Mr. Mani (26 page)

—Quite so, sir. You see, sir, the captain, who is seventy years old, is an absolute fiend for horses, you'd almost think he were part horse himself. In Midlothian, sir, where he lives, a horse isn't raced without his say-so, and all he lives and breathes for is to breed a better, faster animal that will compete with his colors; his whole life, you might say, has been one long search for the ideal thoroughbred. When war broke out he joined up at once despite his age and was commissioned chief livery officer of the 67th Cavalry; his service in France was spent mostly poking about in stables, and I daresay he thinks the whole war is one colossal derby and can't understand why the jockeys keep shooting at each other. And when all the jockeys had their mounts shot out from under them in Europe and the tanks came to take their place, he was jolly well cheesed-off and ‘eard the East a-callin', and so he signed on with Allenby and sailed across the sea to go on searching for his
equus idealis
among the fabled stallions of Arabia, hoping to find it and ship it back to Midlothian to the astonishment of all his racing mates. He's determined to track it down if it's the last thing he does, and this whole ruddy war, as far as he's concerned, from that duke shot at Sarajevo to the millions who died at Verdun, has been fought solely to transport him to the deserts of Arabia for that purpose. Wherever he goes, commandeering horses and camels for his regiment, he keeps an eye out; and so the minute Beersheba was taken, while the smoke was still rising from the burning houses and the dead and wounded were being gathered, he put on his kilt and went galloping off into the wilderness with his cronies and two interpreters to look for the steed of his dreams...

—Thank you, sir, gladly. A small drop By George, it's raining again! I'm sorry to have to bore you like this, but I had a don at Cambridge who said that God was in the details, and that's so not only when God is an aesthete but when He's a jurist as well. And the details matter here especially, because now is when our defendant links up with His Majesty's forces, and had it not been for Captain Daggett's enthusiasm, he would never have penetrated so quickly to the privy chambers of regimental headquarters...

—Quite so, sir, and without the most cursory check on him. Captain Daggett, you see, had no time for anything but horses; he was charging about from one Bedouin camp to another, rousting out every quadruped with a mane and having them lined up in front of him so that he could look in their mouths and at their fetlocks, and whistle to them with his special Scottish whistle that works on every horse in the world, which answers with a special wiggle of its ears that only Daggett understands, after which he waits for old Dobbin to defecate and sniffs its droppings to know what's inside it.

—By George, sir, I've seen it myself. It's the sort of connoisseurship that borders on madness. And after that he summons the horse's owner to recite its family tree; and his two interpreters—who never recovered from the heatstroke they came down with in Cairo, to which they were whisked straight from Queens College in Oxford, where they studied with dons who had never been east of Magdalen Bridge—are so terrified of him that they forget what little Arabic they know; so that each question he wants to ask the Bedouin calls for a lengthy confab on their part and much leafing through the dictionary, in which they don't even always understand the English; whereupon they stand there working out a final draft in whispers while the Bedouin wait patiently and the gray-haired captain grows flushed with rage; and when at last the magic words are carefully uttered in their atrocious accents, any resemblance between which and the speech of real Arabs is purely accidental, the Bedouin turn crimson and then white with anger; and spitting on the ground, they stalk off, fold their tents, take their horse, take everything, and vanish over the horizon, leaving nothing behind but a whirlpool of dust and two mortified interpreters with no idea what their mistake was...

