Nineteen seventy-three. Another missing person. Close to home. Home was the Al Akbar Apartment House, West Bank, Jerusalem. It was a thirty-minute walk along a dusty goat track to the Jaffa Gate in the Old City, where I worked.
Sitting here in Adelaide, in my kitchen in 2021, I celebrate the forty-eighth anniversary of our friendship with our customary pot of Earl Grey. It was a friendship veiled in mystery, as was his unexplained departure from my life. Nineteen seventy-three was the year that I learnt about the intransience of life, a feature endemic to a war-torn country, and its lesson, that one commands only minimal control over fate.
I had arrived from the souk with the usual assortment of sweet honeyed pastries for our high tea. I busied myself setting up our space on the wrought iron and cerulean tiled balcony, which gave out onto desiccated hills, peppered with flat-roofed square concrete blocks, called apartment houses, generally occupied by poor Palestinian families. I called John’s name out loud, checked the communal kitchen and bathroom and proceeded down the dark corridor to his room.
His door was ajar. Wardrobe bare and chest of drawers empty, hanging perilously open. His dilapidated suitcase, gone. A hasty and seemingly unplanned flight. The floor was strewn with the flotsam of living: a discarded old sock, a single satin slipper, and scraps of paper torn from a notebook, and crunched into balls. The air was heavy with the stench of stale human body odour. A diaphanous streamer of fluff was suspended from the ceiling, floating in the cross-draught created by the gaping door and window shutters. Kneeling on all fours, I detected a travel-weary trunk under the bed. I tugged on it with one hand, bringing it into the sunlight. It was forsaken and devoid of contents, but for a few ancient beads. I pocketed them just as John had done before me. How disappointing, his pilfered stash of treasures gone, only the rubbish remaining. I stood frozen in place trying to decipher the messages hidden amongst the residue of his belongings. All evidence of his existence had evaporated into the oppressiveness of the hot desert air, leaving me to ponder his fate. A familiar shadow of dread descended upon me, its claws of grief and loss embedded quickly into my flesh. Throat constricted, my tongue drier than sandpaper. John Robertson: amateur archaeologist, retiree, English expatriate, a veteran volunteer-librarian at St George’s Anglican Cathedral in East Jerusalem, and my neighbour at Al Akbar had disappeared.
Memories of our conversations were running on a continuous loop through the fog in my head as I grappled for clues that might provide some explanation.
‘So, what brought you here after retiring? ’ My eye contact too uncomfortable for him to return.
Looking out into the heat haze across the hills, his distant gaze pulled back into focus, ‘I simply needed a change of scene. What about you, why are you here?’ deflecting my queries with practised skill.
His taciturn manner wasn’t born of shyness nor was he inarticulate. John Robertson could speak rapturously on those subjects that lifted his spirit and made him soar: literature, history, and the near-by archaeological digs that consumed his spare time. Months into our friendship this man remained an enigma, locked up and inaccessible to me.
Burnside Writers Group 