The Mandelbaum Gate

by Muriel Spark

‘A what?’ said Saul.

  She then remarked, without relevance, that the Scriptures were specially important to the half-Jew turned Catholic. The Old Testament and the New, she said, were to her — as near as she could apply to her own experience the phrase of Dante’s vision —’bound by love into one volume’. Then, perceiving that Saul Ephraim was giving serious thought to what she had said, she gave a timid English laugh, and added that of course she realized one could make a fetish of the Scriptures.

  She had hired a car early that morning and had driven northward through the Judean hills to Galilee. The scene with Freddy Hamilton resembled an alcoholic hang-over. On the way, she began to feel a sense of her own identity, and realized that this was in fact what she bad begun to lose amongst the answers she had been obliged to devise to the questions of Israelis since her arrival in the country. She recalled that day she had been driven by a guide along the road to Caesarea … It was eleven in the morning:

  ‘A half-Jew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which half?’

  ‘Through my mother.’

  ‘Then you are a whole Jew. The Jew inherits through the mother by Jewish Law.’

  ‘I know that. But one says half-Jew to mean that one of the parents is a Gentile and the other—’

  ‘But the Jew inherits through the mother. You are then a full Jew by the Law.’

  ‘Yes, but not according to the Gentile parent’s law.’

  ‘What was your father’s Law?’

  That was a question indeed.

  ‘I’m afraid he was a law unto himself,’ Barbara had said to this questioner, a large blond Pole. He laughed at that.

  She told him of her father in the wild upsurge of his middle age and downfall ‘He broke his neck while fox-hunting. The horse threw him. He landed in a ditch and died instantly.’

  ‘My father died also in a ditch. Shot by the S.S. Why have you made yourself a Catholic to deny your Jewish blood?’

  ‘I don’t deny it. I’ve just been telling you about it.’

  ‘You are brought up as a Gentile or a Jew?’

  ‘Neither. No religion.’

  ‘And your mother’s relations and your father’s relations, what religion?’

  Barbara had felt displaced, she felt her personal identity beginning to escape like smoke from among her bones. ‘What a lot of questions,’ she said. So they drove along the road to Caesarea through the fertile plain of Sharon, cultivated to the verge of the road on each side. They had found the car to be cooler with windows shut than open to the hot breeze. But not much cooler. ‘A lot of questions,’ she had said, twice, with the resigned dying-fall of a victim deprived of fresh air and civil rights.

  ‘I ask her a question, she makes a big thing of it that I am Gestapo,’ said the guide to some invisible witness.

  Barbara said, ‘Well, it’s hot.’

  He said, ‘I ask you, because you say you are half-Jew, you say you are a Catholic, and I ask you only what is the religion of your mother’s relations and the religion of your father’s relations. It is a natural discussion, if you would say to me, who are you, who is your mother, who is your father and how do you come to be an Israeli guide, and I would answer those questions. Then I should ask who are you, what is the family, your brothers and your sisters—’

  Barbara thought, ‘Who am I?’ She felt she had known who she was till this moment. She said, ‘I am who I am.’ The guide spoke some short Hebrew phrase which, although she did not know the language, quite plainly signified that this didn’t get them any further in the discussion. Barbara had already begun to reflect that ‘I am who I am’ was a bit large seeing it was the answer that Moses got from the burning bush on Mount Sinai when he asked God to describe himself. The Catechism, it was true, stated that man was made in God’s image chiefly as to the soul. She decided, therefore, essentially ‘I am who I am’ was indeed the final definition for her. But the thesis-exponent in Barbara would not leave it at that. They entered Caesarea, home of ancient disputations, while she attempted to acquaint the guide with the Golders Green Jewishness of her mother’s relations and the rural Anglicanism of her father’s, the Passover gatherings on the one hand and the bell-summoned Evensongs on the other, the talkative intellectuals of the one part and the kennel-keeping blood sportsmen of the other. The Polish Israeli was bewildered. Barbara added that her parents themselves were, of course, exceptional, having broken away from their respective traditions to marry each other. And she herself was of course something else again. The guide persisted in his point: Why had she turned Catholic? If she wanted a religion she was already a Jewess through her mother. Barbara knew then that the essential thing about herself remained unspoken, uncategorized and unlocated. She was agitated, and felt a compelling need to find some definition that would accurately explain herself to this man.

