The demographer is called Dan. Not Daniel of the den but Dan one of Jakob’s twelve sons, each of whom founded a tribe, his roughly north-central. He is, in the context of this particular old age, some fifteen years younger, and married to the highly reputable literary scholar Rebekah, also younger, a True Friend of thirty-four years’ standing. So Dan is a T.F. by marriage, a friend-in-law but truer even than that. A bel-ami.

And this is rare. The husbands of feminine T.F.s are usually polite appendages, even O.P.s, influencing the wife away, whereas the wives of masculine T.F.s merge into the professional friendship and acquire friend-in-law status or more with ease, and are never O.P.s. There are exceptions, throughout a long life, as when the husband cuts out his own wife to talk only professionally with the woman T.F. But Dan is more than not O.P. He joins in the passionate politico-historico-literary discussions with quiet enthusiasm and never imposes his own socio-scientific interests unless asked.

True, when asked, which is often, he slides into an explanation so detailed and digressive that the answer never seems to come. Even by correspondence. Asked once whether the likelihood of population growth among Palestinians is ever thought of by the politicians at the creation of the Israeli state he replies by a long e-mail giving population figures of both sides then and population figures of both sides now, but nothing on politicians then. And now, about the six billion in the world, how is it true but misleading? This on the shaded terrace. But then, he is not a teacher, who has to attract like an actor and simplify like a teleprof. And soon it’s the patient care he takes to miss out nothing that wins the rapt attention, moves and even flatters.

For professionally based friendships with women can become quite dodgy, since women have somehow not yet fully developed the art of unrivalling friendship on their own, with or without appendage (but have men?). Sooner or later, a power-glitz occurs, as with Oenone and many others. Or a priority-glitz, since women always have more people and things to look after than men. Things smaller and more scattered too, taking children to school and fetching them, unimaginable sixty years ago, shopping for the family, cooking and all the rest. Whereas a professional friendship between a woman and a married man surges quite naturally like a surfer crouching under a wave, then balancing on the wave-length with his wife as beach-witness and companion, wholly sharing and admiring, happy at the showery foam, and, if she has a profession, pleasurably listening and contributing her experience.

This is the most relaxed relationship with a man, the stimulus of otherness without the blur of sex, a relaxation eventually obtained anyway after attaining the one and only advantage of a certain age, reached now long ago. As with a gay, yet different precisely because not that.

Dan and Rebekah are here for forty-eight hours, all the way from Jerusalem for what all three accept tacitly as a last reunion with the slowly dying cripple. Who can hardly believe they’ve come all that way for forty-eight hours with an invalid as asserted, when it would be so much more normal to combine it with a longer rest from the permanent terror-time in Jerusalem. The invalid who can hardly walk or stand without lurching; who prepares a tasteful snack on trays, leaning the hip or loin against the sink or stove for contact with the centre of the earth and as long as they carry the trays; who can’t stand to peal or stir but can clamber down in agony to take guests out for dinner providing they come with a car. Which these do, rented at the airport.

The heat is heavy, and creepy-crawly as well. The snack is on the terrace shaded by a huge green parasol and a dark green mulberry tree growing from below. Iced cucumber soup, smoked salmon, cheeses, raspberries. The first dinner is in the garden of the favourite cicada-shrieking restaurant, which they appreciate so much they want to come back there the second night. Just as well since other restaurants with garden are all booked up on a Saturday in season.

Writers, recent books, educational problems, universities compared. But soon, global politics and worse, Israel and unresolvability unless both sides stop draining the past to whip up hatred everlasting, and start analysing the problems from now. Says Rebekah. By whose invitation to teach in the late 70s Jerusalem and the land of Israel are now a physical reality, a changing landscape, more real in space than in the slow spiral of time, each side stuck on the same positions, but further along. This, however, is an illusion. Easily nurtured when confined to the European media.

Dan: Until the nineteenth century very few Jews saw the idea of Israel as more than an abstract concept, in fact early Zionists even considered Uganda.

You mean there was no connexion between the idea and the land?

