The Mandelbaum Gate (44 page)

‘All
these spy renegades lead nightmare lives,’ he said. ‘Odd people.’

‘I’m a
bit tired,’ Barbara said. ‘Do you mind if we leave off now?’ She passed her
hand up and down the side of her neck. He was a nice young man but he made her
feel neurotic.

‘Of
course, of course. I’m sorry. It must have been an ordeal, that return to
Israel. Quite a risk. You might have caused us some trouble, you know.’

‘You
make trouble for me,’ said all the voices still, in her dreams.

‘I’m
expecting a telephone call from Rome,’ Barbara said. To hell with their
questions. One had a private life to lead.

The
young man was leaving. He said, ‘Will you spare me about twenty minutes
tomorrow — a few more things.’

‘Well,
yes. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you much on your side. Maybe one of
your men in Jordan could talk nicely to Suzi Ramdez, the travel agent. She
could tell you more than I could.’

‘They’ve
got Suzi Ramdez, I’m afraid.’

‘Who
have got Suzi?’

‘The
Jordan police have picked her up. They’re very zealous when they get moving,
but they usually move too late. Anyway, I’m glad they didn’t get you.’

She did
not give him Abdul’s news. She said, ‘Have they really got Suzi? Are you sure?’

‘Of
course. Certainly. We’re pretty alert, you know, although we don’t look it.’
Yes, and Suzi was in Athens.

‘Will
she go on trial? She wasn’t really involved.’

‘One
never knows what will happen in these political cases. But I’m sure she was
involved with everything. Everyone out here’s involved with everything.’

Oh,
go away, she thought. Keep nice and safe. Take no risk Look both
ways and always brush your teeth.

He
said, ‘I’ll look in tomorrow, then. It’s only to check a few things. We want to
be on the safe side.’

‘One more day shut up in
that room,’ said Barbara, ‘and I would have died of claustrophobia and
frustration.’ — She was sitting beside Suzi in the car, dressed in her Arab
clothes.

‘Or
perhaps murdered Ruth Gardnor.’ And slowly, under her veil, she was rubbing
ointment into the strained tendon of her neck. They were driving through the
bare Judaean hills, that wilderness of John the Baptist, who was a voice crying
there, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’ She thought, it was a voice crying from
the hill-top that is meant by a voice crying in the wilderness, for she had
previously always thought of that phrase as a piece of delicate rhetoric,
signifying a lonely, unprevailing plaint of a wandering prophet. But it looked
to Barbara that this voice in the wilderness must have been a high crag-top
proclamation, good, loud and frightening, for everyone in the valleys to hear,
echoing from peak to peak.

They
had left the house at Jericho the day before, Sunday, at nightfall. She had
followed Suzi out into the sweet air and walked to the car, two weeks after she
had arrived. Their departure had been perfectly simple, for Ruth had again gone
to Amman for the week-end and Joe Ramdez had left with Ricky on Friday, that
day when Barbara had wandered into his room and found him in bed with Ricky.
She had been all that night pacing herself to exhaustion, up and down and round
her room. At two in the morning she had taken a warm shower in the small
cubicle adjoining her bedroom. If only, she thought, I could lie for a long
time in a warm bath, it would soothe away the irritation of Ruth Gardnor. But
she turned on the shower which creaked as it sprayed. She had gone back to bed,
and tried, as a spiritual exercise, to be grateful for her safety in this room
and her recovery to the extent that her energy now seemed nearly to burst her
skin open. But she could only tremble with anger; Ruth would come in at seven
in the morning with a tray of coffee, meekly terrified of Barbara after the
fight, and very anxious to propitiate her against some power she obviously
suspected Barbara to hold over her, and against the eventuality of trouble.
This was quite dear, although Barbara was in no way informed what sort of power
Ruth feared, except that it was to do with the spy business. And Barbara fumed
against Ruth’s totally womanly solicitude combined with her totally repugnant
human theories, and against the total misunderstanding. She lay and tried to
feel grateful, but even her capacity for gratitude felt gagged; she was the
half-witted mute she had undertaken to be when she first set out with Suzi in
disguise.