—Perhaps, Colonel, I have availed myself of poetic license. But it's quite justified to explain our captain's enthusiasm when, on that morning of the first of November, he was approached by Mr. Mani, unshaven and wearing his black suit that was wrinkled from a sleepless night. Mani surveyed our captain, who had just finished circumambulating a horse and was now whistling to it in Scots while waiting for it to drop its turds; looked at the quaking interpreters making gargling noises with their tongues; observed the disheartened Bedouin, who were already resigned to the loss of their mounts; quietly took a few steps forward as his eyes bore into the uniforms, weapons, and bridles of the soldiers, who were the first Englishmen he had ever seen out of mufti; and then opened his mouth and in his best School-of-Bible Scots brogue translated for the captain with utter proficiency an entire discourse on equinology. Little wonder, then, that by late that afternoon Mr. Mani was already well tied to a commandeered horse with which he seemed to form a single creature, surrounded by British cavalry and in a place of honor beside the captain, who regarded him as his personal and heaven-sent savior. That evening in Beersheba he was brought to the house of the Turkish governor, above which the Union Jack was already flying; and there, sir, if I may be permitted a personal note, as I was going about my duty with the adjutants of the brigade, which included packing Turkish documents in boxes, identifying the dead, and covering the wounded so that they might finish dying quietly in the light of the desert sunset; there, among the shying-back horses, I caught my first glimpse of him, freshly untied from his mount: pale, exhausted, old-looking, treading on slivers of glass and empty Turkish cartridges that glowed in the waning sun as he climbed the steps to the governor's house; unlike any Englishman, unlike any Jew, unlike any Arab or Turk, unlike anyone at all, even though he was more of a native than any of them. Was he already thinking of treachery?

—It was the first of November, sir—1917, sir.

—Yes, Colonel.

—No, Colonel.

—Most certainly, Colonel.

—Not yet, sir. From that moment on he became the chief divisional interpreter, and since he could palaver a bit in Turkish too, he soon made himself indispensable. And yet, so he says, the thought of treachery had yet to sprout in him, for the cold, bare kernel that had worked its way into the dark, dry earth still lacked the stimulation of moisture.

—Yes, sir. That's how he put it during one of his interrogation sessions. And that was why he didn't reach for the British passport sewn into the lining of his coat, but rather sardonically told himself, “Aye, the foreigners have come to replace the foreigners.” His mind, sir, was not yet made up. He was still watching silently from the sidelines, trying to puzzle out our intentions. Gaza was ours; the breakthrough was a success; our butting bull, Sir Edmund, spurred the army on northward along the coast, through the fields of Philistia, over sand dunes and swamps, urging it on to Jerusalem in time to make a Christmas gift of the city to Lloyd George and John Bull, because London was famished for a victory that might help it get over the endless slaughter at Verdun, the war being now in its fourth outcomeless winter. Was this the moisture that made the kernel sprout?

—No, sir. At first he was the personal prisoner of the old Scotsman, who hid him in his trailer and ranged back and forth with him between Beersheba and Gaza, looking for his dream horse. By now, though, all of army intelligence had heard of him; and so they commandeered him from old Daggett and put him to work as a translator while the interpreters tagged after him to learn and to marvel; for he was indeed most wonderfully adept at it: the words seemed to translate themselves without even passing through his brain, changing languages in midair, changing grammar, changing intonation, so that the speaker felt that quite miraculously, the unknown language was coming out of his own throat ... Meanwhile, the army flowed like a mighty river up the coast, crumbling the Turkish positions, which were as weak as the sand surrounding them, one after another; one after another, the villages surrendered too; and wherever they went, the military governors took Mani with them to translate their proclamations. Picture him if you can, sir, in our midst, a thin, quiet civilian with glasses and burning eyes; wrapped in his father's already threadbare overcoat and still in shock from the sudden change; cut off from his son and household with no way of informing them of his whereabouts—and yet at the same time, getting to know his native land, even if he was tied to his horse, because he was still in the habit of falling off. There wasn't a village too small or out-of-the-way for him to be brought to, sometimes no more than a few mud huts and tents; and there he would stand, a ruddy little civilian surrounded by officers with their riding crops under their arms, translating their proclamations of occupation and their instructions for curfews to a band of ignorant Arab darkies in peasant cloaks and head cloths—and mind you, doing it so fast that the translation was done before the words were out of the officer's mouth, so that they seemed less a translation than a little speech cooked up on his own whose meaning no one could be sure of. In fact, sir, he might have been taken not so much for an interpreter as for a glum little commissar popping up out of the earth with a military escort to explain the war to the villagers. He would look out at all those Arab faces positively glowing with attention, straining to catch a whiff of the young Jew in his old overcoat surrounded by his train of Englishmen; if the village headsman had a question, he would answer quite firmly at once, adding “It doesn't matter” to any officer wishing to know what had been asked; and if the officer insisted, “But be sure to tell them such-and-such,” he would reply, “I've told them all that's necessary” and give the sign to move on; and off they went to the next village...

