Read The Mandelbaum Gate Page 16


  ‘It is the western style as you see,’ Alexandros said, and Freddy realized that this was indeed an unusual feature for an Arab establishment, where one would normally expect the system of sanitation set into the floor. ‘The last tenant of the shop was a Jew,’ said Alexandros with his French-Arab gesture of the hands and shoulders that so much conveyed his impartiality to the humours and chances of war, fate and life.

  Freddy tore up first the letters from his mother and Benny. Down they went, He waited for the cistern to refill, rightly judging it to be a slow one. He did not want to block up Alexandros’s lavatory, or force the cistern to work by repeatedly yanking the chain. While he waited, he realized that the contents of the three sealed envelopes he had in his hand would probably not go down so easily as had the air-mail paper from Harrogate that he had just got rid of, since his own writing-paper was heavier stuff. So he took out his cigarette lighter and, thankful to find it was in working condition, burned up the three letters he had written that afternoon, holding them over the lavatory pan, and dropping in the charred remains one by one, first Benny’s, then the doctor’s and lastly Ma’s. He pulled the chain. Down they went. But not quite. A few charred fragments — those last corners of paper that he had held between finger and thumb — remained floating. Freddy waited for a further four minutes until the gurgle faded to a whisper, pulled sharply and hoped. His total effort was doomed to success. The last of the Harrogate relics disappeared. He emerged from the tiny cabinet to find Alexandros hovering anxiously outside the door.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Hamilton?’

  ‘Perfectly all right,’ Freddy said. ‘I was just disposing of some tiresome correspondence.’ As he followed Alexandros into the front shop, settling on a sofa in the large space reserved for special customers, Freddy assured his host that he had been careful as regards the drains.

  ‘Mr Hamilton,’ said Alexandros, ‘you’re a wise man. If a correspondence is tiresome, what can a man do? He tries his best, he tries to say one thing, he tries to say another thing. Then after a few months, a year, two years, if there is no satisfaction, then pouff? — he should put the entire affair down the drain. Finish.’

  Freddy said, ‘It lasted longer than two years. It has gone on all my life. Family trouble.’

  ‘Oh well, your family; I thought it might be a lady. In the case of the family, Mr Hamilton, a man must do the same as with a woman. If they make troubles without end, troubles all the time, there is a point where a man must put the business down the drain. Let the family go their way. Finish. I see you have delayed long enough.’

  ‘I should have done it years ago,’ Freddy said. He could feel Alexandros looking at him with approving wonder, and realized that some new thing about his appearance was conveying an unaccustomed liberated impression. ‘Do you know,’ Freddy said, ‘I feel quite young, Alexandros.’

  ‘You’re not an old man. Myself, I tell you in confidence, I don’t live in an old man’s way. I’m fifty-seven.’

  ‘I’m fifty-five.’

  ‘Middle age,’ said Alexandros, sinking into a chair opposite Freddy. ‘If a man has lived older than his years till middle age, then he should start to live younger.’

  ‘One can make a fool of oneself,’ Freddy said. This apparently touched a talking-point in Alexandros. He stood up and said, ‘One may do this, always. Agreed. But this depends also on the company. In the consideration of this or that company — this person, that person — one is foolish, one is wise. I also make a fool of myself in the consideration of my wife that I have left my business at Beirut in the hands of my second son, to come here among the Moslems. My wife is a good woman and a fine Mama of the family. But she does not trust my second son’s wife, a woman who is a Catholic also like ourselves. My wife is telling me I am a fool to leave the business in Beirut where this wife of my son can make changes. My wife is also against the Moslem religion. Here in Jerusalem she won’t speak to our neighbours, she weeps that in Beirut we have all Christian neighbours. So, to my wife I look like a fool. But to my sons I am not foolish. They say, the Papa goes to Jerusalem, he makes a specialized business . of fine goods, he sends his first son to the university and his second son he permits to have a life for himself in Lebanon. Another thing, Mr Hamilton — myself, also, I like the Moslem religion all right. I am an Arab. The Christian religion agrees with the religion of Islam in many particulars. But women do not know of this.’ He sat down.

