Arabesque (12 page)

She liked the Jews of Palestine. They had the taste but not the conservatism of her husband’s stockbroking friends, the energy but not the vulgarity of the smaller fry of European
commerce, and they had made Jerusalem a little capital of the arts and of science. Her sympathies were wholly Zionist. To historical rights of Jew or Arab she was indifferent. The right of the
Jews, for her, was that they were proud and happy, hard at work and secure. A joyous and intelligent folk had been re-created, and the world was the richer for it.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early December. At the special request of her colonel she had spent the morning at work, and had come from the bare maps and tables of the cheerless military office
home to her flat. The first heavy winter rain roared out of the windless sky and capered on the roof outside the windows of her living room. Dry and warm amid a veil of water, she idled happily,
still savouring her delicious privacy.

Her bell rang. It was her German-Jewish landlord, Dr. Finkelkraut, who had a habit of calling punctiliously upon his tenants at the most awkward hours in order to announce some meticulous
and—humanly speaking—impracticable scheme for the care of the furnace, the use of the water or the hanging out of laundry.

He bowed with Central European formality, implying that he disturbed her not as a casual caller, but as a responsible landlord acting under the beneficent state.

“Mrs. Herne,” he said, “it is my duty to alarm the tenants.”

She supposed the water was about to be cut off again.

“I am alarmed,” she answered, smiling.

“You have taken notice, yes?” he insisted, as if asking her to sign a receipt. “It is the police!”

Armande had developed immunity to the excited noises that occasionally drifted up from the flats below. She now listened. The block was humming with hysterical exclamations.

“What’s all the fuss about?” she asked.

“An Arab murderer has been observed to enter my house,” replied Dr. Finkelkraut importantly. “By instantly organising our microcosm I assist the police. They wish to search the
flats. I have alarmed my tenants and instructed them not to be afraid.”

“Well, he wasn’t here and he can’t get in,” said Armande, “but the police can look around if they like.”

Dr. Finkelkraut trotted across the roof with the heavy steps of a good citizen hurrying from one civic duty to another, and vanished down the stairs.

Before Armande could shut her door, an Arab sprang from behind the housing of the stairhead and rushed towards her. She let him in. Fouad was Fouad, whatever he had done.

Fouad fell on his knees and carried her hand to his forehead. He was no longer the spruce, grey-clad rider who had honoured Wadiah by his attendance. The major-domo was wearing the black cotton
of the poor. The wet rags clung to his body. His moustache, a black and proud edition of Wadiah’s, was weighed down by rain. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.

Armande caught him by the good arm, dragged him to the bedroom and shut the door. Then she dashed outside. There was no trace of blood on the roof; evidently Fouad had had the sense to keep his
hand muffled in his rags. In her room there was blood on the parquet. She flung a rug over it. When she looked up, Dr. Finkelkraut and the police were at her door.

There were a British sergeant, an Arab and a Jewish constable. The constables began a thorough search of the roof and chimneys, while the sergeant addressed her in Hebrew.

“Mrs. Herne is English and works for the army,” explained Dr. Finkelkraut officiously—her presence added respectability to his house.

The sergeant smiled with relief. He was a pleasant, fresh-faced young man. Armande’s excitement, fear, distress—she had no time to realise what she had done, why she did it or what
she felt—began to ease in face of this male innocent. Him at last she could handle.

“Bit of luck finding
you here
!” he explained, as if Jews had neither eyes to see nor tongues to speak. “You can tell me all about it. Mrs. Herne, there must be a man
somewhere on this roof.”

“There might be,” Armande answered. “I’ve been reading.”

“Could he have got into your flat?”

“Not without my seeing him. What’s he done?”

“Committed a very brutal murder in the Lebanon. We’ve been on the lookout for him, and he was recognised while he was asking for this street. Then he ran for it, and the constable is
sure he saw him bolt into this house.”

“Whom did he murder? Was it political?” she asked, sounding, she hoped, the cool and curious Englishwoman.

“Just one of their blood feuds—and all the usual mutilations with it. Now where can he have got to?”

“Fire escape?” she suggested.

