by CL Skelton
Still Jan had ignored her and had travelled the dusty miles by coach from Kibbutz Aaron on the edge of the Negev to the humid heat of the Mediterranean city of Haifa, a city which of all places in his new homeland held traces of the indefinable heart-tug of home. It was to Haifa he had come sixteen years before in the late autumn of 1934, a refugee, penniless as most refugees, the son of a German war hero and a gentle German lady who was also a Jew. As he wandered deeper into the twisting shadowy lanes of the old souks, now pocked and shattered by shellfire, he felt he could actually come face to face with the ghost of himself, his old self, stumbling wide-eyed through those same streets, a startled European benumbed by the shattering changes in his country that had cast him unwilling into the gay, alien clutter of an Arabian city. A ghost amid ghosts, he thought sadly, for the Arabs whose city he had entered were gone, scattered by the violent birth throes of Israel, refugees now themselves beyond her borders. Haifa, the changeling child, had forgotten its parentage and rose up around him, a new, modern, western industrial city, irrevocably changed by its Jewish inheritors, of which he was undoubtedly one. Yet he mourned the old Arab city with a nostalgia that was undeniably perverse.
Jan was glad he was alone and that Yigel, his closest friend who had accompanied him on the coach journey, had gone off by himself this morning to poke about the museums with kibbutznik curiosity. Yigel would not understand his attachment to the Haifa of his memories; nor indeed would Hannah. She would grow hurt at what she interpreted as pro-Arab sympathies, as well she might. Arabs had killed both her parents, and he knew she must think of them as he thought of the Nazis. But Hannah was gentle, as the martyred often are, whereas Yigel, whose parents were alive and well and living in considerable comfort in Haifa itself, had nothing for Arabs but bitterness and hate. They were still to him the enemy they had been when he and Jan fought side by side in Haganah in the first days of Statehood, and so they would always remain. Jan did not argue. Yigel was a good friend, and Jan had learned in thirty-six years that it was possible to be friends and yet disagree. And so too, he thought again of Hannah, was it possible to be lovers. For she and he had so many chasms of strangeness, and alien culture, and language and belief to separate them that it seemed at times they had spent the last three years in one ceaseless argument shifting with lightning swiftness from German to Yiddish, to Hebrew, to French the better to express their differences. And yet they were, without question, in love.
Hannah’s grandparents had come from Russia in the First Aliyah in the early days of the century; passionate and idealistic Zionists who had paid for their idealism with malaria and early graves. But not before providing Palestine with five Sabra children, among whom was Hannah’s father who had founded the kibbutz of which both Jan and Hannah were members, and who had died beside her mother, defending it from the fedayeen. When Jan met Hannah she was a newly-orphaned fifteen-year-old with a long rope of sun-bleached hair and large dark eyes filled with a heart-wrenching combination of grief and determination. Within a year Jan was stunned to find himself her lover. He was seventeen years older than she, and her youth shocked him as much as it drew him. It was she, not he, who made every first move, with that frank-eyed Sabra candour that came so easily to young kibbutzniks, and so hard to the European born like Jan. At times, to amuse himself, he would recall his own adolescence, picturing himself at fifteen, a stiff, crop-haired blond youth in a dark suit and a stiff collar, sitting amidst his German aunts, drinking coffee and eating cakes by the coal fire of his mother’s house in Munich. Then he would look at her, tumbling into the long grass of the kibbutz orchard, brown-legged in her rolled cotton shorts, her blouse half undone in readiness, her braids of hair flung out like a child’s and her woman’s arms opened to him. They might have grown up on two different planets, so unlike were they. And yet in all Palestine there was no place he felt he belonged more than in those sun-brown arms. ‘Hannah,’ he whispered out loud to himself, because he so liked the sound of her name.
A dark-skinned, dark-clothed woman passing in the street looked up, blankly and uninterested, at the sound. Her eyes took him in and dismissed him as the stranger he appeared. She was a Sephardic Jew, a North African immigrant, as were most of the occupants of the old Arab quarter. Eastern and alien, she had no more in common with him than had her Arab predecessors, and the dismissal in her eyes made clear she desired no further contact. But for the continuing cataclysm called history Jan Muller and the Sephardic stranger would never have come within hundreds of miles of each other. Now they brushed elbows among Arab ghosts. Such was Israel, he thought, turning almost reluctantly back towards the harbour where another shipload of strangers sailed to join them.
