Bartlett first suspected that he was being followed as, town guide in hand, he walked up Dizengoff Street from Dizengoff Circle where a fountain splashed and teenage soldiers with submachine guns on their shoulders munched peta crammed with meat and tehina and humus and stalked the happy soldier girls.
There was no proof; it was merely a new instinct awakened when he realised that his suitcase had been searched. Twice he spun round to surprise his pursuer. Each time he thought he noticed a furtive movement on the sidewalk. But he couldn’t be sure: it might have been the overactivity of this new instinct. And there was so much jostling movement in the street. He walked on past the small expensive shops, bookstalls garlanded with Time, Newsweek and Hebrew scandal magazines liberally bosomed and buttocked, past a dozen sidewalk cafés where tourists drank beer and Israelis sipped mineral waters.
Halfway up the broad thoroughfare Bartlett stopped at the Stern Café and ordered a Gold Star beer. It seemed to him in his new state of awareness that there were two oiled movements behind him as he turned into the café. But, of course, it was all ludicrous. Why should anyone want to follow a middle-ageing geologist who had flown to Israel to escape briefly from a fossilised routine and. a faithless wife to present a paper to a gathering of colleagues who would be transfixed to their seats by the familiarity of his material?
But if there was anyone shadowing him then, Bartlett reckoned, they would now be sitting at one of the cafés down the street from which they could observe him. He leaned back in his seat and, with incredulity and enjoyment, observed the inhabitants of the twenty-one-year-old country parading past him.
Jews from Iraq, the Yemen, Germany, Russia, Poland, Britain, America. Youthful Jews strutting with victory and self-sufficiency, more sexually aware than any young people Bartlett had seen; middle-aged and elderly Jews with indelible blue numbers on their arms and indelible suffering on their faces; preoccupied Jews wearing wide-brimmed black hats, long coats and curly beards, Jews wearing skullcaps, sun-glasses and desert tans.
He ordered another beer and watched a bus queue swarming into a single-decker bus as if it were a captured Russian tank. A little one-armed man with a chattering face leading a gaunt giant with a ruined face from café to café selling dishcloths – everyone gave a few agora but no one took the cloths.
A smart, middle-aged woman with large soft breasts beneath white lace sat at the table next to him, ordered an ice cream and offered herself to him for 175 Israeli pounds. ‘Fifty dollars,’ she added helpfully.
‘I’m English,’ Bartlett said. He looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m.
She took a small plastic conversion table from her handbag. ‘About twenty-one English pounds. And a few agora – but we won’t bother about those.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Bartlett said. ‘It is a little early for that sort of thing.’
‘You English,’ she said. ‘It’s never too early.’ She moved into a seat closer to him; she smelled faintly of spices.
Bartlett paid the old black-jacketed waiter, picked up his briefcase and started to turn left up the sidewalk. Then he swivelled on his heel and ran back in the direction he had come.
At the first café on the right he saw the Pole in the gold-rimmed spectacles trying to disappear behind a copy of a Hebrew morning paper. At the next café he spotted the crewcut American attempting a similar illusion behind a copy of Life magazine.
At the third café he saw Raquel Rabinovitz.
‘Shalom,’ she said. She was drinking a Coke through a straw.
‘Shalom,’ he said.
‘Sit down and have a drink in the Champs Elysée of Tel Aviv.’
‘I’ve already had one,’ he said.
‘Then have another.’ She snapped her fingers at a waiter. Tom Bartlett sat down.
‘I know it sounds far-fetched,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure I’m being followed.’
‘It is just coincidence,’ she said. ‘You forget that Tel Aviv is just a village compared with New York or London. Every tourist comes to Dizengoff. They say it is one of the most exciting streets in the world.’
Bartlett who was watching a tall Yemeni girl in a short leather skirt agreed. ‘But that hardly explains why my suitcase was searched.’
‘Perhaps an overzealous customs official opened it.’
‘But I had the key.’
‘All right – but I tell you I could open that lock with a teaspoon.’ She drained the Coke with a gurgle. ‘And I think I am right in presuming that you are not the tidiest of men. The suitcase looked to me just as you might have packed it.’
Bartlett shook his head. ‘My wife packed it. She is a very tidy woman. That’s how I know it had been searched.’
‘Ah.’ The conversation lapsed.
Bartlett considered telling her that yesterday he had overheard the President of the United States on the telephone. It seemed to him that the intercepted call might somehow be the key to the subsequent events. But he didn’t want her to think he was completely out of his mind. He opened his copy of the Jerusalem Post.
