The Mandelbaum Gate (8 page)

Last
spring, when he had begun to visit the Cartwrights at week-ends, these garden
beds had been in full bloom. To Freddy, although he was no botanist, they had
always looked very English, set here in the garden above Jerusalem; they
looked decidedly different, at all events, from what they had looked all over
Palestine in the prolific spring. And now, ambling about in the far
associations of his thoughts, Freddy contemplated the neatly printed labels of
each clump blossoming under the watering-can, and recalled another bold,
amateur-handed script, poker-worked into the wood by his great-aunt herself,
and how the letters had started up from her little skew-wired tickets. She had
been a wild-flower gatherer who had planted a patch of her garden in dumps,
labelled according to country names: Bird’s-foot Trefoil, Lady’s Finger, Tufted
Vetch, Hair Tare, Viper’s Bugloss, Forget-me-not, Ling, Small-Flowered
Crowfoot….

‘I
think, dearest Ma —’ Freddy’s fountain-pen moved like an energetic snail over
the letter-pad resting on his knee. He used a broad nib that left a trail of
familiar patterns, his words; it was always a matter of filling in a lot of
pages for Ma, she liked him to send long letters. The pen scratched noisily
against the splash of the. watering-can in the hot afternoon, and Freddy
functioned on with his letter, as he had done for thirty years of his natural
history, a letter a week.

…
both try to forget the garnet brooch
incident. I shall drop a note to Benny. It is true there was no reason for her
to ‘blow up’ about it. But do remember how touchy Benny has always been. Of
course, one should be careful to ascertain the facts before one speaks in
haste, although. goodness knows, as you say, Benny has known us long enough,
and really ought to exercise a little understanding, as you are good to her. At
the same time, dearest Ma, don’t please go giving away your stuff so readily. I
feel Benny is quite well off without ‘extras’, and indeed, the garnet brooch
must have become quite valuable by now. (You say it is only a semi-precious
stone, but these semi-precious stones in old settings are become very rare.)
However, I am glad that Benny is recovering her good sense and does not continue
to feel aggrieved. As I say. it would be hard to replace Benny in times like
these, and to be accused to her face of ‘borrowing’ the brooch was no doubt, to
Benny, a source of …

Freddy
looked up. I mustn’t appear to carp at her, he thought. On the other hand she
looked in his letters for a certain amount of response to provocation. In a
manner, it kept her going, to have a sort of unreal running bicker with him,
serialized into his long weekly letters and her longer weekly replies.

The
Arab odd-job boy finished his watering and silently returned to the house.
Like that young Hardcastle, Freddy thought. Like Hardcastle, the gardener’s boy
of Freddy’s youth, who had moved back and forth, remotely attending to things,
unloquacious, unsmiling, totally unwilling to conspire in Freddy’s games. ‘Still
waters run deep,’ Freddy’s mother had said, and true enough, young Hardcastle,
when he attained the age of fifteen, had disappeared from the job, from the
village, from his home, last seen by the bus driver who had borne him away
never to be heard of again. Many young Arab boys in Palestine reminded Freddy
of Hardcastle. They slightly disturbed him. He preferred the vivacious type in
the alley bazaars, arguing, cheating, flashing Arabic code-words at each other
in the presence of a stranger, or shouting cheerful abuse at their
fellow-youngsters who led the mangy over-laden donkeys up the narrow pathways
of Jordan’s Jerusalem continually.

Freddy
saw the morose boy approach once more from the house. Freddy, in his shaded
arbour, wished to break the silence, if only to make concrete his mournful
sense of its being ultimately unbreakable. But his Arabic lessons had not
progressed so far as to enable him to say, as he desired to do: ‘You fellows
are lucky being able to stand the sun direct on your skin in the heat of the
afternoon. We English have to keep in the shade.’ Freddy looked down at the
letter and thought he must work round to write something on the question of the
Arabic lessons he was taking from Abdul Ramdez, since his mother had replied to
his first mere mention of the lessons: ‘I hope you are not getting too thick
with that Arab teacher, When your Uncle Hamish was stationed in Egypt, his Arab
teacher was quite scandalous.’ Yes, and so was Uncle Hamish.

