Barbara was looking at the food on the table — bread, watermelon, olives and cream cheese. She took coffee and said, ‘Can we get some food after Mass?’ and explained that she intended to take Holy Communion and was obliged to abstain from solid food for three hours beforehand. Suzi began cheerfully to issue voluble caution not to reveal her eyes while taking Communion, ‘but lift the veil so — I am accustomed to taking Catholics to the Holy Sepulchre, but for you it will be necessary to take the Holy Wafer with the eyes covered, as this is necessary for you, to make sure you are not seen by others. The priest will —’ Barbara meanwhile was assailed by a consideration from the distant reality oft her private life; she thought, if I do intend to marry him, whether the Church allows it or not, does the intention alone constitute a mortal sin? She thought, then, if there’s a doubt in one’s mind, then it’s all right. Rather wearily she felt her old identity returning in spite oft this new disguise and the elation of the fantastic moment she had plunged into. It’s too much for me, she thought, all this bothering myself and questioning all the time; I’ve had enough of it.
She said, ‘Oh, I won’t risk it.’
Suzi said, ‘You are very wise. It’s best that you should not move from the crowd to the Communion rail, but you will stay by my side and nobody will notice you if you keep quiet and humble. If anyone who knows Kyra well shall approach us in Jerusalem, maybe I shall say you are Aliyah, the niece of my servant Kyra. I shall say something, believe me. You say nothing.’
‘I thought she was to be Kyra,’ Freddy said. He was reading a local English-language newspaper, which was several days old, just as if he were breakfasting late at home with this morning’s Sunday paper.
Suzi cut a slice oft the crumbly bread and passed it carefully to Barbara. ‘There’s no need to fast then,’ said Suzi. Barbara ate her breakfast with a sense of reprieve which seemed to extend over the three of them, and over the whitewashed room with its plain wood furnishings and the surprising telephone hung on the wall. Suzi’s dark, thin face had a touch in it of western anxiety, the mark of the emancipated; Freddy’s face, too, gave the map of his life. But for the moment, they were both relaxed; she thought, there’s something in this undertaking that lifts a burden of nerves from us all; by every reasoning the physical experiment alone should be nerve-wracking to contemplate, but it isn’t. Suzi said, ‘Finish up your coffee.’ Barbara did this, glancing at that page oft Freddy’s paper which was turned towards her. ‘Eichmann’s Quality Truthfulness’ stated these local headlines, ‘Marilyn Monroe Gall-bladder Operation’. Barbara said, ‘I think it’s going to be fun.’ Freddy did not reply for a moment, busily finishing what he was reading on his side of the paper. ‘Hero’s Welcome to Major Gagarin in London’, stated Barbara’s side. Freddy cast down the paper and jumped to his feet, taking a deep, contented breath as if the air were full of blessings. ‘Yes, hurry up, girls. We start in five minutes. Under starter’s orders! Get ready. The car’s outside.’
Barbara said to Suzi, ‘Might this lead you into trouble?’
Suzi laughed. ‘Everything I do might lead me into trouble. One day I shall run away. Now there is no danger for me except that my father, Joe Ramdez, shall suspect that I play a trick. If we fall in with the police we say you are an eccentric English lady, as they understand this. Or I say something to the police and to some I can give money. You say to them you are English if the police arrest you, and that you always wear the national costume of the countries you visit. I do not think this will happen with the police, as I am never stopped at the police posts with my tourists, and Freddy looks like my tourist.’
‘It’s good of you,’ Barbara said, and followed her to the car.
‘That is not all the opinions of me,’ said Suzi as she went ahead. ‘But you speak like Kyra.’
It was a large blue American car oft the type generally provided for hire by the travel agencies. ‘You get in the back,’ Suzi said to Barbara, adding, as Barbara gathered up the folds of her clothes to do so, ‘Never mind that you have difficulty to get in and out of the car as this looks O.K. for an Arab village woman.’
Freddy started up the car, and looked round the empty yard. ‘Shouldn’t we say good-bye?’