“Impossible. I have a man at the bottom of it.”

“Well, he can’t be here,” said Armande. “But have a look round the flat if you like.”

She held the sergeant with smiling eyes; she was oddly terrified lest he should watch her throat and see the heavy beating of her heart.

“I needn’t bother you, Mrs. Herne,” he replied. “I can see you have only these two windows and your door opening on the roof. So if you’ve been here all the time ߪ”

When the police had left, Armande sprang into the bedroom. Fouad was crouching on his heels in a corner of the room: a wet Arab, pitiable and helpless as a wet kitten. So much of their dignity
and grace depended on the free movement of the covering.

“Merci, Madame! Merci! Merci!”
he murmured in halting French.

“Show me the wound!” she cried anxiously. “Did the police shoot at you?”

“Yes, yes, Madame. But it is nothing.”

It was nothing, a mere tear in the fleshy part of the upper arm which she dressed and bandaged. Fouad yelled and moaned as the disinfectant stung him, but held out his arm without wincing. She
was sure that any Englishman (or Englishwoman, for that matter, if educated at Bingham Priory) would not have uttered a sound, and yet would have made her amateur surgery twice as difficult by
wriggling all over the place with set face. Fouad’s reaction emphasised the frighteningly foreign nature of the world in which she had to act. To act! Thinking, watching, learning—those
had been easy, even enjoyable.

Armande gave him a drink. Dry clothes? Heaven only knew what was the modesty of these feminine and conventional Arabs! At last she thought of a huge coat of rough sheepskin which she had bought
in Hebron. He accepted it gratefully.

Se left him to change, and paced up and down the living-room, giving Sheikh Wadiah a mental dressing-down that would have shattered his self-complacence for a year. Fouad had slight trouble in
his family, indeed! His life was in her hands, indeed! Well, it was. That had been no Oriental figure of speech. What power did Wadiah think she had? What absurd picture had he made of her? It was
sheer lunacy to saddle her with a common criminal. It was cheating. This had nothing to do with any intrigue or any service to her country.

She returned to the bedroom. There Fouad could safely stay, and had to stay. The windows looked north to a patch of rocky hillside; the walls were flush with those of the house. So long as he
kept to the back of the room, he could not be seen. In the living-room he would be at the mercy of her landlord, or anyone else who should visit the roof and glance casually through her
windows.

Fouad, wrapped in the sheepskin robe, was squatting on the floor, uncomplainingly awaiting the sentence of his judge.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, Madame. I eat before I come. But a cigarette—you have?”

Armande sat on the bed, and tried to extract his story. It was difficult, for Fouad had no English and only a hundred words of French. He told his crime frankly and with a modest pride, though
he admitted that Sheikh Wadiah had considered it ill-timed, inconvenient and out of date. He spoke of his chieftain as a boy of his schoolmaster, recognising that Wadiah, as a responsible
authority, had to hand out hard words but did not necessarily believe them.

Twenty years before, in a savage riot between Moslem and Christian, Fouad’s aunt had been raped and murdered, and his father killed while attempting to protect her. The murderer was well
known, and wisely disappeared into the Mohammedan world of the Far East. While Fouad was on Sheikh Wadiah’s business at Damascus, the son of the criminal was pointed out to him. He followed
his man to a quiet street, killed him, defiled his body and escaped to Beit Chabab. Wadiah could not deny his guilt and could not protect him.

“He say to me—escape to Palestine! See Madame Armande. Maybe she use influence. Maybe they not hang you. So I am here.”

“But, Fouad, I …” began Armande.

She was going to say that she had no influence at all, but that, she saw, was just a form of words for her own satisfaction. Why alarm him when she intended to do all she could?

“Madame, I not stay here,” Fouad reassured her. “I come only to speak. Madame not to fear. I not tell police where I was.”

“You must stay here till I come back,” replied Armande decisively. “I am going out now to try to help you. Keep in the bedroom and do not open the door whoever
comes.”

