The Mandelbaum Gate (30 page)

‘I
ought to have practised the part.’ The robe was shorter than that worn by most
Arab women of the old order. ‘Is it too short?’

‘It is
like a poor woman’s dress that has been given it for alms by another lady. It’s
all right.’

‘I
caught a glimpse of your brother the other day, but I didn’t see him to speak
to,’ Barbara said, feeling that this was the first piece of information due.

‘That
is a pity.’

‘I didn’t
know I was going to see you.’

‘Abdul
must have been doubtful of you for a friend, or else he would have sent a
message. He’s my favourite man like Alexandros. Now you come and eat some
breakfast. Do you drink coffee or tea? There is tea but it is not like English
tea. Come, follow.’

There
was no time to think; it was a lovely feeling, and Barbara was still sleepy. It
was good to be in other peoples’ hands, responsible only for a plausible
wearing of the servant’s clothes and the representation of a deaf-mute Arab
woman. There was no time, as she dressed up and listened to Suzi’s talk, to
reflect on what was happening; her thoughts merely fluttered, like a moth
approaching and retreating from a bright light. She dipped her face-cloth
below the surface of the dusty film on the water in the jug and wiped it over
her face, saying, ‘Where can I wash?’ while Suzi said, There’s a water-tap
downstairs, but you get a big wash tonight, it’s not so necessary for you to be
washed just now.’ And indeed, it mattered so little that Barbara laughed with
Suzi, put on the veil, then lift ed it so that she could see better to pack the
dressing-gown in her suitcase.

‘Give
me the passport and the money. The luggage and belongings we leave here; they
are safe,’ Suzi said. ‘Freddy is ready. Come, follow.’ Suzi arranged the veil
over Barbara’s eyes once more.

She was
afraid to descend the dark wooden staircase with this veil covering her face,
and she lifted it again as she followed Suzi downstairs. Freddy was there,
drinking coffee at a table in a large whitewashed room. Before he could see her
she covered her face again, to make an effect. Freddy looked up. ‘Is she
coming?’ he said. Suzi’s laughter rippled; it was the laugh of a cultivated
woman. Barbara thought then, it’s going to be all right, and astonished herself
by her confidence in this unknown Arab girl; and it seemed the tone and quality
of Suzi’s laughter was the reason.

Freddy
said, ‘Oh, of course, there you are, it’s you, Barbara.’ She threw back the
veil and said, ‘Does it work?’ He said, ‘You look absolutely splendid. I wish
Alexandros could see you.’ He said something about her being hot in all that stuff.
Suzi began explaining that it was quite light in weight, and moreover very
well designed for hot weather as the folds could billow and catch the breeze: ‘The
Arab women of this old type are no fools.’

Barbara
was looking at the food on the table — bread, watermelon, olives and cream
cheese. She took coffee and said, ‘Can we get some food after Mass?’ and
explained that she intended to take Holy Communion and was obliged to abstain
from solid food for three hours beforehand. Suzi began cheerfully to issue
voluble caution not to reveal her eyes while taking Communion, ‘but lift the
veil so — I am accustomed to taking Catholics to the Holy Sepulchre, but for
you it will be necessary to take the Holy Wafer with the eyes covered, as this
is necessary for you, to make sure you are not seen by others. The priest will
—’ Barbara meanwhile was assailed by a consideration from the distant reality
oft her private life; she thought, if I do intend to marry him, whether the
Church allows it or not, does the intention alone constitute a mortal sin? She
thought, then, if there’s a doubt in one’s mind, then it’s all right. Rather
wearily she felt her old identity returning in spite oft this new disguise and
the elation of the fantastic moment she had plunged into. It’s too much for me,
she thought, all this bothering myself and questioning all the time; I’ve had
enough of it.

She
said, ‘Oh, I won’t risk it.’

Suzi
said, ‘You are very wise. It’s best that you should not move from the crowd to
the Communion rail, but you will stay by my side and nobody will notice you if
you keep quiet and humble. If anyone who knows Kyra well shall approach us in
Jerusalem, maybe I shall say you are Aliyah, the niece of my servant Kyra. I
shall say something, believe me. You say nothing.’

