other’s certainty of atrocity.
‘It’s full of citizens who are quite willing to be spies,’ said Krag. ‘Especially now, when people are half starving. The Turks have a tradition of informers.’
‘I don’t think I’ve told you about these, have I?’ said von Papen. Out of one of his upper tunic pockets he produced Maeltzer’s shattered reading spectacles and placed them on the desk.
Krag picked them up and looked at them this way and that while von Papen told him how they had come into his possession.
‘Of course,’ he concluded. ‘They could have been lost days before and it was merely a sentry’s boot that sent them skidding along the stone work and down through the machicolation. Even so –’
‘Quite. Very disconcerting to have the very walls, at least the ceiling, the roof, grow eyes as it were.’ Krag was holding the battered frames up to the light, trying to read the name of the manufacturer. Some of the glass was still in the half-moon frames and he had to be careful not to cut his fingers on these jagged bits.
‘But I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘That Turkish officer was probably right. It was some curious Jew. They’re a myopic bunch, especially the Hasidic Orthodox. It comes from a certain amount of inbreeding and never taking their heads out of some learned work.’
