The Mandelbaum Gate (32 page)

The
priest glanced at his watch and the friars at each other. He made a slight
gesture of pulling himself off a subject that was leading far, and said, ‘I don’t
mean you to be afraid of saying your prayers at the wrong shrine. It’s always
the right place if you pray there.

‘We
know the creed of our faith and what we believe. Outside of that it is better
to know what is doubtful than to place faith in uncertainties. Doubt is the
prerogative of the believer; the unbeliever cannot know doubt. And in what is
doubtful we should doubt well. But in whatever touches the human spirit, it is
better to believe everything than nothing. Have faith. In the Name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

They
felt he had done his worst. The friars stood moveless, watching him return to
the altar and begin the second part of the Mass.

‘Credo
in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium,
et invisibilium —’

Suddenly
he had broken off and had turned once again to the people. This alone was
irregular…. But he was about to speak, with an advisory finger pointed… ‘I forgot
to mention the Milk Grotto, near Bethlehem. Don’t go near the Milk Grotto. It’s
a pure fake. They claim there’s a legend that milk from Mary’s breast fell in
this grotto where for some reason she happened to be nursing the infant Jesus,
in consequence of which the walls of the grotto turned white. They make up packets
of white stuff from the walls for pilgrims to take away. The stuff is supposed
to be a comfort to nursing mothers or some such hocus-pocus. Keep away from the
Milk Grotto, it’s only a chalk cave.’

The
communist agent returned to the altar and began again. ‘Credo in unum Deum …’

When
the Mass was ended and he moved from the altar towards the friars, the
youngest again made a move as if to say a few wild words. But both elders
restrained him; and when the Englishman brushed past them, muttering the prayers
appointed to be said after Mass, the friars stood mute, with downcast eyes,
content to wait for their justification in Heaven, which, being all Italian
territory, would be so ordered that foreign firebrands like this one would be
kept firmly in their place.

Freddy already thought
highly of Suzi, who had told him what a lovely smile he had. This was something
he vaguely recalled having heard before at an earlier time of his life; it was
a pleasant reminder — ‘… Freddy’s attractive smile’, or ‘… your nice smile,
Freddy’ — something like that. Suzi was very outspoken but that was the Ramdez
touch; Abdul was the same. By the time he came to stand outside the Holy
Sepulchre after the service, waiting for the girls to emerge, he had forgotten
Suzi’s compliment about his smile but only thought highly of Suzi. The girls
had gone to look round the Holy Sepulchre and visit the other shrines. Suzi had
told him to wait for them outside, had pushed confidently through the crowd,
followed mutely by Barbara. Things seemed to be going well. Freddy had thought
the sermon rather long but quite practical in its way. He had been to a Roman
Catholic Mass once or twice before, for funeral services, and considered there
was too much of it. He was not, anyway, a very religious man. He entertained a
patriotic belief in God, but since his youth he had been to church about as
seldom as he had been to Buckingham Palace. However, he disapproved of letting
young chaps into the Foreign Service who openly professed to have no religion
at all. A security risk, Freddy felt decidedly. He looked up at the scaffold
props of the Holy Sepulchre and wondered if Joanna and Matt would hear of his
lingering presence in Jordan. He didn’t really care one way or another; and
when his mind turned on those tedious letters from Ma and Benny, his anxious
replies, and the all-responsible letter to the doctor which had gone swirling
down the lavatory at Alexandros’s place, he felt respectably at one with the
world. Things were going well. It was like being at the races when one had
started off with a pound each way and the horse had come in, perhaps second, at
a good price; then, if one did quite nicely in the second race, even at a
modest price, one knew one’s luck was in for the day.

One’s
luck was in at last, and the enterprise of Barbara Vaughan’s pilgrimage had
got off on a good start. He thought highly of Suzi Ramdez. Somewhere along the
road to Bethlehem, their next goal, a pink gin before lunch would be a good
idea.

