A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 1

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Copyright

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type nativity5 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  I was deeply touched by the generosity of friends and strangers who supported this book. The full list of honour is at the back, but there are special shout-outs that I want to make here, to five people who, between them, put up more than half the crowdfunding total.

  Guy Weston’s intervention last Christmas was a game-changer. You’re beyond kind and generous, Guy, and even paid for lunch that day. I look forward to our pilgrimage. And special thanks to my fellow travellers Richard and Alison Cundall, to Will Lewis for blind confidence in me, and to Melvyn Marckus, who has generously edited and read more of my writing than is strictly healthy.

  I’d also like to thank the Rev’d Charlotte and Bill Bannister-Parker, Richard Bridges, Sarah Macdonald and Sian Kevill of MAKE Productions and Sir Kenneth and Lady Warren for their generosity, variously of wealth, spirit, lunch and Oxford.

  Thank you all – I couldn’t have done it without you.

  For Marcelle and Eric – you know why

  In darkness, and in secret, I crept out,

  My house being wrapped in sleep.

  – “The Dark Night of the Soul”,

  St John of the Cross

  Part 1

  Prologue

  We were helping Israel to close its borders, to turn in on itself. As word had spread through the Samarian hills to the east, a pathetic trickle of Palestinians, a fresh generation of refugees, had grown into a crowd more alarming as families sought the security and health services of the Sharon Plain. I heard Hebrew as well as regular Palestinian Arabic.

  We were young then, Sarah and me. I think we believed in humanity. How long ago that seems. We’d been co-opted to offer humanitarian support between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm, just by the reservoirs, and provide some order for the crossings of the new fence.

  The border guards were a mixture of Magav police and military and were meant to defer to our UNRWA bibs – it stood for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, but we said it was “Rather Walk Away”. They kept directing families of all ages into a holding pen, a high flat-wired fenced area about the size of an English suburban garden, complete with a shed at the bottom end, where shamefully there was a single chemical latrine, some emergency medical gear, such as stretchers, as well as a metal chest of flares and, we always suspected, mustard gas.

  Sarah had started to warn the men as the air grew more still towards evening that the pen was growing too crowded. Sarah was always firmer than me. I may have burnished the image in the intervening years, but I picture her now standing brace-legged in high-waisted khaki trousers, her field phone sticking above her blue bib like a badge of authority, leaning slightly in to a Magav officer on her walking stick and telling him what to do with her question: “Are you going to seal the muster station and order open process?”

  I tried to remember what I’d read five years before about crowd-control errors at football stadiums. There were some children pressed up against the fencing with older siblings behind them. But they were only curious, not being crushed. I smiled at them and they stared neutrally back, running the wire between dry lips.

  Sarah heard the cry first. She swung round with her eyes to the distance, as if she was looking at the mountains. Then I heard its second, louder version, somewhere between exhalation of fear and an imprecation.

  “Shit,” murmured Sarah and ran with her loping gait to the UN jeep.

  She unlocked the med box with the bundle of keys at her waist and pulled at the handles of a bag, about the size of a rolled sleeping bag.

  “Follow me,” she called, heading for the gate of the pen.

  She was dodging bodies and catching shoulders. We made it to the back of the pen, where a woman in a blue silk weave lay, her knees splayed like an open oyster. A boy knelt beside her, too young to be her husband. A brother, perhaps.

  How had Sarah known? Maybe she’d seen her arrive earlier. But she always seemed to know things before me.

  The ground was wet. It was never wet unless the boys pissed in the holding pens.

  “Roll up her robe.”

  She was a large woman, hair matted, crying and juddering. She was past caring for her modesty, but the boy looked desperate, frozen. Sarah leaned across and slapped him across the face and barked something huskily in, I thought, Arabic but it sounded strange, more like a Hebrew patois. He lifted her robe back like a tablecloth and I gently pushed him to one side to provide some screen with my back, for some dignity. Up nearer her head, he grasped her hand and held it to his chest.

  Sarah moved round, still kneeling, and lay her walking stick across her lap and the woman’s legs over it to either side of her. She cupped her hands, as if in homage. Or prayer. The woman threw her head back, arched her spine and cried again, a primal howl that filled the valley and made the men stare away.

  “Oh Christ, she’s delivering,” said Sarah, to herself.

  She rolled aside and tore open the Velcro strip of the med bag.

  “Nat, get where I was and hold the head – don’t pull, just support.”

  I knelt in the ruts her knees had left in the earth.

