Druze: the Druze are an Arab people whose religion stems from Islam but has distinct esoteric features; the Druze live mainly in Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
duffle: a duffle coat, made from a coarse woollen fabric, widely used in the British navy from the First World War; typically fastened with two or more wooden or horn toggles through loops of rope or leather.
francs-tireurs: literally “free shooters”; a term often used for irregular forces or partisans, but here appearing to mean simply ‘marksmen’ or perhaps ‘snipers’.
Gauss: Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), brilliant German mathematician and physicist, whose conjectures are still being followed up today.
German colony: a compound to the southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem, established in the late nineteenth century by a German Messianic Christian sect.
Hafiz: fourteenth-century Persian lyric poet.
Immediate (as in ‘an Immediate’): an instruction for immediate action.
I-tanks: infantry tanks designed to accompany (and sometimes to carry on the outside) foot soldiers into battle.
Jewish Brigade: Jewish Infantry Brigade Group. A unit within the British army, formed in 1944, which fought against the Germans in Italy. After the Second World War many members became involved in illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine.
Judas (as in ‘a Judas’): a small hinged or sliding panel in a door which allows observation of the person on the other side.
Juliet: a high quality cigar. The full brand name is ‘Romeo y Julieta’, used by two different companies, one in Cuba and one in the Dominican Republic.
Kalmuk: the Kalmuk people, who live on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, are of Mongol origin.
Lager: German for ‘camp’.
Mactaggart forts: military fortresses built throughout Palestine from 1938 (including one in the Hebron) on a model designed by Sir Charles Tegart; Tegart’s name is commonly misspelled ‘Taggart’. Durrell may have deliberately added ‘Mac’, or it may be a slip of his memory.
Miko: evidently, from the context, a top-secret intelligence report. It has not been possible to verify the term. Durrell may have invented it, or misremembered some term he had once been familiar with. It could, perhaps, be an acronym for ‘Military Intelligence Covert Operations’, with the C changed to K.
Mills bombs: a range of hand grenades named after its inventor, Sir William Mills, and first produced in 1915. A new type, the Mills 36M, was produced during the Second World War.
Oxford Shorter: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, first published in 1933, in two large volumes.
sabra: a Hebrew word for a Jew born in Palestine. It first came into use in the 1930s. It refers to the fruit of the prickly pear; equivalent to ‘a rough diamond’.
specie: money in the form of coins.
Tellers: Teller mines: German-made anti-tank mines.
Tobruk: as part of the North African campaign, Tobruk was the site of a battle and a siege in 1941.
Verey lights: flares fired from a pistol, to illuminate the sky, named after their American inventor, Edward Wilson Very.
Judith
1. The Secret Rendezvous
The old “Zion” was something of a miracle-ship to the loafers upon the quays and wharves of Haifa; they said that she had no right to be afloat at all. They might perhaps have said the same of old Isaac Jordan, her skipper. As for real sailors who saw the old hulk bustling across the oily harbour water towards the outer sea, they respectfully removed their pipes and spat, gazing after her with a kind of awed sympathy bordering on horror. The Naval Station Commander, catching sight of her from the broad glass windows of the signal station, was apt to utter a pleasantry to his Number Two: “There she goes, with all the grace of a flat-iron!” Yet he noted with a professional eye that her speed was respectable considering her age; only her stability was somewhat questionable. She was about as stable in a head sea, he told himself, as a soap dish. Isaac was a madman to take her to sea. And yet, he had been doing it for years now.
Isaac had bought the “Zion” for a song in the thirties and harnessed her to the trade of smuggling despite her shape, which suggested that her original designer had intended her for use only in shallow estuaries, on lakes, or perhaps as an auxiliary to a dredger. It was with misgivings that he turned her nose to the open sea for the first time, for he was uncomfortably aware of her duckboard lines. Yet she was steel-built, he told himself, and his confidence was rewarded, for, though she fumed and wallowed and stank, she answered the wheel quite well at ten knots, and her pumps worked in an approximate fashion. What more could one ask?
Deeply relieved, Isaac took out a heavy insurance on her and put her to work, aided by his crew of ruffians of all nationalities, clad in rags and tatters, like gypsies. He had spent many happy years in her, now smuggling currency, now gold bars, specie, forged stamps, hashish, antiquities… everything one could think of. “Zion” was his accessory after the fact.
As for Isaac Jordan himself, he was a stout grey man in his sixties, heavy of build and absolutely wedded to his cutty pipe. People said he slept with it in his mouth. In summer he wore a soiled yachting-cap of ancient cut and an equally soiled suit of pyjamas with a blue stripe. On the breast pocket of these, however, he sported a number of First World War decorations, both English and French, which earned him a certain measure of sympathy and even latitude from the port naval authorities. In winter, this impressive display was transferred to the breast of his coarse blue sweater of the kind issued to submarine artificers and worn under a sheepskin-lined duffle. Isaac was something of a character in the port and did not allow it to be forgotten that he was an ex-Naval Commander, “Retired R.N.”. Moreover, those who might have been forgiven for believing that his medals were from the prop-room, so to speak, soon found to their chagrin that they were real and had been awarded him for services described as “gallant” in the official citations. This, then, was Isaac’s own rather eloquent way of enjoying his retirement and his small pension; it may have been a tiring, if lucrative, profession, but he was suited to no other. The only really maddening thing about him from the point of view of the naval authorities was that they could never catch him in flagrante; even on the few occasions when “Limpet” had pounced on “Zion” and boarded her, they had found her cargo innocent, indeed, quite unexceptionable. Isaac smiled and spat over the side with a kind of mournful satisfaction. Nor did he spare young Derek Noble of the “Limpet”. “Call yourselves a Royal Navy, eh? It’s gone down since I left it, that’s all I can say.” And if Noble did not choose to bandy words with him on the high seas it was because he knew very well that the banter would be continued at leisure over a glass of buttered rum in the Chatham Bar in Haifa the following evening.
Within the last few years, however, Isaac had somewhat changed the nature of his trade. Stirred by the fate of his fellow-Jews in Germany, he had volunteered to smuggle weapons into Palestine for the Jewish Agency. The journeys were longer and more dangerous, the profit nominal. Nevertheless, the old “Zion” plugged up and down the eastern Mediterranean full of crates demurely labelled “Agricultural Machinery”. His landfalls were many and curious, and seldom the same twice running. He brought all his skill and experience to bear now in blockade breaking, for the British blockade was tight. So far he had been successful — indeed, so successful as to cause a great deal of bad language and impotent signalling between the corvettes and destroyers which maintained the patrol of the northern reaches of the country. Isaac was always either inside or outside some statutory sea-limit, to the intense fury of “Limpet”, “Termagant”, “Havoc” and several others of the iron bloodhounds of the Fleet. They made books on him, they laid bets on him, they dreamed of catching him, but so far he had always managed to slip through the mesh. Derek Noble became so infuriated that he spoke darkly of putting a torpedo through “Zion” in the harbour “just to show that damned old rogue Jordan”. Other commanders developed their own theories about Isaac’s facility for disappearing at sea; these varied between notions of black magic and ideas of dematerialization. Isaac himself suggested mildly that the “Zion” was really a submarine. Once clear of harbour, he had only to submerge… No wonder “Limpet” always made a fool of herself.