Mr. Mani (23 page)

—I don't believe, sir, that he's partial to anything in particular, whatever's available will do ... Well, that evening the first sergeant relayed an order for us four advocates to remain after work, and after a while Major Clark appeared, all bleary-eyed from drink and the day's intrigues; his little squint was gone, and he was wearing his dress uniform with the brass all polished and the decorations agleam. I could see at once that he had vanquished the brigadier and received leave to attend his own wedding, and I knew he would never be back in the Orient, since his future father-in-law had landed him a plum on the general staff to make sure he didn't fly the nest again now that it was properly feathered. And so he sat the four of us down with the Handbook of Wartime Jurisprudence and the secret file in front of him, speaking to all of us but looking only at me, because he knew his man and realized that for the past twenty-four hours I had been preparing myself for the case. First he told us about his adventures that day and about his tilt with the brigadier, and then he said to me: “And you, my dear Ikey, shall make this Jew your business, just don't forget whose side you're on; I want a proper investigation, and a proper indictment, and death, because that's what the law calls for and what divisional headquarters expects, seeing that this blighter is responsible for the loss of lives and artillery across the Jordan. You're the very man to do the job quickly and smoothly, since who could deny satisfaction to a Jew asking for another Jew's head? By Jove, it should be a special treat...”

—Yes, sir. Those were his words A special treat.

—That's just his manner, sir. I've never taken it to heart, sir. I've served with Major Clark for over a year now, first in France and then here, and there isn't a more likable, decent chap anywhere, even if he has a sharp tongue. And his anti-Semitism is the most natural thing in the world; I mean, it's all a parcel with his views on women and horses, which are very solid indeed and have survived their encounter with the facts with hardly a scratch. But he wouldn't harm a fly and in fact there's no greater gentleman ... Well, sir, we all drank to his health and went our ways, and I went mine firmly gripping the file as though it were a most wonderful book that I was about both to read and to write. I couldn't wait to talk to the prisoner, who was mine now, all mine'... I knew he was still putting up a brave front and admitting nothing, and no sooner had Major Clark left the room than I was out in the wet, lonely night, heading for the guardhouse. It was nearly midnight; the melting snow was trickling underfoot; a huge moon buzzed down above the city walls as if it were being hauled in on a kite string; and suddenly, as I was crossing the walled city in utter silence from the Damascus to the Jaffa Gate, I heard a snuffling and a tinkling of bells; and a shepherdless flock of black goats came charging out of a lane in such a dark frenzy that they might have been a pack of devils looking for the Archfiend himself, and vanished down another lane and were swallowed up by the cobblestones. The church bells were ringing away, and there was a smell of freshly baked bread, and I was actually trembling with desire to begin, already haunted by the momentous feeling that has gripped me, waking and sleeping, for the past five weeks ... and which, Colonel, is the reason I'm here now, tiring you without getting to the point, because the story keeps coming between us, and I'm afraid I may already have tried your patience too far...

