Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  “To hell with that, Saul! She won’t’ve left for work yet, why don’t you just go?”

  Saul laughed abruptly and picked some bits of thread off his cardigan. “It’s a funny thing, David, but I’ve never been able to openly defy him. It sounds weak, doesn’t it? But it’s the way I am. The ructions it’d cause—well it never seems worth it.” He squared his thin shoulders and began folding again. “But I’ll tell you something. After the war I’m not coming back here to live with him. I’m going to ask Mr. Moritz to let Helga marry me on my first leave.”

  Sigmund gave Saul and Helga his blessing and a few weeks later, David, who was still a civilian, accompanied his friend on a wedding-eve night out. They went for a walk around Hightown, as a change from Strangeways, then sat drinking tea in a café where the only other customer was an old man who looked as if he had nowhere else to go.

  The frizzy-haired waitress smoothed her soiled overall over her ample hips and came to give the oil-cloth-covered table a cursory wipe. “On leave, luv?” she smiled to Saul.

  “Embarkation leave, as it happens.”

  “He’s getting wed tomorrow,” David added with a grin.

  “What’s ’e doin’ in ’ere then? Pub next door’s t’place fer ’is last fling!”

  “She’s right, Saul,” David said as the girl took their empty cups away. “So how about it?”

  “Since when did Jewish lads go shikkering?”

  “It’s a special occasion, isn’t it?”

  “Pubs’re all right when you’ve got no home to go to, like when you’re a soldier in a strange town.”

  “Shall we go back to your house then?”

  “Not likely! We’ll go to yours.”

  It was after ten when they got to the Sandbergs’ and everyone was in bed.

  Saul watched David build up the fire and smiled wistfully. “You don’t know how lucky you are, David.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “The sort of home you’ve got.”

  David changed the subject. What was the use of harping on Saul’s bad relationship with his father, which was what his remark had implied. “Tell me what being a soldier’s like, Saul.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “But I’d like to know how it feels.”

  Saul watched the flames roaring up the chimney while he thought about it. “As if you’re marking time, more than anything else. I mean you’re still the same, still yourself, aren’t you, even though you’re in uniform? Wanting the same things you’ve always wanted, only now you have to wait till the war’s over.”

  David looked at him uncertainly. “But there must be more to it than that.”

  “Not for me there isn’t.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what you’re doing in the army?”

  “I got called up, didn’t I?”

  “Exactly. Because someone assassinated an Archduke thousands of miles away, but what’s that got to do with us? I can’t fathom out what the war’s for.”

  “They say things’ll be better for everyone afterwards.”

  “But that’s not why it started, is it?”

  Saul picked up the poker and stirred the coals impatiently. “What’s the good of you and me breaking our heads about why it started? All I want is for it to end, so I can come home and be with Helga. That’s when I’ll start living. When I come back.”

  David looked at his friend’s yearning expression in the firelight and was touched by compassion for him. Saul’s life had not been happy, who could blame him for longing for the time when it would be? But supposing that time never came? After his brief honeymoon he would be going overseas with his unit. “Everything a person does is living, Saul,” he said impulsively. “Even if they loathe every minute of it, it shouldn’t be wasted.”

  But Saul’s mind was occupied with more immediate matters. “Come round early tomorrow and keep me company,” he instructed. “It’s the best man’s duty to protect the bridegroom on his wedding day. Especially from his father.”

  David overslept the next morning and did not arrive at the Salamans’ home until eleven o’clock. Bessie opened the door with a towel swathed around her head. Her pudgy face flushed with embarrassment when she saw David standing on the doorstep.

  “I’ve just washed my hair,” she apologised. “And I’m not dressed yet.”

  David eyed the grubby wrapper she was wearing and tried not to show his distaste.

  “It needs washing. I haven’t had time, with all the excitement and everything.” She smoothed the wrinkled flannel, which had once been blue, but was now a yellowish grey, then folded her arms to hide the unfettered mounds of her bosom. “Wait till you see what I’m wearing for the wedding, David!”

  As if that could make up for how you look now, he thought. He had once called at the Moritzes’ early in the morning, but Miriam and Helga had looked neat and fresh in their wrappers though they hadn’t been expecting him. He was aware of raised voices echoing down the lobby, as he stepped inside and knew he was too late to perform the duty Saul had asked of him.

  “Dad and Saul’re at it again,” Bessie sighed shutting the door. “It gets on my nerves!”

  “So how d’you think it is for Saul?” David asked listening to Salaman’s voice thundering through the thick wood of the kitchen door.

  “Is it my fault if he can’t get on with his own father? Saul behaves as if he hates Dad. Ever since my mother died.”

  This was not news to David and he had often wondered about the cause, which must be too painful to talk about or Saul would have told him.

  “He thinks Dad killed her,” Bessie said casually as if this were not an extraordinary thing to say. “Saul’s never stopped blaming Dad for not fetching the doctor that day.”

  The shouts from the kitchen grew louder.

  “That’s what I’ve had to live with since I was a little kid, David. You get used to it.” She went upstairs, clutching her makeshift turban which had loosened and slipped to one side.

  David thought of what his friend had had to live with. A father he loathed, whom he held responsible for the death of the mother he had adored. “Couldn’t you have asked your father to leave Saul alone this morning?” he called angrily to Bessie. “It isn’t fair to upset him on his wedding day.”

  “Why should Dad have to be upset? Or me? Nobody thinks about that, do they?” she retorted and flounced into her bedroom. A moment later she emerged again. “I didn’t mean to be rude to you, David,” she said contritely and returned to her room in another huff when he did not raise his head to look at her.

  David hovered in the lobby, trying to find courage to walk into the kitchen. What a household, he thought. What with his father and his sister, Saul would be well out of it. He made his way along the dingy passage, wrinkling his nose at the mixed smell of new cloth and boiled cabbage which he did not have time to notice when he came here to work. When he reached the kitchen door he could not bring himself to knock and open it. The violence in his employer’s voice rooted him to the spot.

  “A son like you nobody should have!” Salaman was raging. “I wouldn’t wish you on my worst enemies!”

  “And you’ve got plenty!” Saul shouted back.

  “Who is the biggest one? You!”

  David forced himself to turn the door knob and enter, but his presence went unnoticed. Salaman was standing in front of the fire with a whole smoked salmon clutched in his hand, gesticulating with it wildly, the veins on his forehead standing out as if they were about to burst. Saul had his back to the window and was wearing only an undervest with his khaki trousers. His pale complexion looked tinged with green, as though he was gripped by a terrible nausea as he regarded his father.

  “To bring his wife to live here after the war doesn’t suit him!” Salaman bellowed to the air.

  “That’s right, it doesn’t!”

  “Why have a row about it now?” David interjected, but neither of them heard him.

  “Who
will you come to, to set up a home for you, Mr. Clever?” Salaman rasped. “You expect me to provide the money to keep you in comfort, when your work isn’t worth an errand boy’s wages!”

  “I don’t expect anything from you and I don’t care what you bleddy well think of me, either!” Saul told him. “Even today you couldn’t let me alone, could you? You had to do something to spoil it for me! But you never have cared how you upset people. Just because you’re rich, you think you can walk all over everyone. Well you’re not doing it to me anymore!”

  Salaman began to tremble and the colour drained from his face so rapidly David thought he was going to faint. Then Saul became aware of David standing in the doorway and managed a sickly smile.

  “Hadn’t you better get dressed?” David said in the most matter-of-fact tone he could muster. “We’ve got to be in shul at one o’clock.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.” Saul pointed to the smoked salmon disgustedly. “He wanted to take that bleddy thing to the wedding, David, to have at the reception. Can you imagine how insulted Mrs. Moritz would be? Only the best for Isaac Salaman!”

  Salaman looked down at the oily, pink fish in his hand and seemed surprised to see it there.

  “No wonder my poor mother died young,” his son said with immense bitterness. “But she’s better off in her grave than married to him.”

  Salaman lowered his bulk into a chair as though his legs would no longer support him.

  “The grease from the salmon’s dripping onto your trousers, Mr. Salaman,” David said.

  But his employer was not listening. He was gazing at Saul and now even his lips looked ashen. “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee,” he quoted ominously.

  David felt a chill of foreboding in the pit of his stomach and saw his friend blanch as his father pointed a quivering finger at him.

  “A son who breaks the Fifth Commandment, what comes to him for doing so is on his own head.”

  The synagogue bristled with excitement as befitted a wedding. David could see the flutter of handkerchiefs behind the grille where the women sat waiting to shed sentimental tears and was conscious of his stiff collar cutting into his neck.

  Beside him, his father was fidgeting nervously with his moustache, which he had waxed for the occasion. A Jewish bride and groom must each be accompanied under the chupah by a married couple, usually their parents if both were alive. Salaman had asked the Sandbergs to deputise and would soon stand with them beneath the marriage canopy whilst they and the Moritzes handed sips of wine to Saul and Helga after the rabbi had blessed it.

  Saul had gone with Sigmund to the room where Helga waited with her mother and Sarah and the bridesmaids. Before her father escorted her to the chupah, her bridegroom must gaze upon her face and afterwards lower her bridal veil himself, a custom dating from biblical times when Jacob was duped by Laban into marrying his elder daughter Leah, instead of the beautiful young Rachel whom he had been promised.

  David could not wipe the scene he had witnessed that morning from his mind. The ludicrous sight of Salaman clutching the huge fish, and the chill evoked by his final words, were still with him. But Saul had been calm and when they walked to shul together, as if no evil could touch him once he was married to Helga.

  He returned down the aisle alone, the tallith which none but the bridegroom donned for a wedding draped incongruously around his uniformed shoulders. David saw him glance at his father, but Salaman appeared not to notice. Then the beadle ushered them to the chupah to await the arrival of the bride.

  Not until his son performed the ancient rite of shattering a glass did Salaman show any emotion. As the sound of Saul’s boot stamping purposefully upon the fragile goblet filled the hushed synagogue and the joyous shouts of mazeltov, which always followed, boomed from the congregation, the lonely widower was suddenly convulsed with sobs and had to be helped to a seat.

  “Tears of happiness like that, I’ve never seen,” Rabbi Blasberg remarked whilst shaking hands with the Moritzes and the Sandbergs.

  Only Abraham and David were aware that their employer was weeping sorrowfully, and for himself.

  “Pull yourself together, it’s a wedding not a funeral,” Saul said to his father and David was sure he had chosen the words deliberately.

  Salaman blew his nose and kissed Helga. “So how does it feel to be Isaac Salaman’s daughter-in-law?” he inquired as if she had just become a member of the Royal Family.

  “O Lord, who healest the broken-hearted and blindest up their wounds, grant Thy consolation unto the mourners,” Rabbi Blasberg intoned emotionally. Conducting mourning prayers for a lad you’d married to his childhood sweetheart only a few weeks ago was a painful duty and he could hardly bring himself to look at the bereaved bride.

  Helga still had the War Office telegram clutched in her hand. It had arrived that morning when she was about to leave the house for work and her scream had chilled her parents’ hearts. Afterwards, she had withdrawn into a pitiful silence whilst arrangements for the week of Shivah were made around her. Her husband’s earthly remains would lie in a non-sectarian military cemetery near Ypres, beside those of the comrades with whom he had fallen on the battlefield, but Jewish prayers for his departed spirit must still be observed by his family.

  Salaman, who had insisted on the marriage being solemnised in his shul instead of the small, Austrian congregation to which the Moritzes belonged, had surprised everyone by deferring to Helga’s prior right as his son’s widow and allowing the Shivah to be held in her parents’ home.

  The bleddy hypocrite! David thought savagely, watching him blubbering into his handkerchief as he recited the Kaddish, his sacred duty as Saul’s sole male next-of-kin. How can he stand there mouthing the mourner’s prayer, when he as good as put a death-curse on Saul?

  The house was packed with friends and neighbours who had come to console the family. Visiting the bereaved was an honoured tradition, but the death of a soldier added an extra dimension to it. Most had someone of their own in the army and lived in fear that their turn to mourn might come next.

  Sarah stood beside Paula Frankl, whose son Hugo had just gone overseas with a Labour Battalion.

  “There’s something wrong with your David that he hasn’t been called up yet?” Paula mouthed from behind her chenille-dotted veil in a whisper which sounded more like a hiss.

  Sarah adjusted the scarf with which she had covered her head to enter the house of mourning and avoided Paula’s accusing eye. It’s like when Malka Berkowitz lost her little ones in the epidemic and David got better, she thought. But her good fortune could not be expected to last. She pulled the scullery door open to let some cool air into the kitchen and saw Esther leaning against the sink with her friend Sophie Plotkin and some other young girls. They can’t bear to be in the same room with Helga, she reflected with a pang; it’s as if they don’t want what’s happened to her to touch them.

  Salaman’s voice, and the great sobs which were making it difficult for him to say the Kaddish, drifted through the open doorway to those who were crammed into Sigmund’s workroom and the lobby. The sorrowing man dabbed at his swollen eyes with his wet handkerchief as the time came for every man present to join in the prayer and the house resounded with the ancient chorus.

  Helga was seated beside Bessie, her black-kerchiefed head emphasizing her pale composure. Miriam had told David her sister had not shed a tear, as though her feelings were too private to share with others. Her low stool was by the window, where she had stood with Saul to receive their wedding guests, radiating the happiness which had lent her beauty for so brief a spell. Even Miriam, graceful as a long-stemmed rose in the bridesmaid’s dress which had made Bessie’s identical one look like a sack, had not outshone Helga that day, David recalled.

  “I have such lovely memories,” she said to him quietly when he took her hand for a moment before he left. “And I’m thankful for that.”

&nb
sp; But David could not stop grieving for the waste of his friend’s life and thought of the conversation they had had by the fireside after their bachelors’ night out. Saul had existed in misery for most of his eighteen years and was cut down before he had begun living.

  David’s conscription papers arrived the following week, when Sarah was alone in the house with Nathan. She propped the envelope against the candlesticks on the mantelpiece and remembered how she had tried to comfort Mrs. Kletz when her Manny joined up. But God had not watched over Manny. He had let him be shell-shocked and mutilated at a place called Passchendaele and Mrs. Kletz had said there were worse things than death after she visited him in a military hospital down south.

  “You can cry if you like, I won’t tell anyone,” Nathan said gravely. “Lou said his mother did when their Issie got called up and now she cries all the time, in case the war’s still on when Mottie’s old enough to go.”

  Sarah dragged her gaze away from the envelope and began clearing the breakfast table. “I don’t believe in crying before there’s something to really cry about,” she replied and made up her mind as she said it that this was the only way to be. “You’ll be late for school, Nat. Hurry up!” Things must go on as usual until David came back.

  But that evening she could not keep her eyes off him.

  “You’ll get used to me being away, like other people’s mothers do,” he said as he combed his hair in front of the mirror. He turned around and smiled at her. “I’m no different from anyone else, you know.”

  Sarah reached up and touched his lean face. Good looking he wasn’t, yet a person had to look twice at him. “To me you are,” she said softly.

  “Don’t make such a fuss, Sarah!” Abraham muttered tetchily, but she knew he was as choked with feeling as she was.

  “I might be late back tonight, Miriam and I have a lot to talk about,” David told them as he left the house. But when he got to the Moritzes’ it was Sigmund, as usual, to whom he addressed his thoughts.