“Martha took off when the kids left home,” Ed said morosely. “With the philosophy professor. My best friend as a matter of fact. I didn’t remarry.”
Herb said nothing. Later Kitty heard from Maurice that he had lived for years with the drama critic of his newspaper who had taken his own life in a fit of depression.
“Anyone hear the news?” Mort asked.
“Pictures of Sidon,” Herb said. “Lebanese women waiting in line for water, wandering around the rubble of their houses. Reminded me of Europe during the war.”
Kitty couldn’t imagine the rotund Herb as a soldier.
“I was a cook,” he said as if he had read her thoughts.
“Your Begin thinks it’s still 1940,” Ed addressed Mort, “running after ghosts. He thinks he’s the new Jesus Christ or something. You’d think that every bomb they drop on Beirut lands on the head of some terrorist.”
“The arms dumps are in the camps,” Mort said.
“That gives us the right to kill civilians because they weren’t smart enough to get out? Where did we get to be so cynical? You know who’s a terrorist? Menachem Begin’s a terrorist. A terrorist with the world’s best armed forces at his disposal, for his own use. Because 1,500,000 children were murdered by the Nazis, does that give him the right to bomb Beirut? You know what he’s doing? He’s not only sacrificing Israeli lives in a war that doesn’t officially exist, occupying West Beirut in an invasion that doesn’t exist, more important he’s killing the moral integrity of a wonderful people. Who’s going to feel sorry for a victim who created his own victims? Ask Mo if he wants to bomb Beirut.”
“What do you do with somebody who won’t negotiate?” Mort said. “‘No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel’.”
“Women and children you don’t bomb…”
“You got war, you got suffering,” Mort said, “and we don’t get any favours for TV. You’d think the Israelis were a gang of thugs.”
“They made up the pictures?” Ed asked.
“OK. Let me ask you something. Where were the cameras for the last seven years when the PLO were terrorising the Lebanese Christian community? Where were the cameras in Afghanistan, the Falklands, Iran and Iraq…?”
“Do me a favour!” Herb said. And to Maurice. “You want to give me the plates?”
“Why did Israel enter Lebanon in the first place? I’ll tell you. Number one to get the PLO out of the second country they’d nearly destroyed. Number two to ensure adequate security for the northern settlements of Israel…”
“The principle of military necessity does not excuse the massive destruction of buildings.” Herb took the plates from Maurice.
Mort shook his finger. “Over 10,000 commando raids have been carried out against Israelis, not to mention the murders in London, Paris, Athens, Madrid, Washington. The hijackings, bombings, kidnappings by the Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, all trained and financed by the PLO…”
Herb snorted. “The eggs are up.”
“…when the assassination attempt was made this year on Schlomo Argov, outside the Dorchester Hotel in London, the Israeli Airforce – not unreasonably – attacked two known terrorist bases in Beirut without a single civilian casualty. The PLO began a twenty-four-hour attack on Kiryat Shemona and Nahariya, civilian targets; they set the whole of Northern Galilee alight. Only then was ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ launched.”
“It’s enough already,” Maurice said opening his freezer which to Kitty’s surprise seemed to contain nothing but loaves of bread. “We’ve got company.”
“Maybe I don’t want to eat breakfast with an antisemite,” Mort said, spreading jelly on his toast with the same knife he used for his eggs.
Herb pointed his spatula. “Because I don’t endorse every move Israel makes, that makes me an enemy?”
Maurice put four slices of bread into the toaster. “Don’t listen.”
“It’s the same at home,” Kitty said. “Rachel and Josh aren’t speaking.”
She ate her eggs and the wheat toast Maurice piled on to her plate, marvelling at her appetite, and listened to the conversation, like a shuttlecock, going back and forth across the table as it had in London and was surely doing in Melbourne and Johannesburg, in Montreal and Brussels.
“Don’t you agree, Kitty,” Herb said, topping up her coffee, “that until Israel recognises the legitimate right of the Palestinians, including the right of self-determination, there can be no lasting peace?”
