“I hate flying,” Kitty announced to her own surprise. Since Sydney had died she had been diffident about addressing strangers, feeling that she was imposing, thrusting the burden of her widowhood peremptorily upon others.
The woman shrugged, in an age old gesture. She was sun-tanned, small and dark, wearing a jersey suit.
“If it creshes, it creshes, I’m not so important.”
Kitty recognised the lilt of the Israeli accent, the philosophical approach of its people. She wished she could be as dispassionate but everything seemed to worry her.
“You come from Tel Aviv?” Kitty asked.
“Jerusalem. I’ve been to visit my brother in Hendon…”
“We used to live in Hendon.”
“Mayflower Gardens.”
“Mayflower Gardens!” Kitty said. “We were at 26. The house with the monkey-puzzle tree.” She remembered that it was no longer there. A thought struck her. “You’re not Archie Bensons’ sister-in-law?”
“Arieh Ben Zion!” The woman laughed, “I’m Ruhama.”
“It’s a small world,” Kitty said. “Archie used to walk to synagogue with my late husband. Wasn’t it you…?”
Ruhama helped her. “My husband, Moshe, was killed in the Mitla Pass in the sixty-seven war. He was a tank commander. Now they’re giving back the Sinai.” Her voice was bitter.
“I’m going to Sharm-El-Sheikh,” Kitty said. The tour had been booked to the southern-most point of that ‘great and terrible wilderness’ which intruded itself into the head of the Red Sea.
“Ofira!” Ruhuma said, giving the reef bound bay its Hebrew name.
For Kitty it would be a day out along the coast of the triangle of land that lay barrenly, with its mountains and its desert, between Africa and Asia. For Ruhama there was blood on the sand.
“My oldest son, Baruch, was shot down in the Yom Kippur war,” Ruhama said.
Kitty thought of Josh, safe at home.
“…my baby, Amos, is doing his army service.”
Kitty was silent. In the diaspora they collected money for the defence of Israel. She tramped the streets for Jewish Women’s Week, for their personal contribution. It was blood from stones. In the cold and in the wet she went from house to house knocking on doors. It was a thankless task. Sometimes, in the bigger houses, the au pair was instructed to tell her that no one was at home when upstairs she distinctly saw the curtains move. She wrote receipts, awkwardly, on windy doorsteps, for derisory sums when inside there were hothouse flowers and luscious smells of exotic meals wafted from the kitchens. Frequently there were excuses. She’d heard them all. ‘I haven’t been to the bank.’ ‘I’ve run out of cheques.’ ‘I’m late for an appointment.’ She’d offer to call back but it was never convenient. Kitty didn’t suppose it had been very convenient for Moshe Ben Zion to give his life defending the Mitla Pass, nor for his son Baruch to die at the controls of his Skyhawk. At the more humble homes she often fared better. Women surrounded by mouths to feed would reach deep into their purses, and pensioners, living on their own, were proud to contribute, secure in the fact that they would not be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice like Ruhama Ben Zion.
“Arieh – Archie – sent my ticket,” Ruhama said. “It was his ruby wedding. They gave me a week off from my job. I work in the supermarket six days a week, eight in the morning until seven at night. In the evenings I teach at an Ulpan.”
The supermarket all day and English to foreigners at night! With the absurdly high rate of inflation in Israel Kitty knew that Ruhama’s situation was not unusual. She felt ashamed of her soft life in unthreatened territory.
“It was wonderful,” Ruhama said, speaking of the ruby wedding. “All the family. Do you have a family?”
Kitty took out the photographs she carried in her handbag.
“This is my daughter, Carol, her husband Alec, and the children; my daughter Rachel – she’s getting married in the summer – and my son Josh…”
Kitty looked at Ruhama but she did not flinch.
“…with my daughter-in-law, Sarah. She’s converting to Judaism.”
Sarah’s decision had been announced to Kitty on her birthday. She could not have had a better present. Much as she loved Sarah there was always at the back of her mind the displeasing thought that were she and Josh to have children they would not be Jewish. The Shelton name would, in Sydney’s eyes, have been disgraced.
