O Jerusalem (35 page)

I finished my apple, watching the tourists go by. They would lose their purses to a nice peaceful pickpocket if they weren’t more careful, I thought, and tossed the core of my apple into the gutter to follow them. Night was closing in fast, and the original purpose of finding Holmes had long faded from view—after an hour in the
souk
I had to admit that I had little hope of stumbling across him. I turned back towards the Christian Quarter, and there I took a wrong turning.

It is difficult to become seriously lost in a walled city that covers less than a square mile, and I had memorised the names of the principal streets that cut through the maze; however, with most of the streets lacking either signs or street-lamps and darkness settling over the already dim lanes, I mistook the Akabet et-Tekkiyeh for the parallel Tarik es-Serdi, and found myself in an alleyway of locked shops and few people. Wondering if it ended in a cul-de-sac, I put my head around the side of the one lighted shop I came across, and said to the man, “Good evening, my uncle. I beg of you, does this street lead to the Jaffa Gate?”

For a moment I thought the man knew me, such was the look of delight that dawned on his rotund features, but when I looked more closely at the face under the incongruous bowler hat, I realised that he was merely filled with the bonhomie of drink. He started around the high piles of his goods (hats and shawls) with both hands out to greet me and protestations of undying servitude on his tongue. I backed away but could not avoid him entirely without being undeservedly rude, so I allowed him to grasp my hands and rant on while I smiled and nodded and tried to keep my distance. This went on for some time, and I began to feel more than a little ridiculous. Finally, I decided I had expressed enough politeness, so I brought my hands together, raised them
in a tight circle to break his hold, and then took a step back—directly into two more sets of hands with two more friendly mouths breathing alcohol at me.

God, I berated myself as I tried to pluck six hands from their grasp on my person, leave it to me to find the only drunks in the Moslem Quarter. They were not intoxicated enough to be clumsy, only free from restraint, and they had me well and truly cornered—in a friendly manner, I admit. An entirely too friendly manner.

All good things must end, however, and reason was obviously no weapon against these three: flight would have to do. Bending over sharply, I scooted backwards under the arms of two of the men—and my concealing turban was plucked neatly from my head.

The three men blinked like owls at the mussed blonde waist-length plaits that were revealed in the lamplight. One of them hooted in amazement, and they came for me again. I moved back away from their reach, my head feeling peculiarly light in the cold night air, but I did not relish having to walk across half the city and into the inn without my turban. I backed, and backed some more, watching for a means of distracting them or a wide enough place to enable me to dash past them, snatch the length of cloth from the ground, and run.

As I danced backwards out of the grasp of those hands, my foot trod on some bit of slippery rubbish and flew out from under me. I hit the paving stones and rolled, coming up filthy and bruised and finally angry. The merchants did not appear to be armed, and I was just beginning to contemplate the pleasure I should have in trouncing the three sots when I heard a voice.

Those ringing tones would have been instantly recognisable no matter the circumstances or the language: Arabic or Rumanian or the King’s own English, an alley in Jerusalem or a tunnel beneath London, cursing or wheedling, there it was, sardonic, superior, infuriating, and at that moment immensely welcome.

“Is it allowed for others to join in this game?” it said.

The merchants stopped their laughing advance and began to crane their necks to find the voice. I straightened. “Holmes, thank—” I caught myself and blurted out in no doubt ungrammatical Arabic, “I need your help.”

“Yes?” he drawled. “You seem to be doing well enough.”

I had him now: in a dark niche above a stone arch that kept two walls from collapsing into each other. The distraction his words had worked was all I needed: I jabbed a knee into one man’s groin, brought an elbow up smartly into the second man’s nose, and put a shoulder in passing into the third man’s belly, catching up the rag of my turban and scrambling upwards over wares and awnings to gain the heights. Holmes hauled me the last couple of feet, and before the merchants had caught their breath to raise an alarm we were off across the rooftops and away.

We paused atop a piece of twelfth-century stonework while I restored the covering to my hair. “I won’t even ask how you found me, Holmes,” I said. “But you might at least have lent a hand.”

“What, and rob you of the satisfaction of dealing with three large men single-handedly?”

He was right. I was aware of an intense feeling of pleasure at what I had done, on my own. This was the first time I had actually used the skills I possessed of physical defence, and “satisfaction” was indeed the word. Of course, all three had been drunk, fat, and clumsy. “Not so large,” I demurred, and then in the faint light from a nearby window I noticed the stain on my elbow. “And if you’d interrupted a little more effectively I wouldn’t have that man’s blood all over my sleeve. I’ll never get it out.”

“I believe if you examine it you will find it’s nothing so fresh as that,” he said mildly, and with that I stood
up and saw the filth that was smeared the length of my robe.

