Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  People often ask why the Jews of Germany, knowing of the existence of Dachau (in 1934!) having read Mein Kampf, were so foolish as to stay on. Why didn’t we all just leave? If you told Josh or Alec or your brother-in-law, Juda, or his wife – Leonora isn’t it? – who scarcely acknowledges her Jewishness (Goering said “I’ll decide who’s Jewish!”) that something might happen in England, would they be so quick to move to a strange country where they don’t speak the language, and to which they could take neither money nor possessions, and would not be able to practice their professions or make a living? Anti-semitism is a disease. Its only fundamental cause, it has been said, is that the Jew exists. He will always exist. If we run away Mount Sinai runs after us. Anti-Semitism will not be eradicated any more than greed, which, contrary to the beliefs of our denigrators, is a human – Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Mellon, Harriman, Huntington, Whitney – and not a racial prediliction. Because of my Uncle Felix whom I admired, and whose practical and colourful world I was more able to relate to than the sombre, and deeply spiritual one of my father, I had always wanted to study medicine. I think it saved my life. (Even with hindsight it is difficult to say what actions at that time were proper or improper, what decisions would save lives and what destroy them.) In the camp I told them I was a doctor, although I was nowhere near qualified as I had not been allowed to continue with my studies and they put me to work in one of the barracks where the transports disgorged their human cargo (five hundred thousand Hungarians in one month alone). I had enough to eat for a while and got some of my strength back. I tried to tell the newcomers what was happening (the crematoria were working overtime) but they would not listen. I could not make them believe any more than I had believed what I was told when I first came to the camp, any more than the world believed (your Eden knew what was going on), any more than we believe that husbands, brothers, fathers and sons are being tortured right now in Brazil and China, in Turkey and Iran. Where are the farmers falling over themselves to leave Rhodesia, (pardon me, Zimbabwe), the white South Africans? Yet the graffiti are there! Ugh, Kitty. Rather than change the world we go into therapy to make it bearable or put on sneakers and run. Tell me about the wedding. It’s getting close. You’re not going to believe this Kitty but I’ve only ever been to one (my office nurse, and that in a church), it’s what you get when you don’t have a family.

  Weddings are important. Rabbi Jose bar Halafta was once asked ‘How long did it take the Holy One, blessed be He, to create the world?’ The answer was ‘six days’. ‘And from then until now what has he been doing?’ ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, is occupied making marriages.’ Do I believe this? Kitty I don’t know. Sometimes I think he saved your cynical correspondent and sometimes how can He exist if innocent children had their heads smashed against a wall? There are some things that can be explained away (particularly by the behaviourists) but you cannot put down to hunger, sex, rage or fear the curious reactions one experiences when listening to Mozart (I have a seat for Don Giovanni next week at the Met.), looking at the ocean, or reading John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ for the first time. Tell me what happens with Unterman and about the wedding list. I should like to send Rachel a small gift – I feel I already know her. I know nothing about your Benjamin Britten (although I saw Peter Grimes which was commissioned by Koussevitzky), you will have to tell me. I look forward to it and your next letter. Bless you. MM.

  PS. I am re-reading Thoreau with you and taking a fresh look at nature and society. ‘My life has been the poem I could have writ, but I could not both live and utter it.’

  PPS. Like yours truly Nietzsche never married, never had children. We both had ‘aunts’, who lived with us, his August a and Rosalie (really his stepsisters), mine Lottie and Lena. There the analogy ends. MM.

  A sketch of Maurice, cap on his head, at his easel was attached to the back page.

  When she’d read the letter and unpacked the small case she had taken to Carol’s Kitty picked up the phone to ring Norman who she felt had been avoiding her.

  Norman, in bedroom slippers, gardening trousers and one of the mis-shapen pullovers knitted by his mother, could scarcely bring himself to answer the telephone. He roused himself sufficiently to do so, in case it was Sandra whose call he was expecting. ‘Yes’, he told his Aunty Kitty, ‘yes’, he was quite well. He wasn’t sure if this week he could manage dinner – even shepherds’ pie, his favourite, which was the carrot Kitty dangled. No, there was nothing the matter! It was not true, Norman thought as he replaced the telephone on the table in the hall, looking at his dishevelled appearance in the oval oak mirror as he did so. Something was the matter.