The girl leaned across and pointed at the four young faces peering from the front page. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
The four soldiers had been killed in two days of artillery exchanges across the Suez Canal. Two of them at Kantara, two of them at Port Tawfik. Bartlett didn’t know what to say.
‘Every day,’ she said, ‘we see their faces. Alive one day, dead the next. Our young men, our future. Everyone you meet has had a relative or a friend or a neighbour killed since the truce. The world doesn’t realise what those communiqués mean to us Israelis. Two killed, three injured. In a way to a small nation like Israel such figures have as much impact as the American losses in Vietnam.’
‘I’m sorry for you,’ Bartlett said. He knew it sounded inadequate. Those young faces staring at him beside news from Cape Kennedy, above an advertisement welcoming two officials from the American board of the General Israel Orphans Home for Girls, Jerusalem, to Israel. He said: ‘It all seems so remote sitting here in the sunshine.’ He swallowed the warm dregs of his beer. ‘Do you see any end to it?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘One day perhaps. When the Arabs realise that we will never be moved because the only place we can retreat to is the sea. One day when they realise how well we have treated the refugees in Gaza and elsewhere. One day when your governments leave us Jews to negotiate our own peace with the Arabs.’
‘One day when you give up some of the land you captured?’
She looked at him contemptuously. ‘What land do you suggest we give up?’
Bartlett opened his mouth to reply but he was stopped by a crack as loud as overhead thunder. He jumped. ‘What on earth was that?’
‘A supersonic bang. An aircraft passing through the sound barrier. We get them all the time.’ Amusement softened the contempt. High above Tel Aviv, two Mirage jets headed south in the general direction of Cairo. She lit a cigarette with theatrical calm and said: ‘We will never give up Jerusalem, the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Perhaps we may negotiate the return of some of the Sinai.’
‘You seem very hard,’ he said.
‘All Israelis are hard. We have to be.’ A wisp of warm wind stirred her fringe and the sunlight found gold in the ocean depths of her eyes. ‘Do you realise that not so long ago you and I would have been fighting each other?’
‘When the British were in occupation?’
She nodded.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you would have been a policewoman, not a soldier.’
They walked up Dizengoff, under the dark green trees, past the police station, to the area where the small, dusky shops were crammed with sausages, matzos, humus, slabs of compressed apricots, dried fish, bottles of wine, pickled herrings and cucumbers, fat olives, halva and peta; where butchers found pork and bacon beneath bloodless steaks; where greengrocers polished and piled their peppers, apples and thick-fleshed Jaffas with pride.
They turned left down a side street where every square yellow building housed an advocate, a dentist or a doctor. For most of the way Raquel sulked. But on the corner of Hayarkon, the seafront road, she turned swiftly and surveyed the street behind them. It was empty except for a vendor pushing a cart loaded with a glistening hillock of strawberries. The emptiness of the street seemed to placate her. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you?’
Bartlett said: ‘I must have been mistaken.’ But he knew he hadn’t been.
They walked back into town along Hayarkon. Past the Hilton Hotel, past the British Embassy sporting the grubbiest-looking Union Jack that Bartlett had ever seen. On the town beaches the young men batted balls to each other with bats like aircraft marshallers’ indicators; the summer sound of ball on bat was as drowsily monotonous as the clicking of knitting needles.
Outside the Dan Hotel, Bartlett said: ‘Would you care to have dinner with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She stood on the steps worrying about the invitation.
‘I’m an Englishman,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t expect me to insist.’
‘I think you are laughing at me all the time.’
Bartlett was contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was very rude.’
‘I think perhaps we have a lot to talk about.’
‘I’m sure we have,’ Bartlett said.
‘Like soil irrigation. And the potential of the Negev. I am looking forward to your address in Jerusalem, Mr Bartlett.’
‘You will be there?’
‘Of course. I made arrangements to collect tickets this morning.’
Bartlett took the initiative and was surprised at himself. ‘Then we will discuss our common interests over dinner this evening.’
She smiled and Bartlett thought he detected relief that the decision had been taken from her. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But first we must see the bonfires.’
‘What bonfires?’
‘Tomorrow is May 6, Lag Ba‘Omer, a Jewish holiday, Mr Bartlett. Tonight there will be bonfires all over Tel Aviv. It is just like your Guy Fawkes night. Except that there are no fireworks.’
‘Very well, Miss Rabinovitz. I’ll look forward to it.’
‘Be here at six,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up in my car.’
She ran down the steps and stopped a passing sherut. Bartlett took his key and walked past the tiny art gallery towards his ground-floor room. As he walked down the corridor his new instinct told him that he would discover that his room had been searched: His new instinct was right.