A Long Way to Shiloh (15 page)

I woke with the feeling that everybody had better be very gentle with me today. I felt monolithic, unarticulated, in grave danger of shattering. Last night had been a mistake, of course, and yet there had been something about it … What had there been about it? It seemed best not to think too hard. Dangerous stresses could be set up by thought. The mind twanged and fluttered like a cat’s cradle already without any weight being put on it.

I got very carefully off the bed in a rising threnody of springs and stood for a moment with a hand on each side of my head, directing it about the room. The angle of vision seemed to have narrowed significantly. The eye of God was pitiless this morning.

‘Can I come in?’ She’d heard the springs.

‘Yes.’

She looked a bit subdued herself.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Strange,’ I said.

‘Shimshon has gone.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s disturbed, poor Shimshon.’

Demented would have been a better word, I thought,
recalling
the red-eyed phantom of the dawn.

‘Will you be ready to go out soon?’

‘Go out?’ My voice seemed to be vocalizing distantly like some middle-register foghorn. I listened to it curiously. ‘Go out where?’

‘We’ll have coffee in the street. Mr Benyamini below has a bad mind. He knows we’re here together. My mother has to work today, but tomorrow she’ll stay.’

‘Ay see,’ I heard the foghorn curiously sounding.

‘Have a wash, then. We’ll go.’

We went to Rothschild Boulevard and sat and had a few cups of black coffee. I had a couple of brioches as well and presently began to feel less detached.

‘You were terrible last night.’

‘Yes.’ Vagrant snatches of it had come back to me over the brioches. I sat and mused gently. Something had got into me last night, no doubt about it. As through a mist, I could recall my correction of the Yemenis’ grammar, the heady feeling of being in possession of all available knowledge. The recollection, strangely, brought no familiar heartburning. Odd. Very odd. Odder still, vestigial feelings of knowing my onions still
persisted
, together with a calm conviction that when the present disorders should pass all would be found to be well. Why? No use to inquire now. The mind would have its own no doubt deluded reasons, I thought, nodding slowly at my coffee.

‘Do your stitches hurt?’ she said, misinterpreting the nod.

‘No. Not really.’

‘You’ll have to have them looked at. We’ll go to a doctor here.’

‘I’ve got to take this fellow’s hat back.’ Snatches of my tango recurred then, together with thoughts of the doctor’s father-
in-law
of blessed memory. The old chap’s gear was certainly having a turn or two in its latter days.

‘What do you want to do now?’

She was in her tuned-in mood of inquiry. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. We decided in the end what I wanted was a little walk, and we had one, down the swarming lanes off Carmel. The day was assuming its own dream-like character, outside time. About two o’clock I had a sudden mad craving for a plate of cold borsht and a tomato. We found a place and I had them, the girl watching with some amusement and attending to a much heartier plate herself.

‘Shimshon likes such little meals,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you would.’

‘A plate of borsht wouldn’t go far with Shimshon.’

‘Well. He’s a very unusual person. Of course he doesn’t talk much –’

‘Thinks a lot, though, eh?’

‘And acts,’ she said with some acerbity. ‘Don’t be humorous about Shimshon.’

‘What is it he does?’

‘I don’t know. He won’t talk about it. I know it’s secret and sometimes dangerous. Once he had to cross the border. Maybe he’s done it many times.’

‘In the south?’

‘I don’t know. He used to say the south.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If it’s something they don’t want you to know, they say it’s in the south. It’s all desert there, so who knows?’

‘Doesn’t he ring you up?’

‘Of course. It’s a military line and they never say from where. All I know, sometimes he says he’s coming and five or six hours later he arrives – whether from the north, the south, I don’t know. Probably north, since he wants me to think south. I don’t ask now. I know he can’t speak plainly.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ I said, spoon poised and staring at her.

‘What?’

‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘Something’s wrong with the soup?’

‘It’s
back
to
front!’

The proprietor was eating a plate of klops at the next table and he got up and had a look at my soup, a bit sharply.

‘It’s what?’ he said.

‘Back to front. It shouldn’t be north. It should be south. I need a map,’ I told him urgently.

‘You need a sleep,’ he said, after examining both the soup and me again, and went back to his klops.

‘Yes, come, we’ll go now,’ the girl said with some anxiety. ‘We’ll go back, never mind Mr Benyamini.’

‘I need a frigging map! I need it now, this very minute, right away, instantly!’ I declaimed, dropping the spoon in a frenzy.

‘Yes, yes, we’ll get a map. We’ll get it in the street,’ she said, wiping borsht off her blouse. ‘Come now.’

She still hadn’t latched on when we were outside, so I filled her in, boutons flashing in a nuclear burst of revelation. They’d flashed last night, of course, under cover of the stony Avdat. They’d quite possibly flashed the night before under cover of the concussion.

