O Jerusalem (17 page)

After we were introduced all around and the initial drawn-out welcome was giving way to a redistribution of burdens to the newcomers’ backs, I witnessed an odd little episode. The headman, whose name had been given as Farash, held up the lantern he was carrying and peered at Mahmoud’s face. He even reached out and touched the ugly scar with one finger.

“It is well?” he asked quietly.

“Praise be to God.”

“And now Ali.” Farash shook his head. “You and your brother, you always come to us hurt.”

Mahmoud laughed—actually laughed. “When Ali has a sore, he fears an amputation. His head is fine.” Then, so quietly that I could barely hear, he said to the man, “Mikhail the Druse is dead.”

“Ah!” It was a sound of pain Farash made, and then he asked, “Killed?”

“Shot.”

Farash shook his head again, mournfully this time. “Another good man is lost,” he murmured. After a moment he stirred, and with a deliberate effort pulled himself back into good humour. “But you and Ali are with us again, and we shall feast.”

The festive air of the villagers carried us across the uneven ground and through a couple of minor wadis until without warning we were parading into a tiny village, through a sparse collection of mud huts with lean-tos holding them upright, past a well and some bare trees and up to the grandest villa in town, a windowless box twelve feet square and so low that even Mahmoud, the shortest among the four of us, had to stoop. There were clear signs that chickens and at least one goat had recently vacated the premises, and the fleas were appalling, but the honour was great.

Every man in the village was soon in the hut with us, with the women crowded outside of the door. Cigarettes were taken and glasses of cool water given while coffee was made and distributed by the ancient village
mukhtar
, whose house this obviously was. After the coffee had been drunk, four men staggered in carrying a vast platter heaped high with rice that glistened with grease in the lamplight, topped with a mound of hastily cooked and venerable mutton. The combination of hasty cooking and the age of the animal did not make for an easy meal, at least for those of us who tried actually to chew the meat, but we filled our bellies on rice and bread and the less gristly bits, drank more coffee,
and then sat listening to the fireside tales of wartime valour and pre-war derring-do until the wee hours, when the
mukhtar
abruptly stood up, shook our greasy hands with his, and departed, taking his village with him, all but a few shy and giggling children who lurked around our door until the morning.

The next day a bank holiday was declared, and all day long people from neighbouring tents and houses drifted in for the fun. Mahmoud was kept busy writing letters and contracts, Ali sat beneath a tree with needle and thread, repairing the mule packs and pads while talking easily to acquaintances, and Holmes squatted in the shade of our fine villa and absorbed the local colour and gossip. I, however, beat the dust and the wildlife from one of our rugs and took it out to a distant grove of bare fruit trees beside an irrigation ditch, trading fleas for flies and dozing to the rhythmic creaking of the mule that worked the
dulab
, drawing water from a deep well. I slept the sleep of the just and the profoundly weary, unconcerned about potential threats and undisturbed by the occasional passer-by checking on my well-being, until the noise of thundering hoofs made me bolt to my feet, certain that I was in the path of a cavalry charge or at the least a stampede. It was only a horse race, and it was won by a remarkably unfit-looking beast with a gloating, exuberant Ali on its back. Mahmoud, I gathered, won a great deal on his wager.

In the late afternoon the cook fires started. Following the afternoon prayers, I led the mules down to the nearest rain pool to scrub their dusty hides, accompanied by what seemed to me a number of children disproportionate to the population as a whole, who were soon wetter than the mules, if not as clean. The youngsters found me greatly amusing, a mute but comprehending boy who wore strange glass circles on his face and laughed at their antics, and I returned to the village in the midst of a noisy, wet entourage.

While I was restoring the animals to their hobbles, I
heard someone call my name. To my surprise, when I looked around I saw Mahmoud, surrounded by a knot of men. He was tucking something that looked like money away into the breast of his robes with one hand, and gesturing to me with the other.

I brushed some of the mud off my garments, straightened my turban, and went to see what he wanted. To my even greater amazement, when I approached he flung his heavy arm around my shoulders and turned to his companions.

“Amir is a very clever boy with the knife,” he said, enunciating carefully enough for me to follow his words. “I will wager his throwing arm against anyone.”