  He was demanding a definition. By the long habit of her life, and by temperament, she held as a vital principle that the human mind was bound in duty to continuous acts of definition. Mystery was acceptable to her, but only under the aspect of a crown of thorns. She found no rest in mysterious truths like ‘I am who I am’; they were all right for deathbed definitions, when one’s mental obligations were at an end. ‘I am who I am’, yes, ultimately, as a piece of music might be what it is; but then, one wants to analyse the thing. Meantime, she thought, the man wants to know who I am, that is, what category of person. I should explain to him the Gentile-Jewish situation in the West, and next, the independence of British education, and the peculiar independence of the Gentile Jew whose very existence occurs through a nonconforming alliance. And next, the probabilities of the Catholic claim, she thought. The fierce heat of noon penetrated her sun-glasses. She thought, later on I must make an attempt to explain: I’ll explain after lunch.

  But why? At Caesarea they had looked at the historic ruins and the recently excavated ramparts of Herod’s city; they looked at the prehistoric Mediterranean Sea and were refreshed by it. The man was dogmatizing about dates and events at Caesarea, the most important of which was, to him, the recent moment when excavations by a team of archaeologists had begun. They ate lunch at an outside table under an awning. The guide said:

  ‘In Poland the Catholic priests used to lead the pogroms.’

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t have,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you Catholic?’

  Why? Why did she trouble about these questions? The man was a hired guide. She was paying for his services. Anywhere else one would take up a properly resentful attitude. But here in Israel it was unthinkable; one paid their travel agency, they were hired, but these facts appeared irrelevant to the relationship. Here on this territory the Israeli guides were far more autonomous in their attitudes than any French citizen on home ground, or any English guide in England. The Israelis generally did not merely show one round, they guided, whether they were official guides or not. It occurred to Barbara that all in some degree rather resembled the Irish and the Welsh in their territorial consciousness, and she was reminded, too, of the games of her childhood where one’s own chalked-out area, once won, contained whatever features one said it did, neither more nor less. She kept remarking to the guide that the country was beautiful, since this was easy to say, being true. It duly pleased him. He said, ‘I swam for it,’ and explained that he had arrived as an illegal immigrant on a ship in 1947, and had swum ashore by night.

  She had returned to the hotel after the trip to Caesarea in a state of exhaustion and nervous panic that reminded her of the sensations she had experienced as a result of anaemia, for a few months, some years ago. She was now in good physical health; it was spiritual anaemia, she ruthlessly decided, that she was suffering from. Instead of saying goodbye at the door and tipping him like a tourist she acted on a desperate placatory impulse and asked him in for a drink. Then, immediately realizing that she was yielding to a familiar weakness, that of humouring the constitutional tyrant, she now recalled having parked the fellow on Freddy Hamilto
n, who was reading a newspaper in the quiet green courtyard, and had said she would be back presently. She had taken a long time to come down from her room, and when she did she found the huge guide had begun to expand on the adventures of the past day. Courteous Mr Hamilton had seemed more than merely courteous, he was listening with deep interest. The guide was checking off the fingers of his left hand, one by one, as he said, or nearly sang, ‘I gave her Abu Gosh, I gave her Ramle where is Arimathea for the Christians, I have given her Lod as you call Lydda, traditional birthplace of St George —’

  ‘Patron Saint of England,’ said pleasant Mr Hamilton.

  ‘Correct. I gave her Haifa, I have given her Mount Carmel —’

  ‘Ah, here’s Miss Vaughan,’ said Freddy Hamilton. ‘Ah, Miss Vaughan, I’ve been hearing an account — let me …’ He rose to help her to pull up a chair from another table. The guide continued, on his right hand, ‘I gave her the grotto of the Prophet Elijah, I gave her, then, the Persian Gardens and the Temple of the Bahai Faith.’

