The Mandelbaum Gate (15 page)

Every
time he slept with this girl he found himself with a problem which for want of
a more precise definition, he termed ‘spiritual’; he was afraid of her. When he
spent days and nights at the flat without sexual relations with her, as he
frequently did, he found himself with a physical problem; for he wanted very
much the physical contact with this bold foreigner. That she herself was taking
some sort of risk in carrying on this relationship did not occur to him, until
she was suddenly unavailable, detained and being questioned pending a
court-martial; Abdul lay low. He started attending to his studies, lie did not
go near the flat or any busy part of Cairo. He remained in the college
precincts, attending lectures and reading his books from early morning to early
evening, when he went to bed and lay listening for the footsteps of the police.
Within three weeks he heard that the English girl had been recalled to
headquarters in Britain pending her release from the forces, on the
recommendation of one of those psychiatrists whose main job in war-time was to smooth
over such events as this, and Abdul realized, with relief, that her lover’s
identity was unknown.

Meanwhile,
Abdul had acquired from the woman something ineradicable, and which was so much
part of her nature that she had been herself totally unaware of it:
self-humour. It was a form of endowment at the same time that it was a form of
corruption. It undid him as a middle-class Arab enemy-hater with a career in
the army or a position in business.

‘I am
an Arab Nationalist,’ he had announced to her. ‘I despise the British.’

‘Nationalist
of what nation?’ she had said, quite innocently. ‘What place, what territory?’
He made these responses his own and used them for years afterwards.

‘Islam
is united.’ But he knew it was not.

This was
not the only innocent remark the girl had made which affected him. From the
histrionic or dramatic point of view he was henceforth a spoiled Arab. He could
not take any propaganda seriously. And she had unwittingly instilled
scepticism into him, had taught him to be a doubter and, at the same time, a
faint-hearted hater. He was by no means the only Arab of his generation to
react in this way to the fervour of the resistance movements at Cairo while the
big war was going on outside. Many were influenced by the Lebanese who mostly
considered themselves to be a different cultivation altogether from the rest of
Middle-Eastern humanity. Many joined the Allied forces.

Abdul,
then, joined all the student factions, merrily uncommitted at heart and, in
the same spirit, out of the sheer desire for discovery and scope, would have
joined the British army had they accepted him. He was found to have
tuberculosis, was sent back to Palestine and, within a few weeks, to a
sanatorium in Lebanon. There, his sister Suzi, the blue-eyed one, came to visit
him at various intervals, sometimes accompanied by Mme Ramdez and sometimes by
black-veiled Kyra, smelling like her usual self with the addition of
eau-de-cologne which she had applied to her forehead in consideration of foreign
travel.

It was
at this time that the secret affinity ripened between Abdul and Suzi. She was
then fifteen, Abdul nineteen. He talked of new ways of life and outlook,
undreamt of even by their modernized parents. His imagination went wild in most
particulars, but Abdul conveyed to her, as only tubercular patients can, the
excitement of what was in his mind. He said that the modernization of Joe
Ramdez was simply a new form of the old exploiting mentality. In this way Suzi
discovered the future as an idea, and together the brother and sister merged in
a pact of personal anarchism; they started to fool everyone; they conformed to
outward demands and resisted in spirit, the Arabic mysticism in their nature
easily adapting itself to this course. Suzi, on one of her visits with Kyra,
had a love-affair with a French officer and managed to convince her suspicious
chaperone, and later her mother, that she was merely cultivating his
acquaintance in her role as a spy. To be a spy of some sort was the respectable
thing for any literate Arab, even if it only involved spying on each other. To
spy on a Westerner was a matter of special commendation. The girl noticeably
handed a note to Abdul in his hospital bed, every time she visited him. These
were really love-notes from herself to Abdul; and they were partly sincere, for
the temperamental sympathy between the brother and sister was not unlike an
erotic passion, so new to their Palestinian lives was their liberation of
spirit; Abdul’s attitude to her as a woman was not to be found in any other
Arab of her acquaintance, and only superficially in the French officer, who
very soon left with his regiment for other parts. Abdul treated her as a girlfriend,
and she was bold and merry with him; it delighted him, even more than had his
encounter with the Englishwoman in Egypt.