Vayishlach
, reversal songs, and now today Shimshon … an old and continuing tradition of people forced by events to speak unplainly, to say the opposite. As the priest had said it. He hadn’t gone north from Jerusalem; he’d gone south. No marble in the north; plenty of it in the south. No identifiable rock peaks in the north; quantities in the south. And no reason why Northern Command troops should raise an eyebrow in the north – but every reason in the south.

Of course! It wasn’t enough simply to decipher the coded document. You had to decipher the man himself. You had to strip the layers off the onion skin. He’d set out to deceive. And he’d still deceived, two thousand years later. He’d got the measure of bloody old Sidqui, anyway, and bloody old Sidqui had led us all astray.

The girl had paled a bit under this incoherent flow, and she began looking distractedly about her. ‘A map, a map,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where we can get a map here.’

‘Where are we?’

‘The Carmel market. There are no book shops … Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Would any map do? Like a bible map?’

‘Of course it would do. Certainly it would do. I
want
a bible map!’

‘This way. My father’s shop. He has some.’

We nipped down the back doubles to it. It was a
disintegrating
bicycle-shed type structure, wedged in the entry to an alley. It was locked. I nearly kicked the door down in my fury,
screaming
at him to come out

‘It’s no good. He does this. He just locks up and goes to
synagogue
. What time is it?’

‘Three o’clock.’

‘He’ll be at
mincha
, the afternoon service.’

‘How long for?’

‘I don’t know.
Mincha
doesn’t last long. But it’s always possible,’ she said, looking nervously at me, ‘that he’ll decide to stay on for
ma
’
ariv
, the evening service. He often –’

‘Where’s the synagogue?’

‘Right opposite.’

‘Go and get him out!’

‘But he’s with his cronies. I don’t like to –’

‘All right,’ I said, and gritted my teeth, and went across myself.

He wasn’t in the synagogue; he was in the adjoining
bet
ha-midrash
, the study hall, with a dozen other little old men, taking in snuff and the words of Obadiah, whose prophetical portion was the Sephardic one for that week. The old buffer was delighted as ever to see me. ‘Hello,
bocher
! You picked just the right moment. Settle an argument. The phrase, “How are his hidden places sought out

‘I want a map,’ I said.

‘A map?’ he said uncertainly. ‘It doesn’t need a map. The prophet is speaking –’

‘Give me a map!’ I snarled.

‘One of the roll-up maps, for the children’s classes,’ the girl said, having hastily come in behind me. ‘You have them in the shop. It’s to settle another point.’

‘Ah! A map. To settle a point. Of course. But we’ve reached here such an interesting –’

‘The map!’ I said through clenched teeth, and would have picked him up and run across the road with him, if he hadn’t come then. But he did come, and half the study circle with him, to help discuss this further interesting point.

The interior of the shop was a choking camphorated
darkness
, revealed, when he lit a dangerous-looking oil lamp, to be in a state of post-holocaust confusion. The stock, of prayer shawls, shawl bags, phylacteries, books, vest fringes, mezzuzahs and skull caps, was in a single heap as if flung there by some passing congregation in flight The eye of God, however, the twin of the one in my room, was keeping an eye on things, and perhaps enabled him to find where the maps were buried; which he did after some minutes, while I waited sneezing evilly and treading on various old men in my agitation.

‘Here we are. Maps,’ the old man said, rather surprised. They came in individual cardboard boxes and he blew the dust off and took one out. ‘Four pounds. Or half a pound English.’

‘Father, he doesn’t want to buy it!’

‘Of course. Would I sell him? It’s just a matter of interest. It’s very reasonable. For a map,’ he said.

‘Very reasonable,’ a couple of the old men said. All of them were trampling about pricing the stock, and finding all of it very reasonable.

I took the map with trembling hands and unrolled it. It was marked in tribal divisions.

‘Have you got a ruler?’

‘A ruler? I don’t think I’ve got a ruler. Do I sell rulers?’ he asked the girl.

He did not sell rulers, but one of the old men had a tape measure with him, and I managed with that.

It went thirty centimetres from Jerusalem to Mount Tabor in the north, so I swung it round and found thirty centimetres from Jerusalem to the south. It landed in the Wilderness of Zin. Could there be a habitable place in this wilderness?

There was a habitable place. There was the oasis of Hatseva; the ancient watering place of Hatseva.

We met Agrot there about four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He’d been driving since six from Nazareth, across country almost cut off by floods, and he was wet, tired and
bad-tempered
. The oasis of Hatseva was, as oases go, far from being romantic. A rather dreary though dense tangle of eucalyptus and other flora, it sat weirdly in a featureless expanse of geological rubble, at the moment lashed by rain and howling winds.

When last used to any purpose it had been a Roman military post, and today it was an Israeli one. From midday onwards, Shoshana and I had sat in a little prefab hut, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and making conversation with the commander, a keen bible collector. He was hunting around for ‘a really nice specimen of an early Latin Vulgate’, misplaced somewhere in his kit, when Agrot arrived. Agrot had a private word with him, and then a few minutes later we were sitting alone in another room.

