O Jerusalem (37 page)

The income of the Bedu is not large, because they live where there is little need for hired work, and such is the basis of profit
.

—THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN

he morning began early, when a fist pounded on the door with a rhythm I knew well.

“Up, Russell! You have work.”

I tucked my hair into my turban and opened the door, to see a familiar sight: Holmes, not rising from his bed, but rather coming home after a long night. I wondered if he had slept at all. I yawned; he looked at me with that dreadfully cheerful, superior attitude of the earliest bird around.

“Are you going to give me breakfast while you tell me about it, Holmes?”

“No time for either.”

“Holmes!” I objected.

“Can you find your way to the Souk el-Qattanin?”

“The Cotton Bazaar? Er—”

“Straight down David Street past the jog where it becomes es-Silsileh, two hundred yards towards the Haram, then north on el-Wad, and the Souk el-Qattanin
comes in on your right. Just follow the sound of looms.”

“Why?”

“Because the army and the Red Cross have begun to renovate the
souk
and restore it to its original purpose, thus creating jobs for—”

“No, Holmes: Why do I need to go into the
souk
?”

“The innkeeper has arranged work for you on the renovation project there.”

“Work? What kind of work? I don’t know how to run a loom. And isn’t today Friday? I thought everything stopped on Friday.”

“You won’t be weaving. And it’s mostly Christians today, of course. Ideal for your purposes; the other days it’s mostly Arab women, and you wouldn’t fit in.”

“But doing what?”

“Carrying rocks and dumping the baskets where you’re told, I should think.”

“That’s it? What, are we out of money? I think I’d rather beg. Surely you can make me up to look like a leper or a multiple amputee or something.”

“Don’t be frivolous, Russell. You will watch. For anything unusual.”

“Everything’s unusual, Holmes,” I pointed out.

He ignored my sarcasm. “You’d better leave your spectacles here, too.”

“Then how am I to watch?”

“Listen. Perceive. For heaven’s sake, Russell, use your brain. Now, you are already late. Take a cup of coffee down in the courtyard, and I’ll see you in the afternoon.”

“What will you do?” I cried desperately.

He paused in the doorway to his cubicle, looking back at me sternly. “I will sleep, of course, Russell. I am, you will be so good as to remember, an old man who is recovering from a serious injury. I must have my rest.”

His door closed softly in my face. I stood with the
ancient wood in front of my nose for some time before I decided that I might as well follow his instructions and learn something as go back to bed and lie there scratching and wondering. Folding my spectacles into a pocket, I went down the shaky stairs and out into the bazaar.

T
he project in the Cotton Bazaar was, inevitably, under the auspices of the army. A bored sergeant leant against a wall, smoking an Egyptian cigarette and looking at the women and a few men who were clearing rubble from the derelict street.

The Cotton Bazaar was one of the covered markets, a filthy Mediaeval near-tunnel of crumbling stone and rotting timbers that had, understandably, been abandoned for some years. I could hear the rhythmic sound of a number of looms, coming from no place in particular but seeming a part of the air. In the section of the bazaar still awaiting renovation, two privates with spades formed one end of the line, a group of donkeys with panniers the other, and in between we, the workers, balanced the heavy baskets on our heads to transport the rubble across the uneven and narrow places where the donkeys would not go.

I had carefully constructed an explanation for my presence, as good a speech as I could manage considering that I had no idea why I was actually here, but I rapidly put together another explanation in broken Arab English for the sergeant. He was not interested. He just waved me to the waiting baskets without looking at me and spat onto the paving stones. I took a basket and joined the line of dispirited workers.

Two hours later I was very aware that my skull was not fully healed: It did not take kindly to the weight of a wide basket laden with damp soil and stones resting on it. My stomach cried out for food, even some of Ali’s half-burnt, half-raw bread, and my hands, arms, shoulders, and back were on fire. I had done no serious physical
labour since the previous summer’s harvest: I was, after all, by profession a student.

Now, however, one of Oxford’s finest was hauling rock with the illiterate workers of Jerusalem. How should I explain the state of my hands to my tutors, if ever I returned to those green and pleasant shores? Even the thing from which we had fled here as respite, some unknown, invisible, and apparently omnipotent foe in England after our blood, began to look attractive compared to this.…

Later in the morning several of the workers broke off for a smoke and a gossip. Trying to look inconspicuous (that is, not as utterly exhausted as I felt), I collapsed slowly onto a heap of displaced paving stones and tried not to tremble. My companions, half a dozen women and three men, had accepted me as a decidedly stupid young man with speech problems, and talked over and through me. A man with an elaborate gleaming copper contraption mounted on his back came down the street, selling glasses of tea. He passed slowly down the line of resting workers, taking each customer’s coin and waiting while he or she drank before passing on to the next, when he refilled the glass and waited again. I bought two glasses, and was thinking about a third when an angel appeared.

