The Mandelbaum Gate (16 page)

At Acre
the people he had known were gone, but as happens, the place itself, by some
invisible influence or tradition, had drawn the same sort of people, the young
or the young at heart who belonged to nothing but themselves, for whose
temperament no scope existed in any society open to them, and who by day
enacted the requirements of their society. These were lapsed Jews, lapsed
Arabs, lapsed citizens, runaway Englishmen, dancing prostitutes, international
messes, failed painters, intellectuals, homosexuals. Some were silent, some
voluble. Some were mentally ill, or would become so.

But
others were not. Others were not, and never would become so; and would have
been the flower and pride of the Middle East, given the sun and air of the mind
not yet to be available. They met in a cellar at Acre, lined with wooden
benches, lit with oil lamps and cleared for dancing. Abdul would have preferred
the beaches or the cafés, and the open sky, but at least in the cellar an Arab
could laugh at the Arabs or mimic the solemn Israeli guard without being knifed
or shot. Three knifings were to occur within this little community over the
next ten years, but they were not political; they were to do with sex or drugs,
and in two cases the wounds were slight; in the third the body was successfully
disposed of from a fishing-boat.

Nothing
much had changed by 1961, the year of the Eichmann trial, when Abdul Ramdez
drove to Acre, the golden city of the Crusaders on the Mediterranean. At
Christian festivals, Easter and Christmas, he was able to pass over to Jordan
openly with mass pilgrimages to visit the Christian shrines, on the strength of
his baptismal certificate, acquired with that good foresight before the war
with Israel. Suzi, with the certificate he had obtained for her, got past the
officials to meet him at the churches. She was still unmarried at thirty-one.
She was unhappy, and only Abdul knew it. Sometimes he crossed the border
illegally, but he did not always see Suzi on these occasions. He had contrived
to meet his father several times since the partition of Palestine. ‘Are you a
nationalist? … A Nasserite? … What party? …’ But messages between Joe
Ramdez and Abdul passed frequently. They were comparatively easy to smuggle
back and forth across the border.

Nothing
much had changed at Acre over the years except the place of rendezvous and
Abdul’s real age. He was now thirty-four, but he kept himself lean, was strict
with himself and looked no more than the age he had decided on. He did not
trouble about the future. Twenty-five. Foreigners like Hamilton were puzzled at
times by Abdul’s maturity of knowledge.

‘But
surely, Abdul, you must have been a young infant at that time. How could you
remember King Farouk before he grew fat?’

Abdul
piled lies upon truth, without attempting to convince. He felt he was making an
almost poetic effort. He derived huge pleasure from mixing everyone up so much
that they saw through it in the end.

‘Sometimes,
Abdul, I wonder if you’re just treating me to a big leg-pull.’

Hamilton
had said this one day. Abdul thought it intelligent of him. He said, “Well,
what have I got to lose, Mr Hamilton? You know that all the Arabs in Palestine
are dispossessed. There’s nothing to lose, now that Abdul has lost his orange
groves.’

‘Did
you possess orange groves?’

‘Vast
groves.’

‘I don’t
believe it. Come, Abdul!’

‘I am
an Arab,’ said Abdul, looking fierce, ‘and you may not accuse me of a lie.
Anyway, I have lost a good travel agency business in Haifa. The Jews have got
it.’

Hamilton
had laughed and regarded him fondly.

Abdul
drove to Acre on the following Sunday and thought for a while of the Hamilton
he had seen a few days before, unwell, bewildered. Someone at Acre would know,
or find out, what had happened to the Englishman over in Jordan and what had
happened with Miss Vaughan. It would be a pity if Hamilton started to make
trouble, and stopped being friendly.

The new meeting-place at
Acre was more spacious and comfortable than any previous one. New young people
came in from time to time.

