O Jerusalem (32 page)

The door behind him opened and a Bedouin came in, looking enough like Ali to be a younger brother. “This is Gasim ibn Rahail,” the abbot told us in Arabic. “His people are on their way up to Jerusalem. You will go with them. Gasim, these are my friends. Care for them as brothers.”

“Your word, Holy Father,” the young man said, and
gave us a grin that made me wonder if he spoke in mockery. It was, however, merely affection untempered by awe, and it suited us very well. We took our leave of Abbot Mattias and his monastery, and turned our faces, at long last, to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the centre of three religions, is not at all a town for amusement
.

—BAEDEKER’S
Palestine and Syria,
1912 EDITION

e came to the city in the afternoon, climbing up the dusty road from Jericho in the company of six tents of Bedouins, ten camels, and an uncountable number of goats and fat-tailed sheep. The Bedu chose to stop the night on an over-grazed flat to the east of the city near a well called the Apostle’s Spring, the water of which was possessed of numerous small red wriggling creatures. After we had drunk a final cup of coffee with the sheikh (Gasim’s father), been presented with all his camels, goats, and horses, given our own meagre possessions to him in return, then reciprocally given back each other’s gifts with lengthy and painfully gracious protestations of unworthiness, we thanked him for his hospitality by declaring our worthless selves his slaves for eternity, and finally took our leave.

Walking towards the setting sun, we
came to the Mount of Olives, a great sprawl of tombs and gravestones, and there at our feet lay Jerusalem.

She is a jewel, that city, small and brilliant and hard, and as dangerous as any valuable thing can be. Built in the Judean hill country at the meeting place of three valleys—the Kidron, the Hinnom, and the long-buried Tyropoeon—Jerusalem had moved uphill from the year-round spring that had made her existence possible. When I first laid eyes on her, some of her structures were already thousands of years old. It was 401 years since the Turks took the city, 820 years since the Crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon had slaughtered every Moslem and Jew within the walls (and a good number of unrecognised native Christians as well), eighteen and a half centuries since the Romans had last razed her stones to the ground, and still she rose up within her snug, high walls, a nest of stone set to nurture the holy places of three faiths, a tight jumble of domes, minarets, and towers, dominated from this side by the flat expanse of the Temple Mount, the holy place called by Arabs Haram es-Sherîf, the largest open space in the city, a garden of worship set with tombs and mosques and the enormous, glittering, mosaic and gilded glory of the Dome of the Rock.

Built towards the end of the seventh century, the Dome of the Rock cost its builders the equivalent of seven years’ revenue from all of Egypt. It is constructed as an octagon of three concentric stages, at the heart of which lies the Rock, an uneven grey slab some forty-five feet by sixty. If Jerusalem is the
umbilicus mundi
—the umbilicus of the world—then the sacred Rock is the heart that drives the life-blood through the umbilical cord. The Talmud declares that the Rock is the earth’s very centre. Here the priest Melchizedek offered sacrifice, here Abraham bound Isaac in preparation for offering his beloved son’s throat to God, and from this place Mohammed entered heaven on the back of his mighty steed, el-Burak. The Ark of the Covenant rested
on the Rock, and tradition maintains that it still lies buried beneath, hidden there by Jeremiah as the enemy entered the city gates. The Rock bears the imprints of the angel Gabriel’s fingers and the Prophet Mohammed’s foot, and ancient legend has the Rock hovering over the waters of the great Flood, or resting on a palm tree watered by the rivers of paradise, or guarding the gates of hell. In a small cave beneath the Rock, benches mark where David and Solomon, Abraham and Elijah all prayed; in the Time of Judgement, God’s throne will be planted upon it. The Rock had been a sacred place to humankind back through the dim reaches of memory, and would continue to be so when the city before me had been buried yet again—either by the forces of destruction, or through being built up beyond recognition.

Beyond the Haram es-Sherîf, the city itself clusters close, all whitewashed domes and pale golden stone. A soft breeze came up, and I watched as her colours deepened with the approach of night. When the sun lay behind her, despite the scurry of lorries and the dust and the smoke of the evening fires, she took my breath away, that city. There were tears in my eyes and a psalm on my lips, and for the first time I knew why Jews, as one, declare that we will meet “next year in Jerusalem.”

The sun had gone and the lights were up before I recalled my companion, seated near me on the stone wall smoking his pipe.

“Holmes—I’m so sorry, you must be famished. It was just so beautiful.”

“Quite.”

“And the moon will be over it before long.…” I said wistfully.

He stood up and smacked his pipe out against his boot. “We don’t have to be in the city until tomorrow,” he said impatiently. “I shall find someone to sell us our supper. All my life I have wanted nothing better than to spend a night amongst the tombs on Olivet.” I ignored
the sarcasm: It was a gracious gift, if churlishly given. I sat and waited for the moon to climb, peripherally aware of the night noises, pilgrims returning late from the Jordan, the occasional army lorry grumbling its way towards Bethlehem, the jackals and donkeys to which I was now so accustomed blending with the calls of the
muezzin
s and the sound of church bells and the low, constant hum that emanated from the city of seventy thousand souls.

I ate and drank the food Holmes put in my hand, accepted the thick robe he wrapped around my shoulders, and watched, enchanted, as the city slept and changed shape beneath the waning moon, until in the morning the sun woke her and restored to her that bright, hard beauty. Holmes again pushed food into my hands, cadged a mug of coffee from somewhere and gave me some, and when the city across from us was veiled by the dust raised by lorries and donkeys and the sun on our shoulders held a promise of heat, we rose, and went up to Jerusalem.

The city had seen more activity and renovation in the last twelvemonth than she had the whole of the Turkish occupation. The roads into the city were crowded with lorries carrying boulders and timber and tiles, with donkeys carrying rocks, sacks, and provisions, and with thoroughly draped women carrying a little of everything. Upon reaching the valley bottom we inserted ourselves between a caravan from the east and an army lorry whose driver’s accent declared him from the East End. At camel pace we circumnavigated the walls until we reached the Jaffa Gate, our lungs full of dust and our ears assaulted by shouts and curses, and I felt that had this not been Jerusalem, I might have turned on my heel and fled back out into the clean, simple, silent expanse of the desert.

We threaded our way among a fleet of horse-drawn carriages for hire and entered Jerusalem in the foot-steps—literally, as he had chosen to mark his pilgrim’s
entrance on foot—of the conqueror Allenby. To our right rose the Citadel, somewhere to our left lay the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, before us sprawled the great labyrinth of the bazaar, and all around us swirled an informal market, a miscellany of goods and peoples. I saw none of these. I did not notice the picturesque Copts and the Armenians, did not register the toasted-sesame smell of the round bread loaves that passed beneath our noses on the panniers of a donkey, did not even hear the strange, flat clang of bells or the
“bakshish”
cries of the beggars or the polyglot of tongues. My whole being, my entire awareness, was taken up by a small, crudely lettered sign propped in the window of the Grand New Hotel: Baths.

I was suddenly aware that, aside from a cold hip-bath at the
kivutz
, I had not properly bathed since leaving Allenby’s headquarters in Haifa a week before: my turban had glued itself to my head and my tunic to my shoulders, my hands revealed black creases where the skin bent, my face was filthy with caked-on dust, and, not to put it gently, I stank. Even Holmes, who when in disguise had the knack of appearing far more unkempt than he actually was, who possessed a catlike ability to keep his person tidy under the most unlikely of circumstances (such as the time earlier in his career when he had arranged with a local lad to bring him fresh collars along with his foodstuffs while living in a stone hut on Dartmoor), even Holmes, as I say, was showing signs of wear, both visible and olfactory. The darkness on his face was not all dye and bruises.

“Baths, Holmes,” I breathed.

“I can hardly take you into a bath-house,” he said absently, scanning the area around us.

“Not a public bath-house, Holmes. A bath, in an hotel, with a door and a lock. Oh, Holmes,” I groaned.

“Patience, Russell. Ha! This will be our man.”

I tore my eyes from the beguiling sign and followed his gaze, to where a lad of perhaps ten or eleven years
was hopping off a low wall. The child walked backwards a dozen or so steps in our direction, finishing up a spirited conversation with the handful of other urchins who remained perched on the wall, then turned his back on them, hopped over the single leg of one beggar and the leprous hand of another, scrambled beneath the belly of a camel and dodged both the rock thrown at him by the camel’s owner and the front end of an army staff car to fetch up in front of us. He was as dirty and ill clothed as any London street arab, with a grin that could only have been born out of an intimate acquaintance with illegality. He looked like a pickpocket, would no doubt grow into a thief, and I knew instantly that he was a colleague of Ali and Mahmoud.

“You look for someone, I think?” he said in English, a cheerful conspirator.

Holmes’ hand shot out, and seized the young imp by his collar, dragging him forward until their faces were mere inches apart. The boy’s grin vanished and he started to struggle, but Holmes just held him and hissed in furious and colloquial Arabic, “If you think I shall do any business with a donkey as stupid as you, child, you are too dumb-witted to live, and I ought to put you out of your misery. Get away from my sight.” He shook the boy, let go of him, and we watched him pick himself up from the dirty stones and flee. “Come,” said Holmes. I followed him to a niche against the wall, and there we squatted, with the dust washing over us and our bellies empty, until eventually the chastened lad reappeared, carrying a basket of oranges. He sold a few to passers-by before he reached us.

“Oranges from Jaffa?” he offered, speaking Arabic this time. “Juicy, sweet. Three for one piastre.”

“Six for one,” countered Holmes, looking bored.

“Four. Large ones.”

“Done.” The coin and the fruit changed hands; the boy faded away; we stayed seated and picked up our oranges. I rolled mine around in my hand, speculating
on the chances that this particular fruit had been grown by the man I had seen bleed to death, and then I dug in my nails to peel away the rind. I grimaced at the black smears my fingers left on the damp skin, and separated the segments gingerly, trying to touch only the edges of the fruit’s flesh with the very tips of my fingernails. When we had each eaten one fruit and wiped our hands on our robes, Holmes took the other two and stowed them in the mule’s pack, then handed me the lead rope and set off in the direction in which the boy had gone. Down the narrow street, and there he was, leaning casually against the wall, the empty basket tucked under his arm and a half-eaten orange in his hand. Without looking up, he pushed away from the wall and wandered off.