City of Secrets

Stewart O'Nan

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781760293505
• eBook ISBN:
  9781952533709
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From master storyteller Stewart O'Nan, a timely moral thriller of the Jewish underground resistance in Jerusalem after the Second World War.

In 1945, with no homes to return to, Jewish refugees set out for Palestine in their tens of thousands.

City of Secrets follows one survivor, Brand, as he tries to regain himself after losing everyone he's ever loved. Now driving a taxi provided - like his new identity - by the underground, he navigates the twisting streets of Jerusalem as well as the overlapping, sometimes deadly loyalties of the resistance. Alone, haunted by memories, he tries to become again the man he was before the war - honest, strong, capable of moral choice.

He falls in love with Eva, a fellow survivor and member of his cell, reclaims his faith, and commits himself to the revolution, accepting secret missions that grow more and more dangerous even as he begins to suspect he's being used by their cell's dashing leader, Asher. By the time Brand understands the truth, it's too late, and the tragedy that ensues changes history.

A noirish, deeply felt novel of intrigue and identity written in O'Nan's trademark lucent style, City of Secrets asks how both despair and faith can lead us astray, and what happens when, with the noblest intentions, we join movements beyond our control.

1

When the war came Brand was lucky, spared death because he was young and could fix an engine, unlike his wife Katya and his mother and father and baby sister Giggi, unlike his grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. A Latvian and a Jew, he was interned first by the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again. By chance, he lived. While he was tempted almost daily (really, nightly), he wasn’t enough of a fatalist to return the gift. The winter after the war, with no home to go back to and no graves to venerate, he signed on a Maltese freighter and landed in Jerusalem, realizing his mother’s lifelong dream. In their dining room in Riga hung a bad lithograph of the walled city like a fortress out of Beau Geste, its stone golden in the numinous desert light. At the end of the seder, his Grandfather Udelson raised his glass to it. “Next year in Jerusalem.” For Brand it was next year, without the sweetness.

Like so many refugees, he drove a taxi, provided, like his papers, by the underground. His new name was Jossi. His job was to listen—again, lucky, since as a prisoner he had years of experience. With his fair hair and grade school Hebrew, he could be trusted. The British soldiers, the blissful pilgrims, the gawking tourists all wanted to talk. They spoke to him as if he were slow, leaning in close behind his ear, shaping each syllable.

Where was he from? What did he think of the trials? How did he like living in Jerusalem?

“I like it,” the man he was pretending to be said, instead of “It’s better than the camps,” or “I like living,” or, honestly, “I don’t know.”

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions—everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past. The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm. When he ran out of kerosene, his contact Asher brought him a jerry can liberated from their masters. Nightly the streetlights flickered and the power went out. His flop off the station road overlooked the Armenian cemetery where the whores took the soldiers after the bars closed, their electric torches weaving between the crypts. The rain fell on the domes and bell towers and minarets, filling the ancient cisterns beneath the Old City, fell on Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives and the desert beyond, thunder cracking over the Dead Sea. The dankness reminded Brand of his grandmother’s root cellar. As a boy he was afraid the door at the top of the rough stairs would swing closed of its own weight, the latch catching, leaving him in darkness. Now he imagined her hiding there, dirty-cheeked, surviving on jarred beets and horseradish, but of course she couldn’t be. The house, the town, the entire country was gone.

Sometimes in the night when his dreams and the lightning wouldn’t let him sleep, he dressed and went down to his taxi, an old black Peugeot he kept buffed to a mirror-like shine, and drove through the Zion Gate checkpoint into the Old City, as if he were going to pick up a fare, to see the widow. Her name was Eva, but when Asher had recommended her, he called her The Widow as if it were a code name, and though Brand was a widower himself, he couldn’t get it out of his head. She would always be another’s, that dead love private, untouchable.

How, after everything, was he still proud? There were worse things than second best.

Eva, his new Juliet, his new Eve. From Vilna, the Jerusalem of the North, with an urbane scorn for backward Latvia. She was older than Brand by more than a decade, her eyes baggy, her jet hair threaded with gray. Before the war she’d been an actress known for her Nora and Lady Macbeth. She wished she had her clippings to show him. In the right light he could see she’d been striking once, the dark hair and sky-blue eyes, high cheekbones and generous lips, but at the corner of her mouth a deep scar had healed badly, the nerve severed so that one side drooped in an exaggerated frown, like the mask of tragedy. Like Brand, she hated the Russians and Germans equally, absolutely. She was a joke among their cell, a ruined woman, useful for one thing. When she drank, she railed against the world, calling all men pigs.

