Mr. Mani (24 page)

—Yes, sir. I gathered all this information from the defendant himself, although I was able to corroborate it from other sources. I'm dreadfully sorry to be taking so much of your time, but I have my reasons ... I assure you that I do...

—Thank you, sir. All this was nearly twenty years ago. But can there be any statute of limitations when we seek to trace, through the maze of their origins, the roots of treachery and espionage so as to keep them from spreading their rank weeds? The family was stunned by the disaster; their benefactor, the consul, was long dead; the
lying-in hospital was dealt a mortal blow. For a while the Swedish midwife tried keeping it up, at first openly and then clandestinely, since the authorities revoked its license after Dr. Mani's death; there were debts to be paid too, so that part of the equipment had to be sold and some of the rooms rented out to pilgrims; and gradually, the women of Jerusalem stopped coming to give birth there. That Christmas the city was flooded by Christian pilgrims who had come to mark the new century, and the faithful midwife suddenly regained her faith and returned with them to her native land. In December 1899 our defendant was twelve years old; he had always been an independent lad, even when his father was alive, and now he became even more so. If you try to picture him for a moment, sir, as I can, you'll see a thin, black-haired boy with glasses and a dark complexion like his mother's, a moody youngster who daydreamed and even talked to himself. In late December of that year the winter finally arrived; everywhere there were church bells and parades of Russian pilgrims through the streets; the two centuries, one coming and one going, were a source of universal excitement. And then one afternoon, so he told me, young Mani went down to the former hospital on the ground floor and was startled to find a young woman in travail lying on a bed, one of those Jewish adventuresses who had come to Palestine from Europe to live in the new Jewish farming villages, partly out of ideological conviction and partly to run away from home. She had reached Jerusalem on her last legs, with the address of the lying-in hospital, not knowing that it was defunct; had found no one there; and had lain down on a bed. It was afternoon; the boy's mother, sister, and grandmother had gone to see the processions and had not come home yet; no one was there but him and the woman; and now she began screaming and sobbing, throwing off her blanket and howling for help while he stood there and stared at her, both straight-on and in the mirror. At first he was too paralyzed to move; and when at last he tried helping her undress, he couldn't get her clothes off, no matter how she begged him, until he ran to fetch a knife and slashed them. Then he stood watching the birth canal heave open and listening to her moans; saw the baby's head appear slowly in a pool of blood; witnessed it all: the dreadful suffering, the screams; and was made to swear while standing helplessly in that cold room that he wouldn't leave her or lay down his knife before cutting the umbilical cord. And throughout all this he never shut his eyes. He looked now at the woman and now at the mirror, watching the birth on both sides of him ... which is how, so he says, his intense political consciousness was born, gripping the knife in that cold room...

—Yes, sir,
political,
sir, those were his words and that's how he views it. Unbelievably intense; it's the only thing in his world that matters; it
is
his world. And thus, in a single cold, gloomy,
fin-de-siecle
hour, a skinny twelve-year-old with glasses became, as he puts it, a
homo politicus.
And here, perhaps, lies the first, subtle kernel of the bizarre, the hideous act of treachery that came eighteen years later, on account of which, sir, you were brought from Egypt to join your colleagues on the bench tomorrow while I hammer home his guilt ... I say, though, look at how the sky has cleared! Didn't I remark two hours ago, sir, that Jerusalem wasn't Glasgow? Even the most torrential rains have their limit here ... and so I ask myself, sir, and you too, Colonel, whether you haven't heard enough by now. To think of all the times my mother warned me not to forget myself, that is, not to forget my listeners, because my tongue has a way of getting carried away, especially when it has such excellent whiskey to carry it...

—Of course, sir. I have a most definite purpose in mind.

—I daresay, Colonel, that everything will fit together in the end.

—With all my heart and soul, sir.

—Thank you, sir, that's terribly kind of you. Well, then, where were we? Ah, yes, at the start of the century, which erupted right under our defendant's nose...

—Sir?

—What baby is that, sir?

—Oh yes, that one ... but just what was the question, sir?

—Why, yes, sir.

—Yes, sir.

