Tanner's Virgin (8 page)

I made them check it again, and they came up with the same figure. It was hard to believe that I had given so much money away in so short a time. There are a countless number of very good causes which I support, and it looked as though I had been supporting them even more munificently than I had realized.

“I thought there was more,” I said.

“If Monsieur desires an accounting—”

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “I trust you.” That didn't sound right, and the manager looked very unhappy. “I mean I must have forgotten to carry,” I said. “When I was subtracting. Something like that.”

“But of course,” he said, doubtfully.

“I'll have to get more to put in. As soon as I find Phaedra and get back from—” I realized suddenly that I was running off at the mouth. “—from wherever I'm going,” I finished.

I didn't want to close the account. I withdrew three thousand dollars in American funds, leaving so little that the bank obviously was only continuing to serve me out of a sense of noblesse oblige. I changed some
of the dollars into Swiss francs and some into British pounds, and on a hunch I bought a couple hundred dollars' worth of gold from a wholesale jeweler on the Hirschengraben.

I killed time at a movie. I had already entered the theater before finding out that the film was one of those I had seen at Portsmouth, the Great Train Robbery thing, with all of the voices dubbed in German. The ending remained the same. Goddamned Scotland Yard caught the lot of them.

I took a taxi to the airport. I couldn't go home and I couldn't go back to England. I couldn't go to Kabul because the spies would tear me apart. I couldn't go to India or Pakistan because it would cost too much. I had only three thousand dollars and that would be barely enough to buy Phaedra's freedom. I couldn't go to Iran because the only direct flights went through either Athens or Istanbul, and I couldn't go to Athens or Istanbul for political reasons. I probably could have gone to Baghdad, but I wasn't sure how seriously the Iraqis took my involvement with the Kurdish rebels. I probably could have gone to Amman, unless the Jordanians knew me as a member of the Stern Gang.

I felt like Philip Nolan, the man without a country. I felt like a displaced person, a refugee, homeless, unwanted—

So where I went was Tel Aviv.

T
ourists entering Israel
had their passports checked at length. Their luggage, too, received careful scrutiny. I had no way of knowing whether this was a matter of routine or if the inspectors had been tipped off to some special circumstances, but it was obvious in any event that M. Paul Mornay's Belgian passport would not get me into the Promised Land.

So Paul Mornay left the tourist line and joined another line composed of those planning to immigrate permanently to Israel, and in this line his passport did not receive a second glance. In Hebrew I told the attendant I was fulfilling my lifelong dream of returning to the homeland of my people. In Hebrew he told me that I would indeed be welcome. “You already speak the language,” he said. “That will be of great value to you. And it encourages us to welcome newcomers from Europe. The country is drowning in a sea of Sephardim. And a sea of paper—consider the cursed forms we must fill out! But I shall gladly help you.”

He gladly helped me, and in short order M. Paul Mornay had filed his preliminary applications for Israeli citizenship, stating that he was a Jew and had a Jewish mother, this last being Israel's
sine qua non
of
Hebritude. “So you see that we are stricter than Hitler,” the immigration officer joked. “With just one Jewish grandparent one could be admitted to Auschwitz, but one must have a Jewish mother to enter Israel.”

I've no idea whether the real Paul Mornay,
aliveh sholem,
had a Jewish mother. Neither of my own parents were Jewish, although I do remember dimly that a sister of my father's had married a man named Moritz Steinhardt, at which point the rest of the family ceased speaking with her. I have never been wholly certain whether she was ostracized because her husband was Jewish or German.

But as I filled out the immigration forms I felt a sudden bond of kinship with Minna's little friend Miguel. He stayed home on Jewish holidays, and I was a member of the Stern Gang and a citizen-to-be of Eretz Yisroel. As the rye bread advertisements put it, you don't
have
to be Jewish.

 

I stood at the window of Gershon's apartment and looked out at downtown Tel Aviv. “Many Americans compare our city to San Francisco,” Gershon said, “but I have never been there. Do you notice the resemblance?”

I did now. In the taxi from the airport, I could think only that the driver punished his cab like a New Yorker.

“I have spoken to Zvi,” Gershon went on. “You recall that he was with us in Prague when we first met you, Evan. He must stop at synagogue for his father's
yahrzeit
but will be over later. You remember also Ari and Haim?”

“Yes.”

“Haim is with the Army in Sinai. It is months since I have seen him. And Ari. When you saw him, he still had both his legs. He lost one in the June war. His jeep took a direct hit, he was lucky to live at all. So now he has an administrative job in Hebron. A desk job, preparing orders for the management of the new lands of Greater Israel. It is no fun for him, as you can imagine. But there is talk of his running for a seat in the Knesset in the next elections. A wooden leg will produce almost as many votes in Israeli politics as a wooden head.”

