I said I’d get a cab. Schreiber had what I imagined would be called a Junior Suite. Everything with dinky little arches – the windows in clutches of three, the separation of his lounge and office area from the bedroom. He poured white wine as soon as I arrived without asking if I wanted any, and we sat next to each other on the sofa looking at his laptop. That should have given me a heads-up – it all felt too intimate from the start.
The briefing was laughable by any standard. It consisted of a single photograph of a cafe with red signage in Arabic that I didn’t recognise and a Google map of some East Jerusalem lanes, to which he pointed with a pencil. The address on a piece of paper handed to Toby would have been fine. But Schreiber wouldn’t have been able to practise his Boston charm that way.
I had to laugh in his face when he told me solemnly that “I cannot describe the man you will be meeting, because I don’t know who he is.”
“Well, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?” He must have thought I was flirting.
“He will know your name and he will be looking for a woman.” He refilled my glass. “Do you mind if I ask how you got that scar across your eyebrow?”
“I was in a car crash.”
“It’s really very attractive.”
“It speaks very highly of you too, Mr Schreiber.”
He leaned in, leering, and I could smell white-wine breath.
“Where do I get my envelope?”
“What envelope would that be?” I rolled my eyes and moved away up the sofa like a coy maid in a play. “Oh, that. Toby will give it to you.”
“Then I guess that’s all I need to know.” I stood and grabbed my jacket.
“Need you really go? I thought we might have a drink, get to know each other better.” He exited the other end of the sofa and barred my way to the door.
“No offence, Schreiber, but I think I’d rather die.”
“Aw,” he pulled a little baby reproachful face, “that’s not very Christian,” and he moved in on me, pushing me against the wall.
I looked up at him and placed both hands on his shoulders for balance. Then my right knee found the inside of his thigh like a locating rail and glided its delivery into his slack little sack, like a kitten in a purse. He hissed through his nose and stood back, his arms hanging as if in a paralysed dance move as he fought the urge to grab his groin. In truth, it hadn’t been too hard a jab.
A gasp. “You little bitch.”
“Now you’re on the money, Schreiber,” I said and swung out the door.
And that, more or less, is what I was telling Toby about as we drove past the Colony for my errand the following day. We were in good spirits, the boring conference was over, I was looking forward to a few days off in Jerusalem and, though I wasn’t going to say so, knocking around with Toby for a while.
“What are your plans?”
“I don’t know. I may visit some aidie friends. I’ve got some working with the Bulldozed.” I’d tried to call Sarah but she hadn’t replied. Nor had I seen her at the conference centre. I should have thought that was strange, but I suppose I just thought she was frantically busy. She probably was.
“Where’s the envelope, Tobes?”
Toby theatrically slapped his forehead like he’d forgotten it and I sharply palmed his shoulder. He pulled a manila one from his inside pocket. It had nothing written on it, but it was no bigger than a private letter.
“Is that it? I was expecting something larger, Tobes.” It was an attempt at innuendo.
I watched the white sprawl of affluent inner-city Jerusalem passing. The new Jerusalem, the unholy city, dressed as a whore for her pimp. Could this be where it all began and would end? For me, maybe, but I didn’t know that then. I was still somewhere safer and, as Toby drove, something in the high Holy Land light made me think of being happy in other trucks, my feet on the dash, like the one in Sudan, or like the one in Beirut, one hundred and fifty miles or so to the north.
If I hold my nose, I can still taste the dust from breeze-block buildings caking my outer lip, there in Lebanon, when the Church started to send me on missionary work. The smell of fruit and urine as I walked the hopeless alleyways, one foot either side of the central-running drain, laundry drying high enough overhead to catch some of the sky. The narrow-lipped children, eyebrows raised at the Western woman in clean, pale cotton. And I smiled into the deadpan faces, with their pastel-shaded charity clothing, and the brilliant white light of that sky, pinched by the narrow alleys, occasionally illuminating their bare walls, but never cleansing them. I remember how they hung their clothing over corrugated-iron shutters, painted blue. Blue paint was what they had.
This bit is Yusef’s story. It isn’t really mine. Without Yusef, I wouldn’t be here now. The first time I knew Yusef was just six weeks – some forty days, as it happens – and I know now he was my salvation.
Yusef was, and very probably remains, and may he always be, a teacher originally from the West Bank. He was assigned to my beat in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. He was from an exiled Palestinian Christian family, and I think that’s how he had picked up work with us. I was notionally coordinating the efforts of local educational associations for the Palestinian camps, with a brief for skills training for women. There were women heroically managing their communities across the camps and I’d developed an interest in their workshops on gender and family issues. The rank poverty of some of the camps had fomented grotesque domestic violence – who’d