“Not you,” she said. “You’re like me.”

How? he wanted to ask, but was afraid of the answer.

When she cried after lovemaking or while they ate breakfast at her small table, he knew it was for her husband, whose name she wouldn’t say. Brand had no money, and they’d come to a loose arrangement he soon regretted. He was forbidden to mention the word love, would be banished at the first hint of romance. She was not his, merely a comrade. She taught him Hebrew and English a phrase at a time, correcting his fledgling attempts with her perfect articulation, as if training him for the stage. In return, he chauffeured her to her assignations, waiting discreetly across the street, smoking and reading the paper, trying not to think of Katya, whose memory had sustained him in the camps and through the long, starry watches at sea. After Katya, whatever happened to him was nothing. The world was not the world.

Tonight the Zion Gate was jammed, traffic backed up along the wall, the rain falling in long needles through a red fog of exhaust. The line was stopped. In the stark wash of floodlights shining down from the sandbagged ramparts, soldiers were going from car to car with dogs, opening doors, pulling people out. The police hadn’t called curfew in weeks. There must have been an action, though the radio said nothing. He tried the underground station at the far end of the dial and got a blast of static.

Ahead, a soldier with a tommy gun was frisking a gray-bearded Arab in full robes and headdress while a dog nosed about inside the car, a grave insult if the man were Moslem, dogs being unclean. It was quite possible the man was a Christian; many of them were. Brand, being a transplant, couldn’t tell them apart. He was more concerned that the dog would muddy his seats, and wished he hadn’t thrown away his paper. It was too late to turn around, and he shut off his engine to save gas.

His papers were false, as was the Peugeot’s registration, the car itself stolen from Tel Aviv, repainted and fitted with a smuggler’s false-bottomed trunk. If taken in for questioning, Brand had no defense. He’d be detained as an illegal and a thief, interrogated, then jailed or deported, but all the times he’d been stopped, all the checkpoints he’d braved, the police had never challenged him. While his documents—like his current life, he might say—were passable forgeries, his livery license, a metal badge attached to the front bumper, and much harder to come by, was real. And yet, having been arrested before—once, in Riga, sitting in his booth in his favorite coffee shop—he knew that as a Jew you were never safe.

The dog clambered out of the Arab’s car, its tongue lolling. The soldier with the gun motioned for the man to open his trunk. For a moment Brand expected someone to be in it—an assassin, perhaps—expected that person to spring out with a pistol and sprint for the darkness, only to be cut down by gunfire. There was nothing, just a spare tire and a cardboard box the soldier turned over, dumping in the mud a knot of embroidered scarves popular with the tourists. As he prodded them with the muzzle, the Arab turned his head and spat. Before he could turn back, the soldier with the dog stepped up with a baton and clubbed him across the face, knocking him to the ground.

The dog charged, snarling, fangs bared, and as the old man scrabbled backward in the dirt, for a second—was it Brand’s imagination?—he looked directly at Brand, eyes beseeching, as if Brand might save him.

Sorry, Brand thought, biting his lip as if still deciding. You shouldn’t have spit.

The Tommy hauled the dog off by its collar. A squad came running, yanked the old man to his feet and hustled him away, bleeding, his robes muddied, leaving behind the pile of scarves and a single sandal. The soldier with the gun pulled the car off the road and left it there with the trunk open.

Brand moved up, straddling the scarves, and lowered his window. The soldier with the dog paused at the front of his car and noted his badge number.

“Papers.”

Brand handed them over. The dog was panting, white froth on its tongue. In the silver light its breath was a cloud. In the camps he’d seen a guard dog shake a toddler like a doll. He’d never trust one again.

“Where are you going?” Unlike Brand’s, the Tommy’s Hebrew was flawless. It was always a shock to think a Jew could be brutal, let alone his enemy.

“The Jewish Quarter.”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a fare there.”

“What address?”

There was no reason to lie. He did anyway. “Seventeen Beersheba Street.”

The soldier handed back his papers. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” Brand said, then, when he was well past him, his window closed, used a new word Eva had taught him: “Wanker.”

The berm was lined with deserted cars, their doors and trunks flung open, bags and clothing scattered about the ground like trash. The Arabs must have pulled something big, because when he finally reached the gate, the police were loading a dozen of them onto a sand-colored bus with wire mesh over the windows. At the end of the line, the old man shuffled after the others with his head bent.