  Freddy said, ‘I often think all religions have something in common when you take away the damn nonsense. How do you feel about the Jews? I’ve got a special reason for asking you, Alexandros.’

  ‘The Jews,’ said Alexandros, in the quieter tone of voice demanded by the subject, ‘are good for trade. There is no business here in Jordan since the Jews have departed. The prices are too low. They understand the markets and the variety of quality merchandise for the visitors of one quality or another quality. The country is poor because the Jewish economy is absent. You must not say Alexandros told you this. Not to anyone, please.’

  ‘As persons? How do you feel about the Jews individually? I want to ask your advice about a friend who’s got Jewish blood. I’ve got to attend to it right away, in fact.’

  Alexandros spread his hands and cast up his eyes. ‘I have known good and bad. People — they are people.’ He looked then at Freddy’s zipper-bag and said, ‘But you do not intend to return to Israel tonight? The Gate is dosed. It’s too late.’

  ‘I know,’ Freddy said.

  Alexandros waved a hand towards the curtain which hung across the narrow staircase. ‘You must dine with me, please. I then drive you back to the Cartwright house in my car.’

  ‘I won’t be returning to the Cartwrights. My friends think I’ve gone. But to tell you the truth, Alexandros, I mean to stay in Jordan until I’ve helped a friend of mine out of difficulty. In fact, now that I’ve got rid of those tiresome letters I’ve got an overwhelming desire to do so.’

  Alexandros folded his arms.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Freddy, ‘you think I’ve gone off my head. And if so, I can only—’

  ‘Mr Hamilton! I am far from thinking such a thing. To my mind you are an extra sane man. Is it a man or a lady, this Jew?’

  ‘A young woman of my acquaintance,’ Freddy said. ‘That lady who bought the silver fish from you. She —’

  ‘Zobeida! …’ Alexandros was over by the staircase, pulling the curtain aside, linking himself still to Freddy’s presence by an arm outstretched in his direction — ‘Zobeida! Make a place at my table for a guest. Lela! Tell Zobeida I have a friend —’

  ‘Look,’ Freddy said. ‘I don’t want it known that I’m still in Jordan. I don’t want the Cartwrights to hear. I have a reason.’

  ‘Then nobody shall hear,’ said Alexandros, and disappeared upstairs.

  Saturday night to Tuesday afternoon: the events were to come back to Freddy in the course of time; first, like an electric shock of fatal voltage, but not fatal, and so, after that, like a cloud of unknowing, heavy with the molecules of accumulated impressions and finally when he had come to consider the whole mosaic of evidence, when he had gathered the many-coloured fragments of what actually happened, and had put the missing parts in place, then he came to discern, too late for action but more and more dearly as the years sifted past, that he had been neither a monster nor a fool, but had behaved rather well, and at least with style and courage. Looking back at the experience in later years Freddy was amazed. It had seemed to transfigure his life, without any disastrous change in the appearance of things; pleasantly and essentially he came to feel it had made a free man of him where before he had been the subdued, obedient servant of a mere disorderly sensation, that of impersonal guilt. And whether this feeling of Freddy’s subsequent years was justified or not, it did him good to harbour it.

  Now, on the first evening of those missing days, Freddy began to see himself, as he sat at Alexandros’s table, in a physical way under such an aspect as he h
ad seen himself in his Cambridge days when he had been a boxing half-blue. It may have been that Alexandros was now regarding him with the special interest called for by the occasion; Freddy was not sure of this, for Alexandros was offering his special reserves of hospitality, as he would his rare pieces, which were generally kept from display in the shop. However that may have been, Freddy felt as the conversation proceeded, a sense of his appearance which he had not thought about for years; and although his thoughts and speech were given to the eager matter of discussion, a left-hand accompaniment, as it might be played on the piano, went on in his brain concerning his own physical presence; ‘well preserved’, thought Freddy, would describe the effect, and certainly I’m in good shape due to walking and exercise; hair turning grey, but plenty of it; five foot ten, no stoop; rather short neck. It’s a pleasing appearance — how astonishing — but that’s merely a fact I simply haven’t thought of since I left Cambridge — or, at least since….