The juxtaposition of my grandiose name with my unprepossessing appearance had its usual effect, reducing the villagers to helpless laughter. Mahmoud grinned like a shark and kept his arm firmly across my shoulders while I stood and wondered what was going on in that devious mind of his, and what he had in store for me.

When the villagers realised that he was seriously proposing to bet on the knife skills of the youth with the ridiculous name, they made haste to accept before this madman had second thoughts. If he wished to give back all the money he had won from them during the day, who were they to object? A couple of the men scurried off to devise a suitable target, the remaining dozen began to sharpen their knives, and Mahmoud, giving my shoulders a final hard embrace, turned his head and whispered in my ear in clear English, “Do not be too good at first, understand?”

I had a sudden coughing fit to conceal my astonishment, and turned away to watch the men bringing up a length of tree trunk and some stones to prop it upright. Mahmoud proposed to run a con game on these villagers, absorbing what remained of their hard-earned cash after Ali’s unlikely victory at the horse race. Oh, I had done the same myself in English pubs armed with darts, but I had only done my opponents out of a few drinks,
and they had always been people who could afford the small loss. This was something else, and I disliked the taste in my mouth.

I pulled myself up. Mahmoud knew what he was doing; these were his people, after all.
Maalesh
, I said my-self—as no doubt the villagers would say before too long. I only wished I could feel so easy.

Under the tutelage of Holmes and a number of others, over the last four years I had accumulated a variety of odd abilities. I could pick a lock laboriously, drive a horse or a motorcar without coming to grief, dress up in a costume as a sort of amateur-dramatics-in-earnest, and fling a fully grown man (an unprepared and untrained man) to the ground. My only two real gifts, gifts I was born with, were an ear for languages and a hand for throwing. Be it a rock or a pointed object, my left hand had a skill for accuracy that I could in all honesty take no credit for, although I had on occasion found it tremendously useful. As I was about to again.

The men giggled at the sight of my thin and obviously inadequate little throwing knife, and they slapped their knees whenever my first throws went wide of the mark. Mahmoud began to look worried—well, not worried, but he took on a degree more stoniness and his right hand crept up once to rub at the scar—when three largish wagers were swiftly lost. The villagers were ecstatic. I tossed my knife in my hand and gave Mahmoud an even look, trying to get across a mental message.

Either he received it or he well knew how the game ought to be played. In either case he trusted me. He reached into his inner pocket and drew out a considerable stash of money, which he proceeded to count out, milking the drama. He laid it on the ground in front of his feet, and looked back at me.

We took those villagers for a lot of money that afternoon, with the rest of the village, men and women, looking on. I did try to lose a bit when the less prosperous men had their bets in, but it was not always possible.
My losses ceased to concern Mahmoud when he saw what a good investment they were, both in the short-term cash returns when over-confidence blossomed and in the long-term benefit of goodwill. It is never a good idea to alienate your host by making him feel completely swindled.

But we did take the money of poor men. And I did not care at all for the way Mahmoud had manoeuvred me into taking it.

Eventually, enough cash had changed hands to lower the interest in the contest. My last challenger stood down, jovial to the end, if rueful. Mahmoud folded away a thick wad of filthy paper money, tucked two heavy handfuls of coin into the purse at his belt, and gave me a look under his eyebrows that was very nearly a complacent smile. As the crowd thinned, I looked over their heads and saw our companions, standing and watching with all the others. Ali gave me a sour look, Holmes an amused one. I squatted down to sharpen the tip of my blade on a stone, slipped it back into my boot, and joined them. Feeling, truth to tell, a bit cocky but more than a little ashamed.

A long Bedouin tent had made an appearance on the hillside behind the village, and the smell of coffee was heavy in the air. The children who had followed me when I washed our mules and had been kept at bay during the contest now swarmed back to claim me, but I gratefully escaped my enthusiastic admirers by insinuating myself far enough back in the tent to be among the adult coffee drinkers, perched between the
mukhtar’s
rather messy falcon and his equally ill-tempered saluki dog.

