MOST OF THE work at the stables was done by Haia’s daughter, Yael. One day, he sat for a long time over Eliachim’s manuscript, unseeing and with his head in his hands. Haia quietly put a mug of tea in front of him.
“Difficult?” she said, looking at him contemplatively, her head tilted to one side.
“Mmn. Well, not really. Just a bit hard to concentrate. Was wondering about my daughter, in fact. How she is. A bit vulnerable, you see.”
Haia nodded. “They can be such a worry.” She sat quietly, drinking her coffee.
“You haven’t seen our riding school, have you,” she said after a while. “I think you’d find it interesting. And it would be a break from this. You need a break. I’ll get Yael to show you round.”
Yael came to collect him. The riding school was a short distance from the house; she motioned to him to get in her car, a dusty jeep with a large dent in the side.
She was reserved and quiet. He wondered if she resented having to show him round. She was tall and slim, dressed in a long-sleeved cream top and black leggings under a loose black skirt. Her hair was concealed by a startlingly colorful headscarf tied in a tight knot on the nape of her neck.
She opened the glove compartment and he saw a pistol lying there. She noticed him do a double-take.
“I live in bandit country,” she said with a laugh.
“Doesn’t it worry you?” he said.
“Not as much as it probably worries you,” she answered.
Was she spoiling for a fight? She had only just met him.
“Why should it worry me?”
“Because you’re British, and the British hate us.”
He decided it was time to be diplomatic.
“I expect it’s a very spiritual experience for you, to live there.”
She twisted her face into something between a smile and a grimace.
“Cheap housing. That’s the real reason.”
He couldn’t stop himself.
“Because it was land that belonged to someone else?”
Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, although her voice remained calm.
“Only in the sense that it belonged for a while to squatters, or thieves. My town is as legal as Tel Aviv, or London for that matter.”
She paused for a few seconds.
“How long has your family been in Britain?”
“My family? Er…hundred years or so. Less, some of them.”
“My town, Neve Ya’acov, was built in 1924 when the Arabs sold the Jews the land. Sold it to them. You know: contracts, money. Just like you buy a house from someone in London. But here we Jews were actually coming back. We’d lived there when it was Judea. No Arabs then. No Islam. Not even invented. Then there were Arab pogroms, and then Jordan stole it from us in ’47 and drove us out. So, just who do you think has the greater right to live in their house—you or me?”
She looked at him coolly. His mind raced. Her question was ridiculous. How could there possibly be any comparison? The response to her was so obvious. He just couldn’t be bothered to think of it now. Why should he?
The jeep pulled into the stables. Russell climbed down, irritated. He could do without such lectures from right-wing zealots. Presumably her riding school would be full of kids from such families.
He stepped carefully over piles of manure and breathed in the acrid smells of hay and animal. Yael paused to caress and croon over the horses leaning their heads over their stall doors, and to talk to young members of staff who were busy saddling and unsaddling on the cobbled yard. Russell jumped as the horses snorted and tossed their manes. Nervously, he gave them a wide berth.
His eyes widened as they approached the field where instructors were taking the young riders through their paces. About half of these children were Arab.
A woman sat on a bench with a small boy, around eight or nine years old at a guess. The woman was young. She wore tight white jeans and pink stilettos; her eyes were dramatically outlined in thick black liner and mascara. Her hair was concealed beneath a pale blue Muslim scarf which reached below her shoulders. She looked bored. The child hung his head and scuffed his shoes in the dirt. She spoke to him sharply. He didn’t respond but hung his head even lower. Exasperated, she sighed and started scrolling on her cellphone.
Russell and Yael stood by the fence on the perimeter of the field. Now Russell could see that all around parents were standing or sitting on benches watching their children at their riding lesson. Several parents were dark-skinned.
“Many Arab children come here?” he asked in surprise.
