— Yes, sir. They were questioned quite stiffly with the help of an interpreter who speaks their language.
— Yiddish, sir. It would appear that they had no idea what he was up to and could not have been less involved in his schemes. England, Turkey — they don’t give a fig for any of that. Their one concern is not to have his guilt rub off on them, although I do believe they feel a sort of solidarity with him, perhaps it even goes back to that bar-mitzvah chant… Anyway, we had better get back to our story. Well, sir, he grew up, the lad did, dark-haired, bespectacled, and homely, an independent and rather solitary homo politicus drifting among the identities of Jerusalem while working out his politics and acquiring languages as though they were a batch of keys to a house with many doors. He was still a bachelor, still stirred to the depths of his soul by that woman’s womb and screams. In 1905, when he was eighteen, his grandmother died of old age, the one person in the world he really loved. Meanwhile, his younger sister was married off as she had known she would be, to the son of a wealthy Jew from North Africa who had come to purchase a grave in Jerusalem and was buried in it sooner than he had planned; once the week of mourning was over, the young man departed with his new bride and her mother, for Marseilles, to which he also invited her brother, who was employed as a court clerk at the time. Young Mani, however, resolutely declined; he was awaiting political developments, which were not long in coming, since in 1908 the Young Turks seized power and proclaimed a multinational, multiracial empire — a proclamation that so affected him that he resolved to study law and serve in the Turkish parliament. And so, letting out his two rooms in the defunct hospital that was now a pilgrims’ hostel, he put the family possessions into storage, gave his father’s old clothes to charity except for a large, warm overcoat, ordered a calling card from a print shop that said “Journalist” even though he had no journal to correspond for, and in the late summer of 1908 took the train to Jaffa, departing Jerusalem for the first time in his life. He did not once lift his head to look at the mountains sliding by outside the window, but kept his eyes on the suitcase between his legs and on his father’s coat by his side, wanting only to put Palestine behind him without a glimpse of the route whereby his father had deserted him. From the railway station in Jaffa he took a black hansom straight to the port, where he boarded a northbound ship for Constantinople. Three days later, toward evening, she cast anchor in Beirut — which is, as you know, sir, a handsome and rapidly growing city famed for its houses of amusement. All the passengers hurried ashore, he told me, save himself; for he had decided not to budge from the empty ship and there he remained, pacing the deck and listening to the sounds of song and laughter from the shore while regarding the brilliant lights of the city in which his father had perished. Toward midnight the first passengers returned to their cabins; yet still he strode the deck, watching the lights dim as the song and laughter faded away. A late moon rose in the sky. And then… then, sir, so he says, he heard a cry; as if a huge, powerful infant were crying in the city, or so he says, sir; and with shaking hands he packed his suitcase and went ashore, passing the watchmen and entering the little streets, through which the last revelers were heading home and the last passengers returning to their ships. And all along, sir, he kept hearing the cry. And so he struck out through the winding lanes of the old city and came to the railway station, where he quickly crossed the tracks and started up a steadily climbing street until he came to a boardinghouse, a small establishment for travelers in need of a night’s lodgings. There were voices inside and a light swayed in the vestibule; and he asked if there was a room available and was told that there was; and he climbed the stairs and flung his suitcase on the bed and stepped out on the terrace and gazed down at the station below, which was flooded with moonlight, the tracks running north and south; and then, sir, he opened the squeaking clothes closet and hung up his father’s old coat… and there it stayed for six years…
— I do, sir. He remained in that city for six full years, until the outbreak of the war, And in the same boardinghouse and the same room, where he would still no doubt be if not for the war, as if being near the train station where his father had died held him in a vise. And I ask myself, sir, whether his act of treachery, or espionage, even if it surfaced many years later, was not conceived there in Beirut, although all my efforts to determine whether he was already planted then by the Turks have yielded nothing…
— Yes, Colonel. A most thorough investigation, carried out around the clock, from every angle. There wasn’t a stone left unturned. Were any Turks lurking in the background, I’m sure I would have found them. But there isn’t a Turk in sight, sir, or even a German. The whole thing seems purely self-generated by his own muddled, neurasthenic mind. That’s the point I’m driving at, and if anyone thinks there’s a lesson to be learned here, anything applicable to the apprehension of spies and traitors in the future, the only lesson I can see is that every case is unique, Joseph Mani too, who claims he spent his seven years in Beirut studying, sir. And he really did attend the American University, which was easily done with his British passport that opened all sorts of doors. His income from the rent in Jerusalem paid for his bed and breakfast, and the rest of his needs were financed by odd jobs that he found as a guide, an interpreter, and a hotel agent, because Beirut was full of visitors in those years, tourists who came from all over. The town was booming; it was the gateway to the Orient for Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen; for Austrians, Russians, and even Americans; processions of pilgrims passed through it; so did archaeological expeditions, Christian missions, journalists discovering the East. And Jews too, of course, in every possible shape and form. A bureau of the Zionist Organization was opened too, to help stranded pioneers on their way to Palestine, penniless Jewish youngsters without a visa for the Ottoman Empire, let alone Palestine, without money for a ship berth, so that they planned to continue their journey on foot and slip across the border. Mani picked them out at the train station, where he hung about every evening, as they stepped out of the coaches: pale young men and women from Russia, on the run from the law since the abortive 1905 uprising, unkempt and unwashed with their bundles roped together… and here was this dark, bespectacled Palestinian Jew come to meet them, wearing a little necktie and attempting to hit it off with them in Hebrew, then switching to French, then going over to his smattering of Russian. He directed them to the cheap doss houses on the hills above the city, which gave him a modest commission; explained where they might find an inexpensive café told them about the Holy Land and pointed out the way to the Zionist bureau; but he never befriended them past that. From women, he kept away entirely; it was as if he had still not gotten over his twelve-year-old’s memory of that winter day in the empty house with its womb that seemed less about to bear life than engorge it, and with a most ravenous appetite. And he had his studies to keep up too.