‘They are all gone farther down the hill to the monastery to be busy with the Masses in the church,’ Suzi said. ‘And we are sightseers and tourists now, so we don’t say good-bye.’
We’re off!’ Freddy said. ‘The pilgrimage is begun. First stop, the Holy Sepulchre.’
Suzi said, ‘Now I tell you the places of interest that we see. We leave Haceldama and we approach the ancient Jerusalem. Over there is Mount Scopus and we come to the valley of Jehosophat, which is the scene oft the Last Judgement. I have read your Bible and Christian books besides the Koran, and the Bible also is a great book.’
‘But rather obscure,’ Freddy said. He added, ‘mystifying’, in case Suzi had not caught his meaning.
She said, ‘That is not so much a fault when you can read two or three times, and you can find different opinions as to meaning. Incidentally, over there, as we turn, is Israel, where you came from; the people here do not use this name for that territory, you must not speak this name, it’s better to avoid. Is it true that the Jews have imprisoned Martin Buber in the Hebrew University, and will not permit anyone to go visit with him because he speaks in favour of the Arabs?’
Part Two
6. The Passionate Pilgrims
Freddy Hamilton, Barbara Vaughan, Suzi Ramdez — each, in later years, when they looked back on that time, remembered one particular event before all others. It was different in each case. Alexandros, too, had his special recollection that was to gleam suddenly. Michael Aaronson remembered only the worry and waiting, as he sat in his office looking out over London Wall, when it was certain that Barbara had disappeared.
‘What I remember most vividly of all,’ Barbara told her cousins later on, ‘— and I’ll never forget it — was when I went into the wrong room at the house at Jericho and found Ricky in bed with Joe Ramdez. I nearly died.’ For Freddy it did not come easy to talk of those days, lost in comedy and found again in tragedy: as if switching the dial of the wireless from confused station to station, he would rapidly send the pointer of his mind through a range of recollections until he came upon the clear moment of waiting outside the convent where Barbara was lodging, while Alexandros bargained with the porter for the unlocking of the door. But he would not speak of it. Instead, he would dwell on another more concrete moment — and by that time it was common knowledge that he had stood in the hot sandy courtyard of the house at Jericho and recognized, before he himself could be observed, Gardnor’s wife walking towards a palm-tree, and casually extracting a small folded paper from a deep slit in the ragged bark. ‘It simply came to me immediately there and then,’ Freddy said to a small group of colleagues, one Saturday afternoon two years later, when they had returned to the house where they were guests, after watching village cricket. ‘It just came to me that this was Nasser’s Post Office, as we called it. We’d been looking for the spot high and low since the leaks began some months before. When I saw Gardnor’s wife I simply knew it. And then I went and got the damned sunstroke and forgot it for two or three weeks.
However, it all came back. Just in time for us to get Gardnor. Unforgettable. Gardnor’s wife, at Nasser’s Post Office, getting her orders and passing on our stuff.’ Freddy took his fountain-pen from his inside pocket, and from his outside pocket he brought the cricket score-card, on the back oft which he drew for his friends a diagram of Nasser’s Post Office — the road, the house, and the palm-tree, marking with a cross the spot where he had first stood and then crouched, concealing himself behind his car, while Mrs Gardnor went to the tree and collected the message from the tufted bark. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I put in some more investigation on the spot. And I proved right. I wasn’t mistaken. Unconsciously, I must already have suspected Gardnor. We all did, as it turned out. But as he himself admitted in co
urt, he knew we couldn’t act without real proof…. It was only a stroke of chance … quite absurd….’