The catalyst for the decisive step that Sarah was taking had been her love for Josh. Although apparently not committed as his father had been, Sarah had come to realise that – despite his denials – Josh and his religious heritage were one; that his Judaism went deeper than the practices he did not observe; that its tenets were a component of his corpuscles, its precepts embodied in his bones. It was a part of Josh she had no access to. His mother, Rachel and Carol, his uncles and his aunts, had more right of entry to the core of his being than she. If Sarah was motivated by jealousy it did not invalidate her decision for which there was another consideration. By marrying Josh she had overnight become allied to Judaism although she had not embraced it. She was asked questions as if she had joined the rabbinate instead of just getting married to Josh. ‘Why do they consider themselves the Chosen People?’ and ‘Why do they always wear little hats?’ She felt constrained to answer the queries, which until she had consulted Josh, left her floundering for replies. In marrying him, she had, she discovered, become one of ‘them’ without becoming one of them. She wanted to be able to answer the questions, to be accepted by Carol and Rachel and by Aunty Beatty and Uncle Juda, who looked at her as if she was from another planet. She was. She knew nothing of Sabbaths that began on Friday, Festivals threaded like golden markers through the year, laws and customs whose origins and minutiae fascinated her. She wanted to understand where Josh came from, what was his creed. “I would like to become Jewish,” she said. The resolution was her own. It echoed the prayer of the most famous proselyte of all. ‘Where you go, I will go…’ She wanted to share the fortunes of the Jewish people the darkness as well as the bright joys of their triumphs. ‘Your people will be my people…’ She would identify with national aspirations. ‘Your God will be my God.’ She was prepared to serve as a witness to Israel’s religious commitment. ‘…where you die, I will die, and there shall I be buried.’ She would defend Jewish beliefs and practices even to the grave. She went weekly for instruction to a Mrs Halberstadt but it was Kitty who took her by the hand.
In Kitty’s kitchen Sarah was initiated into the mysteries of kashrut – forbidding the eating of certain foods, including animals that had neither cloven hooves nor chewed the cud – the prohibition against the blood which carried the life of the animal, and the injunction that the killing must be done in the most humane way. The laws, Kitty told her, had a deep moral significance which raised the trivialities of the daily round into a continuous act of worship. They could no longer be defended on grounds of hygiene, but must be regarded as a kind of spiritual calorie count, intended to prevent obesity of the spirit and insensitivity of the soul. They refined the character, raised man from the beast, and as such were perennially valid.
Sarah watched while Kitty soaked her meat for half an hour in water, drained it for a further hour sprinkled with coarse salt, on a special board. She listened while Kitty explained that the prohibition concerning the mixing of meat, or meat products, with dairy foods extended to cooking utensils and even the plates on which the meals were served. In Kitty’s kitchen there were cutlery, china and saucepans for the ‘meat’ dishes and some, in different designs, for the ‘milk’. There were two specially designated washing-up bowls, with their own cloths and brushes, and tea-towels in distinctive colours. By her side in the kitchen, watching her prepare for the festivals, listening, while Kitty explained that each commandment must be carried out as beautifully as possible according to one’s means, Sarah discovered that around her was a world of warmth, affection and stability and that it was just such a home that s
he wanted to build together with Josh.
She did not ask Kitty for the formula for she realised there was none to give. The haven that Kitty had created with Sydney, and now strove to perpetuate on her own, was based on a practical code embracing both the highest level of human love and the most humble domestic chore – to which Sarah did not have the key. That some of the practices were irksome there was no doubt. Josh found them so. Looking beyond them, Sarah was aware that they represented a shared sense of purpose in what seemed the most commonplace things. The symbols were intangible. The rewards, in her mother-in-law’s face, in her life, were visible. Kitty knew that her replies, in response to Sarah’s increasing flood of questions, were inadequate. Sydney would have known the answers but he would not have spoken them. Not to Sarah.
