Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  ‘Why would you even say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe because–—’

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ I told her. ‘You know it hasn’t. You know it won’t.’

  Not one rabbi but two presided over proceedings. The first for consecrating the ecstatic couple’s union beneath the chuppah and the second for singing, dancing and saying all the relevant blessings at the reception. There were two bands, one for the segregated mitzvah dancing and the other for later in the night, when the rabbis had gone home. Only then could the modern, mixed dancing take place.

  I danced with Carla, a whirling mitzvah dance, and thought I could never let her go.

  When family members came to claim her, I had no choice but to surrender her.

  As I waited at the bar for a vodka, Old Man Biancardi pulled up beside me.

  ‘Am I correct in assuming that you are Katherine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand that this whole affair is entirely the result of your friendship with my daughter.’

  I laughed. I wanted to deny it, but he overrode my attempt.

  ‘I would just like you to know that I expect you to stand by Carla whenever she needs you, no matter that you are on opposite sides of the globe.’

  I bowed my head; he inclined his.

  ‘As long as we understand one another. She is my youngest,’ he concluded.

  The reception was brought to a close well beyond midnight, after which the couple went up to the bridal suite. The following day they would leave Tel Aviv for ten days in Eilat, Israel’s Great Barrier Reef. I left that same day to return to Australia.

  After the honeymoon, before going back to England, the two of them would go to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Ariel would attend a rabbinical conference there, elated to have been invited. He would also participate in a short, intensive course in biblical grammar at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. How arcane. He told me at the reception that he wanted Carla to sit by him in those lectures, convinced she had much to gain by doing so. How even more arcane.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the characteristic Biancardi shrug. Of course she would do it if he wanted her to.

  APRIL 1974

  Arriving home, I found a telegram from Carla, who was still in Eilat.

  PREGNANT! FOUR MONTHS GONE.

  This four-word missive disturbed me deeply. Now they’d have to lie to the Conversion Court about the reason for the baby’s early arrival. Oh God, oh God, oh God. It had nothing at all to do with conceiving the baby out of wedlock; that had never affected the status of the child under Jewish law. It was about having made love before the Court gave the relationship the green light.

  This wasn’t Lac d’Or, Carla, where you were sent to your room for breaking the rules. Your father wouldn’t be able to buy your way out of this one—or wait—maybe he would. I’ve heard tell…but no; much more likely—if you got it wrong—I believed they could simply annul your conversion. Carla, why must you always walk the tightrope with no balancing pole, no safety net? Doubly so, because even if your father could write a cheque to extricate you from this deadly predicament, I very much doubt that he would. He’d probably see the undoing of your conversion as the universe righting itself.

  But I wrote none of this. She was at the coalface. She had to deal with it.

  So, all I did was once again reply ‘Mazel Tov’, although this time something uneasy twisted in my gut.

  Once again Carla sent me a telegram:

  I am not in the lobby of the King David hotel. I wish I had been. Instead I told Ariel that I must sleep in—morning sickness. But ariel, ever punctual, is there awaiting his fellow rabbis before going into the conference room. According to one of the three surviving rabbis who agreed to speak to me, the bomber had embraced Ariel and said, ‘Salaam, my brother, this is for Palestine.’

  When forensics arrived there was nothing left of either of them. Somehow Ariel’s passport survived, flung from his body in the blast. There was a thin strip of something attached to it. His skin? Later, another rabbi rang me and said that the Beth Din would immediately send me a document confirming Ariel’s death. Thus, according to Jewish law, should I ever want to remarry, this document would provide the evidence that it was permissible for me to do so. Hung up on him.

  But how do we conduct the funeral and sit shiva if the coffin is empty? This is the sort of legal conundrum Ariel loved to meditate upon.

  Come Katie, please come.

  I rang to tell her I was coming. That I would be leaving on the midnight flight out of Melbourne. She told me to come to Jerusalem, to the Hillel Suites in Katamon, Room 418, where she had taken a large double room for the two of us. There she would wait until I arrived. Not in the lobby, you understand.

  I understand. Not in the lobby.

  APRIL 1974

  There was a funeral service for Ariel though there was virtually nothing left to bury. It took place before I arrived, and afterwards Carla returned to the suite to wait for me.

  Once again, I had booked a hire car, this time driving from Lod to Katamon. Somehow, I morphed into a crazy Israeli on the roads, disregarding stop signs and shooting through the amber. I blasted pedestrians with my horn and they stepped back, accustomed to this roadway insanity.

  I arrived at the Hillel Suites. They were expecting me and presented me with my key.

  ‘Your friend has been sitting shiva with friends and family. But they have all gone home now. You should have some privacy,’ said the concierge.

  I made my way to room 418, refusing assistance with my luggage. I inserted my key and opened the door, about to call out to Carla that I was here. But before I even had a chance to draw breath, I saw her standing at our bathroom door, opposite me. She was crying, holding herself as if she could catch the blood fast dripping out of her and push it back. Her hands were covered in blood. When she saw me, she held them up.

  ‘Is your God trying to tell me something? First Ariel and now the baby?’

  I rang down to the desk and told them to send an ambulance. It was an emergency. Carla looked as though she were about to fall. I came closer to try to support her but she waved me away. Then her legs betrayed her. Now she sat on her feet, trying to remain upright. Bright red blood was everywhere. I thought she must surely pass out.

  ‘Is this your God’s handiwork?’

  I didn’t know what to say. If there was a God and He allowed this—Lord, I had no answers.

  ‘Our God,’ I said, trying to reach her, ‘Our God, yours and mine, commands us to be kind to the widow and the orphan’.

  ‘Why does he even make widows and orphans?’ It was a cri de coeur.

  Then, for a reason I have never understood, I asked her, ‘Will you go on being a Jew?’

  She laughed and said, ‘You know the law: once a Jew always a Jew’. It was a curious little laugh, hollow and alien. I’d never heard her make such a sound before. I thought she had passed out, but then she tried to sit up.

  ‘Don’t tell my family. I don’t want them here. Promise me.’ She saw me hesitate. ‘Promise me,’ she insisted.

  So I did.

  The ambulance arrived. I told the paramedic that I was her sister, and he waved me aboard.

  Was this the precipice? Had I caught her in time?

  They had her on strong painkillers. In broken English the doctor told me they had transfused a lot of blood. Is that really a word—transfused? When they brought her back to her bed they allowed me to sit with her. She was drowsy and I took her hand. She squeezed it.

  ‘The baby?’ she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper. ‘It’s gone, isn’t it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She drooped among the bedclothes like a flower deprived of water. I saw she had fallen asleep.

  ‘When can I take her home?’ I asked the doctor, not sure if I m
eant the suite in Jerusalem, London or Milan, maybe even Australia.

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘She needs to be with family. Why have none of them come?’

  ‘She wouldn’t allow it,’ I said, and he looked at me as though I were the village idiot. ‘So, call them.’

  I took her back to the Hillel Suites. They were kind there and said they had cleaned the room and we could have it for as long as we needed it. I ordered up room service and tried to force feed her chicken soup, some schnitzel, some mashed potato. She wanted none of it.

  ‘Is there anything you do want?’ I asked.

  ‘Chocolate. With that caramel flowing through it. And some of those little Bizli cracker things,’ she said.

  I was pleased. That should not be too difficult.

  I kissed her cheek and told her I would not be long.

  ‘Just to be sure,’ she said, ‘you didn’t tell my family about any of this?’

  ‘I promised, didn’t I?’

  She lay back down among the pillows and sighed.

  ‘Chocolate, Katie, and Bizlis.’ Again, that strange, alien sound that was supposed to be laughter.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ I said. I kissed her cheek again.

  The lobby was deserted, and the streets were unnaturally quiet. Nor were they as brightly lit as usual. The first two little kiosks I went to were shuttered. So was the third. That was odd. By the time I reached the fourth I had started to sweat on this mildest of nights. Something was wrong, though I couldn’t quite say what it was.

  I saw a kiosk owner who was packing up for the day. I threw a two hundred-shekel note at him and grabbed what Carla had asked for.

  ‘Keep the change,’ I shouted at him and he smiled widely. I realised I’d given him the equivalent of seventy Australian dollars. I didn’t care. Just as I turned to go back to the suites, he called out after me, ‘Chag Sameach, motek, Happy Holiday, Sweetie. Tonight is Erev Pessach! Why aren’t you home with your family?’

  Behind my knees I felt twin pulses juddering. Of course—Passover Eve. Everyone was home with their families. That’s why all the shops had been closed. Carla knew it. She was totally in tune with the Jewish calendar. And she knew I wasn’t—the atheist in the room. She had sent me on a fool’s errand.

  So now I began to search desperately for a cab, but all the drivers were at home, too. I started to run. It wasn’t that far. Well it was that far, but I was trying to tell myself that I could do this. I could run the distance, I could keep this speed. I had been gone forty minutes at most. Or maybe fifty. I didn’t know. I had completely lost track.

  I was fit from swimming. I had kept it up. Soon I learned that swimming fitness did not translate into running fitness. When I reached the suites, each breath I drew was rough and erratic. I found myself exhaling on a weird shrill note like a tubercular patient in the Swiss Alps.

  The kosher lift was programmed to stop at every floor for the holiday. I hurtled up the staircase till I reached the door. I realised I had left my key inside the room. I hammered on the wood crying out Carla’s name. Other people heard me and stuck their heads out. I propelled myself down the stairs. I found Amnon, the concierge, enjoying this peaceful night on double pay. But soon I had him charging back up the stairs with me, master key in hand.

  After my hysterical knocking when I had first arrived, there was now a little knot of people outside 418. Amnon actually shooed them all away by saying in Hebrew, ‘Move along please. Nothing to see here.’

  I started to laugh a little hysterically, but he took my arm and pulled me around to face him. He squeezed my cheeks till they hurt, and I fell silent. For some reason I remembered he had told me once that he was a Navy Seal.