‘I
thought she was to be Kyra,’ Freddy said. He was reading a local
English-language newspaper, which was several days old, just as if he were
breakfasting late at home with this morning’s Sunday paper.

Suzi
cut a slice oft the crumbly bread and passed it carefully to Barbara. ‘There’s
no need to fast then,’ said Suzi. Barbara ate her breakfast with a sense of
reprieve which seemed to extend over the three of them, and over the
whitewashed room with its plain wood furnishings and the surprising telephone
hung on the wall. Suzi’s dark, thin face had a touch in it of western anxiety,
the mark of the emancipated; Freddy’s face, too, gave the map of his life. But
for the moment, they were both relaxed; she thought, there’s something in this
undertaking that lifts a burden of nerves from us all; by every reasoning the
physical experiment alone should be nerve-wracking to contemplate, but it isn’t.
Suzi said, ‘Finish up your coffee.’ Barbara did this, glancing at that page oft
Freddy’s paper which was turned towards her. ‘Eichmann’s Quality Truthfulness’
stated these local headlines, ‘Marilyn Monroe Gall-bladder Operation’. Barbara
said, ‘I think it’s going to be fun.’ Freddy did not reply for a moment, busily
finishing what he was reading on his side of the paper. ‘Hero’s Welcome to
Major Gagarin in London’, stated Barbara’s side. Freddy cast down the paper and
jumped to his feet, taking a deep, contented breath as if the air were full of
blessings. ‘Yes, hurry up, girls. We start in five minutes. Under starter’s
orders! Get ready. The car’s outside.’

Barbara
said to Suzi, ‘Might this lead you into trouble?’

Suzi
laughed. ‘Everything I do might lead me into trouble. One day I shall run away.
Now there is no danger for me except that my father, Joe Ramdez, shall suspect
that I play a trick. If we fall in with the police we say you are an eccentric
English lady, as they understand this. Or I say something to the police and to
some I can give money. You say to them you are English if the police arrest
you, and that you always wear the national costume of the countries you visit.
I do not think this will happen with the police, as I am never stopped at the
police posts with my tourists, and Freddy looks like my tourist.’

‘It’s
good of you,’ Barbara said, and followed her to the car.

‘That
is not all the opinions of me,’ said Suzi as she went ahead. ‘But you speak
like Kyra.’

It was
a large blue American car oft the type generally provided for hire by the
travel agencies. ‘You get in the back,’ Suzi said to Barbara, adding, as
Barbara gathered up the folds of her clothes to do so, ‘Never mind that you
have difficulty to get in and out of the car as this looks O.K. for an Arab
village woman.’

Freddy
started up the car, and looked round the empty yard. ‘Shouldn’t we say good-bye?’

‘They
are all gone farther down the hill to the monastery to be busy with the Masses
in the church,’ Suzi said. ‘And we are sightseers and tourists now, so we don’t
say good-bye.’

We’re
off!’ Freddy said. ‘The pilgrimage is begun. First stop, the Holy Sepulchre.’

Suzi
said, ‘Now I tell you the places of interest that we see. We leave Haceldama
and we approach the ancient Jerusalem. Over there is Mount Scopus and we come
to the valley of Jehosophat, which is the scene oft the Last Judgement. I have read
your Bible and Christian books besides the Koran, and the Bible also is a great
book.’

‘But
rather obscure,’ Freddy said. He added, ‘mystifying’, in case Suzi had not
caught his meaning.

She
said, ‘That is not so much a fault when you can read two or three times, and
you can find different opinions as to meaning. Incidentally, over there, as we
turn, is Israel, where you came from; the people here do not use this name for
that territory, you must not speak this name, it’s better to avoid. Is it true
that the Jews have imprisoned Martin Buber in the Hebrew University, and will
not permit anyone to go visit with him because he speaks in favour of the
Arabs?’

Part
Two

6.
The Passionate Pilgrims

Freddy Hamilton, Barbara
Vaughan, Suzi Ramdez — each, in later years, when they looked back on that
time, remembered one particular event before all others. It was different in
each case. Alexandros, too, had his special recollection that was to gleam
suddenly. Michael Aaronson remembered only the worry and waiting, as he sat in
his office looking out over London Wall, when it was certain that Barbara had
disappeared.