They were asking her opinion, waiting for her reply concerning the Palestinians. They were all waiting. Mort, as if she were a politician about to issue come important statement, Ed with his fork in mid-air, Maurice with an expression of what she strongly suspected was adoration. Busy, first with Rachel’s wedding and later with her plans to come to New York, Kitty had not really had time to analyse her own reactions to the conflict in the Middle East. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation she had a sneaking suspicion that the Jews, who had a long history of being persecuted, should somehow behave better than others. In any case she did not feel that the Palestinian question was ever going to be resolved by killing Palestinians. War, as far as Kitty was concerned, was defined in derelict homes and orphaned children rather than in terms of right or wrong.
“Let the Arab leaders recognise the rights of the Palestinians,” Mort said, without waiting for Kitty to answer. “Jordan is also Palestine, even though, like Israel, it happens to be called by another name. What I’d like to know is how the 600,000 Arabs who ran away in 1948 became 4 million ‘Palestinian’ refugees. I’ll tell you. They’re migrants, needy souls of other nationalities, who’ve gone to the camps for shelter and have become human weapons in a holy war that will never end. And you know why? Because ever since 1948 the ‘refugees’ and their descendants have been used for political purposes – the Lebanese government actually forbids the rebuilding of Palestinian houses anywhere in the country – they force them to be refugees, to live in camps, because they want to keep their hatred directed against Israel!”
Kitty had to pinch herself. Yesterday she had been Carol’s mother, handing over the flat to her eldest daughter and the children, concerned with finding sufficient sheets and clearing away her more precious knick-knacks from the path of Mathew, who at three was into everything, and not twenty-four hours later here she was on the other side of the Atlantic sitting in Maurice’s kitchen with a group of men, discussing the political situation.
Ed got up from the table and took his dishes to the sink. “Why don’t we take Mort to the park and try to knock some sense into him?” he said to Herb.
“It’s too hot.” Herb was on his fifth piece of toast. Kitty looked up in time to see Ed giving him a conspiratorial wink. Herb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and shot up like a little rubber bullet. “Oh, sure, sure. You coming Mort?”
“There’s enough hot air in here.” He looked from Maurice to Kitty. “OK. I just remembered. I have to go to the library.” They clustered by the door. Like a comedy act, Kitty thought, Ed so tall, Herb so short, Mort in his scarlet track-suit. Herb produced a gift-wrapped parcel from his carrier-bag, holding it out to Kitty. “We want you to have this.”
“A small token,” Mort said.
Ed smiled shyly: “From the Friday Afternoon Club.”
Before Kitty could thank them they were gone, leaving her alone with Maurice. Remembering the poker game was Tuesdays and Thursdays she said: “Why the Friday Afternoon Club?”
Maurice looked uncomfortable. “If you assume you’re going to live to be seventy, seven decades, and think of each decade as a day of the week starting with Sunday, then the four of us are on Friday afternoon. Aren’t you going to open it?”
It was a book, the collected stories of Bernard Malamud. At home people gave her flowers and chocolates. There was an inscription on the fly-leaf. “Enjoy the Big Apple”, signed “Ed Benedetti, Herb Bograd and Mort Zuckerman�
�. Kitty was overwhelmed by the welcoming gesture of Maurice’s friends, her transmogrification. To her horror she felt her eyes fill with tears.
Maurice led her to the sofa from where she could see the wretchedness of his easel. He put a hand on hers. “It’s going to be all right, Kitty. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Six
“Mrs Klopman,” the houseman said, looking at Rachel’s notes.
“Ms,” Rachel said.
As usual the reiteration of her married name made her feel vulnerable, as if she were personally inviting upon her head the heaped blows of two thousand years of persecution.
The houseman, according to the badge on his white coat, one Dr Goldberg, looked up from his notes and, unbeknownst to the midwifery sister whose skin had the hue and patina of milk chocolate and whose name was Patel, recognised Rachel whom he had never met. The unspoken acknowledgement of their shared background, their common fate, disturbed Rachel as much as did the thoughts which made their way unbidden into her mind following the pronouncement of her name. She was not like her father-in-law, Patrick’s father, whose entire horizon was bounded by things Jewish and by Jews. In the mornings, no matter what was taking place elsewhere in the world, he searched his broadsheet for news of Israel or domestic items involving Jews. In the evenings, on his TV screen, he picked out Jewish actors, comedians, politicians, analysing the proportions in their veins of Jewish blood. Applying the same standards he scanned the book reviews (Jewish authors), public opinion polls (the Jewish vote), the Honours Lists (Jewish accolades), and the obituary columns (Jewish deaths). Notwithstanding this obsession he was not, Rachel observed, a practising and observant Jew as her father had been but was possessed of what he himself called a “Jewish heart”, assessing others according to whether or not they supported Jewish charities and unable to decide whether or not he liked them until he ascertained their views on Israel.
Patrick considered that his father’s parochial attitudes, searching for Jewish involvement in the least likely places, had been a contributary factor to his own rejection of Judaism. Neither he nor Rachel, despite their upbringing, lived a Jewish life. When they crossed the threshold of the Klopman house in Winnington Road it was as if they entered a country for which there was no longer a visa in their passports, as if they trod upon alien soil. Since his childhood, according to Patrick, his mother had been an embarrassment to him, stifling his identity both as an individual and as a Jew. From his first days at prep school there had been notes excusing him from swimming or gymnastics every time he sneezed, setting him apart. Later on she had always been coming to see the headmaster on one pretext or another concerning Patrick’s prowess. She had worried when he had put his name down for a university (notwithstanding the fact that it was Cambridge) which would take him away from London and her jurisdiction, and when, before going up to it he had set out overland to Turkey, she had slipped a cheesecake into his rucksack.
On the face of things he had long ago disentangled himself from the stranglehold of his mother’s affections but her solicitude had left its mark. If Patrick did not eat (although now it was spare-ribs rather than salt-beef) at regular intervals he became anxious and ill-tempered. If he shivered he believed he was coming down with ’flu. He worried about Rachel if she was late home, and fussed over the child she was carrying. It was hardly surprising, Rachel said, considering the neuroses which were the birthright with which his mother had endowed him, that he had opted, as his medical speciality, for psychiatry.
Rachel associated herself neither with Herbert, with his Jewish jokes and “spot the Jew” fixation, nor with Hettie and her obsession with the nutritional well-being of her family, more appropriate to the days when starvation was a constant threat. Whence then stemmed her unmistakable feeling of rapport with the white-coated Dr Goldberg whom she had not set eyes upon until this moment? She was not religious, had cast off as anachronistic and burdensome the shackles of orthodoxy imposed upon her by her late father, and on her visits to Israel she had felt herself to be a stranger – more at home in France or Italy – and had certainly not experienced the sensation, claimed by others, that she had come home.
While she lay, white-shrouded on the bed, watched by the pool dark eyes of Sister Patel who with her kind were shamelessly exploited to shore up the crumbling infrastructure of Britain, as her own antecedents had that of the garment industry, Dr Goldberg checked on the progress of her pregnancy.
“Everything seems to be fine,” he said, as if the embryo carried by Rachel were no different from those of the other women in the antenatal clinic. “Any problems?”
Rachel smiled. She was not nauseous like her sister Carol, plagued by every minor complication of her condition like her sister-in-law Sarah. She was Ceres, an earth mother, would drop her children like puppies, after which she would proceed on her own two feet, unaided to the postnatal ward. She took a letter from her handbag and gave it to Dr Goldberg.
“What’s this?”
“A list of my wishes for when I go into labour. I don’t want there to be any mistakes. I want to remain upright, to be delivered without an episiotomy, to breastfeed on an unrestricted basis and to keep the baby with me at all times.”
“You’re a very aggressive young lady.”
“Assertive,” Rachel corrected him. “I’m not attacking anyone. I’m merely expressing my views. I don’t want other people to take decisions for me. To run my life. There’s one more thing – I don’t want to be electronically monitored.”
Dr Goldberg looked doubtful. “There could be a slight increase in risk to the baby…”
“What about the risk of allowing technology to replace loving human contact – which will be provided by my labour partner – in the place of birth?”
“Will that be all?”
“For the moment.” Rachel swung her legs over the bed.
“Three weeks then, Ms Klopman,” Dr Goldberg said.
“See you,” Rachel said.
“Not me. I’m off to the Middle East tomorrow.”
“Israel?”
“Lebanon.”
Rachel stood still with her mouth open. Sister Patel wanted to hurry her out of the cubicle, there were other patients waiting.
“They need volunteers,” Dr Goldberg said. “I feel I have to do something.”
“For the Arabs?”
“I feel no compunction about supporting justice for the Palestinians as much as for the Jews. There is an Israeli people and there is a Palestinian people and we must respect their identity if we want them to respect ours.”
“Dr Goldberg!” Sister Patel said.
“I’m coming.”
“I’m not suggesting one mustn’t care about the Palestinians,” Rachel said, “most Jews are not insensitive to the feelings of those who have been cruelly misled into believing that they are entitled to still more land. I’m talking about the PLO, who have robbed the Lebanese of sovereignty in their own country.”
“And now they’re being murdered by the Israelis!”
“Whom they welcomed with open arms after six years of anguish…”
“Dr Goldberg, please!”
“The tanks and guns found in Lebanon so far,” Rachel said, trying to look dignified in her white hospital gown, “are enough to equip an army of a quarter of a million, Dr Goldberg. We are not talking about Israel’s prestige in the world – we are talking about her life!”
Disturbed by Dr Goldberg and his views – he was as misguided as Josh – Rachel decided to take the rest of the morning off from her Uncle Juda’s art gallery where she was working until her child was born. She would have coffee with Carol whose head was not bothered by political issues and whose horizons were conveniently bounded by her children, extant and expected, and her home.
She found Carol and Sarah at the kitchen table on which there was a ring cake made by Carol, identical to that which her mother had been turning out for as long as Rachel could remember, and a half-finished letter, wh
ich Carol had been writing to Kitty in New York.
Seven
Kitty had never seen so many books. Sydney had had a glass-fronted bookcase in the hall in which he kept his sets of dark blue Festival Prayer books lettered with gold (one for himself and one for Kitty), his Pentateuch with its commentary by a former Chief Rabbi, the three volumes of the Laws and Customs of Israel (everything from Rules of the Morning Prayer to the Laws concerning certain forbidden foods, the customs surrounding birth, and the precepts concerning death), a Maimonides reader which had been his father’s and the dark blue volumes of the Jewish Encyclopaedia.
Maurice’s books – which provided him, he said, with the company and spiritual presence of the best and greatest of the human race – climbed from floor to ceiling in both living-room and bedroom and spilled out into bookshelves along the corridor. They were written in Yiddish (Scholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim), German (Heine – who with Mozart, according to Maurice, brought man closest to the ultimate mystery of the universe – Goethe, and Schiller, as well as the twenty volumes of Der Gross Brockhaus), and English (late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Rashi and the Christian Scholars), and touched upon the fields of literature, religion, sociology, psychology, medicine, history and ethics. Apart from Cora, the twelve stone maid from Atlanta who came once a week to clean (and would not let even a cup of coffee pass her lips before pronouncing grace) and flicked a desultory feather duster over their spines, he did not like anyone to touch them.
He had in his sitting-room a complicated looking music centre with giant speakers which flanked his easel though no television (Maurice said he was very particular about whom he let into his room) but he bought one with a remote control switch for Kitty so that she could operate it from her bed. He wanted to but her everything. She only had to ask.
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