A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes

by Aileen Baron

on Tour Feb 1 – 28, 2014

CHAPTER ONE
Later, Lily would remember the early morning quiet, the shuttered
shops in the narrow lanes of the Old City. She would remember that
few people were in the streets — bearded Hassidim in fur-trimmed
hats and prayer shawls over long black cloaks returning from morning
prayer at the Wailing Wall; an occasional shopkeeper sweeping
worn cobbles still damp with dew.
She would remember the empty bazaar, remember that the peddler
who usually sold round Greek bread from his cart near Jaffa
Gate was gone.
She would remember the crowd of young Arabs, their heads covered
with checkered black and white kefiyas, waiting in the shade of
the Grand New Hotel, leaning against the façade, sitting on window
ledges near the entrance; remember them crowded under Jaffa Gate
in a space barely wide enough to drive through with a cart, standing
beneath the medieval arches and crenellated ramparts, faces glum,
arms crossed against their chests, rifles slung across their backs,
revolvers jammed into their belts. One wore a Bedouin knife, its tin
scabbard encrusted with bright bits of broken glass.
Only their eyes moved as they watched her pass. Lily remembered
holding her breath, pushing her way through, feeling their
body heat, snaking this way and that to avoid touching the damp
sweat on their clothing. No one stepped out of her way.
She would remember the bright Jerusalem air, fresh with the
smell of pines and coffee and the faint tang of sheep from the fields
near the city wall; the empty fruit market, usually crowded with
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loaded camels and donkey carts and turbaned fellahin unloading
produce, deserted and silent. Vendor’s stalls, looking like boarded
shops on a forlorn winter boardwalk, shut; cabs and carriages gone
from the taxi stand.
She would remember the pool at the YMCA, warm as tea and
green with algae, and the ladies gliding slowly through the water,
wearing shower caps and corsets under their bathing suits, scooping
water onto their ample bosoms, gathering to gossip at the shallow
end. She would remember swimming around them with steady
strokes, her legs kicking rhythmically, and the terrible tempered
Mrs. Klein, blowing like a whale, ordering Lily to stop splashing. A
tiny lady holding onto the side of the pool and dunking herself up
and down like a tea bag nodded in agreement; Elsa Stern, the little
round pediatrician with curly gray hair, gave Lily a conspiratorial
wink and kept swimming laps.
She would remember it all. Everything about that day would
haunt her.
###
Lily Sampson was on her way to the new YMCA on Julian’s Way
that morning, to catalogue pottery from the Clarke collection in the
little museum being built in the Observation Tower.
She had stayed at the YMCA four years ago when it first opened in
1934 and reveled in its splendor, in its graceful proportions, in its arches
and tiled decoration, its tennis courts and gardens, and the grand Moorish
lobby paved with Spanish tiles. It had a restaurant, an auditorium where
Toscanini played, and a swimming pool — the only one in Jerusalem.
Tourists came to ooh and ah and told her this was the most beautiful
YMCA in the world. They would climb the Observation Tower for a
view of the city and look through telescopes into windows of apartments
on Mamilla Street and Jaffa Road.
Lily went there to use the swimming pool three times a week
when she was in Jerusalem, walking from the American School
through the quiet lanes of the Musrara quarter, or cutting through the
Old City.
At five minutes to nine, her hair still damp against her ears, her
eyes stinging from chlorine, Lily climbed the six flights to where the
little museum would be.
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Sheets of glass and wooden shelving for cases were stacked
against the wall in the corner of a large, bare room that held only an
old table, two wooden chairs, pottery wrapped in newspapers and
stowed on the floor in old grocery cartons, and a wall clock that said
four minutes before nine.
Eastbourne had said he would be here around nine o’clock. Lily
suspected that if Eastbourne agreed to help her today, he had reasons
of his own. She was grateful that he recommended her for this job,
grateful for the small windfall from cataloguing pottery during the
short break in excavations at Tel el Kharub.
