O Jerusalem (6 page)

Still, two men were dead, and this one would be soon. If it wasn’t to do with us, what was it?

Mahmoud had bent over the dying man, so close his beard brushed the man’s shoulder, and was speaking forcibly into his ear. “Yitzak,” he said, over and over again until the still figure stirred slightly and the blue eyelids flickered.

“Yitzak, who did this?” It took me a moment to register that he was speaking in Hebrew.

“Mahmoud?” the flaccid lips breathed. The embroidered skullcap the man wore was dislodged by his faint movement. It tipped and dropped away to the earthen floor, revealing thinning hair, a circle of pale scalp, and a clotted head wound.

“We are here, Yitzak. Who did this?”

“Ruth?”

“Ruth and the children are not back yet. The carriage is not in the barn. Your family is safe. Who was it, Yitzak?”

“Man. Saw him. With. The
mullah
. Last week.”

“The
mullah
who preached in Jaffa?” Yitzak blinked his affirmation. “It was one of his men?”

“Two. Not his. I—” Yitzak coughed wetly and groaned, and that was all he told us. Ten minutes later his breathing ceased. Mahmoud stood up, looked at the drying blood on his hands, and went outside. While Holmes moved in a circle around the body, examining the scuffed ground, I stood and listened to the sound of a hand pump and the splash of water. When Mahmoud came back into the barn, the entire front of his dark garment was wet. He picked up the lantern from the floor, and inclined his head towards the door, a clear gesture that we should leave. Ali protested in Arabic, something about Ruth and the children seeing this.

“We must not bury him,” Mahmoud told his brother. “We must go.”

“We cannot—” Ali began.

Mahmoud moved slightly, a matter of drawing himself up, and Ali stopped immediately. Mahmoud’s face was dark with rage, not at Ali but at what Ali was forcing upon him. I took an involuntary step back, and hoped fervently that I would never have that look directed against me. “You will go and tell the neighbours,” Mahmoud said forcibly. “We will meet you on the road.
Insh’allah,”
he added: If God wills it.

Ali glanced at us and nodded, but before he could turn away, Holmes spoke for the first time.

“Why did the killer leave his knife?”

Mahmoud stood with the lantern in his hand and looked at Holmes; neither he nor Ali showed any reaction.

“The knife,” Holmes repeated. “This man was knocked unconscious, dragged here, dramatically arranged in the doorway by two men wearing boots and robes rather than trousers, and stabbed with that knife. His position shouts out ‘murder most foul.’ Of Jew by Arab. The shocking effect was deliberate.”

Ali turned to leave, but Mahmoud stopped him with a gesture, and went back over to examine the body more carefully. The three men studied the scuffed boots, the head wound, the pitiful skullcap, the marks on the floor, and above all the ornate dagger that had slowly taken the farmer’s life. After a couple of minutes, Mahmoud rose. “We cannot bury him,” he repeated.

“I agree,” said Holmes. “It would raise an even worse uproar than this would. But given an hour or two, we could transform murder into an unfortunate accident. And if the two hired men might simply disappear for a while …?”

Mahmoud reached up to rub at his beard, and his fingertips travelled briefly down the scar. He nodded thoughtfully. “‘Allah is the best of tricksters.’ Yes. Better for all. But quickly.”

“It might also be best to remove your possessions from the vicinity. It is one thing for unburdened men to slip into the groves, were a stranger to come upon the farm; quite another to make an escape encumbered with mules and household goods.”

I could see where this was going, but truth to tell, I had no wish to assist in the doctoring of the site. I did not even want to think about what they would have to do to disarm the effects of this death. Oh, I protested, of course, but in the end I gave in gracefully to the
combined demands of the three men that I take the laden mules and get them out of the area. I do not think I fooled Holmes, but I protested.

We loaded the animals, tied them so I could control all three with one lead, and Ali gave me instructions that a child could have followed, on how to reach a hidden place where I might wait until they joined me. He repeated the directions three times, until I turned on my heel and walked away with all the Hazr worldly possessions trailing behind.

