Arabesque (18 page)

“That is possible, of course, Sheikh Wadiah,” Rains agreed politely.

“Have you a file on her?” asked Abu Tisein.

So crude a reference to his secret files made Rains wince.

“There may be a few details about her on record somewhere,” he admitted.

“They would show you that she is not stupid,” said Nachmias with a melancholy smile.

Wadiah turned his folded hands palms upward, as if offering the whole casket of conversation in order that Rains, out of his exceeding wisdom, might accept and seal it with his last word.

Rains was embarrassed. There was nothing to say. He did not know what Wadiah expected him to say.

“There was once a Pasha in the Lebanon,” began Wadiah smoothly entering the silence before it had time to be a noticeable silence, “who was beloved by all his subjects. What a
man said to him he believed. And if a man swore by God and his Greatness and his Mercy, he believed him all the more; for he was a pious Pasha as well as innocent, and he could not think that men
who must die would take the name of the All-Merciful in vain.

“There came before him,
ya
Abu Tisein, two
mukhtars
, one of a great village and one of a little, who had quarrelled over the rights to a threshing floor. The
mukhtar
of the great village was a man of power and cunning. By God, he was a true leader of his people, and for their sake he knew neither fear nor shame! And he lied boldly before the
Pasha, swearing that the threshing floor was his.

“Then the other
mukhtar
was silent, for he said to himself: ‘If I lie the Pasha will believe me and if I tell the truth he will believe me, and who am I that I should know
whether the truth or a lie is better for my village? Let justice be done to the stronger, that the courts of the Pasha be empty and the country be at peace’.”

Major Rains was startled at a certain frank and disrespectful tone in Wadiah’s voice as he told his obscure anecdote to Abu Tisein. Neither of them, however, showed any change in the
expressions of interest and mild benevolence with which they regarded his desk.

When they had gone, he still puzzled over their motives and their relationship to each other. Had they quarrelled or had they not? And what on earth was the meaning of Wadiah’s parable? He
went on puzzling in the mess, where, he feared, he was thought a dull fellow. But sound. He hoped they admitted he was sound.

Devotion to duty was so easy when it just meant spending long hours in the office; but outside the office he could not stop thinking and thinking and getting nowhere. The Middle East was so full
of subtleties; nobody said what they meant, or meant what they said. And at the end of it all there wasn’t any clear truth to be found. That Pasha, if he ever existed, had saved himself a lot
of trouble.

What was in the mind of Nachmias, of the Herne woman, of Montagne? One kept on putting down headings and subheadings to compel the case into some sort of order, but nothing happened.

He wondered whether the boastful old Wadiah could really tell whether a man was lying or not. Perhaps he could, at any rate with his fellow Lebanese. What a gift to be envied! Or was it? One
might be wrong and disorganise the whole system for the sake of one’s personal flair. It was the system that mattered, not the man—the tried and tested system that carried the lame dog
along.

Rains hoped that the Field Security report, when it came along, would make sense of this case. Guy Furney had suggested that they were likely to produce a convincing explanation, even if they
had no proofs; but Guy had not known the full story. He had already left when Nachmias brought up his rumour against Montagne.

The Field Security report was delivered next day by Captain Wyne in person. Rains considered it most questionable. Without a single proof, on conjecture only, they had built up a case against
David Nachmias. And Nachmias was a trusted agent of G.H.Q. That meant that he, Rains, was in duty bound to send the gist of the accusation to G.H.Q.—and what a rocket he would get back! It
was poor comfort that he could pass the rocket on to Wyne. And there was Wyne, with his damned, lazy, heavy-lidded eyes, watching him read the report as if he knew just what was coming.

“A very clear piece of writing,” said Rains—it was a good army rule always to praise a subordinate when you could—“but you know, Wyne, the only new fact you have
is that this Herne woman won’t say who employed her. Your sergeant believes she was working for Nachmias. Nachmias admits he employed her sometimes, and that he went to see her that Saturday
when your sergeant says he did. But Nachmias seems pretty sure that at Beit Chabab she was working for Montagne. Now what is your own opinion of Montagne?”

