Dreamers of the Day Page 23

  If my mood improved after that second day, poor Sergeant Thompson’s patience was stretched thinner by the hour. We often ate meals together at a little square table off to one side of the courtyard, while the “toffs” dined at a large round one in the middle. Neither of us took offense; we knew our place in this august assembly, and it was peripheral.

  Our isolation allowed the sergeant a chance to vent his frustration to a sympathetic ear, for my ambling explorations were in stark contrast to those of Mr. Churchill’s breathless ministerial tour. Sometimes accompanied by his wife, usually interpreted by Lawrence, always guarded by Thompson, Winston was being quick-marched through a series of receptions and ceremonies. His agreed-upon schedule was punctuated by sudden demands for additional appearances and speeches, which Sir Herbert urged him to make and which Thompson argued against without success.

  “I’m never given any notice of a change in plans,” the sergeant complained. “There’s no opportunity to inspect the site. Even when I have matters in hand, he’ll hare off on his own.”

  Churchill might begin his duties with a public event: laying a wreath at a military cemetery or visiting some dignitary or other. Next he would attend a series of private talks with Arab or Jewish factions, during which he hoped to allay the fears of the former while encouraging settlements by the latter. You can imagine the tension, walking that sort of diplomatic tightrope. Often, while walking between venues, Winston would veer away to get a better look at something that had caught his painter’s fancy. Thompson tried valiantly to keep him in sight, but within seconds his charge might suddenly turn and disappear down an alley, leaving his bodyguard nothing to do but dash after him and fume.

  You might think it easy to keep an eye on a person as resplendently British as Churchill in Jerusalem, but that small city teemed with humanity of all kinds. Shrouded Arab women, white-turbaned Muslim mullahs, Greek priests, Italian monks, and robed Bedouin in kuffiehs joined fashionable French tourists, ragged water carriers, shouting street vendors, store owners, British soldiers, American businessmen, and earnest pilgrims—all these milling amid the beggars, the lepers, and the blind crying, “Baksheesh!”

  And the streets through which all these people shuffled and pushed and shopped were so narrow! Once I saw a small boy hop across a lane from one second-story window to another; without much effort, he could have doubled the leap and not risked a fall to the pavement. In Thompson’s eyes, every building concealed a sniper and every alley an ambush that would take Churchill’s life. “I will never get that man back to England alive!” he said despairingly.

  Though Winston’s wanderlust was a constant worry, my own caused no one such distress. After exploring the nooks and crannies of little Jerusalem, I decided to spend my last day hiking around Suleiman the Magnificent’s sixteenth-century walls. Lawrence’s insight made me glad that this long-dead Muslim had found the city holy and deserving of protection. I was happy as well that Napoleon had decided against an attack centuries later, and pleased that the pasha of Egypt, the sultan of Turkey, and the British Crown had let the last two centuries pass without finding a compelling tactical reason to level the town.

  I turned off on the Jericho Road—the way by which David (may have) fled from Absalom—and walked through fields scrubby with thistle but fragrant with wild garlic, thyme, and mint. When I reached the base of the Mount of Olives, I looked back from the place where Titus (assuredly) massed the Tenth Roman Legion for his assault on Jerusalem, and where Flavius Josephus found the words of Lamentations tragically apt:

  How solitary doth the city sit, that was so full of people!

  How she is become as a widow!

  She who was great among the nations,

  and a princess among the provinces,

  How she has become a tributary,

  and weepeth sore in the night.

  Sobered, I was in the right frame of mind to visit the Garden of Gethsemane, on the western slope of Olivet. This hillside orchard had escaped the repetitious razing and rebuilding that buried old Jerusalem beneath so much rubble. Of all the places mentioned in the New Testament, it is thought to be the most likely to have been visited by Jesus. It was certainly visited by my sister, Lillian.

  Within the garden walls, behind an iron fence, grew eight olive trees of undoubted antiquity. The circumference of their trunks approached thirty-five feet, and after thousands of seasons their branches were fantastically twisted. While I visited, smiling brown-robed Franciscan monks escorted visitors to the (genuine) bedrock where the disciples (might have) slept and to the spot where Judas (reportedly) gave the kiss of betrayal.

