On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘Why didn’t he leave?’

  ‘To go where?’

  ‘The States.’

  ‘To do what? He was now old. He was becoming deaf. He only spoke German and only knew German law. And it wasn’t easy to find a sponsor.’

  ‘What about Eleazar?’

  ‘He offered to take the children, but he wouldn’t sponsor your grandparents because he might have had to pay for them for the rest of their lives. Also your grandfather was an optimist. Even when he had to sew a star of David on his suit he thought that the bad times would pass, that Hitler would mellow, that all would be well.’

  ‘But they sent Dad and Miriam to America …’

  ‘Yes. Because they saw the war coming and sent them to Chicago.’

  ‘To their Uncle Eleazar?’

  ‘Yes. He wasn’t their uncle, only a cousin, a vulgar man who lived in a nasty apartment with his Irish housekeeper. The two children thought that they had come on holiday, but they never went back. For a time there were letters, then postcards, then news from friends and the Red Cross. Then nothing.’

  ‘They were taken off?’

  ‘Yes. The first time, when they came for your grandfather, a doctor friend gave him an injection which made it look as if he had had a heart attack. But they came again and took your grandfather and grandmother, your great-uncle and your aunts, they took them all to Riga and they were never heard of again.’

  ‘I know, Ma,’ said Anna – her voice softer and less aggressive than it had been before, ‘and it’s all terrible, but we can’t go on agonizing about it for ever.’

  ‘I don’t want you to agonize,’ said Rachel Dagan. ‘I only ask you to try and understand the effect of it all on a boy who first sees his parents humiliated and then learns that they have been gassed and burnt.’

  ‘It must have been bad.’

  ‘It was. He has never got over it. Always, within him, is his anger – his desire to do something to save them, or to take revenge on those who treated them in this way.’

  ‘But how could he?’

  ‘How, indeed? He fought in the war, in the last war, but against the Japanese, not the Germans. Then, after the war, we all hoped that justice would be done, but soon we were told to forget about the Nazis because the Communists were the enemy now. But your father could not forget, so he came to Israel – not just because there were great opportunities here for an archaeologist, but because he felt that here he could be proud to be a Jew.’

  ‘I don’t know why he can’t just forget about being a Jew.’

  ‘As your grandfather forgot?’

  ‘That can’t happen again.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure.’

  ‘It’s more dangerous for Jews in Israel than it is in Europe or the States. You don’t dare go to the Old City, or even take a walk in the park.’

  ‘That’s only because of the intifada.’

  ‘Which has made Jews into torturers and killers.’

  ‘That may be true of some,’ said Rachel Dagan, ‘but here at least we are masters of our own fate. And that is what your father wanted – not just to be in control of his individual destiny, but to have a son who would be untainted by the shame he felt at his father’s humiliation. It is not true that Michal loves Jake more than he loves you, but Jake is everything that he wanted and needed in a son. He is clever. He is brave. He is proud. Even his worst qualities – his contempt for the Arabs and the Bedou – delight your father, for he sees in him a phoenix which has risen out of the ashes of Auschwitz.’

  Anna sat back, the tears gone from her eyes but not the look of resentment. ‘But do you go for all that crap?’ she eventually asked her mother.

  ‘What … crap?’

  ‘The phoenix rising from the ashes?’

  Rachel turned away as if to hide her reaction to Anna’s question. ‘You should understand,’ she said to Anna, ‘that men are different to women …’

  ‘Humph.’

  ‘And while women are often content with a home, men … their pride – their self-respect even – depends on the fortunes of their tribe, their nation.’

  ‘You mean that Dad felt like a wimp because his father was kicked around by the Nazis, but Jake feels like a man because the boot is now on his foot and he can kick around the Arabs?’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as that. Jake, and your father through Jake, can respect themselves now as part of an ancient nation. They are no longer the schnorrern in Poland or the dentists in New Jersey. They are the masters in the land given them by God.’