The
building stood in the great muddle of the poor Arab quarter. It was equipped as
a laundry, and in the daytime the lower ground floor functioned as a cheap
washing establishment where, in one room, an unpunctual and inefficient supply
of warm water was available, with wash tubs and soap, at a cheap rate, to the
poor women who had to do their washing themselves, and who were slightly
advanced beyond the river-washing set.

The
club-rooms could not really be called club-rooms, since the traditions and
organization of any sort of club-life did not belong to them. These
meeting-rooms were in the cellars and on the floor above the laundry. Windows
from all sides kept watch on any possible police approach from the sea or from
the street. Some of the upper rooms were always hung with washing, hauled high
on pulleys, which, at night when the lights were on, could be glimpsed above
the half-curtains from the alleys outside.

Two
Pakistanis, students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, came to open the
door for Abdul. They were temporary caretakers, since the laundryman who looked
after the house at Acre was away to the north on business.

Abdul
had two rooms of his own on the upper floor, but everyone else used them. The
rooms had some rush matting on the floors and brightly-covered low divans, with
a bare wood table in each, and, in one room, a wireless set. He went there
sometimes to sleep, and read, or talk. He went to talk about nothing or
everything, and, quite often, about business.

Soon
Abdul and his friends would move their premises. It had always been like this,
and there could be no question of their applying for a night-club licence to
make their meeting-ground legitimate so far as that would have gone; the part
of their activities which was illegal could have been protected by a
night-club pretence, but the Israeli police surveillance would have been
in-tolerable. The law could not altogether prevent, but it could harass, those
few young Jews and Jewesses who came to the house at Acre because there was no
other place acceptable to the reality of their feelings in the world around
them. The group was seldom more than twenty-five in number at any one time.

‘What
have you been doing?’ Abdul said in English, as the students knew no Arabic or
Hebrew.

One of
the Pakistanis, a very small man, replied ‘Considering the lilies.’ This was a
well-worn remark in that house, but it was new to the Pakistanis, who did not
know its origin and merely liked it.

An Arab
girl in khaki shorts and shirt brought in some coffee. She spoke to Abdul in
English seeing that the Pakistanis were present: ‘Mendel came back safe. Hassan
is returned. Mendel saw your sister.’

Abdul
put down his coffee, he hugged and kissed her for all this news.

The
taller Pakistani said, ‘Your sister Suzi has been very involved. She sent a
message, she is very involved.’

‘Very
involved,’ said the girl. ‘Mendel will tell you, he’s coming soon, he’s on his
way.’

‘What
is she involved about?’

‘The
tourist agency. Very interesting.’

‘She
must be up to something,’ Abdul said, and went to the window to smell Acre.
Night had fallen and he heard the splash of oars.

It was ten at night, in
the cellar of the laundry at Acre. Here the Crusader foundations could be seen,
quite clearly, rising unevenly up to two feet above the flagged floor, until
the Crusader stones met the stones that had been set upon them, probably by
the next conquerors — the Turks, perhaps.

The
light from the oil lamps was thinly misted from their smoke. About a dozen
people, young, not of local origin, were gathered, or were drifting in and out
of this room. It would have been impossible to tell from their appearance only
which of these young men and women were Jews and which were Arabs. The
difference was discernible in their accent of speech, although colloquial
Arabic was mostly spoken. The two students from Pakistan and a handsome
large-limbed western girl with a mass of long brown hair, who was the daughter
of a Church of Scotland clergyman resident at Tel Aviv, were the only
non-Semites. The rest were Arabs and Jews, most of whom were maturely sixteen
years of age and upward to the reaches of their late twenties or early
thirties. Abdul, if anyone had considered it worth finding out, was the eldest.
They were dressed in jeans, dresses or shorts, and corporately they had the
coffee-bar look of the young, everywhere.

A girl
was plucking the strings of a guitar, making soft aimless Arabic music with few
notes. Nobody was dancing at the moment. Abdul had fetched a tin of beer from
a scarred, lop-sided oil refrigerator which stood in the passage outside, from
which anyone who wanted beer took it, depositing the money in the ice-tray.
Abdul sat drinking alone, watching the door until Mendel Ephraim appeared.

