by Allan Massie
“I’m moving into a hotel,” she said. “I don’t know which yet. I’ll let you know.”
She booked into the YMCA on King David Street. A young clerk with thick curly hair smiled as he examined her passport.
“A name honoured in Israel,” he said.
She explained that she would bring her luggage in later. First, she wanted to sleep. Very well: would she pay now please?
The little cell was cool when she awoke. The sun had moved round. It was late afternoon. From the vestibule she telephoned Rachel. Luke answered.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said. “Have you and Rachel quarrelled? She won’t say anything either. I’ll bring your luggage in myself.”
“No,” she said, “can you put it on a bus maybe?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll be there by eight o’clock. Becky, I want to see you. All right?”
“All right.”
She had four hours to kill. There was an inscription on the wall by the telephone booth: “These buildings are the fulfilment of the inspired vision of James Newbigin Jarvie of Montclair, New Jersey.” It was a big claim, perhaps natural if you came from Clear Mountain. There was a map on the floor of the vestibule. She asked the clerk – a different one, this time – about it.
“Sixth-century Jerusalem,” he said. “A famous map. This is a reproduction.”
“Yes,” she said, “I thought it might be.”
But it gave her an idea. She purchased a map and guidebook from him.
Following its directions, she climbed Mount Zion again to David’s Tomb, to gaze over the forbidden Old City. If you turned to the south, you could see what must be Bethlehem. A sign directed her to the Chamber of the Martyrs. She hesitated and entered. People stood, with heads bowed, in reverence before the tablets covered with names. A few names stood for millions. It was on account of them that Franz’s father was held in the prison near the Damascus Gate, scarcely a mile away, and was carried every day to the law court on King George Avenue. But this silent chamber and these silent people were what it came down to; she was out of place.
Again she looked over the Old City. Jerusalem was divided, like her heart. She turned away from the mountain, down the hill, into the valley. She stopped at a café and ordered tea. She read again in the guidebook.
This valley with its mean cottages, its tin-roofed shacks, its yards where chickens pecked around the base of fruit-trees, where women in headscarves sat in the doorways peeling vegetables and calling out to their children or their neighbours, where at a little petrol station across the road, two men in singlets and cotton trousers that sagged from their waists were arguing, not fiercely but in the grumbling manner of an argument that has gone on for days, weeks, months, and can never end; this valley, she read, was Hinnom. “Because in ancient times it was a valley of depravity and sin the name Gel-Hinnom or Gehenna was given to the place for the wicked in the world to come to.” Well, that was Franz’s father. Perhaps they should bring him here: “Therefore, behold the day cometh, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Topheth” (which was its other name, it seemed) “nor the Valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter, for they shall bury in Topheth till there be no more place. And the carcasses of people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth, and none shall frighten them away.”
She took the slice of lemon from her glass of tea and sucked it. That was the prophet Jeremiah, according to her guidebook. She knew nothing of him. Her scriptures were stories, read to her by Nell from the Children’s Bible, or cursorily examined in school. She had wept with Ruth, been dazzled by Joseph, pitied King Saul who was cheated by the disagreeable Samuel and cast out because he showed mercy. “Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet with other delights.” Well, she had wept, whether she was properly a daughter of Israel or not, though she was ambivalent towards David, the author of the lament, at least until the moment when he too wept over his son Absalom. And who was the king who had said, “My father chastised you with whips, but I shall chastise you with scorpions’? Franz’s father had been a scorpion. This Gehenna, this Topheth was, she saw, the place for idols or idol-worship and child sacrifices: the Auschwitz of the ancient world. Didn’t that suggest that history was merely a cycle of atrocities, that, with each turn of the wheel … she remembered what Ramón, her old dancing-partner who was now an officer, had said, when she met him by chance two days before she had left for Israel: “I am leaving the army. I’m going to breed horses. Last week I was compelled to watch a man being tortured. They ripped out his fingernails.”
