by Jane Hawking
7
Extremes
With a little help from Shakespeare, Stephen had devised a title for his book; the manuscript had been moulded into a form acceptable to the publisher and a date in June 1988 was set for publication. The American edition was to be published in the spring, before the British edition. That first American edition had to be pulped at the last minute because of the fear of legal action on account of certain aspersions cast in the text on the integrity of a couple of American scientists. This misfortune allowed a minor omission to be rectified: Stephen had dedicated A Brief History of Time to me, a gesture which came as a much appreciated public acknowledgement, but the dedication had been left out of the American edition. The presses were put into overdrive to produce ten thousand copies of the amended edition within days, the potential libel was erased, my name featured in the dedication and the book was launched in the United States.
While Stephen was in America for the launch, Tim and I went to stay with his best friend Arthur and his parents, who were now living in Germany. The two little boys saw each other rarely these days, yet neither of them had made other close friends; when they met, they happily settled into their familiar routine, like long-lost brothers. As there had been a late fall of snow in the Black Forest, Arthur’s father, Kevin, surprised us by asking if we would like to go skiing. I had never skied in my life and never expected to do so, although rumour had it that Stephen used to be a competent skier and Lucy regularly went skiing with her friends. Indeed, at that very moment she was in the Alps recovering from an arduous run of rehearsals for a play which she and her companions in the Cambridge Youth Theatre were to perform in Cambridge in April before appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer. Tim and I jumped at the chance to learn to ski. He learnt quickly, hurling himself down the slopes at breakneck speed, threatening to overshoot the car park at the bottom. I watched helplessly while Arthur’s mother, Belinda, desperately shouted instructions at him to snowplough – that is, to slow down by turning the skis inwards. The memory of broken arms when learning to ice-skate made me much more wary and nervous – until I realized that snow was a soft bed, if cold and wet, to fall into or onto. During that weekend in the Black Forest, I recovered some of my lost bravado. High up on the hillside, with the wind in my face and the sun shining on the glistening white snow, I rejoiced at the release from the treadmill of care and responsibility, and from the divisive, tedious squabbles of petulant nurses which had made our home life such an unendingly depressing struggle. Skiing demanded one-hundred per cent concentration, both physical and mental: the immediate objective was the bottom of the slope, and the only question the brain could accommodate was how to get there in one piece.
Stephen was in America for over three weeks. Soon after his return, we were to set off together to Jerusalem, where he was to collect the prestigious Wolf Prize, awarded jointly to him and Roger Penrose for distinction in physics.
My misgivings about the Israel trip were not solely caused by my reluctance to leave the family or to take time from teaching. Although I was looking forward to meeting Hanna Scolnicov, my friend from Lucy Cavendish days, I was not much looking forward to visiting the holiest, most ancient city in the world in the company of a party of physicists: I would have preferred a pilgrimage with more like-minded people, but I had no choice. There was a discernible tension in the air when Stephen said that, if I did not want to go, he was sure that Elaine Mason, the nurse who had accompanied him to America, would be happy to go in my place.
He had resented my refusal to go to America with him in March when Tim and I had gone skiing and, since his return, the communication lines between us had become brittle and taut. My suggestion that he should sack some of the troublemakers among the nurses met with the blank, incontestable reply, “I need good nurses”. When I offered to collaborate with him on a proposed autobiography, a project which I hoped would bring us closer together, his reaction was dismissive: “I should be glad of your opinion.” Only then did I start to perceive the truth of what other nurses had been trying to tell me for some time, namely that one of their number was exerting undue influence over Stephen, deliberately provoking and exploiting every disagreement between us. Naturally my relationship with Jonathan featured large in the increasingly extravagant web of wile and deceit that was being woven and, as far as that was concerned, there was little I could say in my own defence, since clearly in the eyes of the world our relationship was a guilty one.
Before our departure for the Middle East, there was just time to see Lucy performing in the lively spectacle of The Heart of a Dog, a staged adaptation of the political satire written in the 1920s by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The novella, in which Bulgakov voiced his concerns at the take-over of Russian society by the proletariat, was considered too abrasive for publication at the time and was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, the year of our most recent visit. On the following Sunday, leaving my parents in charge of the home, we left for Israel.
