O Jerusalem

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 footsteps—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.

He led us a short distance down the narrow, cobbled street, then turned left and left again, a circle that brought us back to a gateway we had already passed—reluctantly on the part of the mule, which had tugged at the lead rope, knowing his partners were within. We entered through a pair of high, stout wooden doors opening into a small cobbled yard with stables, a covered cistern, some bare vines growing up the stone walls, and several windows, all of them lacking paint and most of them standing open to the flies and the smells. Against the right- hand wall an ancient wooden stairway clung precariously, leading in two stages to a doorway twenty feet above the yard. On the very top step of the stairway sat Ali.

He watched us arrive, then dropped his attention back to the wooden figure he was working at with the long knife from his belt, the blade he used for slicing onions, carving figurines, and killing men. As the wicked steel blade caught the sun, it struck me that the reason he used one knife for such diverse and often unsuited tasks was so that his hand might know it as a natural extension of itself, carving donkeys and cleaning fingernails to make it the more accurate when the time came for violent applications. I swallowed hard and looked away.

There was no sign of Mahmoud. Our urchin guide ran up the stairs and perched next to Ali, who ignored him and went on shaving paper-thin curls of wood from the emerging figurine. I stood with the mule’s rope in my hand, looking dull (with very little effort) while Holmes negotiated a pair of rooms. One room would have been more expected and therefore less conspicuous, but I had insisted, and he had agreed, that some risks were necessary. When I saw the rooms I was glad that at least I should not have to share the windowless cubicle and its narrow single mat on the floor: “tiny” was an understatement, and if it was a step up from squalid, one would have to be remarkably generous to call it comfortable. Still, there seemed to be little insect life, be it crawling or hopping, and the dirt on the walls and floor seemed to be mere dust and debris, not actual filth.

There was a bath, of a sort, or rather two: a dank closet in one of the cellars where cold water sputtered from a dripping green pipe to form a primitive shower-bath, or a tin bath behind a flimsy partition on the open roof. I sighed, and walked down to the cellar.

Refreshed, if not precisely clean, I went back upstairs and found Holmes just coming down from the roof. He was whistling. He looked, and smelt, beautifully clean, and although he retained a moustache, his handsome salt- and-pepper beard had given way to startlingly smooth (if still dark) skin.

“You had a bath,” I said.

“A fine, hot bath,” he replied, radiating good cheer.

I scowled at him.

“With one servant to pour hot water over my head, another to shave me, and a masseur who would make a fortune in the best Turkish bath in London.”

“May your eyebrows grow inward,” I growled in Arabic. “May your hair itch and fall from your head. Sabah el-kheir, Mahmoud,” I added, greeting that gentleman as he appeared in the doorway across from mine. His room, I saw, was blessed with both window and the exterior door to which the stairway led, and a small but well-fed charcoal brazier glowed merrily from the middle of the floor.

“Allah yesabbihak bil-kheir,” he returned my good morning—using, of course, the masculine ending. I was quite used to it by now. In fact, if someone had addressed me using the feminine I might