A car stopped in front of the café. It was a taxi. A white shape leaned over towards the driver, then backed out of the car, turned, and she saw Ivan Murison. He was not alone. A curly-haired boy, in jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt, emerged from the other side of the car. Murison stopped on seeing her.
“How clever of you to have found my favourite café in all Jerusalem,” he said.
Her eye took in, as for the first time, the battered iron tables, the chairs that sat unevenly on the rough beaten earth, the bead curtain lacking three strands that hung over the door, the chickens pecking around the dusty oleanders, the withered fig tree. Ivan Murison took hold of the boy’s arm, his fingers pressing hard on the café-au-lait flesh just above the elbow.
“This is Yusuf,” he said. “Yusuf, the beautiful Miss Czinner.” The boy smiled, showing very white teeth. He looked about fifteen.
“Yusuf works here, which is why I have chosen it as my place of relaxation. We’ve had a nice little outing.” He let the boy go. “Be a lamb,” he said, and the boy, understanding, slipped into the café.
“And to think I’ve been trying so hard to find you, my dear. Mind if I take a pew? Remember I’m one of the family. That’s why it hurts that you’ve been avoiding me. Has someone said something nasty about me?”
“I didn’t think we’d anything to talk about.”
“Oh, but we do. But that will keep. What brings you to this part of town?”
She explained that she had merely been following her guidebook. She had had no particular intention…
The boy returned with brandy, a Coca-Cola for himself, and another glass of tea for her. He sat down between them, pulled up his shirt and stroked his flat satin-smooth stomach. When another customer arrived, he got up and served him, and then returned to his chair.
“Yusuf’s a Christian Arab,” Ivan Murison said during one of his absences. “Charming, don’t you think?”
He talked of the trial. His manner was almost sympathetic. He spoke admiringly of Eli, and said how difficult it must have been for him. And Franz: how brave he was, how he admired that. “Not being a brave man myself,” he laughed. He told her he was sorry Nell hadn’t come. It would have been so nice to see her again. “We separated on friendly terms, you know.” He talked of Israel and of his love for the country, “Though I wish they treated their Arabs better.”
He exerted himself to please her. But he failed. The light died away. The street lamps came on, spots of yellow in a purple haze. Away in the distance, in the mountains, they could hear the rumble of thunder. Or perhaps it was gunfire. Ivan Murison talked of the significance of Gehenna. “Israel has always been apocalyptic,” he said. “I prefer Yusuf’s attitude to life. He takes things as they come. He lives in Gehenna and still knows how to laugh. Don’t you think laughter is what we need, my dear?”
“Oh,” she said, “laughter. I think I’ve forgotten.”
Ivan poured himself another brandy and lit one of his little cigars. There was a tremor in his hands. He mopped his brow with a red, white-spotted handkerchief.
“You don’t like me much,” he said, “do you? I’m used to it, you know. Nobody does. Oh, in the right mood, I still amuse people, but they don’t like me. I have to buy what affection I can get.”
She was repelled by his self-pity.
“You could be my daughter,”
he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh I’m not suggesting you may be. Besides, I have a daughter, by my second marriage. She’s at some redbrick university, I forget which. She hasn’t much time for me either, you know. And so I’ve pursued success. Without success, I’m a hack. This book I’m commissioned to write on the trial, it’ll be no good. Oh, it sounded great when I outlined it, and for a few months I was excited to be back on the old trail. But it’s gone. Où sont les neiges d’antan … ‘The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on,’” he waved a cigar-clutching pudgy hand. “I’m talking rot, you think. Wait till you’re my age. You don’t like me. You think I was trying to blackmail Franz. So I was. Pointless. What do I care about Kestner or Czinner? Oh, I’ll hack out a narrative, and I’ll be paid and it will sit in a few bookshops, and then be remaindered. But I could write once. Ask your mother.”
“What went wrong?”