Lily stepped onto the balcony that opened off the museum, holding
her breath at the sight of Jerusalem, creamy gold in the morning
brightness. The great gilded cupola of the Dome of the Rock glinted
in the sun. The Old City, its stone walls adorned with towers and
battlements, steeples and minarets, loomed behind the King David
Hotel.
She could see the crowd of grim-faced young Arabs she had
passed this morning at Jaffa Gate, now grown to two hundred or
more. The tops of their heads bobbled like so many black and white
beach balls.
Smoke twisted from small fires in the Valley of Hinnom. Lily
looked through the telescope toward Government House on the crest
of the Hill of Evil Council. She could just make out the Union Jack,
flopping limply from its tower.
In the street, a dapper American tourist in a Panama hat and seersucker
suit came out of the King David across the way.
The ladies left the YMCA one by one — Mrs. Klein, still frowning,
her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, marched down the street;
Dr. Stern walked toward the corner.
Lily heard Eastbourne enter the museum. “Let’s get to work.” He
looked at his watch. “I don’t have much time.”
Full of his usual charm this morning, she thought. “I was watching
for you,” Lily told him. “I didn’t see you in the street.”
“I had breakfast downstairs.”
“You actually ate here?”
“I was hungry for some good English cooking and a real breakfast.”
Of course you were, Lily thought. Good British housewives get up
early every morning to cool the toast and put lumps in the porridge.
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“You don’t have a cook at the British School?”
“He’s an Arab. This morning I had ham and eggs.”
Lily noticed the newspaper under his arm and twisted her head
to read the headlines. Eastbourne folded it into a small packet and
put it in his pocket.
“I haven’t finished with the paper,” he said, looked out at the
street, and checked his watch again.
On the wall clock, it was exactly 9:00 a.m.
The sound of an explosion from somewhere in West Jerusalem
rocked the air.
After a tick of silence, a shout of “Allah Akbar” erupted in a fullthroated
roar from the crowd gathered at Jaffa Gate.
Lily rushed to the balcony, with Eastbourne close behind her. A
mob spewed out of the Old City, propelled by the rhythmic chant,
onto Mamilla and around the King David Hotel, and spread in a torrent
toward West Jerusalem.
Five or six men carrying rifles ran down Julian’s Way and encircled
a truck, rocking it back and forth until it turned over. At first the
impassioned madness and destruction seemed strangely distant to
Lily, choreographed and rehearsed, like a slow-moving pageant. She
watched three men rush from the gas station at the turn of the road
with full jerry cans, spilling gasoline on the street as they ran.
Waving fists, brandishing rifles, kefiyas flying in the wind, the
horde swarmed into the warren of back streets with old Jewish shops
and houses, down Jaffa Road toward Zion Circus. The blare of
sirens, scattered shouts and screams carried from the direction of
West Jerusalem on wind heavy with smoke.
Lily heard the crash of shattering glass and looked toward
Mamilla to see a man with a jerry can splash gasoline through a shop
window. A rumble of flames erupted and danced in the currents of
heat from the rush of the blaze.
“It’s that bloody Grand Mufti, el Husseini,” Eastbourne said. His
nostrils dilated with anger, and he wiped his hand across his mouth.
“You can’t trust him. He must be orchestrating this from Syria, with
the backing of Hitler and his crowd.”
The tourist from the King David, his back arched in a posture of
fear, stood in the middle of the street now, tilted this way and that by
rioters who swirled around him as if he were a lamppost.
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Eastbourne watched from the doorway, looking toward the tourist
in the Panama hat, and glanced at his watch again.
Mrs. Klein advanced on the rabble like a tank, shouting and flailing
her arms. The mob surrounded her while she punched and kicked
and screamed. They pressed against her, pushing her back onto the
road. She floated to her knees, her skirt billowing around her, falling
to the asphalt, her hair undone and sticky with blood that began to
puddle on the pavement.