But to take the events as they happened, so far as is human:
Freddy went first, an unobtrusive foreign visitor among a crowd in the forecourt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and was followed by Suzi and Barbara, unnoticeable among another crowd, on that first Sunday morning of the pilgrimage. Some of the people had come for sightseeing purposes; these blocked the way until they had done gazing at the many-shaped structure, clicking cameras, craning up to the domes and terraced rooftops that expressed the divine ideas of those zealots and their conquerors who made them, and staring also at the heavy wooden props and scaffolding which modern times had contributed to the edifice in order to prop it up. When the people at last surged into the huge, cool, and altogether sepulchral interior, they separated into several groups, each clustering round its own guide or pastor for further directions. Freddy, who had been to the church before, began to make his way to the flight of stairs leading to the Choir of the Greeks at Golgotha, where the Anglicans and Catholics worshipped at their respective Orthodox and Latin altars. As he broke away from the crowds, Freddy failed to notice a procession moving towards him from the chapel which stood over the Holy Sepulchre itself, in the centre of the huge rotunda where the crowds were gathered. The people had made a pathway for the procession, which comprised a Coptic priest followed by his incense-swinging acolytes, newly emerged from a Mass. Freddy, vaguely assuming this procession to be only one of the little bands of variously garbed visitors among the others congregated in the area, sacrilegiously barged into one of the acolytes, and extricated himself with an apology which was not understood, so that he was abused by the thin, pale acolyte with something between a hiss and a spit.
From their part of the hall Suzi and Barbara could see the encounter. Barbara said, ‘Oh, goodness,’ and was immediately seized by Suzi, who gripped her arm to remind her to be deaf and dumb. An English female voice not far from Barbara said, ‘Oh, look at that terrible man —’ obviously referring to Freddy. Barbara had turned to look in the direction of the voice, and then, when she quickly realized she was not supposed to have heard it, she fixed her veiled eyes, very unhearingly, very unspeakingly, in front of her. But the voice had been disquieting; for a moment Barbara had thought she recognized it.
Presently, they were up in the Greek Choir where two Masses, one Orthodox, one Latin, were in progress, assisted by two congregations haphazardly thronged, kneeling or standing on the bare pavements before each altar, only a few feet from each other. The Greek Orthodox service at the main altar of Calvary that stood above a round earth-hole, the traditional site of the Cross, was mainly attended by an English mass-pilgrimage numbering about sixty and an American group of about twenty-five, mostly women with a few ageing men, and several clergymen, who were evidently leading the pilgrimages. Among them were also some individual pilgrims of unguessable nationalities and numerous local Arab worshippers, the fruits of the missions to Palestine from generation to generation. Only two Arab women over in the Greek congregation were veiled and dressed as Barbara was, but she was thankful even for them, for in fact at the Roman Catholic altar where she now stood with Suzi she was the only veiled woman.
And in fact, the three Franciscans who stood aside throughout the Mass, custodians of their altar, sent each other a communal glance at the sight of Barbara. The glance was a familiar question: when would these Arab convert-women throw off their old traditions and understand that Catholic Arabs were not obliged to cover their faces but only their heads? — they were as bad, in their way, as the young tourist girls who came, not only to visit the holy places, but to the Mass, without any covering on their heads at all, and with dresses without sleeves.
But the venerable brothers had more than Barbara to bother them that day. It was a memorable Sunday that lasted them all their old age, one of the worst oft the increasingly bad memorable Sundays when the modem foreign priests, chiefly English and American, came to the Holy Sepulchre with their pilgrimages to say a Mass at the Altar of the Nailing of the Cross. That would have been very good, but instead of saying their Mass and going away, these upstart clergy very often insisted on giving a sermon. Sermons were not encouraged, as the demand on the use of the famous altar by visitant priests and their pilgrims was heavy on Sunday mornings, and even a short sermon held up the next Mass on the list.
But it was not so much the fact of the sermon on this particular Sunday, but its substance that made the occasion a prototype, for the three honest custodians on duty, of things to be deplored during times of recreation; and thus it contributed to bind together their staunch years to come.