—Why, yes, sir. Quite thick of me, sir. Yes, of course. I reckon it was born in the end, but I'm afraid I didn't pursue the matter, because it seemed to me more of a metaphor ... I do believe he cut the cord with his knife and gave the baby its freedom, but as to whether it lived or not ... we must hope for the best...

—By all means, sir ... Well, then, the new century dawned on us all, each of us at his proper station, and on the Manis too, who were still quite stunned by their tragedy. The old grandmother, though pushing eighty by now, was as youthful as ever and still adored by the young lad; the mother had put on weight and was aging rapidly; the sister was only ten but already resigned to a fate of being married off young; and the four of them barely eked out a living from letting out rooms in the defunct hospital. Young Mani was left pretty much to his own devices, and being a
homo politicus,
as he puts it, he set himself goals and made himself friends accordingly. His first decision was to study languages; it still rankled him to have had to sit listening to his father converse with his young guests from Europe without understanding a word. And having made up his mind, he went about it as single-mindedly as an army crossing a river—which meant secretly leaving the Jewish school in which his father had placed him without bothering to inform his mother or grandmother and roaming the streets of Jerusalem until he found the Scottish Mission on Mount Zion and its School of Bible, a very Christian institution, I needn't tell you. What interested young Mani, of course, was not the Bible but English, which he quickly mastered with an Inverness accent. But that was just the beginning. Afternoons found him in the nearby village of Silwan, where a chum of his father's, an old Arab sheikh, agreed to chat with him in Arabic and put him through his conjugations. And that still left evenings, when he sometimes frequented an Algerian family he knew to help mind the children and pick up a bit of French. He was already, you see, quite adept at moving among different elements before he had even celebrated his bar-mitzvah, which is like a Catholic confirmation or a Mohammedan
toohoor
and takes place in synagogue at the age of thirteen, when you must chant parts of the Bible in a special melody that is the very devil to master—believe me, Colonel, I can vouch for that personally, and so can the Great Synagogue in Manchester ... And so, as his bar-mitzvah approached, he betook himself to one of your little Jerusalem sects, one of those black-coated, fur-hatted, curly-eared lots whom you may have come across in London, Colonel, if you have ventured to the East End...

—Most assuredly, sir ... that's where you see them, dressed the same way. He presented himself to them as an orphan, which is what he did everywhere, sir, as if he were motherless too; and they arranged for his bar-mitzvah, and taught him the proper chant notes, and even saw to the refreshments. That was the start of his odd ties with them, which have continued to this day. I've questioned them about it most thoroughly, trying to get to the bottom of it, because you see, sir, it's not as if he belonged to them or could have even if he wished to: first, because he's a Sephardi; second, because he's a freethinker; and third, because he's a Zionist, which is utterly foreign to them. And yet such ties existed; initially as a matter of mutual interest and eventually as one of subtle affection; because even the most hermetically sealed system needs a secret outlet, a man who is free to come and go on special assignments and is preferably an outsider, so that no control need be relinquished over one's own; and best of all, a queer bird like Mani, a none too reputable orphan who could easily be disowned. And so he rendered them various services, such as corresponding in English with wealthy Jews in America, negotiating the rental of flats from the Mohammedans, and preparing digests of the newspapers, which their religion forbids them to read, in return for financial remuneration or its equivalent. They made no religious demands of him, not even that he wear a hat—indeed, already as a boy he was in the habit of calling on their elder bareheaded and speaking to him respectfully but as an equal. Not that he considered himself antireligious. He sometimes even attended services, although never theirs but only those of his fellow Sephardim, whose hymns were familiar and didn't take all day—and then, of course, he clapped a red Turkish fez on his head before going off to pray. But he quite definitely did not wish to be considered religious either, because the one thing he could not have enough of was his freedom...

—In the Deity, sir? I believe he does, although he declines to profess it. In any case, he refused to answer the question, which I put to him with the greatest delicacy, on the grounds that it was too personal.

—No, sir, a Jew is not required to believe in Him. As a rule, however, he does, since he has little else to believe in.

—Are you quite certain, Colonel, that you wish me to expound on such questions of identity? It's a dreadful bog, you know; the Jews themselves start out across it with the greatest confidence and end up floundering madly. I can't tell you how sorry I am to be boring you like this.

—I would be most keen to, sir.