  Alexandros had sent the women of the household away before Freddy joined him upstairs. It was a charming room, containing a few very good objects that apparently Alexandros could not bear to part with; there was no suggestion of an antique dealer’s residence, it was that of an uncomplicated, tasteful Arab, and it might have been a room in the house of any western man of Freddy’s past acquaintance who had a leaning towards Oriental rarities if he cared to have rarities at all. The ceiling was low and white, as were the walls. The floor was newly laid with plain polished wood, partly covered by two modern and remarkably handsome Persian rugs. On one wall was hung a carpet of great age and mellowness, the most beautiful Freddy had seen. Its colours glowed forth throughout the evening in a process of slow revelation. A pair of mosaic jars that Freddy could not closely examine, forming table-lamps, were placed at either end of the room, and glimmered quietly in pale blue, green, and russet under the shaded lights. Freddy also noticed a Dutch landscape painting on the more shadowed of the walls, and on the largest wall, a dazzling Russian icon in a large, wrought-silver frame. The rest of the room was furnished casually — a good, small table, a dining-table covered in a white lace-edged cloth and laid for the meal in shiny silver and china which was discernibly Mine Alexandros’s best, some rush-seated chairs and a narrow soft couch with damask-covered cushions. It had seemed to Freddy, as he entered this room, that his perceptions must have been getting terribly dull over the years, and now that they had begun to return, he was more enthusiastic than ever about the rightness of his tearing up the letters and disposing of them down the lavatory.

  He said to Alexandros, ‘I hope Mine Alexandros is not put out by our dining alone.’

  Alexandros said. ‘Another time, you will meet my wife here in my home. There are many days before us. I told her it is a matter of my business. As you don’t wish to he seen, Mr Hamilton, it is important that I serve the dinner to you myself.’

  It was a dish of rice, chicken, and olives. Alexandros had fetched it and had again disappeared, returning with an unlabelled bottle. Wine from Palestine,’ he said. ‘It comes from over the border, but not through the Mandelbaum Gate.’ Freddy recalled an Embassy row in Jordan because one of the consuls had brought over a bottle of Israeli wine, with the label on it, which his servant had reported to the authorities.

  They ate, and Freddy felt Alexandros’s eyes upon him and experienced that sense of his own physical qualities, and the qualities of the room, and, most of all, the carpet glowing on the far wall. And he, in turn, perceived large Alexandros in his physical presence, sitting opposite him, fleshy, brown-skinned, thick-jowled with curly black hair, semitic nose, and vital dark eyes. But the heavy man, by a spread of the fingers or a gesture of neck and shoulders, gave out a weightless courtesy. Freddy felt he could lift Alexandros on one finger, and was perfectly at ease with his own self-awareness harmonized at the back of his mind with the immediate subject of their conversation, Barbara Vaughan’s predicament.

  ‘She’s nothing to me,’ Freddy said, ‘in the usual sense. And I’m nothing to her. She’s engaged to an archaeologist who’s working on the Dead Sea material. She says she’s gone off him, but —’

  ‘Off him? That is to mean she’s changed her mind and doesn’t love him now?’

  ‘That’s what she said. But I rather doubt that she means it. The point is, whether she’s in danger, roaming about Jordan. A half-Jew … I think she is in danger.’

  ‘You have had sleep with her? Excuse me that I ask out of curiosity. One desires to understand all sides of a business.’

  Freddy thought this intelligent of Alexandros. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I haven’t slept with her. I don’t know if she’s the sort of woman that one would want to sleep with. I’m afraid I hadn’t thought of it.’

  Alexandros raised his brows, gave a shrug that might have signified anything, and, in the same gesture, put a large portion of his dinner into his mouth.

  ‘Too nervy,’ Freddy said. ‘It would be a lot of hard work to sleep with a woman like that, I should imagine.’

  ‘I imagine very different,’ Alexandros said. ‘It is of course one of the things of interest that one asks oneself in secret thought when a lady comes to the shop to buy — how is she like in the bed? — and I have thought this morning when she came to the shop, that she is a sexual woman.’

