David was only fifty miles from the
orange grove where he patrolled with a rifle by night, and by day sat at Arab
cafes drinking coffee, playing dominos, and chatting freely, but he may as well
have been on the far side of the moon.
In
that orange grove, it hardly mattered what he did. He was the Jew from Baghdad Palestine
He did not need to put on airs with
them, to watch his dress or diction or even curb his habit of day
dreaming. Even the reports he had
written about these people to the SHA’I were smothered in the haze of
oriental meandering. What had happened to those
reports? Their details were placed on
index cards and stored in a labeled file marked with the name of each town or village: Jenin, Abu Dis, Tulkarem.
Had they performed any useful function? He would never know, just as he did not know
if his work in Damascus served the greater good, or was it just more
missteps?
He walked to the
American Consulate with his reports crammed into a false heel in his shoe,
written in an equally cramped, tiny block script, to save space. The empty shoe bottom seemed an apt metaphor:
Shemesh felt as if the ground he walked on was riddled with holes.
No comments:
Post a Comment