He read
her notes, when they began to reach him by messenger three or four times a day,
with enormous secret amusement, returning similar messages even before old
Kyra’s eyes. He explained to all Arab personnel at the hospital who might be
concerned, that these notes were in aid of ‘the Arab struggle’. This was highly
acceptable, and nobody inquired what sort of struggle to what precise end.

After
the end of the war, Abdul, partially cured in both lungs, returned to Palestine
where the huge Jewish immigration had turned the old Arab hostility to the Jews
into hysterical hatred. The British military were active everywhere, unable to
cope with the illegal immigrant shiploads that managed to come ashore, week by
week, in spite of the vigilant army and air force in Palestine and their ships
off the coast. The British were hated by the Arabs for not killing all the
Jews.

Joe
Ramdez had opened at Haifa a small branch of his travel agency which was one of
the main British sources of secret intelligence concerning the illegal
immigrant ships. Abdul was now placed in charge of this establishment, where he
gaily accepted payment by both British and Jewish agencies in the matter of
illegal immigrants. One way and another he had a bright time of it, distrusted
on all sides, yet frequently confided in on the mere hypnotic strength of his
attractive personality, and was eventually retained by various intelligence
agencies more from fear of what he could divulge than from his usefulness as a
spy. Joe Ramdez took his son’s duplicity for granted, the only difference
between the two processes of thought, father’s and son’s, was that, whereas
Abdul knew and joyfully recognized his double-dealings for what they were, the
father took a double course of life to be a single, natural line of human
proceeding and would have been wild with anger if anyone had openly called a
lie of his a lie, or suggested some moral defection on his part: and he
expected the same treatment from everyone outside his own family. But when a
British officer said to Abdul, leaning over the desk at the travel bureau in
Haifa, ‘Ramdez, what a frightful, bloody young liar you are!’ Abdul replied, ‘I
know,’ with his quick, young smile. In any case, he was not quite twenty-one at
the time, which alone was very disarming. Abdul adored life, the Mediterranean
waters, the sun, and his sister Suzi.

Bullets were flying from
all quarters. Abdul closed down the agency in Haifa. He took off his smart-cut
suit of clothes and put on a white shirt and khaki shorts. Bullets from the
small black window apertures of the Arab quarters sang about his ears; the
bullets pelted down from the mountains of Carmel. Abdul did not return to his
lodgings. He waited in an upper store-room of the travel agency until this
local rising had been put down, then he emerged one night, thin from lack of
food, and closed the doors of the travel agency at Haifa for ever. He got to
friends at Acre, where he obtained a birth certificate dated 1931, which made
him a plausible sixteen years of age. There, too, on the strength of some
knowledge of the Catholic religion that he had picked up while in hospital in
Lebanon, he persuaded a simple and ancient Franciscan monk to baptize him
before witnesses and sign a baptismal certificate. Abdul did all these things
without any distinct notion of their subsequent usefulness, but merely on the
prompting of an instinct for self-preservation. By no means did he wish to
fight in an Arabs’ war with the Jews or anyone else. A careful copy of the
baptismal certificate was made for him by his friends, with the substitution of
Suzi’s name, and this copy was conveyed in secret to his sister in Jerusalem.
Certificates of baptism were useful for crossing borders in this pilgrim
territory, they were useful for many things. He began to love Acre, with its
band of friends and its crowds of poor.