  Then I felt a warm, firm hardness fill my palms as the woman shrieked and the boy whimpered. Sarah leaned across her with a syringe and surgical scissors between the fingers of one hand. She tore the antiseptic seal off the blades with her teeth and spat them aside. She said something to the boy again. I caught it in Arabic: “Hold her ankle towards you.” But then she seemed to repeat it in her strange dialect.

  He didn’t move.
She slapped him again and the message was clear in any language. “Hold it!”

  Then, softly, like the sudden mood-swing of a madwoman in an asylum, she ran the ball of her thumb across the forehead of the woman to shift the hair from her eyes and spoke in English.

  “It’s all right, my love. You’re going to have a baby.”

  The new face appeared sideways in my palm, still in its caul, features squashed and pulled down like a tiny bank robber with a nylon stocking over its head. The blue-grey mass barely filled my hands.

  Sarah dealt with the cord like she was wrapping a gift in a shop, but the baby, freed of its caul, didn’t wake. Sarah held it face down in the palm of her hand, and rubbed its back. The head rolled, the mouth opened noiselessly and a little fist twitched. Then, blinking suddenly through rubbery folds, it cried. There was a wave of acclamation in the throng behind us. God was still great, apparently.

  The baby was swaddled in bandages and a gauze arm-sling from the med bag and given to the boy to hold on stiff, clumsy forearms. The woman took some minutes to deliver the placenta and get cleaned, then leaned against the hut.

  Sarah handed her the bundle with the little dark face.

  “Here’s your daughter,” she said. “Every happiness of her.”

  The woman smiled and thanked her, the boy grinning. “He has a sister now,” she said.

  He also had a fast ticket through the processing station. It would take no more than an hour or so for a UNRWA ambulance to take this fragment of a family down to the Laniado hospital in Netanya. That’s why they smiled too.

  Later that evening, Sarah and I sat on a ridge and looked down across the plain towards the coast, drinking tea spiked with vodka from a Thermos and sharing a cigarette. Most of the new arrivals had been processed in threes, even if it broke up families. It was a pointless exercise, because even if they were denied access across this new border point, they’d make it through the urban streets on either side. It was all for show, though it heralded the wall that was to come. The pen beneath us had room for families to sleep now in some safety, even if others arrived in the night.

  “Good gig today, Sarah,” I said, out of nothing.

  “I wonder where the dad is,” she said after a moment, blowing smoke into the night. “Whether he knows.”

  “She’s alive. Pretty sure that’s better than the alternative.”

  Sarah didn’t reply.

  “Why were you speaking Hebrew to the boy, Sar?”

  “It wasn’t really Hebrew,” she said. “It was Aramaic. It’s what they sometimes speak up in the north. They may have come down from Syria originally.”

  “There’s another one in the family now. Another mouth to feed. Wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t heard her.”

  I could see she was drawing hard on the cigarette. Sarah never gave much away, but I knew when she was close to the edge. She screwed her eyes to see into the dark. I leaned across to take the fag and, in a girly way, started to sing.

  He bought me a banana, I made it shake, he brought me home with a bellyache.

  It was a hopscotch song from our childhood that we’d corrupted for the primary school girls when it was our turn to look after them. Smoke came from her nostrils like a dragon and she turned and grinned at me, then slapped me across the ear, playfully, not like she hit the boy.

  So, Sarah. Sarah the Jew, whom we mocked at school and whom I came to love. Always the cleverest of us. She was always Sarah Curse at school, full name. Funny the things that come to mind when you have too long to think. We’ve always spoken with a quick frankness, as those who have grown up together do, not always really friendly but without the dishonesty of the casual acquaint-ance.

  Once, after we’d left school, I told her suddenly that I’d always coveted her name, that it had been so cool, and she confessed that it had been made up, though not by her. It had originally been Cruse; her grandfather had changed the spelling as a refugee in England to make it easy to say, but also because so many of his family had been shipped out of northern Italy by the Nazis to die. They had been from the Savoie border regions of Italy and France. The name was probably a corruption of Crose from the Italian word croce, which means cross. Crozier is probably another corruption.

  The awful implication was that forebears of the Jewish Cruse family had probably been baptised French Christians, before reconverting to Judaism in Italy.

  I told her that I’d longed to be called Sarah Curse. And we laughed, rather ruefully given the darkness of Sarah’s family history.

  But also because my name is Natalie Cross.

  And this is my story, not hers. I’m telling it because it keeps me alive. That’s literally true, as you’ll see. This is not just an act of therapy, it’s my life assurance, as a dear lover in Lebanon once told me. A record of crimes against my humanity. Names changed to protect the guilty, but they can and will be named if I come to any more harm and they know that. So that’s why I’m telling this story: it’s my security. So long as it’s told and heard, I’m safe. A testimony, really.