  He opened the door and I launched across the room. No Carla on the couch. Straight into the bathroom, Amnon at my heels. She was in a bath whose water was still giving off steam. It was blood-filled. She had done a professional job, the vertical slice of the veins on either arm. Her face was blue-white. She was not breathing. Amnon took a single look at her and said, ‘Niftar’, dead.

  I screamed and tried to find a pulse in her ruined arms. I plunged my head into the water in the hope of putting my ear to her heart. I was soaking and bloody with it. Amnon pulled me out and I fought him.

  I felt his breath on my face and saw that he was pale, too. Somehow, a naked girl lying in her own blood in one of his hotel’s bathrooms was worse than witnessing death by combat.

  ‘She is dead,’ he said in English, in case I didn’t get it in Hebrew. In case I was blind. ‘Pack your things. I’m moving you to another room. I need to call the ambulance and then her family. She’s wearing a ring. Do you have her husband’s details?

  ‘Niftar,’ I said, ‘the King David hotel’. I covered my eyes with both hands as though I were about to bless the Sabbath candles. I could not bear to look at him: those knowing eyes that had seen too much.

  I gave him the Biancardi information, name, number, address; and again, his eyes registered knowledge.

  ‘She converted for him?’

  I nodded.

  When the ambulance arrived, Amnon spoke to the paramedic. She listened and seemed to agree with whatever it was he was saying.

  Carla, dear God, Carla, was hoisted naked out of the bath and placed in a body bag. I always thought there was something heroic about my Italian friend, especially in her last Herculean efforts for the sake of Ariel. I didn’t want my last sight of her to be the defining one. I forced my mind’s eye to focus on Carla skiing, Carla drinking whisky, Carla ruling the fumoir as though it were her own little fiefdom, her fair curls encircled by an aura of smoke.

  When Amnon and I were finally alone in the room, he phoned down to housekeeping, requesting two particular men to clean the space. He helped me pack up my things and took me to another room on another floor. He told me I must shower. That I could not continue with Carla’s blood all over me. When I emerged in the hotel’s bathrobe, I saw he had produced from somewhere a largish bottle of Scotch. From his pocket he took out a much smaller bottle, this one containing small, dark green pills. I didn’t even think to ask him why he carried such things around.

  He set a glass down in front of me and filled it to the brim. He took my hand, opened my palm and shook out two of the little ovals into it.

  ‘Drink that,’ he pointed to the glass, ‘swallow those.’ Now he pointed to the pills, ‘and I will come for you in the morning.’

  I called Gideon, explaining it all and telling him it would be a little while longer before I came home. He asked me if I needed him to come. I said no.

  Then old man Biancardi turned up at my door, invited himself inside and sat down in the largest chair. He wasted no time.

  ‘You said you would look after her, even if you were on opposite sides of the planet. You promised me.’ His cold grey eyes watered as he spoke.

  I tried not to cry. I would not tell him that she had deceived me so she could be alone to carry out her plan.

  ‘I have come to bring her home,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you think she might want to be buried next to Ariel?’

  He was brutal. ‘She is a suicide. She couldn’t be buried next to him. Even if I were to allow it, your law would not permit. But in any event, I heard that what they buried of Ariel was almost less than a single strand of flesh.’

  He said Ariel’s name with an Italian lilt, so that it came out with an additional syllable—‘Ariel-e’. Somehow that gave it a musical sound.

  ‘So, no,’ said Carla’s father, ‘I can’t see the burial happening your way’.

  ‘Don’t Catholics have laws against suicide too?’

  ‘Catholics, I can handle. I know how to get what I want with them. It’s Jews I don’t understand.’

  ‘What if I could help you to—–’

  ‘Help!’ His voice exploded in the confines o
f the room, another Biancardi owning every space he occupied. ‘You’ve helped the Biancardis quite enough for one lifetime.’

  He stood and looked around him as though he were not quite sure where he was or what he was doing. He wavered. I took him by the elbow and steered him from the room.

  MAY 1974

  MILAN

  I attended the funeral, with Maria-Elena and Ivory also rushing to the graveside in response to my telegrams. Maria-Elena was followed closely by three men wearing dark suits and sunglasses. We all stood at the edge of the crowd, sensing we would not be welcome in the midst of it. I noticed there were no people of Carla’s age except for a few cousins who were wound inside their parents’ arms. Where were her friends? Could the three of us really have been her only allies? Before Lac d’Or—wrapped in her father’s money—had her life really been that lonely?

  Her father shook and cried, and I didn’t know who I pitied more. But, of course, it was Carla, her life cut short. People tossed roses onto the coffin as it was lowered into the void. The sun came out briefly, pallid, almost colourless, backlighting the gravediggers as they shovelled dirt into the abyss. They worked with a steady rhythm, but because of the light that shone behind them, I could not see their faces. I did not need to. It was just one more grave to them. Tomorrow there would be another, and the next day another and the next…

  Carla’s life found a small space to reside within me forever as a strange, fierce, little saga. It did not matter how much I wanted it to have been different, all I would ever have left was a memory I could not change…

  And Gatsby would always have died.