Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  Rachel pulled off the cardigan and the tee shirt and the granny vest she was wearing as one, and stood bare-breasted, in her scarlet tights and shocking pink leg warmers, before the mirror in the salon.

  “Isn’t she tiny?” Rika said, spanning her narrow waist with her tape measure. Her eyes were moist. “She’ll make a beautiful bride, Kitty, like a living doll!”

  Fifteen

  The letter, in its blue and red battlemented flimsy airmail envelope, addressed in a spidery hand which had not been learned in the United States, was waiting on the mat for Kitty when she got home, having dropped Rachel at the library. She had not expected it. She had sent Maurice Morgenthau a postcard showing Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and had anticipated an aerial view of Manhattan or a close-up of the Statue of Liberty in return. She put her apple cake into the oven, made herself some coffee – of which she was in need after her morning with Rachel – and sat down to open the letter which cheered her up even before she read it.

  Few people wrote to her. There was a cousin in Greenock whose husband had found difficulty in holding a job, even before the days of mass unemployment, to whom she used to send the children’s outgrown clothing when they were young and with whom she tried not to lose touch. There were notices of forthcoming events and broadsheets containing news from the various societies to which she belonged. Apart from that Kitty’s mail consisted of bills, from which when Sydney was alive he had protected her, and appeals for donations from the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief, and from the Home for Aged Jews – for which she sent the Head Housekeeper five pounds for nine loaves of bread, or ten pounds for fifty-five pints of milk – and from the Jewish Blind Society which Sydney had supported and which she considered it her duty to continue to support. Her immediate family, and Sydney’s extended one, all lived within telephoning distance. A personal letter was a rare treat. She drew the pages from the long envelope and unfolded them:

  Dear Kitty

  How goes it with you? The snow here is three feet deep in places and the temperature nine degrees below. I look out my window and try to take myself back to Sharm-el-Sheikh or Masada – remember the heat on top there? No wonder they had water at strategic points, what must it have been like to excavate! I tried but could no longer feel the sun, the vacation, whose last days’ meeting you made memorable. The people down below on the street, in boots and coats, leaning against the wind – the present – is the only reality. You can’t go back. I’ve never tried, except in my painting which possesses me wholly, and through which I am driven by an inner necessity to express longings and anxieties, in which are symbols of death and destruction which cannot be visualized, let alone understood, by those who have not been where I have been, and seen what I have seen. Maybe I should have gone back. To examine that past you recalled with your loving eyes when you looked at the number on my arm that evening in the Dead Sea – I rewarded your concern with cynicism – a flip remark of which I am not proud.

  Maybe if I had gone back to re-examine the past, if I had spoken about it to someone, to anyone, I wouldn’t be such a lonely, disagreeable old man. In mitigation I say that it was too painful. I wasn’t the only one to stagger out of Europe almost 40 years ago with a bleeding heart – but I was to myself. You can’t just lump people together. Blacks. Jews. Prisoners. Survivors. As soon as you start doing this you isolate individuals from the human race. It’s no more valid than supposing that everyone who lives on the same floor of the same apartment building is the same and should behave and react the same, have the same loves, hates, fears and dreams and take the same size in socks. When I think of you Kitty on the coach or in Yoske’s – about the lobster I have a theory it’s more important what comes out the mouth than what goes into it – I think of your family, your children, and grandchildren, and envy you each one of them with a consuming envy. Of my entire mishpacha – brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts – I was the only one left after the war. One finger from a whole hand. There was no one to love, no one to live for.

  People matter, things don’t. (There’s something sad about the materialism, the showing off of possessions in American life.) Automobiles, fancy clothes don’t interest me. Offer me a chicken or a rose, I’ll take the rose. Why didn’t I marry, I hear you ask – you were too polite at Yoske’s – to begin with I could never have children. When I think of them in relation to myself it’s to see them – condemned never to grow old – go into the ‘showers’: ‘Mummy, I’ve been good. It’s dark in there!’ or, old before their time, trying to stretch their little necks towards the rod whose arbitrary one point twenty metre height divided those tall enough to reach it from those who would be gassed. An SS guard with his baton put an end to any dreams I may have had of progeny of my own. There have been women – fireflies – who have illuminated my life for brief periods, then left me alone to wrestle endlessly with questions which I could not voice and which were unanswerable.

