Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  “So this is your city,” Orli says, more to herself than to me. “It looks like you.”

  “How can a city look like me?” I laugh.

  “It has your confusion.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “It’s beautiful,” she explains. “And very interesting, but it doesn’t know what it is. Over there it is kings and queens.” She points at the Tower of London. “There it is space.” She fingers the Gherkin. “And here it thinks it is France.” She points to the gothic structure of the Palace of Westminster. “But this is its beauty,” she adds.

  “I’m not confused,” I say. “That was a long time ago that I said that. And you’d got me drunk with that cocktail with the daft sparklers and those endless rounds of shots you ordered.” We grin at each other. “I know who I am.”

  “Okay, if you could be any part of this city, what would you be?” she asks.

  I like this kind of question. Hayley and I spent a lot of time over the years deciding which genre of cuisine we would choose if we could only pick one to live off forever, and which one outfit we would wear every day, and which superpower we would select. But this is a new one. I mull it carefully, but although there’s a lot I love about London, there isn’t any one part I feel really attached to, nowhere I really see as me. Which I suppose is the problem. “I guess I’d be the river,” I say. “Flowing away.”

  “Changeable,” she laughs. “Always moving.”

  “Polluted,” I add. Then, placing a hand on her back, amend, “Dirty.” She has been in England for a full eight hours and we have only kissed once. She laughs again, reaches for my other hand and squeezes it. “So what would you be then Miss Psycho-babble? What part of the city are you?”

  “Ah, I am not really here,” she answers. “I am just a scent in the air.”

  She is right as always. She, and everything about her, is a scent I am tracking.

  We walk along the river. It is only April and the evening is cold. Even with my jacket Orli is shivering. We stop to look across the Thames and she arranges my arms around her shoulders like a coat. Resting her head against me she squeezes our interlocked hands. I like this gesture. She does it frequently now and though we haven’t translated it aloud I feel it to be a secret, silent hello, a quiet promise of union. Or else she is checking I am still there.

  “Danny,” she says softly, still gazing across the river. “Danny, I want you to wait.”

  I drop her hands.

  “Not forever. I want you to come. You know I want you to come, but-” She reaches for my hands again, squeezes them. “There are things to talk about.” Orli’s eyes seem clouded, looking at me yet past me too. Perhaps it is the murky Thames water. Or the evening. They are dense with something.

  “I have to go to the army,” I say slowly. “You know I do.”

  Orli shifts her gaze back into focus and her tone changes, as though she has only just started listening, as though my words have flicked a switch somewhere. “All because of what my father said?” She begins to walk along again. “It isn’t a game, Danny. It’s real you know.”

  I can’t quite catch her point. “Orli,” I venture. “I’m not David. You’re not going to lose me.”

  She shakes her head. “You have no idea.”

  We walk on. For a good few minutes neither of us speak. But she is wrong, I do have an idea. I know there will be challenges, but they excite me. And I will be with Orli, who excites me. I think I feel her mood shifting, lightening, there is again a squeeze between our palms. Enough of this. Enough disagreement. I want to go home, to get her home; it is my birthday after all. I am about to tell her this but suddenly, Orli’s palm has stopped squeezing and is slipping from mine, suddenly she is not at my side, and as I turn I see her ducking underneath the barrier next to us and her feet are on the edge of the cement, and her hair is loose and wild and she is leaning backwards, away, over the river.

  “Orli! Are you crazy?”

  I reach for her hands, clamping down over her knuckles gripped around the barrier. She laughs, but I press tighter and slowly she allows me to swap the metal railing for my grasping hands. Our eyes lock. She smiles, and I think she is going to climb back under, back into my arms. “Come on,” I say. “Come on.” Instead she leans back again, further, over the rushing flow. Now her whole weight is in my clutch, her whole life and death. Despite the cold, my hands begin to sweat. It is difficult to hold on. She bends her knees, half sitting in the air, like we are a team of gymnasts. It makes her heavier. She weighs more than I had realised, or I am less strong.