“In American politics, too.”

“I have heard this.” Gershon ran a hand through his thick black curls. “So much for old times. Zvi you will soon meet again, and the others must wait until your next visit. But you must be starving. I have an Arab girl who comes in twice a week to clean. She comes tomorrow, which accounts for the appearance of this apartment.” He shrugged. “But I must do my own cooking, and my skills in that area limit me to sandwiches. Are you a very close observer of the dietary laws, Evan?”

“Not really.”

“A bit of butter on a meat sandwich—”

“Would not bother me at all.”

“Thank God,” Gershon said. He returned from the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches on thinly sliced dark rye. I took a bite and looked at him.

“Zebra sandwiches, Evan. You have probably not had anything of the sort in America.”

“Never.”

“The flesh of the zebra is virtually unknown outside of Israel. It is said that zebra tastes remarkably like the flesh of the prohibited swine, yet the zebra parteth
the hoof in obedience to the Mosaic injunction. These sandwiches, for example, may taste rather like ham sandwiches.”

“There is a remarkable resemblance.”

“The zebra is a heaven-sent animal.” Gershon's eyes shone. “For example, a portion of his flesh when fried is an exceptionally good accompaniment to eggs for breakfast. They say that it tastes much like bacon, but of course I have no basis for comparison.”

I finished one of the sandwiches. “The, uh, zebras,” I said. “Are they imported?”

“Oh, no. The raising of zebras is a native Israeli industry. Yet perhaps because the breeders wish to protect their secrets, one rarely actually sees these fine black-and-white striped animals anywhere in the nation. However, on a drive through the countryside one might hear their characteristic cry from within one of their pens.”

“What sound do zebras make?”

“Oink,” Gershon said. “Ah, Evan, my comrade, one requires a Talmudic turn of mind to contend with life in modern Israel. Between the theocracy and the round-shouldered ghetto dwellers and the lice-ridden Sephardim, one has one's hands full in letting the country take her place among the nations of the world. Do you know that there are fools who would return Sinai to Nasser and the Golan Heights to Syria? There are even those who would give back Jerusalem to Hussein. But not a square foot of territory shall be returned.”

“There is talk that Sinai and the west bank of the Jordan might be given back as part of a peace settlement,” I said.

“Peace?” Gershon sighed heavily. “Peace,” he said. “Peace is a bottle of beer, Evan.” This statement confused me until a while later, after Zvi had joined us, Gershon served us some local beer. The brand name was Shalom. “We have no need of peace, Evan. In what sort of war does the victor make concessions to the vanquished? Almost a year and a half ago, in June, after years of provocation, the Arab attack was crushed in a lightning war of six days. Now the deserts shall bloom and we shall have renewed living space for the Jews of the world who will return to their homeland. Who can even speak of peace? Every day there are new border incidents. The people grow strong with victory. They have a sense of their historic mission….”

The mind plays tricks, translating phrases from one language to another. Lightning war becomes
blitzkrieg,
living space metamorphoses into
lebensraum.
I remembered the Sternist oath I had sworn in a cold-water flat on Attorney Street, pledging to work for the restoration of Israel to its historic boundaries from Dan to Beersheba on both sides of the Jordan. The language of the oath, I realized, was somewhat inconclusive; Dan and Beersheba set the north-south limits, but just how far “Greater Israel” might extend east and west of the Jordan was subject to varying interpretation.

Unwelcome thoughts. I bit deeply into my zebra sandwich, chewed, swallowed. And, when Gershon paused, I began to talk about Afghanistan and a girl named Deborah Horowitz.

I went over the story a second time when Zvi joined us. The tale of Phaedra's fate could not have had a more appreciative audience. A nice Jewish girl kidnaped by
Arabs. I explained that the Afghans were not Arabs. But they were Moslems, were they not? I admitted that they were. Moslems, Arabs, it was the same thing, was it not? Well, I said, one could stretch a point. Zvi cited the commandment in the Torah that the Daughters of Israel should not prostitute themselves. This sidetracked Gershon momentarily; he began reminiscing about a Yemenite immigrant in Jaffa, a hooker with almost unbelievable muscular control. Zvi glanced sharply at him and he abandoned the subject in midsentence.

“We will go with you,” Zvi said, firmly. “We will rescue this Deborah and return her to the land of her forefathers. We shall lead her out of the land of Afghanistan, out of the house of bondage.”

The thought was a tempting one. I extended the metaphor mentally and imagined the waters parting so that Zvi and Gershon and Phaedra and I might cross the Arabian Sea on dry land.

“You have work here,” I said. “And the rescue of Deborah may be accomplished with little difficulty.” I wished I believed this. “I need only to get from here to Jordan. Then I will be able to proceed by myself.”

“Ah. You wish to enter Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“But this will be no problem for you, will it, Evan?” Zvi smiled. “You are an American and can enter Jordan at will.”

Gershon said, “But he has been to Israel. Will Hussein admit him?”

“Perhaps. The Egyptians are stricter about that sort of thing, of course, but the Jordanians—”

I cut in, explaining that I didn't happen to have an
American passport handy, and couldn't enter Jordan with it if I did. I would have to slip across the border. “I suppose this would have been easier before the war,” I added, “when the Jordanians held the west bank. But if you could tell me the best place to cross—”

The two exchanged glances. Zvi said something to Gershon about the absolute secrecy of their mission, and Gershon pointed out that I was a loyal Sternist and had performed great service in Czechoslovakia, not to mention my generous financial gifts to the organization. Zvi thought this over and decided in my favor.

“We will be part of a group crossing the border tonight,” he said. “It is possible that you could join us.”

“I am grateful.”

“It will be necessary for you to dress as an Arab. We can provide suitable clothing, but it would be advantageous if you could learn a few words of Arabic in the hours that remain.”

I said in Arabic that this would present little difficulty. Zvi raised an eyebrow. “Next you will tell us that you can ride a camel.”

“I will tell you no such thing.”

“Ah. But you will learn. We drive east to Rammun. Do you know it? It is not far from Jericho, but Joshua did not level its walls and so it is less well known. A small old town, most of it abandoned when the Jordanians withdrew across the river. Our camels are waiting there.”

I
n the seventeenth century
an Afghan nobleman named Ali Mardan Khan demonstrated his public spirit by raising national monuments of one sort or another in and around Kabul. The greatest of these was an arcaded and roofed bazaar called Chihâr Châtâ. Its four arms had an aggregate length of about 600 feet, with a breadth of about thirty. Kabul is a beautifully situated city to begin with, nestled among the mountains with peaks rising on three sides of the city. It is a city of striking architecture, and Chihâr Châtâ, it would seem, was something rather extraordinary.

In 1842 a British general named Pollock evacuated Kabul. On the way out he leveled Chihâr Châtâ to punish the city for its treachery. Leveled it. Knocked the whole thing down, that is, so that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't.

I couldn't really blame General Pollock. Kabul was that kind of a town. Treacherous.

By the time I had been in the city for all of twenty-one hours, they had made three attempts on my life.

That's treacherous.

 

But wait a minute—wasn't he in Israel a minute ago? Something about getting on a camel?

True. Except that it wasn't a minute ago, really, but several weeks ago, and since that camel (and if you have never ridden a camel you cannot possibly know how bad they are) there had been donkeys and mules and broken-down cars and a truck and a lot of walking and, all in all, an almost incredible spate of boredom. Well, not boredom, exactly. It wasn't boring sitting around a mountain campfire with a band of Kurdish rebels. It wasn't boring at a village a few miles from Teheran, eating sheep's bladder stuffed with cracked wheat and almonds and apricots, which is at least a thousand times better than it sounds. The mountain views through Afghan Turkistan were never boring, nor were the languages (some new, some half-known) or the people.

It was just such a grind. I kept on the move constantly and I just couldn't find any real way to speed things up. The distances were great, the roads fairly primitive, and my own lack of valid papers kept me away from main roads and speedier methods of transportation.

So it took a while. It took more time to live through than it does to put down a quick summary of what happened. What happened was that virtually nothing happened, and I stayed alive and wound up in Kabul, and all of a sudden the rest of the world decided I had lived too long and to too little purpose and did what it could to change all that.

I reached the outskirts of Kabul after nightfall, and it was another hour by the time I got as far as the center of town. I stopped at a coffeehouse, where an old man
with a wispy beard and stainless steel teeth was playing an instrument that was a cross between an oud and a round-backed mandolin. I had a cup of coffee—very thick, very bitter—and a pilaf of cracked wheat and currants. I kibitzed a backgammon game, had another cup of coffee, and asked a fellow kibitzer if he knew a man named Amanullah.

“I know Amanullah the Seller of Fish, and Amanullah the Son of Hadi of the Book Stall.”

“Perhaps he means Amanullah of the Lamps and Old Artifacts,” one of the players suggested.

