Mr. Mani (27 page)

—Indeed they are, sir. Every last document has been stamped and put in this file, which makes it a weighty one in more ways than one.

—I quite agree, sir. It was done a bit cavalierly and without a proper security check, because he had become known to everyone throughout the autumn months of the advance on Jerusalem. Which is why it shouldn't surprise you, Colonel, that not a few men would like to see both him and the documents thoroughly terminated. And indeed, from now on he was free to come and go in headquarters as he pleased. He even had his own desk in one of the rooms there, at which he translated the military governor's orders. But in his large bed at night, sir, where he lay with his quiet wife and his son, he shut his eyes and pictured himself orating to the Arab villagers in the fields of Philistia, and all at once, sir, his heart bled for the Arabs...

—Yes, for the Arabs, although not really for them, sir, that's little more than a pretext. In the darkness of the earth the root will suck any nourishment to aid the stem's growth.

—But I'm almost there now, sir, I've practically gotten to it. Because how does one explain his disappointment? Time passes, you see; he goes about in his British uniform and everyone shows him respect; but every day after work he exchanges it for his black suit and takes his son and crosses the walled city, passing the Wailing Wall and the great mosques and exiting via the Dung Gate, from where he ascends the Mount of Olives on which his father and grandfather are buried and reaches the Augusta Victoria Hospital and the monastery of Tur-Malka, which are all places, sir, that are marked on the map; and near there he enters a little Mohammedan coffeehouse and listens to the talk by the copper trays; and then he descends the mount and attends a Jewish meeting, where there are speeches and delegations of Jewish dignitaries who have come huffing and puffing from abroad to witness the redemption of Zion before taking the next mail packet back; and way up north he sometimes hears the thump of a cannon shot, a single round being lazily traded by the two armies; and still the spreading root of treachery knows not what fruit it will bear ... until one day, sir, he walks into a room of the general staff to throw an old draft of something into the wastebasket; and the room is empty, sir, the only sounds are the distant laughter of some officers playing football with a tennis ball outside; and he spies a map rolled up in the basket; and takes it and sticks it under his jacket; and at home that night he sees that it is a plan for an assault by the 22nd Regiment east of the Jordan; and he folds it back up, and puts it in a little bag with his prayer shawl, and goes as he does every Saturday to the Sephardic synagogue on Rabbi
Isaac of Prague Lane; and when the service is over he brings his son home and does not follow him into the house, but rather keeps walking to the walled city, where he buys and dons an Arab cloak; and then, heading north through the Damascus Gate, he walks for three hours—here, sir, his route is marked on this map, if you care to follow the trail of treachery yourself, with me as your faithful guide. He reaches this little town here, Ramallah; passes straight through it like a sleepwalker and continues on into the fields; sees the British guard in its tents and shallow foxholes, which are not at all like those at Verdun, sir, because here they're used only to rest your feet in while having tea; walks up a hill, and down a hill, and pretty soon runs into rain; smells tea himself and the smoke of a Turkish campfire; and there they are, sir, in their tattered uniforms with their faded ribbons, the same as ever, the same as they always have been; aye, he's known them since first he saw the light of day in the narrow streets of Jerusalem; the vanquished, warming themselves by the campfire, laughing in low voices, hungry as always, chewing on their mustaches. And so he steps up to them and asks for their sergeant and hands him the map with the plans and asks to see an officer; and one comes and takes a look and doesn't understand; and so he asks to see a German, because there's always a German with such troops; and while they go to fetch the German he stands and waits, absorbed in the fire, the Turkish soldiers staring at him wide-eyed, in the distance the houses of an unfamiliar Arab village that according to the map must be el-Bireh; and he swallows his spittle and waits some more, all but oblivious to the rain beating down on his cloak, which might as well be someone else's for all he notices it. After a while three men ride up on horseback, and the German dismounts in a great hurry, one Werner von Karajan, a cunning old fox, so we've heard. It doesn't take him but a minute to see that the plans are real and inestimably important, and he can't wait to rake in his prize; but our interpreter needs an interpreter, who is found in the person of a dark-skinned, bespectacled Turk with a fez, Mani's double from over the lines. There is a glitter of gold coins; the defendant spurns them at once; in fact, sir, he never took a farthing; all he asks is to have the two villages rousted out so that he can deliver a speech to them. What sort of speech? the Turks want to know. He doesn't answer them; doesn't even favor them with a glance; simply says again that he wishes to deliver a speech. Well, sir, his audience is quite literally whipped together in a jiffy: farmers, shepherds, women, children, and old men; some still gripping their hoes and pitchforks; some with their sheep and donkeys. Here and there there's even someone with a little education, some village teacher in a dirty old red fez. It's late in the day by now, but the sky has cleared a bit and the rain has stopped; the burning red rays of the winter sun glint in the village square, glint on the mud and the dung. He asks for a table, but there is none in the entire village. A bed is fetched instead; a plank is laid over it; he strips off his cloak; now he is in a suit and tie, shriveled to a little black flame; and then, sir, he mounts the plank, and there is silence; and he sways a bit back and forth as if he were still saying his Sabbath prayers; and he begins to speak in Arabic; and what he says is: “Who are ye? Awake, before it is too late and the world is changed beyond recognition! Get ye an identity, and be quick!” And he takes Balfour's declaration from his pocket, translated into Arabic, and reads it without any explanation, and says: “This country is yours and it is ours; half for you and half for us.” And he points toward Jerusalem, which they see shrouded in fog on the mountain, and he says, “The Englishman is there, the Turk is here; but all will depart and leave us; awake, sleep not!”