  ‘Ah yes, I’ve heard of the Bahai Faith. Very interesting. Very decent people, I hear. Founded after the last war. Money to burn.’

  ‘In this the lady was not interested. She did not wish to visit the Bahai Temple.’

  ‘I think we did enough for one day,’ Barbara said.

  ‘A very full day,’ said Freddy.

  When the Israeli had gone, Freddy said, ‘Nice fellow. Seems to know his job.’

  ‘I found him insufferably overbearing.’

  ‘Did you? Oh well, you know, we’re foreigners here now. One inclines to forget that. British to them means something different from British to us, I’m afraid.’

  Saul Ephraim, to whom she had recounted that day’s excursion in detail, said, ‘You seem to be unlucky with our guides. Not surprising. You’re British. Well, that’s all right, more or less. You’re a Catholic convert — O.K. But you’re a half-Jew as well. The three together are a lot.’

  ‘I should have thought being a half-Jew would be held in mitigation of the rest.’

  ‘You ought to know better.’

  She did know better. The family on her mother’s side at Golders Green, with whom she spent half of the vacations of her youth, had proved as innocently obtuse about her true identity as had the family at Bells Sands, Worcestershire, with whom she spent the other half.

  Barbara, on the summit of Mount Tabor, conscious of the Holy Land stretching to its boundaries on every side, reflected wearily upon her reflections. She thought, my mind is impatient to escape from its constitution and reach its point somewhere else. But that is in eternity at the point of transfiguration. In the meantime, what is to he borne is to be praised. In the meantime, memory circulates like the bloodstream. May mine circulate well, may it bring dead facts to life, may it bring health to whatever is to be borne.

  At Bells Sands — it was the Easter vacation, just after her sixteenth birthday — her energetic tennis-playing grandmother, with hair discreetly dyed the colour of steel, sat on the arm of a chair in her white pleated dress, swinging one of her long sinewy legs, brown summery legs in good condition; the party was gathered in the dining-room after tennis; it was tea-time. Her grandmother took a teacup from the tray offered by the young, round-shouldered parlour maid. Barbara had been saying she must go and pack. Her cousin Arthur, then at Sandhurst, later killed in North Africa, was to drive her to the station.

  ‘Must you go tonight, darling?’ said her Vaughan grandmother. Barbara passed round the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Why not go up with Arthur in the morning? Stay and be comfy.’

  ‘No, I’m expected. It’s the Passover. An important festival.’

  The warmth of the spring oozed in through the french windows as if the glass were porous. The silver teapot danced with light and shade as a breeze stirred the curtains. The air was elusively threaded with the evidence of unseen hyacinths. So it must have been before she was born, when the family understood that her father was going to marry the Jewess, and there was nothing left to say.

  ‘Well, I admire you for it,’ said her grandmother.

  The young men were eating the cucumber sandwiches two at a time.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Your loyalty to your mother’s people. But honestly, darling, it isn’t necessary. No one could possibly blame you for skipping it. After all, you don’t look as if you had a drop of Jewish blood. And after all you’re only half. I assure you no one minds.’

  ‘I’m awfully fond of them, you know. I don’t feel the least temptation to give them up. Why on earth—?’

  ‘Yes, I know you’re fond of them, it’s only natural that you should be. Only I want you to know that I admire you for being so loyal, darling. I think I’m right in saying that we all of us admire you.’

  ‘Grandmother!’ said Barbara’s other cousin, Miles. ‘Grandmother, shut up.’

  ‘There’s nothing to admire, no effort,’ Barbara said. ‘The Aaron-sons don’t call it loyalty when I stay here. They take it for granted.’

  ‘Well, I should hope so, Barbara dear. This was your father’s home and it’s yours, too.’

  Barbara perceived that she had courage, this lithe grandmother of hers. It took courage for her to speak steadily of her son, her favourite, her disappointment in life, now dead from a fall while hunting. It had been an indigenous sort of death, but the mother would have preferred him alive with his unfortunate marriage, all the same.