“Or Amanullah Who Has But One Eye. Is this the Amanullah you seek,
kâzzih?
”

Amanullah, it seemed, was as rare in Afghanistan as flies in a latrine. Kabul was positively buzzing with Amanullahs. I explained rather haltingly, which is the only way I've ever learned to speak Pushtu (also known as Pakhsto and Pakkhto and Pashto). It is the language of the Afghans, and it is one of those unnecessarily complex Asian tongues to which I attribute the illiteracy of such a large portion of the population. Of course they can't read and write. There are thirty-seven classes of verbs, thirteen intransitive and twenty-four transitive. No one should have to contend with that sort of nonsense.

Well. What I explained haltingly was that I had traveled upon a journey of many miles in search of a man named Amanullah whom I had never met and whose likeness I had never seen.

“I know not the name of his father,” I said. “Amanullah is a large man with white hair, long white hair. He is a seller of slaves.”

“Ah,” said the kibitzer, thoughtfully. “Amanullah of the White Hair.”

“Amanullah of the Selling of the Slaves,” said the backgammon player.

“Do you know where I may find him?”

“I know of no such man,” said the kibitzer.

“He is unknown to me,” said the other one.

I had always wondered where the old vaudeville acts went when the Orpheum circuit dried up. I went back to my own table and had another cup of coffee. Then I left a few copper coins on the table and went outside, and as I was slipping my little change purse back into the folds of this robelike Afghan garment I was wearing, it fell to the ground. The change purse, not the garment.

So I bent down to get it, and my turban blew off.

That seemed silly. There was hardly any wind at all, surely not enough wind to blow a turban off somebody's head. I said, “What the hell?” which probably means nothing at all in Pushtu, and I turned around and picked up the turban, and there was a dagger sticking in it.

If I hadn't dropped the change purse, the dagger would have landed in the small of my back or thereabouts.

I looked around and didn't see anyone. I looked at the dagger again to make sure it was still there, and it was. I was suddenly reminded of all those terrible movie bits where a guy walks into a bar in Boston and asks questions about a man named Kyriatos, then gets on a jet to St. Louis and charters a private plane to the Sun Valley slopes. Halfway up the ski lift somebody
sticks an automatic in his back and a voice says, “I am Kyriatos. What do you want with me?”

I'd always objected to that sort of garbage in the movies. But here I had gone into a coffeehouse and asked some dumb questions about Amanullah, whom evidently no one had ever heard of and cared not at all about, and then I took three steps out the door and somebody put a dagger in my turban.

It couldn't be connected, I decided. That was the trouble with secret agentry as a career. It fostered paranoia. After a few years in the field you couldn't get mugged by a junkie without reading international intrigue into the affair. Every penny-ante burglar who knocked over your apartment took on the trappings of a spy searching for mysterious documents. Obviously some Afghan lowlife had tried to do me in for the purse I had just dropped. Or, if you prefer, some ardent nationalist had tried to do to me what he had just heard me doing to his language. But none of this, obviously, had anything whatsoever to do with Phaedra Harrow or Amanullah of the White Hair.

I removed the dagger from my turban and found a place for it in my robe. It was a very impressive affair, that dagger. The handle was some sort of bone with an elaborate inlay of mother-of-pearl. The blade was of fine steel with a geometrical pattern etched on either side. It was the sort of weapon that used to be found in English gentlemen in very early Agatha Christie novels.

The idea of resuming my search for Amanullah made me a little nervous at first. But I told myself I was being silly, and after telling myself this for a few
minutes I began to believe it, and off I went on the trail of Amanullah of the White Hair.

The next few hours produced a few offers of slaves for sale and very little else. Slavery, I learned, is illegal in Afghanistan, just as off-track betting on horse races is illegal in the United States. From what I could see, it was about as hard to purchase a slave in Kabul as it was to get a bet down in Manhattan. Perhaps it was even easier, because the slave-selling business seemed more competitive than bookmaking. I kept shuffling around asking for Amanullah the Slave Trader, and I kept finding myself referred to other men with slaves for sale who did not, sad to say, happen to be Amanullah.

Kabul gets very quiet between midnight and dawn. Almost everything closes and the streets are empty. There was a cold dry wind blowing down from the north, and I spent the early hours of the morning huddled in the doorway of a saddler's shop, trying to get warm and organize my thoughts. The one was as hard as the other.

The sun came up in a hurry. I shook the dust out of my robes and resumed wandering through Kabul, asking more questions, nibbling dough cakes here, sipping coffee there, and gradually finding my way to the oldest section of the city. The streets were extremely narrow, with the huts on either side taking up where the street left off. Motor vehicles could not negotiate those streets. Heavy-boned Afghan work horses and little Persian donkeys plodded patiently through the streets. The air was heavy with an air pollution centuries older than carbon monoxide. The sun rose higher in the sky,
and the heat, trapped by the too-close huts and shacks, became oppressive.