—With great pleasure, sir. I even have my own hypothesis. But for the moment, I suggest that we stick to our story. I daresay I should say a word about this sect, because from the day of his arrest they've gone tiptoeing after him and us, his handlers, like a flock of birds—crows, sir, if you will—all perched around the ringside; quite indistinguishable from each other, yet each of them with his clearly defined role and place. Already on that snowy night when I rushed off to the guardhouse and saw the first of them standing blackly by the edge of the square, I could tell by the way he stood there that he had been sent; not even his umbrella was his own, because since then I've seen it pass from hand to hand like a rifle at the changing of the guards. A night hasn't gone by without one of them trailing behind me—along the narrow streets, into the shops, up steps and down steps ... but the moment I approach them, they vanish. What they're after, don't you see, is to try to read in my face whether the accused has said anything to incriminate them...

—Yes, sir. They were questioned quite stiffly with the help of an interpreter who speaks their language.

—Yiddish, sir. It would appear that they had no idea what he was up to and could not have been less involved in his schemes. England, Turkey—they don't give a fig for any of that. Their one concern is not to have his guilt rub off on them, although I do believe they feel a sort of solidarity with him, perhaps it even goes back to that bar-mitzvah chant ... Anyway, we had better get back to our story. Well, sir, he grew up, the lad did, dark-haired, bespectacled, and homely, an independent and rather solitary
homo politicus
drifting among the identities of Jerusalem while working out his politics and acquiring languages as though they were a batch of keys to a house with many doors. He was still a bachelor, still stirred to the depths of his soul by that woman's womb and screams. In 1905, when he was eighteen, his grandmother died of old age, the one person in the world he really loved. Meanwhile, his younger sister was married off as she had known she would be, to the son of a wealthy Jew from North Africa who had come to purchase a grave in Jerusalem and was buried in it sooner than he had planned; once the
week of mourning was over, the young man departed with his new bride and her mother, for Marseilles, to which he also invited her brother, who was employed as a court clerk at the time. Young Mani, however, resolutely declined; he was awaiting political developments, which were not long in coming, since in 1908 the Young Turks seized power and proclaimed a multinational, multiracial empire—a proclamation that so affected him that he resolved to study law and serve in the Turkish parliament. And so, letting out his two rooms in the defunct hospital that was now a pilgrims' hostel, he put the family possessions into storage, gave his father's old clothes to charity except for a large, warm overcoat, ordered a calling card from a print shop that said “Journalist” even though he had no journal to correspond for, and in the late summer of 1908 took the train to Jaffa, departing Jerusalem for the first time in his life. He did not once lift his head to look at the mountains sliding by outside the window, but kept his eyes on the suitcase between his legs and on his father's coat by his side, wanting only to put Palestine behind him without a glimpse of the route whereby his father had deserted him. From the railway station in Jaffa he took a black hansom straight to the port, where he boarded a northbound ship for Constantinople. Three days later, toward evening, she cast anchor in Beirut—which is, as you know, sir, a handsome and rapidly growing city famed for its houses of amusement. All the passengers hurried ashore, he told me, save himself; for he had decided not to budge from the empty ship and there he remained, pacing the deck and listening to the sounds of song and laughter from the shore while regarding the brilliant lights of the city in which his father had perished. Toward midnight the first passengers returned to their cabins; yet still he strode the deck, watching the lights dim as the song and laughter faded away. A late moon rose in the sky. And then ... then, sir, so he says, he heard a cry; as if a huge, powerful infant were crying in the city, or so he says, sir; and with shaking hands he packed his suitcase and went ashore, passing the watchmen and entering the little streets, through which the last revelers were heading home and the last passengers returning to their ships. And all along, sir, he kept hearing the cry. And so he struck out through the winding lanes of the old city and came to the railway station, where he quickly crossed the tracks and started up a steadily climbing street until he came to a boardinghouse, a small establishment for travelers in need of a night's lodgings. There were voices inside and a light swayed in the vestibule; and he asked if there was a room available and was told that there was; and he climbed the stairs and flung his suitcase on the bed and stepped out on the terrace and gazed down at the station below, which was flooded with moonlight, the tracks running north and south; and then, sir, he opened the squeaking clothes closet and hung up his father's old coat ... and there it stayed for six years...