O Jerusalem mr-5

by Laurie R. King

  Plumbury’s reaction was a clear victory for the Bull: not only did the startled man blink a second time at the unwashed Arab youth standing in front of him, he went so far as to raise a pale eyebrow. The general let loose a bark of laughter.

  I decided to play along with the general’s game. “How d’you do?” I said politely in my best Oxford accent, and held out an equally languid if rather unsanitary hand.

  “Er, yes, quite. That is, how d’you do?” Plumbury managed.

  “You stand up to the costume very well, Miss Russell,” Allenby remarked.

  “Thank you, General.”

  “Colonel Lawrence used to dress up as a woman sometimes to get inside the Turkish lines, but then draping a man head to toe with an Arab woman’s fittings is hardly a disguise—a person could conceal an orang-outang or a dancing bear under what those ladies wear. Yours is a different thing entirely. And you, Mr Holmes, look very much at home in your costume. I swear you look younger than you did, what was it? nine years ago? Ten, that’s right, just before my Lake Victoria trip. How is your brother?”

  “He kept good health when last I saw him.”

  “Good, good. Sit down.” After the briefest of hesitations, which I realised afterwards was probably the contemplation, and rejection, of having me, the only lady present, pour, Allenby picked up the teapot. “I trust Earl Grey is all right. That’s what they sent in the last shipment. And if you want milk, all we have is tinned, I’m afraid; I’ve never much cared for the flavour of goat’s milk in my tea.”

  The domestic scene was completed by a large plate of small, crustless sandwiches—anchovy paste on brown bread and hothouse cucumbers on white—and a silver tray of tiny iced cakes. We sipped from delicate cups, balanced plates on our knees, and patted our lips with dainty embroidered serviettes, and the only one of us who looked as if he belonged there was Plumbury.

  Our polite social conversation consisted of reminders of the outside world. I was distressed to hear of the death of President Roosevelt, who had been a sort of distant cousin of my American father’s family. Ali and Mahmoud were gratified at the news that the holdout garrison in Medina had at long last mutinied against their fanatic commander, surrendering to the Emir Abdullah. Then with the second cup of tea, business began.

  “I was in Beersheva two days ago,” said Allenby abruptly. “Tell me what you’ve discovered since leaving Joshua.”

  Ali set down his cup and began his report, in flawless English. I was interested to hear him analyse the last few days without interpreting what we had done. He almost made it sound as if we had been following a clear course of action, rather than desperately casting back and forth across the desert for a scent. Allenby seemed to understand, however: he sat back with his cup of tea to listen without comment until Ali had brought us into Jericho and up to our abduction from that town by the general’s driver.

  “Problems?” he then suggested. Mahmoud answered this query.

  “Not specifically against the English, although in the south your soldiers are making Britain no friends.”

  “They want to go home, I know, and I badly want to send them. They’re sick at heart and far from home, particularly the Anzacs. You heard of the barracks mutiny back in Sussex? A ‘soldier’s strike’ they’re calling it, if you can believe it. Bad show, that. What else?”

  “You have spoken with Joshua,” Mahmoud replied. “You know what I know, that trouble is coming; you know what Joshua thinks, that it is a planned trouble.”

  “Do you agree with Joshua?” Allenby asked.

  “Someone wants the country, yes.”

  “Who?”

  Mahmoud gave him that curious sideways movement of the head that is the Arabic equivalent of the French shrug, and did not answer.

  “Who?” Allenby repeated, this time with the threat of command in his voice. Mahmoud’s back went suddenly straight.

  “My general, you know better than I who it could be. I am a creature of the ground, and know only what moves on my own patch of earth, while you see all the land from Dan to Beersheva, and on into the Sinai. I sincerely hope that you know more than I, or we are all lost.”

  Allenby seemed to waver on the brink of letting loose with a display of his famous temper, and I felt us all shrink within ourselves; then he relented. He even laughed. “Very well, Mr Hazr, from the point of view of a lowly ground dweller, who do you see coordinating these incidents?”