“Writing’s character, you know,” he said, and smiled. “I was fond of your mother. And admired her. I was hurt when I thought she had seen through me. I still carry her photograph. Silly, isn’t it?”
He drew an envelope from a stained wallet and extracted some photographs and pushed them across the table in her direction. Nell had been caught laughing, in a way Becky remembered from childhood, but not often recently. Her hair flopped over one eye; she looked a bit like Lauren Bacall. Then there was one in which she was leaning against a bar. She wore a suit cut to resemble uniform and held a cigarette dangling in her right hand. She was challenging the world to surprise her.
Becky stopped short.
“Why do you have these photographs of Franz? Where did you get them?”
“I didn’t mean to show you those,” Ivan said. “I thought they were in a different envelope.”
She looked at them again, and then at him.
“Yes, you did,” she said. “You thought they would upset me. Where did you get them?”
“No,” he said. He set his glass on the table, steadied its rocking, and planted his finger on the back of the other boy in the photograph.
“That’s Charlie,” he said. “Carlo Bastini. He was at school with Franz. He’s a friend of mine and he gave me the photographs to help me identify Franz.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You thought you could use them. You thought they could hurt me.”
“Have it your way.” He drank some more brandy. His eyes flickered towards Yusuf who was now with a group of boys of his own age at another table where voices were raised in argument.
“They’re talking politics,” he said. “Politics and resentment. They’re all full of resentment. I can’t blame them, you know. All right,” he said. “Charlie didn’t want to give me the photographs. I insisted. I thought they might come in useful.”
“Well, they haven’t, have they? I understand them, Mr Murison. But you’ve missed one thing. When I first fell for Franz, I was warned by kind friends that he was queer. Maybe he used to be, but he isn’t now. So I don’t care, you see. They mean nothing to me.”
She tore the two prints in half. Ivan Murison made no move to prevent her. Then she quartered them, and dropped them in the ashtray. She leaned forward and held her lighter under the corner of one of the pieces.
When the flame died down, Ivan said, “I did a piece on old Willie Maugham once. He’s gaga now, you know. They shouldn’t let him give interviews. He said to me, ‘My tragedy is that I pretended all my life that I was three-quarters normal and only a quarter queer, whereas it was the other way about.’ I made the same mistake myself for twenty years. Then I said, to hell with it.”
He looked at the other table. Yusuf had swung his chair back, stretching his legs out and clasping his hands on the top of his head, his fingers lost among the curls. He turned and gave Ivan a radiant smile.
“I’m thinking of buying Yusuf. We’re waiting for his father to complete the deal. Does that shock you?”
“What sort of life can you offer him?”
“Better than he’ll have here. He’ll always be a white blackbird, you know – an Arab in a Jewish State, a Christian among Moslems … a poor boy among … Don’t think too harshly of me.”
She was half an hour late, but Luke was waiting for her. He was talking in Hebrew to the clerk. When he saw Becky, he waved, kissed her, and waited till the clerk finished a long sentence.
“Miss Czinner,” the clerk said, “I have a message for you.”
It was from Kinsky. It said that he would be with Franz at the King David Hotel from nine o’clock.
“Well, that’s just down the street,” Luke said. “We could talk for a bit first, then I’ll walk you there. Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
She told him. “The strange thing is,” she said, “I don’t think too harshly of him. I even felt sorry for him. If he was planning something nasty, he’s given it up.”
“And this business of the boy, it doesn’t shock you?”
“Shock, no. Disgust, yes. When I think of it. Can you stop it, Luke?”
“What about the boy? How does he feel?”
“Oh, happy, at the moment. But … later?”
“Yes, there’s always later, isn’t there. You’re right. I told you I could fall in love with you, Becky. You’re not only beautiful, you have the right instincts. You’re moral. It’s what we need, a renewed sense of what’s moral. David – that’s the boy at the desk – and I have been talking about just that. He’s a philosophy student. He says he’s an existentialist. We agreed it’s a perilous position. Here we are, on our own, and we have to construct for ourselves a means of ethical recognition.”
