Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  Maurice had not tried to tell her it was quite safe. She had been grateful for that. She knew very well that it operated without mishap day after day, week in, week out, carrying its passenger loads to the top of the fortress from the desert floor. He had realised that her anxiety came into the same category as her fear of flying, and that statistics did not help. He had tried to reassure her. He was a reassuring man. Not that he talked much. He sat next to her now in the coach, silently, holding on to the seat in front of him; but his very presence was supportive, his demeanour one of calm.

  Over the ice cream at Yoske’s, Kitty had confessed to other irrational fears, situations which she had learned to circumvent lest they disturb the even tenor of her life. Maurice had not come up with any magical solutions. He had merely listened while she talked. How she talked, as if she were drunk – on Coca-Cola! She had talked over coffee, and in the taxi, going back along the seashore, and on the beach road, along which they had strolled – to walk the ice-cream down – before returning to the hotel.

  She had not talked to anyone, not even to Sydney, as she had to Maurice – perhaps because after the holiday she would not see him again – about her feelings, her innermost fears. With Sydney she had discussed the children, the family, people who were known to them, events which had happened, the substantive components of their lives. The words that she spoke to Maurice and which were borne away over the night-time ocean, beneath the black sky and the bright stars, belonged to an inner life she had never before revealed to anyone but herself. Back in her bedroom she had been astonished at her own loquacity, as if a well had been uncovered, an undisclosed spring, and its outpourings had quenched the fire of indignation sparked off by the lobster.

  In the morning, in the bus, she had looked anxiously at the group outside Maurice Morgenthau’s hotel to see if he was there. She had put an uncertain hand on her hold-all on the empty seat next to her, not sure whether he wanted to sit beside her or whether he would take his place, as usual, at the back of the bus, as if they had not been to Yoske’s. He had taken the adjacent seat as if there were no other, as if it was his place – sat down and handed her an orange from his pocket by way of greeting.

  The cable car was worse than Kitty had expected. They were counted in like sheep. Through the window she could see the hazardous zig-zag of the snake path. She could have stayed on the bus. She had not come all this way, on her own, without Addie, to sit at the base of the citadel where her co-religionists had shown such courage. She searched unavailingly for her own. At the top of the mountain, far, far away, a second car was suspended. Between them slender and seemingly ineffectual cables were stretched taut. The plight of the passengers in the upper car seemed worse. Kitty’s time on the flat summit – presuming she did not die from heart failure on the way up – would be marred by anticipation of the descent. After the Valley of the Inscriptions, she should have known better. She was not going to put herself into such a situation again. But she would not have to. Tomorrow she was going home to the safety of the High Street where there were no ladders to climb, no cable cars suspended above the treacherous crags of an unfriendly valley. Tomorrow, if the plane did not crash – which was not, in Kitty’s book, outside the realms of possibility – she would be back in England.

  They seemed to be letting more and more people into the little cabin where the mood was light-hearted. Acceding to a request the holiday-makers shuffled towards the back of it. Kitty was hemmed in by Dutchmen and by Frenchmen and by Swedes. The lady from Nigeria was there, with her children, and the German with his camera. She looked for Maurice but he was staring out of the window eating an apple. She felt the press of bodies and the rise of the familiar panic as light-hearted reassurances were exchanged and the doors closed making escape impossible. She was not the only one who was apprehensive, but she was, she was convinced, alone in the grip of the sudden terror that seized her as the car jolted, flinging the tourists one against the other, and they were on their way. Kitty was by the window, had been jostled against it, but she could not look out. As the car climbed grindingly towards its twin, which came to meet it, she knew that below, the desert waited uncompromisingly; that it would accommodate her shattered body, and others from the crash, with as little difficulty as it had the broken bones of the Roman legions and the corpses of her fellow Jews who had made so noble a stand against them. She closed her eyes against the awesome space which surrounded the capsule as it hung, bejewelled by the sun, over the valley. When she opened them she saw the zippered jacket level with her eyes.

  “Another coupla minutes,” Maurice said.

  They had passed the opposing car and the stares of those, packed tight, who rode in it, and were approaching the platform.

  “Herod had some task.”

  Kitty knew that Maurice meant the conversion of the desert cliff into a fortress without the help of a cable car. Herod had built a wall on the mountain top, twelve cubits high and eight cubits wide, and on it constructed 37 towers. He had hewed cisterns out of the rock to provide water, and fortified the citadel against any enemy who might wage war on it. He had not reckoned that this fortress would be manned against his own legions by a crusading band of Jews.

  Within two or three yards of the platform the cabin came to a halt with so little assurance that Kitty was fearful lest they roll all the way down into the valley again, out of control. They were jerked up a yard; then back again, swaying. The mechanism had broken.

  “There’s still steps to climb,” Maurice said.

  We’re not there yet? Kitty was surprised that her thought had not been spoken. The words had jammed in her stricken throat. Another jolt. She glanced behind her into the barren valley with its excavated rectangles which had been Roman camps, and was immediately sorry.