The mayhem in the cabin presaged the end of the journey, which was confirmed by the captain, together with the information that the temperature in Tel Aviv was some eighteen degrees higher than it had been in London. After Kitty’s internal flight south it would be higher still. A steward, picking his way through aisles awash with debris, handed out landing cards. Kitty took one. He did not give one to Ruhama who was going home. Looking at it – name, address, date of birth, place of birth, destination – she realised that there was no helpmeet, no Sydney, beside her and that she must fill it in. Sydney had always taken it upon himself to do these tasks, just as she had automatically carried out such chores as were necessary in the home.
Kitty knew that today things were arranged differently. Carol and Alec in Godalming shared the responsibilities of Peartree Cottage, the children, and their lives together equally. She could not imagine Sydney changing nappies and washing dishes as Alec did, and she had not herself adjusted to the endless filling in of forms with which her daily life seemed now to be strewn. Sometimes, in the case of shares and their allotment, or declarations for the tax inspector, they appeared to be couched in a language with which she was not familiar. She was doing her best to master it but found it hard, as beginnings always seemed to be. She discovered, in small things of which she knew nothing – insurance policies and paperwork relating to the car – how Sydney had sheltered and protected her and that every day there were new skills she must learn.
The pressure on her ears announced the plane’s descent. A screaming baby demanded attention, and a sickening and prolonged crunch directly beneath her directed her thoughts once more to her morality, although she knew it was the landing gear. The other passengers, trussed into their rows like battery chickens, seemed unperturbed. Kitty, stiff with fear, could not understand it. She picked up the magazine from the fish-net pocket attached to the seat in front of her and with clammy hands and fingers which were not steady, flicked through its pages. The maps of the world crisscrossed by the thin red lines of the air routes, diminished her; Bordeaux and Bucharest, Addis Ababa and Alice Springs; she had seen so little of it, knew even less, felt her own insignificance in the pale blue expanse of the named and numerous seas. In less than five minutes, if – God forbid, which she doubted – the plane did not crash with herself blown to smithereens, she would be in Israel which boasted four of them. Next to her, her neighbour was chattering about the whereabouts of her passport, speculating as to whether there would be anyone at the airport to meet her. Kitty did not answer. She did not feel like talking. As if her words would fall like stones upon the fuselage causing it to shatter. She gripped the arms of her seat with knuckles that were white as the engines whined, and the magazine fell from her lap to the floor. She heard the sound of prayers and added her own silent one. Inadvertently glancing towards the window, she saw the white sands of the seashore looming towards her at an unnatural angle, the skyline of Tel Aviv beneath her gaze. She was convinced, as they descended, rapidly now, over the grey-green water, that any minute she would be with Sydney, all her troubles, all her problems would be over, and wondered would her children mourn. There was a jolt. She had been right. The plane glided swiftly, smoothly along the runway fighting a battle of opposing forces with the airbrakes. She dared to turn her head, amazed that round her there were smiling faces and that she was alive. Together with others, rhythmically, spontaneously, she started to clap.
Five
Norman picked up Kitty’s postcard from where it lay on the mat. Unbelievable blue fishes, flat – like the plaice on the bone his mother used to grill for him – swam to and fro, their backs striped with broad black bands, through the lucid waters of the Gulf of Eilat. He had missed his aunt. Not only for the dinners which twice a week she enjoyed preparing for him – having no one else to cook for – but for the wise and sympathetic ear of his surrogate mother, not yet having come to terms with the death of his own.
It was five months to the day – he marked them off on his calendar – since he had as usual taken Dolly her cup of tea, and she had not answered his habitual morning enquiry as to how she had slept, what sort of a night she had had. He had not thought it strange. Had put the teacup on the bedside table, opened the curtains to let the daylight fall on the thin carpet. Dolly’s sleeping pills – which sometimes she took late – had, he imagined, not worn off. He shook her arm. Since her stroke she had aged. Her skin was slack like an old woman’s. Not that she was young. Norman himself was forty-two and his mother had been getting on for thirty when he was born. She had shrunk. He had watched the gradual process, his heart bleeding, daily. She had never been a big woman but as he helped her down the stairs, into her chair, into her bed at night, he had felt the bones through the flesh, the increasing lightness of her frame. He shook her again. There was no response. She usually woke with a grumble, about her heartburn (for which she blamed Norman who had brought her night-time biscuits), her aching back, her lack of sleep.