“Maddeningly intolerant, of course, but honest as the day.”

“That is not what we have on record. How do you know?”

“Damn it, I lunch with him once a week!”

“But, my dear Wyne, that doesn’t prove anything. Do you realise he might be a communist agent?”

“So might I.”

“But you aren’t, you see.”

“How do you know?”

Rains was conscious of disliking this officer. It was very unusual, to say the least of it, to treat a superior with irony. One learned that as a subaltern. Brains were not everything.

“Have you your sergeant’s original report?”

“Yes, But it won’t do you any good, sir.”

“All the same, I prefer to see things in writing,” answered

Rains sharply.

Major Rains devoted himself to Prayle’s report, complete with coloured chalks and Appendix A. He gave it ten conscientious minutes while Wyne sat opposite to him idly glancing through
files on his desk. Rains preferred—whatever Guy Furney might have allowed—that visiting security officers should ask for any files they needed. He rang for his clerk, and told him to
remove the “out” basket.

“Your men should study the style of the military police,” said Rains at last.

“Yes, they used to at one time. We changed that,” Wyne replied.

“I don’t understand.”

“If I may say so, sir, it is not his report to me that matters, but mine to you. Prayle is a sergeant who can only give what he knows in converstaion. His written statements are extremely
difficult to follow.”

“A lot of vague drivel about
urra ovva
and
pang pang
!” Rains snapped. “Clarity is the very first thing one demands in an N.C.O.’s reports.”

“No, sir!”

“What then? What then?”

“Intelligence—even if you have to dig for it.”

“I don’t think we’re getting any further, Wyne,” said Rains with deliberate patience. “Your theory about these arms is disquieting—and a little irresponsible,
you know. Really, David Nachmias is beyond suspicion.”

“Why?”

“We have to accept authority, Wyne. Otherwise all work becomes impossible. David Nachmias is vouched for by people who know a great deal more of the over-all conduct of the war than we
do.”

“Major Furney,” remarked Wyne, “used to say that the Zionists had two wars—one against the Germans and one against us.”

“Very clever!” answered Rains disparagingly.

“On the other hand your point of view may be cleverer still.”

“And what do you think my point of view is?”

“That David Nachmias is far too useful to our bosses to be broken on mere suspicion of obeying his other bosses.”

Major Rains saw in a flash that this was the thought which had been hovering around the back of his mind for the last twenty-four hours. Captain Wyne could evidently be a very valuable officer
to anyone who knew how to handle him.

“But of course you see the implications of that, sir? Montagne is for the high jump, if you let Abu Tisein get away with it.”

Rains wriggled.

“I wouldn’t like the French interfering with my officers, you know.”

“And Mrs. Herne?”

“Well, there we do have clear consciences,” said Rains with relief. “She seems to have worked for one of them, and from our point of view it doesn’t matter
which.”

“It would be interesting to find out. Shall we pick her up for interrogation?”

That was a suggestion which Major Rains had been dreading. The possible repercussions might be troublesome to everyone.

“You can’t go bullying Englishwomen, you know,” he said. “Why, there might even be a question asked in the House about it. Leave her alone. We’ll just see that she
desn’t have any more opportunities to give trouble. Whomever she worked for, hers was quite a minor part.”

“We could ask her unofficially over all the proper drinks.”

“You have asked her already, and she wouldn’t talk. I think we’ll leave the matter to higher authority.”

“They’ll just pass it back to us again.”

“They won’t, Wynne, they won’t. They’ll decide there isn’t enough evidence either way, and forget about it. We don’t want to go setting ourselves up against
G.H.Q., do we? That isn’t the way to promotion.”

Rain, week after week, danced upon the tarmac of the ancient highway that ran from camp to melancholy camp along the Syrian shore. The red mud of Lebanon, the sands of
Palestine, choked the culverts and sucked at the wounds of the road where the wheels and tracks of divisions, relieving one another between Tobruk and the Euphrates, had worn away the level and
lovely route of peace. The men, huddled in their gas capes, ploughing through the mud under the olive trees, cursing the water that found its way through infinitesimal meandering into petrol cans
and pumps, longed for the cleanliness of the desert. Then came the snow, lying deep upon Jerusalem and the hills, even weighing down for a day the great leaves of the banana groves until it
splashed on to the semitropical sand of Beirut Bay.

