O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [110]
When we broke for lunch I rapidly shovelled the remainder of the picnic down my throat, then sat with the basket on my knees, dabbing up the crumbs with a damp finger while I racked my brain to think of a way to return the conversation to the subject of the woman’s comment about the reappearing soil. Unfortunately, the women were at one end of the alley, while I was with the men twenty feet away at the other. The men’s conversation was infinitely less interesting than the chatter I could hear coming from the other end, being all about injustices done and relatives wronged by the new government, until one old man began dramatically to recite a positive epic: One of his goats had gone missing the week before! The very next day, his neighbours threw a feast! Roast goat figured prominently on the menu! The old man’s grandsons attempted a course of rough justice! The military police arrived! They put a halt to the fracas!
His long and emphatic recitation finally came to an end, and before any of the others could draw a breath I made a loud remark, putting my tongue in the front of my mouth to supply a ready mechanical explanation for any linguistic failures.
“My mother lost a chicken the other week, but whoever took it left a silver bangle in its place.” The smattering of tales sparked by this pale story were neither enthusiastic nor particularly apt, and when they started to drift off on another track I made another loud comment. “We think it is an afreet.” As I had hoped, the entire alley fell silent at my reference to a troublesome imp.
“Why would an afreet leave a silver bangle?” the man next to me demanded.
“Why would an afreet take a chicken?” I retorted, my logic equal to his. “Afreets cause trouble. My mother’s chicken gave us many eggs, but the silver bangle, when she tried to sell it, brought only problems, for a woman down the road said we had stolen it.”
This was much more satisfying. For ten minutes we swopped stories of false accusations and genuine theft, and then I gave a final nudge.
“Why do you think the piles of soil keep coming into the Souk el-Qattanin? The new piles with old coins?”
After a moment of silence a great babble of voices burst out, which only eventually was dominated by one man, who simply had a greater lung capacity than the others.
“—the coin to my brother and we cleaned it until it shone, and then we carried it to the cousin of my brother’s wife, who has a shop on the Tarik Bab Sitti Maryam, near the place where Jesus stumbled, where many foreigners used to buy things before the war and are now beginning to return, and the cousin of my brother’s wife sold that coin to a rich Amerikani just last week for two gold lira, although he only gave my brother and me twenty-five mejidis. ”
The others politely waited until he had finished to contribute their “Wa!” of appreciation and their own stories, which circled around the suggestion I had planted in their minds, that the rich soil was being placed there by some peculiarly subtle variety of demon. I listened with only half an ear, though, because my question had already been answered by the last speaker: Yes, there was a rich and therefore deep vein of soil being worked somewhere beneath my feet.
“My father,” the man was saying, “blessed be his memory, found a purse of coins on the roadside, and when he was honest enough to report this, being a good Christian, the police beat him and threw him into the Old Serai for a week,