  In the middle of the garden, however, I was astonished to come across a modern tomb with a wholly unexpected inscription: “Adeline Whelan from Washington was buried here in 1875.” Seeing my surprise, a young monk explained. “That good lady paid to have a well dug and a fountain built. The well supplies water to moisten this holy ground so that we may cultivate flowers.” And as I was leaving, an elderly Franciscan handed me a bouquet, along with some leaves from the ancient olive trees. The leaves I later carried home to Ohio as a remembrance of his faith, if not my own.

  From Gethsemane, I walked onward to Bethany. In my time, the town was an unexceptional huddle of dust-ridden houses surrounded by the blue-flowered borage that carpets Mount Olivet. Was this truly where Martha did housework while Mary sat at the feet of Jesus? I have no idea, but I was glad that the Gospels recorded that homely scene. After walking through sand and pebbles, over cobbles, and up stone stairs, I could appreciate how soothing and refreshing it would have been when a woman bathed the Lord’s feet and anointed them with balm. It put me in mind of the way Mrs. Motta ministered to me when I was ill, and I blessed the memory of her kindness.

  As I made my way back to the summit and to my room in Government House, Clementine Churchill’s habit of afternoon “siestas” began to seem eminently sensible. I washed away the dust of the road with a quick bath and stretched out on the bed, drowsily wondering what Karl was doing, and how Rosie was. And then it happened: lying in the quiet borderlands between dozing and dream, I heard Lillian speak again, her lovely voice as serene as I remembered it.

  I always had faith in you, Agnes, she said, as clearly as if she sat at my bedside. I knew you would find your way.

  It was such a comfort then, but looking back now, in my present circumstances? I may have lost my way forever in Jerusalem. I certainly haven’t found it yet.

  Supper that evening was an informal but semiofficial one, with the London delegation and the top officials of Government House gathered. There were ten men at Churchill’s table. When Clementine joined them, looking rested and cool, the men rose. Well brought up, and the youngest among them, Lawrence pulled out a chair for her. The talk and laughter resumed.

  I was ending my stay feeling pleasantly tired but, like everyone who worked with the relentlessly energetic Churchill, Thompson was exhausted. “It’s almost over, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Clementine told me you’re leaving for Aleppo day after tomorrow.”

  “And from there, on to Malta and Naples,” Thompson said, rubbing his eyes. “Who knows what fresh hell they’ll present?”

  There was a shout of laughter at the big table, where Winston was holding court with Falstaffian humor.

  “He’s self-centered. He makes the world revolve around him, and he can be an awful bore, but I’m starting to like the man.” Thompson paused to light one of the Turkish cigarettes Winston had insisted he smoke instead of his pipe. “Maybe he just takes some getting used to. Like these things!” he said, blowing out exotic smoke. “There’s something about him.”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “I know what you mean.”

  Eventually, of course, the whole world would know what Thompson meant, but that was years in the future. In 1921, Churchill was still a youngish bureaucrat with a shadowed record. Indeed, the conversation that night soon turned to the defeat that almost destroyed his political career, and Th
ompson sighed. “Here we go again—Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. He just can’t let it go.”

  Like most disasters, the decisions leading to it had seemed like good ideas at the time. The jolly little war that was supposed to have ended by Christmas of ’14 had become a ghastly stalemate. With both sides dug into their trenches, there was nothing but horror to show for the mounting casualties of that first winter, Thompson told me, so England’s War Council argued about the way to break the deadlock on land. “Churchill made a case for an attack on Turkey through the Dardanelles Straits,” Thompson whispered, “but Kitchener wouldn’t release any troops from the western front. And the czar’s armies had all they could handle in the Caucasus.”

  “When Carden said he thought the straits could be forced by sea power alone,” Winston was telling the others, “the whole atmosphere changed! Fatigue was forgotten! The War Council could see its way clear of the western front.”

