— Yes, sir, quite faithfully. Every morning he went to the university, where he continued to consider himself a student for six years, albeit a rather slow óne and of a special status because of the king’s English that he spoke. His examinations and term papers were postponed from year to year; his requirements were met at a snail’s pace; most of his time was spent reading the daily and weekly papers in the library; since the age of twelve, after all, he had been his own headmaster; and now he had the run of the university, whose student body was a hodgepodge of different levels and backgrounds. And yet he had a sure notion of his curriculum; it was politicojurisprudential; he studied the laws of the Turkish majlis, the American constitution, the philosophy of the Koran; but also English poetry, Sumerian archaeology, Byzantine iconography, choosing his lectures systematically and at his leisure; and if there were any he had failed to comprehend in their entirety, he waited a year or two for them to be repeated and sat through them again. Afternoons were devoted to field work, that is, to attending political meetings of Druze, of Shiites, of Communists, of Christians, of Maronites, of Catholic priests, shuttling from identity to identity, although by now the identities were all jumbled up; a simple promenade down the main street of Beirut was an excursion to them all. And of course, he did not neglect the Sephardic synagogue, which he made a point of attending every Sabbath eve, although he was far from punctilious in his observance of the Law; he refused, for example, to kindle a fire on the Sabbath, but did not abstain from forbidden foods. Politics remained his goal; he regarded it reverentially, as a complete philosophy of life with an inner logic of its own and a reason and purpose for everything. Events in Europe and in the Balkans left their powerful mark on him, and his imagination was fired by the approaching world war. Each time his mother and sister urged him to join them in Marseilles, he refused. The Turkish authorities were growing harsher; the Germans were everywhere; foreigners were being asked to leave; he feared leaving Ottoman jurisdiction and not being allowed back. His British passport burned in his pocket like a hot coal… and to make matters worse, Colonel, in the early winter of 1914 he had a baby — and a motherless one to boot…
— A quite genuine baby, sir. Its mother died shortly after its birth, which took place in the room its father’s gray overcoat had been hanging in for six years. And our Mr. Mani had to register it at the police ministry, where the German officers nosing about in the thick and hostile atmosphere of those prewar days could not help but wonder about this thin Palestinian student with the glasses, this journalist without a journal, who brought his infant to a Druze wet nurse every morning, a peddler in the souk of Beirut, and sat by her reading an old paper picked up out of the gutter while waiting for his child to drink its fill. Mind you, though, the paper was not too old for him to learn from it that Turkey would soon be in the thick of it too — and so, in late summer of 1914, as suddenly as he had arrived six years earlier, he took his father’s coat down from its peg, wrapped up the baby, and made his way southward to his native city, which after Beirut seemed a poor and gloomy place, bathed in a hard, dry light. He arrived at the house in Kerem Avraham to find it full of boarders, since by now every boarder had a boarder of his own and there was no place for him, the owner, to lay his head; and so off he went to his sectaries — Hasidim, sir, is the name for them; and he knocked on their door in his father’s old overcoat with the baby in his arms and said to them, “Find me a wife.” I rather doubt that surprised them one bit, sir; it’s their habit, you see, to be surprised by nothing, so that they can concentrate on divine matters; and so all they asked him was, “Do you want a wife to mind your child or a wife to bear you more children?” “I’ll think about that,” says he, and so he does, and when he has thought he tells them, “I want a wife to mind my child and me.” Well, sir, they have all sorts of women for a man like him: young widows and divorcées who will marry whomever they’re told to; but that isn’t whom they bring him; for although they never say so, they don’t wish to have him too close to them; and in any case, they aren’t at all keen on cross-marriages. In the end they find him a wife some thirteen years older than he is, a childless but attractive woman of nearly forty who came to Jerusalem from Mesopotamia at the end of the century and has already been through two husbands: one dead and one walked out on her; and has a bit of property and a souvenir shop for tourists in the walled city, between the Jewish and the Armenian quarters. Straightways she takes to the infant as if it were her own, with all the love and devotion you could ask for, and our Mr. Mani moves in with her, sinking into the piles of pillows and quilts left behind by her two husbands and hiding his British passport under the mattress. And thus, while great armies meet in battle along the blood-filled rivers of Europe, he sleeps his way through the winter of 1915. His new wife cooks her Babylonian dishes and serves them to him in bed as if he were convalescing from an illness, and the baby joins him there, crammed with goodies and smothered with gobs of love. And yet even there, sir, ensconced in his featherbed, he still considers himself a homo politicus and sends his wife out on urgent errands to bring him all the newspapers she can, which he peruses among the quilts and pillows, even those that arrive months late — boning up on the living and the dead and studying the maps and keeping track of the progress of the war and the lines of battle, some of which have long been erased; until finally, his Turkish fez on his head, he sallies forth from his lair into a Jerusalem made poorer than ever by the fighting overseas and resumes his identity shuttle. Mornings are spent in an Arab coffeehouse in the walled city, arbitrating petty tiffs and composing writs for the courts, because even though he has brought back no diploma from Beirut, he passes himself off as a solicitor; afternoons he comes back home for a sound snooze; then up and about once more without even a change of clothes, just a white hat in place of the fez, to call on a German-Jewish professor in the new city and teach him Arabic grammar; and from there to his Sephardic synagogue for the afternoon prayer; and then to his sectaries, to translate some English correspondence; and then back home for dinner with his wife and child; and then off again, this time with no hat at all, to the Zionist Club, where he sits in the back row with a drowsing Turkish secret policeman and listens to lectures and debates, sometimes rising to ask the Zionists a question of his own; and home at last late at night to hush the day’s speakers in his head and tell them all what he thinks, which is still not at all anti-English, because it has not dawned on him yet that the English will soon arrive; so that if any thought of treachery crosses his mind, it is no more than a dim kernel, as lifeless as a pebble, as a pip that falls on dry earth and seems more the dross of the fruit than the source of a new tree. And so more long years go by, and 1917 arrives, and the expeditionary force lands in Egypt and crosses the desert until Great Britain is next door to Palestine, and on the ninth of January, as you know, sir, we took the border town of Rafah.
— Major General Philip Chatwood, sir, with his Australian and New Zealand cavalry. It was a short, easy battle, and by February news of it had reached Jerusalem and caused great excitement. Our Mani was jolly well shaken, so he told me, in a state of utter turmoil — and I asked myself, sir, what exactly was the meaning of it? Was this the jolt that turned under the dry pip that was playing dead, down into the warm, dark, blanketing earth?
— Yes, sir. What I mean, sir, if you’ll forgive me for being rather literary, is, was this the beginning of the treachery that was soon to burst forth into the open? What could all that turmoil have meant in a man who called himself a homo politicus but sat through the war in Jerusalem with his face turned north toward Turkey, blind to what was happening in his backyard? What had he thought would happen? Was he still the boy waiting for his father to come home? Because all at once, here is Great Britain in the south, and he’s as shaken as if his father had made a secret circuit of Palestine and come back at him from the opposite direction…