I’d swapped my
shtreiml
for a large black sou’-wester, and he seemed to find nothing odd in my sitting around in it. He simply said brusquely, ‘You don’t look so bad. I’ve got news.’

It concerned the Arab who’d photographed me in Nazareth. The Nazareth police had picked him up late Friday night. They’d picked up a few other street photographers as well, only this one had been clot enough to have the negative still in his possession. By breakfast time Saturday seven of his
associates
were in the clink with him. Quite a lot had been found out by now.

I said, ‘What is it – a Jordanian government network?’

‘It’s a syndicate. A private syndicate.’

It was a Jordanian-Syrian syndicate, started apparently in 1961, when a sharp upturn in scroll prices had attracted
business
brains in Amman and Damascus. One of the members, an Amman bookseller, had contacts with the Ta’amireh Arabs, and had been able to organize a first look at anything new that was found. They’d bought and sold three or four things at very much better than normal academic prices before the priest’s scroll had appeared – to present them with a poser. They hadn’t dared take a normal option on it – as they’d hitherto been doing before raising a buyer – in case it somehow got away from them. In the end they’d had to buy it, outright, for £9,000.

‘Who advised them?’

‘Sidqui. He was the best they could get. Apparently the earlier stuff had gone abroad, illegally, so they couldn’t trust anyone attached to the university. Sidqui was a good bet. He’d got grievances against the university. They’d retired him early because of ill health. He was fine for them.’

‘For us, too,’ I said jovially. ‘Well, now they’re barking up the wrong tree –’

‘Let me finish,’ he said wearily. ‘There’s the military angle.’

The military angle came from the Syrian end. One of the Damascus backers was connected with the so-called Palestine Liberation Army, some of whose more militant members were springing the raids from Jordan. The syndicate couldn’t buy themselves a raid, but they could buy advance information and also the right to participate if necessary.

‘It’s proved necessary,’ Agrot said. ‘A bunch of their men is coming in with a raiding party this week – either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, according to weather. No – please,’ he said, as I tried to speak. ‘Just listen a minute. I’m very tired. I was up all night interrogating these men, and I’ve been driving all day. We’ll take a helicopter back – I’ve asked the commander to whistle one up. The roads are impossible. We have to be back there tonight.’

‘Who has?’ I said.

‘We have. You and I. It’s not as simple as it sounds. It’s going to be a problem of deduction. They have three parties coming in, and the question is –’

I said urgently, ‘Look, the bloody thing isn’t up there!’

‘You’ll tell me on the way.’

‘But it’s down here. I told you it was down here.’

I hadn’t in fact told him that. I couldn’t tell him it on the phone. I lost no time telling him now.

He barely listened. He sat staring at me with lack-lustre eyes. At the end, he said, ‘You could be right. I don’t know. They’ve got more of the scroll … All I know, we’ve got to attend to this first. That’s obvious enough, surely?’

‘No. It isn’t,’ I said. ‘For reasons that I’m trying to –’

‘I’m too tired to differentiate between your reasons and their reasons –’

‘Well, I’m not,’ I said briskly. ‘Which gives me a slight edge in evaluating them, and also brings us to a point. Much too much nonsense has been going on here.’ And so it had, I thought, enraged suddenly by the recollection of all the berserk things he’d involved me in. Clambering up and down the Ein Gedi canyon, frigging about in Galilee, getting myself assaulted and abducted in the Holy City. It was time now for all this to stop. The scholars had to put their thinking caps on.

I told him this, at length.

He sat looking at me, blinking slowly. He said, ‘Well, I can’t make you,’ and paused. He looked out of the window. He said, ‘How much work do you expect to do here in this weather?’

‘What do you expect to do in Galilee? The weather won’t be any better, and didn’t you say the raid was contingent on the weather?’

‘Yes. I can’t argue with you,’ he said simply. ‘I just thought since you were so involved … They’ll certainly come one of these three nights.’

‘Won’t you get warning?’

‘There’ll be a warning. There’s to be a system of flashlight signals the night before.’

Very typical. I could see myself cowering evilly on some windswept hill, waiting for an almost certainly hepped-up Arab across the border to remember to flash his little flashlight, probably with a failing battery and from dense cover. The least I could see in it was a nasty cold.

‘They won’t be coming tonight, then.’

He said, ‘No, not tonight …’ and trailed off, and I suddenly saw he was at rock bottom, slumped in his chair, moustache and twisted nose both drooping.

This led me to rashness. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to waste time! If and when these bloody Arabs are set to buzz, let me know and I’ll come.’

‘It would be too late. It’s got to be planned …’

‘I couldn’t help with the planning. I’m no military genius. When you tell me what to do, I’ll do it’

‘All right. If that’s as much as you can offer …’

It already seemed a bloody sight too much, but before I could qualify it, he was asleep; and half an hour later, was gone, whisked away to northward, by whirlybird.