The Mandelbaum Gate (22 page)

‘Are
you all right, Mr Hamilton?’

‘Perfectly
all right,’ Freddy said. ‘I was just disposing of some tiresome correspondence.’
As he followed Alexandros into the front shop, settling on a sofa in the large
space reserved for special customers, Freddy assured his host that he had been
careful as regards the drains.

‘Mr
Hamilton,’ said Alexandros, ‘you’re a wise man. If a correspondence is
tiresome, what can a man do? He tries his best, he tries to say one thing, he
tries to say another thing. Then after a few months, a year, two years, if
there is no satisfaction, then pouff? — he should put the entire affair down
the drain. Finish.’

Freddy
said, ‘It lasted longer than two years. It has gone on all my life. Family
trouble.’

‘Oh
well, your family; I thought it might be a lady. In the case of the family, Mr
Hamilton, a man must do the same as with a woman. If they make troubles without
end, troubles all the time, there is a point where a man must put the business
down the drain. Let the family go their way. Finish. I see you have delayed
long enough.’

‘I
should have done it years ago,’ Freddy said. He could feel Alexandros looking
at him with approving wonder, and realized that some new thing about his
appearance was conveying an unaccustomed liberated impression. ‘Do you know,’
Freddy said, ‘I feel quite young, Alexandros.’

‘You’re
not an old man. Myself, I tell you in confidence, I don’t live in an old man’s
way. I’m fifty-seven.’

‘I’m
fifty-five.’

‘Middle
age,’ said Alexandros, sinking into a chair opposite Freddy. ‘If a man has
lived older than his years till middle age, then he should start to live
younger.’

‘One
can make a fool of oneself,’ Freddy said. This apparently touched a
talking-point in Alexandros. He stood up and said, ‘One may do this, always.
Agreed. But this depends also on the company. In the consideration of this or
that company — this person, that person — one is foolish, one is wise. I also
make a fool of myself in the consideration of my wife that I have left my business
at Beirut in the hands of my second son, to come here among the Moslems. My
wife is a good woman and a fine Mama of the family. But she does not trust my
second son’s wife, a woman who is a Catholic also like ourselves. My wife is
telling me I am a fool to leave the business in Beirut where this wife of my
son can make changes. My wife is also against the Moslem religion. Here in
Jerusalem she won’t speak to our neighbours, she weeps that in Beirut we have
all Christian neighbours. So, to my wife I look like a fool. But to my sons I
am not foolish. They say, the Papa goes to Jerusalem, he makes a specialized
business . of fine goods, he sends his first son to the university and his
second son he permits to have a life for himself in Lebanon. Another thing, Mr
Hamilton — myself, also, I like the Moslem religion all right. I am an Arab.
The Christian religion agrees with the religion of Islam in many particulars.
But women do not know of this.’ He sat down.

Freddy
said, ‘I often think all religions have something in common when you take away
the damn nonsense. How do you feel about the Jews? I’ve got a special reason
for asking you, Alexandros.’

‘The
Jews,’ said Alexandros, in the quieter tone of voice demanded by the subject, ‘are
good for trade. There is no business here in Jordan since the Jews have
departed. The prices are too low. They understand the markets and the variety
of quality merchandise for the visitors of one quality or another quality. The
country is poor because the Jewish economy is absent. You must not say
Alexandros told you this. Not to anyone, please.’

‘As
persons? How do you feel about the Jews individually? I want to ask your advice
about a friend who’s got Jewish blood. I’ve got to attend to it right away, in
fact.’

Alexandros
spread his hands and cast up his eyes. ‘I have known good and bad. People —
they are people.’ He looked then at Freddy’s zipper-bag and said, ‘But you do
not intend to return to Israel tonight? The Gate is dosed. It’s too late.’

‘I
know,’ Freddy said.

Alexandros
waved a hand towards the curtain which hung across the narrow staircase. ‘You
must dine with me, please. I then drive you back to the Cartwright house in my
car.’

