A Palestine Affair Page 6

  “Jews make terrible policemen,” he said.

  “Why is that?” Joyce spoke from the bed, her face turned away from Bloomberg.

  “Too cocky. Too much imagination.”

  “Isn’t that what they say about you?”

  “I have no imagination whatsoever. Hence the dour and laborious images that I frequently produce.”

  “That was one man in one newspaper.”

  She was tired of trying, fed up with stroking, boosting and encouraging him.

  “In the right newspaper it only takes one man to kill a show.”

  Bloomberg continued to assess his paintings, turning them this way and that in the yellow light thrown by the oil lamp.

  Joyce thought of De Groot and the man or boy who was perhaps his lover. “I kissed thee ere I killed thee.” Was that it? Othello?

  After a while Bloomberg set aside his canvases and got into bed beside her. He ran his hand once through her hair as if to soothe her, but it was he who quickly fell asleep.

  11.

  Saud crouched in a corner of the narrow, malodorous basement room. Next to him two fellow detainees played dice on the floor. The collection of bodies was absurd—fifty men and boys, all named Saud. One by one they left to be interrogated. By the time they got to Saud it would be the middle of the night. He had heard the muezzin’s call to evening prayers hours ago. At street level outside the room’s only window a screeching cat fight was in progress.

  Saud’s mother must be desperate to know where he was. His brothers had to have been out searching for him. Or did everybody know by now about the roundup? And if his mother came to get him what would she say? Would she say nothing at all? That would be the best. After all, why would she speak to a British policeman? But what about the woman who had seen him in the bottom of the cistern?

  He had fallen asleep by the time they came for him, curled up with his head on a flagstone pillow. The strong arms of a man on either side lifted him to his feet. The policemen were short, squat individuals, their faces sunburned, especially at the tips of their noses.

  “Forty down, ten to go. Don’t look so scared. I’m Corporal Arthur, he’s Corporal Sam. We’re here to take you for walkies.”

  “This way if you don’t mind, son.”

  The men hustled Saud down a broad corridor that led to a small office. They dumped him in a chair.

  “Won’t be a moment. The dentist is in the toilet adjusting his drill.”

  “I don’t think he’s got one, ’as he?”

  “Well, if he has it’s one of those funny ones, without the little spigot on the end.”

  “A drill doesn’t have a fucking spigot.”

  Corporal Arthur lowered his head until his face was close up to Saud’s.

  “Ever been here before, son?” he half whispered, “ ’cause I have a funny feeling I recognize you.”

  Saud responded with a blank look.

  “No speak English, Abdul?”

  “It wasn’t you I saw last Tuesday with your hand in the charity box, then scooting out the back of the Holy Sepulchre, was it? ’cause it was certainly someone who resembled you. Skinny with black hair and looking like he wanted a kick up the arse.”

  Kirsch came into the office and the two men stood to a ragged attention. He saw that the boy was scared. And why not? Even without Dobbins and Cartwright, who enjoyed putting a little fear into “the natives.” They weren’t prejudiced, Kirsch thought, just stupid, or indifferent. Zionism and Arab pan-nationalism meant about as much to them as last year’s snow.

  “Saud number forty, sir.”

  “Thank you. You may leave. I’ll call you when I’m ready for the next fellow.”

  When they were alone Kirsch poured Saud a glass of water from the jug on his desk. The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

  Kirsch wrote down his full name, Saud al-Sayyid; his address, on the Street of the Chain; and then his age, which Kirsch had guessed correctly.

  “Well, Saud, perhaps you’d like to tell me where you were last Saturday night?”

  Kirsch tried not to sound patronizing, but he was fighting a long tradition.

  “I was alone, and writing.”

  The answer startled Kirsch, not only for its content, but also for Saud’s apparent fluency in English.

  “Writing?”

  “Poetry.”

  “So you’re a poet?” Kirsch had rarely felt more stupid in the light of one of his own responses.

  The boy shrugged.

  “And where do you do your writing?”

  Saud thought for a moment, then raised the index finger of his right hand and tapped twice on the side of his head. De Groot had gestured this way during their lessons, as an incentive to make Saud think.