  “A Turk,” Mahmoud answered promptly. “It stinks of Turkish methods.”

  Plumbury’s sleek head nodded in agreement.

  “Hoping to take back the country while our attention is elsewhere?” Allenby said, though it was not a question. “That would be the easiest time, when it was not expected.”

  “And when the soldiers are weary of fighting and the English people sick unto death of war. This country is in a state of confusion, the ideal setting for a tyrant to take hold. Or a fanatic.”

  “It would be nearly impossible to convince the British people to support a new war way out here, that is certain,” Allenby agreed. “Even Whitehall would be loath to make the move up from a military occupation to all-out war. Still, no matter who started it, or why, the situation is beginning to gain its own momentum, and our task is to nip it in the bud, to kill it now, in a tight operation, not in six months. Or in six years on another battlefield.” He sat forward, and my awareness of his size, which had lessened somewhat under the influence of porcelain cups and crustless sandwiches, flooded back. “This land has been fought over for thousands of years. A sea of blood has already gone into this soil. I do not intend,” he said forcefully, “to supervise another bloodletting. I believe we have the opportunity to create a new thing in Israel: a land where neighbours are brothers, not enemies. I believe that if Weizmann and Feisal can agree, that if we can make a fair beginning, Christian, Jew, and Arab can live together. What we must have, however, is that fair beginning, and someone, some group, looks to be attempting to kill it in the early stages.” A look of vague embarrassment flickered across his face and he subsided into his chair. He continued gruffly, “I can’t be everywhere, putting out fires. If some man is setting them, I need help to catch him. I don’t know that you, Mr Holmes, Miss Russell, can do much; I realise you’re here for a brief time. But you two,” he continued, turning his hard gaze first on Mahmoud, then on Ali, “are supposed to be good at finding things out. Joshua tells me you are his best. Prove it.

  “In one month, on either the ninth or the sixteenth of February, I intend to act as host to a meeting of representatives of the major faiths in Jerusalem. We will visit the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then we will break bread together at Government House. I wish to have this problem cleared up by then. Do you understand me?” There was a gleam of threat in the general’s voice, and suddenly the tales I had heard, of grown men fainting or vomiting after a hard interview with the Bull, did not seem so fantastical after all. Ali turned three shades lighter, and the rocklike Mahmoud seemed to quiver slightly, as if the earth had shifted beneath his feet.

  Allenby saw both reactions, and seemed satisfied. He nodded and stood up, saying, “You will want to look over the reports.” We obediently put down our cups and got to our feet. “Any questions? Fine. Good-bye, Miss Russell, Mr Holmes. I shall be leaving early for Tiberias, so I won’t see you again, and I’m afraid I have to send Plumbury down to Jerusalem, so you can’t even have his brain to pick. Still, let Arthurs know if you need anything during your stay.”

  It was my first inkling that we were stopping the night in Haifa, but when I saw the accommodation, I did not question the decision: there was a bath. The room had high ceilings and once-proud imitation French plaster cornices and a gorgeous, deep feather bed with a canopy draped with mosquito netting, but most of all it had a bath, and the spigot ran hot when I turned it on. I had thought the dye on my skin was becoming darker as it aged, but it was only grime. The hard soap in the salt-rich sea
had not actually cleansed.

  We took our dinner in an upstairs drawing room, in what, according to Ali, had been the harim or women’s quarters when the pasha had built it. Over the soup I asked our two companions about an unlikely statement of Allenby’s that had puzzled me slightly.

  “When General Allenby said something about picking Lieutenant Plumbury’s brain, was that a joke?”

  Mahmoud gave a crooked smile, but Ali chuckled aloud. “The lieutenant is a typical Allenby possession. He looks about nineteen, does he not? What they call ‘wet behind the ears’ and about as effective as a string broom. In truth, he has double firsts from Cambridge in history and philosophy, he lived here for three years before the war, and he knows nearly as much as the general does about the country.”