—Yes, sir...

—Just so, sir. “Awake, sleep not”: that was the gist of it; the speech lasted but a few minutes. Whereupon he held out his arms to the Turkish officers standing about him with their shiny boots in the mud; and they lifted him and carried him on their shoulders to keep him from muddying himself. There wasn't a peep from his large audience. It hadn't understood a word; hadn't understood what this new thing was that was wanted of it; hadn't understood what was a country; barely knew where the borders of its village lay. He donned his cloak in the gathering dusk, much fussed over by the German; was escorted back to no-man's land; and promised to come again next Saturday with more documents...

—Yes, sir, that was his sole remuneration; we've verified it from sources behind the lines. But he returned every Saturday in January and February, eight times all in all; they even gave him a little flock of goats each time, so that he would look like a shepherd; not that he didn't manage to lose most of them on his way down the first hill and end up with only two or three. They had him vary his route each time, and the German organized a special task force to track him and pick him up. Straightways he would hand them the documents with a show of scorn, saying, “You don't deserve them,” after which he would be taken deferentially to that week's village, where his audience had been waiting on its feet since dawn. By now every Arab between Ramallah and Nablus knew of him and was convinced he was a punishment inflicted by the Turks for their defeat—a most odd and ridiculous punishment, a sign of disarray and weakness. By now too he had his table, and a chair, and a blackboard, and even a glass of water; he stood with the Turkish officers about him and read Lord Balfour's declaration; and then he unfurled a colored map of Palestine that he had drawn himself, with the sea a bright blue, while the Arabs stared at it and failed to comprehend why, if this was their country, it was so small. He pointed to the blue sea, to the Jordan, to Jerusalem, and said, “Awake!” and they looked to see who had dared to doze off; “Get ye an identity,” he went on, “before it is too late! All over the world people now have identities, and we Jews are on our way, and you had better have an identity or else!” And then he took a scissors from his pocket and said, “Half for you and half for us,” and cut the map lengthwise, and gave them the half with the mountains and the Jordan, and kept the sea and the coast for himself. It rather distressed them to see it snipped up like that, and they pressed forward and some even tried to touch it, but the hungry, rickety-legged, rheumy-eyed Turkish soldiers pointed their bayonets and cocked their rifles, because the German had laid down the law that not a hair of the Jew's head should be harmed. Not that anyone would have harmed him, because the angrier he became and the more he swore at the villagers and provoked them, the sorrier for him they felt, even if they did blurt out to him like children, “But we want the sea too!” At first that stunned him, made him lose his temper; then, irately, he took another map from his bag and cut it horizontally...

—Some eight Saturdays, sir.

