Rock Me Gently

by Judith Kelly

  I took a deep breath and began to talk.

  It occurred to me as I spoke how long I had carried the unshared weight of my feelings about the past: for years my waking and many of my sleeping hours had been filled with that sullen, secret ache. I had already told Miriam the bare facts of Mum leaving me at the convent; now the shadow of the emotions I had experienced passed gravely over my consciousness. The anguish, the sense of desertion, the fierce camaraderie among the girls. The terror that came with the nuns’ footsteps.

  ‘There were - well, we were afraid of almost all of the nuns, but two of them in particular - Sister Mary and Sister Columba ‘

  As I started to find the words for my feelings about the two monumental nuns, with their white-wimpled black uniforms, I felt nearly overwhelmed. My lungs dilated and sank as if I was inhaling a warm moist thin air, and I smelt again the warm moist thin air that hung in the bath at the convent above the sluggish pea-soup-coloured water. I saw myself rising in the cold morning and filing down with the others to early Mass and trying vainly to mouth my prayers against the fainting sickness of my stomach.

  I spoke impatiently, gesturing with my hands as if I was catching the dark details that flocked about me. I could feel a flush rising in my neck, creeping over my jaw as I struggled to tell Miriam how Sister Mary had broken my nose, how we had all been viciously beaten at one time or another for the flimsiest of reasons. In the most intense moments of the story I still watched her eyes to see if she was listening, and I saw that her head did not move, that her eyes did not leave me, and I felt the warmth of her interest.

  Finally I came to the scene I revisited in my dreams and stopped. The slippery, treacherous rocks. The raging sea. The line of children.

  ‘The thing is -’ I could not go on.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Miriam, watching my face.

  I had never put into words, aloud, just exactly what the thing was. I was dizzy with the fear of it, the palms of my hands suddenly sweaty. I steadied myself with a hand against the table, feeling the wood silky under my palm.

  ‘I had a friend.’ The words seemed large and foreign in my mouth.

  Miriam nodded.

  ‘And the thing is, she ...’

  I had always tried to push away the memory of how Frances died. That way I could pretend to believe it had nothing to do with me.

  ‘She died and it was my fault.’ I took a big quavery breath. A wad of woolliness filled my throat, stopping any more words getting out.

  ‘Yes?’ Miriam did not seem disgusted or accusing. She did not even seem especially surprised. ‘It’s all right. Go on,’ she said, as if it were normal, a child being responsible for another child’s death. The expression on her face was not terribly sorry or offering her deepest sympathy, it was just a matter of geometry: an equal and opposite force.

  It was what a person needed when they could not balance themselves any more. But I could not go there. I swallowed, and shook my head. Miriam looked at me for a long moment, and then squeezed my hand.

  I was shocked when she said, ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She caught herself and patted my hand. ‘Oh, I believe your story - but what I can scarcely believe are the similarities in both our stories.’

  It turned out we had a similar experience of growing up - no affection, constant fear, physical abuse - a fundamental slavery. We went back and forth, telling stories. It became easier the more I talked, until finally I realised that I did not mind the force of her enquiries.

  She sat in one of her overstuffed library chairs, the late afternoon sun slicing across her freckled face. ‘The nuns’ habit puts me in mind of a uniform, you know. A uniform often suggests community, order, identity, with the right to have total power over others, to treat people as absolutely inferior and to assert the righteousness of violence.’

  The convent had indeed similarities to a concentration camp. You could not show your suffering for fear that worse could happen. A horror that had to be endured, there being no alternative.

  Miriam and I talked and talked, and at last my tears came. They fell easily, no longer hindered by shame. Miriam put a hand on my shoulder. A simple gesture of affection and support. We remained like that for some minutes. Someone then banged at her door, demanding to be admitted. I wiped my eyes and left her to her visitor.

  I sat awake on the compound veranda for a long time that night, smoking a cigarette, a habit I had picked up from Cydney, and staring up into the endless Israeli night. The stars blazed overhead in an icy spill as the warm wind teased my hair. Keeping my mind carefully blank, I allowed memories of Nazareth House to unroll inside my eyelids like a film.