  “Carden’s mistake was bringing Fisher out of retirement,” someone said. “Brilliant admiral, Fisher. Single-minded devotion to the navy, but if you crossed him—ruthless!”

  “And widely detested,” Winston admitted, “but Fisher and I worked well together.”

  “You were so young,” Clementine said, reaching out to put a fond hand on her husband’s. “I think that may have tempered Fisher a bit: the youthful First Lord of the Admiralty and the old salt.” She looked around at the others. “I never trusted the man, but Winston was endlessly patient with him.”

  “Fisher saw the logic of the Dardanelles. He threw his support behind me, and I was grateful,” Winston said stoically.

  “We’d just taken four hundred thousand casualties on the Somme,” Thompson told me. “An eastern front made sense.”

  “Stop the Turks! Divert the Germans!” Winston cried. “That’s why we set Lawrence here in motion: to draw off their troops! Change the balance in the west!”

  At Lawrence’s name, my ears pricked up. I had never understood quite how the desert campaign fit into the strategy of the war until then, but I did remember the news accounts of the Dardanelles. The British naval bombardment of the Turkish forts holding the straits was fitful, delayed intermittently by bad weather.

  “But we were winning,” Winston cried. “The Turks were out of ammunition with no chance of resupply. Then de Robeck and Hamilton called off the attack,” he said disgustedly.

  For Clementine, her husband’s colossal military failure remained an intensely personal event. Men who had eaten at her table had turned on her beloved husband, and she was unsparing in her condemnations. Winston was more sanguine, perhaps because he had his wife to express his own dismay at being held responsible for what he still saw as good strategy badly executed.

  Have you ever noticed that those who feel guiltiest about a decision will bring it up themselves and keep on talking about it, long after everyone else has grown tired of the issue? One by one, everybody but Winston fell silent, wishing he would, too. “If we’d taken Gallipoli,” he insisted for perhaps the fourth time in half an hour, “it could have ended the war years earlier.”

  Lawrence stood as though to stretch or perhaps to signal that they’d plumbed the depths of this topic, thanks all the same. I thought that he was simply bored until he approached the table where Thompson and I sat. Then, for the second time since I’d met him, I became aware of the slight tremor that could shake his whole body and of a change in the color of his eyes. Ordinarily the rich blue of a clear winter sky, when he was angry they could take on the flat, unreflective gray of carbon steel. To us, or perhaps to himself, he whispered, “I knew the name of every man who died under my command.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes changed again. In later wars, soldiers would call it the thousand-yard stare, when the memory of a single horrifying minute would abruptly eclipse all the intervening years.

  Winston went on talking, and suddenly I understood what had driven Lawrence from the table. Gallipoli was all high-level politics to the toffs. Admirals, generals, First Lords, prime ministers, but not a single mention of the boys! Battleships were sunk, supply and troop-ships were torpedoed, all hands lost. A quarter million Australians and New Zealanders were killed as pointlessly as their brother soldiers on the western front, and with no breakthrough to justify their deaths. Churchill spoke no word of regret.

  Perhaps realizing that he was losing his audience, Winston finally dropped the subject. “Listen here, Lawrence! You really must come back to London with us!”

  Eyelids fluttering, the colonel came to himself, saw the reality around him, and shook off the memories. He returned to the other table but remained standing. As usual, his voice was low and rather soft, but I could make out the gist of his reply. He had forgotten how to get on with other Englishmen, he told the others wryly. He’d been happy to serve as Winston’s adviser in Cairo and his interpreter here in Jerusalem, but it was time for him to move on. There would be strategy to work out with Feisal and his brother Abdullah. They needed to make plans for the new nations of Iraq and “Trans-Jordan”—a place I had not heard of previously, but one that had apparently been magicked into existence in the past few days.