The evening followed the standard programme for a semi-formal soiree: coffee, food, coffee, sweetmeats, tobacco, coffee, and talk. An immense brass dish was carried in by six men, laden with four whole roasted sheep that had been stuffed with rice and golden fried pine nuts. Tonight the meat was delicious and actually
tender. The rice was flavoured with a small, tangy red berry called
sumac
and the bitter, refreshing coffee that followed was fragrant with cardamom.
Narghile
s and regular pipes came out, the rhythmic drum of the coffee mortars fell silent for a while, the irritating “music” of the one-stringed violin and the wailing song of its player ceased, and the stories began. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that I had no great trouble in following the thread of talk. Under the pressure of continuous use, my Arabic was improving faster than I had thought possible.

The
mukhtar
opened. He was a once-large man now reduced to bone, stringy muscles, and bright colours: blue robe, green turban (a claim to descent from the Prophet), and a beard reddened with henna (sign of a devout pilgrimage to Mecca somewhere in his past). His teeth were worn to a few brown stumps on his gums, but his eyes were clear, his hands steady on the
narghile
as he smoked and talked of his part in the recent war, shooting from the high ground at the retreating Turks.

Then his son—Farash, who had spoken so intimately to Mahmoud the night before and been told of the death of Mikhail the Druse—told a complicated story about some relative who had married a woman from another tribe and ignited a feud that had lasted for sixty-two years, although I may have misunderstood this. Holmes contributed a blood-curdling narrative concerning a Howeitat clan feud begun by a marriage ceremony that greatly amused the men, although I couldn’t see quite why. Ali made a brief remark that seemed to link women and donkeys, but again, I did not understand the jest. He then told a lengthy and energetic tale about two men and five scorpions, and at some point it dawned on me that the two men he was talking about were none other than Davy and Charlie, the abusive British guards on the Beersheva road, and that the sly revenge Ali was describing explained his high spirits when he had rejoined us with the armaments
on the road north of town. I laughed loudly with the others, earning myself an uncertain glance from the narrator.

Next came an ancient villager, speaking in a high and monotonous voice, who launched off on a story that wandered through people and places, touching down on the occasional battle, that nearly put me to sleep and made a number of the others restless. After half an hour or so the
mukhtar
reached decisively for his leather canister of coffee and the roasting pan, and the continuity of that story was soon broken by the serving of coffee.

When we had all drunk our compulsory three thimblefuls, Mahmoud handed over his tiny cup and began to speak.

Silence fell throughout the length of the tent as the children were hushed in the women’s side, and all listened to the strong voice speaking of the outside world. Mahmoud was a good speaker with a compelling, even dramatic, manner, surprising for so normally reticent a person. The story he told the village concerned the final conquest of the Turkish Army three and a half months before.

The people obviously knew of the war’s conclusion, but not in detail, and it was detail he gave them. His audience sighed at the first mention of the name of Allenby, the conquering hero whose very name transliterated into Arabic reads “to the Prophet.” Mahmoud told of the fulfilling of prophecy, when the ancient tradition declaring that the Holy Land would be free of the infidel only when the waters of the Nile flowed into Jerusalem was realised, transformed from a declaration of hopelessness into actual truth when the British Army supplied water to the city, carried on the backs of a regiment of camels from its source in the Nile. He went on to tell of heroic fighting, of small groups holding off armies, of a single man who crept across a hill, invisible as a rock, to destroy the huge gun flinging shells across
the miles at the distant British troops. Each of his episodes drew admiring remarks and much sucking in of breath from the audience, murmurs and exclamations of
“Wa !”
during the telling, and wagging of heads coupled with laughter at each conclusion.

The greatest applause came, however, with the story of Allenby’s deception of the Turks and their German advisers. With his hands in the air Mahmoud sketched the land north of Jerusalem, his left hand describing the sea and Haifa while his right hand drew the Ghor, or Jordan Valley, that hot, miserable, malarial lowlands that separates Palestine from the vast deep desert to the east. Here Allenby had laid out his greatest trick: He would convince the enemy that he was about to strike out on his right, directly across the Jordan, whereas in reality he planned to attack on his left, circling down on them from their western flank through the Valley of Jezreel, that is known as Megiddo, or Armageddon.