Jaffa at the turn of the century. Nothing really, not even the simple, cheap and good life that grew to seem so full of essence, of sweetness like pomegranates, when one looks at it from the thin false comfort of international strings of hotels and convenience foods. This Platonic essence came so much later, after the second world war, with the euphoria of independence from the physically present foreigner and before the indigenous ruler grew to understand that his power was for real and could be used to control, to imprison, to maim intellectually and physically. But in 1910, say, Jaffa was a crummy sort of town, dustily or muddily combining the worst of every world that had ever impinged on the place. However glorious their past, none of the cities of the coast, from Antioch to Alexandria, can show much man-made physical beauty or unity, as though the desert, the wildness, were necessary to compress builders’ souls, to crystallise the jeweled facets of Jerusalem and Cairo and Damascus.
Jaffa was called a port although virtually no construction existed to support the claim. Ships’ passengers scrambled awkwardly down rope ladders curving over the ship’s sides, lurching against the small fishermen’s rowing boats swelling and dropping away below, and jumped when they judged it safe, relatively. Women were bundled together and half-carried, half-dragged, then thrown like sacks. The stronger fishermen tried to catch them and sometimes succeeded.
“But I jumped.” Even at over seventy she looked capable of such a break with tradition, and Miss Alice had been seventeen when she arrived in the Holy Land. Her father intended to re-beatify the region by recalling its unholy, its infidel or heretic or schismatic peoples to the light. Miss Alice also felt stirred by the call. “And I longed to travel, the sun, the places of pilgrimage, Biblical sites. I felt so sorry for the poor people, cut off from the Truth although they lived at its sources: God assured me that I could do something to help, that they were waiting for me.” She snorted. “He would have done better to tell me to go to Liverpool, although in that case I might not have listened so attentively.
“And the challenge. The Society had warned my father to consider the risks I might face. Moslem men understood as little of the sanctity of the family circle as they did the Truth that the Society wished to expound to them. The law of the Turk was made to be broken … uncontrollable . . . lustful . . . there was no bobby on the beat . . . the streets were ill-lit or not lit at all at night—that at least was true—the harem . . . the high price that white women could fetch (they really thought of Moslems as being black) . . . a lonely life. Hardship, physical difficulty of everyday life, disgusting food—I could not have been better prepared to love the place when I reached it. The real danger was the one they never mentioned, that I should never be able to leave it again, never bring myself to face the meannesses, the thin lips and emotions, the dreariness, the polite unkindnesses, the utter greyness of skies and hearts, of home.”
There had been, though, much trouble and difficulty at the start. The Ottoman authorities did not encourage foreigners to settle, there were laws against buying property. And the local authorities resented the idea of an alien presuming to change their satisfying religion for another of which they knew only that its adherents were seldom warm or generous or forgiving. The Moslem functionaries were on the whole indifferent to the Missionary Society’s activities, but the Orthodox and Melkite and Latin hierarchies made endless difficulties, laid complaints, warned Istanbul of their strong resentment, made cabals and all but united forces to fight the alien. The Jews threatened to anathematize anyone who dealt with the gentile. The Society found it was obliged to temporise with the forces of darkness. It postponed the day, shelved the project of building the new temple which would irradiate the heathen, and opened a small school for girls in two rented rooms that an Armenian agreed to rent for eleven months, and later a makeshift clinic to teach hygiene to their mothers. These were a relative success in that pupils did attend in some numbers, but not a great source for pride since at first they were all without exception Christian already. Idolatrous churches, but still Christian, and the original aim had not been simply to switch adherents from one denomination to another, but to restore the Founder’s teachings to his homeland and thereby hasten the millennium. This was evidently further away than the scheme’s originators had first planned for, but in the hiatus many people began to earn considerable sums of money, more found employment and prestige—bishoprics could be established for those left unsatisfied at home—and pragmatism won again. “Render unto Abdel-Hamid . . . as Our Lord would have said.”
Slowly both sides, or all seventeen sides, shifted their stance. Like true lovers who, after their final separation, find that they have each acquired the essential characteristics they most disliked in the otherwhile losing the qualities that originally made them beloved, the Society and various native churches and administrations found themselves caught in a long slow waltz down the decades, through social and sectarian reversals, until a century later they found themselves frozen at diagonally opposite points from the ones they had started at. But when Miss Alice jumped from her ship, this saraband had only recently begun and Mr. Rhodes had a difficult time ahead of him.