  All at once, I realized how foolish I was to imagine that a man of Lawrence’s importance would have time to take me to Jebail. He’d made a spontaneous offer to buck me up when I was saddened by memories of my sister; I should have recognized it as a polite fiction, not meant to be taken seriously. Then, to my surprise, I heard Lawrence say, “—but Miss Shanklin and I will stop first in Jebail.” He turned around and told me, “I’ve organized a car for the journey. Can you be ready by six?”

  “Of course,” I replied, getting to my feet and coming to his side.

  “Too early for me, Shanklin!” Winston cried. “We must make our farewells now.”

  Everyone rose to shake my hand cordially, and Clementine even urged me to visit her and Winston in England.

  “Be sure to give Thompson a few days’ warning,” Winston rumbled cheerily. “He likes to prepare for the uprisings your presence seems to provoke.”

  The detective sergeant himself surprised me almost speechless. He took my hand as Winston had, but bent very low to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Take care of yourself, miss.”

  I was amazed at how fond of him I’d grown, despite his complaints and gruffness. “You do the same,” I told him, rising on tiptoes to return his gesture, and we bid each other both good night and good-bye.

  I imagine you’ve had quite enough of my travelogues. Believe me, I felt the same way myself by the time we left Jerusalem. I was saturated with sites and sights, and felt quite unable to absorb a single additional fact, no matter how edifying.

  Lawrence, too, was ready to blow off steam, and his means of doing so involved a borrowed army staff car with a Rolls-Royce engine and no springs. With our luggage secured, I climbed into the front seat and accepted a scarf he thoughtfully provided to tie over my hat. With that, he cranked the engine and, a moment later, yelled, “Hang on!”

  During the hours that followed, I made my peace with death while Lawrence made a temporary peace with life. Grinning into the sun, eyes narrowed against the wind, he hurled us along rutted, potholed, crowded roads. The first time he veered off to jounce overland, a small scream escaped me and I braced myself against the dashboard. Lawrence glanced at me, his brows raised in genuine surprise. “Oh,” he said, and from then on, he warned me when he intended to drive off the road.

  That was his only concession to a nervous passenger, but soon I was caught up in his frank and heedless joy. Flinging the car around rockfalls, lurching onto the sandy shoulders to avoid flocks of sheep and the occasional stray goat, flying past camels and donkeys laden with trade goods, swerving to provide wide berth to anyone wearing robes and sandals, he worked clutch and gearbox, wheel and brakes, all four limbs constantly engaged. If a sudden change in direction startled me, or a thumping bounce threatened to catapult me out of the seat, I got a grip on myself by watching him and admiri
ng the sheer physical mastery required to dominate such speed and power.

  Conversation was all but impossible over the roar of the unmuffled Rolls and the noise of the wind in our ears. Only once did I try to ask a question, when we passed the first of several startlingly green enclaves amid the scrub and thornbushes. “What’s that?” I yelled, pointing.

  “Jewish settlement,” he yelled back.

  Halfway up the coast, he pulled the car over and fishtailed to a pebble-scattering stop near the shade of an olive grove. For a while, there was no sound except the clicking of hot metal. His face alight, Lawrence turned to me expectantly, and to please him, I said, “That was fun!” To my surprise, I found that I meant it, and when he saw that, he gave a full-throated shout of laughter. That was when I realized that he had lost the giggle in my presence. It was the nicest moment of our time together.

  Cross-legged on the ground and comfortable in khaki trousers and a white knit shirt, Lawrence shared out a picnic lunch. We ate flat bread, salty goat cheese, and succulent oranges while gazing at the waves of the Mediterranean as they raced one another up the beach below. If the low mountains and gaunt hills of Palestine were naked and stony, the soft green of the Lebanon reminded me of home. Much of the land around us was cultivated, and I could see why Lillian loved this place. Lemon and almond and fig trees scented the more prosaic stands of ash and cypress nearby, and there were flowers everywhere! Early spring anemones were just past, but lupines were in full bloom: blue and white and yellow. I picked out pink stock and mauve vetches. Blue borage and iris. Lavender clover, and alliums of many varieties. Blood-red poppies, with their sad associations. Pink bindweed, cheerful white daisies.