The Haj - Leon Uris [134]
I pushed my way into the mob in the mayor’s outer office and every time someone objected to me moving up the line, I held up the letter and they shrank back in respect. The mayor had four clerks at four desks screaming back at the waves of petitioners. I jammed the letter in one of their faces. He took a look at the envelope and disappeared into the mayor’s office. In less than a moment, he returned and advised me that my father had an appointment at the home of Clovis Bakshir the next day.
3
MY FATHER WAS CHAGRINED at first that I had concocted such a clever scheme to get him an appointment with Mayor Clovis Bakshir. Of course, he had to agree to the existence of the fictitious letter writer, Colonel Hakkar. Then he thought again.
‘A lie used in the proper time and place can be a piece of pure poetry,’ he assured me.
Since Kamal and I now worked regularly for the Iraqi quartermaster, that lazy and ignorant scum, Captain Umrum, we always had cigarettes to spirit home under our robes. The rich live on a gold standard. The Bedouin lives on a dung standard. In the casbah, we lived on a tobacco standard and it was better than money. Our cigarette sales put a few more pennies into the family pot. We insisted that Haj Ibrahim buy new robes for his meeting with the mayor so he would be spared the humiliation of his rags.
‘No,’ my father said defiantly. ‘Let Clovis Bakshir see what we have been reduced to. Besides, as long as I have my dagger in my belt, I am well dressed. I am sorry you will not be with me, Ishmael.’ He patted my head and left alone.
For Ibrahim, the meeting was a renewal of an old alliance. The Haj had known the family briefly during the Mufti’s revolt. From time to time, the Bakshirs had been hidden from the Mufti’s troops in Tabah and later were taken down to the Wahhabis for safekeeping. Clovis Bakshir’s welcome was sufficiently friendly and the fruit bowl well stocked but not overwhelming.
Clovis Bakshir was a small man, almost delicate, who spoke with outcroppings of his university education. He was a study in deliberate calm and smoothness. The only thing that gave away the churning in his innards was his chain-smoking and tobacco-varnished fingers.
‘Obviously, it is not possible for me to know of everyone who is in Nablus in these times. Had I realized you were here ...’
‘Your predicament is completely understood,’ Ibrahim answered. ‘We only have so many eyes and ears.’
They repaired to the cool of the veranda. One could not see the town, for the villa was in a rare wooded area. One of the underground streams surfaced nearby and continued on as a brook, with a petite waterfall just over the way. There was a café by the waterfall that was the central meeting place for the men of the Bakshir tribe. In more peaceful times, Clovis Bakshir held court by the stream.
Haj Ibrahim was puzzled and immediately suspicious to see a second man waiting on the veranda. He quickly noticed the man’s ramrod posture, sun-baked face, and immaculately trimmed and plastered moustache. He wore a Western suit of superior material and a traditional Arab headdress.
‘My good friend and confidant, Mr. Farid Zyyad. I was certain that your experiences and observations would be of great interest to him.’
As coffee was served, Haj Ibrahim had already begun to maneuver to find out the meaning of this unexpected guest. Zyyad moved himself inconspicuously out of the line of conversation, off to a side. Highly polished shoes, something rarely seen in these parts, offered another tiny clue. Whoever he was, he was upper echelon.
Clovis Bakshir lit the first of many cigarettes, which were drawn on rapturously by long, thoughtful inhalations and exhaled in thin streams, like an extension of the man himself. The ashes were never flicked and never fell but only grew agonizingly longer. ‘Of course I will do what