A Pagan Place
1970
COVERING THE YOM KIPPUR WAR of 1973 for the Daily Telegraph, I found myself once again trying to understand the ways of the Middle East. After the fighting was over, an Egyptian army corps was encircled, and Henry Kissinger and General Saad el-Shazly, the Egyptian Chief of Staff, were closeted in a tent in the Sinai desert deciding how to proceed. If Egyptian defeat could be presented to the watching world as victory, honor would be satisfied and a peace treaty might follow – a few years later, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat were to prove the point. Back in London, I suggested to George Weidenfeld, my publisher, that I add another chapter to The Face of Defeat, my 1972 book about the Palestinians, a party at the mercy of an eventual peace treaty. George had just invited the well-named Aldine Honey to accompany him to Israel. Edna O’Brien made up the party. The Country Girls had established that the Irish literary tradition was safe in her hands, but it was said that she wanted to escape from the Ireland that is the backdrop of her novels. For some obscure reason I had the impression that she wanted to write something other than fiction and was thinking of a travel book for George to publish.
This unlikely quartet was staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. We went our separate ways but a day came when we all met up in the lobby. It was one o’clock, we were ready for the Coffee Room with the view from its big window. Always thinking ahead, George suddenly said that the war was over, people like us should show every sign of goodwill to the Arabs and we would have a proper lunch at the main hotel on the Palestinian side of Jerusalem.
At about half past one, the four of us entered that hotel’s dining room. Immediate hush. The atmosphere hardened. Elderly notables dressed in formal suits and ties occupied every table and every chair. They stared. Edna and Aldine were the only women present. We stood about. The headwaiter’s facial expression spoke more than any words. At last he seated us at the one and only table on a platform running along one of the walls – away from everyone else, yet in full view. Some time after two o’clock, unwillingly, the headwaiter at last placed before us a saucer with some olives. Holding one of these olives between pursed lips, Aldine invited George to take it. When he leaned forward to do so, he appeared to be kissing her. Horrified effendis had had quite enough. The room seemed to shudder. If peace brought scenes like the one they had just witnessed, these men preferred war.
Half an hour later we had still not been able to order a meal. George was determined to stick it out; I proposed instead that we cut our losses and go sightseeing. Under a clear blue sky, Edna and I made our way past the shops on Salah-ad-din Street going towards the Old City. The noises and colorfulness of Arab life were new to Edna and fired her imagination. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is at the center of historic Christendom and the closer Edna came to it the more the afternoon had the feel of a pilgrimage. Oh, she turned to me to say, if only the Mother Superior of her school back in Ireland or the Father who had taught the Catechism could see her now, what would they think!
Architecturally, the Church is fortress-like; on almost every day of the year, to enter is to pass from brilliant sunshine into the slightly mysterious gloom of the cavernous interior. Across the threshold, Edna prostrated herself without warning on the flagstones of the nave. As with the effendis earlier in the hotel dining room, there was a mass reaction. It was as if clerics and monks and acolytes in attendance, guardians of the shrine, tourist guides, had been waiting for this opportunity. Briefly the patter of footsteps hurrying from all directions, then the dog-pile with a storm of broken English that went something like this: Missie Missie, what are you, you Catholic, you Protestant, hundred shekels I show you everything, for you Missie special eighty shekels, you Armenian, you Orthodox, what are you? Then I could hear Edna saying, “David, get me out of here!”
Back in the King David, Edna gave me a Penguin paperback of what was then her latest novel. The cover shows a naked female form so artfully photographed and reproduced that there’s no telling what’s what. Edna’s inscription is, “David – in Jerusalem with love. Sorry about the cover!”