Although there were delays at Heathrow, the main stretch of the flight passed without incident. Jonathan, who was away on tour with the Cam-bridge Baroque Camerata, had given me a Walkman and tapes of Bach’s Mass in B Minor for my birthday, and with that I whiled away the time, occasionally peering out of the window down to the distant blue depths of the Mediterranean. As night fell and the sky and the sea darkened, a strip of neon lights appeared far below clearly marking the coastline, and we were told to fasten our seat belts for landing in Tel Aviv. The plane began its descent, and I watched as we skimmed lit buildings and roadways. I heard the rumble of the undercarriage being lowered and waited for the jolt of the landing on the runway. The bump never came. Instead the plane lumbered its way back up into the night sky. To my own surprise, I was fascinated, not frightened. There were no announcements. A hush descended on the cabin, and I sensed that the same questions were passing through the minds of all the passengers: had we been highjacked and were we heading for Lebanon?
Ten minutes later the captain’s voice came over the address system. We had not been able to land in Tel Aviv because of sudden fog, he explained, and had been diverted to the only other available runway, a landing strip at a military airbase in the Negev desert, the neck of Israeli territory narrowing down to the Red Sea between Egypt and Jordan. The plane droned through the night to the desert, where it made an abrupt and bumpy landing on a short runway, not built to accommodate 747s – and there we stayed. By the time the fog had cleared in Tel Aviv, the period of duty for our crew had expired, so we – and they – had to wait for another crew to come out from Tel Aviv to collect us. I pulled down the blind, curled up and went to sleep. Stephen’s assistant, Nick Phillips, nudged me the next morning just as the engines were beginning to turn. I drew up the blind and looked out on a perfect introduction to the Holy Land. Outside was a scene of timeless peace and beauty: golden sands, silken dunes and barren, purple hills, all tinged with the soft pinkish hue of dawn.
The focal point of the official visit was the presentation of the Wolf Prize in the Knesset against the backdrop of Chagall’s immense tapestry of the history of the Israeli people. The ceremony took place in the presence both of the highly respected, liberal-minded President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, and the notoriously hard-line, right-wing Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. They epitomized the two ends of the political spectrum in a country where good sense and fanaticism coexisted in equal measures. After the completion of the ceremonials, Stephen and Roger Penrose were so much occupied in scientific meetings, lectures and seminars with their Israeli colleagues that I was often left to wander and explore at will through Jerusalem. “Go into the Jewish quarter of the Old City, by all means,” I was advised, “but don’t go into the Arab quarter: it’s too dangerous because of the Intifada.” In my impatience to be independent of the official party, I shrugged off such caution with indifference, happy to find that the hotel, a modern block, was within easy walking distance of the Jaffa Gate of the Old
City. Like a magnet, the grey walls on the opposite hill, as austere and forbidding as the walls of the Alhambra in Granada, drew me to them. Unprepared for the bustling, noisy mass of colourful humanity which ebbed and flowed in and out of the gate beneath David’s Tower, I paused, looking about me and wondering which way to go, to the right or to the left. I was tempted to let myself be pulled along with the crowds and be sucked down the narrow street on my left, but mindful of the advice to keep out of the Arab quarter I set off to my right, past the grey-stone Anglican cathedral into a street which ran along the inside of the city walls. It was disappointingly dull and quiet. Hammering came from the occasional workshop, a few people going about their daily business hurried down the street, the sounds of a piano wafted from an upper window, otherwise there was little to claim my interest. It was pleasant but unremarkable. I carried on walking and came to a new housing development which was even more disappointing. However, an alleyway between the new houses on the left gave onto a steep flight of steps which descended to a leafy little square where I stopped for a drink, before carrying on down the next long flight. At the bottom was a broad open expanse, enclosed on the far side by a high wall of mellow, sunburnt stone. Black-coated men were praying and kissing the wall and bridal parties were being photographed against it. I had reached the Wailing Wall. I ambled across the open space, watching the crowds, some earnest and devout, others laughing and talking.
