O Jerusalem

I couldn’t assemble enough coherent thoughts to come up with a lie, so I simply gave her the truth. “I am beset by memory. I was in a motorcar accident some years ago, and this one has brought back… unpleasant things. It’s not a concussion,” I added, using the English noun. “I’ve had one before, and this is not as bad.” My hand went up to explore the outside of my skull.

“Good.” She put the lamp back on the tea-chest. “Could you eat?”

“I don’t know. Tea would be a blessing.”

“I will send Sarah up with some, and bring your supper in a short time. My name is Rahel. I ought to warn you, do not make any noise if you can avoid it. Mahmoud thought you were best hidden away.”

My two hostesses left me. Further explorations revealed one large and tender lump behind my right ear, an abraded shoulder, a scraped elbow, and many amorphous aches. Whatever had hit us, I seemed to have been fortunate. Even my spectacles, which I picked up from the table, were relatively undamaged, aside from two parallel scratches on the side of the right lens and a certain wobbly feeling as I put them on.

I was considering the risks of being on my feet when Sarah came back and saved me from immediate action. The tea she poured with great concentration from the brass beaker was mint, and sweet, and although it was not what I had in mind, it continued the work the brandy had begun. By the time Rahel returned with a tray, I was positively ravenous.

A light soup, a piece of bread, a small glass of harsh red wine, and I felt considerably more real. The next goal was to be upright, and with Rahel’s assistance I achieved that, keeping a wary eye on the low rafters.

“Where am I?” I asked her as I hobbled up and down experimentally, her hand on my elbow.

“Ram Allah. About ten miles from Jerusalem, just off the Nablus road. You are in the attic of the inn. I am the innkeeper.”

“It is very generous of you to take me in,” I ventured. It was difficult to know precisely what arrangement Mahmoud had with this woman, and surely not wise to make assumptions.

“Mahmoud has helped me; I help him. He saved my life and the life of my daughter in the war. You have heard of the Nili?”

The name popped an immediate reaction into the front of my mind, loosed from some dim corner. “Netzach Israel lo Ishakar,” I said promptly. “ ‘God will not forsake Israel.’ The spy operation run by… the Aaronsons?”

“Yes. My husband and I had an inn in Nazareth until the spring of last year. Men talk in inns, and we sent a great deal of information to your government, until we were betrayed to the Turks. I was a dear friend of Aaronson’s sister, who… died after being tortured by the Turks. A week later, they killed my husband. Mahmoud rescued Sarah and me, and brought us here. He can ask a great deal more from me than hiding a friend in the attic.”

I moved free from her support and walked slowly down the length of the room. “I cannot stay here.”

“Where would you go?”

That was indeed a poser. Still, I could not simply sit. With every degree of returning energy came two notches of anxiety for Holmes. Who had taken him, and why? I found I was standing in front of Rahel.

“Did they tell you nothing?”

She put out her hand and took my shoulder. “Those two have more soldiers in the field than the British Army. They will find your friend, and they will come back for you.”

She was right, of course. It would be senseless, and no help to Holmes or myself, to go out into the night, in an unknown city, and lose myself as well. But it was very hard.

And I had no wish to stay in the confines of the attic.

“Do you have guests in the inn?”

“The last customers are just leaving.”

“Servants you don’t trust? Any reason to think there is someone out there looking specifically for me?”

“No,” she admitted.

She helped me dress and secure my turban over the lump on my skull. Leaning heavily on her arm, I lurched my decrepit way down two flights of narrow stairs, used the privy, and was given soap, water, and a stiff brush to scrub my hands. Sarah was sent to bed, I was settled on a bench in front of the fire with a rug wrapped around me, and Rahel, after throwing wood onto the coals, went off somewhere. I decided that she was hoping if she left me alone, warm and quiet, I might go back to sleep.

I did not wish to sleep; I was, in fact, leery of sleeping. My bruised brain could not yet piece together what had happened on the drive down from Haifa, but there was a car, and an accident, and a death, and every time I closed my eyes the images that seared across them were those of the automobile accident that had taken my family four years before: vivid, terrifying memories, of my brother’s face and my mother’s scream and nothing at all of my beloved father who was driving, over a cliff and gone in flames, the guilt-saturated stuff of the nightmares that haunted me still. I had never spoken of the accident to Holmes, had told no-one of the death of my family aside from one long-ago psychotherapist. I could not think why I had allowed it to slip out in front of Rahel, but no, I did not wish to risk sleep.

So I sat propped against the rough plaster wall, watching the flames die down in the hearth and alternating between drowsy half-sleep and abrupt, heart-pounding terror when it was all I could do to keep from tearing open the outer door and shrieking the name of my lost companion and mentor into the night.

This cycle went on for a couple of tiresome hours, and I had just twitched my way back down into a state of torpor when a stealthy movement somewhere in the building brought all my nerves jangling to life.

Gritting my teeth, I lifted my head to look into the room.

Mahmoud stood there; behind him Rahel, with a rifle in her arms and looking very comfortable with it there. The intensity of the joy I felt at seeing him, this phlegmatic, uncommunicative, and utterly trustworthy Arab, took me by surprise. I gulped back the tears of weakness, and murmured, “Salaam aleikum, Mahmoud.”

“Aleikum es-salaam, Amir,” he replied. “Your injuries were not serious, I am pleased to see.”

“Have you found Holmes?”

“We know where he is.”

“Thank God,” I said explosively in English. I let the rug drop from my shoulders and tried to stand up. Mahmoud instead pulled a stool over in front of me and sat down on it. His dark eyes probed my face.

“You are in pain,” he noted.

“It will get slightly worse, then better,” I said. Little point in denying its existence, not with those eyes on me. He thought for a minute, then seemed to make up his mind.

“You are Inglezi, firengi,” he said: English, a foreigner. “But you are also not firengi. If you were only firengi, if you were nothing but an Englishwoman, I would not have returned here tonight, because the Inglezi have no— they have a different sense of what is honourable. What was done today is a blood insult, you understand? You and your Holmes have eaten our salt, shared our bread. Blood ties exist, you understand?” He was speaking English, but a much simpler English than I had heard him use before. It occurred to me that he was thinking in Arabic and translating as he went. I assured him that I understood what he was talking about, and that I agreed. He continued. “If those ties did not exist, the exercise of retrieving him would be only a task, a service to the English government. Ali and I would do that as we have done other jobs. But this is a matter of honour, and I believe you have the right to be there with us, if you choose.”

Were I in his shoes, I reflected, I should be asking how badly I in my feeble state might handicap them, but he asked no such question. I met his eyes evenly.

“I will come, if you will have me.”

He nodded, and stood up. “There are arrangements to be made; I will return for you,” he told me. After a brief consultation with Rahel he went out. She followed, to return in a couple of minutes with another glass, this one containing two inches of a clear, brownish liquid.

“This will help you to ignore the pain. It will not remove the pain, but neither will it cloud your mind or slow you down.”

I drank it, and sat until Mahmoud came and led me away.