Free The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

virgin cousin had
expressed the sentiment that when she scattered these flowers abroad in the
fields and sidewalks of India, she was doing something to unite East and West.
Her father had shouted her down, in his fierce manner, denouncing the practice.
‘Never the twain shall meet —’ he reminded her, as if the words were Holy Writ.
The old brigadier had gone on to tell Cousin Beryl that she was only making a
lot of damn difficulties for the botanists; he added — irrelevantly as it had
seemed at the time —that he himself had once forbidden an Indian servant to
marry a girl from Bhutan, because it would only lead to a damn muddle in the
offspring. But every third summer, Cousin Beryl, dressed always in loose, white
shantung garments, packed her seed box and bore it away to Lahore. So it must
have been, thought Freddy, with the spinster ladies of General Allenby’s time
out here. He had not yet propounded his theory to Joanna. She would be
sceptically interested in it. He was waiting for a moment when it was absolutely
necessary for him to say something interesting.
     
    To arrive here, a mile
from the outskirts of Jerusalem on the Jordan side, Freddy had jostled his way
from the guardhouse at the Mandelbaum Gate, through the Old City’s network of
alleys, past the Damascus Gate. It had been too hot to take a crowded bus, and
not for one moment was he tempted by a taxi. Sometimes Joanna could manage to
meet him with her car, but Freddy was just as well pleased when she couldn’t.
Past the Damascus Gate, towards the Holy Sepulchre and down to the Via
Dolorosa, plodded Freddy, dodging the loaded donkeys and stick-wielding boys,
who in turn were constantly dodging the vast wide motorcars that hooted with
rage and frustration down the lanes; these cars were filled with hooded Arabs
of substance and their emancipated wives. Freddy and numerous tourists had to
flatten themselves hastily against a wall or a tangy-breathed donkey whenever
the fanfare of a motor horn heralded one of these feudal-minded carloads. At
the Via Dolorosa he ran into the huge Friday pilgrimage headed by the praying
Franciscans, who moved from station to station, on the route from the Pillar of
the Flagellation to Calvary. Freddy, with a number of the English Colony, had
followed a much larger procession than this, last Easter, along the Way of the
Cross; he had found it religiously moving, but it had exhausted his capacity
for any further experience of the sort.
    This
Friday he dodged down a side-turning into the shop of an Arab dealer called
Alexandros, whom he knew, to wait there till the procession had passed.
Alexandros had been conducting a business courtship with Freddy for the past
five months over an icon that Freddy had his eye on. The dealer was an Orthodox-Catholic
from the Lebanon. Most of the Moslem Arab shops were shut on Fridays, and
Alexandros therefore did some extra trade on that day of the week. He was
serving a tourist, an Englishwoman, when Freddy arrived, but he immediately
sent a young assistant out to fetch Freddy some Turkish coffee. Freddy relaxed
in the large cool shop and, as he waited for the deal to be done and the coffee
to arrive, he thought of the hours to come, on the shady bench in Joanna’s
garden, getting his letter off — Yes, you are right … no, I think you wrong …
anything you like, dearest Ma…. and felt this hot effort to reach the house
was worth it by virtue of the cool contrast ahead of him.
    Alexandros,
whose wares were superior to those of most of the other traders in the area,
was attempting to persuade the customer of this fact. She seemed rather stupid
and sceptical, as Alexandros implored her credence, using his arms to do so, a
little more in the French merchant manner than the Arab. Freddy’s feelings
expanded towards the salesman and contracted against the woman. Heavy
Alexandros, dark, middle-aged, went on to explain that the little wooden
crib-figures, for which he was asking five pounds