  “This is how it will be for me,” she says calmly, still smiling, the water roaring beneath us. “This is how close I will always be to losing you.”

  Our fingers are slipping. It is not funny. None of it is funny. I yank her arms and she comes tumbling forwards. I catch her body, pulling her over the barrier, her chest first then one leg and the other. “Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

  “I wanted you to see. To see what it will be like for your family, and for me.”

  But I am in no mood for a lesson. I turn away and start striding towards the car. “They’ll get used to it. And you’ll have to as well. Fuck.”

  She grabs my arm and steps in front of me. “Then it really is for you, not for me?”

  “I told you that already.” I am still angry, my heart is still racing. “I told you.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  She doesn’t apologise.

  She doesn’t seem to realise the danger of what she just did.

  She looks pensive, preoccupied.

  “Life is not a fucking metaphor,” I say.

  Now she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. She kisses my shoulder. “I just don’t want to be the reason,” she tells me again.

  ***

  I ignore Safia’s call. It’s 8.45am. She’ll be on her way to work, just off the tube at Covent Garden, queuing perhaps at the kiosk that sells her favourite coffee, a those-in-the-know hole in the wall, not Starbucks. We’re meant to be meeting her for lunch – a third attempt to get together this week. (The attempt being made by Safia, the cancelling being done by me.) It’s not that I don’t want her to meet Orli. I do. I distinctly do want them to meet. But today is our last day. I don’t want to waste the time we have together by sharing Orli with anybody else. That’s what I tell Orli. But it’s possible that I’m not ready to introduce her to the one fiery element of my otherwise waterlogged world. I wait a couple of hours and then send Safia a text: Sorry. Got hectic. Dinner tomorrow night?

  ***

  My Nana is in the kitchen when I arrive and waves to me from the window. The cobbled path to her door has been lined carefully with daffodils. Mum tells her not to, that her knees can’t take it and wouldn’t it be easier just to have a few pots, but Nana insists on working in her tiny garden every day, despite the rain, despite the cemented plots to her left and right, flowers having given way to driveways. I remember being put to work weeding one Sunday when Mum and Dad were at a wedding and Nana and Papa had charge of us. I must have been eight or nine and I loved the ritual of it all, wanted to be part of it. Side by side, Nana would prune while Papa watered, or one would dig while the other sprinkled in the seeds and patted down. A ballet between them. I remember Nana letting me hold the hose that day and Papa showing me how to break the hardened soil with the tip of the shovel. And I remember spilling a lot of dirt onto the pathway, which I’m sure they later had to clean up and probably had to redo most of my ‘work’. I might be making it up but I think that was the same summer they cobbled that pathway and so planted the daffodils. I stop for a second to admire them. A few months ago, Nana finally allowed Mum to hire her a gardener so there is someone again to mow the lawn and trim the hedges and do the jobs that require heavy instruments she can no longer lift. But I feel suddenly very guilty that it wasn’t me doing the lifting, that I haven’t offered to help her, that in my whirlwind of work and clubs and meaninglessness I have never made ti
me for this. I see her still waving from the window and feel another pang of guilt. Her cold is better but she is 87 years old. It’s a long journey to her house from Israel.

  Tea and biscuits are presented within seconds of my crossing the threshold. The tray shakes as Nana carries it into the lounge but she’d kill me if I tried to take it from her. Not yet redundant is a pronouncement we have heard pass her lips so often that Gaby and I have adopted it and now say it to each other, only sometimes in correct context. The pot jolts, but the liquid inside it doesn’t spill.

  “This was my mother’s china you know,” Nana informs me as I reach forward to take the delicate cup. She speaks with a thick Hungarian accent, though she has been living in England since she was 18 and her English is perfect.

  “I know, you’ve told me once or twice.”