‘I won’t
be returning to the Cartwrights. My friends think I’ve gone. But to tell you the
truth, Alexandros, I mean to stay in Jordan until I’ve helped a friend of mine
out of difficulty. In fact, now that I’ve got rid of those tiresome letters I’ve
got an overwhelming desire to do so.’

Alexandros
folded his arms.

‘I
suppose,’ said Freddy, ‘you think I’ve gone off my head. And if so, I can only—’

‘Mr
Hamilton! I am far from thinking such a thing. To my mind you are an extra sane
man. Is it a man or a lady, this Jew?’

‘A
young woman of my acquaintance,’ Freddy said. ‘That lady who bought the silver
fish from you. She —’

‘Zobeida!
…’ Alexandros was over by the staircase, pulling the curtain aside, linking
himself still to Freddy’s presence by an arm outstretched in his direction — ‘Zobeida!
Make a place at my table for a guest. Lela! Tell Zobeida I have a friend —’

‘Look,’
Freddy said. ‘I don’t want it known that I’m still in Jordan. I don’t want the
Cartwrights to hear. I have a reason.’

‘Then
nobody shall hear,’ said Alexandros, and disappeared upstairs.

Saturday night to Tuesday
afternoon: the events were to come back to Freddy in the course of time; first,
like an electric shock of fatal voltage, but not fatal, and so, after that,
like a cloud of unknowing, heavy with the molecules of accumulated impressions
and finally when he had come to consider the whole mosaic of evidence, when he
had gathered the many-coloured fragments of what actually happened, and had put
the missing parts in place, then he came to discern, too late for action but
more and more dearly as the years sifted past, that he had been neither a
monster nor a fool, but had behaved rather well, and at least with style and
courage. Looking back at the experience in later years Freddy was amazed. It
had seemed to transfigure his life, without any disastrous change in the appearance
of things; pleasantly and essentially he came to feel it had made a free man of
him where before he had been the subdued, obedient servant of a mere disorderly
sensation, that of impersonal guilt. And whether this feeling of Freddy’s
subsequent years was justified or not, it did him good to harbour it.

Now, on
the first evening of those missing days, Freddy began to see himself, as he sat
at Alexandros’s table, in a physical way under such an aspect as he had seen
himself in his Cambridge days when he had been a boxing half-blue. It may have
been that Alexandros was now regarding him with the special interest called for
by the occasion; Freddy was not sure of this, for Alexandros was offering his
special reserves of hospitality, as he would his rare pieces, which were
generally kept from display in the shop. However that may have been, Freddy
felt as the conversation proceeded, a sense of his appearance which he had not
thought about for years; and although his thoughts and speech were given to the
eager matter of discussion, a left-hand accompaniment, as it might be played
on the piano, went on in his brain concerning his own physical presence; ‘well
preserved’, thought Freddy, would describe the effect, and certainly I’m in
good shape due to walking and exercise; hair turning grey, but plenty of it;
five foot ten, no stoop; rather short neck. It’s a pleasing appearance — how
astonishing — but that’s merely a fact I simply haven’t thought of since I left
Cambridge — or, at least since….

Alexandros
had sent the women of the household away before Freddy joined him upstairs. It
was a charming room, containing a few very good objects that apparently
Alexandros could not bear to part with; there was no suggestion of an antique
dealer’s residence, it was that of an uncomplicated, tasteful Arab, and it
might have been a room in the house of any western man of Freddy’s past
acquaintance who had a leaning towards Oriental rarities if he cared to have
rarities at all. The ceiling was low and white, as were the walls. The floor
was newly laid with plain polished wood, partly covered by two modern and
remarkably handsome Persian rugs. On one wall was hung a carpet of great age
and mellowness, the most beautiful Freddy had seen. Its colours glowed forth
throughout the evening in a process of slow revelation. A pair of mosaic jars
that Freddy could not closely examine, forming table-lamps, were placed at
either end of the room, and glimmered quietly in pale blue, green, and russet
under the shaded lights. Freddy also noticed a Dutch landscape painting on the
more shadowed of the walls, and on the largest wall, a dazzling Russian icon in
a large, wrought-silver frame. The rest of the room was furnished casually — a
good, small table, a dining-table covered in a white lace-edged cloth and laid
for the meal in shiny silver and china which was discernibly Mine Alexandros’s
best, some rush-seated chairs and a narrow soft couch with damask-covered
cushions. It had seemed to Freddy, as he entered this room, that his perceptions
must have been getting terribly dull over the years, and now that they had
begun to return, he was more enthusiastic than ever about the rightness of his
tearing up the letters and disposing of them down the lavatory.