  Kirsch wasn’t sure how to respond. Was the boy teasing him? Laughing at him? But it was Kirsch who laughed.

  “Okay. Recite me some of your work. Anything.”

  “In Arabic or in English?”

  “I think I’d better hear the English.”

  Saud, it seemed to Kirsch, shivered a little, and then, remarkably, he rose from his seat and declared, “Those are the golden islands for which we longed as one longs for a homeland, to which all the night stars beckoned us with the light of a trembling ray.” The lines both astonished Kirsch and seemed vaguely familiar. But his knowledge of English poetry, if that’s what the boy had stolen, or learned in school, was hardly deep enough for him to make an identification.

  Saud sat down.

  Kirsch looked at him across his desk, then glanced at his watch as if the time might offer an explanation for the peculiarities of the situation. It was after midnight.

  “Thank you,” Kirsch finally said. “That was extraordinary.”

  The interrogation proceeded. By the end of half an hour Saud had failed to supply much of an alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the murder—his mother had been sleeping when he came home and he had left the house to pick up water before she awoke—but the adolescent poet, charming and wistful, certainly didn’t seem like a knifer. Nevertheless, there was something troubling that Kirsch couldn’t put his finger on. He determined to let the boy go, but to keep him under observation.

  12.

  Bloomberg had been painting alone on the roof of Ross’s house for about three hours when Ross contrived to interrupt him. The hills around the city were covered in a light white summer dust that seemed to parch and blind their viewers. Bloomberg was mixing white and ochre on his palette, trying to get the color that he wanted. Ross’s hundred pounds, which had seemed like money in the bank, was proving difficult to earn. But only because Bloomberg remained so resolutely himself: ornery, dissatisfied, an East End arrangement of bravado and insecurity.

  Eventually Bloomberg put down his knife and turned toward his visitor.

  “A formidable prospect,” Ross said.

  Bloomberg didn’t reply. It was unbearable to have to sing for your supper as well as paint for it.

  “The stones quite cry out.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Really not?”

  It was never Bloomberg’s intention to embarrass Ross, but if that happened as a by-product of necessary honesty, then so be it.

  Ross remembered something that Aubrey Harrison had said after an evening spent in Bloomberg’s company: “His work makes a better impression than he does.” One had to make accommodations for true artists—although there were limits.

  The two men looked out across the landscape. Ross, hands behind his back, gestured to the east simply by raising his eyebrows and lifting his chin.

  “First day I was on the job, about a month after we took Jerusalem, two representatives of local transport came in to see me. They were after a concession to run trams to Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives—right over there.”

  “I see that you didn’t grant it.”

  “No, I told them that the first rail section would be laid over the dead body of the military governor.”

>   “So they’re waiting for you to die.”

  Ross laughed. “I expect so.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to be buried here?”—Bloomberg swept his hand in the direction of the Mount of Olives. “Not much shade, though.”

  Ross’s features darkened. The British Military Cemetery was on nearby Mount Scopus. There were men buried there who had been under Ross’s command during the war. But Bloomberg couldn’t know that. After a moment Ross brightened again.

  “Next to caliphs, Crusaders, and Maccabees? I’d be honored.”

  Beneath them, on the narrow ribbon of road that wound toward the Allenby Barracks, a woman walked, her thin arms extended by two heavy shopping bags.

  “I suppose Mrs. Bloomberg is at home preparing for the Sabbath?”

  “Mrs. Bloomberg is not Jewish.”

  Ross registered this information with a short intake of breath.

  “Nevertheless,” Bloomberg continued, “she does like to go shopping on Fridays, and when we visit observant friends she enjoys the false security of a white tablecloth, two challahs, and a pair of candlesticks.”

  “The Zionists themselves are rarely so beholden to tradition.”

  “Oh, that too—my wife considers herself a Zionist. In London she went through two winters of Thursday-night meetings at Toynbee Hall. I believe she once shook Weizmann’s hand. She’d come home and report the content of the speeches. She’s the one who convinced me to come out here. Joyce, bless her heart, thought I could do worse than use my meager talents to help the cause.”

  “Really? And have you been persuaded that such is the case?”