  ‘Well, there’s time for another set before you change and pack, Barbara,’ said Uncle Eddy, gazing out at the sky as if he could tell the time by it. The lawn lay beautiful as eternity. A servant was calling in Eddy’s two children from an upper window; presently their high voices came quarrelling from the shrubbery and faded round the back of the house. There was a stir in the beech leaves like papers being gently shuffled into order. The drawing-in of an English afternoon took place, with its fugitive sorrow.

  ‘See here, Barbara,’ said her grandfather at Golders Green a few hours later, ‘these are the bitter herbs which signify our affliction in Egypt….’ He enumerated the items on the Seder table, the eggs, the cake, the paschal lamb.

  She was familiar with the scene from previous Seder nights, but her grandfather, knowing she had not been formally instructed and had no Hebrew, was careful each year to explain everything. There was always a great deal she was ignorant of, which the other grandchildren, her cousins, took for granted. But she recognized the excitement of this Feast when, as a child, she and the other children had sat up late with their elders at the exotic table, every face shining with candlelight, every morsel of food giving a special sensation to her mouth, not only because it tasted different from ordinary food, but because on this night every morsel stood for something else, and was food as well. The children drank wine and deliverance with it…. The unleavened bread, crisp matzho that made crumbs everywhere, was uncovered. ‘This is the poor bread which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.’ Barbara had understood from her fifth year that it was not actually the same wafery substance, here on the table at Golders Green, that had been baked by the Israelites on the first Passover night, and yet, in a mysterious sense, it was: ‘This is the bread which our fathers ate …’

  ‘This is the night,’ said her grandfather, an unageing man, to Barbara, now so conscious of having turned sixteen, ‘when we give thanks to God for our ancestors’ redemption. He split the sea for us and we passed over on dry land.’ She listened, as if she had not heard it before, while her cousins, now grown old, between eighteen and twenty-one years of age, took their places. Like herself, they had been recognizably intellectuals, with an additional bent for music, before they had turned fifteen.

  The cousins, undergraduates in philosophy, law and medicine, were gathered in purposeful concentration round the Seder table, where usually, on summer evenings after supper when the table had been cleared, they leaned over the shiny wood surface far into the night, loquacious on the subjects of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Mussoli
ni, Hitler, and the war impending. Now they were about to intone in due order the responses on the subject of the Exodus from Egypt into the Promised Land.

  A small dark girl of eight was present, a refugee orphan from Germany who had been allotted to this family in the emergency parcelling-out of rescued children in those late nineteen-thirties. Her eyes were wonderful pebbles in the candlelight.

  The young men pushed back their skull-caps, for the room was warm with mesmeric ritual as much as with actual heat.

  It was only a few months ago, in the Christmas holidays, that Barbara and these alert young men, her cousins on the Jewish side, had reached the conclusion one evening that agnosticism was the only answer, their atheist mentors having erred on the dogmatic side. But here and now they were suddenly children of Israel again, Barbara always included, because, after all, blood was blood, and you inherit from your mother’s side.

  In former times, Barbara, being the youngest member of the Feast, yet knowing no Hebrew, had repeated after her grandfather the euphonics of the question reserved to the youngest of the company. But tonight the German child was repeating in Hebrew the question:

  Why is this night different from all other nights?

  It is different, Barbara had thought. The elder Aaronsons hoped she would one day marry a Jew, a doctor or a lawyer, somebody brilliant. They did not believe that her Gentile relations could be particularly well-disposed towards her. As for love, how could you expect it? The elder Aaronsons said, Barbara, bless her, she’ll make a nice match in five, six years’ time. They felt she would compensate for her intractable mother, who now never came to the family gatherings but only wrote letters from Paris.

  Her grandfather intoned joyfully. He was in good voice. The very old Auntie Bea’s rings twinkled on her moveless hand as the candles flickered in a little draught. Michael, her closest friend among the cousins, for Barbara’s benefit, murmured an English rendering of the versicle liturgy to the accompaniment of his grandfather’s deep patriarchal boom, and the young men’s gruff responses: