O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [51]
Mahmoud’s story was obviously the high point of the evening; anything else would be an anti-climax. With the typically abrupt leave-taking of the Arab, the party began to break up. Limp children were carried off to their beds, older boys clattered off into the four directions on scrofulous donkeys, and adults pressed the mukhtar’s hand and that of Mahmoud before walking off into the night, reciting segments of Mahmoud’s story to one another at the tops of their voices, laughing and calling and fading away.
Not everyone left. The close friends and family of the mukhtar, twenty-five or thirty men, stayed on, chatting and smoking a last pipe and conducting small business. I thought we were perhaps finished for the evening, and began to think with actual anticipation of my hard bed where at least I could stretch out my leg muscles without causing offence, when Holmes dropped a question into a brief silence.
“My brothers,” he asked, frowning in concentration as he rolled up a cigarette. “Do you think the Turk is truly gone from the land?”
* * *
EIGHT
د
Writing is the shaping of letters to represent spoken words which, in turn, represent what is in the soul.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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The question rippled through the tent, silencing the men around the fire. I could hear the sounds of sleepy children on the other side of the cloth partition; someone shouted monotonously from the other end of the village. Holmes ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of the thin cigarette paper, sealed it, and reached for the tongs to take a coal from the fire. Men began to speak, in a frustrating jumble of voices.
Some, I thought, protested loyally that Allenby and Feisal had truly driven the Turk to his knees. Heads nodded, and hands reached for the reassurance of narghile and cigarette. Some men, though, did not agree. The men of active fighting age, men whose faces were even more guarded than the average Bedouin’s, quiet men with scars and limps, men who had done more than stand and shoot at a fleeing enemy, those men did not nod their heads and exclaim loudly at the cowardice of the Turk. They glanced at each other from under their eyelids and at Holmes, and they said nothing.
Holmes listened politely to the protestations of freedom, and allowed the subsequent conversation to drift away into a series of bloodthirsty reminiscences of wartime ghazis. I did not think, however, that he had missed the covert glances, and I was not surprised when, a few minutes later, he got to his feet and left the tent, nor that when he returned he settled down not into his former spot, but in the midst of three of the men who had been silent. One of those was Farash, the mukhtar’s son.
Reluctantly I had to agree that the questions he was about to put to the men were best done casually and quietly, so I stayed where I was in the third rank back from the fire. I looked to see what Mahmoud and Ali would do and saw that, despite the sour expression on Ali’s face, they too planned to stay where they were and allow Holmes to continue his sub rosa interrogation. Mahmoud, moreover, tore his eyes from Holmes and turned to the mukhtar.
“Perhaps you have a thing you would like me to read?” he offered.
The eager look on the mukhtar’s old face, and on several others nearby, showed that they had been hoping for the offer. Three or four men scattered, to return with precious, tattered journals in hand. The mukhtar sent a rapid-fire set of instructions at the dividing wall. In an instant, a woman’s hand appeared under the coarse striped fabric, holding out a worn copy of an English journal called Boy’s Own Paper with a dramatic cover showing a troop of khaki-clad lancers riding furiously towards an unseen enemy. The dubious expression on the central horse was echoed by its rider, understandable in my opinion since the men were