  Something had crept in, like a thief in the night, between himself and Sandra, to undermine their alliance, the close harmony of their relationship, which had come like a shooting star into Norman’s life. That all was not well had been achingly clear to Norman from the moment they had transferred the protestations of their love from Sandra’s flat to his bachelor bed, since when the matter had gone from bad to worse. Sandra refused to acknowledge the impasse, which gave her, in Norman’s book, a place among the angels. The more discouraged Norman became the more she praised him, the more depressed he declared himself to be, the more reassuring was Sandra. He tried to attribute his slipping commissions to the general recession which, naturally, was having repercussions in the property business; Sandra would not let him. He was going through a bad patch, she said – she had faith in him – things would improve. He had left the suits he had so headily selected with Sandra hanging in his wardrobe, and gone back to his old clothes although Sandra had bought him a cashmere sweater – still in its cellophane in his drawer – and three new ties. Norman declared his life was over; Sandra – holding him close – said it was no such thing. He had made a resolution. If his own world was going to pieces he would not allow himself to shatter Sandra’s. He would give it one more chance. If tonight he found himself unable to love Sandra, if on this occasion, as on the other occasions lately, he failed, he would write a letter refusing to see her again; begging her to leave his life as decisively as she had come into it, and direct herself to her sons, Hilton and Milton and to their future. He was slightly drunk. He had been drinking lately. Just a little. Then a little more. Until the hateful image of himself was drowned, the pain of his debâcle less acute. He was pouring another drink, from the bottle on the floor beside him, into the glass in which he had given his mother her nightly medicine –the only one to hand – when Sandra, using the code they had adopted, tapped at the window.

  She brought a lustre, a fragrant halo, into the dim-lit hall. Kissed Norman beneath the dead, black, light bulb he had not bothered to replace.

  “Hi!”

  He took her coat, from whose soft arms she got more consolation than from his own, and followed her into the sitting-room.

  “Milton’s ecstatic,” Sandra said, “He’s playing the solo in the end of term concert. César Franck. In front of the whole school.”

  Norman could not work up any enthusiasm for Milton’s musical prowess. He felt as disinterested in the week’s activities of her two sons as he was in Sandra’s breasts, whose outline was explicit beneath her angora sweater, and the symmetry – which once he had found divine – of her legs. She sat on the sofa and chattered, curled herself at his feet in place of the whisky bottle, undid buttons and zips, then led him upstairs to bed. He fumbled with the china doorknob of his room.

  “Not in there,” Sandra whispered.

  Norman looked at her, the whisky robbing her face of its outline. She opened the door of the other room, his mother’s bedroom, where the double bed had lain untrammelled since her death.

  “Sandra!”

  Sandra pulled at him but Norman would not come. He stood horrified on the worn axminster of the landing while she sat on the bed, Dolly’s bed – where she had breathed her last – and with deliberation removed her clothes.

  “Sandra!” Norman, with a crystal clarity, could see his mot
her in the bed, lying there as he had found her, icy cold, then Sandra, her nipples erect, her arms extended.

  “It’s all right, Norman.”

  Norman flung himself, sobbing, on to the bedside rug, and buried his face in Sandra’s lap.

  Twenty-one

  Kitty could not pinpoint exactly when the idea first came to her. It had crept leisurely, piano, adagio, into the recesses of her mind. At the dining-room table, the dishes from her solitary dinner not cleared away (she carried her meal into the dining-room even when she was alone, Sydney would have liked her to, to keep up his standards), she faced the pad of notepaper, her pen in hand. Her leisure moments during the past week had been spent finalising her guest list, trying to fashion it within the limits imposed upon her by the Klopman confluence. By asking only those closest to her on the Ladies’ Guild and confining the helpers from the Day Centre to the one or two women whom she knew best, she had arrived, within a few either way, at her permitted number.