And in the early afternoon a sidewalk vendor of doubtful sausages closed his good eye a moment in thought, stroked his beard with tobacco-stained fingers, opened his eye again, and nodded pensively at me. “A great man with white hair that hangs to his shoulders,” he said. “A man with a furious appetite, a man who eats day and night and whose belly would press through his robes if it could. A man who deals with the foreigners, with the men of Europe and India and with the sons of Han from the Chinese hills, purchasing women from them and placing them in houses in the countryside where the miners use them as
maradóosh.
Is this the Amanullah you seek,
kâzzih?
”

“It is, old one.”

“He is the brother of the husband of the sister of my wife.”

“Ah.”

“You have business with him,
kâzzih?
You have women to sell?”

“I have business with Amanullah.”

“By your accent you have come on a journey of many miles. You are an Afghan?”

“My mother was an Afghan.”

“Ah. If you go to the Café of the Four Sisters,
kâzzih,
you find him there. Amanullah. You tell him you bear good wishes of Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. May your business prosper,
kâzzih.
”

“May your road run downhill and the wind be at your back, Tarsheen.”

“Blessings attend you,
kâzzih.
”

 

The Café of the Four Sisters was a little wineshop deep in the heart of the old part of town. Two of the sisters passed among customers seated on cut-down wine barrels. One brought me a glass of sweet white wine. If all Afghan women looked like the two sisters, I could understand why Amanullah's business was prosperous. I couldn't remember ever seeing a more unspeakably ugly woman.

Unspeakable or not, I spoke to her. I asked for Amanullah and was pleased to note that she knew precisely whom I meant. We didn't even go through the vaudeville routine aimed at defining precisely which Amanullah I had in mind.

“He comes here every day,
kâzzih.
”

“Is he here now, then?” I had seen no one who fit the description.

“Ah, but he is gone.”

“He returns soon?” There is, incidentally, no future tense in Pushtu, which is why the conversations reported up to now have been somewhat stilted. Just a present tense and an imperfect tense. The present is used to convey present time and all future and conditional time. The imperfect covers all past time. “He comes again to the café this afternoon?”

“It is said that he goes on business to the west. He returns by nightfall, but if he stops here for wine I know not.”

“I thank you, sister.”

I set my wine glass down. Someone brushed my table and nearly knocked it over. I rescued the glass, raised it, set it down untasted. Something struck a chord in my
mind but I couldn't pick out the notes. That man who had passed my table—

I got up, glanced around for him. He was just leaving the café. I followed him out, lost him in the crowd. I caught a glimpse of his small eyes and spade-shaped black beard and then he was gone.

I returned to the café. In the corner an old man was coughing violently, pounding the earthen floor with his fists. His face had a bluish cast to it and he seemed to be dying of something. A few of his friends were clustered around him. The rest of the drinkers ignored him.

I got back to my table, but my wine glass was gone. I decided that the waitress must have picked it up, and I remembered how cloyingly sweet the wine had been and decided I didn't want any more anyway.

On the way out the door I heard the death rattle in the old man's throat.

 

The third time was the charm.

I don't really think anyone would have figured it out on the basis of a simple dagger through the turban. I suppose, though, that I should have gotten the message in the Café of the Four Sisters. My own wine glass gone, an old wino coughing himself to death, a man who looked familiar passing my table and almost spilling my wine—I guess anyone with half a brain would have figured out that the man with the spade-shaped beard had put some poison in my glass, which the other man had cadged when I ducked out of the café. If I had read it all somewhere I'm sure I would have figured it out for myself, but instead I was living through it, and it's always harder that way.

If nothing else, I was certain that I didn't know anybody in Afghanistan. I know people almost everywhere, and on the whole I found it quite remarkable that I didn't know anybody in Afghanistan, since a friend in need in Kabul would have been a friend indeed, indeed. And if no one knew me, there would be no reason for anyone to be putting daggers in my turban or poison in my wine.

I went back to the Café of the Four Sisters a couple of times in the course of the afternoon. Amanullah never did get there. I spent the rest of my time sort of wandering around and getting the feel of the city. It was what guidebooks call a study in contrasts, with broad avenues as wide as the streets of the old quarter were narrow. There were a few foreigners in the city, most of them Pakistanis from Kashmir, a few Russian types of one sort or another. Mostly, though, there were Afghans, and most of them were dressed more or less as I was—leather sandals, a loose-fitting robe more like an ancient Roman toga than anything else, and a sort of turban.