  I remembered one night when the girls were talking together in small groups in the boot-room about two nuns. Let’s call them Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy.

  One girl with little red rabbit eyes said: ‘They were caught last night.’

  ‘Who was caught?’

  ‘Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy.’

  ‘Who caught them?’

  ‘The Mother Superior. A senior girl told me.’

  ‘But why have they both been sent away?’ I asked. ‘C’mon, tell us.’

  ‘I think I know why,’ Janet said. ‘I bet it’s because they nicked the money from the missions box.’

  ‘Who nicked it?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe all the nuns went shares in it.’

  ‘But that was stealing. How could they have done that?’

  ‘A fat lot you know about it,’ Ruth said. ‘I bet I really know why Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy have scarpered.’

  ‘Oh, go on, Ruth,’ everyone said. ‘Go on, tell us. We won’t split on you to the seniors.’

  A ring of girls craned their necks forward to hear. A small girl with olive skin and curly dark hair thrust her face into the circle of girls, breathlessly glancing around at them as if trying to catch each flying phrase in her open mouth. Ruth raised her head to listen for an approaching nun. Then, smiling uneasily, she said, ‘You know the communion wine they keep in the vestry?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied a hushed chorus of voices in unison.

  ‘Well, I bet Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy were caught swigging it together. And that’s why they’ve scarpered.’

  Everyone groaned in disbelief, but the girl with the red rabbit eyes who had spoken first said: ‘Yes, that’s what I heard too from a senior girl. Those nuns stole wine from the vestry.’

  The girls became quiet. I thought of the silent vestry where I had stood on the day of my First Communion and even though it had been summer, icy cross-draughts whipped my legs and my toes threatened to cramp in the cold. Although it wasn’t the church, you still weren’t allowed to speak in the vestry. That’s where the communion wine was kept, together with the priest’s vestments hung neatly on a hanger. I had waited in there, dressed in my communion veil and dress, before our procession to the altar. The white-smocked altar boy looking like the Beano’s Lord Snooty with his pale doll’s face and sleek combed hair, had swung the censer by the chain to keep the coals alight. He swung it gently to and fro against Ruth’s bottom, but stopped when she threatened to punch him. At the altar I had raised my eyes heavenwards, opened my mouth and put out my tongue a little, and Father Holland had bent down to give me the holy communion; I smelt a slight sour stink on his breath and it had made me feel a bit sick.

  The girls continued talking, huddled in little groups here and there in the boot-room.

  Frances, who had been silent, said quietly, ‘You are all wrong.’

  We all turned towards her eagerly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Tell us, Frances.’

  Frances pointed out the window across the playground where Sister Mary was pacing to and fro by herself, her rosary beads swinging.

  ‘She knows,’ she said.

  The girls looked out at her and one said, ‘Why, has she
told you?’

  ‘Well, of course, she’s told her,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s her pet girl.’

  Scowling at Ruth and lowering her voice, Frances said, ‘I’ll tell you why Thomas and Lucy have gone, but you mustn’t let on to any of the seniors.’

  ‘Tell us, Frances. Go on.’

  She paused for a moment and, looking nervously out the window, she said mysteriously, ‘They were caught in Thomas’s cell together last night.’

  The girls looked at her. ‘Caught? What doing?’

  ‘Snogging.’

  All the girls were silent.

  Frances said, ‘And that’s why.’

  ‘Vile!’ said Ruth. ‘Even Mary Magdalene wouldn’t have got away with that.’

  The film reel snagged, ran out and the memory stopped. But what more was there? We never did find out why those two nuns were sent away.

  ‘Jude?’ Cydney’s soft voice.

  My cigarette had gone out. I flicked it over the veranda railing and drew a hand across my eyes. ‘Hi, Cydney.’

  She sat down beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I shrugged. On the night air, the faint scent of citrus washed over us from the groves. We sat in silence for a moment.

  After a pause, I said, ‘Did I ever tell you I spent part of my childhood in an orphanage?’

  I visited Miriam every day. And slowly, I found that on waking each morning there was no longer a terrible urgency to escape my thoughts. They were mostly harmless. They centred around learning my part in a play we were to perform in Hebrew to the other members of the kibbutz, a couple of letters I had to write and planning my imminent trip to Jerusalem with Cydney, Rick and Mark, small goals to purify my days. My plans became clear in my head, neat and tidy, like boxes all lined up in a row.

  We stood on the side of the road and stretched out our thumbs; hoping, praying. Most of the traffic that passed was lorries with full loads of watermelons, oranges and chickens. Then miraculously, a battered red lorry with a layer of red dust obscuring the hood and the headlights, pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the road and rolled to a stop. It just stood there with its signal lights blinking. The four of us gaped back with uncertain hope, until Cydney’s face contorted in that funny awestruck look she got sometimes.

  ‘Holy shit! A ride! That didn’t take long. Let’s go!’ And we were pounding the road.

  When we reached the cabin, Cydney and I grabbed the door handle and tugged ourselves up and took our seats of honour beside the driver. Rick and Mark climbed into the open back and settled themselves on the straw amongst crates, boxes and a bunch of hippies, grime-faced and crazy. Some of them were holding on to the bars on the sides and blabbing non-stop.

  ‘Jerusalem?’ Cydney asked the wiry, grizzled driver as we climbed in.

  ‘Jerusalem?’ she asked again more anxiously as we began to pick up speed, bumping and rattling through the dust. Bent over the wheel, the driver merely raised one eyebrow and thumped his foot hard on the accelerator. We sped off down the road like riding a killer whale, weaving and surging and churning, tail-slapping whole schools of smaller cars.

  The driver kept shifting his myopic eyes from the road to the instrument panel, watching the speedometer, which jerked suspiciously as we overtook everything at high speed on nail-bitingly narrow bends. Even a single donkey warranted an ear-piercing blast of the horn to signal our approach. I kept my eyes glued to the road, listening to the rattling of the old jalopy with all my senses on alert for a change of tone, a variation in rattles. It felt good to be alive and I wanted to be sure that it wouldn’t all end in a splintering crash of metal at the hands of this suicidal driver.

  ‘I’m scared shitless,’ hissed Cydney in my ear. ‘Is he taking us to Jerusalem, or kidnapping us?’ We giggled as the sun rose slowly in the sky, heating the lorry into a burning grid. I peered through the rear window to look at Rick and Mark. They lay on their backs on a pile of straw. They saw me looking and Mark gave me an ambiguous wave, either of greeting or derision.

  Despite the heat, I shivered when we passed two women dressed from head to foot in black flowing robes, leading their flock of black goats across the scorched fields. As we reached the pine country of Jerusalem’s surrounding hills, we passed an encampment of black tents with a camel or two lazing next to them. It seemed that somewhere along the way we had crossed over some great but unspoken divide.

  Cydney loved it. ‘Far out. Out of this world. Totally cosmic,’ she kept repeating, bouncing on the seat and craning her neck to see everything at once.

  Jerusalem was an emotion more than a city with its citadels, arches, domes, and minarets. It seemed to hover between earth and heaven. The fragility of the brilliant air and massive white clouds hanging over the Holy City made Cydney’s commonplace ‘out of this world’ true enough to give my soul a start.

  We were unceremoniously dumped in the Old City near the Damascus Gate and went ambling down the arched alleyways. The sun swept through the endless lanes, an obstacle course of stalls and stands bearing helter-skelter displays of peanuts, dried salted chick-peas, lupin seeds, gaudy pastries, fritters dripping with oil and honey. A swarm of flies and children, both attracted by the same wares, buzzed and shouted as they chased each other around the stalls, The stallholders, who feared for the stability of their wares, brushed both flies and children away with a single cursing gesture. Donkeys backed out of bedroom-workshop-kitchens, or bakeries, or basket weavers’. In the alleys, tailors worked away on the foot-pedals of old Singer sewing machines. Ancient beaded necklaces dangled on strings in the doorways of shops. Souvenir shops displayed clay lamps, belts, fleece-lined slippers, antique brassware, carved cherry­wood pipes, rotten teeth, coins and battered pieces of everything, including crowns of thorns and genuine slivers of the cross, laid out on the ground - a scavenger’s heaven. Groups of jaded tourists piled out of their air-conditioned coaches ‘doing Jerusalem’ via their four- or five-star hotels, searching through the lenses of their automatic cameras for some reminder of the sensation they once had as children when they first gazed on the world. And Arabs sat in corners sipping coffee and sucking at their bubbling hookahs filled with apricot tobacco. Their hollow, saucer eyes, drooping brown, glanced briefly at us as wisps of olive-grey smoke escaped into golden shafts of sunlight. A traditional jewish woman in a wig and babushka shuffled up the street, displaced in time, like something that had stepped from a sepia-toned turn-of-the-century photograph.

  A gang of impish boys shouted frantic advice at a driver backing his tipper-lorry into a narrow lane. Hawkers offered mint tea on little brass trays, freshly baked bagels topped with sesame seeds, boxes of Turkish delight, highly perfumed and coloured mauve.

  We had paused at one of the stores to look at a set of carved camels, when a young Palestinian boy, no more than fourteen, grabbed Mark’s sleeve and shouted demands for shekels.

  Mark shook him off. ‘No.’

  The boy narrowed his eyes, looking at Mark speculatively. ‘Please, you give me money to buy food for my family?’ he offered hopefully.

  The skin around his brown eyes was red and puffy. There was blood on his forehead - not much, but a cut. Clouds of tennis-shoed tourists walked around the boy, their eyes appraising him, hardening and turning away. Some raised their cameras to buildings, focusing shutters, firing away, as the boy tried to get their attention, his arms outflung. He turned suddenly to me, his eyes wide, his underlip pouting and, spreading out his hands in a gesture of entreaty, he said, ‘Lady, please help.’ His voice was pure need, pure despair.

  I tried to smile at him, but I could only think: How did I ever learn to smile such a cheap smile? I stood stupefied, uncertain what to do. I looked over my shoulder to see if the others were watching.

  ‘Come on, Jude,’ yelled Rick. ‘Don’t let him rip you off. He’s only begging.’

  What did he mean only? Wasn’t that bad enough? The boy’s young brown eyes and his outstretched arms seemed to me at that moment an image of
guilelessness, and I halted until the image had vanished and I saw only his ragged clothes and damp coarse hair and large almond-shaped eyes pleading with me.

  ‘Here,’ I said. I fumbled in my duffle bag, found some paper money, crumpled it into his hand. I turned and walked away from him, feeling guilty but forgiving myself: nobody else had bothered with him. They got me every time; they could spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frowned. Buskers, vagrants, tramps, winos, the homeless. In the grip of the needy I was needy.

  I found Rick, Mark and Cydney in a store examining some jewellery. I let myself be talked into buying some rather garish Eilat-stone necklace, which I thought Miriam might like, and, for myself, a silver filigree hand on a thin chain that the storekeeper assured me would keep away the Evil Eye. It seemed a good idea, and I laughed and slipped it on.

  We continued our meandering, taking in the sights and smells that assailed us. Up until now, Rick and I had been flirting a little, making each other laugh about silly things. It was nice, it was easy, but what if I started to like him and then, boom, he disappeared?

  Cydney winked at me, smiling as if she knew what was going on. I licked my lips, felling more nervous than I could remember.

  ‘Here, Jude, I’ll carry that.’ Rick lifted my duffle bag off my shoulders, slinging it over one of his own. I smiled uncertainly at him. When we got close, he smelled nice. A spicy, woody fragrance. As we climbed up some steps to the Jaffa Gate, I caught his eye again. He smiled, his blond stubble sparkling in the sunshine, and I wondered if he knew what I had just been thinking, wondered what he was thinking.

  The four of us decided to splurge, and booked ourselves into the King David Hotel, the most expensive and certainly the most elegant hotel in Jerusalem. The contrast with the spartan accommodation on the kibbutz was breathtaking. I turned around in the lobby, feeling like a child eating ice cream for the first time.