  You were so generous with your family, sharing them with me and getting nothing in return except that I was a physician and a painter, and the odd stick of gum. I am diffident, Kitty, about a curriculum vitae that starts at Majdanek and ends in Buchenwald, whose middle name, Auschwitz, has been discovered by Hollywood, immortalized in second-rate films – colossal monuments to bad taste – which would make the Creation sound banal and inadequate fiction, reduced to glib words and reductive phrases, and now has a coach park, a cafeteria and a souvenir shop. (You have seen for yourself the pedlars from Acre and Nahariya selling peanuts and popsicles outside the Memorial Museum.)

  Although I said not a word to you Kitty, I find it easy to talk to you – perhaps because there are 3,000 miles between us – may I? Are you interested in the ramblings of a pale ghost? The real Maurice Morgenthau died in 1940. I will not, I hope, distress you because the truth is untellable. Personal experience – childbirth or the act of love – cannot be conveyed. And if I could knock my head against the wall of silence, anything I could relate about those years which left the biggest blot Rorschach has ever seen on the copybook of evolution and on my life, would be like a grain of sand on Long Beach – absolutely nothing to what really happened, and which you would need a pathological imagination to appreciate. No, I would just like to write you from time to time, to redeem some bits and pieces of Maurice Morgenthau in the hope of resurrecting him. Soon there will be no one left who looked into the sun of Gross Rosen and Dachau, Flossenberg and Belzac, no walking dead who eat and sleep and work and play – like puppets when the strings are pulled – but who belong in the mass graves of Kharkov, Lublin and Kovno, in the crematoria of Treblinka or the ghettos of Theresienstadt. Soon the most Machiavellian, relentlessly perpetrated act of genocide mankind has ever known – to use the term ‘holocaust’, ‘complete destruction by fire’, is already to mitigate – will be consigned neatly to the history books, and with a great sigh of relief will be heard from the conscience of the world. I will understand if you’ve heard enough of the meanderings of an old man and do not reply to your coach companion, Maurice Morgenthau.

  P.S. How is Addie? Is her ankle healed? MM.

  The envelope fell from Kitty’s lap on to the floor. There was something else in it. A pencil sketch on a piece of thin card – Kitty, jumping from the rock into the Canyon of the Inscriptions. The expression on her face – which Maurice had caught exactly – was one of terror. She did not know whether to laugh at it or whether to weep at the pathos of the letter.

  The timer, telling Kitty that her apple cake was cooked, and the telephone rang at the same time. They broke into her thoughts which were of Addie (where she was going for lunch – although she had popped in and out in the ten days she had been home from Israel there had, incredibly, not been time for a good talk) and of her sister-in-law Freda, from whom she had had a mysterious phone call, and of Norman who was coming for dinner, and of Maurice Morgenthau and the reflections the two pages of his script had stirred up within her, and of Sydney who was rar
ely out of her mind. It surprised her that now they no longer had Sydney, his family seemed to regard Kitty as its head, to be deferred to and consulted. By rights the distinction should have gone to Sydney’s younger brother Juda whose interests, as the family realised, did not extend further than – if indeed as far as – his own home.

  Unlike Sydney, Juda was a selfish man whose horizon was strictly limited to his own needs. He would spare neither himself nor his resources for the betterment of the ‘Jules Stanley Gallery’ where the walls were lined with rare drawings and fine paintings, or in the furtherment of his not inconsiderable investments, but he was not the least bit interested in the day to day problems of his sisters, Freda, Beatty and Mirrie – nor, except in the most superficial way, in those of his immediate family. The forthcoming marriage of his only daughter, Vanessa, would cost Juda a substantial sum of money which his wife Leonora considered, in her relentless social climb, well spent, but no sleepless nights. When problems to do with the wedding arose, as they had in the past week, Leonora had aired them in the surprised ear of Kitty who had never found her sister-in-law particularly friendly. The Queen’s dressmaker was making the wedding dress for Vanessa, who would be wearing a tiara lent by Leonora’s mechutanim who were tenuously attached to the aristocracy – and be attended by four page-boys. Manners, rather than curiosity, prompted Leonora to ask what Kitty herself was planning, and the information that Rika Snowman would be making the wedding dress for Rachel who would be followed down the aisle by Debbie and Lisa, elicited a barely audible acknowledgement.