  “So what’s the matter?” an Israeli voice enquired.

  There was a nervous riposte of comments in a confusion of languages. Kitty kept her eyes on the zippered jacket. A grating sound struck at her entrails and she wondered if one felt anything before hitting the ground. The remaining yards of cable were swallowed up and they came to a categorical halt, level with the ticket collector on his reassuring platform.

  Twelve

  With her talent for creating order out of chaos Sandra had transformed the flat as she had transformed Norman who could scarcely recognise it. The ugly, old fashioned contours had been disguised, its chill, grim spaces centrally heated, and its unattractive floors and peeling surfaces translated into gracefulness with deep pile carpet and with paper and with paint. It was as elegant as Sandra herself, an extension of her, as was Norman. She had been away for three weeks during which the light had gone out of his life. Since Sandra had entered it, it had not been so bleak.

  It was a bleak time of year. Reminders of Christmas – which Norman did not celebrate – all around him, and weather which froze his toes and his fingers and the locks of his car. There had been no Aunty Kitty to relieve the tedium of the evenings, and business, as it did annually, had ground to a virtual standstill. After the holiday it would pick up. It was the pattern in the residential property and the travel trade. No sooner had the forks come out of the plum puddings than thoughts would turn to dwellings – that were smaller or larger or nearer or farther – and holidays in the sun. It had been the longest three weeks that Norman could remember.

  He made the rounds of his relatives whom he had neglected since the advent of Sandra. With her image constantly before his eyes, her voice, with its Capetown accent in his ears, he had not enjoyed his visits, Aunty Mirrie in her primrose, spinster flat had given him soup from a packet, which she had reconstituted with boiling water, and a plate of cold salt-beef, like dried cardboard, with coleslaw from a plastic container, and asked him, wheedling, to ‘be a good boy’ and mend her fuse.

  At his Uncle Juda’s Hyde Park flat he had drunk coffee from Meissen cups. His Aunty Leonora had made excuses for not asking him to dinner – although they employed a cook – as they were packing f
or Gstaad. He had sat in the drawing-room among the objets d’art while his cousin, Vanessa, who was getting married in the spring, sat entwined, on the giltwood sofa, with the effete looking Nathan, heir to banking millions, when they should clearly have been in bed. Uncle Juda, whom he had not seen for some time, had fingered the material of his new suit, appraised the Jermyn Street shirt, the accessories which Sandra had chosen: “Boom in the property, Norman?” and “Have to find you a nice young lady,” his Aunty Leonora said. She was fussing over last minute arrangements for the holiday and had no intention of doing any such thing.

  He had sat with his Uncle Leon, shovelling semolina pudding into the obedient mouth, while his Aunty Beatty went to the cinema, and listened to her castigation of him for allowing Leon to wet himself, when she came back. He had driven to Bushey to visit his mother’s grave and had Sunday lunch with Freda and Harry. Aunty Freda had not been herself, efficient and managing. She dropped a sherry glass, smashing it, and had forgotten to make the gravy. She seemed snappy with Harry, which was unusual, and after lunch, excusing herself, had gone to lie down. “A headache,” Harry said, and told Norman it was the ‘change’. Norman nodded understandingly.

  They had been duty visits. To pass away the time without Sandra. Her call had been a clarion from paradise, her voice the sweetest music in his ear.

  “Norman…?”

  He had been expecting a client about a house in Avenue Road.

  “…I’m back!”

  He felt like picking up all the property particulars from his desk, flinging them into the air, and letting them drop, like confetti.

  “How have you been?”

  Lonely.

  “Fine,” he said. “You?”

  “Great. Just great. Look I know you’re busy…”

  What business could there be of the slightest importance?

  “They’re delivering the furniture in the morning,” Sandra said. “Come tomorrow night and you can sit on a real chair.”

  “My Aunty Kitty’s coming home. I promised to have dinner…”

  Friday was always a late and busy night at the office.

  “I’d like to see the furniture,” Norman said, as if chairs and tables were the be-all of his existence. “I’ll come in on my way to Aunty Kitty’s.”

  “My mother-in-law’s coming home from Israel tomorrow,” Sarah said. “I want to get her table ready for Friday night.”

  She sat in Mrs Halberstadt’s cluttered sitting-room with her notebook and pencil on her knee. She enjoyed her sessions with Mrs Halberstadt who, in straitened circumstances, sat amongst her riches – her books and her bronzes, her worn rugs and embroidered cushions – in her flat in Temple Fortune. Miron Halberstadt had been a businessman, unsuccessful because he had belonged to an old-fashioned world which had very fixed ideas of what was right and what was wrong. His failure had not bothered him. The love of his life had been rabbinic literature, evidence of which preoccupation filled, and over-flowed from the shelves on the walls. A quarter of a century had passed since he had died. His widow had used the time to further her education, which had been rudely interrupted in youth by Adolph Hitler, and she had been teaching Slavonic languages to Adult Education classes for many years. In addition, approved by Rabbi Magnus, amongst others, for her devotion to and her knowledge of Judaism – an enthusiasm which she shared with her late husband – she took on a small number of pupils, prospective converts, for practical religious instruction. Sarah was her favourite. Intelligent, enthusiastic, and warm, she wanted to encompass Judaism as she did Josh and her work and everything else she undertook, wholeheartedly and with love. In Mrs Halberstadt’s eyes, Sarah, by wanting to give to Judaism more than she expected to extract from it, was a true convert. Looking at the girl, with her long hair and topaz eyes matching her mohair sweater, she turned her attention to Friday nights.