  ‘But that’s fantasy, Ma, and you know it. I very much doubt that either Dad or Jake really believe in God except as an excuse for screwing the Arabs. Even if they do, it’s plain as hell to me that if God ever did give Israel to the Jews, then he changed his mind and took it away from them a couple of thousand years ago. I mean, Dad can dig up the whole fucking country, and all he’s ever going to uncover that’s authentically and undeniably Jewish are a few piles of stones from the time of Solomon. The Hasmonean remains are really Greek, the Herodian remains are really Roman, and everything else is either Christian or Muslim.’

  ‘That is not true, Anna.’

  ‘Look around you, Ma. What do you see when you look at Jerusalem? Turkish walls, Christian churches and on top of it all the golden dome of a mosque which has been sitting on the site of the Temple for at least thirteen hundred years.’

  ‘But there are Jewish monuments …’

  ‘Sure. The Hilton, the Sheraton and the Laromme.’

  ‘You are too harsh, Anna.’

  ‘Well, if I am, it’s because I feel cheated.’

  ‘No. You have not been cheated.’

  Tears returned to Anna’s eyes. ‘I have, Ma, because you let me out of this crazy country to see it all from the outside, and then you didn’t really want me back because I couldn’t and wouldn’t swallow the mad myth which makes Dad and Jake feel like real men.’

  ‘We need a myth,’ her mother said gently.

  ‘Perhaps we do,’ said Anna, tears now dribbling down her cheeks, ‘but you never thought about a myth for me. You left me to salute the Stars and Stripes, then sent me to sing God Save the Queen, so I’m left without a myth or a country or a family …’

  ‘We didn’t mean it that way,’ said Rachel Dagan.

  ‘You may not have meant it,’ said Anna, ‘but it happened, and you let it happen because you cared more about them than you did about me.’

  ‘Not them, Anna,’ her mother said in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper, ‘but him perhaps …’

  ‘Then him, yes. You were such a perfect fucking mother to Dad that you had nothing left for me.’

  ‘He was the first, Anna.’

  ‘Then why did you have me?’

  ‘You came …’

  ‘Well, I wish to God that you’d aborted me and fed me to the dogs …’ And with that she got up and shut herself in her room to sob once again into the pillow.

  She slept and did not wake until around five, when she heard her mother tapping on the door. ‘Anna. The telephone. It is Andrew.’

  Anna got off her bed and went out into the living-room. Her mother was not there. The telephone lay on its side next to the receiver.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, trying not to sound sleepy.

  ‘Anna?’ He seemed agitated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could we meet?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Can you get to the Jaffa Gate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you there.’

  Anna was glad to escape from her parents’ flat. If she could have done, she would have left Israel that evening and returned to London. However, going to meet Andrew amounted to much the same thing: he now seemed her only friend.

  He was sitting on the steps beneath the citadel, wearing the same jeans and shirt he had had on that morning. Since Anna had expected him to be back in a Sim
onite habit, or at least the kind of dark, quasi-clerical costume that he wore when he was in London, this struck her as odd but agreeable: he was decidedly better-looking when not dressed as a priest.

  When she came closer, and he stood to greet her, she sensed at once that he was in an unusual mood. His manner was almost frenetic, like someone who has missed a night’s sleep but has kept awake by drinking frequent cups of strong coffee. He said at once: ‘I am glad you could come,’ as if she was doing him a great favour in meeting him in this way. ‘Where shall we go? Would you like a drink? Or shall we go for a walk? Where can we go? There’s a nasty little café over there. The rest seem to be shut because of the strike.’

  ‘They’ll be open in the Jewish quarter.’

  ‘That’s true. Let’s go there.’ They started walking towards the Armenian Patriarchate. ‘And if nothing’s open, we can take a cab to my hotel.’

  ‘Your hotel?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve taken a room at the American Colony. Just for a night. I could probably stay longer but I don’t know what it costs.’

  ‘I thought you were staying at the monastery?’

