To Live in Peace

by Rosemary Friedman

  She was almost level with the hoarding against which the three youths lounged, staring at her; she could hear the beat of her heart but not the fall of her feet. She wondered if she had forgotten about God, who must be here amongst the rusty railings, the uneven paving stones, and found herself in extremis addressing him. She apologised for not waiting for a cab as she had promised Maurice, for being so foolish, for not listening to Josh who had told her a hundred times to take care in New York (a city renowned for its violence), and for thinking that the criminal acts which took place were directed towards other people, towards satisfying the requirements of the statisticians, and that they couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her. She tried to remember the words of the shema, the universal prayer of Jews used thrice daily and in distress, but could get no further than the first words although she had known it by heart since she had been a child, had learned to pronounce it before she had memorised her nursery rhymes, to lisp its syllables before she could even read.

  “Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be his name, whose glorious kingdom is for ever and ever. And thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy might…” She had certainly done her best although since Sydney’s death she had been slipping a bit. “…And these words which I command thee this day shall be upon thine heart: and thou shall teach them diligently to thy children…” She had done that all right, or rather Sydney had. He’d been as strict with Rachel and Carol as he had with Josh – not that it had done any good in Rachel’s case, she had no time for the religion. Maybe when she had a child of her own she’d change her views…

  From the corner of her eye she could see the sweatshirts and the white suit, all of which looked as if they could do with a wash. If she survived the next few seconds she would survive. Maurice would have known what to do. He had survived the concentration camps. He was a survivor. Kitty had never been put to the test.

  Until it came to the crunch you never knew how you were going to react in a given situation. Often you surprised yourself. Some years ago she had been having pains in her stomach and Lennie Silver, who was their family doctor and had looked after them all for years, had sent her to have an X-ray. They’d taken a couple of pictures then the radiographer had frowned and told her to get up off the table. “We’ve seen enough, Mrs Shelton. We don’t need to keep you any longer,” and she’d gone home and pruned the roses (they were still in Hendon then) with the tears pouring down her face wondering whether Sydney would marry again and how Josh and Carol and Rachel were going to manage without her. She had thought herself philosophical when it came to her own mortality but she had been scared out of her wits at what she thought was the prognosis, desperately lonely and afraid. As it turned out she had been eating too many peaches (she never could digest stoned fruit) and a course of anti-spasmodics had seen her right as rain.

  The young men were strung out in front of the graffiti (she could just make out a few of the words which were not very polite), standing quite still as if they had been pinned like butterflies against the corrugated iron. Kitty tried not to look, neither to the right nor the left, but straight ahead as she drew level with the trio. “Keep going,” she told herself, “just keep going.” As she passed the watchers she felt a pull, as of a current, drawing her towards them (although it was ridiculous), and that as the only human beings within sight they must, were destined to, make contact. She kept her eyes on their sneakers, each pair more disreputable than the last. The six laced feet, at bizarre angles at the ends of nonchalantly crossed legs, did not move. She counted them silently. One…two… She was level with them now. Three…four… She had been stupid after all, how Bette would laugh when she told her of her fears.

  There was a movement beside her, towards her, she tried to hurry but seemed to be suspended between the buildings, reviewing her life although she knew that it was over.

  “Pardon me, Ma’am.” The white suit confronted her, blocking her path, but she knew that the others were behind her.

  “Do you have any idea of the time?”

  Time.

  Time.

  She had been silly.

  They only wanted to know the time.

  She looked at the watch with its gold bracelet which Sydney had given her for their last wedding anniversary. She squinted at its tiger’s eye face.

  “Five past nine.”

  The aerobics class started sharp at eight-thirty to accommodate the working pupils – in this town women such as herself, without careers, were almost invisible – she was certainly going to be late.

  “Five parst nine!” The youth who towered over her imitated her accent. Perhaps she wasn’t going to get away so quickly after all. She felt something cold against her throat and recognised, weak with fear now, the blade of a knife.

  “I don’t want to have to use this,” a menacing voice drawled. He wasn’t kidding. The man in front of her reached for her watch, pulling at it and hurting her wrist. If he’d waited a moment she would have given it to him. A watch was a watch, it was not so important. He tugged, his black fingers with their ragged nails against her pale skin. She opened her mouth to scream with the pain of the twisting, burning flesh but an unpleasant hand covered her mouth from behind, and the sound subsided into a stifled sob as, surprising herself, she fought to hold on to her handbag with her passport, her little bit of England, and for breath.

  Someone was kicking, someone was struggling as she clung for dear life on to the navy pochette with its navy strap in which were photographs of her grandchildren. A palm slapped her face and she felt the blood trickle from her nose. She tried to scream as they took her watch and the gold chain from her neck, showering her with obscene epithets, hurting her head, but she clung to her possessions until she felt the steel of the knife bite into her flesh and realised that this was New York and there would be no compunction about using it.

  She let go her pocketbook at the same moment as a great weight came crashing down on her skull and the pain was so exquisite it was almost beautiful and she didn’t feel the ground as it rose up, no hesitation at all as in her summer dress, now moulded wetly to her skin, she collapsed like a rag-doll beneath the blind eyes of the tall buildings.

  “OKAYMOVE OKAYMOVE OKAYMOVEmovemove move…”

  The words ran off with the squelching feet and an incandescent light which she strove to meet through the taste of her own vomit came like a meteor towards her and gathered her up in the welcome arms of its silence.

  Fifteen

  The news that Kitty was in hospital was passed on by a telephone call from Maurice to Carol in London, from where it was relayed to the more remote members of the family and was responsible, indirectly, for setting the final seal on the quarrel between Rachel and her brother Josh. Carol, as had her mother, had thought that mugging, like rape or kidnapping, was something that happened to other people and was stunned when Maurice told her, breaking the news as gently as possible, that Kitty had been concussed and as a result of the coup de grace now had twenty stitches in her head.

  Never having had any first-hand experience of brutality, Carol had not really come to terms with a world in which no daily news bulletin was complete without its story of innocent victims – security guards or postwomen – who had been maimed or annihilated by some gratuitous act of violence. The world of her three children was different. She remembered breaking the news to Debbie, then aged three, that her grandmother, Alec’s mother, had died. Quick as a flash the child replied: “Who shot her?”

  She had tried to get hold of Alec at the hotel in Godalming but he seemed never to be in his room. She had passed the news on to Rachel and Josh and had called a family conclave. Rachel had said that if Josh was going to be present she wasn’t interested in coming, having no desire to be in the same room as her brother, and Carol had to persuade her that there were more immediate things at stake than their unresolved quarrel and that it had to be decided if one of them
was to go over to the bedside of their mother in New York.

  “If he says one word,” Rachel told Patrick. “If he so much as mentions Begin…”

  “We were talking about your mother.”

  “I don’t wish to discuss it with Josh.”

  “It’s probably mutual.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  Patrick put his arms around her. “My wife’s. And son’s.”

  “It could be a girl.”

  “There’ll be others.”

  “Women are people.”

  “Did I say they weren’t?”

  “You’ve been brought up to believe it. You’ve only got to listen to your father belittling your mother’s work at the Children’s Home. When he mentions it – if he talks about it at all – he refers to the fact that she drives almost a hundred miles twice a week and cheerfully does the most soul-destroying, unrewarding tasks for those pathetic outcasts as ‘keeping busy’. He unconsciously denigrates her efforts in order to conserve his own dignity as bread-winner. Her voluntary work is only ‘keeping busy’ because it’s unpaid and part-time and because her ‘proper’ job – also unpaid – is keeping that great big house and your father in the manner to which he has grown accustomed, a full-time job in itself. In actual fact your mother does one and a half jobs although your father would rather die than admit it!”

  “I’m not like that.”

  “I heard you the other day. ‘Rachel is filling in time,’ you said, ‘in her uncle’s gallery’.”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  “I’m on the go for eight hours a day – not to mention the travelling – dealing with Joe Public, God help me, who doesn’t know his art from his elbow, and has most probably only come in from the rain, and if he hasn’t he doesn’t want to see me but to go into the back room and play telephone numbers with Uncle Juda who has me keeping the books and humping the paintings and looking up the catalogues and running out for his sandwiches and finding non-existent taxis and acting as errand boy for a miserable pittance most of which goes at the supermarket checkout on a Saturday morning from where I emerge with at least four heavy carrier bags weighed down as women have been throughout the ages with water on their heads or firewood on their backs for the benefit of…”

  “Can I help it if I’ve been on duty for the last few Saturdays?”

  “‘Filling in time’, as I’m sure you would realise if you really thought about it, is hardly an accurate assessment of the way I spend my day, which although it may be less charismatic than yours is equally valid.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “The exploitation of women at work is simply an extension of their exploitation at home where they work not for low pay but for no pay. We both live here yet I am supposed to be responsible for getting the vacuum mended and remembering to buy the loo paper.”

  “I’d get it if you asked me.”

  “Exactly. I have to ask you.”

  “Well, you can hardly expect me to think about loo paper while I’m at the hospital.”

  “What about me at the art gallery? Don’t answer. I’m only ‘filling in time’ – which is what I said in the first place!”

  “Are you sorry you married me?”

  “Patrick, we were talking about loo paper.”

  “You’re always fighting. Rachel Klopman versus the world.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you sorry you married me?”

  “On the contrary. You’ll be a magnificent mother for our…”

  “Yes?”

  “For our child, Rachel. God I love you.”

  “I can’t help it if I’ve got a lot to say. I take after my Aunt Beatty.”

  “You care passionately.”

  “Too passionately?”

  “Never too passionately.”

  “Cut it out. We have to go to Carol’s…”

  “Did you know,” Lisa said, “that there are more eight-year-olds in China than there are people in Great Britain?”

  “I can’t say I’d thought about it,” Carol said, handing her youngest daughter a tin. “Put these biscuits on a plate.”

  “Is Auntie Rachel coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Uncle Josh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are they always fighting?”

  “You fight with Debbie.”

  “They’re grown up.”

  “Sometimes people don’t feel very grown up inside.”

  Carol didn’t feel very grown up herself. In her mother’s kitchen talking to Lisa who, biting her tongue, was arranging the biscuits Carol had made from her mother’s recipe in concentric circles on a plate, she had the strange sensation that she was Lisa, enacting the scene she had played so many times with her mother, whom physically at least she so resembled. She remembered how, as an adolescent, a well-meaning friend of her parents’ had commented on their similarity, adding: “Not as good-looking as your mother was at your age!” It hadn’t helped. Carol was painfully aware of her limitations. She wasn’t clever like Rachel, nor sure of herself like Josh. Encouraged by Sydney she had married straight from school, going from one family to another without having learned independence.

  Her poetry had turned out to be a lifeline. In it she was able to express feelings for which elsewhere she could find no words, hopes, fears and dreams which troubled her. That these days she lived largely in her head seemed to irritate Alec as did the fact that her uncomfortable pregnancy, in addition to looking after the other three children, consumed so much of her energy and time. It was not that she did not care for Alec – she hated every moment of her separation from him and Godalming – simply that she was incapable of demonstrating her love (except for a short while following the death of her father) in ways he would have liked. Here in this flat the shades of her parents made her feel once more uncomfortably like a small girl, and the news of Kitty’s accident had filled her with terror. If it hadn’t been for the children she would have taken the first plane to New York. It was as if she had been mugged, and yet she was also Lisa putting out the biscuits. It was painful and confusing to have no clear idea of exactly who she was.

  Rachel and Josh sat on opposite sides of the room.

  “Biscuit?” Carol handed the plate to Rachel.

  “Sugar and white flour,” Rachel said, recoiling from the cherry-topped hearts as if they were about to strike her.

  “Mummie made them,” Lisa said.

  “She should know better. Sugar is the…”

  “It’s like the antenatal clinic in here,” Patrick remarked, changing the subject before Rachel got on her wholefood hobby horse.

  “You still going to give birth swinging from a tree?” Josh addressed Rachel.

  “When Morris Goldapple delivered me…” Carol began.

  “He didn’t deliver you,” Rachel said. “You delivered yourself. Morris Goldapple was there.

  “You’re always arguing,” Josh said, “even if there’s nothing to argue about.”

  “Carol thinks that Morris Goldapple gave her a gift! A present at the end of her pregnancy for being a good girl. In actual fact he is just protecting himself from the undesirable connotations of the birth situation by shrouding himself in ritualistic procedures; shaving, enemas…”

  “The children!” Carol said.

  “…confining women to bed in an inferior position, sedating them if they make a fuss, withholding food – I’m taking sandwiches – reducing them to a state of childlike dependence which denies their sexuality by emphasising their ‘plumbing’.”

  “There’s no need to be offensive,” Carol said.

  “It’s better than being passive and docile, relinquishing all control and allowing other people to make decisions for you, to run your life. Morris Goldapple, if I’m not mistaken –”

  “You don’t know anything about him,” Carol said.

  “– if you’d let me finish: Morris Goldapple, together with o
thers of his kind, looks upon birth simply as another manifestation of human pathology, on a par with fibroids or carcinoma of the cervix.”

  “God forbid,” Carol said.

  “He becomes so detached that he can no longer function at the required instinctual level. Birth is most probably as painful for the child as it is for the mother but obstetricians like Morris Goldapple…”

  “Take it easy, Rache,” Patrick said, “you’re upsetting Carol.”

  “She upsets everyone,” Josh said. “I thought we were here to talk about Mother.”

  “Poor Kitty,” Sarah said, putting an arm round Carol. “She must have been terrified. Mugging is the sort of thing one reads about.”

  “She should never have gone to New York,” Rachel said. “Running after that old man!”

  “I wish I was with her,” Carol said, “if it wasn’t for the children…”

  “I’d go,” Sarah said, “but it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “That leaves me,” Rachel said. “I’ll go.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Josh said.

  “You must be joking.”

  “I promise not to say a word about the ‘Butcher of Lebanon’.”

  “Watch it,” Patrick warned.

  “I’ll make some more tea,” Carol said.

  “It’s not the first time General Sharon has overstepped the mark,” Josh continued. “In 1956 he was accused by four of his own battalion commanders of exceeding his orders. He only escaped a court martial by the skin of his teeth.”

  “The Israelis did not enter Sabra and Chatila!” Rachel said.

  “They were in charge.”

  “The British were in charge in Jerusalem in the 1920s when for two days the Jews were slaughtered by the Arabs under al-Husseini. They arranged to have the army sent out of the city.”