  The languid youth was another Allenby illusion, a sleight of hand equal to the fake horse lines on the banks of the Jordan. I nodded in appreciation, and wished I might have seen more of the great man before we left his country.

  We took our coffee (English coffee, a pale and watery imitation of the stuff Mahmoud made) in an adjoining room, its table piled high with files and boxes. We read through reports of recent incidents, speeches and pamphlets and outbreaks of violence, until my head began to swim, although I could glean no pattern, or even a sense of a pattern, from them. At midnight I gave up and took myself to my feather bed. Which incidentally, after nearly a month of sleeping either on a ship’s bunk or on the ground, proved more luxury than I could bear: I ended the night comfortably on the floor, wrapped in the bedclothes.

  Of the next day I remember little, and those memories left me are both sketchy and disconnected. I recollect emerging from my heap of bedclothes on the carpet and indulging in a luxurious second hot bath. I can recall breakfast vividly: devilled kidneys and kedgeree, boiled eggs, toast, and kippers, taken from hot plates on the sideboard and eaten at a long, gleaming mahogany table with a smattering of men, uniformed and not, all of whom were preoccupied and none of whom appeared to think that we were in the least out of the ordinary breakfast companions. There were newspapers, even, from Cairo, Paris, and London—some of them less than a week old.

  I definitely remember getting into the motorcar that was to return us to Jericho. It was a Vauxhall this time, that looked the veteran of many a battle with the hard roads. Mahmoud sat in front; I was behind the driver on the right-hand side; Holmes on my left in the middle; Ali next to him on the outside.

  After that I have only three brief recollections of the day. The first is telling Holmes about something I had dreamt the night before, children playing on a beach with buckets and spades, and a donkey ride in the background. Next comes the clear image of a bridge over a stream, and a child with three black goats that had immensely long ears, all of them looking up at us. Finally I retain the impression of the motorcar gearing down to climb a hill, and rocky cliffs, and a few sparse trees. After that, darkness.

  THIRTEEN

  ش

  The feeling of blood ties is natural among men, with rare exceptions. It causes affection for one’s blood relations, that no harm should befall them. One feels shame when one’s relatives are mistreated or attacked.

  —

  THE

  Muqaddimah

  OF IBN KHALDÛN

  I woke reluctantly, lying on my back with my left cheek pressed into a soft pillow that smelt of sunlight. A foot from my eyes was a rough wall, warmly illuminated by the steady yellow light of a candle, or a lamp. I did an inventory of my body, decided that my head ached abominably, my stomach felt equally wretched, and the rest of me seemed to have been run through a clothes wringer. Gingerly, slowly, I eased my throbbing head over to face the room.

  I was in an attic of some sort, judging from the low and sloping ceiling. An oil lamp made out of clay burnt on a tea-chest beside my bed, its small flame rising from the wick as perfect and without motion as a Vermeer painting. I was not alone: a child sat on the floor on the other side of the lamp, propped into the angle formed by the opposite wall and the stack of wooden chests that had been pushed up against it. Her head was resting back against the wall. She was asleep.

  I lay for a long, peaceful time, contemplating the pure, small flame and the pale throat of the sleeping child. She was wearing a light-coloured dress, blue, I thought. It had an embroidered yoke. Her arms were folded across her chest, elbows on her drawn-up knees, hands resting on their opposing shoulders. The sleeves of the dress had fallen back to reveal half a dozen glass bangles on each thin wrist. Her left earlobe gave off a gleam which, I decided after some thought, indicated a small gold earring looped through it. Nearer by, my spectacles lay folded on the tea-chest; I could see twin reflections of the lamp flame in the two lenses, and a long, tall reflection up the side of a glass of water.