And so
she had leapt from her bed again, convulsively, and taken another shower, a
cold one. Her neck was painful. Then she had walked up and down the room till
dawn.

Light
footsteps outside her window: this was not unusual. Several times during the
two weeks Barbara had heard these morning footsteps and, peering out, had seen
a tall girl sidling along the wall of the house, pausing at every few steps as
if to make sure she had not been heard. The girl had passed Barbara’s window
and turned the corner of the house. The first time, she had been wearing a shirt
with blue jeans. She had Asiatic features with dark, lank hair. On the next
occasion that Barbara had seen her, she had at first thought this was a
different girl, for she was wearing a short, pink organdie dance-dress and was
barefooted, carrying high-heeled gold sandals, but Barbara recognized the girl’s
features as she looked round her before turning the corner. On subsequent
mornings the girl was always dressed in her pink frills, but once Barbara was
puzzled by a matted pile of blonde hair until the girl turned her face enough
to show that she was the same girl wearing a theatrical wig. Obviously, she was
returning from a secret rendezvous.

Barbara
had asked no questions about the occupants of the house, either of Ruth Gardnor
or Suzi. The girl did not look like a political prisoner. But occasional
ripples of talk or a shrill quarrel-burst came through an open window from the
opposite end of the large house, perhaps when the breeze happened to blow in a
certain direction; and once Suzi had referred to ‘the girls’ without
explanation; and so Barbara was certain there were a number of girls in the
house, and suspected they were enclosed under some sort of supervision for some
purpose.

All
through those weeks at the house in Jericho Barbara had been weaving plots to
run away and take refuge at the British Embassy in Amman, or with Harry’s
friend at the American Embassy. But with only the Arab woman’s clothes to wear
there was scarcely any chance of her being able to stop a car for a lift, or of
getting near to the town of Jericho, or of reaching a telephone. It was almost
certain that she would have been picked up by the police. A bicycle … she
longed to steal a bicycle. She could hear bicycle wheels occasionally
approaching the house. How did one ride a bicycle in long clothes? It could be
done. Cars came and went. She could steal a car. Another week and perhaps this
is what she would have done. Who could tell what would have happened if her
imprisonment at Jericho had lasted another week, or another day? There would
have been no pilgrimage. She would not have been a jolly good sport, but merely
someone who made trouble for everybody. Afterwards, she had reason to feel
fairly certain that if she had tried to get away she would have fallen into
danger or been caused to disappear.

But on
that last Friday in the house after the troubled night of creaking shower-baths
and frantic thoughts, on that early morning when she once more saw the
fly-by-night girl creeping back from her enterprise, the urge pressed on her at
least to leave the house and stand for a few moments breathing under the sky.
She put on the cotton kimono that Suzi had lent her and left her room. She went
on tip-toe along the corridor where she knew a door led to the central area of
the house, which in turn led up to the courtyard. There she breathed under the
sky and watched the misty pink of dawn on the cliff-tops of the Judaean desert
in the distance. Only a well and a palm-tree kept her company in the courtyard.
She walked once round the large, spreading house, turning corner after corner,
keeping near to the wall, and felt weak from the walk. She heard a sound as she
turned into the courtyard and saw an old Arab man with a sack over his shoulder
approaching the main door to deliver provisions. He had not seen Barbara. She
turned back and tried another door, which was locked. She tried another, which
was open and which led to a long corridor similar to that where her room was.
She walked to the end, hearing from the various rooms on either side the sound
of sleepers and of people stirring themselves to rise from bed. She found a
door at the end of the corridor, and in the hope that it would lead to Suzi’s
part of the house, opened it. The window curtains were drawn and streaks of
pink dawn that came through the window at the sides of the curtains and at
their points of meeting, enlightened a huge bed. A man and a woman lay
sleeping. The woman was Ricky. The man was a dark-skinned, large-faced Semite,
an Arab with a mane of grey hair. Barbara peered in the half-light of the room
and definitely saw Ricky. It was Ricky with her head thrown back in sleep, a
profile on the pillow, her arms outspread so that one of them lay limply across
the man’s body. Barbara had not yet made another movement since opening the
door, but now the man sprang up, wide awake. He seemed enormous, his legs
beneath a long white shirt leaping from the bed. Barbara fled back along the
corridor and out to the courtyard, pursued by the man, who shouted furiously at
her in Arabic, French, English, and some other language. She was not listening.
She ran to the front door where Latifa, smelling strongly from her night’s
sleep, was hauling into the house the sack which the old man had brought.
Barbara pushed past her, and as she sped through the entrance chamber and along
the passage to her room, she heard behind her a roar and rush of abusive vowels
from the doorway against Latifa. Barbara then lay on her bed, worn out. She had
lost one of her sandals and her foot had been cut somewhere on the wild run. In
about twenty minutes, after she had heard many unusual noises, Ruth Gardnor
came in, wearing her dressing-gown. Ruth said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done
that, Barbara. You know I’m responsible for you, I’ll be held responsible if
anything happens to you. They’ll never trust me again.’