Presently
he set off for Nazareth where Christian Arabs were mostly congregated. He
begged lifts all the way from the British military, explaining that he desired
to get to the hospital at Nazareth as he had been spitting blood and was afraid
of being sniped at by the Jews. How old was he? Sixteen. He had, in fact,
developed a short, recurrent cough. The British soldiers searched him for
bombs, found five pounds in his pocket, his birth certificate and baptismal
certificate; that was all. He had not changed his name. Abdul Ramdez, a fairly
common name, was as good as any. He coughed frequently. ‘Hop in,’ said the
Englishmen. On the second lift that he got in a military jeep, which took him
all the way to Nazareth, he found himself coughing less controllably than
before, and towards evening he did indeed spit up blood.

At the
tubercular sanatorium in Nazareth, after he perceived how the war was going, he
took lessons in modern Hebrew. He now had assurances that his lung disease, in
spite of long neglect, could be quite cured. He got modem Hebrew lessons from a
Baptist missionary woman who visited the hospital, and explained to the suspicious
Arab patients that a knowledge of Hebrew would enable him to continue his
profession of spying on the Jews when he should be discharged. Once or twice
his textbooks were destroyed in hostile rage by one or another Arab, but on the
whole he managed to convince almost everyone of his nationalistic loyalty, by
almost daily renewals of vows of hatred against the Jews. He felt no hatred on
so large a scale, since all his energies went into his will to live well in the
world, to get the best he could out of Palestine and to be free to say any
frivolous thing that came into his head regardless of the impression it might
make. At night, when he lay among the row of sleepers, he felt the security and
comfort of being together with his own people. By day, he surged with
individuality again.

The
state of Israel was three years old and was warily at peace, separated by an
armistice line from Jordan, when Abdul left the sanatorium. Jerusalem was now
divided; his father’s home and business establishment were in the Jordanian
sector. Infrequent messages, mostly verbal, had passed between Abdul and his
family while he was in hospital, carried in secret by various individuals — a
foreigner, a Red Cross officer, an Arab spy, a Church of Scotland minister.

Abdul
was aware that none of the family except Suzi had any conception of his mind
and how deeply bored he was by the mentality that now presented to every Arab
in Palestine the blood-duty of becoming a professional victim. Abdul saw years
of futile service ahead in this uninteresting cause. He knew of the homeless
Palestinian refugees massed along the frontier, and he discerned then what a
foreigner could not so accurately foresee, that there was a living to be made
out of the world by preserving a refugee problem. Abdul guessed, and was
presently proved right, that his father, for one, was doing his big bit on the
refugee question and would in time make a fortune out of it. Joe Ramdez was in
fact already active in newly established agencies for negotiating contracts
with merchants for supplies bought by foreign relief funds.

Just
before he had left hospital, Abdul had got a brief note in Suzi’s handwriting. ‘How
are Abdul’s orange groves thriving?’ He puzzled for a few moments, then smiled.
The displaced poor were already being urged to recall the extent of the lands
and possessions from which they had fled before the Israeli? onslaught. More
and more, the bewildered homeless souls, in thousands and tens of thousands,
agreed and then convinced themselves, and were to hold for long years to come,
that they had, every man of them, been driven from vast holdings in their bit
of Palestine, from green hilly pastures and so many acres of lush orange groves
as would have covered Arabia.

Abdul
had earned some money by teaching the children while in the sanatorium. On his
discharge he bought a car on the instalment plan and drove to Acre, passing
through the green hills and battered villages of Judea. He said to himself, at
times when he sped past some fruitful plantation, ‘There go Abdul’s orange
groves.’ He was bored far beyond the point of fury with his elders, he was
bored with the fervent industrious Jews bursting with their new patriotism. It
had been necessary for him, a Palestinian Arab, to obtain a permit before he
could leave Nazareth. He was an inferior citizen still; the Jews had only
replaced the British. The officious Israeli policeman who issued the permit, a
man younger than himself, made Abdul feel sick. He was beyond fury. He laughed.
The Israeli guard called a fellow-officer to his side and then asked Abdul what
there was to laugh at. Abdul explained that he was newly out of hospital and it
was a nice day. He was allowed to go. He did not want to grow older than he was
then, in 1950. At that time he was twenty-three.