He said
to Alexandros, ‘I hope Mine Alexandros is not put out by our dining alone.’

Alexandros
said. ‘Another time, you will meet my wife here in my home. There are many days
before us. I told her it is a matter of my business. As you don’t wish to he
seen, Mr Hamilton, it is important that I serve the dinner to you myself.’

It was
a dish of rice, chicken, and olives. Alexandros had fetched it and had again
disappeared, returning with an unlabelled bottle. Wine from Palestine,’ he
said. ‘It comes from over the border, but not through the Mandelbaum Gate.’
Freddy recalled an Embassy row in Jordan because one of the consuls had brought
over a bottle of Israeli wine, with the label on it, which his servant had
reported to the authorities.

They
ate, and Freddy felt Alexandros’s eyes upon him and experienced that sense of
his own physical qualities, and the qualities of the room, and, most of all,
the carpet glowing on the far wall. And he, in turn, perceived large Alexandros
in his physical presence, sitting opposite him, fleshy, brown-skinned,
thick-jowled with curly black hair, semitic nose, and vital dark eyes. But the
heavy man, by a spread of the fingers or a gesture of neck and shoulders, gave
out a weightless courtesy. Freddy felt he could lift Alexandros on one finger,
and was perfectly at ease with his own self-awareness harmonized at the back of
his mind with the immediate subject of their conversation, Barbara Vaughan’s
predicament.

‘She’s
nothing to me,’ Freddy said, ‘in the usual sense. And I’m nothing to her. She’s
engaged to an archaeologist who’s working on the Dead Sea material. She says
she’s gone off him, but —’

‘Off
him? That is to mean she’s changed her mind and doesn’t love him now?’

‘That’s
what she said. But I rather doubt that she means it. The point is, whether she’s
in danger, roaming about Jordan. A half-Jew … I think she is in danger.’

‘You
have had sleep with her? Excuse me that I ask out of curiosity. One desires to
understand all sides of a business.’

Freddy
thought this intelligent of Alexandros. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I
haven’t slept with her. I don’t know if she’s the sort of woman that one would
want to sleep with. I’m afraid I hadn’t thought of it.’

Alexandros
raised his brows, gave a shrug that might have signified anything, and, in the
same gesture, put a large portion of his dinner into his mouth.

‘Too
nervy,’ Freddy said. ‘It would be a lot of hard work to sleep with a woman like
that, I should imagine.’

‘I
imagine very different,’ Alexandros said. ‘It is of course one of
the things of interest that one asks oneself in secret thought when a lady
comes to the shop to buy — how is she like in the bed? — and I have thought
this morning when she came to the shop, that she is a sexual woman.’

‘Would
you say so?’ Freddy realized, with envy, that Alexandros never permitted
himself a moment’s boredom.

‘To the
fingertips.’

‘How
astonishing.’

Alexandros
nodded slowly. He was evidently delighted to be established as the expert that
he was.

The
evening warmed around them. ‘She’s in danger if it is known that she is a Jew
by blood,’ Alexandros said.

‘Even
though a Christian?’

‘She
has been first to Israel, so she would be thought a spy.’

‘I’m
not sure how seriously my friends, the Cartwrights, realize it. I’m afraid we
discussed the question rather a lot —’

‘Yes, I
know,’ said Alexandros. ‘The servants of the Cartwrights have reported. My shop
boy has told me already this evening that we have a Jewish tourist in
Jerusalem, and she was the one who bought the silver fish from our shop. One cannot
help this news spreading. They fear Israeli spies.’

‘She’s
a half—Jew.’