My friend from the inn, the young cook’s helper, came skipping down the slippery cobblestones, placed a hamper in my lap, and turned and trotted away. My life was saved.

I bolted half the food in the basket without tasting it, by which time my co-workers were heading back to their very different kinds of baskets. Reluctantly, I placed it to one side, but its rejuvenating effects were already taking hold. I smiled at the old woman in front of me. The dim
souk
seemed brighter. The language around me became comprehensible again.

It always astonishes me, what women will freely talk about, even in front of men. By the time we stopped for
lunch, I knew more about some of these good ladies than I knew about my neighbours in the Oxford lodging-house where I lived, and I had thought that intimacy considerable. I learnt a number of new words that morning, although truth to tell I had to guess at some of the English equivalents. It became quickly apparent that neither the sergeant nor the two privates (who had been put to dig as a punishment) spoke a word of Arabic. They may have suspected the nature of the comments and raucous laughter, but could do nothing but practise being phlegmatic and British. I began to enjoy myself, and ventured the occasional brief remark which, as they were Christians, they were able to accept slightly more readily from me, a male, than had they been Moslems.

Halfway through the next work period, a statement was made which interested me greatly. We had finished clearing the first patch, and our sergeant had shifted us around the corner to a side alley, when one of the women, looking with interest at the heap of fresh mud there, said plainly, “We moved this same soil yesterday,” to which another responded, “And the day before.”

They both laughed, but I looked closely at this pile as it went into my basket and into the pannier. It did seem different from the heap we had finished with, wetter and somehow less organic, but only when I saw how the others deposited the soil on the donkeys did it occur to me just how it was different. They too were paying attention to the contents of their baskets, and instead of simply upending them into the panniers, they were taking the time to tilt and shake them attentively, watching the soil pour down. Even without my spectacles I could easily see the change in their attitudes; then, near the donkey, the woman ahead of me snatched something from her emptying load and hastily thrust it inside her robe. Something flat the size of a thumbnail; I thought it was a coin, and then I knew how this soil was different: It was old, and these canny diggers knew it.

I nearly missed the bit of treasure buried in my own load, would have missed it had my colleagues not decided I was little better than a half-wit. One woman, a thin, hard-faced little grandmother, paused after emptying her basket to watch me tip mine into the donkey’s containers. Her hand moved, but mine was there before hers, and I had the object stashed away before she could even curse. Later I paused in a doorway to examine it more closely. Scraping the caked soil of the ages from it with a thumbnail, I found a tiny glass phial, no more than two inches tall. I felt eyes on me, slipped it away into my pocket handkerchief, and took up my basket again.

When we broke for lunch I rapidly shovelled the remainder of the picnic down my throat, then sat with the basket on my knees, dabbing up the crumbs with a damp finger while I racked my brain to think of a way to return the conversation to the subject of the woman’s comment about the reappearing soil. Unfortunately, the women were at one end of the alley, while I was with the men twenty feet away at the other. The men’s conversation was infinitely less interesting than the chatter I could hear coming from the other end, being all about injustices done and relatives wronged by the new government, until one old man began dramatically to recite a positive epic: One of his goats had gone missing the week before! The very next day, his neighbours threw a feast! Roast goat figured prominently on the menu! The old man’s grandsons attempted a course of rough justice! The military police arrived! They put a halt to the fracas!

His long and emphatic recitation finally came to an end, and before any of the others could draw a breath I made a loud remark, putting my tongue in the front of my mouth to supply a ready mechanical explanation for any linguistic failures.

“My mother lost a chicken the other week, but whoever took it left a silver bangle in its place.” The smattering
of tales sparked by this pale story were neither enthusiastic nor particularly apt, and when they started to drift off on another track I made another loud comment. “We think it is an
afreet
.” As I had hoped, the entire alley fell silent at my reference to a troublesome imp.

“Why would an
afreet
leave a silver bangle?” the man next to me demanded.

“Why would an
afreet
take a chicken?” I retorted, my logic equal to his. “
Afreets
cause trouble. My mother’s chicken gave us many eggs, but the silver bangle, when she tried to sell it, brought only problems, for a woman down the road said we had stolen it.”

This was much more satisfying. For ten minutes we swopped stories of false accusations and genuine theft, and then I gave a final nudge.