—Oh, but he was, sir, he was every bit the martinet. You would have thought the officers were actually afraid of him ... at which point, on the twentieth of November, as Allenby was pushing east toward Jerusalem, he stepped into staff headquarters one night and discovered on the table a telegram from London with news of Lord Balfour's declaration, which quite bowled him over...

—So I should think, sir. It was in the form of a short personal correspondence written by Lord Balfour himself. I've attached it to the brief, just for the record.

—Thrown for a loop by it, sir. He had never expected such a development, you see, and here he was, having been away from home for three weeks, and especially, from his son, whom he was terribly attached to, rolling helplessly along with the British juggernaut thundering across the Holy Land—and all of a sudden, here was this most wonderfully generous proclamation of intent that he had not at all foreseen, although in all fairness, no one else had either. He couldn't sleep at night; the thought of returning to Jerusalem made his blood race; he rose from his bed and roamed about among the horses and the cannon; the rains had set in and cold winds blew; Allenby's army crept slowly up into the mountains of Judea; his father's old overcoat came apart and he was given an army greatcoat and high boots; and before he knew it, he was in the front lines, wearing a strange mishmash of mufti and field uniform, peering through binoculars at forward positions and utterly amazed by the thought that less than a month ago he had surreptitiously set out southward from his native city—and now here he was, about to reenter it from the west with the forces of the world's greatest empire! On the sixth of December, Colonel, he found himself with the infantry in Nebi Samwil, where a fierce skirmish took place, gazing down upon Jerusalem, which struck him as frightfully small, frightfully stubborn and hostile. On the ninth, as you know, the city was taken, and two days later Sir Edmund entered it on foot with his columns behind him. The church bells clanged away; the city elders came out to greet him with bread and salt; our defendant marched into the city with the conquerors, one of a kind among the bagpipes and Aussie hats, peering feverishly at the onlookers; and then, near the Jaffa Gate, he right-faced all on his own and slipped away home, where he arrived as though after a hard day's work and took straight to the quilts and the pillows with his son. For a week he didn't leave the house; he had no friends to tell his adventures to, nor did he say much to his wife; mostly he stared at the windowpane, down which the rain ran in rivers, listening to the boom of the field artillery as Colonel Chatwood beat back a Turkish counterattack and pushed his front line to Ramallah.

—Yes, sir, a bloody fierce counterattack it was too. But I'm sure the brigadier is looking forward to showing you the battleground and explaining his military exploits, and I wouldn't want to steal his thunder, especially since I'm a rank amateur at military strategy and had better get back to our defendant and his story ... And indeed, toward Christmas, sir, the skies cleared, and he went out into the streets for a look at the brave new bedlam of a world. Several buildings had already been appropriated for the military government; barbed wire had been laid all around them; policemen and officials and statesmen and politicians were scurrying everywhere; the Jews were exultant; the Arabs in shock; the rain and fog set in again more strongly than ever, as if our army had brought its own English weather from London; and our Mr. Mani said once more to himself, “Aye, the foreigners have come to replace the foreigners...”

—Quite so, sir. I asked him that over and over. What did he think, a
homo politicus
like himself: that we would conquer Jerusalem, hand the keys of the city over to the natives, and retire with a modest bow?

—Jolly well put, Colonel! Here was the decisive, the fateful moment when the kernel of treachery, which had been slowly working its way down into the darkness, soaked up the sweet liquid trickling toward it through the earth and decomposed all at once, as if dowsed with corrosive acid, into thousands of thin little tendrils, frail, helpless gossamers that would seem to have no future in that heavy soil to all but the most discerning observer, who now notices two cotyledons, one the root's and one the stem's, each pushing greedily, unrestrainedly, off from the other ... Well, sir, he walked into headquarters and was quite merrily hailed by everyone, because in the excitement of battle the trusty interpreter had been forgotten; and then he went straight, sir, to Major Stanford, the chief adjutant of the division, and showed him his British passport. The major inducted him on the spot. He issued him a uniform, a cap, and even an old pistol; added a mess kit and a dogtag; put him down for five pence ha'penny a week; and had our own Major Clark affix his signature on behalf of the advocate-general's corps. And that, sir, was the start of Interpreter Mani's career as a corporal in His Majesty's army...