Well, that was invented by the religious Zionist movement which felt threatened by such an attack on Jewish identity.

Ah, identity again.

And now many are trying to de-invent that particular identity staked on the Bible. In favour of a new identity created by America: the Fight against the Terrorists. And many modern Israelis are atheists or agnostics.

Yes, I wanted to ask you, how serious is the Islamic belief in Mahomet’s death-flight to Jerusalem and back? Making it their third Holy City? Do they really need three? And do we really intend to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, even symbolically?

I don’t know. Their real struggle is for their land, from which we ejected them at the start, and continue to do so in more cynical ways. Changing the word stealing into settling.

Not to mention disgraceful treatment as second class citizens. We often go and help them pick fruit and olives in their orchards. As a gesture. Rebekah joins in.

But isn’t that dangerous? With Israeli tanks nearby?

No, they don’t attack when we’re there.

You mean you dress in white and blue?

No, but they see us arriving. At the check-point. You see, it’s all more complicated than the media show, not only now but historically. Palestine was never independent but part of Arabia, or part of the Ottoman Empire, or a British protectorate. That’s the right wing argument. But it’s true that there have always been Jews in modern Palestine, from the post-Christian Exodus to the refugees from Andalusia and Morocco after the Catholic reconquest, and the Inquisition. Then the pioneers in the 1880s, individuals not a movement, who never imagined a future state. Then the tsabars in the 1930s, secular, socialists, who started the kibbutzim, and off Dan goes into history. Moving lightly from binationalism inside one state to two separate states to total expulsion, though not necessarily in that order.

Until the Likud is formed.

For a long time the secular Jews from Europe have the upper hand, or at least there’s a fifty fifty alternation. Until Sharon, whose aggressivity causes the second Intifada, but with human bombs instead of stones, who promises security then destroys the very foundational idea of the State of Israel as a safe haven for persecuted Jews.

Even building a wall –

Called a fence –

Only so as not to recall Berlin, but recalling it just the same. Now it’s a partition.

They have a son Jesse doing his National Service who refuses to be sent to the Occupied Territories. This is allowed, and respected. And a seventeen-year-old daughter Abigail who wants to be literary but will also have to spend two years in the army. Just like the invalid’s own war at sixteen. Rebekah is born there, descended from early secular-socialist arrivals. Dan is an American immigrant of the 70s, now speaking perfect Hebrew.

The miracle. Produced by men and women not God. Recalling the visit to independent Ireland fifty years ago, full of Celtic twilight and romance but deeply disappointed to see the English pound still used, bacon and eggs still eaten and Erse unspoken. The Professor of Gaelic in Cork University has five students. Erse is obligatory for the Civil Service but never used. A few women on the West coast are paid to bring up their children in Erse. Today not even that. No point, they say, adding yet another language to international conferences. Or laziness? Is that how races disappear? Such thoughts silently descant the conversation.

In contrast, a parallel case, Lithuania. Six centuries part of Poland until 1918, all talking Polish. A few old men out of the backwoods, the frontier closed, strong will all round at all levels, the impossibility of buying even a stamp except in Lithuanian. The oldest Indo-European language. And twenty years later, when the frontier reopens, nobody speaks Polish. A man-made miracle. Like Hebrew.

And the Basques. Vasco de Charmer here. Basque is pre-Indo-European even. Linked to no other. But not in the way Finnish and Hungarian are non-Indo-European yet traceable in their interlinks and in movements of peoples. The origin of Basque may not be linguistically traceable because utterly remote. But DNA research has shown an impressive continuity beween today and the Homo Sapiens Cro-Magnon vestiges, over the entire Basque areas in France and Spain, more extended then. At least the results suggest more of a resistance to infiltration than an expansion. So the Basques represent the remains of a pre-Celtic hegemony of sorts, going back forty thousand years, even sixty if traced back to the Middle East, and more to the African Exodus, anyway long before the so-called barbarian invasions of Huns, the Visigothic, the Ostrogothic, Lombard, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, Viking conquests. For that matter even longer ago before the Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Minoan, Shang, Assyrian, Ch’in, Phoenician, Achaemenid, Greek, Olmec, Toltec, Mayan, Macedonian, Celtic, Carthaginian, Roman, Han, Aztec, Parthian, Sung, Yamato, Gupta, Sasanian, Islamic, Turkic, Tibetan, Byzantine, Mongol, Ming, Carolingian, T’ang, Temur-i-lang, Holy Roman as opposed to Unholy, Ottoman, Venetian, Inca, Egyptian, Malaccan, Uzbek, Habsburg, Moscovite, Manchu, Jürchen, Tokugawa, Russian, Safavid, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, British, Napoleonic, Belgian, French, German, Soviet, Japanese, American empires. All have crumbled, only the last lasts, and will crumble also. Meanwhile destroying all non-them.

