A Palestine Affair Read online

  Kirsch tried hard not to laugh. Poor Barker with his “Germanized Jew” and a toilet stink in every room of his house. He should never have left England. Perhaps none of them should ever have left England.

  “These Arabs here”—Barker waved his hand in the general direction of down the hill—“just like my Moslem friends with their boundary stones, won’t stand up for themselves, you see. So someone’s got to do it for them and it might as well be me.”

  “What is it precisely that you want me to do?”

  “You tell the administration that unless another house is found, and sharpish, I go. And they can forget the municipal office design.”

  “I thought your main concern was for your Arab neighbors.”

  “They don’t know the ropes. Poor sods. But they will learn. And when they do, Alhamdulillah!”

  As the hour was creeping toward ten, Barker decided that it was time for a G and T. Kirsch, declining Barker’s offer to join him in a drink, decided that he’d better go and speak to the grand mufti, whose home was at the far end of the spill.

  “Please yourself,” Barker said, then added as if as an afterthought, “Guess who I saw at the gardens last night. The Bloomberg woman. God, she’s a looker.”

  “Really, was she alone?” Kirsch tried hard to appear indifferent, but he sensed his cheeks reddening. He hoped Barker wouldn’t notice.

  “Good Lord no, she was with a crowd of men. Doesn’t waste much time, does she? I hear Ross sent her old man off to paint Petra. Can’t quite understand what Ross sees in Bloomberg: not a great talent there, if you want my opinion.”

  Kirsch was desperate to know whom Joyce had been with, but asking Barker would be giving away too much.

  “Well, I’ll be leaving.”

  Kirsch opened the door and let in a rush of sunlight that seemed to drag the stench on its back. At this time of year the valley was usually cracked and burned; any irrigation, except this kind, would have been welcome. Kirsch felt despondent. He had to speak to Joyce. He wanted to go to her right now, but, imposed or not, he’d already shown enough dereliction of duty. Two men sent by the municipality approached carrying shovels over their shoulders. Two men to clear up a river of shit: it would take them half the year. Still, to erase what Kirsch had allowed to be done with Saud would take longer. He stepped gingerly over a brown stream and began to make his way across the valley.

  23.

  The cars could take Bloomberg and his party only so far. They had set off shortly before dawn. By nightfall, it was hoped, they would be twenty miles or so from Petra. Rachman drove the lead vehicle as before. The road coursed through the Wadi-es-Sir, a deep valley that seemed to have been designed by a Romantic artist; there were even the picturesque ruins of a fortress positioned exactly where Bloomberg would have liked them had he been executing a painting of the place a hundred years ago. They drove past the black-haired tents of the local bedouin, on through the town of Madaba, where Bloomberg spotted a rash of church spires among the minarets, and from thence to Hesbon and on to Kerak, where the paved road abruptly came to an end.

  They had driven in silence almost the entire way, as the transition from darkness to dawn, calling such profound and colorful attention to itself, seemed to require. Bloomberg, led back by the luxury of his previous night’s accommodation to the poverty of his London childhood, had been thinking about his mother. There she was, vivid in his mind’s eye, with her thick, strong washerwoman’s arms, standing at the wringer putting through his wet clothes. She had covered the floor with newspaper to absorb an excess splash of water. Bloomberg’s father had left their home on Christian Street hours ago and was hard at work pressing suits in one of the sweatshops off the Whitechapel Road. And he, Mark, the hungry prince of six children, the eldest son, sat with a tall glass of milk and a biscuit listening to his mother—sweat pouring off her face, her arms red—as she admonished him never, as members of some local families did, to take food or clothing from the Mission for the Conversion of the Jews. In the front of the car, the desert dawn advertising itself in staggered, rosy tints, Bloomberg smiled to himself: now he got his food and clothing from the private mission of Sir Gerald Ross in exchange for painting churches and Nabatean temples. His mother wouldn’t have been too happy.