Armande’s lonely mood harmonised with, indeed was in part created by, that of the great garrison of the Middle East. She was doubly an alien, being a woman on sufferance among these
soldiers who themselves were utterly alien to their surroundings. In her work there was neither gaiety nor excitement; nor, after the bitter use that had been made of her, did she seek either. She
was checking stores in two languages. The fact that some of the stores were confidential made the job no more interesting. She was checking stores, and probably would continue to check until the
war ended.

Communication with home was worse than ever. For Armande there was little comfort in the exchange of letters with her husband. Letters from England answered those that she herself had written
four months earlier. Her own words were lost in the passing of time. She had forgotten what on earth the correspondent was replying to, so that the response was either stale or meaningless. Much of
marriage, she now thought, depended on the little daily intimacies; those lost, a husband and wife had no live subjects to talk about in letters.

What, she wondered, had really happened to the great lovers of fiction and history when they were years absent from one another? Surely their longing must have been so desperate that longing
alone created a bond? Each, deprived of half a soul, lived in darkness, and of the darkness wrote. Longing she had, but it was for the life she had lost—not so much for John as for John
coming home from the office, John opposite to her at the dinner table, John fussing about the oddness of her friends. Longing for John as a lover—but of that she did not think. It was
inconvenient, difficult and led to disloyalty of thought. Observing the emotional follies of these exiled men and women with no conventional outlet for their capacity to love, she could not believe
that she had a passionate temperament, or that hers was a passionate marriage.

Her mother’s letters she disliked; they were too full of patriotism and complaint. The hotel seemed to have become an expensive rest home for Free French, and Maman exulted over her dear
boys and her profits in successive sentences. At least one page of any letter of hers was abuse of rationing and of a hardhearted food controller who could not accept the morale of her guests as an
excuse for breaking the law. Dear boys or not, Maman had been twice before the magistrates—once for killing her own pigs and once for some complicated deal in eggs that Armande could not
understand. So many references in letters from England were obscure. Her friends seemed to accept and be perfectly familiar with a hundred restrictions on their liberty that to her were foreign and
unpredictable as the laws of China.

One evening early in Frebruary, Armande was called to an interview with her colonel. He was alone in his office, a small, bleak shed furnished only with a map, a security poster and the two
trestle tables belonging to him and his adjutant. It had the usual smell of a staff office in winter, compounded of stale ashtrays, wet battledress and the fumes of a small, overworked paraffin
stove.

Armande recognised in his eyes a well-known look of yearning, which meant that he had an unpleasant administrative job in hand and was longing for the open-air life he had enjoyed as a
subaltern, or, alternatively, a tent at Advanced Headquarters in the Western Desert where he might occasionally hear a bang. Longing for his wife and children produced a different expression, of
sultry ill temper, when the sergeant clerks stuck firmly to the main office and only Armande and the typists could approach him at all.

In a voice that he was obviously striving to keep clear of any note of criticism, indeed of any implication whatever, he told her that her employment was at an end.

“But why?” asked Armande, smiling.

She had never been sacked before. The experience was incredible. In her surprise she answered the colonel as if he had been talking of someone else and asking her advice.

“Uniformly satisfactory. Excellent character,” grunted the colonel uncomfortably.

“I know,” Armande laughed—after all, the man wasn’t writing a testimonial for his batman. “If it’s just because I can’t type fast yet, I’ll go
away and learn.”

“Good Lord, no, Mrs. Herne! I say, do sit down! This is quite informal.”

Armande sat down. The poor old colonel seemed to call for a more intimate touch than could be supplied while standing opposite to him. Poor old? It was just the effect, she supposed, of being a
colonel and sitting important (though reluctant) in an office. He was still in his early forties.