  They had already dealt, to Mrs Halberstadt’s amusement, with the disaster of Sarah’s gefülte fish. Among her other attributes Mrs Halberstadt was an excellent cook and had earned her living at it – being the only work she was allowed to do – on her arrival in England as a refugee. In previous sessions they had discussed the importance of food – derided by those who did not understand and who saw it as a religion in itself – in the Jewish home. Food, said Mrs Halberstadt, defined the man; it was the symbol of domesticity, family and community whose values – in the world of ‘fast food’ and ‘take-aways’ – were in danger of being eroded. The shared partaking of it provided love, warmth and gratification, and security. A family dining together could shut out both the harshness of the outside world and unpleasant fantasies. The Jewish table determined the seasons. Friday night was its apotheosis.

  “On Friday night,” Mrs Halberstadt said, “up to eighteen minutes before sunset at the least, two candles, for the sake of shalom bayit, harmony in the home, and oneg Shabbat, Sabbath joy, are lit by the woman in the room where the meal is to be eaten…”

  Kitty had not felt so happy since Sydney had died and her euphoria, her disturbing sensations of light-hearted pleasure, filled her inexplicably with guilt although she knew very well that Sydney would not have wanted her to be sad.

  She had survived the cable car. The descent – suspended in the incandescent air, the pitiless sun, over the stony and implacable valley floor – had not been nice. From the top to the bottom, where they had ground to a reassuring halt, she did not think that she had drawn breath. When they’d touched the ground she’d thought – there was still the hazard of the flight home – that she just might see her family again. But it had been worth it. How it had been worth it! Standing on the table top of the mountain which was dotted with other groups, including one of the white-clad Baptists whose rendering of ‘Amazing Grace’ filled the air, looking down over the wild Judean desert, feeling herself at the strategically important gate of the Hasmonean kingdom, Kitty had listened while Avi had recited to his party the moving words of El’Azar’s last oration as he urged the zealots to suicide: ‘…long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but only God…now the time has come to prove our determination by our deeds. Let our wives die before they are abused and our children before they have tasted of slavery…and after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another, mutually, and preserve ourselves in freedom…let us die unenslaved by our enemies and leave this world as free men…’

  Letting her imagination – touched perhaps by the sun from which on the mountain top there was no shade – run riot, Kitty relived the heroism of her forebears. Later in the museum, she would see nuts and grains, a plait of hair and a woman’s shoe miraculously preserved. Her enthusiasm had not been doused by Maurice’s dry assertion later, in the coach, that Josephus had invented the fiction of the martyrs in order to please the enemy commander; Kitty preferred to believe the legend – that Masada had been the last outpost of Jewish resistance against Rome.

  They had lunched at the foot of the mountain, Kitty filling a tray for Maurice and herself, and afterwards descended through the salt marshes to the lowest spot on earth – the Sea of Sedom, Sea of Zobar, the Eastern Sea, the Arava Sea, the Asphaltum Sea, Bahar Lot, the Dead Sea, as it was variously called – which had been blasted open as if by some sorcerer and which was not a sea at all. Kitty had bathed in it before, on an excursion from Jerusalem, with Sydney, floating on the surface of the mineral laden waters – for in it no form of life could either swim or drown. She knew the routine. For Maurice it was the first time. Putting on her swim-suit in the ladies’ shower room, where afterwards she would rinse every particle of salt from her body, she looked in the mirror and wished, as she had intended before she came away, that she had lost some weight. There had been one consolation. In Israel, until now, she had felt neither plump nor old. It was different when you went to the Italian Riviera or the South of France.

  On the gritty beach she found that half the bus-load had changed and were in the water, lying in grotesque positions – supp
orted by the excessive buoyancy – with their toes in the hair. The other half stood – their cameras clicking, capturing the hilarity as bodies bobbed around like corks – on the shore. Kitty, self-conscious in her swim-suit, looked round for Maurice. He was a few yards into the water. Lying on it with his arms folded, in the sun. On his left forearm, blurred at the edges, as though they had been inscribed on blotting paper, were the irrefutable numerals of a concentration camp number. Kitty understood suddenly about the zippered jacket he never seemed to remove, about the cafeteria meals for which he would not stand in line, about the bread roll he had not allowed her to waste.

  Later, in the coach, she thought it surprising that she had been surprised. The seven numbers had shattered her equilibrium, pierced her susceptibilities. It was the first time she had spent her days with, talked at close quarters to a survivor.