  When Kitty enquired where Nathan’s Aufruf was to be, Leonora had grown distant. She didn’t think they’d be having anything like that she said, as though Kitty had suggested a public lynching, rather than the calling up of the bridegroom to the Reading of the Law in synagogue on the Sabbath before the wedding, which was generally followed by a lunch. Kitty was not surprised. Vanessa’s Nathan, from what one heard – the engagement, advisedly Kitty thought, had been in Barbados where Nathan’s parents had a house – was more at home on the grouse moors or the hunting field than in a synagogue where the wedding, were it not for Juda – who although there was little evidence of it in his daily life was superstitiously attached to his origins – would not have taken place.

  Kitty let the timer ring – a few minutes more was not going to hurt the apple cake – and answered the phone. Beatty’s anxious voice superseded the pips.

  “Kitty?”

  “What’s the matter?” Kitty said.

  “It’s Leon. The doctor didn’t like the look of him. He can’t pass water. They’ve taken him in.” Beatty’s normally strident voice was shaky.

  “Where is he?”

  “St Mary’s. He wants to do some tests.”

  It was Kitty’s bridge afternoon.

  “I’ll come over,” she said. “What ward is he in?”

  “Mary Magdalene. That’s all he needs. There’s a yossel over the bed!”

  “I’ll bring an apple cake.”

  She’d open a tin of fruit for Norman.

  “You’re a gutte neshumah,” Beatty said.

  Getting the cake out of the oven, the gas jets burning her face as she stooped, Kitty thought suddenly of Maurice Morgenthau, for whom ovens had a different connotation than for apple cakes, and it was not a faceless column who shuffled unwittingly towards the furnaces but herself and Carol and Rachel and Josh and Beatty and Leon although he was sick and Addie despite her plaster cast which was coming off tomorrow and Dolly, Norman’s late mother with her bad back and Leonora whose wealth would not save them and that the Gestapo had come into her flat smashing the bird’s eye maple furniture and the glass-fronted bookcase in the hall which held the Festival Prayer Books and hit Sydney across the face knocking out the teeth he had always cared for so meticulously with dental floss and marched them off along the Finchley Road where Rabbi Magnus was down on his knees scrubbing the paving stones before an amused truck of SS men and into the waiting cattle trucks packed so tightly there was no room even to sit down. She shut the oven door on her unbidden thoughts – complete destruction by fire, Maurice had said – and tested the apple cake with a skewer before going over to have lunch with Addie who was grilling some mackerel.

  Kitty didn’t like hospitals. Who did? she thought, as she walked down the green linoed corridor along which third world maids clattered cups on to trays and spruce sisters smiled into telephones, and boys and girls no older than Rachel – with white coats and stethoscopes – intermingled with porters pushing chairs and trolleys, and physiotherapists hurried importantly, and visitors, with flowers and shopping bags, looked uneasily for wards, and out-patients came tentatively in, and in-patients went thankfully out. Sydney had died at home. That was one blessing. At least he hadn’t spent his last days harnessed to machines in strange and frightening surroundings, cared for by bright faced nurses and impotent doctors.

  Beatty sat by the bed with a plate of grapes which she had peeled and which she was trying to insert into Leon’s closed mouth in the men’s surgical ward.

  “He hasn’t touched a thing,” she said. “They’ve put a tube in.” She indicated the catheter which snaked from beneath the bedclothes into a bag in which there was an inch of blood-stained urine. “The lunch was hamburger. I told them he was kosher – they were very nice I must say – and they’ve put him down for kosher meals tomorrow – Sister did offer him a salad but I told her he never touches salad – rabbit food he calls it, so I thought I’d try a few grapes…”

  “He doesn’t look very hungry.” Kitty put the tin with the apple cake she had made on the locker on which Beatty had already put a big bowl of fruit and a jar of chicken soup and some horse-radish and beetroot sauce. She looked at Leon with his waxen face, and sunken cheeks, who seemed to have aged ten years since she had last seen him. “What did the doctor say?”