  In Kerak Bloomberg and Rachman mounted horses, then waited while the other men and the boy loaded baggage onto the largest animals among the small caravan of camels that would follow. Almost immediately, Rachman’s attitude to the trip took a drastic turn for the worse. He seemed to find something insulting in having to abandon his car for a horse. He barked orders, particularly at the boy, and refused to look at Bloomberg. By the time the loaded camels set off, however, Rachman’s black mood seemed to have passed and he appeared to view with amusement (which Bloomberg shared) the strange sight of an artist’s dismantled studio moving through the desert’s morning light on the backs of a shuffle-footed ponderous camel line.

  Bloomberg had ridden a horse only once before in his life, after his father had befriended the local milkman and the old geezer had let Mark sit on his dapple gray all the way from home to the Tenter buildings on St. Luke Street: clink of empty bottles in their crates, astonished cries from a group of girls that included his sister Lena, jeers from the barrow boys. Then, as now, the animal seemed to have a far better sense than Bloomberg both of direction and of the little that was required of the rider.

  The horse plodded forward down one of a series of tracks that had been beaten hollow by the tread of a hundred thousand camels, and now stretched almost half a mile in width. Away on Bloomberg’s right, and then falling behind the caravan, the rift of the Dead Sea seemed to present a mirage stretching into infinity.

  Bloomberg had no chance to speak to the al-Sayyid boy during the day. He saw him during the men’s occasional stops for prayer. The boy always knelt at a distance away from the others and seemed afraid of them. Frequently, when they stopped, he stood in the narrow shade thrown by his camel. The farther they traveled, the more Bloomberg felt an awkward tension in the group: almost imperceptible to begin with, it had risen with the heat of the day, but whether its source was himself or the boy or the simple inconveniences of the journey, Bloomberg couldn’t tell. At the first prayer-stop Rachman had informed Bloomberg that they were traveling on the Darb-el-Haj, the ancient route of pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Although nowadays, he had added, most pilgrims took the boat to Jedda. After relinquishing this piece of information he clearly decided that he didn’t want to play tour guide, and he left Bloomberg alone to examine the landscape.

  To Bloomberg’s surprise the stretch of desert that he had imagined as empty—a foolish sentimentalism, he now realized, to think that he was “going back in time”—was littered with dilapidated buildings and surrounding debris. It didn’t take him long to gather that they were following the track of an abandoned railway line—or rather a rail line that must once have followed, with hardly a diversion it seemed, the direction of the Haj. All along the route were derelict station buildings; sometimes only their zinc water tanks remained with a few common huts beside. More often there were multiple signs of destruction, and once again Bloomberg was reminded, this time indelibly, that here too the Great War, his war, had swung a mighty arc and passed through: ruined buildings, broken tanks, roofless guardhouses, deserted gun carriages, shattered wagons; and around one station vast shell holes and half-filled trenches.

  They saw no other travelers. Once, Bloomberg’s horse, deciding that it needed a rest, halted of its own volition. The legionaries’ camels overtook Bloomberg without a sideways glance, but the boy stopped, leaned from his camel, and with a few sharp clicks of his tongue and a whack on the horse’s hindquarters got the animal moving again.

  Bloomberg felt slightly ridiculous, a skinny Sancho Panza in a gaucho’s hat. But a certain foolishness was appropriate, he decided, for the artist who had attached himself to an old-style patron. Before setting out from Amman he had reread the letter of i
nstruction that Ross had given him, with its directives framed as requests: “You will not have forgotten the accurate architectural aspect of your paintings with especial reference, I hope, to the view of the Temple of Isis at the exit of the Sik when the light best suits it by day and possibly by moonlight.” Even the time of day! Still, he wasn’t ungrateful to Ross. At this time not too many in London would have shelled out to keep Bloomberg in brushes and paint.

  As soon as the first stars appeared in the sky Rachman called the party to a halt and pitched camp. Two of the men set a small fire and began to make coffee. Mustafa untied one of the camel bags and distributed food. The men tore ravenously at the provisions, in the way Bloomberg had seen his fellow soldiers attack their rations in the army.