  There was no reason, she thought, looking out of the window – the evenings were getting lighter, the days longer – why she should not invite Maurice to Rachel’s wedding. He was her friend. If only on air-mail paper. Maurice, she felt somehow (even at a distance of three thousand miles), knew her better than her children, was more familiar with her than her family, understood her better than had Sydney. He would not come. He was too shy. In Israel, other than at Yoske’s, he had scarcely spoken. Why should he cross an ocean to be present at the marriage of two people he did not even know? He wanted to send Rachel a present, true – he was a kind soul – but that didn’t mean he was prepared to go to the expense of coming to England to attend a function at which, apart from herself, he would know no one, to allow himself to be cast upon an alien sea of unfamiliar faces. A present was something different.

  Kitty had found a sample bride’s list in a magazine, which she was going to show to Rachel, for whom she was now waiting. Together when Rachel could spare the time, they would select the items at one of the stores, although Rachel and Patrick had not at the moment any intention of setting up home. They had in fact asked Kitty if they could stay with her – the council flat had to be given up – after Carol’s children had gone, until December, when they planned to start on their global trip, South America, Australasia, The Far East. Hettie and Herbert, for a wedding present, were buying them a house but they would not hear of it until their return. Any gifts, Patrick said, which they might receive, would have to be kept in the Klopman attic. The list, in alphabetical order, for Rachel’s approval, was on the table beside Kitty. With Maurice’s request in mind, she looked at it. ‘Aprons’. She could not see Rachel in one. Her daughter’s cooking, as far as Kitty knew, was confined to the rock cakes she had learned to make at school and the brown rice and lentils, on which they seemed to subsist, which was generally cooked by Patrick. ‘Carpet sweeper’. Kitty’s mind boggled. ‘Grapefruit spoons’! ‘Ironing board’. Rachel seemed to manage without an iron. Perhaps, after all, she would not show the list to Rachel. ‘Vacuum Cleaner’. ‘Vacuum Flask’. Nothing there for Maurice. Wine Rack. ‘Wok’. She had an idea. She would ask Maurice to send Rachel a painting. Rachel would like that. She liked anything ‘real’, anything which had been created – rather than manufactured – lovingly by the sweat of one’s brow, by hand.

  Dear Maurice,

  Thank you for your short note. It set my mind at rest because I wondered what had happened when I did not hear from you. I have grown used to expecting your letters – I’m like a child, waiting for the postman, they mean such a lot to me – and hearing about your life. I’m only sorry it had been so tragic. Sorry too that you’ve been ill. Shingles is very painful and drags on. I know because my sister-in-law Mirrie had it, a few years ago, and it was very unpleasant. What about your shopping? Did you ask your neighbour? People are usually only too pleased. I know you don’t eat much but you have to keep your strength up, especially when you are ill. You must look after yourself. Talking of food, you wanted to hear about the dinner menu for the wedding. Dinner! It’s going to be more like a medieval banquet. Hetty would not let Unterman go until he had agreed to the most original (and expensive) meal he has ever served…