—That's very kind of you, sir. And so I climbed the stairs of the tower that the Jews call the Tower of David and the Arabs el-Kal'a; and I woke the sergeants and the duty officer and showed them the file and my authorization to conduct the investigation, which from now on I was to be in sole charge of; and I instructed them to let no one near the prisoner except by my express permission. Then I was taken to the cell block, past four hundred years of Turkish rule to a dungeon, a sort of round pit encircled by a walkway, in which our prisoner, the defendant, had been put like some sort of dangerous snake or panther, although in fact, in his black suit he looked more like a buzzard. He was seated on an army cot and reading a book by candlelight, a hard look on his gaunt, lined face; reading as though reluctantly, with the book half-pushed away from him. It was a Bible with both Testaments that an evangelical old officer of the guards, thinking him as good as hung already, had given him for his soul. He was so absorbed in his defiant, his recalcitrant reading that he didn't notice me looking down on him from above—not even when, like an actor on stage, he let the book drop, blew out the candle, cast himself down on the cot, curled up like a baby buzzard, and shut his eyes. My first thought was to let him be until morning while I studied the file and planned my attack; but the more I looked at him, the more something told me that unless I pressed ahead that very night, I would never get a confession out of him; no, the more time I let pass, the more tightly he would weave the tissue of lies he had cocooned himself in. And so I asked for a room and a pot of coffee and sat down to read the file and put my thoughts in order, and at 2
A.M
. I returned to him. It was very cold down there. I removed his blanket and touched him; and he opened his eyes, which were so big and pure and young-looking that you could see they hadn't been made by whoever had made the rest of him; and I started speaking quickly and gently right into his dreams, casting a fine net to trap the fish of truth in its muddy swamp; while he, confused and tired though he was, in fact, thoroughly dejected, did his best in that clear Scots brogue you'll hear tomorrow to get a grip on himself and swim clear, carrying on once more about some woman of his behind Turkish lines, as if we were talking, not about villages of fanatically ignorant Mohammedans whose females go veiled and barefoot, but about some town along the Loire in a story by de Maupassant, with pretty young mademoiselles in embroidered aprons waiting for their lovers. And he too, he insisted, had “a ladylove,” although you could tell at a glance that he wasn't a ladies' man but a man of words who couldn't picture the figment of his own imagination; so that had I asked him what the color of his lady's eyes was, he would have marveled that they had any color at all, let alone that he was expected to know it. It was a lie I wasn't having any part of. And yet the less I would hear of it, the more he clung to it, telling me about this woman he had been trysting with for a month, adding embellishments to his own ridiculous yarn that he clearly didn't believe a word of, as if it had taken hold of him and made him its master instead of the other way around; until at last he fell silent, shivering from the cold, and let his ladylove recede back into the mind that had concocted her. At that point, I took him up to the office; I let him warm himself there, made him a cup of hot tea, and introduced myself. “What will it take to make you trust me?” I asked him. He answered that he had a little son whom he hadn't seen for three days and missed terribly; and so I woke three soldiers of the guard, and at 3
A.M
. we set out for one of those new quarters outside the walled city, Abraham's Vineyard was its name, and knocked on a door there. A middle-aged woman in a clean frock, with a rather nice, pleasant face, opened directly, as if she had been waiting for us. When she saw the soldiers she cried a bit; and the man touched her gently and murmured something in Hebrew and hurried up some stairs to a second story; and soon he came back down with a four-year-old child in his arms, a handsome blond boy who looked out of sorts, or perhaps a bit soft in the head. You'll see him in court, sir, tomorrow; I've granted him permission to attend the opening session, because I know that if the defendant had counsel, he would use the child as grounds for clemency...

—Directly, sir.

—Yes, sir.

—No, sir.

—Quite so, sir.

—The point is, sir, that while he was kissing his son I ordered the soldiers to search the house and make sure to go through every drawer and collect every scrap of paper that they found. We sat without a word in the kitchen, the two of us with the boy on his lap, until they finished and came back with a large basket full of papers, after which I told them to sit in the drawing room and had them served tea. Meanwhile, there was already a first purple glow outside, and a few lights came on in the neighborhood, because news had spread of the police. And yet that was the only sign of life there was in that utter, predawn silence. The woman put the boy back to sleep and went to bed herself; and we sat there, the two of us; and I said, “Look, why don't you tell me about it from the beginning, or if you like, from even before that: just who are you?” By then we were both so horribly fagged that only the truth could keep us awake, and that's what he began to tell me while I sat there listening, that was the opening through which I fished his confession. Afterward it was merely a question of dotting the “i's” and crossing the “t's.”

—Thank you, sir. Gladly.

—He is indeed. Born in Jerusalem, as was his father. His grandfather came here as a young man from Greece. Mind you, you don't easily find such Jews, because Jews aren't naturally born in Palestine as Englishmen are in England and Welshmen are in Wales. Most of the Jews you see here are newcomers, and those who are born here usually leave. Dashed few stay on, and those who do are rather highly regarded, more by others, I daresay, than by themselves, which is rather a boost to their self-esteem, although perhaps not as much as all that...

—Right you are, sir. You would think, wouldn't you, that Jerusalem would be for a Jew what London is for an Englishman; but the East End of London has more Jews in it than this entire country. I suppose that's because London is too substantial a place to carry about with you, whereas the Jews take Jerusalem wherever they go, and the more of them take it with them, the lighter it becomes...

—Up to a point, sir, up to a point. It's even true—why deny it?—of my own self. But my home is Manchester and the city of my dreams is London, and even if I have a warm place for this town in my heart, it's for the idea of it, not the reality. It's really quite extraordinary, sir, how, although I've been here for several months, the idea and the reality remain entirely separate.

