I thanked the boy for his hospitality and we wished each other peace and good fortune. As I went out the gate, adjusting my abayya across my shoulders, it occurred to me that I had just conducted my first true conversation with a native speaker.
Our inn was at the edges of the Christian Quarter, a place well supplied with pilgrim hostels. I walked back towards the Jaffa Gate, and in the open place before the Citadel I turned past the Grand New Hotel and dived into the bazaar, picking my way cautiously down the slippery, uneven stones that were more stairway than street. On either side of me the sellers of carpets and clothing, mother-of-pearl knick-knacks, copper pots, and narghiles kept watch. When a European woman and her lieutenant escort approached, the raucous calls of “Bakshish!” and “See my carpets, madam, finest quality!” and “Olive-wood crosses from Bethlehem, effendi!” merged into a single sound which heralded their progress like the voices from a flock of crows. They passed by without noticing me, the woman looking harried and the officer furious, and for the first time I was truly grateful for my occasionally inconvenient disguise: No man there gave this dusty Arab youth a second glance, save to be sure I did not come within snatching distance of the wares.
With growing confidence I walked on, down the shop-lined alleyways, through the merchants of grain and seed and into an area where the streets were so narrow that the wooden lattice-work boxes over the upper windows nearly met in the middle. Then the vaulting began, and the open street became a stone tunnel. When a cart or a laden donkey came along (and once a mounted police constable) pedestrians had to squeeze to one side. I paused at a book-stall and made two small purchases, and wandered on until I came to a meat market. There I held my breath and scurried through the foetid air and the flies, slowing again when I came to tables heaped high with fruit. I bargained for a couple of withered apples at one stall, a clot of dates and a handful of sweet almonds at another, and nibbled at them as I passed through a baffling variety of hats, caps, turbans, and scarfs, long black robes and dust-coloured khaki, a Scotsman in a kilt and a Moroccan in his embroidered robes, a Hasid dressed in his best silk caftan and a wild-eyed ascetic wearing almost nothing at all. I listened to the rhythm of Arabic (understanding a great deal of it) punctuated by the cries of children and a waft of Latin that smelt of incense and the occasional murmur of Hebrew, breathed the scents of freshly watered dust and old sweat and young bodies, of gunpowder and petrol, turmeric and saffron and garlic, incense and wine and coffee, and everywhere the smell of rock, ancient stones and newly crushed gravel and recently hewn building blocks.
At the far end of the souk I perched on a high doorstep and ate the second apple while watching the residents of Jerusalem go about their business. Half a dozen urchins screamed up and down the steps after a fraying golf-ball; two oblivious grandfathers in gleaming white robes sat in an inner courtyard, playing chess and rubbing their long beards in thought; a trio of adolescent girls with demurely hidden faces huddled together and giggled madly when a pair of handsome young boys went past them. A police constable strolled by me, followed by a small group of fashionably dressed tourists searching for the place (forty feet above what would at the time have been street level) where Jesus stumbled and put out his hand.
A few minutes such as this could almost make a person forget the lives that had been lost on these stones, the Nazarene Jesus two millennia before, the British Tommy bare months ago. It was a precarious peace that a handful of us were fighting to maintain, a foothold of good-will and security that future generations might use to rise above the bloody past. If we failed, if Karim Bey had his way, the fragile structure of government would collapse, anarchy would reign, and tyrants would again walk these stones. Hell lurked just outside the city gates.
I finished my apple, watching the tourists go by. They would lose their purses to a nice peaceful pickpocket if they weren’t more careful, I thought, and tossed the core of my apple into the gutter to follow them. Night was closing in fast, and the original purpose of finding Holmes had long faded from view—after an hour in the souk I had to admit that I had little hope of stumbling across him. I turned back towards the Christian Quarter, and there I took a wrong turning.
It is difficult to become seriously lost in a walled city that covers less than a square mile, and I had memorised the names of the principal streets that cut through the maze; however, with most of the streets lacking either signs or street-lamps and darkness settling over the already dim lanes, I mistook the Akabet et-Tekkiyeh for the parallel Tarik es-Serdi, and found myself in an alleyway of locked shops and few people. Wondering if it ended in a cul-de-sac, I put my head around the side of the one lighted shop I came across, and said to the man, “Good evening, my uncle. I beg of you, does this street lead to the Jaffa Gate?”
For a moment I thought the man knew me, such was the look of delight that dawned on his rotund features, but when I looked more closely at the face under the incongruous bowler hat, I realised that he was merely filled with the bonhomie of drink. He started around the high piles of his goods (hats and shawls) with both hands out to greet me and protestations of undying servitude on his tongue. I backed away but could not avoid him entirely without being undeservedly rude, so I allowed him to grasp my hands and rant on while I smiled and nodded and tried to keep my distance. This went on for some time, and I began to feel more than a little ridiculous. Finally, I decided I had expressed enough politeness, so I brought my hands together, raised them in a tight circle to break his hold, and then took a step back—directly into two more sets of hands with two more friendly mouths breathing alcohol at me.
God, I berated myself as I tried to pluck six hands from their grasp on my person, leave it to me to find the only drunks in the Moslem Quarter. They were not intoxicated enough to be clumsy, only free from restraint, and they had me well and truly cornered— in a friendly manner, I admit. An entirely too friendly manner.
All good things must end, however, and reason was obviously no weapon against these three: flight would have to do. Bending over sharply, I scooted backwards under the arms of two of the men— and my concealing turban was plucked neatly from my head.
The three men blinked like owls at the mussed blonde waist-length plaits that were revealed in the lamplight. One of them hooted in amazement, and they came for me again. I moved back away from their reach, my head feeling peculiarly light in the cold night air, but I did not relish having to walk across half the city and into the inn without my turban. I backed, and backed some more, watching for a means of distracting them or a wide enough place to enable me to dash past them, snatch the length of cloth from the ground, and run.
As I danced backwards out of the grasp of those hands, my foot trod on some bit of slippery rubbish and flew out from under me. I hit the paving stones and rolled, coming up filthy and bruised and finally angry. The merchants did not appear to be armed, and I was just beginning to contemplate the pleasure I should have in trouncing the three sots when I heard a voice.