After my proud little gesture, I was greatly relieved when I succeeded in finding the place without mishap. I had envisioned dawn breaking with me still stumbling about the countryside, trying to explain myself in yet more stumbling Arabic, but I found it, the ruins of a burnt-out and long-abandoned caravanserai—roofless, overgrown, and no doubt infested with snakes, scorpions, and other happy creatures. I hobbled the mules, found a smooth boulder to perch on, drew my feet up under the hem of my skirts, and gave my soul over to patience.

And to thought. The shakiness that had overtaken me on seeing the dead man was beginning to fade, but I still felt queasy, and my mind skittered nervously away from speculations concerning what my companions were doing. I firmly directed my thoughts to the question of what threat might be felt both by a family of Jewish immigrants and by a pair of wandering Arabs, and meditated upon the possible relationship between two Palestinian Arabs and a family of Jewish settlers. What was I not seeing here?

And what, indeed, was I doing here?

I
t was not a long wait, as waits for Holmes tended to go, but it seemed considerably more than two hours before one of the drowsing mules twitched up its ears and a low whistle came out of the night. This was followed
by the sound of three men moving quickly; in less time than it takes to describe, we had become four men (to all appearances) and three pack mules, still travelling quickly.

There are no true mountains in Palestine, not by European standards and certainly not within a day’s walk of Jaffa, but I could have sworn that our two guides had imported some for the occasion. We scrambled up and down precipitous if unseen hillsides, obliging me to cling to the pack ropes and let my surefooted animal lead me in the darkness, abandoning all pretence of my being in charge of it. At some hour well before dawn, we quit the hills and took to a dusty road for a few miles. Finally we stopped. Ali pressed cold food into our hands, we swallowed mouthfuls of musty water directly from a skin, and then we curled up on the hard ground and lay motionless as stones until the sun was well up in the sky.

I woke to the sound of argument, unmistakable if unintelligible. I started to sit up, and sank back immediately, wondering if I had been beaten while I slept. Not a part of me did not hurt. I then remembered Yitzak, and blood, and I redoubled my efforts to become upright.

The name Jaffa—or Yafo—seemed to be central to the argument. Working from that clue, I decided that our two guides were proposing to double back and see what they could find out about Yitzak’s “man with the
mullah
.” Holmes, naturally enough, was objecting to this plan; if I knew him, he would propose instead that he himself return to Jaffa and investigate while Ali and Mahmoud cooled their heels here. Seeing Ali’s expression flare into outrage, I judged that the proposal had just been made, and that perhaps it was a good time for me to step in.

“Holmes,” I called. “Do I understand it aright, that they wish to go into Jaffa and ask questions but that you object?”

“But of course,” he began. “How can I know—”

“Holmes,” I said, addressing my mentor, my senior partner in crime, a man nearly old enough to be my grandfather, a person revered by half the world. “Holmes, don’t be difficult. They’re right, and you’re wasting time. I didn’t argue last night when I was sent away with the rest of the household goods, because it was the sensible thing to do. Now the sensible thing would be to let them get on with it. Painful as it is to admit, I can’t be left alone here during the day—my Arabic wouldn’t stand up to a visitor. Yours would.”

I allowed nothing in my attitude to suggest another reason that he stay where he was instead of haring off for a strenuous day in Jaffa; if he was not going to mention his half-healed back, I was certainly not about to bring it up. He glared suspiciously at me, and Ali looked flabbergasted at my effrontery, but Mahmoud glanced sideways at me with something verging on respect, looked up into the air, and recited in English, “Would they attribute to Allah females who adorn themselves with trinkets and have no power of disputation?” He then arose, taking the argument as settled. Ali followed his example with alacrity lest Holmes change my mind, but before they went, Mahmoud went to one of the packs and dug out a grimy block of notepaper, the stub of a pencil, a wooden ruler, and a tidy skein of string with knots tied all through it. He handed the collection to me, and pointed with his chin to a spot down the dusty road.

“The tall rock with the vine?” he said in Arabic, and waited until I nodded. “One hundred metres, with that as the centre. We need a map.”

“Why?”

It seemed a reasonable enough question on my part, but his answer was not helpful.

“A subdivision of geometry is surveying,’” he pronounced.

“And …?”

“‘One who knows geometry acquires wisdom,’” he elucidated, then turned on his heel and walked away, with Ali close behind him. I looked at Holmes, let the crude survey instruments fall to the ground, and went back to my pile of packs to sleep.