“Oh, God, Holmes, it reeks! What is that?”

“Best not to ask. Come.”

“I hope we’re going back to the inn.” The other robe I possessed had seemed too dirty to bear, but now called to me as a paragon of cleanliness. I was not surprised, however, when he did not even answer, only swung his legs over the wall and dropped softly into the roof garden below. Muttering Arabic curses under my breath and searching for an unsoiled patch of my
abayya
on which I might scrub my palms, I followed.

We rejoined street level in the Jewish Quarter and picked our way through the alleyways until we came to an open place. Several men, Polish Jews by the sound of their accents, were walking purposefully off to our left, and I glanced towards their goal, an opening between two squalid blocks of houses. It wasn’t until we had walked a bit farther and I saw the bulk of the Temple Mount rising before us that I knew where they were going. I stopped dead, and when I listened I could make out their voices, struggling to reach the heavens out of the alleyway and past the heads of the houses that had been built up against the holiest place in Judaism. My people were praying at their Wall.

“‘We sit alone and weep,’” I recited, tomorrow’s Shabbos prayer. “‘Because of the palace which is deserted. Because of the Temple which is destroyed.’”

“Russell.” Holmes spoke sharply in my ear. A pair of men walking by us, dark shapes in their black caftans and fur hats, stopped dead to stare at the phenomenon of an Arab boy reciting a Hebrew prayer. I politely wished them in Hebrew a good evening, and they looked at each other and scuttled off.

“That was not wise,” Holmes commented.

“‘Let peace and joy return to Jerusalem,’” I told him a bit giddily. “‘Let the branch put forth and blossom.’”

“That is precisely what we are attempting to
achieve,” Holmes said, and took my elbow to march me away from there.

“Where are we going, Holmes?”

“To see a Moslem woman whose baskets were returned to her, and then an Armenian priest with an interest in archaeology.”

Why was it, I wondered silently, that the only time Holmes gave me a ready answer to a simple question was when the response was cryptic to the point of being oracular?

“Will we have time to eat?” I asked hopefully.

“Probably not.”

Either cryptic or disheartening.

Muhammad said: “Every infant is born in the natural state. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a heathen.”

—THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN

olmes’ mysterious Moslem woman with the reappearing baskets lived in the village of Silwan, or Siloah, across the Kidron Valley from the Old City. We went out through the Dung Gate near the southern end of the Haram es-Sherîf and walked along the outer wall of the city for a space, then dropped down onto a rutted track leading across the valley (which was usually dry, although at the moment it had a trickle at the bottom) and up the other side. There we found a village of tombs, taken over and added to by the living. The inhabitants looked as rough as their setting, and I could only hope that we appeared too poor to bother assaulting.

Holmes seemed to know more or less where we were going, and only at the far end of the village did he stop to ask a child for the house of “the widow of Abdul the Ugly.”

The widow lived in one of the tombs, it seemed. A boy answered our salutation, a child of about ten who eyed us with all the suspicion we deserved, two strange men calling on a widowed woman after dark. However, either Holmes’ gentle but firm manner, his reassurance that we were only wishing a few words and would happily remain outside for the exchange, or his mention of copper coins, softened the lad’s manly role, and in a few moments the mother was there, swathed to her eyebrows and crouching nervously just inside the entrance to the erstwhile tomb while we remained outside to preserve the proprieties.

“Madam, we are interested in the tale of your baskets,” Holmes began. When the silence within was broken only by an exchange of harsh whispers between mother and son, he added,
“Sitt
, I assure you I am not a madman. I too have had a thing taken and replaced, and when I heard your tale in the
souk
today, my interest was great. I believe it is merely boys who have done this, but if a boy is creating mischief, it is best to know this early, while he is still young, do you not agree? These are hard times to raise boys in. The temptations are many, and they have no respect for their elders.”

How on earth Holmes, whose closest approximation to being a parent had been in hiring hungry street urchins to run his errands back in the Baker Street days, knew that this would lay down a firm common ground with an illiterate Arab woman, I do not know, but it did. She immediately launched into a mournful recitation of the difficulties in raising children today, using phrases I have heard in twentieth-century drawing rooms and read in the hieroglyphic epistles of ancient Egyptian parents. She had just used the phrase “He’s a good boy” for the fifth time when Holmes cut her off.

“Sitt
, I wish to know also about your baskets. You lost them?”

“They were stolen,” she replied, her indignation fresh
and showing no wear after what must, judging by the rolling of her son’s eyes, have been much telling. “Stolen from my wall, my front wall, over where the good gentleman is even now sitting.” A hand reached out from the
burkah
and pointed upwards. We looked up and saw a twisted nail driven between the stones of the wall above my head.