  “Pfft,” she smirks. Nana inspects the cup in her own hand carefully and tuts when she finds a tiny, hairline crack in the handle. “How is Gaby?” she asks. “It’s very difficult being a bride you know.”

  “Oh really? Difficult choosing dresses and flowers and going to food tastings?”

  “Don’t be cheeky,” Nana reprimands. “There is a lot of responsibility to it. The whole world is looking.”

  “Gaby’s fine,” I say. “I think. We’re not really speaking.”

  “Why not? Daniel, this marrying for love, this is what happens now,” she smirks. “This is what these young ones do.” I grin and she continues more earnestly. “You mustn’t always take up your mother’s mantle. I know you always want to protect everybody but you can’t-”

  “How are you Nana?” I interrupt.

  “Oh, you know. I can’t complain. My legs ache a bit, and my fingers are playing up again. And you’d think the neighbours would consider turning down their television wouldn’t you? I was up past eleven thirty last night with that one’s racket.” She nods her head towards the neighbouring wall and sips her tea delicately, her little finger raised. “But I can’t complain.”

  I can’t help but laugh gently. I lean forward and plant a kiss on her cheek.

  “Such a charmer,” she says. Then looks at me closely. “Go on. What is it?”

  “Did Mum tell you about Israel?”

  She puts down her tea. “Of course she did.”

  “I’m sorry I won’t see you so much,” I say quickly.

  “This is a problem,” she agrees.

  “I know you didn’t get to meet Orli but-”

  “This is a problem too.”

  “Mum hates it,” I say. “But-”

  Nana raises her hand to stop me. “Daniel, I told her already to take her feet off your back. It is a wonderful idea.”

  “Oh.” I’m not sure quite what I’d expected Nana’s reaction to be, but this wasn’t it. “Oh. Really? I think you’re the only one.”

  “Pfft,” she says again, a noise frothing in the front of her mouth like the hot chocolate she used to make us during school holidays in the years after Mum went back to work. Toast or poppyseeds? These were the accompanying choices to our afternoon drink. The same each day: toast with jam or poppyseed crackers with cheese. I love that noise. Gaby makes that noise sometimes, when she’s talking to me. And I always keep a packet of poppyseed crackers in my cupboard; they make me think of arms wrapped around me, and games of dominos. I don’t come to this house often enough, I think. I have forgotten how comfortable I feel here. Nana flaps her hand at the wall behind her. It is lined with row upon row of books and I know them well. There is half a shelf dedicated to novels, another half to biographies, a few graphic novels and a large stack on the floor of National Geographics, but the rest is philosophy, psychology, history, politics. “Do you know how long I’ve spent reading these things?” Nana asks me. “Buber, Spinoza, Maimonides, Rosenzweig… useless all of them.”

  “Nana, you have just swept away centuries of philosophy.”

  “Good riddance,” she winks. “None of them could tell me why it happened.”

  I stop grinning.

  “Why…” She pauses. “None of them could show me the good.” She stops again and closes her eyes. She does this occasionally now mid-conversation, but this time she is only gathering herself. “The only good, the only good to have come out of those camps, Daniel – it is Israel. That is it. Kaput. Nothing else. So nothing is more important. If I was young enough, I would go there myself.”

  “You could come with me, Nana,” I smile. And for a second I imagine it, my little European Nana hobbling through the hot Tel Aviv streets with her smart winter’s coat. It makes me smile again. But then I catch a glimpse of Nana, no longer talking, and not mischievously winking but somewhere else, somewhere cold, dark. These reveries are happening more often these days, but they were always there, always present, haunting, and I know I will never feel this like she does. It is real but not real. Her life, but not mine. For me a story, an echo, a single twist in my disjointed DNA.

  “The china was my mother’s,” Nana says again. “She brought it with us from Hungary. It was all that was left in the house when we came back to it.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “We’d had art, you know. And things. Books. Belongings.”

  Nana has never spoken to me before like this, and I say nothing.