‘I must
be a hell of an Important agent,’ said Barbara, not caring, at that moment,
what happened to her.

‘Suzi’s
told me,’ said Ruth. ‘So there’s no use pretending.’

‘Told
you what? Told you what? Suzi tells everyone something different.’

‘Keep
quiet, oh, please do.’

I must
be even more of a hell of an Important Cairo agent, thought Barbara, than I
guessed I was. She was feeling easier, though. The storm was over. She said, ‘I’ve
hurt my foot,’ and let Ruth Gardnor bathe it and fuss over’ it with bits of
plaster.

Barbara
said, ‘Who is that man?’

‘Joe
Ramdez. Fortunately, he thinks you are a whore with scarlet fever.’

Barbara
said, ‘I’m hungry.’

Ruth
disappeared to fetch her some breakfast, and when she returned with a large
loaded tray, Barbara said, ‘I don’t want anything. I want to sleep.’

Ruth
started to cry and wept for a long time. She said, ‘It isn’t only that I’ve got
to look after you. I’ve become so fond of you. I’m genuinely fond of you, I really
am. I admire your courage tremendously and what you’re doing for us…. And you
won’t even give me a kind look.’

‘I need
eyebrow tweezers,’ said Barbara. ‘Find a pair, please.’

‘What
for? What for?’

‘For my
eyebrows.’

Suzi had arrived early on
Sunday and they were off at last. Suzi’s plans for the week to come were
well-made in so far as they did not go wrong, although, in the theory of the
layout, nothing should have gone right.

‘First,’
said Suzi, ‘you do not pay me for all this touring and all this schemes and
trouble to me that you’ve been. You pay my brother Abdul on the Israeli
territory, when you return by means that we have planned for you. Poor Abdul,
he needs this money. But one time we have lost big money in sending it across
to him. Money is a temptation to kill. Never will I give Abdul money to take
over with him. An Arab soldier even might kill and take, and report afterwards.’

‘Does
he come over here then?’

‘Oh,
yes, sometimes Abdul comes. He will come next Sunday and return you to Israel
with him. He knows you’re with me, because I’ve sent a message by a friend of
his, Mendel, a Jew who I spoke to at the Mass in the Holy Sepulchre when you
were taken sick. You were by my side that time.’

It was
all one to Barbara how a Jew called Mendel had been at Mass in the Holy
Sepulchre. She did not think, now, of unpicking knots, for there was some
definite purpose in the air about her, liberated as she was under the black
clothes with the landscape flying past the car. Knots were not necessarily created
to be untied.

Questions
were things that sufficed in their still beauty, answering themselves. What am
I doing here on a pilgrimage, after so much involvement? Because I am what I
am. Suzi said, ‘You would not have come to Jordan, perhaps, if you knew first
what would happen and how it would bring you the fever. Now your relatives are
anxious for you, but Abdul very soon tells them news by secret messages that
you are safe.’