Dr. Stern turned back, hurrying toward her friend splayed on the sidewalk.
A man careened to face Dr. Stern, stepping into her path, thrusting
a fist in her direction as if to greet her. Her eyes widened, her mouth
opened, and she staggered against him. He pushed her away and slowly,
carefully, she plummeted straight down, silent, onto the sidewalk.
Lily closed her eyes and turned away from the balcony back to
the notebook on the table, back to the comfort of the past to count
clay lamps, juglets, burnished bowls with turned-back rims. She
picked up a lamp, the nozzle smudged with ancient soot, and put it
down again, drawn back to the balcony with a horrified fascination.
The tourist in the seersucker suit, without his Panama hat, disappeared
into the revolving door of the hotel.
“Get inside,” Eastbourne said. “This isn’t a peep show.” He
looked at the street. “When this is over, they’ll cover the bodies, take
them away, and hose down the streets.”
What will be left in two thousand years, Lily wondered? Just a
thin layer of charcoal, without memory, without skeletons to mark
the day, just one more level in the stratigraphy of Jerusalem?
People hung out the windows of the King David Hotel, one man
with field glasses, others leaning against balcony railings, some
aghast, some curious. A father led his small daughter inside, shut the
door and pulled down the blinds.
The tourist in the seersucker suit was gone now.
Dr. Stern lay on her side in the street. Little rivulets of blood
seeped from beneath her, flowing downhill and staining the pale
blue cloth of her skirt. The little tea bag lady lay stretched out on the
steps of the YMCA as if she were sleeping in the wrong place.
Mrs. Klein lay in a widening dark pool, her hair, beginning to
mat with blood, loose and wild against the asphalt. She looked oddly
peaceful, her frown gone, her jaw fallen open in death. False teeth
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lay beside her softened cheek. A man stopped, looked at the teeth on
the sticky pavement, picked them up, wiped the blood on his sleeve,
and put them in his pocket. He pulled a knife from his belt and, brandishing
it, ran on toward Mamilla.
“The name Jerusalem means City of Peace, you know,” Eastbourne
said. Shuddering, Lily edged back to the table. The haze of smoke from
the fires, the blare of fire trucks, the sounds of sirens from ambulances,
of sobs, of wounded and mourners, of shutters ringing down with a clatter,
penetrated the room. Lily was drawn to the balcony, and back inside
to the table, too mesmerized to stop, too terrified to watch, mourning for
the ladies who would never again skim across the green water, for
Canaanites and Jebusites, for Israelites and Judeans, for Crusaders and
Mamelukes who fought in this city with its twisted streets, its strange
mystique and power, its heritage of blood and vengeance.
“Go downstairs and get me a packet of Players,” Eastbourne
said, reaching into his pocket. “Here are fifty mils. Bring me the
change.”
Lily dropped the money when he held it out. Her fingers numb
and shaking, she picked it up slowly. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking,” she
said and turned toward the door.
In the lobby, the desk clerk looked at her dumbly, his eyes glazed,
his face pale. A bushy mustache hid his mouth and quivered when he
spoke.
“Rioting in the streets and you ask for cigarettes,” he said in a
hushed monotone. “Cigarettes? Are you mad?”
“Players,” Lily repeated.
“I don’t sell them here. In the dining room.”
Lily went into the dining room. The desk clerk followed and
placed himself behind the bar.
“Players,” Lily said again and put the money on the counter.
He counted it and pushed back the change. “You cold-blooded
English. You have no feelings. Here are your cigarettes.”
“I’m an American.”
“Crazy American. You’re all the same.”
Lily climbed the stairs, catching her breath at the landings, looking
down empty halls at laundry carts stacked with fresh linens for
unmade beds. She felt heat from hidden pipes radiate through the
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whitewashed walls, heard the elevator knock and clatter as it moved
from floor to floor.
On the sixth floor, the museum was silent. The notebook was
still open on the table; the clay lamp was where she had put it down.
And Eastbourne was gone.