  It was very pleasant, lying there, and absolutely still, so silent I could clearly hear the light rattle of breath down the young throat. I did not know how I came to be here, but I did know that I wanted neither to move nor to remember, because both would cause pain. Although I was dimly aware that at a distance there was sound, a vague impression of voices and movement, in this room it was so quiet I fancied I could hear the tiny hiss of the oil burning off the wick. I was quite disappointed when the child snorted and woke, blinked once, and then looked straight at me. The bangles on her arms jingled musically as she rubbed her eyes.

  “Hello,” she said, only it was not “Hello” and it was not “Salaam.” She had said “Shalom.”

  “Shalom,” I answered her, and asked in my childhood Hebrew, “Where am I?”

  “You were hurt,” she said, and then in Arabic continued, “Mahmoud brought you here.” Switching back to Hebrew, she asked, “Do you speak Ivrit, then?”

  “Not well.”

  “It sounds all right. I just asked because Mama said I should speak Arabic if you woke up.” And in Arabic she continued, “Are you feeling better now?” Her speech sounded odd, and it took me a minute to realise what was wrong: She was using the feminine form, not the masculine to which I was accustomed.

  “Where am I?” I asked, sticking to Hebrew.

  “You are in a storage room in the top of our house. My name is Sarah.”

  “And where is this house, Sarah?” I asked patiently. The child was even younger than I had thought.

  “In Ram Allah,” she replied, which meant nothing to me at the moment.

  “Where are my friends?” Much as I wanted the continued bliss of ignorance, memory was pushing against my mind with increasing urgency.

  “Uncle Mahmoud went away after he brought you here, but he said he would be back. Ali went with him.”

  And then it was all there, the car, the crash, and blood. My mouth, already dry and foul tasting, turned slowly to shoe leather and the cold began to trickle down my spine. “What about the other men?” I demanded in English, and when the child looked at me nervously, I put the sentence together in Hebrew.

  “There were no other men,” she said, puzzled.

  “A car?”

  “It was wrecked. That’s how you got hurt, Uncle Mahmoud said, but we weren’t to let anyone find you, so that’s why we put you up here. It isn’t very nice,” she confided, wrinkling her nose and glancing at the cobwebs.

  None of her speech registered, only the fact that Holmes was not here. And hadn’t there been a driver? I couldn’t seem to remember what we had been doing and where, but I knew Holmes had been with me, and now he was not.

  I could not lie here, not knowing; I had to know, and the first step was to move. Pain came with motion, but no agony, nothing broken or dislocated, as I shifted over onto my right side and began to slide my feet over the side of the low bed. I set my left hand against the coarse sheet in front of my chest, glanced down at it, and froze: it was caked with some dry and flaking red-brown substance. I lay back and brought my hands up before my eyes in the feeble light, and saw on both hands the same cracked brown stain smeared across skin, palm, fingernails.


  There was blood on my hands.

  “We were going to wash you but Uncle Mahmoud said it was better to let you sleep. It isn’t your blood,” the child said, trying to comfort me. I closed my eyes and, putting my hands beneath me again, slowly levered myself up until I was sitting. My head gave a violent throb, my stomach heaved, but my feet were on the floorboards and I did not actually pass out, just sat with my head collapsed forward onto my knees, waiting for the worst to fade.

  There was an exclamation from the doorway, and the child Sarah scrambled to her feet and flew across the room. I could not summon the reserves to raise my head, so my first sight of Rahel was her bare feet.

  “My daughter, I thought I told you to come and fetch me when our guest awoke.” Her Hebrew was sweet on my ears; for a brief moment she sounded like my mother.

  “Sorry, Mama. I was just going to come.”

  The woman had a lovely voice, and her hand on the side of my neck was cool. She did not seem to be feeling for a pulse or estimating fever, but rather was conveying sympathy and comfort, and I could have slumped on that pallet with her hand on my neck and her words in my ears for the rest of my life. Instead I asked her a question.