The
odd-job boy had moved the lawn-spray to another part of the lawn, and had
returned to the house. Freddy listened for voices; Joanna had evidently not
returned, for he heard none.

Usually,
on his week-end visits to the Cartwrights, Freddy left his office on the
Israeli side of Jerusalem early on Friday afternoon, plodding through the
Mandelbaum Gate with his diplomatic pass in one hand and his zipper-bag in the
other, always blinking in the glare, since he hated wearing sunglasses, which
made one look so much like a rotten gigolo or spy. He came in the heat of the
afternoon so as to reach the cool bungalow sooner. Both Cartwrights were
usually out till five, busy with their work. But Freddy would make himself at
home. Lemon tea, then a seat in the arbour, writing letters.

‘Dearest
Ma …’ Freddy stared at the bungalow to gain thought. It was a slightly
crooked house. He had heard that the Arab builders simply built a house, they
did not use any instruments, not even a set-square. The walls and windows were
slightly crooked. But the bungalow had a decidedly English appearance, probably
due to the chintz curtains flapping in the breeze, and to the garden that
seemed to support it. Joanna’s geraniums were marvellous, massed by the back
porch. And the lawn really was green. Most of all did he feel at home with the
wild-flower clumps. He had, in fact, contributed a few plant roots from the
Israeli side of the border, some of which had flourished. Joanna’s labels bore
witness to Freddy’s contributions from the Israeli side: Mount Zion, Galilee,
Nazareth, Mount Tabor … Bulbous Buttercup, Speedwell, Yellow Cow-wheat, Hound’s
Tongue. Freddy supposed he was wrong, he knew little about wild flowers,
really, but he had a theory that these plants that he had pulled from the soil
for Joanna, and those she had gathered for herself, were not indigenous at all.
Their seeds had been brought to Palestine and sown, he suspected, by a
conspiracy of the English Spinster under the Mandate. A second cousin of his
had done the same service for India, where she had returned after every home
leave with a shoe-box full of wild flowers gone to seed. This virgin cousin had
expressed the sentiment that when she scattered these flowers abroad in the
fields and sidewalks of India, she was doing something to unite East and West.
Her father had shouted her down, in his fierce manner, denouncing the practice.
‘Never the twain shall meet —’ he reminded her, as if the words were Holy Writ.
The old brigadier had gone on to tell Cousin Beryl that she was only making a
lot of damn difficulties for the botanists; he added — irrelevantly as it had
seemed at the time —that he himself had once forbidden an Indian servant to
marry a girl from Bhutan, because it would only lead to a damn muddle in the
offspring. But every third summer, Cousin Beryl, dressed always in loose, white
shantung garments, packed her seed box and bore it away to Lahore. So it must
have been, thought Freddy, with the spinster ladies of General Allenby’s time
out here. He had not yet propounded his theory to Joanna. She would be
sceptically interested in it. He was waiting for a moment when it was absolutely
necessary for him to say something interesting.

To arrive here, a mile
from the outskirts of Jerusalem on the Jordan side, Freddy had jostled his way
from the guardhouse at the Mandelbaum Gate, through the Old City’s network of
alleys, past the Damascus Gate. It had been too hot to take a crowded bus, and
not for one moment was he tempted by a taxi. Sometimes Joanna could manage to
meet him with her car, but Freddy was just as well pleased when she couldn’t.
Past the Damascus Gate, towards the Holy Sepulchre and down to the Via
Dolorosa, plodded Freddy, dodging the loaded donkeys and stick-wielding boys,
who in turn were constantly dodging the vast wide motorcars that hooted with
rage and frustration down the lanes; these cars were filled with hooded Arabs
of substance and their emancipated wives. Freddy and numerous tourists had to
flatten themselves hastily against a wall or a tangy-breathed donkey whenever
the fanfare of a motor horn heralded one of these feudal-minded carloads. At
the Via Dolorosa he ran into the huge Friday pilgrimage headed by the praying
Franciscans, who moved from station to station, on the route from the Pillar of
the Flagellation to Calvary. Freddy, with a number of the English Colony, had
followed a much larger procession than this, last Easter, along the Way of the
Cross; he had found it religiously moving, but it had exhausted his capacity
for any further experience of the sort.