The Basques are not empire-builders but hunter-gatherers cave-painters and early exchangers. The Basques are now split over two nations, like the Kurds over three. Such splits are politically stupid. Neither has merged or absorbed sufficiently to disappear, nominally. Like the Franks, the Lombards. Should the Basques not be granted their own state today? Without violence? The real European ancestors.

But then, returning from this mental threnody whose mere bits and pieces punctuate the conversation, isn’t that draining the past to whip up present violence? As Rebekah says of Israel. There’s now talk of identity again, so long after the non-belonging fashion of the 70s, but now rerooted.

Is identity acquired through language, through land, through length of time, through legend?

Plenty of individuals, especially of conquered nations, have two or three languages, two or three land loyalties, but these never have two religions, except concealed, and even that means learning about the other.

Perhaps. Though I read somewhere that Bangladeshis in England tend to become waftingly multi-faithed, but that’s probably exceptional. And religions used nationalistically become myths, while their institutions create rites. Sometimes there’s little left in any of them except feasts and forbidden foods.

I don’t know. It seems that religion as such, pure faith in something, is winning everywhere. Or perhaps what wins is astrology, sects, football and so on.

And in any case can the whole world attain bi-tri-lingualism and plural origins as a solution, if it is one? The solution won’t come from individual ex-patriots, especially if the ex- of expatriots is felt as loss, not merely away from. As for immigrants, theoretically bi-lingual as you point out, that has merely led to deeper nationalisms, and fundamentalism.

That leaves legend then. It’s hard to believe.

Well, there’s race.

And power.

Lord yes. Power manipulates all the previous.

Rebekah also has a disability, so that deep empathy flows and no O.P.ishness is possible. Her handicap is an equally local nervous ailment, therefore rich in mutual understanding: the eyelids closing uncontrollably at various times of the day so that she can’t see and has to lie down and take a pill. True, it’s less visible or easier to conceal than a cripple’s difficulties, or else she rules over it more efficiently. It’s also only one ailment, however difficult. And she has a gentle and attentive husband. She can still teach, with an assistant who records texts for her. She can still travel. And write. She is the author of the scholarly article called Ill Locutions in which one handicapped witness says that disability and dolor are not the main problems of the disabled, O.P.s are. But this has been too much intercommented by phone and e-mail to be discussed here. It surfs in the background, however, like the empires and lost languages. Are these two nervous diseases linked, legs or lids, as not from the central nervous system, that is, not the far more agonising Creutzfeldt-Jakob, but from the peripheral? Brains still eager? This is not discussed either.

Eager for what? For all that goes on slalom-like between intelligent people, all that is written, read, sung, pictured, thought. A discourse that zigzags like blood pressure, changing registers, personal one moment, metaphysical the next, philosophical, catty, humourous, technical on the disciplines shared, frivolous, rhetorical, witty, political, historical, personal again. Rather than just one register alone, me me me my husband my children my garden my dog. The scenic railway conversation is rare, so rare. As here, all day, above the thoughts leading off from Hebrews to Lithuanians to Basques to empires, thoughts that nevertheless orchestrate. As now. The topic shifts, from listening role to participant’s.

Then something happens. The discreetly lit restaurant garden darkens, the cicadas chatter hysterically in the pine-trees. Dan’s slow low voice murmurs, interrupted by Rebekah’s, clearer and better articulated, like a good teacher’s.