  ‘I was, but suddenly … Well, that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve decided to leave, for the time being … probably for ever. The order, that is … and, having made up my mind to do that, it suddenly seemed quite wrong to go on living as a Simonite, even for a day or an hour or even a minute longer. So I rushed out into the street with my bag, but then I thought it was discourteous just to leave like that, so I went back and told the Prior – he’s a nice old German – and he was very sympathetic. I think he was upset about what we all saw this morning – and he rang the American Colony.’

  ‘But why? Is it because of Dad’s find?’

  ‘Yes, well, not just the find as such but more what we made of it afterwards – especially Father van der Velde and Cardinal Memel.’

  ‘Do they know you’ve left the order?’

  ‘No. They went straight from Tartur to the airport.’

  ‘What did they think of the find?’

  ‘Different things. Father Pierre – that’s the Cardinal’s secretary – thinks that the whole thing is a fraud, but the other two seemed to accept that even if this particular skeleton was not that of Christ, it is almost certainly somewhere else, because he almost certainly did not rise from the dead in the literal sense that we had always supposed.’

  ‘And is that what you believe?’

  ‘Yes, I think I do, not just because Cardinal Memel and Father van der Velde believe it, or even because Father Lambert seems to have come away convinced that it was the body of Christ, but really because it suddenly seems to me wrong to insist upon something so inherently improbable when doing so separates us from others who believe in God.’

  ‘But surely the whole point of Christianity is that Christ was the Son of God?’

  ‘Yes. And the whole point of the Muslim religion is that Mohammed was God’s prophet, and for the Jews it was Moses, and for centuries now we have been slaughtering one another – and people are being killed now here in Israel because the Muslims insist that Mohammed rose up to Heaven from the rock under the Dome, and we insist that Jesus rose from the dead from under that kiosk in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and you insist that God gave you Palestine.’

  ‘I don’t insist on anything.’

  ‘No, of course, not you, but your father and Jake.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What struck me yesterday, even before I saw the skeleton, was that if there is a God, and that God wants us to love one another, then we should build on what we have in common, and not insist on the things which divide us.’

  ‘And what do we have in common?’

  ‘Our faith in God, whether we call him God, Yahweh or Allah.’

  ‘And if you don’t have that faith?’

  ‘Then build on our common humanity.’

  They had reached the Jewish quarter and came to a café, where they sat down and asked for two glasses of Coke. As Andrew sat opposite her at the small table, Anna watched him uneasily – wondering, paradoxically, whether his speaking such sense was a sign that he had gone out of his mind.

  ‘All this …’ she began cautiously.

  ‘All what?’ he asked.

  ‘All this belief in the same God and a common humanity – isn’t it a kind of change-around from what you believed before?’

  He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘Like St Paul? A vision on the road to Damascus? Yes, I suppose it is. But it makes me feel … I don’t know … so excited and happy and free – like getting out of prison or leaving school.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘My only sorrow is the thought that Father Lambert must have come to just the same conclusion, but, because he was so much older, felt that he had wasted his life.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He must have realized, as I do, that once you accept Jesus as just one among many good men – one of the best, certainly, but not the unique source of truth – then you can take from his teaching whatever leads to the common good, and discount some of the harsher ideas which really, when one thinks about it, serve no purpose at all.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  Andrew blushed. ‘Well, celibacy, for example. It only entered anyone’s head because Jesus blessed those “who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God”, and St Paul built on that, teaching that it was good to be married but better to be celibate. And then along came St Augustine who, to judge from his Confessions, was obsessed with sex, and couldn’t distinguish love from lust.’

  ‘And you?’ she asked, looking at him with a trace of her old mockery. ‘Can you distinguish love from lust?’

  He blushed again. ‘I think so, yes. And anyway, perhaps lust isn’t as bad as it’s been made out to be.’

  ‘So it’s off to the flesh-pots of Egypt?’

  He laughed and said, with a rather hollow bravado: ‘No, I’m not suddenly desperate to lose my virginity.’