  They sat in a ragged circle, the al-Sayyid boy tucked in between Bloomberg and Rachman. Such talk as there was took place in Arabic. Bloomberg was content to watch the stars multiply against their jet backdrop in a profusion he had never before witnessed. The moon hung above them, plump and yellow like an overly bold stage prop in a melodrama. Eventually the men began to disperse until only Bloomberg and the boy were left by the fire.

  “You’ve seen me before all this, am I right?” Bloomberg asked.

  The boy stretched out his long legs. He still wore the prep-school gray trousers and white shirt that Ross had given him. Goodness knew why.

  The boy shivered. The temperature had dropped quickly since nightfall, but the air was still warm. Bloomberg noticed sweat on the boy’s forehead and that his eyes were glazed. The bandage over his eye had long since fallen off. The blood beneath it had dried in a thin brown line.

  “Perhaps in Jerusalem. My uncle has a shop in the Old City.”

  “Perhaps at my house, more like. You were there one night, weren’t you?”

  The boy paused and weighed his response before replying, almost in a whisper, “Yes, I was there.”

  “What were you up to?”

  “I was lost.”

  Lost? Somehow that seemed unlikely to Bloomberg.

  The boy drew his sleeve across his forehead. Bloomberg saw that the sweat was pouring off him.

  “Are you all right?”

  In reply, the boy simply dropped his head into his hands. He looked as if he might keel over. Bloomberg passed him his water bottle and urged him to drink.

  “Listen, if you’re not well I’m going to have you sent back. One of the men can accompany you.”

  “No. I’m hot from the journey. I will drink now and I’ll be well. Don’t send me back.”

  Bloomberg sensed an urgency in the boy’s response but had no key to understanding it.

  Rachman and Salaman returned to the fire. The boy stood and walked away. In a moment they heard him pissing on the sand.

  “You like this boy?” Rachman smiled. Salaman, in contrast, spat in the ground.

  “I’ve no idea. He seems fine. Is there something not to like?”

  Rachman said something to Salaman, perhaps he had translated Bloomberg’s reply. If so there must have been something funny in it that caused Salaman to laugh.

  The boy returned but, as usual, sat a way off from the others.

  “Why didn’t your wife come on this journey?”

  “She preferred to stay in Jerusalem. And besides, as you see, there is nothing for her to do here. But why do you ask?”

  Again, Rachman turned to Salaman and this time engaged in a brief animated discussion.

  “You didn’t ask Sir Gerald for this boy?”

  “Ask Sir Gerald? Quite the opposite; I preferred to travel unaccompanied, and believe me, if I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have put you to all this bother. Although I do see that your presence makes this an easier trek.”

  Bloomberg’s answer seemed to satisfy Rachman.

  “But what is all this?” Bloomberg continued.

  “This boy is well known in Jerusalem. He’s been a wife to many men.”

  Bloomberg couldn’t help smiling. The thought that Sir Gerald Ross had sent him off on a homosexual adventure was almost, but not quite, as absurd as the real mission.

  “Really? Well, that’s his business, I suppose. I don’t think it will prevent him carrying my easel around, will it? And by the way, what is his name?”

  “His name, to his father’s eternal shame, is Saud al-Sayyid. Lucky his father is dead.”

  Bloomberg lay in his tent trying to compose a letter to Joyce. A letter that he knew would take weeks to reach her, if it ever did. Still, it was easier for him to show his affection when he was far away. He wrote in thick pencil offering a brief description of his journey thus far and he even included a quick sketch that he had made earlier in the day of one of the shattered gun emplacements.

  His reading lamp threw shadows onto the canvas walls and the desert wind whipped them into dark predatory birds. He concluded the letter, in offhand fashion, “I may have found your Saud. But if so he doesn’t seem like much of a murderer. I’ll ask him tomorrow morning if he’s ever stabbed anyone! My driver thought Sir Gerald had sent him along to keep me warm at night—remember that policeman who sat on our bed—‘a boy fucker and his boy . . .’ ” And then with a flash of his old nastiness Bloomberg added, “Perhaps you’d better pass this on to the investigating officer that’s keeping you warm. Or on second thoughts, maybe not. I wouldn’t want him down here interrupting my work.” He licked the tip of the pencil, then ran thick lines through the final paragraph. Why begin to torment her again? And in truth he didn’t want Kirsch getting ideas. If Ross had sent this boy along to Petra he couldn’t have suspected him of murdering De Groot. And then there was the boy’s recent late-night visit to Bloomberg’s house: why on earth, unless he’d spent a childhood reading English mystery novels, would a hunted murderer return to the scene of the crime? There had to be another explanation. Perhaps this Saud didn’t even know De Groot. In the morning Bloomberg would ask him straight out. And what would Saud answer? “Yes, I stabbed the old Jew through the heart and now I’d like to turn myself in.” Bloomberg smiled at his own foolishness.

  He turned down his light. Two of the men snored loudly in the next tent. Over their noise came the demented yawn of one of the camels. What was it that Ross had mentioned about Giotto and his apprentices? This was far better. He would wear the hair shirt of isolation with pride. Under these wild stars Bloomberg felt, for the first time in years, that he was exactly where he wanted to be.

  24.

  Joyce turned up in Kirsch’s office first thing on Wednesday morning. He was surprised to see her and also very happy. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing a white shapeless kaftan that she must have bought in the Old City, but she had bunched the material and tied a red kerchief at her waist that accentuated her figure. Her skin, pale when he had first met her, was lightly tanned now, and in Kirsch’s opinion set off her gray eyes perfectly. Seeing her let him forget, for a moment anyway, about Bloomberg.

  “Where have you been?” Kirsch asked, trying to be jolly and not come across as jealous, although his heart was beating fast.

  “Someone ransacked my cottage.”

  “Oh God. When was this?”

  “Sometime Monday night while I was out.”

  “At the Municipal Gardens.” Kirsch had meant to keep this information to himself, but the words had slipped out. When he was with her he lost control.

  Joyce frowned. “Have you been following me?”

  Kirsch laughed. “I’ve wanted to, but no. Clive Barker—do you know him, the civic planner?—well, he saw you there and happened to mention it to me.”

  “God, this place is a village.”

  Kirsch was about to offer a lighthearted rejoinder but then remembered that Joyce had come to report a crime.

  “Your place, is there much damage?”

  “Torn clothes, and three of Mark’s paintings have been badly stomped.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yes, but he won’t care. He never does. He’ll say it’s
what they deserved. I’ve seen him put ten paintings at a time out for rubbish collection. In West Hampstead I had to go outside early in the mornings and retrieve them.”

  “And the break-in was on Monday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you contact me yesterday? I mean, this is a serious matter.”

  “I was busy all day. Peter Frumkin . . .” Joyce paused. “The filmmaker.”

  “Yes, I know who he is,” Kirsch interrupted testily.

  “Well, he brought me down to the Old City to watch the filming. Then he actually squeezed in a part for me.”

  Kirsch felt his face redden.

  “Did he? I thought they were storming Suleiman’s walls.” Kirsch tried to make this sound like the worst Hollywood silliness.

  “They were, but when the Romans break through to the Temple some of the local women get raped. I was the first victim.”

  Kirsch opened his eyes wide.

  “That’s appalling.”

  But Joyce had already begun to laugh. He couldn’t tell if she was slightly hysterical or genuinely cheerful.

  “Don’t be such a prude,” she said.

  Kirsch remembered how before they made love she had told him when to take his clothes off. She must think him a fool.

  “Very funny,” Kirsch replied. “What did you really do?”

  “I carried water to a thirsty man.”

  “I can see you doing that.”

  “Well, you will, I hope. There’s a cinema somewhere in this town, isn’t there?”