—I appreciate that, sir ... Well, then: why don't I sketch his biography on a thumbnail. His grandparents came here in the middle of the last century from Salonika, in the days when it was still part of Turkey, a childless couple who hoped that settling in Jerusalem might grant them their prayers for a child. And so it did, and our defendant's father, Moses Hayyim Mani, was conceived to his mother Tamara and his father Joseph Mani, who died before his son was born. Moses Hayyim was raised with no end of love by his mother, and grew up to be such a handsome, captivating lad that the British consul in Jerusalem, who was a neighbor of theirs, took him under his wing. He was a great Bible-reader, this consul, and perhaps it was because he saw in little Moses a metempsychosis of his biblical namesake that he decided to make him a British subject; in any case, for his thirteenth birthday he gave the boy a British passport as a present, which you'll find in this file here, Colonel. It's a rather unusual document, written in an ornate hand such as you never see anymore, with a lovely photograph of a child with the most candid, trusting eyes. It even has a number, and we've cabled London to run it down and see what series it belongs to, because it was not the common practice of British consuls to grant British nationality to children for being adorable ... Be that as it may, however, the boy was pleased as punch to be a British subject and took his gift-wrapped passport with him everywhere, reciting Byron and Shelley and retelling
The Canterbury Tales
amid the pestilent poverty of this city, since his mother made a point of his studying English at a mission school. Then he was sent to Beirut, to study medicine at the American University. He was back within a year, homesick for both mother and Jerusalem; was persuaded to return; somehow—although
just barely, it would seem—persisted in his studies while revisiting Jerusalem every few months; and finally took his mother back to Beirut, where he pressed on doggedly out of loyalty to his patron the consul until, at the age of twenty-seven, he received his medical degree. By now it was time to marry him off before he became a confirmed bachelor—at which point the consul had the idea of finding him a British wife to make him more English than ever. It took a while to locate one; but in the end he hit upon another orphan, a woman slightly older than Mani, who was descended from an Anglo-Jewish family that had made a living as camp followers of Napoleon's army until the Egyptian Campaign, when it was taken prisoner by the Turks, from whom the French forgot to ransom it. Eventually, it ransomed itself and stayed on in the Orient; and so, in 1880, the two of them were wed. They had a baby girl who died directly after childbirth, and then a second girl who died, and then a boy, all because of incompatible blood; and indeed, when our defendant came along in 1887, he seemed of a mind to die too; but this time the Manis put their foot down; they fought day and night to save him until he had no choice but to live; and two years later a sister was born who survived too. By now the doctor had been through so many postnatal crises that it occurred to him to open a small lying-in hospital of his own—and so in the early 1890s, when Jews began building outside the walled city, he bought the house in Abraham's Vineyard; found a tough old Swedish woman, an old maid from Malmo who had come to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage, failed to find God, and taken up free thought and midwivery; installed some beds; and ordered the latest equipment from France, including a large mirror in which the mothers could watch themselves giving birth. Then he sat back and waited for the fair sex of Jerusalem to knock at his gate. At first he got only the fallen ones: women of ill repute, compromised young ladies, nuns in the family way, pilgrimesses of dubious virtue. The Swedish midwife, who was quite cunning and resourceful, delivered each of them with hardly a labor pain, as if she took it all upon herself, and after a while Dr. Mani's surgery developed such a reputation that mothers-to-be began flocking to it from all over. Our defendant's father became rather the man-about-town: a debonair charmer, popular with the ladies and well liked by everyone; an excellent host, much-sought-after guest, and honorable member of sundry deputations. At about this time he became an ardent Zionist and admirer of Dr. Herzl, appointed himself a delegate to all the Zionist congresses, and left the trusty Swede to mind the shop, arriving only at the last minute even if he was in Jerusalem, just in time to give the bawling baby a cheery slap on the back, joke with its mother, snip the umbilical cord, remove the afterbirth, and help decide on a name. His own mother, to whom he was unfailingly gallant, was always at his side, putting his wife in her shadow, while the little boy and his sister ran about among the beds. In the summer of 1899 the doctor went off to one of his congresses in Europe and came back with two Jewish youngsters from a small Polish town near Cracow, a sister and brother. Our defendant remembers them well, although he didn't understand their language. The brother was a doctor, the sister an attractive young woman; Dr. Mani sought to interest the former in his clinic and the latter in himself, since he had fallen madly in love with her as only an older man can with a young girl whom he has not time to court and seeks only to devour. The less devoured she wished to be, the more he dogged her footsteps, and before long all Jerusalem knew of his great passion, since Mani the Elder, unlike Mani the Younger, was not at all diffident about his feelings. It was indeed quite an infamous scandal ... and when the two young Polish Jews made up their minds to return home despite the doctor's pleas that they remain in Jerusalem, he followed them to Jaffa, sailed from there to Beirut with them, and vanished. It took several weeks to discover that he had been killed in a ghastly accident in the railway station. He was fifty years old, and by the time the corpse was identified and brought to Jerusalem for burial, it was autumn.