  “My sentiments are of the less exotic, apolitical, and by now quite irritating, I’m sure, miserable-artist type.”

  Ross laughed but stopped short when Bloomberg added, “I’m essentially an East End Jewboy on the make. Someone made a mistake when they distributed the talent, and gave me a dollop.”

  Ross turned to examine Bloomberg’s painting. It seemed to him to have precisely the mix of topographical style and conservative representation that he had been hoping to see.

  “More than a dollop, I’d say.” Ross looked from the painting to the view, and then back again to the work.

  The words “Thank you” caught in Bloomberg’s throat and came out as a cough.

  There was a single puffy white cloud in the otherwise blue sky, some disruptive artist-angel exhaling his cigarette smoke over God’s empty canvas. When the cloud moved over the sun it turned yellow and brown at the edges.

  “Did you catch the knifer?”

  “No.” Ross paused. “We shall, although it would probably be advisable not to. Better, perhaps, simply to fish.” Ross offered this tentatively, as if the idea had just come to him.

  It had never occurred to Bloomberg, who imagined himself a cynic, that the negative outcome of a police investigation could be prearranged.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ross clearly wished that he hadn’t extended beyond his simple “No,” but now that he had, it would be cowardly to step back.

  “Well, once we have the culprit all hell will break loose. The hostile camps are tense and waiting now, but as soon as we identify and arrest the murderer, we’ll be for it. If it’s an Arab, the Arabs will riot and protest his innocence. If it’s a Jew, the Jews will be up in arms. Really, it is a shame, you know. The last three years have been rather, well, relatively quiet. An impressive number of wives and young children have been able to come out and set up house. Club’s doing very well, Arab chappee won the tennis tournament this year, beat Warburton in the singles final. Perhaps you heard.” Ross’s voice trailed away. He had an alarming, and utterly false, apprehension that artists enjoyed only high talk. Real artists, that is, among whom Ross did not include the zealous painters of Palestine, most of whom, he found, had the temperament but not the qualifications of the truly gifted. Twice blessed, then, that a talent like Bloomberg’s had chosen to eschew as subject the mechanized sower going forth sowing, or merry immigrants dancing around Old Testament maypoles: in their place, a hard cosmic stare at the actual.

  They heard a motorcycle engine, and then the two-wheeler appeared from around a distant curve in the road. As it drew near, both Bloomberg and Ross, from the excellent vantage point of the roof, could clearly see both the driver and his passenger. Joyce’s arms were wound tight around Kirsch’s chest, and her long hair, covered only in part by a loose red kerchief, unfurled behind her like a banner. The road curled away and the speeding figures were lost. The two men watching were silent for several moments, then Ross spoke.

  Ross extended his hand. “Better be going. Long trip planned for tomorrow, a hunt down at Ramleh.”

  Bloomberg didn’t respond in kind; instead he turned his palms upward to reveal their yellow and white paint stains.

  “Looks as if my wife got fed up preparing for the Sabbath.”

  Did Ross redden? It was hard to tell; his thin face appeared to carry a permanent sunburn.

  After a moment’s silence Ross began to speak again, his voice measured and constant. “We chase jackal, if you can believe it. Had almost fifty mounted last time out.”

  Ross would have continued but Bloomberg cut him short. “How old is Captain Kirsch?”

  “Kirsch? Mid-twenties, I should think. He’s a good chap.” Ross almost swallowed the last words and they emerged in a whisper.

  “I’m sure he is,” Bloomberg replied, then added, as if in an afterthought for himself, “I’m not.”

  13.

  Kirsch and Joyce left the motorbike at the foot of a valley whose edge was notched by a fingerlike spur; then they ascended on foot into the forest, or what was left of it. The Turks had destroyed great swathes, Kirsch explained. So much so that when Ross refurbished the governorate he’d had to import the necessary wood from India. Still, Kirsch knew a thickly wooded area of scented pines higher up—he’d been out there to pick mushrooms in the spring, a Sunday tour organized by Mrs. Bentwich, the wife of the attorney general.

  Kirsch felt he was talking too much, prattling again. But he couldn’t stop. His body was still recovering from the conditioned intimacy of the bike ride.