‘What I
remember most vividly of all,’ Barbara told her cousins later on, ‘— and I’ll
never forget it — was when I went into the wrong room at the house at Jericho
and found Ricky in bed with Joe Ramdez. I nearly died.’ For Freddy it did not
come easy to talk of those days, lost in comedy and found again in tragedy: as
if switching the dial of the wireless from confused station to station, he
would rapidly send the pointer of his mind through a range of recollections
until he came upon the clear moment of waiting outside the convent where
Barbara was lodging, while Alexandros bargained with the porter for the
unlocking of the door. But he would not speak of it. Instead, he would dwell on
another more concrete moment — and by that time it was common knowledge that he
had stood in the hot sandy courtyard of the house at Jericho and recognized,
before he himself could be observed, Gardnor’s wife walking towards a
palm-tree, and casually extracting a small folded paper from a deep slit in
the ragged bark. ‘It simply came to me immediately there and then,’ Freddy said
to a small group of colleagues, one Saturday afternoon two years later, when
they had returned to the house where they were guests, after watching village
cricket. ‘It just came to me that this was Nasser’s Post Office, as we called
it. We’d been looking for the spot high and low since the leaks began some
months before. When I saw Gardnor’s wife I simply knew it. And then I went and
got the damned sunstroke and forgot it for two or three weeks.

However,
it all came back. Just in time for us to get Gardnor. Unforgettable. Gardnor’s
wife, at Nasser’s Post Office, getting her orders and passing on our stuff.’
Freddy took his fountain-pen from his inside pocket, and from his outside
pocket he brought the cricket score-card, on the back oft which he drew for his
friends a diagram of Nasser’s Post Office — the road, the house, and the
palm-tree, marking with a cross the spot where he had first stood and then
crouched, concealing himself behind his car, while Mrs Gardnor went to the tree
and collected the message from the tufted bark. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I put in
some more investigation on the spot. And I proved right. I wasn’t mistaken.
Unconsciously, I must already have suspected Gardnor. We all did, as it turned
out. But as he himself admitted in court, he knew we couldn’t act without real
proof…. It was only a stroke of chance … quite absurd….’

But to
take the events as they happened, so far as is human:

Freddy
went first, an unobtrusive foreign visitor among a crowd in the forecourt of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and was followed by Suzi and Barbara,
unnoticeable among another crowd, on that first Sunday morning of the
pilgrimage. Some of the people had come for sightseeing purposes; these blocked
the way until they had done gazing at the many-shaped structure, clicking
cameras, craning up to the domes and terraced rooftops that expressed the
divine ideas of those zealots and their conquerors who made them, and staring
also at the heavy wooden props and scaffolding which modern times had
contributed to the edifice in order to prop it up. When the people at last
surged into the huge, cool, and altogether sepulchral interior, they separated
into several groups, each clustering round its own guide or pastor for further
directions. Freddy, who had been to the church before, began to make his way to
the flight of stairs leading to the Choir of the Greeks at Golgotha, where the
Anglicans and Catholics worshipped at their respective Orthodox and Latin
altars. As he broke away from the crowds, Freddy failed to notice a procession
moving towards him from the chapel which stood over the Holy Sepulchre itself,
in the centre of the huge rotunda where the crowds were gathered. The people
had made a pathway for the procession, which comprised a Coptic priest followed
by his incense-swinging acolytes, newly emerged from a Mass. Freddy, vaguely
assuming this procession to be only one of the little bands of variously garbed
visitors among the others congregated in the area, sacrilegiously barged into
one of the acolytes, and extricated himself with an apology which was not
understood, so that he was abused by the thin, pale acolyte with something
between a hiss and a spit.

From
their part of the hall Suzi and Barbara could see the encounter. Barbara said,
‘Oh, goodness,’ and was immediately seized by Suzi, who gripped her arm to
remind her to be deaf and dumb. An English female voice not far from Barbara
said, ‘Oh, look at that terrible man —’ obviously referring to Freddy. Barbara
had turned to look in the direction of the voice, and then, when she quickly
realized she was not supposed to have heard it, she fixed her veiled eyes, very
unhearingly, very unspeakingly, in front of her. But the voice had been
disquieting; for a moment Barbara had thought she recognized it.