  “He didn’t say much. Something about his kidneys. They take you for a fool.” She leaned towards Kitty. “That bed there,” she said, looking down the ward, “next to the one with the curtains closed. I nodded to the wife and she gave me a smile. I think he must be one of us.”

  Kitty followed her gaze to where a woman in a Persian lamb coat sat beside a balding man with glasses and a black moustache.

  “I’ll go over and talk to her later…” Beatty said, secure in the knowledge that kol yisrael chaverim, all Jews were brothers, “when I’ve given Leon these.” She arranged the grapes on the plate as if by making them attractive she could will Leon to open his lips.

  “He must eat. They brought him in an ambulance. He doesn’t know me.”

  Leon opened his eyes and looked through Kitty.

  “Hello Leon,” she said, taking his thin hand.

  “Uncle Leon’s in hospital,” Kitty said. “He doesn’t look at all well to me but Aunty Beatty doesn’t want to know.” She looked across the table at Norman whom she hadn’t seen since her holiday. He looked exhausted, she thought, in his hand tailored suit and his dove grey tie. She’d had a shock when she’d seen him, dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  “Are you all right, Norman?” He had hardly touched the casserole she had made for him and had already put his knife and fork down.

  “Fine.”

  “You’re looking tired. Not overdoing it are you?”

  Norman looked at his Aunt who was collecting up the plates. He got up to help her.

  “Sit down. I’ll do it. How’s Sandra?”

  “Fine.”

  Kitty stood by the door. “I made an apple cake but I took it to the hospital for Leon – I expect Beatty will eat it – I’ve got a tin of peaches in the fridge.”

  Overdoing it. You might say that, Norman thought when Kitty had left the room, but it wasn’t work. It was the love he had made with Sandra every night at her flat, and which he was not going to share with anyone, not even with his Aunt. The days had been torture. He had gone about them in a stupor, moving mechanically to complete tasks which had become meaningl
ess. Contracts and mortgages. Surveys and Exchanges. Freeholds and fees. Sandra. Last night they had had a farewell dinner to celebrate the end of their freedom. Today Hilton and Milton, accompanied by Sandra’s sister-in-law, were coming back from South Africa. Sandra had gone to meet them.

  She had set up the dinner as she set up everything. Norman had never been to such a place. It was a club so discreet that there was no name on the door. A butler had let them in as if to a private house. Arnold Caplan was a member. They knew Sandra and greeted her, taking her fur coat from her solicitously before the log fire in the hall. Upstairs in an elegant drawing-room, people whom his Aunty Beatty would have referred to as ‘moneyed’ sat around casually over Black Labels in their up-market clothes. This was a restaurant? Norman asked Sandra. A dining club. She had never looked lovelier. A shirt of slate-coloured silk complemented her eyes which rarely left his face. A waiter brought menus. On Norman’s there were no prices. “You’re my guest,” Sandra explained. “I love you.” They ordered asparagus, which was out of season and lamb – whose degree of rareness Sandra discussed with a seriousness Norman had thought applied only to beef – and at a given signal, moved to a plush sofa in the darkened dining-room where they sat side by side against a wall. Their appetites were as attuned as their bodies. The asparagus, with its accompanying sauce, was eaten without words. Norman did not remember eating the lamb. Sandra asked for a slice of chocolate cake – a speciality of the chef – with two forks, with an assurance Norman would not dare to assume even in the Wimpy in Golder’s Green, and commanded its inundation with cream from a silver jug, with an aplomb which, even with his new found assertiveness, Norman knew he would never achieve. They had coffee with cape gooseberries thickly encrusted with icing sugar, and although Sandra had protested, he had looked over her shoulder when she signed the bill, to find that it came to almost as much as he earned, sometimes, in a week. He tried not to let it cast a shadow. To ignore the affirmation that he was not as others – others Sandra and her escorts to whom money was a commodity to be lightheartedly disbursed – round the room. He had been living in a world of make-believe at which he had not protested when initiated into it by Sandra. He re-entered it, not protesting now, when she stood up to take him back for their last night at her flat.