  ‘Father Lambert was.’

  ‘Because he was in love.’

  ‘So if you were in love …’

  He looked away, as if to avoid her eye. ‘When you are committed to celibacy, you have to discipline yourself to prevent your thoughts from wandering in certain directions, and you have to cultivate a certain mistrust of your body, not because your body is bad in itself, but because its appetites and passions can lead one astray.’

  ‘But now you think they’re a good thing?’

  ‘Yes, now I do.’ He looked up at her earnestly, his glass empty on the table. ‘It must be difficult for you to understand, but my concept of celibacy was tied up with my belief in the Resurrection. It was as if the sexual act somehow initiated the decay of the flesh, as a fig must split open to release its seed. The Resurrection of Jesus, like the Assumption of Mary, was linked in my mind to their virginity. Then, suddenly, this afternoon, when I realized that Jesus, and Mary too, had a body like yours or mine, which flourished when they were living but eventually putrefied like the corpse in the cistern, then virginity seemed absurd – in fact not just absurd, but wrong, sterile, a denial of life. And that’s what suddenly made the monastery seem intolerable – the thought that behind those doors were fifteen or twenty wretched men struggling to suppress their God-given desires.’

  ‘And Father Lambert reached the same conclusion?’

  ‘I felt all the time as if his spirit were hovering over me, guiding my thoughts in that direction.’

  ‘But he had Mrs Dunn. He knew the difference between love and lust.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve never been in love.’

  She thought of Henry and frowned. ‘It’s all more complicated than you imagine.’

  ‘I dare say.’ He smiled.

  ‘You can love someone who doesn’t love you.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Or fancy someone you don’t love.’


  ‘Or love someone without realizing it.’

  ‘Sure. Or not know what the hell you feel.’

  ‘Of course.’ He hesitated – his voice now calmer than it had been before, as if he had reined in his bolting thoughts and had brought them under control. ‘But you see, I have an advantage over you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, you went onto the pitch before you knew how to play the game, but I have had a long time to learn the rules, watching from the sidelines.’

  ‘A substitute?’ She looked up at him with one of her little sneers but met only an expression of tenderness.

  ‘A substitute? Yes,’ he said. ‘I could hardly expect to be anything more.’

  Anna opened her mouth to make some ironic rejoinder but was suddenly struck by the thought that, if Andrew was so sure he could distinguish between lust and love, it was because he felt he loved someone already; and if he loved someone already, it had to be her because she was the only girl he knew. And this realization filled her with panic, not just because it is always awkward to be faced, suddenly, with love or desire from an unexpected source, but also because, a week before, she had slept with his brother and Andrew did not know.

  Yet – again to her own confusion – the idea that Andrew might love her, and unwittingly follow on where his brother had left off, did not appal her as she might have expected. Indeed, it had no sooner entered her head than the kind of vague admiration she had felt when she had seen him waiting at the Jaffa Gate returned as a brief spasm of sexual desire. She shifted in her seat, as if someone might notice, and said, because she had to say something: ‘Do you think I could have some more Coke?’

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled and turned to call the man who had served them.

  Anna noticed, when he faced her again, that he had the kind of sardonic smile on his face which was more usually found on hers – as if he was more in control of what was going on between them than she was, and was amused to see her floundering in her confused and contradictory emotions. Was he so assured because he had declared himself? Had he declared himself? And did he also understand that, after a couple of years of comradely friendship, she too now considered him in a different way?

  Yet, she told herself in the cynical tone she always adopted in her inner monologues, if he did think he loved her, it must simply be because she was the only girl he knew. It was inevitable, once he had abandoned his commitment to celibacy, that he would think of her in such terms; and, all at once, with an anguish which belied the cynical tone of her thoughts, she became afraid that the friendship he had felt for her had only ever been the sublimated love of a celibate monk. Now it had surfaced as sexual desire, it would wane with its satisfaction, as sexual desire, in her experience, always did. She would have gained one more lover, but lost her only friend.