Barbara, meanwhile, existed
in numb misery. The clothes she was draped in, although they were loose, seemed
to form a kind of oven for her burning body. The crowds pressed as if
deliberately all round her, pushing crude faces close to her veil. Her eyes
prickled and she felt their roots were red hot. Everything in her life was
remotely in the past. Harry Clegg was a few feet of overexposed film. Nothing
worse, she thought, can happen; it was the only thing she could think, but if
she had tried she could not have placed what exactly that happening was, than
which nothing could be worse. At a point during the sermon, she had wanted to
say something to Suzi like ‘I want to go out and be sick’, but being in any
case uncertain whether she actually wanted to be sick or not, she had remembered
she was a mute. From the sermon she had got the erroneous impression of a
sanctimonious voice pounding upon her physical distress. Now she followed Suzi,
who was treating the crowds like those waves of the Red Sea between which the
Israelites passed dryshod; the people made way for Suzi, but on Barbara they
pressed with enlarged noses and twisted mouths on the other side of her veil.
She was beyond feeling ill, it was merely that nothing worse could happen.

She
stood beside Suzi before a stone slab and wanted only to lie on it full length,
without the black shrouds she was wearing; she yearned for its coolness and for
a long sleep, a sleep of death. Through her fever she heard the voice of an
English-speaking Arab guide addressing the group which Suzi had joined. He was
saying that this was the Holy Sepulchre itself, the tomb that had belonged to
Joseph of Arimathea, where Christ was laid on that first Good Friday when his
body was taken down from the cross. The body of Christ was embalmed with spices
and herbs and wrapped in a linen shroud as the cool night was falling. Suzi
took Barbara’s arm to draw her closer to the front of the group where the guide
was pointing to this and that memorial of the burial of Christ. Barbara’s head
was drumming; her ears had begun to ache. She held back and clung only to the
one thought that nothing worse could now happen.

They
were going down some cool dark steps. The guide had gone ahead and waited below
for another group of people to move away before he collected his brood about
him. The brood was talking softly, menacing Barbara. She heard that this was St
Helena’s Chapel, where the true Cross had been found in the fourth century.
Barbara wanted to return to the slab and lie on its cool surface; an Image of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the last scene at Stonehenge passed her mind and
was gone indiscernibly, so that she did not know what caused her to start and
give a little shudder, as if touched by a bat that had somehow got into the
crypt. She had stopped on the dark stairway, and the people behind her wanted
to pass down. Suzi reached up and took her arm. Nothing worse can happen now. A
woman who did not seem to belong either to the group that was about to leave
the chapel or to the approaching group, was standing apart looking round her,
sturdily clutching with one thumb the shoulder strap of her sling-bag; in the
other hand she held a slip of paper about which she evidently wished to consult
someone. Barbara and Suzi had reached the ground of the crypt. The woman approached
their guide, but he had turned to consult with the departing guide about some
guide-business. The lone woman then approached a man among the crowd that
Barbara and Suzi had joined. She was within breathing distance of Barbara’s
veil. She was Ricky. She was Miss Rickward. She said to the man, offering the
slip of paper, ‘Excuse me, but can you read Arabic?’ The man said, no, he was
afraid he couldn’t, but perhaps the guide … He looked round for their guide,
who was nowhere visible at that moment. ‘You see,’ Ricky was saying, ‘it’s an
address that I’ve been directed to. I’m looking for a friend.’ The man then
caught sight of Barbara at the same time as Ricky did, and he started to say,
There’s an Arab woman there, she’d be able to —’ Ricky approached Barbara with
her piece of paper: ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me —’

Suzi’s
arm shot forth like the arm of one holding back yet another Red Sea. ‘My poor
servant is dumb,’ declared Suzi. ‘Very dumb, also holy. Praise be to Allah! She
can utter no word, neither falsehood nor blasphemy. Do not approach my holy
mute, I command you, but stand at a distance, and if there’s anything you want,
ask me.’

‘Oh, I
beg your pardon,’ Ricky said, stepping backward, as did the other people in
their near vicinity. Suzi was reading the words on the piece of paper. She read
out, The Crusaders’ Inn. Ask for Jaber Khalil, from Amin Mahgoub, St Helena’s
Convent.’ Suzi explained how to get to the Crusaders’ Inn while Barbara looked
at Ricky through her veil without feeling a thing, since nothing worse could
happen than had already happened behind her throbbing head. She heard Suzi
tell Ricky to ask for the proprietor, Mr Khalil, while Ricky informed her
gratefully that she had got the address from the doorman at St Helena’s Convent;
she had not been allowed to enter the doors of the convent as an outbreak of an
infectious disease had occurred there that morning. ‘And,’ said Ricky, ‘I’m
trying to catch up with an English friend. I thought she might have come here
for a church service.’

‘Good
luck, then,’ Suzi said, shaking off the intruder as firmly as if she had not
been in total ignorance of any connexion between Ricky and Barbara. Suzi moved
with the group towards the Altar of the Finding of the Cross, where the guide
was now standing ready for them. Holding fast to Barbara, she thrust far into
the stifling crowd, who now made a little space for this woman of Jerusalem and
her picturesque servant.

‘She
has seen all the Holy Sepulchre,’ Suzi said, when they found Freddy in the courtyard.
‘But Barbara must come again on the return journey.’

‘I’m
ill,’ Barbara said. ‘My throat’s closing up. I’ve got a fever.’ Suzi said,
looking straight ahead, ‘Don’t speak. Say nothing. Even now, you might be
noticed. Wait till we get to the car. You must keep it up.’

‘It
must be those clothes,’ Freddy said. ‘She’ll be all right when we’re on the
road to Bethlehem. I think if we can get a drink somewhere before lunch it
would be a good idea. Let’s get moving.’

But
there was no mistaking the fact, when they got a look at Barbara’s unveiled
face on the way to Bethlehem — the hectic flush and the dead-white ring round
her mouth — that she was ill beyond what could be accounted for by the heat
and the clothes she was wearing. They turned back to Jerusalem and once more
Freddy banged on Alexandros’s shop door, while Suzi stood on the pavement
supporting Barbara, looking up at Alexandros’s face in the window.

‘The lady wishes to
contribute to your Arab Refugee Fund,’ Freddy said, falling back on his past experience
of Hong Kong and so forth. He said, ‘The lady wishes to remain anonymous.’ He
handed over ten English five-pound notes out of Barbara’s newly-acquired supply
— ‘and is honoured by your acceptance of this donation for so great a cause.’

Dr
Russeifa stuffed his payment into the inside pocket of his coat, thanking both
Freddy and the lady on the refugees’ behalf. Freddy, careful to mind his
manners, then asked the doctor to state his fee for his professional services. ‘No
fee,’ said Dr Russeifa, ‘I am perfectly honoured to be of assistance to the
unfortunate lady. This outbreak of scarlet fever has of course made her a victim,
and is without doubt the fault of our enemy, so-called Israel, who sends such
germ-warfare to our country daily.’

The
disease had not spread far; Freddy’s information was that there was one case, a
Swedish pilgrim, in the convent where Barbara had stayed. Barbara was now
lying on a sofa in a small room in Alexandros’s living-quarters.

At
first she had said she didn’t care what happened. She had murmured that nothing
worse could happen, and closed her eyes. After taking two aspirins and a glass
of water, she opened them. She had partially recovered her senses and had
become talkative by fits and starts. She had insisted on writing out a large
cheque on her English bank which Alexandros said he could cash.

A
doctor, Freddy had insisted. He said it was probably some local bug she had
caught, a temporary thing, but still one must have a doctor.

Alexandros
knew of three English doctors in Jerusalem. Freddy had met one of them at the
Cartwrights. He hesitated. Alexandros said, ‘Would these English doctors make
an official report of it?’

‘Yes, I’m
afraid they would have to. Especially if she’s got something infectious. They’d
have to put her in hospital of course, and, of course, inform the British
consulate and the Jordanian authorities.’

‘Suzi!’
called Alexandros, and went to fetch her before she answered his call. She had
been with Mine Alexandros explaining things in such a way that the woman could
not possibly understand yet could not decently admit to being puzzled.
Alexandros had brought Suzi into the little room, conferring with her in
Arabic. He then threw wide his arms and announced, ‘We have Russeifa. Dr
Russeifa is the doctor for the Joe Ramdez Insurance Company. You give him quite
a little cash and he will attend to Barbara very quiet.’