Zion (11 page)

Ali had Rishou’s Lee-Enfield.

Izzat looked up. “Ah, we have a Hass’an in our midst.” Rishou ignored him. He snatched the rifle from his son’s hands and pulled him to his feet. He propelled him through the mouth of the cave.

Izzat stood up. “Where are you going, brother? Have you not come to join us?”

“I would rather join a troupe of travelling acrobats.”

“Why are you taking Ali? Are you afraid he may become a true Arab?”

“He is already a true Arab. My fear is that if he follows you he will become a true corpse.”

“Anyone who dies a martyr for Islam lives forever in Paradise!” someone shouted.

Rishou turned and faced them. Two dozen pairs of eyes stared back at him, every one of them icy with hate. “He is only just eleven years old!”

“If he is old enough to fight, he is old enough to join the Stragglers,” Izzat said.

“Oh, he is old enough to fight. He is just not old enough yet to recognize the difference between a holy cause and a foolish adventure.”

“You don’t care about us anymore,” someone else said. “You only care about money.”

Rishou turned his back on them and walked away.

Ali thrust out his jaw in a poor attempt at defiance. Rishou held the Lee-Enfield in front of his face. “If you ever take my rifle out of the house again, I shall break off your arm and batter you senseless with the wet end. Is that clear, Ali?”

“I understand,
yaba
.”

Rishou saw the humiliation in the boy’s eyes; also the contempt' “No. You don’t understand anything, Ali. When you do, it will probably be too late.”

Chapter 8

Old City

It was hot in the tiny room, and their bodies were slick with sweat. She lay on top of him, delaying the empty moment of their separation. A droplet of perspiration began its slow march down his cheek and she licked it away.

“I must stop coming here,” she said.

He held a finger to her lips. “Shhh.”

“This is wrong, all wrong. I should never have come back.”

“Just praise God for today.”

So easy for you, she thought. You are only betraying your wife. When I come here I betray a whole nation, not just Asher.

A Shai officer, venturing into the Arab Quarter! If I were captured what secrets could the Arabs wring from me? This is treachery. He’s an Arab, my sworn enemy.

“There is going to be trouble, Rishou. This time it is going to be worse than 1936. Much worse. This is madness.”

“When I was a little boy, Zayyad sent me to the school in the village mosque to learn my Koran. In the second
sura
, Mohammed tells how, you know, it was a Muslim who divided the sea for Moses and saved the Jews from the Pharaoh. It was Muslims who arranged for Moses to meet with Allah on Sinai and receive the Commandments and become People of the Book. In return, he said, the Jews turned everything around, stole our Koran and falsified it, lied about Abraham.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I did then.”

“And now?”

“My father is a wealthy man, by our village’s standards anyway, and he could afford to send me to the Anglican college here in Jerusalem. I formed a different view of the world. But in Rab’allah every Friday our
imam
still describes to us in the mosque how you Jews kill Arab babies and drink their blood.”

“It’s a lie. We only do that on festive occasions.” She rolled away from him. “We are prisoners of the past, all of us. People talk about things that happened thousand years ago as if they were there.”

“But don’t forget, Sarah, if it weren’t for things that happened thousands of years ago, your people could not justify being here. Without the past you Jews would be invaders and warmongers. Like this Hitler you hate so much.”

She had no answer to that. “Do you hate us?”

“I hate the effendis who sold you the land.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Every good Arab should hate the Jews. The Mufti ordered it.”

“That still is no answer.”

His smile was sad. He reached out and stroked her hair. “I would like to hate the Jews. It is my duty. But some of you make it very difficult for me. Now let me ask you a question. Aren’t you supposed to hate the Arabs?”

“I’m not doing a very good job of it, am I?”

He kissed her gently on the forehead. “If only you had been born an Arab.”

“If I had been an Arab I would be in Rab’allah, meekly fetching water from the well, and you’d be here with a feisty Jewish mistress. Wouldn’t you?”

He shrugged. He supposed she was right.

The Al-Rashid was a rundown hotel on the Suq Khan es Zeit. It stood near the seventh station of the Cross, where Christ was supposed to have fallen for the second time.

We all fall, Talbot thought as he hurried inside. But some fall further than others, and with less grace.

In a cafe on the other side of the bazaar a man in a checkered
keffiyeh
watched him go in. A few minutes later Levi Bar-Ayal followed, pausing only to pass the proprietor some Palestine pounds in return for a key.

Majid sat on the bed, smoking a cigarette. He wore a white silk shirt, bright scarlet silk underpants and paisley socks with suspenders. His jacket and trousers hung in the ancient wardrobe. A navy blue and yellow striped tie was draped over the back of the room’s only chair.

The jangle of oriental music filtered in from outside.

Talbot looked around with distaste. The curtains were drawn but he could make out a cockroach frozen in apprehension high on the wall in the corner. There were unidentifiable stains above the bed. He hated himself for coming here. He always promised himself it would never happen again.

“You look nervous, Henry,” Majid said. “Like a cigarette?”

“No thanks,” Talbot said. He went to the window and adjusted the curtains, making sure there were no gaps.

“What’s the matter, old boy?”

If only he wouldn’t talk like that, like a public schoolboy during Fag Week. ‘Nothing.’