“Will you do something?”
“Yes,” he said, “there are people I can speak to. I think we can arrange to ease Mr Murison out of the country, on his own. I’ll also undertake to talk to the boy myself, like – what’s the expression – a Dutch uncle. Why Dutch? Perhaps I shall take an Arab friend along. I have them, you know.”
“Oh Luke, I don’t know what to say. He’s an unhappy man. I almost liked him some of the time we were talking.”
“But he shouldn’t repair his unhappiness at the expense of the boy, should he?”
“No. Do you suppose that’s what Franz’s father was doing? Repairing his unhappiness at the expense of others? Oh, I know it’s absurd to ask.”
“Absurd?” Luke smiled. “David and I were speaking about absurdity. We can’t judge the reasons why people do what they do. We can only judge the actions themselves. As for liking Ivan Murison, you told me you liked Franz’s father the time you met?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there you are. Perhaps people are at their best with you, Becky. We are none of us a single entity, you know. The self one perceives oneself is never known to others. I’m not the same Luke for Rachel as I am for my mother… Do you still want to marry Franz?”
What if she said “no”? She looked at his strong hands, at his broken nose, at the brown eyes which did not move away from her gaze.
“Yes,” she said. “More than ever. I was doubtful when I came here. I had a dream in which I confused him with his father, or they blended into each other, I don’t know how. But I do: I’m already wedded to Franz in my mind, in my heart, in my body… Luke, what are you doing to me? I can’t explain myself, I’ve never spoken to anyone like this before.”
“Very well, good,” Luke said. “Your friend Minty came looking for you. I didn’t let on I was meeting you. I left her talking with Rache. There were getting on fine. Can I say something? I told you I could fall in love with you. Well, I’m on the brink. Just remember, I’m here if you need me. What time are you meeting Franz? Right, can I give you some advice? Do as he asks, go to England, stay with your mother till this is over. Sure, Franz needs you, but I’ve a feeling he needs you not to see what he’s going to go through in the next months. It’s cathartic for him. When he emerges from the ordeal – and it is an ordeal – then he’ll have m
ade himself ready for you. So go to England. Don’t worry. I’ll look after him for you. Now give me a kiss.”
Franz was alone, in the corner of the bar. She stood, unseen, and watched him. There was nobody else. Luke was a mirage, a false dream. Franz was wearing a white shirt. The sleeves were rolled up just above the elbows. He sat very still, his gaze fixed on the table, where there stood a glass of beer which he had not touched. There was a mirror behind him, and his shadowy hair was dark, the gold dulled. He showed no impatience and did not move his eyes. When they made love she was one with him, but now she was conscious of his otherness. Ivan Murison had held the boy Yusuf’s arm as if he would draw him into himself. A fan whirred overhead.
She turned and, crossing the lobby, approached the desk. Could they book her on a flight to London? The next day? Yes, she had an open return ticket. She waited while they telephoned the airport. She looked into the bar, but Franz was now out of her line of vision. “Yes,” the clerk said, “an afternoon flight, leaving at 16.30, would that be suitable?” “Yes,” she said. “Thank you, it has to be afternoon because I must go to the hospital in the morning.” When she gave her name, Czinner, the clerk stiffened. “Would you be Dr Czinner’s daughter?” he asked. “We all admire him so greatly.” He was wondering about what the newspapers called her doomed romance. “Thank you,” she said.
In the flower shop to the right of the reception counter, she bought a single red rose. She entered the bar. The clerk was watching her back. She laid the rose in front of Franz.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, and sounded as if she was out of breath.
“There’s one condition,” she said later. “You’ve got to sleep with me tonight. I’ll cancel my reservation if you say ‘no’.”
In the morning he waited for her outside the hospital.