On one side of the space was a short tunnel, guarded by soldiers, under a mass of buildings. People were coming and going through it quite freely, so I joined them. In passing through that tunnel, I discovered – without the aid of complex mathematical equations – that time travel is a real possibility. In practical and political terms, that tunnel divided the Jewish and the Arab quarters of the Old City. In historical terms it divided secular modernity from an ancient past which vibrated with the sounds, the colours and the traditions of biblical times. Pilgrims and tourists mingled like visitors from another planet with the local inhabitants who, with their children and donkeys, got on with their daily lives as if the twentieth century had not happened. I walked on alone, pausing now and then on the edge of a group of pilgrims. I listened to the guide’s explanation of each site and I joined in their prayers and hymns at a couple of the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa.
It was a strange experience suddenly to be alone, free to make my own discoveries and form my own judgements. I shuddered at the gloomy, repellent sense of intrigue which pervaded the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its squabbling, rival sects and its queues of tourists waiting to pass through the inner sanctum. I could not wait to get out of its morbid atmosphere into the bright daylight. The view from the tower was its one redeeming feature. The panorama of flat, white rooftops was as striking as the view of the red roofs of Venice from the top of the Campanile. Far below, chickens cackled, cocks crowed and a donkey brayed.
It was with reluctance that I dragged myself away from the Church of St Anne, close by the excavations of the Pool of Bethesda, only a hundred yards from the Lion Gate with its views across to the Mount of Olives. The Church of St Anne, immense and domed, light and airy, was deserted when I went in. I clicked my fingers – a trick Jonathan had taught me to test the acoustics of a building – and was surprised to find that the church was even more resonant than King’s Chapel. Emboldened by the silence of the empty church, I hummed a few bars of Purcell’s Evening Hymn – “Now, now that the sun has veiled his light and bid the world goodnight...” – I listened in astonishment as the sound of my voice was caught by the pillars and flung up into the dome. There the song took on a life of its own and whirled in ecstasy before sliding back to earth in a whisper. The friendly Arab guardian of the Church appeared from a side door. He said that he liked to listen to the pilgrims who came to sing in his Church. Apparently I was lucky to have had it to myself, as usually choirs queued up for their turns. He invited me to return whenever I liked.
The Arab quarter of the city held no terrors for me; so, another day, I made for the Dome of the Rock, the spectacular holy place of Islam and the site of the stone where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. The entrance was closed and guarded by Israeli soldiers. It would be closed, except to worshippers, for the foreseeable future. In disappointment I made my way back up the street through the Arab bazaar with its motley assortment of tourist goods – Bethlehem blue glass, pottery and leather. I browsed among its antique stalls, which displayed bits of Roman glass, copper and coins, and its food stalls spilling over with all the delicacies of the eastern Mediterranean, nuts and olives, Turkish delight and halva as well as a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. Like the stallholders I had met in Tangiers twenty-five years earlier, the Arabs here were polite and friendly. Having haggled over a pretty Roman glass bead at one of the antique stalls, a malachite and silver necklace at a ridiculously low price on another then caught my eye. The proprietor came out to talk to me without attempting to pressurize me into a purchase. He spoke good English and was just telling me about his cousin in Middlesex when he glanced down the street and hastily pushed me into his shop. He then took up a position, arms akimbo, in the doorway. His alarm was understandable. A troop of armed Israeli soldiers was forcing its way noisily up the alley. They did not seem concerned about respecting any property, barrows or stalls in their path and, from the stance adopted by my shopkeeper and others nearby, it appeared that they had a reputation for being light-fingered. When the noise of their passage, their boots on the cobbles and their shouts had died away, the shopkeeper came back inside sighing. He apologized for pushing me through the door and simply said, “You see, we have to be very careful.” I bought the necklace and a richly decorated, hand-painted plate and said goodbye, promising to return. I did return on the last day only to find everywhere closed: the shops were boarded up and, apart from stray cats, the streets were deserted. The ancient pageant of light, life, noise and colour had vanished. Everywhere, every street, every corner, every square, was dark, eerie and intimidating – a ghost city which had closed its doors to time travellers.