Inside the wall, the Armenian Quarter was dark, the iron grates of the cafes along the Street of the Martyrs locked for the night. The radio told Brand nothing, which was typical. The Mandate didn’t broadcast its losses, only the glorious magnanimity of the Empire. He’d read about it in the Post tomorrow, with the obligatory editorial condemning both the Arabs and the British, as if their own position had somehow improved.

Like the rain, the constant politicking tired Brand out, and now, as he turned into the Street of the Jews, there was nowhere to park. He circled the Hurva Synagogue, searching, all the while recalling the old man’s face. What was Brand supposed to do? His father had likely cried out the same way, and his mother. No one had saved them. On a snowy day, while Brand was tending the balky presses of a commandeered stamping plant, the Germans marched the Jews of Riga into Crow Forest and shot them. Not en masse but one by one, making each new victim lie facedown, naked, between the legs of the last, before delivering a single bullet behind the ear, the method designed not merely to break their spirit but to save space. He stopped himself from seeing Katya in the pit by squeezing the steering wheel as if he might crush it till his knuckles hurt, and cursed the old man and the soldier for making him remember. It was late and he was cold. All he wanted was to lie in Eva’s warm bed and sleep.

A block in, the streets ended. The Quarter, like most of the Old City, was cloistered, a warren of stone. He found a spot by what was supposed to be a Roman bathhouse, ducked into the nearest lane and wormed his way back through the maze of cobbled alleys and wet steps, treacherous in the dark. The only sound was the rushing of downspouts, precious runoff sluicing along the gutters, dropping through the grates to the hidden cisterns below. Some nights, navigating the shadowy labyrinth with its vaulted galleries and courtyards and bazaars, Brand felt as if he’d traveled back in time. Others, coming to her half drunk and wildly grateful to be alive, guarding the happy secret of his myopic, impossible love, he saw himself caught up in an exotic adventure. He knew they were both illusions, knew precisely why he needed them. He was no hero, no Romeo, just a fool, untouched as yet by the Angel of Forgetfulness. Now, as he walked the long arcade of the market with its shuttered stalls and through the arched gate behind Eva’s boardinghouse, the lamp in her window that signaled she was busy confirmed his true station in the world.

He would wait. It was too late for pride. He’d done it before, in worse weather. In his flat there was nothing but the dregs of a bottle of arak, and tomorrow he had to get up and drive.

Farther down, there was a dry niche beneath the awning of a tinsmith’s shop. From the shadows he could watch her door. He made for it, only to discover the flaring ember of a cigarette.

“Jossi,” a voice he knew whispered, and the moon-like face of Lipschitz materialized from the darkness—his thick specs and piggy cheeks, a wet glint of teeth. “Asher said you’d come.”

Brand liked Lipschitz well enough, but he’d be damned if he’d stand in line. “I’ll come back.”

“We tried calling your landlady.”

“It’s okay.”

Lipschitz shook his head. “It’s not that. We need your car.” He pointed toward the door with his cigarette. “The password’s ‘Hezekiah.’”

Whatever the job was, after what happened at the checkpoint, Brand thought it couldn’t be good. And it was slapdash, badly planned. Lipschitz, who could barely see, was their watchman.

When Brand knocked, the voice that asked for the password wasn’t Asher’s but that of a Frenchman. The man who opened the door was burly as a lumberjack, with bushy red eyebrows and a rusty beard and a stubby pistol he returned to his coat pocket. It was a serious breach of protocol. To protect the movement, you knew only the members of your cell. Neither mentioned it as the Frenchman led him up the stairs to the landing.

“Your taxi’s here,” the man announced, and closed the door behind Brand.

“Jossi,” Asher called from the bedroom. “Get in here.”

The lampshade had been tossed aside, and the covers. In the glare of the bare bulb, on the bed he’d hoped to share with her, Eva and Asher were holding down a shirtless man dark as an Arab. The white sheets were bright with blood—the room stank of it. The man moaned with his eyes closed, rolling his head on the pillow.

“Over here,” Asher said, tipping his chin. Silver-haired and fit, he reminded Brand of his last ship’s captain, a lover of port wine and chess. His hands were busy pressing a bloodstained towel into the man’s stomach. “Hold this.”

Asher stood, hunched so Brand could duck beneath him and take his place. The towel was wet and surprisingly warm. When Brand pressed it against the wound, the man grunted and tensed, his legs kicking.

“Keep the pressure on,” Eva said. She held another towel to the man’s shoulder while Asher went to the bureau and tore open a gauze dressing. He stripped white tape off a roll and snipped it with scissors.

Despite his dark skin,...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS