Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  Avi had greeted them like old friends. An experienced sightseer now, Kitty had bestowed herself and her possessions in a window seat. As before they had made the rounds of the other hotels. Kitty watched as the passengers, many of whom she had not seen before, lined up in their morning sweaters to board the bus. Maurice Morgenthau, in his zippered jacket, seemed not to see her as he edged his way between the seats to the rear, although she had tentatively made room next to her for her hero, her saviour from the Canyon of the Inscriptions.

  The Sinai, Avi explained, when with a full complement they bounded along its shore for Watir Brook and Neviot, was named by the Mesopotamians after the moon god, Sin. Ethnologically it was Semitic, but geographically it belonged to Egypt who once more was claiming it back. On the way, he told them, they were to look out for those living remnants of history, the Bedouin, who with their camels and their tents, their Bronze Age way of life, were as integral a part of the peninsula as the mauve mountains and the flinty plains. As the bus, manipulated by the chain-smoking Zvi, his shirt white against the sepia of his neck, twisted and turned around the granite passes, crossed wadi deltas and dunes which spilled into the gulf, Kitty gasped at the new vistas with which she was greeted at every turn. While Avi explained about the race of cavemen which, according to Israeli architects, had existed two hundred thousand years ago in this much disputed area, she thought how sensible she had been to come away, even without Addie, that there were sights to see, world to conquer which did not intrude themselves into her humdrum and everyday life at home. To travel, she thought, put one in perspective. Her small world was bound by mental and physical boundaries, from which she knew she must struggle to release herself: by the legacy she had been left by Sydney, of devotion to his family. The euphoria she felt, was not, she suspected, solely the effect of the crystalline desert air which blew in through the open windows of the bus, with their little curtains, which later she would pull against the sun. It was generated by a sudden awareness, a revelation as clear as that which had appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai, that from the chrysalis of her hidebound psyche was emerging a new Kitty Shelton.

  With an extended drive ahead of them to the south, they did not spend long at the coastal settlement of Neviot – Bubbling Springs – which lay between the shallow bay of Nuweiba Tarabin, with its driftwood shacks, and Nuweiba Muzeina where palms waited regally for their summer dates. Avi called it ‘Hippyville’. Beneath the trihedral tents on the beach, rootless young from the middle-class homes of Europe, the United States and Scandinavia, with their tattered vests and their guitars, stared stonily, anachronistically out to sea. A girl, with a tattooed arm and hennaed hair, reminded Kitty of Rachel. In earnest conversation with her, an Arab squatted on his haunches. Avi said he was most probably peddling dope, and in his flowing robes he made a striking contrast to the girl’s near nudity.

  A fat Bedouin, who introduced himself as Suleiman, invited Kitty into his arisha for coffee. When she refused to enter the tent with its carpeted floor, in which middle-eastern music crackled from a transistor radio and flies swarmed around a cooking pot, he offered her a coconut, a necklace made of olive wood, a ride on his moth-eaten camel. Trying to decline politely, she did not notice his companions who had come to surround her with offers of trinkets, or to stand beside her while she had her photograph taken. She looked round helplessly at the sandy robes, the dark eyes beneath the black and white kaffiyehs and wasn’t sure how she had become separated from the group, which had made its way to the cafeteria. She felt Maurice Morgenthau’s hand on her arm, his voice in her ear, as he came to rescue her from the importunate circle.

  Inside the cafeteria her knight in shining armour disappeared once more. Kitty had coffee with two Germans and could catch the drift of their conversation because of the smattering of Yiddish she had learned from her father whose parents had been born on the Vistula.

  When she came out, the albino from New Mexico, whose name was Maisie, was having her picture taken on a camel, while her red-faced husband haggled over the price of the favour.

  This was not the Sinai Kitty hoped to see, and she wasn’t sorry when Avi put two fingers between his teeth and whistled his party to the bus.

  Refreshed, warm sweaters now stowed on the overhead racks from which sleeves dangled in a rainbow of colours, they set out again for the Sharira Pass, where stark walls loomed up on either side of them, plunging the bus into shade, following the natural course of the old Wadi (named Samaghi, for the sap of the acacia tree). As they bounded along, twisting and turning, clouds intermittently covered the fiery sun, changing the craggy landscape, through which they sped, from yellow to rose like a geographical chameleon. Descending to the shore again at Dahab – the golden – a Bedouin at his mid-day prayers, against a backdrop of mountain and of sea, his sandals by his side, put his face to the ground. While Avi told them about the Greek Orthodox monastery at the base of Mount Sinai where the monks, in reverence to the God whom they served, laid out their dead in rows and carefully preserved their bones, Kitty took out her happiness and examined it. It was the first time for eighteen months she had felt light of heart. Her contentment made her feel uneasy, as if Sydney had taken with him her right to be joyful. She wanted the bus to go on for ever through the mountain passes, through the blue waters, through the forbidding cliffs and the desert sands. She did not want to go home, where it was snowing and only Addie Jacobs waited for her, to her children who had lives of their own.

  At Na’ama they stopped for lunch; the amenities were better, Avi said, than those they would find a few kilometres down the road at Sharm-El-Sheikh. With the rest of the party Kitty joined the slowly moving queue for the ubiquitous turkey schnitzel with its accompanying mashed potato which seemed incongruous with the outside temperature which had now climbed to thirty-five degrees. She put a bread roll and a large bottle of mineral water on her tray and carried it to a bare, plastic topped table where Maurice Morgenthau sat alone.

  “No lunch?” Kitty said, surprised.

  “I never stand in line for food.”

  “Eat this,” Kitty said, putting her tray down before him and going back to join the end of the queue.

  He seemed lonely, like a lost lamb, she thought, as she shuffled along the counter for the second time with her damp tray. She knew all about loneliness, it was her constant companion.

  He neither thanked her for his tray nor seemed particularly pleased. Just gave her the money and addressed himself to the food. His table manners were not good. Sydney’s had been impeccable. She discovered that Maurice was a physician who lived in New York. He was mostly retired now and devoted himself to painting which, he told Kitty, gave direction to his life.

  When she’d finished her lunch, Kitty excused herself. She wanted to go to the Ladies’. She had left her bread roll on her tray. Maurice Morgenthau picked it up and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

  When she came out of the Ladies’ Room he was standing on the path. She wasn’t sure if he was waiting for her. He fell in step with her, silently, and they walked towards the beach where Avi had told them they could spend an hour before returning to the bus for the short drive down to Sharm-El-Sheikh and Ras Muhammed.

  They sat on the low wall in the sun – there was no shade – while Kitty chattered about her family to the strange, silent man. She told him about her son-in-law Alec, in the same profession, and about her grandchildren; she told him about Rachel and Patrick who did not want a big wedding. There were beads of perspiration on Maurice’s face which looked as if it had been chiselled out of Sinai rock. Kitty suggested that he remove the zippered jacket but he appeared not to have heard. She told him about Sydney, although he had not asked. Thoughts and memories of him, their happy days, came tumbling from her lips.

  “Do you have a family?” she asked.

  “‘The stars through the window pane are my children’,” he said.

  Kitty wondered if he were quite right in the head.

  When Avi�
��s whistle summoned them from their post-prandial leisure to the bus, Maurice Morgenthau – Morning Dew – walked towards it as if she did not exist.

  Ten

  It is surprising how a word, a look, a letter can change one’s perception of the world, bring it tumultuously about one’s ears. Freda’s came crashing about her when she read the message on the mauve notepaper which arrived with Kitty’s postcard. After the first impact the note did not seem to convey anything, the letters of the alphabet, facing in all directions, refused to form themselves into meaningful words. ‘…your husband Harry…’ He was upstairs, in bed beneath the blue waffle-nylon eiderdown, waiting for his early morning tea. Sometimes he brought it up. They took it in turns. He was a good husband. Harry. ‘Your husband Harry’. Some said too good. It was a family joke. He treated Freda as if she were precious. She was. Or so she’d thought. They got on well. Not like Beatty and Leon, who had always confronted each other from opposite corners of the marital boxing ring – although Leon now was almost out of the count – nor Juda and Leonora, whose fragile marriage, as everyone knew, was stuck together by the delicate glue for appearances which it suited them both to keep up. It wasn’t like Kitty’s, who had been content all her life to play queen to Sydney’s king. Not like that at all. For Freda and Harry loved each other like twin souls, thought alike and, according to some, had over the years, like dogs and their owners, grown to look alike. They never tired of each other. Despite their childless state they had no need of other people. Their leisure time was spent on the golf course in the summer. They took golfing holidays to Scotland or to Spain. In the winter they played backgammon together or watched television, while Freda knitted socks and woolly hats for them both.

  Kitty said it was a question of temperament and marvelled at how equable both of them were. ‘…is the father of my child’. ‘Grow fruitful and multiply’, the scriptures enjoined. Freda and Harry were unable to oblige. The early years of their marriage, the possible years, had been beset with alarms and excursions, all of them to no purpose. Later there had been doctors and hospitals and test upon test. The long road of exhaustive investigations, and their unpalatable outcome, had served only to bring Freda and Harry closer together, to be mother and father and family to each other by way of compensation for their infecundity. They managed to survive the catastrophe that had blighted both their lives – and which now was never spoken of – each in his own way. Harry devoted two evenings a week, and sometimes many hours at the weekends, to the synagogue youth club where he was father to many, and Freda had her imaginary family which never aged and which she could summon up at will. It had been enough. Or so she had thought. Until the mauve letter. In the existence of which, although she could feel the coarse notepaper between her fingers, Freda could not make herself believe. She did a quick rerun of her day, which, although she would never forget it, had hardly begun. She had woken while beyond the blue flowered curtains, the garden and the golf course in its frosty corset, the sky was still dark. She loved that first waking moment, the sleepy warmth and contentment of it, secure in her bed and Harry’s arms, where she always spent her night. They opened their eyes together. They always did. As if the harmony which they enjoyed in the day continued, of its own momentum, through the night.

  “Your turn to get the tea,” Freda said.

  “No yours!”

  It was their morning joke which re-affirmed their love for each other and indicated that all was right with their world.

  Reluctantly, as always on the winter mornings although the house was not cold, Freda had got out of bed and Harry, cherishing the limbo moments between the waking and the tea, had shut his eyes. Freda’s dressing-gown was blue. It matched the sprigged sheets and the quilt and was her favourite colour. Beatty went for dark red, the colour of the curtains in her sitting-room; her spinster sister Mirrie, yellow, in which she had decorated both the rooms of her homely flat; and Kitty for shades of gold, antique in the carpet and shaded velvet in what had once been Sydney’s chair.

  In the bathroom Freda had washed at the blue basin, examining her face in the mirror above it for wrinkles, and to see if it was a good day for her looks. Not that it worried her. Freda was not vain. Her confrontation with her mirrored self was more of an assessment, really, a daily inventory such as she carried out on the bottles in the fridge to see if it was necessary to leave a note for the milkman. She had put a quick brush through her hair and gone down to fill the kettle. So far, so good. Better even. The family, who came unbidden almost now, the children whose voices rebounded from the blue and white tiles and whose crumbs littered the mosaic vinyl floor, had given her no trouble. While she put the cups and saucers on the tray, warmed the teapot, spooned in the tea, the water had boiled. It was at that moment that the post had come. She remembered it exactly because the clatter of the letter-box had coincided with the click of the switch on the kettle as it popped automatically out. Such minor details would be remembered. Kitty’s postcard, which had transported Freda for a few moments to the sunshine of Israel – she had played golf with Harry at Caesarea – then the mauve roughness of the unfamiliar envelope she had so innocently, so ingenuously opened. The nine words, like a bulldozer, had scooped up the happy years of her life with Harry and deposited them, like rubble, on the tip of her sterility.

  When the strength which had left her returned to her limbs, she had gone back into the kitchen and taken up the tea. As usual. Everything must be as usual. It was important. That much Freda knew. She had trodden the stairs, holding up the blue dressing-gown with one hand, put the tray down in the darkened bedroom. Switched on the lamp, at which Harry had opened his eyes, as he always did, and smiled at her, the first smile of the day.

  “Was that the postman?”

  Freda carried his cup with its two sugars carefully, as if her life depended upon her not spilling it, to the little table with Harry’s watch and the small change he had taken from his pocket the night before.

  “Any post?”

  Freda put the cup down and reached into the pocket of her dressing-gown, her fingers identifying the coarse notepaper, making their own selection. They extracted the glossy reproduction of the newly built hotel against the ancient mountains. Freda did not look at Harry.

  “From Kitty,” she said. “A postcard from Eilat!”

  Kitty could not pretend, even to herself, that she did not know about the cable car to which one had to entrust oneself in order to ascend the citadel that was Masada. The only alternative was the narrow curves of the twisting ‘snake path’, tackled by the young with their back-packs before the heat of the day. It was the last excursion. Tomorrow she would be going home. She had bought her presents. A Star of David for Debbie, and for Lisa a tee shirt ‘I love Eilat’: for the baby, Mathew, a leather camel with sad eyes and a tiny velvet kippah, embroidered with silver thread, that would cover the fine red head when on his father’s knee he followed the Grace after Meals; a challah cloth for Carol, which she would put over the Sabbath bread; olive-wood boxes, for their cuff-links, for Alec and Josh; for Sarah, a pair of filigree ear-rings and for Rachel, a colourful Yemeni blouse. For her sisters-in-law, Freda and Mirrie and Beatty, there were ashtrays and vases of hand-painted glass; key-rings and bookmarks – in which wild flowers were preserved – for her friends at the Day Centre and the ladies with whom she played bridge. For Juda’s wife, Kitty took nothing, she never did. Leonora’s Hyde Park flat, with its priceless antiques, was no place for souvenirs from foreign parts with a value that was sentimental rather than commercial.

  The only problem that remained was Addie Jacobs. Kitty had seen nothing that would compensate for the missed holiday, that would off-set the broken ankle. When she got back from Masada she would look once again in the hotel boutique. She did not want to buy Addie’s present at the airport. Other than a stone, which she had picked up in the Negev, and another from the beach at Eilat, she had nothing for herself. She would have her memories – these days it was what she lived
on – and there were plenty of them, colourful and varied. The Pillars of Solomon and of Amram; the ‘world of silence’ with its rainbow fishes, its fine sand and lacy rock patterns, that she had viewed from the glass-bottomed boat; the Taba beach; Coral Island; the kibbutz of Yotvata, and her journey back to nature as it was in biblical times among the wildlife of Hai-Bar.

  Masada was the highlight. Kitty had been looking forward to it. It was one of the trips she had always meant to take with Sydney on their visits to Israel but they had never managed it. From the moment when, as a child, she had first heard the story of the zealots and their tragic end, from the lips of her Hebrew teacher, it had intrigued her. She knew that in recent years the site had been excavated by volunteers from all over the world, that the archeological digs had unearthed miles of walls and thousands of coins dating from the time of the revolt. But it was not the finds that fascinated her. It was the stand of the few against the many, of the weak against the strong; the last fight of those who gave their lives for political, religious and spiritual freedom – choosing death rather than submission – that gave the name of the lonely and impregnable fortress in the Judean desert its magic. Kitty had been up since dawn and had got used to the early starts. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if once back home she set her alarm for five o’clock, out of habit, although the highlight of her day would be neither the wonders of the deep nor the romance of a citadel, but a journey to the shoe repairers or a stint in the kitchens of the Day Centre.