  1

  So come with me through the places that make me who I am. From the executioner’s block to the dhobi-room, where I try to scrub out the bloody stain on my priestly alb. But it keeps coming back. I offer it all up and sometimes, for a heady, transcendent moment, I am healed, and yet the gash returns, like an ill-sewn seam bursting open, like Lancelot’s ever-wounded side, bleeding for Guinevere, that can’t be healed this side of his king’s forgiveness. And, God knows, I’m the wrong side of forgiveness.

  At school, Sarah came into her own. And her own received her not. We were at our comp in a vapid little suburb to the south of London. We thought she’d had something like polio, I reckon, or some sort of congenital muscular-wasting disease. Later, she told me it was Perthes’ disease, a hip-joint thing she’d had surgery for, but was getting better all the time, though she’d get arthritis later in life.

  We never asked about it when we were young. We were never told not to talk about her condition, but it was implicit in the form teacher’s introductory injunctions when she joined the class in the middle of the academic year.

  “Sarah uses aids to walk and sometimes will spend time in a wheelchair when she needs surgery,” she said, as Sarah sat in the front row, displacing someone to the square window alcove. “So she needs our support. Let’s all make her very welcome.”

  I wondered at the time whether that entreaty was a play on words. She had crutches, this girl, but she needed our support too. We were to make her welcome despite that. I wondered even then whether we should have made her welcome because of that. The boys, amounting to around a third of our class, generally did, but they were nicer than us.

  Sarah used to form a bulwark in the corridor as girls leaned against the walls, learning to fold our legs and doing the jabby push that accompanied shrieks of faux outrage at the mildest social observation. We had our roles in this girl-gang: the happy frump, the lippy, the hippy, the thoughtful and the dykey, the tarty, the outré and the nerd.

  I was the quiet one. Not really shy, not, I think, insecure, but remote and I was comfortable with that. I was looking in on their play. I was the audience to their performance. So I watched the drama unfold.

  The young girls at the primary through the fence played a hybrid form of hopscotch and their improvised sing-song carried through windows flung open to expunge the stench of school-dinner vegetables. It was the soundtrack to that time.

  I met my boyfriend at the sweetie shop, he bought me ice cream, he bought me cake, he brought me home with a bellyache . . .

  Sarah would lean on her crutches, white forearms braced in the horseshoe rings. Her upper body pitched forward like an awkward mannequin. One winter half-term in the sixth form there was a ski-trip – I was the only one other than Sarah who didn’t go, and we were knocking around together a bit by then – and I saw photos of the grown-ups leaning like that on their sticks at the top of the slopes and I wondered why, if the
y wanted to look athletic, they should also want to look like Sarah.

  It was difficult to spot when the mood changed in the girls’ corridor. The microclimate of a gang of girls shifts with imperceptible signals. It’s like the distant curl of a cloud that a mariner might spot, or a fresh breeze to the face, the first indications that a storm is on the way. These are gentle and apparently harmless signs, not seeking to draw attention to themselves, sinister only to those who know what they portend. The dark twist on the horizon was a conversational shift.

  I couldn’t have attributed the initiative to any one girl in the pack.

  Maybe Tarty said “spaz”. Maybe Outré said something about it “really getting on my tits”. Perhaps it was Sulky: “All she wants is pity.”

  But then someone said: “If you bent two of her forward, you’d have a pantomime horse.”

  And the troupe came together in a spontaneous caterwaul that was like energy expanding, noxious fumes filling the corridor as if there had been a gas explosion in the science lab and a wall of ignited fuel was rolling towards the fire doors. They howled and rocked as they struck pantomime poses against a torrent of released vocabulary – cripple and hunchback and legless.

  Mummy, Mummy, I feel sick, call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.

  I watched the smile on Sarah’s face die, like a head relaxing into sleep, as she absorbed that her friends were now laughing delightedly at her and not with her. The illusion of friendship had evaporated in the heat of the tribe’s ridicule and nothing could be the same for Sarah at that school again. I watched from my safe distance.

  Doctor, doctor, will I die? Count to five and stay alive . . .

  It never occurred to me, as an act of conscious kindness, to reach out in her defence, to stand by her and to try to reclaim the innocent time before our gang had given themselves permission to mock her. The relief of honesty was, in any case, too great for them – they were venting what they really thought and the serpent could never be returned to its basket.