As well as my sympathy for the Arabs, I felt a natural affinity with the Jewish people: many of our friends were Jews, highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive, whose families had been ravaged by the Holocaust. I could not, however, sympathize with the inhuman tactics of the Israeli army that I had witnessed in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, even less could I sympathize with the loathsome driver who had been allotted to us. An American Jew of central-European origins, he voiced his opinions loudly and coarsely wherever we went. As he drove down the winding road to the Dead Sea, he gestured to a row of white houses up on the hills. “See there,” he said proudly, “that’s one of our settlements, we’re building all those homes. The Arabs had this land for two thousand years and didn’t do anything with it. They’ve had their chance, but now it’s our turn and they want to push us into the sea.” I had heard these wearying arguments before, delivered in the same Americanized monotone by other immigrant speakers. Further down the road, we came across a simple Bedouin encampment. “What can you do with people like that? Just look at them!” the driver expostulated, “they haven’t advanced in two thousand years!” I could hardly contain my indignation. “Perhaps they like their traditional lifestyle,” I retorted. I was saddened that peace was so elusive between two peoples of the same racial stock who had so much to offer each other. The best Jews and the best Arabs had a lot in common. They could both be intelligent, generous, friendly and amusing. Perhaps the Jews had the edge over the Arabs in rational argument, in science, technology and mathematics, but the Arabs had superior intuitive poetic and artistic skills. Between them, they held the key to the most successful and gifted culture the world has ever seen.
There were, inevitably, many official expeditions. Television cameras and reporters followed Stephen to all his meetings, eager for his reactions to a wide range of questions. Unfailingly one question recurred at every interview. I watched and listened
from the sidelines and my heart sank as I heard it repeated again and again in some form or other. “Professor Hawking, what does your research tell you about the existence of God?” or “Is there room for God in the universe you describe?” or, more directly, “Do you believe in God?” Always the answer was the same. No, Stephen did not believe in God and there was no room for God in his universe. Roger Penrose was more tactful. When asked the same questions, he conceded that there were different ways to approach God: some people might find God in religious belief, others in music, others conceivably in the beauty of a mathematical equation. Roger’s answers could not, however, dispel my sadness. My life with Stephen had been built on faith – faith in his courage and genius, faith in our joint efforts and ultimately religious faith – and yet here we were in the very cradle of the world’s three great religions, preaching some sort of ill-defined atheism, founded on impersonal scientific values with little reference to human experience. The blank denial of all that I believed in was bitter indeed.
I sat in miserable silence in the back of the van as the driver conducted us round all the holy places of the Old and New Testaments – the dark little cave in Bethlehem, the bleached stones of Jericho, the parched mountains of the Wilderness, the rippling green flow of the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee. Dumbly, in my corner of the careering van, I mused that this tragic land seemed to breed conflict. Against the impenetrable landscape, the sense of conflict was all pervasive and insidious. Even Stephen and I were in danger of succumbing to it, since we rarely seemed to be of one mind.
However, while Stephen finished his lunch in a lakeside restaurant at Tiberias, I swam alone in the turquoise waters of the sea of Galilee, and for a few precious minutes I felt myself to be at peace and in harmony with the landscape and its history. The threat of war over the Golan Heights had preserved Galilee from the ravages of the tourist industry, with the result that little could have changed in two thousand years. Tiberias was possibly even less of a resort in 1988 than it had been in Roman times, and the Lake was as calm and as unspoilt as a Scottish loch. Had it not been for the heat, Galilee seen from the chapel of the Sermon on the Mount could well have been Loch Lomond. On the final day, we all bathed in the Dead Sea. Encouraged by me and supported by his entourage and the natural buoyancy of the salt, Stephen lay back, floating in the warm water, briefly reestablishing contact with the reality of nature, long denied him, rather than its theory with which he was in ceaseless communion. There was silence all around us. The only witnesses of Stephen’s peaceful bathing were the hazy purple mountains of Jordan in the distance, the blue sky and a solitary bird of prey. It was impossible to drown or even to swim. My attempt to strike out in a breaststroke collapsed in splashing and floundering, and filled my nose with stinging salt. My swimming sessions would have to be reserved for the hotel pool, up on the roof where I swam a few lengths every evening after each day’s hot, dusty excursion. The novelty of swimming with the whole of Jerusalem spread out below would have been entirely agreeable, had it not been for the presence of a suspiciously spotty child in the water. I recognized chickenpox, but trusted that I was well enough protected with antibodies against that virus as a result of my experience in Spain as a student.