  When they stepped off a dusty clay path and into shade Joyce removed her red kerchief and shook her hair loose. There was a light, pleasant breeze, but hardly enough to disturb the tops of the trees. Her loose-fitting white cotton dress, gathered slightly at the hips, short-sleeved and calf-length, had been entirely inappropriate for the back of a motorbike. Still, when Kirsch had seen her—by chance, he said—as she was passing the sun clock on Jaffa Road, there had hardly been time to go home and change.

  “Will he be wondering where you are?” Kirsch felt ashamed that he couldn’t bring himself to mention Bloomberg by name.

  “I doubt it. Although Mark’s not entirely without concern in that area. If I’m not around, who can he . . .” Joyce paused; she was going to say “torture” but settled on the milder “tease.”

  Kirsch scaled a rocky elevation, then extended his hand to pull Joyce up. There was no view to speak of, only the encircling gray-green trunks of a pine copse.

  They sat side by side on a flat boulder.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Later,” she said.

  Kirsch had already reached for the box in the top pocket of his tunic, but now he simply patted his shirt, as if he were frisking a suspect for hidden weapons.

  He was going to ask her if she missed England, or missed New York. He was going to urge her to tell him everything about her relationship with Bloomberg, from how they had met to the current situation. He was going to tell her something about himself, something that, without seeming prideful, might cast him in an appealing light; but he didn’t say anything because he was kissing her. Afterward he wasn’t sure if she had reached up to pull his head toward hers, or if he had made the first move. If the latter, he thought, it wasn’t him, but rather the heavy fragrant air pushing on the back of his neck like an invisibl
e hand. For a few seconds her tongue worked furiously in his mouth, while he felt his own move slow and with adolescent clumsiness. Her body tensed, and then she withdrew from his clinch.

  Joyce sat expressionless, staring ahead, as if nothing had passed between them except an exchange of small talk. The peculiar, and wretched, thought entered Kirsch’s mind that if they were in England he might, at this point, have apologized.

  “I met Mark,” Joyce began, as if in answer to one of the questions that Kirsch had considered but not asked, “on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d only been in London a month and I was staying with a friend of my father’s, Felix Shubert, an art dealer. He was trying, without success, I’m afraid, to sell two of Mark’s paintings. I suppose I had then a flair for the dramatic, by British standards anyway. I was wearing this cherry red dress and a black cape.”

  Joyce turned to Kirsch and smiled. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “I’m one of those cursed people who have a little talent in a number of areas but not enough concentrated in any one. In New York I began as a dancer, then I studied piano. In Paris I tried to go back to dance but it was too late. By the time I got to London I had decided that art was my calling. I spent my month at the Shuberts’ creating a portfolio of still lifes and line drawings. I planned to enroll at the Slade, if they would take me.”

  Kirsch reached for his cigarettes. The kiss, if it had happened at all, might have taken place a hundred years ago.

  “Shubert tried to put me off. Too many impoverished artists had passed his way. When we bumped into Mark that day he tried to drag him on the bandwagon. ‘Help me dissuade Miss Pierce here from painting as an objective—tell her there’s no money in it.’ I found this patronizing. I said, ‘I’m not interested in money—I’m interested in painting.’ Mark wouldn’t give Shubert what he wanted. He said, ‘If Miss Pierce is interested in painting and she’s not interested in money, then I’m interested in Miss Pierce.’ That was the beginning. He invited me to visit his studio, only it was hardly a studio. More of a kitchen. And I liked him ever so much, you know. He’s handsome, you can see that; his eyes are very gentle. There had been a lot of women before me. And everyone admired his work. He didn’t compromise. I’d never met anybody else as driven as I was—but for him it was all in one direction. In his studio there was a painting that covered the whole wall. I’d never seen anything quite like it. He’d taken a scene from the immigrant world, a ship disgorging its new arrivals at London Docks, but made it intensely modern. There was no sentimentality in the representation, everything was oblique, spare figures and wild color. I was utterly moved. The studio was so small that Mark’s paintings took over the whole space. You couldn’t escape, but you didn’t want to.”