He took off his jacket and went to the wardrobe. Majid had appropriated the only hanger for himself. He hesitated, then draped his own jacket over a chair and sat down.

“We haven’t got long,” Majid said. “I have a business meeting at four o’clock.”

“Can we just sit for a while?”

“All right.” He took a packet of Four Square cigarettes from the bedside table and lit two. He kept one for himself and passed the other to Talbot. “You look like you need it.”

It had begun when Majid had worked for him at the house in Talbieh. Majid had proved discreet and Talbot had allowed his lapse to develop into what could only be described as an affair. He was initially relieved when Majid had resigned his post and promised himself he would end this shameful liaison. But he couldn’t.

What if it all came out one day? It had to, surely. But he was powerless to stop this.

God, how I hate myself.

Talbot put his head in his hands. “I think I’m coming apart.”

“What is it, Henry?”

“It’s everything.”

“If you want me to leave I - ”

“No, don’t … don’t go.’

“You’re not making much sense.”

Talbot sat up. His eyes were tired. “Majid, tell me, as an Arab - what do you think of the Jews?”

‘The Jews? Is that what this is about?’

“The Mufti wants them all thrown out of Palestine.”

“That dirty little Arab. We should have hanged him when we had the chance.”

“Well, what do you think of us, the British? Do you think we have betrayed the Jews? Should we have let them come to Palestine, as we promised?”

“Of course you betrayed them. You betrayed everyone!”

Talbot noted how seamlessly Majid switched his allegiance from one moment to another. In one breath he was British; in the next he was an Arab damning them for their perfidy.

“Is this the reason you look like shit, Henry? You think too much.”

“The colonial service has been my life. I always believed that Britain stood for something good, that we were a civilizing force. But now . . . but now I don’t know what to think.”

“You’re getting upset about a few Jews. It’s not worth it.”

“What is worth getting upset about, Majid? What do
you
care about?”

“Myself,” Majid said, with alarming candor.

“There’s something I have never told you. When they hanged your brother I was there. I was ordered to attend the execution by the High Commissioner.”

“I know.”

Talbot stared at him. “You knew?”

“What was there to do? Wagil was always a little simple. What happened was inevitable. I cannot blame you for his stupidity.”

“You really are the most frightful little bastard, aren’t you, Majid?”

“I suppose I am. Now, why don’t you let me help you relax?”

The door burst open and a man in a checkered
keffiyeh
rushed in. He raised a camera and a flashbulb popped. Before Talbot could react the man turned and fled back down the stairs.

Talbot sat up, trembling. “Oh my God.”

Majid smiled in apology. “I’m really very sorry, Henry.”

“What?”

“They made me do it. It was a matter of life and death. May Allah bum me on the Day of the Fire if I lie.”

Talbot walked around the room in a circle, his face white. He clutched his chest. He thought he was going to have a heart attack. “You . . . you arranged . . . this?”

“I did not
want
to.”

Majid got out of bed and started to dress. “I’m afraid someone from the Haganah wants to meet you.”

“The Haganah?”

“They say if you don’t help them, every urchin from Alexandria to Beirut is going to be hawking your picture in the streets as a dirty postcard. They could just be bluffing.”

“You …
fucking
bastard.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Majid said. “But what did you expect?”

When he left Talbot was just sitting there, staring at the wall. The poor man looked like that widow’s son in the village, the one who played with his own droppings. He supposed he had left him in a bit of a fix.

It was Friday evening, the advent of Shabbat, the Jews’ holy day. A wailing rose over the city, the cry of the
shofar
in the synagogues mingled with the call of the
muezzins
and the peeling of bells in the carillons of the churches. Gaberdine-coated Jews hurried to prayer, Franciscan monks in brown habits shuffled in the other direction, heads down, in a bobbing sea of black-and-white-checkered
keffiyehs
.

Well, I don’t have time to join them tonight. I have another master to serve.

May she rot in the fire!

Sarah watched Talbot make his way up the hill from Damascus Gate, a tall figure in a white suit and dark tie, moving with diffident grace. He seemed discomfited by all the jostling, as if he expected the mass should part and move around him. When he reached the coffee house he ducked his head inside the door and looked around, uncertain.

Sarah picked up a packet of Four Square cigarettes and stood them on end on the table in front of her, the prearranged signal. He blinked in surprise. He was probably not expecting a woman.

He made his way over to the table and sat down. He avoided her eyes. “Haganah?” he said.

“Yes. You’re Henry Talbot.”

“Yes,’ he said, staring at the floor. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Such impeccable manners. The serving boy put a small cracked cup in front of him, and filled it with steaming black coffee from a brass
finjan
. He moved away again.

“This is without doubt the most despicable behavior I have ever heard of,” Talbot murmured.

“Is it, Mr. Talbot?”

“I am not proud of what I am. But even I place myself above the level of blackmailers.”

Sarah leaned across the table so that their heads were almost touching. “You pompous English bastard. You people sit in your clubs with your Arab flunkeys serving you gin and tonics and when the real world intrudes you start to rail about civilized behavior! I will tell you what is despicable, Mr. Henry Talbot. What is despicable is the world letting Hitler kill millions of Jews in gas ovens and leaving the rest to rot in camps all over Europe. That is despicable.”