In Jaffa he rented, again from an Armenian (the intelligent usefulness of this community was reinforced by their reluctance to complain to Istanbul, no matter how well-founded the grievance), a house on the sea front. A perfect cube topped by an incongruously red-tiled pointed roof that gave it the look of a squat crystal. The tiles were imported from Marseilles and each one was stamped with a bee.“ Symbol of industry, not of Boney,” Mr. Rhodes explained to the workmen he called in. They knew all they needed to of the first, and little of the second, except that he had once destroyed their town. The house was neatly sliced in two through its midriff; above were the living quarters, a huge central dar divided two thirds up its length by a triple arch, the gothic ogives filled in with sugary wooden curlicues at the apex, repeating those of the facade. Off this central meeting, sitting, eating, discussion space lay several rooms, to be used indifferently as necessity arose for sleeping, cooking, writing reports to the Society, women’s reunions. They were all large and slightly rectangular in shape, since the ceilings were high to allow hot air to rise and flies to circle well above the humans. Only one of them, giving on to the road at the northern corner—where the prevailing south-westerly wind could carry off the smells—was designed for a specific function, or rather, two functions, indissolubly linked. Here a small L-shape had been cut out from the basic cube, and within it there was a hole, two taps and a stone waist-high construction with steps, space for two copper tishts for hot and cold water, an arched niche in the wall for the silvered, lidded soap-bowl and the embroidered linen towels. In the remaining L-minus space, under the window placed to ensure a through draught from the south, there was a large charcoal range built of brick with seven different embrasures—some round, some rectangular; shelves, a long marble slab leading to the marble sink which—“we are modern people, Mr. Rhodes”—was sluiced by another tap, and the only cupboard in the house, made of sandalwood, built into the angle of the wall and constructed on the principle of a Lazy Susan in that it pivoted through its vertical axis revealing on one of its triangular sides dozens of tiny pigeon holes for spices and herbs, on another large rectangles for nuts, raisins, moderate quantities of rice, sugar, dried beans, chickpeas and pinekernels and, on the third, deep arched niches for pickles, jams, orange-blossom water.
Two large earthenware jars, glazed inside but not out, stood in the opposite corner, supplied (empty) with the house, as in London the furniture and fittings come with the contract. These were for olives, either black and green, or short and long pickled (freek and mouni).
“Of course I was appalled.” Miss Alice gave the same snort. “There was nothing, nothing. White walls, a few utensils in what Mr. Ohannes called the kitchen and bathroom. Even in those days I didn’t pretend that we had come from a rich home, but I had grown up with beds and chairs and tables and pictures on the walls—whatever they were, they were things—and sheets on the beds and cloths on the tables and curtains at the windows and carpets on the floors. Everything I knew in a home had always been covered by something else. The lavatory had a lid, and so did all the saucepans. And here nothing was hidden, except the spices—because light took away their flavor—and in fact there was nothing to hide in the first place. I had enjoyed jumping into the boat, but this was different, this was going to be life, it was getting dark, there was nothing. Now I can see that this nothing was a presence, a something that might win, but then I felt only despair. I was so tired, I wanted some hot soup, a bath, to get out of dusty clothes worn all day, to get into clothes made especially for the night. I wanted a bed, and there was no bed in the house. My father seemed quite calm but then my father had been served all his life and wasn’t likely to think where his next bed was coming from. A woman would always have made or unmade it for him and I suppose he thought it was just something that appeared when he wanted it—most of the magic in the 1001 Nights is just men thinking of their ideal women and what they should be doing. The horror of Sindbad’s tale is that the woman never turns up and he has to do the work himself, that’s what has made him a legend. Of course I was stupid, I had thought of danger, of a moustache attached to a pasha, scimitars, gold epaulettes, I hadn’t thought of plumbing and going to the market without knowing a word of the language, and more than this, I hadn’t thought that it would be different from the poor homes that the Society encouraged me to visit before I left. There they had beds, even if there were bugs in the bedding, they had cloths covering tables and mugs and plates on the cloths, and a china dog, and fire dogs; it was recognisable. And of course I never saw where they did their washing and peeing and cooking, not once.” She laughed instead of snorting this time. “I’m not the first to be blind to what was lying under my nose and not the last either. At least I saw it before I lost it, that’s more than most people can say. Anyway, that night Mr Ohannes said, ‘You must be tired, I’ll show you where the beds are,’ and led me into one of the empty rooms. There was a youk carved in the thickness of the wall, and out of its recessed arch he pulled some lahhafs and, holding them bundled in his arms, asked where I would like to have them. I really did not understand, and while I stood there, thinking this was the lowest spot I would ever reach in an exciting life, a life to be different, there was a bang, a thud on the front door and Mrs. Ohannes walked in, followed by several girls, women, what-ever—females, all carrying trays and copper dishes, one or two smoking charcoal hot. So we had supper, lots of little dishes, and a chicken and metres of thin bread and then Mrs. Ohannes poured some warmed rose water over my hands and feet and made me wash my face with a hot linen towel and I fell on the lahhafs and slept. Ah! how I slept. I had been frozen to the end of my bowels, and then warmed again, no sleep like that one. In the morning I found two little girls squatting in the kitchen, blowing on the charcoal range, making coffee so the foreigners would not wake to the cold they had brought with them in their hearts, and from then on I began to learn what to do.”
She looked round the room. There were carpets now, some of them hanging from the doors (but not the windows) to keep out the draughts. There were no pictures on the walls, not even a silver-handled dagger, not a string of blue beads interspersed with alum, not a Bedouin handbag with its tassels of silver niello fish. The walls rose uninterrupted to the round oeil-de-boeuf windows, three metres above, framing nothing but the sea and the rocks. They swelled slightly, out of true, bellied by the damp that had penetrated their earth. Their irregular, almost imperceptible curves were the only decoration of the interior, but through the fretted windows the sea, now a flat, hostile, metallic stare, reflected a complicated pattern of arabesque on the opposite wall.
Miss Alice said, “It’s not what you are here for, but I can tell you this house has no need of art, it is art. There,” she pointed at the center of the floor, where the tiles formed a small concentric circle, “at the August full moon, the light strikes its bullseye, right in the Centre of the circle. Just one night a year for a few minutes—and if you’re asleep, or at the governor’s dinner, you can live here for years and never know it.”
I looked at her, shining with the pride of the housewife who controls the galaxies.