H
owever, further sleep was not meant to be, thwarted by (in order of appearance) an old man in a cart, a young boy with a cow, an even younger boy with six goats, three cheerful and extraordinarily filthy charcoal burners gathering fuel, the old man in the cart returning, and a chicken. All including the chicken had to pause and investigate our curious encampment, making conversation with Holmes and eyeing his apparently dumb but not unentertaining companion.

In the end, I threw off my cloak and my attempt at sleep, to storm over to the vine-covered rock and begin my assigned survey. I knew it was a completely pointless bit of make-work, given us by Mahmoud just to see if we would do it, but by God, do it I would, and in a manner so meticulous as to be sarcastic. Taunting, even. So I sweated beneath the sun with that length of tangled string, barking my shins on rocks and disturbing whole communities of scorpions and dung beetles, mapping out a precisely calculated square whose sides ran compass straight, placing in it every bush, boulder, and patch of sand. I measured, Holmes (when we were alone) noted down the measurements, and then I took a seat in the shade of a scruffy tree and rendered up drawings that would have made an engineer proud. Four drawings, in fact: the map; a topographical diagram; an elevation from the lowest point; and finally as precisely shaded and nuanced an artist’s rendering as I could master.

Holmes chose a remarkably similar means of dealing with the frustration, impatience, and resentment of having been relegated to the side-lines, only instead of
string and inert paper, he worked with words and fools. He sat on his heels, rolling and smoking one cigarette after another, while our visitors (except for the chicken) climbed out of carts or divested themselves of burdens and settled in for a long talk. Holmes nodded and grunted and wagged his head or chuckled dutifully as the conversation demanded, and the only time he even came close to leaving his scrupulously assumed position on the side-lines was when he asked the old man (on the cart’s return journey) if things were peaceful in Jaffa. I pricked up my ears, but it was obvious the man knew nothing about Jaffa and was interested only in equine hoof problems—his donkey’s and our mules’.

By dusk, Holmes and I were ready respectively to strangle a visitor and shred a notebook. He stood up abruptly, and with uncharacteristic rudeness all but lifted the garrulous old man back onto his cart, waved an irritable arm at the stray chicken to dislodge it from its roost on the heap of our possessions, threw some wood on the fire, and slumped down beside it. I tossed my ridiculously precise drawings onto the ground, took out my pocket-sized Koran, and went to sit beside him. I was physically tired and mentally frazzled, but I positively welcomed submitting to the lessons that followed.

Holmes had learnt Arabic nearly thirty years earlier during a sojourn to Mecca, and I had begun intensive lessons upon leaving London ten days before. I did not know if I would be able to absorb enough of the language in the time at my disposal to be of use, but I was determined to try, and Holmes, as always, was a demanding teacher. Our every spare moment of the past days had been given over to the lessons, in language, manners, and deportment. I knew to use only my right hand for eating, I had the most useful verb forms and the most basic vocabulary under control, and I was learning to adopt the small, tight hand motions and the head and body movements of the native Arab speaker.

I had also received a quick tutorial concerning the
society into which we were moving, Arab (both
hadari
, “settled,” and
bedawi
, “nomadic”), Jew (some of whom had ancestors here in the days of Temple sacrifice), and myriad splintered varieties of Christian. Until the war, with the Turk on all their backs, these disparate groups had existed as more or less amicable neighbours; but since the Turkish surrender, the cap was off, the long-building pressure threatening to erupt—complicated further by British attempts at even-handedness, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the growing number of brash Jewish immigrants, both Zionist and refugee.

The British government looked to have its hands full with this tiny country in the next few years.

None of which explained why Ali and Mahmoud had been so fearful of detection on the night we arrived. I looked up from the small leather book I had been puzzling at.

“Holmes?”

“Yes, Russell.”

“You referred to Ali and Mahmoud’s ‘little games.’ Was that whole demonstration of caution a facade?”

“Not all, no. Certainly if we’d been caught by a patrol at that hour of the night we’d have had a most unpleasant time of it. I do think, however, that the good brothers were attempting to illustrate how very awkward our presence here will be. A fact of which any sensible person would be aware.”