A Palestine Affair by Wilson Jonathan

Author:Wilson, Jonathan [Wilson, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

27.

Joyce’s driver took the Nablus Road north of the Damascus Gate. The windows were open and the city’s wayward sounds reached in as punctuation marks on the obliterating white light of the summer morning: church bells, a donkey braying, the occasional klaxon from an automobile, and once what sounded like gunshots, rapid and distant. The car passed St. George’s Cathedral and the American Colony and gained the first hill with its engine groaning; by the time they reached the summit of Mt. Scopus its chassis was shuddering and seemed ready to convulse. Joyce tipped sideways in the backseat and almost banged her head on the door frame. It was only after they had passed the village of Sha’afat that the road leveled and the noise diminished to a murmur, and they were already eight miles out of Jerusalem, heading toward Ramallah, when Joyce realized she was traveling not toward, but away from the desert.

She leaned forward. The driver was the same man, Aron, who had driven her home from the Allenby Hotel after her first dinner with Frumkin.

“Where are we going? What’s this route?”

Aron slowed the vehicle a little.

“North: Nablus, Jenin, Nazareth, Haifa. Mr. Frumkin will meet us there.”

“I understood our meeting was near Beersheba . . .”

“Haifa,” Aron repeated laconically, as if Joyce’s misunderstanding were of no consequence.

Joyce sat back in the leather seat.

“Do you have something to drink?” she asked.

“We can make a stop in the next village.”

Aron parked in a small courtyard near the ruins of an old church. He got out and approached a small shop where boxes of cucumbers were on display under a tattered green canvas awning. Joyce watched him go in, then got out of the car herself and walked toward the dilapidated church walls. At the entrance to the site there was a thin wooden sign nailed to a pole, its message barely visible under a layer of dust. “Here the parents of Jesus missed him on their return from Jerusalem when he was a boy.” The information struck Joyce as oddly tender and evoked a reflecting sadness in her. Her own mother had never seemed to care very much about anyone except herself, while her father, although he had done his best when Joyce was a young child, couldn’t really wait to get her off his hands and into college. He had, of course, other interests outside the family. Had anyone ever “missed” her? Undoubtedly there was Robert Kirsch, poor puppy dog, but not Mark, almost certainly. He had loved her, that she was sure of, but the signal gaps in his life had always been paintings destroyed or not yet done. Joyce’s absence, short-term or extended, weekend visits to friends, her one long trip to America to see her mother, had affected him about as much as a change in the weather outside his studio window; perhaps the light was a little darker and he was obliged to make a small adjustment to his palette, but nothing more. Joyce smiled

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