  “We were Hungarian. Really Hungarian. And then we were British.”

  I nod.

  “You are leaving a great country, Daniel, you know that don’t you? A country with open arms.”

  I nod again. “I need your ketubah,” I say quietly.

  Nana smiles, she points. The marriage certificate is framed in a beautiful antique wood, standing proud between Maimonides and Spinoza.

  I kiss her on the cheek again and carefully remove my parchment passport from the frame.

  ***

  Safia is oddly interested in the minutiae of the emigration process. I suppose it is pretty astounding, the help I’ve received. Before Nana’s I drove straight from dropping Orli at the airport to the Jewish Agency (who knew it was in Finchley?), and it would not be underestimating things to say that the Agency has the process down to a fine art. Beyond filling in a bunch of forms and providing evidence of my so-far Britishness, all I really needed was the ketubah, proof that my parents are authentically Jewish, proof that I can satisfy the Law of Return. I’ve read about this law a lot – not in the context of it being my easy out, or rather in, but as in it being a racist policy that Palestinians are not equally entitled to, not equally able to ‘return’. It comes up all the time in media analyses of the peace process. And at uni debates. It is with slight unease that I refer to it now.

  “Kinda weird, isn’t it?” says Safia.

  I think of my Nana. “I guess. But I reckon there are enough countries where Jews have been booted out for there to be one country that always welcomes us in.”

  Safia scrunches her nose and raises one side of her mouth, not agreeing, not protesting.

  “I have to pick an ulpan,” I say.

  “A what?”

  “A school to learn Hebrew. It’s like an intensive language course for new immigrants.”

  “Do you pay for it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you pay for the Jewish Agency help?”

  “No.”

  “They really want you to come, huh?”

  I shrug. “I guess. But works for me since I really want to go.”

  “Yes I’m aware of that, Dan.”

  Safia moves her arms off the table to allow the waiter to put down her chicken. I make room for my sea bass. We are out in the evening, again.

  “Was it hard saying goodbye to Orli?”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet her.”

  “Uh huh,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

  “I am. Next time.”

  “Fine.”

  “Seriously, I want you to meet her.”

  “Fine,” she smiles.

  Safia digs into her chicken and asks the waiter for another glas
s of wine. Her parents know that she does this – drinks alcohol, eats meat that isn’t halal, doesn’t fast during Ramadan – but I still can’t help feeling that each bite is a small act of rebellion, a way to assert that she is more St John’s Wood than Tehran. I wonder, just fleetingly, what her parents would have said if we’d ever actually dated. Not that I would have. Not that I could have. Not that even chicken-eating Safia was willing to take on the ‘complications’. Safia notices me staring at her fork.

  “Would you like some?” she asks.

  “It does look good.” I pick up my own cutlery and begin to navigate my sea bass.

  “So?” She offers me her fork.

  “Saf.” I take a bite of the fish. It needs a little more lemon. Safia watches me squeeze the slice on the side of my plate over the fillet, then add pepper. She watches me deposit a small mountain of ketchup next to my chips. “Would you like some?” I ask.

  “It’s weird that you keep kosher you know.”

  “Really?” The waiter brings Safia’s wine. I put down my fork and reach for my own glass. “Why?”

  “I mean, it’s weird that you keep kosher when you’re not religious about anything else. Why do you bother avoiding a bit of chicken?”

  I shrug. “It’s how I was brought up.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s how I was brought up.”

  “So you just do it, without questioning why?”

  “I don’t need to question why. It’s just something I do.”

  Safia shakes her head and makes a noise that sounds like it starts at the back of her throat, gathering disdain as it moves forward. More Tehran than St John’s Wood.

  “What?”

  “It’s not a rational answer, Dan. Why? Or else, why not do all the other stuff too?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re meant to be an intelligent, thinking person.”

  “Not everything has to be rational. It’s a gesture. At least I do something.”