Mendel
Ephraim was one of his closest friends. He was the youngest brother of that
Saul Ephraim, the teacher of archaeology at the Hebrew University, who knew
Barbara Vaughan and had sometimes acted as her guide in Israel. Ephraim
resembled his brother in his taut sinewy look, but he had a slight shoulder-blade
stoop; he looked like an intellectual eagle. He was twenty-six. The family had
given him up because of his failure as a son, a Jew and an Israeli; they held
him in suspicion, but did not know what to suspect him of. He had a job in a
tobacconist kiosk at the foot of Mount Zion. Mendel’s failure to respond to the
State of Israel was their greatest puzzle and embarrassment. Many of the
Ephraim family were unbelievers, and it would not have mattered if he had
refused only the religion; but many nonreligious Israelis were accustomed to
speak in historical terms of Israel’s destiny; the Old Testament was to them a
sacred book because it was the history of the Jews rather than a spiritual
record; and it was quite common for those who did not accept any religious or
divine element in life, to maintain that the Messianic prophecies had in fact
been fulfilled in the establishment of the State of Israel. ‘The country,
Israel, is the Messiah.’ they said frequently. Young Mendel Ephraim was as
indifferent to this social mystique as he was to religion. He had worked on a
border kibbutz and been caught, nearly shot, while attempting to cross into
no-man’s land, heaving a spare-part of a tractor, which he. explained was
urgently needed by the Arab farmer on the other side. He had been closely
interrogated about these communications with the farmer which had led up to the
jaunt, but all he would admit was, ‘I could see he was in trouble with his
tractor. You could see. Anyone could see.’

The
family had given him up. It was known he was friendly with Abdul Ramdez the
Arab, and he had to spend a lot of time shaking off the private detectives and
secret-service agents who followed him from time to time. He was never certain
whether these spies were employed by his family or by the state. He did not
care. He shook them off when he travelled out of town. being well acquainted
with the terrain of the country-side and its devious hill routes, and having
accustomed himself to cave life. He was not entirely alone among his generation
in his truculence; there were other Jews like him scattered about.

Abdul,
however, seemed to him even more akin in mentality, being far more humorous
than most, and more articulate. Besides, he was in a way of business with
Abdul. Whether Arab or Jew, it was part of life for Semites who, like
themselves, were of long merchant origin to be occupied in some business.

Mendel had got himself a
tin of beer. He came and sat down at Abdul’s shadowy table. They kept silence
for a few moments. Then Abdul said, in Arabic, ‘You’re back safe.’

‘I’ve
got news for you.’

‘Yes,
later. You’re back safe, that comes first. Hassan’s safe, too.’

The
courteous contours of the old language half-imposed themselves on these
preludes to their conversation, sentence by sentence, as if tradition itself
were fumbling its way among the aberrant communications of the two men. Mendel
said, ‘I have new for you about your sister. The business can wait.’

‘The
business can wait, but tell me immediately how much danger there was, this
trip. Did you have difficulties?’

‘Only
when your sister Suzi recognized me. I thought she would call out when she saw
me at the Holy Sepulchre this morning.’

‘You
didn’t go to the city in broad daylight? Mendel, you’re mad. What did you do
that for?’

‘Well,
I was dressed-up the Arab part.’

‘Somebody
might have spoken to you. The voice, Mendel. It’s dangerous. Anyone can tell by
the intonation that you’re no Arab.’

Mendel
spoke in a harsh whisper. ‘If I had been forced to speak, I would have had
laryngitis. Lost my voice. It was exciting, though. I’ll never forget it.’

Abdul
said, ‘There is a reason that you found Suzi,’

‘Yes, I’ll
tell you the news. Just before dawn I got to the Potter’s Field, and we were
wrapping up the sacks in the cave, ready to return. I saw Suzi coming out of a
car. She went into that old house just past the church.’