The Nachmiases’s flat was in Abu Tor, on the edge of the bare Valley of Hinnom. It was a lovely suburb, but by no means to the taste of every Jew. There was nothing at all between David
Nachmias and any excited crowd of Arabs that might issue from the Dung Gate of old Jerusalem; on the other hand, there was nothing between him and the ancient City of David, outside the walls, upon
Mount Zion. As Armande walked along the edge of the escarpment, the rain cleared; the low evening sun shone upon the walls and towers, and in the water streaming off the rock and rubble down to the
dry bed of the Kidron. Jerusalem indeed was golden.

Mm. Nachmias was at home, languid upon a sofa, with an ivory telephone, a box of expensive chocolates and a French novel by her side. When she rose to greet Armande, the trim bulges under her
smart house coat revealed that even in privacy she would not surrender to the lax and corsetless ease of the Levant.

“But you must wait for my husband!” she cried, when Armande apologised for disturbing her. “He would be desolated to miss you. He is very fond of my naughty Mme.
Herne.”

Mme. Nachmias archly implied that it was good for the uncivilised David to have attractive friends, and that she chose them for him with care.

“The general wanted to see him,” she added importantly. “But he will not be long. I adore your English officers. They are so precise. Ten minutes, and everything is
said.”

Armande’s experience in an army office had convinced her that British officers talked for the sake of talking, and seldom to the point. Madame’s opinion was an illusion,. She was
right, however, in prophesying that her husband would not be long. Half an hour later Abu Tisein entered the flat.

He showed to Armande the stolid gallantry that Madame expected of him, and then turned to his wife.

“By the way,
ch
é
rie
, your cousin Susie is back in Jerusalem.”

“David! I must, I must absolutely speak to her!” declared Mme. Nachmias impetuously. “I will only be a moment,” she added to Armande, “just while David pours a
drink for you.”

She picked up the telephone and began an exclamatory conversation. Abu Tisein carried the drinks to a far corner of the room.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” Armande warned him doubtfully.

“Madame and her cousin,” murmured Abu Tisein, “have equal politeness. On the telephone neither wishes to be the last to speak.”

Armande showed him Wadiah’s letter, and explained the sudden appearance of Fouad.

“That is awkward, yes,” he said. “But I assure you, Madame, it is an inevitable consequence of such a friendship as you made. In Wadiah’s mind, you see, you have become
the protector of the Ghoraibs. All the same, he had no right at all to ask this of you.”

“He thought he had,” Armande retorted.

“Mme. Herne, you romanticise the Arabs! He did not even think he had. It was a last chance for this Fouad, and he tried it,” answered Abu Tisein with the first signs of impatience
that she had ever seen in him. “You must send the man away at once. If he were caught with you—well, the complications might be disastrous.”

“But he ought to see a doctor.”

“For bullet wounds the police doctors are the best.”

“I can’t give him up to the police,” Armande cried. “And anyway the police mustn’t know he was with me.”

“Why should they? Fouad told you he would not talk, and he will not. After all, the police searched your house. They know that Fouad was not in it. He has only to say, for example, that he
never entered the house at all, that he crept away through all those geraniums around the door, and they will accept it. Send him away tonight as soon as it is dark! Watch the movements of the
police, and see that he is not caught going out! And be careful, Madame—if you fail, I cannot protect you.”

Armande waited another ten minutes for the telephone conversation to finish, and said good-bye. She returned to her flat, hurt and annoyed. Abu Tisein had not only refused to help Fouad, but he
had disapproved of her own perfectly natural action. As for his complications—what were they? Wadiah had done a discreet favour to the British; he had every right to expect a discreet favour
in exchange. It was all nonsense for David Nachmias to say that he could not protect her. He was being professionally mysterious in order to force her to do her duty.

It was of course her duty to give up a murderer to justice—that she knew without any officious assistance from Abu Tisein—but it did make a difference that the man had taken refuge
with her. Neither law nor crime was quite so clear in this strange Levantine world as at home. There were loyalties between Wadiah and Fouad, Wadiah and her, Fouad and her. Beit Chabab had
cherished her, saved her, given her self-respect and happiness. To that dear society Fouad belonged. It was utterly impossible to turn him out into the street, and hear the police whistles blowing
five minutes later.