— Yes, sir, political, sir, those were his words and that’s how he views it. Unbelievably intense; it’s the only thing in his world that matters; it is his world. And thus, in a single cold, gloomy, fin-de-siecle hour, a skinny twelve-year-old with glasses became, as he puts it, a homo politicus. And here, perhaps, lies the first, subtle kernel of the bizarre, the hideous act of treachery that came eighteen years later, on account of which, sir, you were brought from Egypt to join your colleagues on the bench tomorrow while I hammer home his guilt… I say, though, look at how the sky has cleared! Didn’t I remark two hours ago, sir, that Jerusalem wasn’t Glasgow? Even the most torrential rains have their limit here… and so I ask myself, sir, and you too, Colonel, whether you haven’t heard enough by now. To think of all the times my mother warned me not to forget myself, that is, not to forget my listeners, because my tongue has a way of getting carried away, especially when it has such excellent whiskey to carry it…
— Of course, sir. I have a most definite purpose in mind.
— I daresay, Colonel, that everything will fit together in the end.
— With all my heart and soul, sir.
— Thank you, sir, that’s terribly kind of you. Well, then, where were we? Ah, yes, at the start of the century, which erupted right under our defendant’s nose…
— Sir?
— What baby is that, sir?
— Oh yes, that one… but just what was the question, sir?
— Why, yes, sir.
— Yes, sir.
— Why, yes, sir. Quite thick of me, sir. Yes, of course. I reckon it was born in the end, but I’m afraid I didn’t pursue the matter, because it seemed to me more of a metaphor… I do believe he cut the cord with his knife and gave the baby its freedom, but as to whether it lived or not… we must hope for the best…
— By all means, sir… Well, then, the new century dawned on us all, each of us at his proper station, and on the Manis too, who were still quite stunned by their tragedy. The old grandmother, though pushing eighty by now, was as youthful as ever and still adored by the young lad; the mother had put on weight and was aging rapidly; the sister was only ten but already resigned to a fate of being married off young; and the four of them barely eked out a living from letting out rooms in the defunct hospital. Young Mani was left pretty much to his own devices, and being a homo politicus, as he puts it, he set himself goals and made himself friends accordingly. His first decision was to study languages; it still rankled him to have had to sit listening to his father converse with his young guests from Europe without understanding a word. And having made up his mind, he went about it as single-mindedly as an army crossing a river — which meant secretly leaving the Jewish school in which his father had placed him without bothering to inform his mother or grandmother and roaming the streets of Jerusalem until he found the Scottish Mission on Mount Zion and its School of Bible, a very Christian institution, I needn’t tell you. What interested young Mani, of course, was not the Bible but English, which he quickly mastered with an Inverness accent. But that was just the beginning. Afternoons found him in the nearby village of Silwan, where a chum of his father’s, an old Arab sheikh, agreed to chat with him in Arabic and put him through his conjugations. And that still left evenings, when he sometimes frequented an Algerian family he knew to help mind the children and pick up a bit of French. He was already, you see, quite adept at moving among different elements before he had even celebrated his bar-mitzvah, which is like a Catholic confirmation or a Mohammedan toohoor and takes place in synagogue at the age of thirteen, when you must chant parts of the Bible in a special melody that is the very devil to master — believe me, Colonel, I can vouch for that personally, and so can the Great Synagogue in Manchester… And so, as his bar-mitzvah approached, he betook himself to one of your little Jerusalem sects, one of those black-coated, fur-hatted, curly-eared lots whom you may have come across in London, Colonel, if you have ventured to the East End…
— Most assuredly, sir… that’s where you see them, dressed the same way. He presented himself to them as an orphan, which is what he did everywhere, sir, as if he were motherless too; and they arranged for his bar-mitzvah, and taught him the proper chant notes, and even saw to the refreshments. That was the start of his odd ties with them, which have continued to this day. I’ve questioned them about it most thoroughly, trying to get to the bottom of it, because you see, sir, it’s not as if he belonged to them or could have even if he wished to: first, because he’s a Sephardi; second, because he’s a freethinker; and third, because he’s a Zionist, which is utterly foreign to them. And yet such ties existed; initially as a matter of mutual interest and eventually as one of subtle affection; because even the most hermetically sealed system needs a secret outlet, a man who is free to come and go on special assignments and is preferably an outsider, so that no control need be relinquished over one’s own; and best of all, a queer bird like Mani, a none too reputable orphan who could easily be disowned. And so he rendered them various services, such as corresponding in English with wealthy Jews in America, negotiating the rental of flats from the Mohammedans, and preparing digests of the newspapers, which their religion forbids them to read, in return for financial remuneration or its equivalent. They made no religious demands of him, not even that he wear a hat — indeed, already as a boy he was in the habit of calling on their elder bareheaded and speaking to him respectfully but as an equal. Not that he considered himself antireligious. He sometimes even attended services, although never theirs but only those of his fellow Sephardim, whose hymns were familiar and didn’t take all day — and then, of course, he clapped a red Turkish fez on his head before going off to pray. But he quite definitely did not wish to be considered religious either, because the one thing he could not have enough of was his freedom…
— In the Deity, sir? I believe he does, although he declines to profess it. In any case, he refused to answer the question, which I put to him with the greatest delicacy, on the grounds that it was too personal.
— No, sir, a Jew is not required to believe in Him. As a rule, however, he does, since he has little else to believe in.
— Are you quite certain, Colonel, that you wish me to expound on such questions of identity? It’s a dreadful bog, you know; the Jews themselves start out across it with the greatest confidence and end up floundering madly. I can’t tell you how sorry I am to be boring you like this.
— I would be most keen to, sir.
— With great pleasure, sir. I even have my own hypothesis. But for the moment, I suggest that we stick to our story. I daresay I should say a word about this sect, because from the day of his arrest they’ve gone tiptoeing after him and us, his handlers, like a flock of birds — crows, sir, if you will — all perched around the ringside; quite indistinguishable from each other, yet each of them with his clearly defined role and place. Already on that snowy night when I rushed off to the guardhouse and saw the first of them standing blackly by the edge of the square, I could tell by the way he stood there that he had been sent; not even his umbrella was his own, because since then I’ve seen it pass from hand to hand like a rifle at the changing of the guards. A night hasn’t gone by without one of them trailing behind me — along the narrow streets, into the shops, up steps and down steps… but the moment I approach them, they vanish. What they’re after, don’t you see, is to try to read in my face whether the accused has said anything to incriminate them…