Oh don’t go into all that again, it’s not the way you say, as I demonstrated recently.

There seems to be some inner tension between them, unknown earlier. Due to her handicap? Dan gives in at once. Followed by an attempted neutralisation by the other disabled.

But couldn’t it just be a different –

Rebekah continues as if unhearing.

This astonishing new pattern recurs all evening. Two low voices, each regularly interrupted by the clearer one, perhaps excited by the national narrative, the male low voice, probably also interrupted, because unheard, and the female low voice, also unheard. The subject changes. The invalid’s voice is raised, as if remembering, once long ago, at the BBC, Speak up, you say you like this book. Then trying to sound like the Queen, or Vanessa Redgrave, and, just before the second career starts, as teacher, taking lessons in voice-production, out of the stomach not the chest, then through the head, the head is a resonance-box. On stage even a murmur should be heard in the gods. And as for teaching the voice must not be a murmur into the lecture notes, as with so many, but projected to the back of the room. Sound versus graphism, as ever. And now, a return to murmur. The conversation changes, at least in pattern:

And soon it’s not just the starting voice unheard and ignored but real interruptions, not occasional but regular, of both low voices. Heard this time, from conscious effort. All evening, rivalling or accompanying the cicadas in the pines. Until, uncontrollably,

Becky, please, stop interrupting me.

Silence. Quickly filled in, and not just by the cicadas. But with What was I saying? Black hole.

And this is the real shock. Not linguistic, political, religious, social, but personal again.

Half the night, insomniaqued by the heat.

For of course, we interrupt and are interrupted all the time, every day, every life. Even by ourselves. God, if he exists, must sigh at man’s incapacity to utter a simple prayer without a stray thought or, more usually, urgent demands intercepting the believed-in stream of divine love. Students interrupt teachers, and as for those idealised multi-register conversations they couldn’t fork off without interruptions. Interruptions express warmth enthusiasm excitement involvement. Provided it’s even. Are about people. Not Other but True. Over-regulated debates from school debating societies to parliaments thrive on boos and cheers.

Nevertheless there is a delicate balance to observe. Interruptions in imitation debates on radio and television produce not just animation but unhearing of two superimposed voices, which rapidly make the programme unlistenable unwatchable switchoffable, the way the aggressive interviewer who constantly overspeaks his guest as rapidly becomes unwatchable switchoffable. Animation and warmth can mean unhearing. Is that logical? Just as the long past of the Basques is not the same as the long past of that narrow strip of land, back to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Palestinians, the Hebrews, the Romans, the Christians, the Jews, the Arabs, the Turks, the British, the Palestinians, the Israelis.

Almost as bad as Europe.

Half the hot night into tired but lonely admission of wrong, followed the next morning by sincere apologies for the rebuke. No counter-apology for what led to it.

Yet that is one of the real differences between O.P. and T.F., the swift and mutual recognition of wrong. Generously accepted here, naturally, with interruptions defended as warmth and all the rest, already thought of in her favour. The more disabled taking the blame as usual for gaudeamus’ sake. And the rapid explanation too, in two parts, one the excuse handed over, the lowness of the voice, therefore unheard: the shame is not for the regal reprimand or not wholly, any more than the constant interruptions show true participation. The delicate line has been crossed.

What flaws the entire trivial occurrence is the throe thrown in: the memory loss of merely the previous moment.

Not just after a writhing walk to the bedroom for what is being fetched, not just the place of a word in a giant puzzle, or forgetting the name of a once idolised star, not reading rich books and forgetting them the following week or day, thus at last putting pleasure before use. But for the words uttered one second before.

Words. Words make the brain work. The brain makes words work. It is the brain it is the brain endures. Could it be Alzheimer’s as a seventh ailment uncommunicated?

The imagination, tortuous and madder-laned, of le malade not imaginaire, but imaginatif. In fact, these are common occurrences, in everyone, even the quiz candidate buzzing then losing the answer. Everyone says ‘What was I saying?’ There’s rarely an answer.