This
Friday he dodged down a side-turning into the shop of an Arab dealer called
Alexandros, whom he knew, to wait there till the procession had passed.
Alexandros had been conducting a business courtship with Freddy for the past
five months over an icon that Freddy had his eye on. The dealer was an Orthodox-Catholic
from the Lebanon. Most of the Moslem Arab shops were shut on Fridays, and
Alexandros therefore did some extra trade on that day of the week. He was
serving a tourist, an Englishwoman, when Freddy arrived, but he immediately
sent a young assistant out to fetch Freddy some Turkish coffee. Freddy relaxed
in the large cool shop and, as he waited for the deal to be done and the coffee
to arrive, he thought of the hours to come, on the shady bench in Joanna’s
garden, getting his letter off — Yes, you are right … no, I think you wrong …
anything you like, dearest Ma…. and felt this hot effort to reach the house
was worth it by virtue of the cool contrast ahead of him.

Alexandros,
whose wares were superior to those of most of the other traders in the area,
was attempting to persuade the customer of this fact. She seemed rather stupid
and sceptical, as Alexandros implored her credence, using his arms to do so, a
little more in the French merchant manner than the Arab. Freddy’s feelings
expanded towards the salesman and contracted against the woman. Heavy
Alexandros, dark, middle-aged, went on to explain that the little wooden
crib-figures, for which he was asking five pounds the set, were by no means
comparable to the mass-produced figures obtainable from the surrounding shops,
on all days but Fridays, for a pound the set or eighteen shillings after the
argument. Freddy, newly relaxed after the glare, smells and sticky heat of his
plod from the border station, was prompted by a nervous reflex to intervene in
the argument, and, much as the timid spinsters of the old days, while abroad,
would be moved to violence against the maltreater of the donkey, Freddy now
stood up. ‘Madam,’ he said, to his own astonishment, ‘I can vouch for the fact
that those articles are what Mr Alexandros says they are, that is to say,
hand-carved from pinewood. This shop, as he says, stocks only superior curios.’
He sat down again. His Turkish coffee arrived and was placed before him.

The
woman looked at Freddy in a reserved way; she could see that he was at home in
the shop. Freddy realized she was more suspicious than ever. His irritation by
her doubts of his Alexandros was increased by the fact that this fat
Englishwoman was only a passing tourist and he was more or less a resident; and
there had been nothing more annoying to Freddy throughout all his postings in
the Foreign Service than the sight of his compatriots making mistakes while
passing through.

Alexandros,
delighted by Freddy’s remark, was saying in a triumphant wail, ‘You hear what
this gentleman tells you, Madam. This gentleman is Mr Hamilton, a very high
officer of the British Government. He is my customer. He comes to Alexandros
regular.’

Freddy
murmured, ‘Perhaps the lady really wishes to think it over, Alexandros.’

The
woman indicated, by picking up her gloves, that she was about to take advantage
of this offer. But Alexandros spread out his hands and said, ‘Madam, this crib
— look at the three Kings, how beautiful, and the camels, they are alive, and
Saint Joseph here. The workmanship. You have it for the sake of your family,
Madam. They will say, in the next generation, “This was when the Mama went to
the Holy Land! She bought this set for the Epiphany crib!”‘

The
woman seemed to waver at this. Then she said: ‘I’ll think it over and let you
know in the morning.’

‘It is
the last. It will go by morning. When the procession is finished the people
come in to Alexandros. Alexandros does not close his shop on a Friday, like the
Moslems.’

‘I’ll
ask my travel agent here. He advises me what to buy and where to go. Thank you.’

Alexandros
followed her to the door. ‘Who is the travel agent?’

‘Ramdez.
I’ll ask him.’

Alexandros
let her go, then. He came and sat beside Freddy. We can have a talk now.’ He
seemed to have forgotten the woman. Freddy said, ‘I mustn’t stop. I’ve got some
correspondence to attend to when I get to the Cartwrights’. I expect your customer
will come back for that crib-set. It’s handsome.’

‘Not if
she follows advice from Ramdez. Travel agent, yes, he is agent for all the
curio-shops, he gets his share from them all. But he is not agent for
Alexandros.’