The visiting priest of that hour was an Englishman in his middle thirties. He was one of the priests accompanying a pilgrimage of about forty English Catholics; they now mingled with the local congregation and with the other foreign pilgrims among whom was a close-knit body of Japanese nuns. As the nuns somewhat established the variegated quality of the scene, Suzi had worked Barbara through the crowd to a point near them, whose long black robes provided a protective colouring for her outfit. The eyes of the Franciscans had automatically moved to the young priest on the altar, and they kept a special watch on the assisting acolyte, a local Arab boy; for it was their duty, to which they devoted extreme diligence, to see that the ritual was correctly observed at this Altar of the Nailing of the Cross. At the other altar in the chapel the Greek rite proceeded under the equally jealous eyes of its custodians, and the chanting murmur of the Orthodox responses droned busily about the ears of the Latin persuasion, so that the blessed mutter of the Roman Mass could scarcely be heard by the faithful; the Franciscans were accustomed to this and were aware that nothing could be done about it. It was true that from time to time feelings came to a boil, and a quarrel would take place between the subordinate brothers of either communion, not to mention the words that had been known to arise when the Copts, Syrians, or even the Gregorian Armenians overstepped the mark on the sacred site of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Saviour. Doctrinal arguments, these simple servants of the Orders left to their superiors; but the question of who had the privilege of sweeping whose paving stone was their province; not many years since, it had come to a fist-fight at Bethlehem on a Feast of the Nativity because a young novice brother of the Orthodox had presumed to clean a certain painted-glass window, this task being properly within the province of a newly arrived Franciscan brother, who, simple peasant boy as he was, nevertheless perceived that the prestige of the One True Church was upon his shoulders, and started a fight.
Sometimes there had been errors of protocol on the Franciscan side, as they humbly conceded amongst themselves. Not long ago, when the Archbishop of Canterbury visited the Holy Land, a few good Franciscans, carried away by the event, had kissed his ring on his arrival at the great Sepulchre. On being told later by their superior that they ought not to have done so, their spokesman offered the reason: ‘We thought it might move Her Majesty to do something for us.’ It was indeed difficult to realize that the British Mandate was at an end.
The English priest at present saying Mass on the altar had nearly reached the moment for his sermon; he had no right to give a sermon, no matter how many English pilgrims he had brought, when time was pressing for the next Mass on the list. As if to aid and abet him, the Orthodox Mass had only a few seconds before come to a quiet end. He had not even asked permission; had merely said as he brushed from the vestry, ‘I’m going to say a few words to the pilgrims, very few.’ The friars’ eyes were upon him as he concluded the Ordinary of the Mass and turned to the congregations.
‘I will say a few words,’ he said, ‘on the text of St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 14: “We have an everlasting city, but not here; our goal is the city that is one day to be.”
‘In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Most of us have come a long way to Jerusalem. It has been the instinct of
Christians since the time of the Early Church to see Jerusalem before they died. Jerusalem was a place of pilgrimage for the Jews, centuries before the time of Christ. The act of pilgrimage is an instinct of mankind. It is an act of devotion which, like a work of art, is meaning enough in itself. The questions, ‘What useful purpose does a pilgrimage serve? What good does it do?” are by the way. People put themselves out to visit places sacred to their religion, or the graves of poets and statesmen, or of their ancestors, or the house they themselves were born in. Why? Because that is what people do.
We usually expect to receive for our trouble the experience of a strong emotion. We expect to be moved, when we reach our destination, by awe or nostalgia; or we hope for a shade of sadness or in some way to be spiritually exalted. But so far as feelings are concerned, our feelings when we get to the place are usually a matter of good or bad fortune, as the case may be. A lot may depend on the weather. And this is more particularly the case where a pilgrimage of religion is concerned. A religious pilgrimage has always been associated with difficulty, danger, heat and bother and general human wear and tear. We who have come by air from the West have so far had an easier journey than the devout Moslems do, who surge in their thousands to Mecca by cheap transport, any transport, to pray at the shrine of Mohammed. We have it easier than Mary and Joseph did when they came up to Jerusalem for the feast and, in the course of all the jostle and bother and commerce of the pilgrimage, lost their child and only missed him when they were on the way home, so that they had to trail all the way back, a day’s journey. I say that we —The friars had already summed up their man and they conveyed their verdict to each other by the flicker of a glance. One of the new upstarts; comparing the Moslems to good Catholics in the same breath…. So far, so bad. They discerned that worse was to come.