“Drink your tea before it gets cold!”
Often she sent him down to make another cup.
A tiny dart of fear, the first, entered Norman’s mind. He looked at the sleeping pills. Perhaps she had taken too many. Her hand was on the coverlet. He took it, the knuckles thickened with rheumatism. It was cold.
“Mother!”
He had dreaded this day.
“Mother!”
There had been no warning. Nothing unusual. Death had come in the night and taken her. Away from Norman. He stood stupidly in the sun looking at the old woman whom, since the death of his father, he had cared for at the expense of his own life.
The family had taken over, Beatty, Freda, his Uncle Juda. Norman had done what he was told. Had played his part in the funeral – unable to accept that it was his mother in the simple elm box – the prayers, the tying up of loose ends with the solicitors. When it was over he had paced the rooms of the terraced house where – six foot tall and heavily built – he had always seemed too large, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dolly. He saw her often. In the kitchen before her illness, cooking his favourite food; in the sitting-room where she knitted his pullovers which were never quite right at the hem; in the garden, putting bread out for the birds. When he put the kettle on it echoed with her voice – as did the narrow bathroom where she did his washing. ‘Where are you going, Norman?’ and ‘What time will you be home?’ He missed the security of it, the structure which it had given to his life.
It was inevitable that he thought of Della, the fiancée he had surrendered in consideration of his mother. He had chosen Dolly who had no one else. For weeks now he had mustered his courage, rehearsed the lines he had composed, in the car on the way to work, before the mirror as he shaved. ‘My mother died…is dead…no longer with us…passed away. I’m free. I love you. Have always loved you. Will you marry me?’ From the mirror Della’s voice mocked him for deserting her in favour of his mother; her laugh scorned his proposal. The plan, which he found himself unable to put into operation, occupied his waking moments and bedevilled his sleep. At Bluestone and Blatt, the Estate Agent’s where he worked, they put Norman’s agitation, his abstraction, down to his mother’s death. The turmoil in his head and in his heart presage
d, he thought, his own. Unable to tolerate his self destruction he took his courage in his ungainly hands. Fortified by the large whisky, which since his mother had died had become an evening ritual, enabling him to confront it alone, he drove to Kingsbury.
Della’s father opened the door.
“Norman!”
The flat had not changed. Della’s mother, still dressmaking, took the pins from her mouth to greet him. They had read of his bereavement and commiserated. Norman’s eyes circumvented the neat sitting-room looking for Della. For a sign.
“Is Della here?” He thought he would choke.
Her parents exchanged glances.
“Didn’t you know?”
Died. Dead. Della. He was being strangled. Thought he must fall.
“Are you all right Norman?”
“Open the window, Mother, it’s very hot in here.”
“Della’s not here,” her father said.
“I thought you knew,” her mother said, pulling the net curtain aside to let in the breeze.
“She got married.”
“Lives in New Zealand.”
“We had a letter…”
“Ever so happy…”
“We’re going in the winter…”
“To visit…”
“They’ve invited us…”
“Geoff, his name is…”
“She’s expecting a baby…”
“New Zealand?” Norman said.
“Ever such a nice boy.”
He didn’t remember getting home. He had no recollection of finishing the whisky. In the morning he found the bottle on top of the television set. Empty. Nothing inside. There was nothing inside Norman as he went to work, came home, went to bed, went to work again, came home, went to bed…until Sandra came into his life; from South Africa. And Aunt Kitty. He told Aunt Kitty about Sandra. To verify it. He did not believe it himself.
Rose of Jericho Page 4