Isaac Mandel, who should be among them, was Jan Muller’s mother’s cousin and, as such, the only Jewish relative he had ever known. His mother had been, like Hannah, an only child, and like Hannah an orphan at fifteen, though for no reason more dramatic than influenza. She had married out of the faith, a faith which her own family had only hesitantly practised, and had more or less left it behind, retaining only those aspects that cling to the apostate: culinary delicacies remembered from childhood and a faint aura of indeterminate guilt. Jan was raised in a Gentile household, among his father’s German relatives, a quartet of blonde sisters whose mutual spinsterhood had been the legacy of the same war that had taken the life of Jan’s father, a hero of the sunken Scharnhorst. Judaism, in the days of Jan’s youth, was as alien to him as to his German schoolmates, except for a distant sense of connection. It, like the photograph of his father in the uniform of the German Imperial Navy, was a private possession, something unique that was his, and in both he took pride. Part of the pride, he realized later, was undoubtedly linked to Isaac Mandel, for as the one incarnation of Jan’s Jewish family, he made a most striking and impressive figure. He was, in the time of Jan’s boyhood, a bachelor of indeterminate age, handsome, dark, well-dressed, with a certain rakish style that whispered of experience. He stood out from the stolid German middle-classes of Jan’s suburban home like a thoroughbred among dray horses; there was about him a panache that stopped just at the right side of flashiness, a glitter of wealth that fell short of ostentation, a glimpse of sharp intellect that yet evaded bookishness. He was a man of undefined power, a man for whom restaurant crowds stopped momentarily talking, and headwaiters whirled to attention by instinct, and when, on occasion, he swept into Jan’s life from his home in Berlin, his big black Daimler attracting crowds of schoolchildren to their gate, his arms laden with expensive gifts, Jan’s dull world lit up with a rare light.
There followed always family dinners, with the blonde aunts patting their coiled braids of hair and resting plump white hands on heavy bosoms, as Isaac talked of theatre and art. Then they would be taken out to the most fashionable restaurants for coffee and cream cakes, on balconies in the summer, or in velvety red interiors in winter. Jan’s mother would blush, and glow, and protest that he did too much, was too kind, meaning it all because she was the most undemanding of women, and because of her sincerity Isaac would only redouble his efforts, and the presents and outings would increase. Jan, with boyish practicality, accepted all that was given, politely, and ingenuously waited for more. It was only when he was grown, and Munich was gone, and with it all their small world, that he really appreciated the generosity of this distant cousin who had done so much to make his mother’s widowhood less lonely, and his fatherless boyhood less grim. Remembering that now, Jan knew that he was right and Hannah was wrong. She could not know, as he knew, what a lonely fierce thing it was to first set foot in an alien land, knowing it must become your home. If, for all that generosity of past years, he could in any way repay, it must first be in this way, to ease the awful loneliness of Isaac’s first day in Palestine. Perhaps, he thought, as the harbour came in sight, and Hannah again flitted across his mind, perhaps he would be lucky and some god of conversation would prevent his mother’s name from arising. Perhaps he could see Isaac off to his new de
stination without ever having to ask the questions he asked of all he met who had known Munich. Have you heard? Have you seen her? Is she alive, is she dead? Those were the questions the Sabras could not understand; the questions that hung on the lips of every refugee from the charnel house that had been Europe … brother, sister, mother, father, child, lover … has anyone heard? For seventeen years Jan Muller had asked that question, and for seventeen years he had met no one who could answer. Not friend , nor family, old neighbour, or passing acquaintance, nor any of the great network of relief and refugee agencies who did their best to find the lost ones. Long ago logic had said she was dead and that same logic, he knew, was what drove Hannah to beg him to forget. But death was one thing, doubt another, and he was haunted forever by the image of her alone and seeking him, as she had sought him the foolish day he had run away from home at the age of seven. He fancied he could see her yet, walking alone down dark streets with no one, no husband, to help her, seeking her only child, calling his name into darkness. For seventeen years he had imagined her thus. It would be a relief, he knew, to learn at last she was dead. And yet it was a relief he found amazingly painful to face.
When he reached the waterfront again, the immigrant ship was just nosing into her berth, casting lines down on to Israeli soil. She was a rusty, unkempt old liner, but a long luxurious way from the battered sea tugs which he and his compatriots of Haganah had employed to run the British blockade in the days of the Mandate. Her deck railings were lined with crowds of men, women and children, silhouetted darkly against the morning light, straining forward towards their new home. Voices drifted down in a complexity of once-familiar tongues; Yiddish, German, Polish, French. As he caught and translated phrases, Jan realized suddenly that at last he had begun to think in Hebrew. He wondered how long before they would, too. He scanned the crowded railings, not really expecting to recognize anyone among such a crush, yet still looking. The men all seemed dressed alike, in shabby suits too warm for the humid heat of the morning, and the women, too, in their cardigans and cloth coats and headscarves had that displaced look of all refugees, self-conscious in other people’s genteel cast-offs. He could not imagine Isaac as one of them and wondered if perhaps Miriam Krautz, who had written him of Isaac’s arrival from her studio in the artists’ colony of Ein Hod, had been wrong. Miriam had once been a neighbour in Munich, though she had moved away to Berlin long before the day of Jan’s arrest, and she had heard, through the complex grapevine of the exiled German-Jewish community in Israel, that Isaac Mandel had been seen in a refugee centre in Cyprus and was on his way to Palestine. Dutifully she had informed Jan, whom she had met again some years ago in a half-constructed street of Tel Aviv, and with whom she had always afterwards kept in touch. He was grateful. It was from such frail links that the fragments of the past were slowly, painfully re-established. It was a process both necessary and agonizing, as each reunion invariably brought news of half a dozen deaths, as if by some cruel arrangement it was necessary to lose six to gain one. That was what it meant to be a survivor. The thought, the word, brought a damp shiver over Jan’s shoulders beneath his sweat-stained cotton shirt, and he thought again of Isaac Mandel, the survivor. For Jan had escaped all that; his early arrest for what now seemed a ludicrously trivial political act, the defacing of a Hitler youth poster, had spared him, leading as it did both to his imprisonment and then his violent rescue by communist Jewish activists who destroyed his provincial prison cell with home-made explosive and smuggled him out of Germany. As the vice closed on all his Berlin family, Isaac Mandel first among them, Jan Muller was already building a new world in the desert of Palestine. Until Miriam Krautz’s letter he had thought himself the only one, the last of his family, for Isaac with all the rest and no doubt his mother too, had been sent to the camps. But Isaac had survived.
The gangplank clanged, metal on metal on to the deck of the crowded ship, and at once its occupants poured down as if yet in doubt of their safety until they were truly on land. Once there, they milled about in the confusion of all disembarkings, looking for friends, relatives, each other, luggage, officials, road signs, lavatories. Children cried, bored already with the Promised Land, and an old, old man, in the antiquated dress of the Hasidim, solemnly sprawled full length amid the secular clutter of the quayside and kissed the concrete ground.
Through them Jan Muller wandered, looking for Isaac or, rather, looking for what Isaac might have become. As the pack of immigrants began to break up into small organized, determined groups, his search became more urgent. Like all Israeli events, the arrival of the immigrant ship was marked by a casual sun-washed informality. Open-shirted officials laughed and joked as they answered questions and directed groups in one direction or another. There was none of the paper and document and ink-stamp fuss that Jan associated with the officialdom of his native land, none of the concern for passports and identifications. But then in a land where the only requirement for entry was that one must claim Jewish identity, there was little need for documentation. It was not an identity, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that anyone would lightly claim.
Still, for all its informality, the immigration procedures of Haifa had grown efficient with much practice and already a party of bewildered new Israelis were being led off by a broad, loud-voiced woman with the unmistakable agricultural authority of a kibbutz official, to a waiting lorry. Jan hastened after them, and had just ascertained that Isaac was not among them when, turning back to the ship, he saw him, standing isolated amidst the crowd, a single leather suitcase at his feet.
Isaac was dressed like the others on the ship, in a slightly ill-fitting, inappropriately dark suit and a battered overcoat, and wore as well a comically broad-brimmed white hat with a dark brown hat-band that, set above his drastically aged face and gold-rimmed spectacles, gave the impression of a kindly grandfather dressed as a gangster. He was studying a piece of paper in his hand, his eyes squinted up behind the glass of his spectacles, peering at the writing on it, obscured by the glare of the sun. As Jan strode through the parting crowd to his side he looked up and acknowledged him calmly, as if he had recognized him, without surprise.
‘Isaac?’ Jan called, ‘Isaac, it is you, Isaac?’ But the man only blinked in confusion, and Jan realized that it was not recognition that he had seen on Isaac’s face, but a cautious acknowledgement of authority. He had mistaken Jan, unsurprisingly, for another Israeli official, and even an Israeli authority was awarded the terrible cautious deference that marked survivors of that world where a mistaken glance could bring arbitrary death.
‘Please, I do not wish to cause trouble, but the lettering is difficult.’
‘Isaac Mandel?’
The man nodded, more cautiously. ‘I should not be here?’
‘Isaac, I’m Jan. Jan Muller. Ian Muller,’ he said, quickly remembering that Isaac had known him by the Scottish form of his name that his mother had given him in honour of a dead Scottish stranger. ‘Heidi Muller’s son, Isaac. I’m Heidi’s son.’ He reached to touch the man’s shoulder but the other drew back as if expecting violence, or a trick.
For a long time he stood silently, as caution and amazement wavered in his eyes. He glanced once behind him, and once towards the doorway of the quayside building, where the two officials lounged, chatting to a pair of young immigrant girls. ‘Ian?’ he whispered. ‘Ian Muller?’
‘Heidi’s son, Isaac. Your cousin’s son. Surely you remember me …’
There was another long pause and then slowly, almost without perceptible motion, Isaac made a nod of affirmation. He dropped his voice to whisper, ‘Ian, a minute, can we talk … is it safe?’
Jan took Isaac away from the quay, up into the commercial district of Haifa, climbing away from the industrial clutter into the pleasant, almost European centre of parks and cafés, midway up the slope that led to the heights of Mount Carmel where the wealthy, Yigel’s parents among them, lived. He carried Isaac’s suitcase, so light that he suspected it contained nothing at
all, in one hand, and kept his other linked through Isaac’s arm. Isaac walked like an old man, shuffling and uncertain. On the way Jan assured him again and again that the converted lorry waiting to take him to the kibbutz to which he was assigned would not leave until afternoon.
‘I asked especially, Isaac. Two o’clock. There is time yet. Time for lunch, coffee, whatever you like.’
‘I would not find it, without the lorry, Ian. This piece of paper, I cannot read it properly. The print is small.’
‘The lorry will wait, Isaac.’
‘Do you have my case, still, Ian?’
‘I have your case, Isaac.’ Isaac nodded, shuffling onwards. He still wore his heavy cloth greatcoat and Jan stopped and said, ‘Let me take your coat, Isaac?’
‘My coat?’ Isaac looked up, his eyes suddenly frightened behind their gold-rimmed spectacles. Jan had a quick vision of those mountains of spectacles, shoes, black overcoats, the detritus of the death camps that the newspapers always showed.
‘It’s warm, Isaac. Let me carry your coat.’ Isaac shook his head fearfully, and turned the lapels up around his ropy throat. Jan let him be. He found a café on the corner of one of the wide boulevards, where it was possible to sit at a table and watch the blue curve of the Mediterranean while the traffic went by. He seated Isaac, who asked that his case be put down beside his knees, where he patted it steadily as a child pats his mother’s knee. Isaac did not wish to eat, but Jan ordered Turkish pastries with the coffee, hoping he would be tempted. When he turned from the waiter, a dark North African, Isaac was again peering at his piece of paper with the printing he could not read.