  ‘Would you say so?’ Freddy realized, with envy, that Alexandros never permitted himself a moment’s boredom.

  ‘To the fingertips.’

  ‘How astonishing.’

  Alexandros nodded slowly. He was evidently delighted to be established as the expert that he was.

  The evening warmed around them. ‘She’s in danger if it is known that she is a Jew by blood,’ Alexandros said.

  ‘Even though a Christian?’

  ‘She has been first to Israel, so she would be thought a spy.’

  ‘I’m not sure how seriously my friends, the Cartwrights, realize it. I’m afraid we discussed the question rather a lot —’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Alexandros. ‘The servants of the Cartwrights have reported. My shop boy has told me already this evening that we have a Jewish tourist in Jerusalem, and she was the one who bought the silver fish from our shop. One cannot help this news spreading. They fear Israeli spies.’

  ‘She’s a half—Jew.’

  ‘This makes more suspicion. You should know this, as you are in a foreign service.’

  ‘Indeed, I understand.’

  Alexandros said, ‘Perhaps you must see the British consul and arrange for her to leave the country. Keep her in the convent for the meantime. It is a pity, but—’

  ‘A pity!’ Freddy said. ‘It’s a damn disgrace that a girl can’t go on a pilgrimage of the Holy Land, a Christian convert visiting the shrines, without fear of arrest.’

  Alexandros radiated response. ‘You are right! Perhaps you let her take the risk. Perhaps the danger is not so much. The government spies will follow her but perhaps they will hesitate to make an arrest.’

  ‘Ramdez is her travel agent,’ Freddy said. ‘I can’t think what possessed her to go to Ramdez. Obnoxious fellow.’

  ‘If Ramdez is the agent, then she could meet danger from private retribution. Ramdez is dangerous.’

  ‘Private retribution?’

  ‘An accident may befall her on her travels. Between the police posts are many miles of desert. She may suffer an accident. This, too, you know of.’

  ‘I do understand,’ Freddy said, struck now by his recollection of political deaths by accident. He jumped to his feet. ‘Alexandros, we must do something.’

  ‘Be seated, Mr Hamilton.’ Alexandros, in his usual manner, prolonged the last syllable to synchronize with the action that accompanied it. His gesture now was to place his two large hands on Freddy’s shoulders and press him back into his chair. He then left the room, but without seeming to withdraw any of his presence, for Freddy could hear his footsteps, heavy with long-accepted proprietorship, beating towards the back of the house, a
nd from there, his voice domestically urging his requirements in Arabic, above a kitchen clatter.

  Freddy had an urge to make himself useful by piling the used plates together. It was a habit he had acquired since the war when visiting servantless friends. But he forbore. Alexandros would prefer to do everything himself. He was a marvellous host.

  Alexandros could be heard on his return, treading more quietly in caution of the stuff he was carrying, which nevertheless rattled a little as he entered. It was a dish of fruit, coffee and a decanter of brandy with cups and glasses. ‘I make a good waiter at the table,’ roared Alexandros, setting down the tray with the last word, ‘tabe-oool’. And when he had shut the door he sat, clasped his hands as if congratulating himself and said, ‘My wife and her servant are thinking I am making big business with a representative from a great museum, as I have told the household. I have said the negotiations are very secret as you are in rivalry from another collector who follows you to gain knowledge of your expert discoveries. We have many such dealings here in Jerusalem. There was much secret business with great collectors and great museums and their spies, and also with many governments when we came first to Jerusalem, as those were the years of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. There were many fragments in many hands. As also with other items of antiquity in Jerusalem. So Alexandros can make a story to silence his household of this meeting tonight, and Alexandros is a good waiter at the table.’

  He unclasped his hands and poured coffee, pushing the used plates and cutlery out of the way. ‘And we make a plan for Barbara.’

  ‘Alexandros, you’re a good fellow.’

  ‘I’m not too old to enjoy this rescue of a woman,’ said Alexandros.

  ‘Neither am I, come to think of it. I’m prepared for anything. But I don’t want to involve you in any danger, Alexandros.’