—In many villages, sir. He even got as far as Nablus and Jenin and visited prominent notables. He was much too stubborn and proud for them; he wouldn't even taste their coffee; hardly anyone knew what he was talking about, and there were some who snickered pityingly; but there were a handful of others who turned pale and wiped the smiles from their faces, men with a smattering of learning who had studied in Beirut or Haifa or Jerusalem and strode about their villages with suits, ties, and white shoes as if they were Virgil or Plato; they listened with trepidation when he talked about the Jews who were coming; “Like locusts,” he said; “one day they're in the desert and the next they're upon you...” It's a mystery, Colonel, how he was never spotted by one of our patrols. He crossed the lines in broad daylight as though slicing butter, and returned by night, walking quietly and quickly, a six-mile round-trip all in all; arrived from the north, tired, wet, and dirty, slipped into the old city through the Nablus Gate, and vanished down the empty, rain-washed alleyways; and then, together with the moon that rose from Jericho, pressed on to the stone steps of his house, where his large wife opened the door even before he touched the doorknob; never knowing where he had been or come back from but helping him out of his clothes, and bathing him, and drying and feeding him, and pulling back the quilt for him; and only then, sinking into it, did he begin to tremble all over, while the moon sank into bed beside him...

—I beg your pardon, sir, I truly do.

—Yes, sir, I beg your pardon, sir. I'm afraid I was a bit carried away.

—Horowitz, sir. Oh, dear.

—Ivor Stephen, sir. Horowitz, sir. I'm afraid I was carried away.

—Yes, Colonel.

—Yes, sir.

—Quite, sir. I am rather fagged. I've been working on this case day and night for the past five weeks, and my passion for the truth has overwhelmed me. I've investigated every last detail; been in and out of his home a hundred times; even walked the route of treachery on foot—and if some fact could not be ascertained, I imagined it back into existence, because I've been dreadfully anxious to get to the bottom of it all.

—No, Colonel, absolutely not. A thousand times no. Had he been an Arab, or an Indian, or a Ghurka, I would have done the same thing. Wherever the Union Jack flies, it will be my passion to know and understand. I rather fear, though, that the trial will flow by us too quickly; because Mr. Mani will plead guilty; and the prosecution—you musn't misjudge me, sir—will be razor-sharp; and Lieutenant Colonel Keypore and Major Jahawala have already made up their minds. And the fact is, Colonel, that when you see the quantity and nature of the documents he passed to the enemy, you'll be in high dudgeon yourself.

—Yes, of course we do, sir. It's all listed right here. He himself kept exact records and received a receipt for each document. It's all been verified, sir, because—and this is a little secret between us—we have an Englishman behind the lines who's passed for a German since the end of the last century, and from time to time he renders a small service.

—Right here, sir, although I'm not certain it's in chronological order. The 22nd Regiment's assault plan across the Jordan, the third of January, 1918. A roster of our brigade's sick and wounded from the thirtieth of December, 1917, to the sixth of January, 1918. A report on discipline in the 3rd Battalion from the third week of January, bearing the signature of Captain Smogg...

—There had been many complaints, sir. A divisional list of all officers on leave as of the thirteenth of January, 1918. A draft of a battle plan for the conquest of Damascus, signed by Major Sluce, from the twenty-sixth of January, 1918. The guest list for the gala evening given by the military governor of Jerusalem on the thirtieth of January, 1918. Two signed photographs of General Allenby, no date. A list of provisions sent to the 5th Australian Battalion. The deployment of our artillery in the Jericho theater as of the first of February, 1918. Some drafts of Lieutenant Colonel Keypore's personal correspondence with his wife.

—I'm afraid there's more, Colonel.

—A description of the firing mechanism of our F Howitzer, unsigned and dateless. A filled-out resupply form for artillery shells. A photograph of an unidentified young woman, apparently a tart, on the Via Dolorosa. A map of Jericho with the position of all artillery pieces from the third of February, 1918. Those, Colonel, were the cannon lost earlier this month in that unfortunate battle across the Jordan. The Germans counted each round that we fired, and when they knew we had run out of ammunition, they ordered an assault. We lost one hundred and fifty men. Although I daresay the Australians were more upset about their cannon, because men are more easily replaceable.