The second dinner is more careful all round, the more disabled sitting between them rather than facing them, and the electric flow fully recovered. They leave the next day, at eleven, to see Avignon before catching the night-plane from Marseille back to Jerusalem, and sleeping it all off the next day.

But why, Rebekah? In the worst heat of day. Wouldn’t it be wiser to snack and sieste here and leave for the airport when it’s cooler?

I want to see Avignon.

You won’t be able to park, it’s the Festival. Or allowed into the palace courtyard, turned into a theatre. And there are huge demos just now, by interim theatre people.

Well, from outside. And I want to see the Pont d’Avignon.

It’s broken.

General laughter. Of course that’s why they want to see it. A well bridge is banal. It’s just the opposite with people. Kwai! Kwhy?

Is the Pont d’Avignon worth ten hours of walking in this heat? L’on n’y danse même plus.

Then suddenly, it all drops into place. Or misplace?

For forty-eight hours Dan has been trying to ring a friend on a mobile lent by his daughter. In vain. Something wrong with the phone of course, though judging by his awkward search for knobs in the posh rented car it’s just remotely possible he doesn’t know he has to switch on the line first. Cellularly incorrect behaviour. Probably it’s not that, however, and this explanation is so obvious he is spared the counsel to avoid hurting his feelings. Said this morning:

Is it a friend? I’m not vain enough to think you’ve come all this way just for me. Rebekah once combined me with a conference.

Of course not, we chose to come just for you.

Forcefully, from Rebekah.

But, as also learnt in a different context this morning, the friend is surely a misunderstanding for their daughter Abigail, on a course north of Paris, chosen to avoid leaving her alone in dangerous Jerusalem. Perfectly natural. And Avignon is the first entrance to the motorway. Annoyed? No, paranoid.

Huge hugs.

And indeed the next day passes, letting them sleep it off in Jerusalem but ringing in the evening to find out about the journey. The machine as usual answers first in Hebrew then in English. Well, no doubt the plane is a night plane. Every day a call, at nine p.m. their time, at lunch-time, at eleven p.m. the next day, at seven-thirty a.m., to give every possibility. For a week since their flight. Clearly a weekly ticket. Huge relief that they did not come all this way just for one disabled person.

But why the elaborate lie? White lies shouldn’t need to be so laboured.

Why not? Elaborate form has little to do with content these days.

To spare the difficult cripple? Yet not to spare her two nights ago. Have they too become O.P.s? She, the author of Ill Locutions?

No. That cannot be. The whole visit so warmly afffectionate, even over an apology. Apart from one throe of shock, the memory loss. And now another throe, the lie.

No, their version is clearly true. The other is imagined by le malade imaginatif. And if it is the other that’s true it’s out of sincere, pitying kindness. And from living so long in terror-time in Jerusalem, where suffering is not just a trivial lie but thousands, millions of lies. Or the heat. They are still T.F., like all the others, from Germany, Italy, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Finland, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York. Too true to describe. And is it not regrettable to become her O.P.?

O.P. also means Old People. Over-sensitive People. Otiose, Obdurate, Obsolete People. Outrageous, obtuse, obstreprous, ostracised. All of which bring one Person into line: Oxhead Person, Oxymoronic Person. A mirror.

The day after the lapsed week, Rebekah rings. Thank you thank you for your hospitality. But I was very sad to see you so diminished.

Well, that’s life, first it increases then it diminishes.

Your cheerfulness is a delight. How are you?

Fine. How was your return trip?

Avignon was very moving. Yes, even the broken bridge. We slept it all off.

Good. I’ve been trying to ring you every day to find out. So glad it all went well.

Yes, well, every day I’ve been at the University, and Dan at the office.

Goodness, is the University still open at the end of July?

Exams. Meetings.

Yes. Of course. But I hope you can rest soon. It was very moving to see you both, thank you for coming.

Etc. etc. Let it go. Ill Locution. T.F. also means either believing their truth behind the apparent lie or forgiving the lie. Therefore the truth no longer matters. Still learning. Another looking-glass. Looking the other way.