It was unforgettable. The whole week was unforgettable, and Suzi most of all. She wondered, later, how it was that Freddy had forgotten Suzi Ramdez. And, of course, the question answered itself: she had been too memorable to remember.
‘That Suzi Ramdez woman,’ said the Foreign Office man, when he spoke again to Barbara, ‘… I wish we’d had a chance to. talk to her. But of course the Jordan police have got her. There’s no news. She’s probably been shot.’
‘I doubt it,’ was all Barbara said.
‘Why?’
Well, she isn’t the type to be shot easily.’
‘Oh, you don’t know what they’re like, Miss Vaughan. This is the East, you know.’
Well, let him find out that Suzi was in Athens. Let them find out themselves, if they wanted to track her down for questioning and make trouble for her in Athens…. You make trouble for me.
‘Does Freddy Hamilton know she was arrested?’
‘Oh, yes. At least, we’ve told him everything that’s happened. He doesn’t recall much about her. Of course, she was only a guide. They usually don’t have women guides, but as you got into these absurd difficulties, you know, of course, well … You were lucky to find a travel agent who’d take care of you, don’t you think?’
‘It led to your getting your information.’
‘Oh, yes, we’re thankful for that. I don’t mean … but there might have been trouble.’
He was a young tall doctor carrying a smart leather case, newly qualified in Cairo. He was dressed in a black suit with his shirt collar and cuffs gleaming white as they caught the light from the smoky lamp. His shoes, shuffling on the sandy floor, were the only parts of his appearance that caught the dust of the place. His brown face and glossy dark hair shone with newly qualified immaculateness. He told her, in good English, that he was newly graduated from the University of Cairo. He asked no questions but those pertaining to her fever and the treatment she had received, her past illnesses, and how she felt now. He told her this was his first job and he was employed by the Jordanian Government at a clinic. Barbara lay on the mattress and did not respond to this information, as she had done at first, with so much as an ‘Oh, really?’ or a ‘That must be very interesting.’ Suzi, squatting in the gloom with a cigarette in her hand, said immediately, ‘He isn’t a government officer now with you, Barbara.’
Barbara smiled, whereupon the doctor, neatly holding up in one hand a hypodermic needle to gauge some stuff he was going to inject into her, and, with a white cloth held in the other, at the same time stood back, and carefully, in the brightest patch of light that fell on the floor, made a movement with a toe of his new shoes. It was a slow movement, with a practised quality. The movement was plainly intended to draw Barbara’s attention to its significance. Barbara did not know what it signified. The doctor watched her face. Then he stood further back. She looked at him, then at the floor, and saw that it was not the movement of his foot but the mark he had traced in the dust that he wanted her to notice. It was the simple shape of a fish. When he saw her recognition, he went on with his business, gave her the injection, wiped the needle, packed it away carefully in his new case, gave her some pills, and directed her when to take them. He then told Suzi that Barbara should not travel more than four hours a day for the next week, but should lie down and sleep as much as possible, shook hands with Barbara, wished her a pleasant journey, said in reply to her thanks that it had been a pleasure, and departed.
What is this dance he does on the floor for you?’ said Suzi, who had not seen the mark he had traced.
Barbara pointed it out. ‘It’s a Christian symbol. The very early Christians under the first persecution used to trace the shape of a fish in the sand as a sign of recognition to each other. Then they would quickly obliterate it.’
‘Why couldn’t he say? The Arab makes ceremony of every little thing. We must obliterate this mark.’
‘No, leave it, it’s beautiful.’
‘Then, in the morning, we obliterate. For the poor people of this house might be frightened to see it. The poor always remember signs for thousands of years, and they mix all things in their minds with magic and great fear and horrible trouble. It’s God’s blame.’
‘Wipe it out now, then. It was meant to be seen and remembered.’
Suzi shuffled the sand into shapelessness and said, ‘I can eat a camel now as I’m feeling empty. How are you?’
‘Very hungry.’
‘There is chicken, nothing special, but I bring it anyway. There is a little bit whisky also that I ordered for me here; it’s hidden in a secret place as these poor people don’t understand whisky, and anyway it’s against my religion, too.’
The actual sites that they visited could have been covered in three days had they been able to go by direct routes. But each journey was a brief, cross-country run between the places of pilgrimage and Suzi’s houses of refuge. The hours of their travels were mostly marked off by the calls to prayer from all corners of the world, so that the noon call corresponded with their return journey, for they set off early to merge, as far as possible, with the morning crowds at the shrines and churches.
It was a new experience to Suzi, so she said, to go with a pilgrim from England or America who was not in a state of religion all the way and who did not talk all the time of ‘prayers and self-sacrifices and charity. Or else, when you have two Catholics, they are talking of Our Lady and the Rosary and Mass for St Peter, and the Novena for St Holy Ghost and St Anthony.’
‘I think they are probably sincere,’ Barbara said. ‘But they do seem to make a career of it.’
‘Are you sincere in these devotions, when you go to them talking and laughing with me so much about love-affairs and men and sex? Oh, Barbara, I don’t mean that you’re not sincere, as I like it so much when everything can be said.’
‘Well, either religious faith penetrates everything in life or it doesn’t. There are some experiences that seem to make nonsense of all separations of sacred from profane — they seem childish. Either the whole of life is unified under God or everything falls apart. Sex is child’s play in the argument.’ She was thinking of the Eichmann trial, and was aware that there were other events too, which had rolled away the stone that revealed an empty hole in the earth, that led to a bottomless pit. So that people drew back quickly and looked elsewhere for reality, and found it, and made decisions, in the way that she had decided to get married, anyway.
‘What is profane?’ Suzi said.
‘Your sexy conversation.’
‘No, yours. I never had such a sexy pilgrim. But I see what you say of the child’s play is true. I hate the man in bed who plays at it like he conducts the military band for King Hussein to review the soldiers.’
At Bethlehem, at the Garden of Gethsemane, at the Basilica of the Agony, Barbara knelt for only a few moments and very quickly left, following Suzi up the hewn stairways of caves and crypts.
‘What a lot of trouble for such a small moment, here and there,’ Suzi said.
‘It’s an act of presence,’ Barbara said, ‘as when you visit a bereaved friend and there’s nothing to say. The whole point is, that a meeting has materialized.’ They stood on the cliff-edge outside the Church of St Peter in Gallicantu and looked across the valley into Israel, where men were working in the fields.
Suzi said, ‘We’re not being followed, so I know we’re safe. Abdul is to take you by the Potter’s Field. We should be there by noon on Sunday. You leave with him on Sunday night or Monday before the dawn.’
Barbara was feeling healthier and fuller. She said, The fatter I get, the more the thought of crossing the border frightens me. Probably because there’s more life to lose in a fat body than a thin one.
‘You talk so silly. Abdul doesn’t get caught never.’
That day on the return to the small room in the village near Bethany where they had spent the previous night, and were again to stay, they passed the steep turning off the high road where the Tomb of La
zarus stood open-mouthed by the roadside. They had already visited the place, but Barbara said, ‘Let’s stop again for a moment.’
She followed Suzi down the rocky path, towards the entrance to the tomb, where two or three Europeans were gathered, and was meanwhile watching a laughing young Arab boy; he was trying to sell something to an American couple who were taking an interest in him. He was offering a simple net sling, and kept repeating, ‘The same that David killed Goli-att. Made like the same.’ He put a stone in the sling and whizzed it beautifully, far into the air and out across the rooftops. At the passing sound of this rapid-flung object, another woman turned to see what it was. The woman was Ricky. Barbara was less surprised than she might have been, and now realized that she had been expecting, at the back of her mind, to see her, and had been looking out for her across the country as she rode with Suzi; she had even been watching for Ricky on the scrub plains, amongst the shaggy Bedouin and the lean, quivering camels, so obscure had been her watchfulness.
Barbara had been following Suzi to the tomb with automatic steps and now found that she had disappeared. Ricky glanced towards Barbara only as part of the passing scene. Barbara, behind her veil, her lips shut tight against conversation, looked about her and, a short way behind, saw Suzi’s head protrude and her eyes beckon from a low house doorway. Barbara went fairly slowly towards the door, stooped, and entered. There, Suzi was handing out money to a large dark woman and a child of tough honey-coloured skin and flaxen hair, one of those chance relics of the late Occupation. Suzi whispered, ‘I saw her in time. She must be in the car with those Americans, I think she still looks for you.’
Eventually, the small party left and drove away. Barbara, feeling sick, went and peered down to the musty tomb, descended a few of the steps, breathed the emptiness of earth, but did not follow Suzi, who always thought this particular tomb was fun to go right down into. She liked to frighten herself, she said.
This was the last time Barbara ever saw Ricky. It was the only danger-point of their journey. The police did not trouble them. Tourists and the population passed them on the road, in cars, and occasionally a handsome farming Arab, tall with billowing robes, paced along at the side of the road, his eyes fixed, even by daylight, on the stars.
‘They’ve stopped looking for you here,’ Suzi said, ‘as I have told so many people you go away to Rome by Saudi Arabia.’
Barbara already knew that Harry had been told she was no longer in Jordan. Barbara had at first objected to this. She had hoped Suzi would get a cable or a telephone call to him through Abdul in Israel, to tell him where she was. But Suzi had said, ‘No, he naturally would then come and find you. He might then get in touch with his friend at the American Embassy or with the British Embassy, and it would be an official business to deport you and so forth. Once you have started this you better go on and be that jolly good sport for Freddy. And you have to be a jolly good sport to pay his money for his trip that he owes the firm Ramdez.’
On the way to some Graeco-Roman ruins Suzi told Barbara that the first true love of her life was Abdul, whose story she told, and whose orange groves she explained.
Another time, on the way to see some lovely Arab palaces and Crusader forts far inside the Transjordan, Barbara told Suzi how she recalled her first meeting with Ruth Gardnor and her husband seven years ago in London. There had been nothing special to remember them by, they were guests at a private dinner party in London, and so had Barbara been. She had not spoken much to them. But she remembered the party, indeed she remembered every guest there, because it was at that party she had played the cello for the last time. That was how she remembered having first met Ruth Gardnor, Once or twice after that she had come across her, but that dinner party, a good-looking affair, was the meeting she distinctly remembered.
‘You play the cello?’ said Suzi.
‘No, not now. Not any more.’
‘You should continue. Music is beautiful. I learned piano but gave up at thirteen. You play good?’
‘I was thought to be a promising cellist,’ Barbara said.
‘Not everyone can be the best. You should continue.’
‘No, I went to teach English about that time, at Ricky’s school. I had already decided to give up the cello when I played at that party where I first met Ruth Gardnor.’
‘That woman is not good in her head,’ Suzi said. ‘She gets the sack from Cairo, I think. I’m sorry for that. I told her you were their top agent, and I made her messenger swear also to it. She believed it.’
‘I know she did. And how did you make her messenger swear?’
‘Nothing. His child is needing treatment in hospital, so I sign a document that he’s a refugee from Palestine, then his child gets hospital treatment through UNRWA. I do this for many poor Arabs. Only refugees get big treatments free. So I sign, and he swears.’
On the way into Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulchre, and at last to the Potter’s Field, they talked in the car and were silent outside, and talked when they drove on again.
She said, ‘I’m afraid. Really frightened.’
Abdul said, ‘Why? There is no fear in me, why should you fear? I harness myself to the cart and I take it down a hill and up a hill, and already you are in Israel. Ten, fifteen minutes you are in the cart among the sandals. Then I stamp these sandals with a marker that reads “Made in Israel” and you also I stamp with this, and sell you back to your family for great profit.’
They were to move off in the early morning mist, for there was a dangerous full moon that night. Abdul looked out over the hills and fields of Palestine under the moon. He said. ‘It’s beautiful but I’m sick of this beauty, as it gives me no admiration in return and no nourishment for my soul in recognition of the worship I give to the land. Very soon I’m going to take a certain one of my friends who is in business with me, and we go together to Tangier and start a café. We have the plan. He is sick, too, of the beauty, although he is a Jew and has some chances in Israel.’
She was too sick with fear to reply. She was wearing her own clothes again and felt vulnerable. She had slept most of the afternoon, since Suzi’s departure, in the same upper room near the Potter’s Field from which she had set out. Her suitcase was there. Abdul had come to her room at six, smiling, and she thought for a moment she was already back in Israel since she had only seen him there.
Abdul said, ‘Take everything small that you value from the suitcase, for you won’t see it again. We give your clothes to the poor.’
He said they had better leave the house in a few hours’ time and start preparing for the move at dawn, when the mists would fall. He said they could not sleep in the house that night, but must wait in a field.
She said then that she was frightened. He said there would soon be no time for her to feel frightened. They must go and prepare. Meanwhile they ate bread and cheese and drank mint-flavoured tea in the empty kitchen below, where Freddy had once been to breakfast. Abdul made up some marijuana cigarettes and gave one to Barbara. ‘It will make you feel good and take away fear. Have you smoked this before?’
‘No.’
‘It’s nothing so much.’ He showed her how to smoke it.
She said, after a while, ‘I don’t feel the slightest effect.’
‘First time is never an effect. Two has the effect.’
She smoked another while Abdul talked. He said he would like to play the guitar and sing, but there was no guitar, and singing or sound was not wise on this night.
She said she felt sick, either from fear or the marijuana or the tea.
‘Smoke to the end and the sickness will go. The reason I would like to play the guitar and sing a great song is that I have just seen my father. I see him once, twice a year. The reason I like to sing when I have just seen him, Miss Vaughan, is that I no longer have to see him soon. I have seen him and it’s in the past tense. You shouldn’t think I hate my father. I say only that I sing when I leave him.’
She said, ‘It’s having no effect wh
atsoever.’
‘Oh yes. You are red around the eyes. That is the first sign of an effect. Your friend, Mr Hamilton, is not well. I like Mr Hamilton, he’s my friend, too.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He has lost a piece of his memory. Some believe this, some don’t. I believe it.’
‘Is he at the hotel?’
‘No, he’s now here in Jordan with his friends, Mr and Mrs Cartwright. The doctor has made him stay there. Also, his friends of the British Legation are asking themselves what he has done with his memory. They are friends to him when he is all right to go punctual to the job, but when he has lost his way for a time they suspect and inquire. I hear all these things, Miss Vaughan. And he is also asking for you. Soon we will tell him all is well. Tomorrow we send by signal a message that you are found in Israel.’
They were among the cool grass under the moon. Barbara dozed and woke. Abdul spoke to her when she moved, in case she should cry out in waking. He said, ‘It’s all ready. You climb in when I tell you.’
‘When?’
‘Two more hours. Try to speak to me in case I catch your fear.’ He was looking across the field as he spoke, and she now saw, where he was looking, the armed border patrol, two men moving in their direction; they halted at a certain point, and returned along the border-line.
She said, ‘Are there any letters at the hotel for me, do you know?’
‘I haven’t asked this. Soon you will be there. A great comfortable car is waiting for us and soon you. will be in your hotel. But now I remember — you know Dr Ephraim the archaeologist?’