  Kitty thought of the session, the interview with Unterman which had left him damp and pale, hardened as he was, as if he had survived an obstacle course. Which he had. Hettie, tanned from her cruise with a brown which was almost black, had given him no quarter. He had arrived with typed menus, consecutively numbered according to price – having to do with Cornets of Smoked Salmon, with Asparagus and Lamb Chops in Pastry, Roast Poussins, Cherry Pom-Pom, and Profiteroles – which Hetty would not contemplate. Canetons à la Bigarade, she suggested having scoured her recipe books, Capilotade de Poulet Paysanne. To Unterman’s credit, Kitty thought, he had not flinched. Yes, he could sauté his chickens with garlic and with parsley and with chervil; yes, with bitter oranges and lemons, with clarified butter (except that it would have to be Tomor margarine) and with sugar, could he anoint his duck. Kitty could see that he was not keen. That he was reluctant – despite the fact that money was apparently no object – to throw the Unterman catering staff, with the dishes they were accustomed to preparing, into disarray. Manfully, he agreed to serve a kosher Gâteau de Foies de Volailles à la Bressane, four hundred Sole Dorée du Guesclin (omitting the Dublin Bay prawns); to produce at the apposite moment, a Soufflé aux Fraises, or for those preferring a cold dessert, a Mont Blanc Glacé (with synthetic cream), and to subdivide the meal with a Sorbet of Citrons Verts. He assured Hettie that during the reception hour preceding the dinner there would be none of his run-of-the-mill ‘canapees’ (eight to a person), miniature Welsh Rarebits or hot mushroom vol-au-vents, pronounced too commonplace by Hettie. Instead there were to be Mousse de Saumon Fumé au Cresson – served with hot matzos – stuffed vine leaves, miniature spinach puffs, hot Danish tartlets filled with smoked roe. There were to be flowers, fresh fruit, printed menus and place cards (following the colour scheme) on all tables, a challa for the blessing over bread, satin skull-caps (not paper) for the men, and small, ribbon-tied boxes of Belgian chocolates for every lady guest. There was to be a banking of flowers in front of the top table, and a wedding cake (for which Unterman produced coloured photographs, supported by gold and turquoise pillars of icing, consisting of four tiers.

  When the statutory time had elapsed following the meal, evening tea was to be served with miniature sandwiches, diminutive reception pastries, and a generous helping of raspberries with cream. Unterman was to provide a full bar (spirits and liqueurs, sherries and aperitifs, together with lagers, beers, fruit juices and soft drinks) and a Möet et Chandon which would of course be available throughout the evening. Volunteering that which Sydney had laid down in Issy Miskin’s cellar, Kitty was aware that it would be a veritable drop in the champagne ocean. Hettie did not protest.

  ‘I have to admire her,’ Kitty wrote of her mechutanista. ‘There’s not a thing she has not organised, nothing she has left out. (We’re going next week to see the choir-master about the music.) She has given me a huge table plan (supplied by Unterman) and as the replies come in I have to think where to put everybody. The Klopman guests are to be interspersed with ours. (Better, I agree with Hettie, than seating the two families separately.) Speaking of guests, I wonder Maurice, I know it’s expensive just for a wedding, you don’t have to, but I thought you might like… May I send you an invitation…?’

  Kitty looked at what she had written. It was a cheek. Why should Maurice want to come to Rachel’s wedding just because they corresponded, because they had spent a few hours in each other’s company in Eilat? She was about to strike out the sentence, to scratch it out so that it was obliterated, when Rachel rang the bell.

  “You look terrible,” Kitty said, at the sight of her youngest daughter’s white face.

  “I feel terrible. We had a Chinese take-away.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Unmentionables,” R
achel said.

  “I told you to come to dinner with me. I fried some liver…”

  “Don’t!” Rachel groaned, peering at the table. “Who are you writing to?”

  “May I bring Sandra?” Norman asked his Aunt Kitty on his next visit. He knew that to bring her to Rachel’s wedding meant running the gauntlet of the family, of subjecting Sandra to Kitty’s appraisal, to the critical eyes of his Uncle Juda, to Beatty’s tongue.

  “Delighted,” Kitty said, and she was, as she saw Norman blossom, Norman reborn, Norman come alive.

  Norman himself felt like a Goliath, as if the world were his to deploy, and that everything was within his power. There had been a bad time when he had felt himself regressing, descending once more into the pit of his old, untutored ways. Sandra had rescued him. At the moment of his going down for the third time in the sea of his despair, Sandra had taken him, unworthy has he had felt himself to be, firmly by the hand. The turning point had come on the night that she had lured him to make love to her in his mother’s bedroom – his bedroom now, he had taken it over – where she had with the body she so unstintingly yielded, slain the demons which had threatened to devour him. It had been neither quick nor easy, but Sandra was not pressed for time nor would she be deflected.