“Sure,” she said. “They come from all over; Israeli Arabs from east Jerusalem, Arabs from Judea and Samaria, even from Gaza. They don’t have this kind of riding therapy where they are. And there are a lot of very traumatized kids out there, Israeli and Arab. Bombs, terrorism, war—this all has a terrible effect on children wherever they come from. So the Arab kids ride here side by side with Jewish kids. The horses don’t discriminate.”
She smiled impishly, and suddenly her long, severe face was transformed.
A couple of children on horseback were being led by instructors slowly round the field. Another horse stood quietly while an instructor talked insistently to the child sitting in the saddle. Even at a distance, Russell could see that the child, a girl, was rigid with fear. After a while she started to wail, with a high-pitched cry of terror. A man sprang up by the fence, presumably her father, and danced from foot to foot in agitation as the child continued to wail. The instructor carried the child down off the horse and brought her over to her father. An intense conversation then took place between the three of them.
“Have all these children been traumatized by what’s going on here?” he asked.
“Not at all. Some of them have other problems in their lives, much more mundane but no less damaging, the usual stuff like abusive parents or family breakdown, even things like dyslexia or eating disorders. It’s all helped by learning to ride.”
“How so?” He was intrigued.
“All kinds of ways. It makes the child feel kind of powerful, in control. Sometimes that’s the first time in their life that the kid has felt that. To master a big animal, to get it to do what you want, that’s no small matter. It makes them more sensitive; they get to know real fast that hurting an animal won’t get them very far; they might even get a kicking. If they want the horse to do something, they learn they have to be gentle and attentive to how the horse feels. For kids who think violence is how things get done, that’s a revelation. And we teach them to groom the horses, to look after them. To care for another living being. Again, sometimes that’s a first for them.”
She really cares, he thought. Despite himself, he was impressed.
The wailing child was now back on her horse. She was still wailing, but now she was being led slowly round the field. They stood silent, watching. Gradually, she quietened. Her father, hunched tensely on a bench, buried his face in his hands.
“Terror, being terrified, is crippling, a real disease,” said Yael thoughtfully.
He stared at the horses processing slowly in front of them. He tried to imagine himself on the back of one of them.
He wanted suddenly to confide in her.
“You don’t have to live in a war-zone to feel it,” he said.
She looked at him sharply.
“But you help spread it,” she snapped.
“What? Me? How?”
He felt physically winded.
“You think we don’t know here what people like you say about us, how you think? Here we’re trying to defend ourselves against madmen trying all the time to kill us, living just down the road from us, teaching their children to hate us, people like these…”—she gestured around the stables—“…knowing that in Britain, in Europe, people like you are blaming us for trying to stay alive. It’s as if you really do want us dead.”
“Oh come on…”
“What, you don’t think they don’t play up to your own prejudices? You think they don’t notice that the more they kill us the more you hate us? You really don’t think that, when they hear the BBC parrot their lies, when they hear you provide a megaphone for their hatred and hysteria, they don’t feel validated when they slit our throats?”
“Actually, mainly there’s just indifference,” he said uncomfortably. “Most people in Britain never even think about it. Or else they’re just sick and tired of hearing about it.”
“Really. You think we’re also not tired of this war to the death, the hatred and the fictions that get us murdered?”
“Why is this all so black and white? Are you really so whiter-than-white? Maybe some of the violence is because of things Israel has done. Maybe the Palestinians feel you’re as aggressive towards them as you feel they’re aggressive towards you.”
“My father died,” she said quietly, “because people like you filled the minds of his killers with the lie that we are responsible for their misery. They’ve made themselves victims of their own aggression; and so have you.”
He was trembling all over. Of course she was wrong. So very, very wrong.
That night, he dreamed about Alice. She was smiling at him and saying something he couldn’t hear. He woke up feeling an acute sense of dread, and wondered why.
* * *
Eliachim’s story (5)
In this most terrible year 4950, in the month of Nisan as we prepared for the great memorial to our deliverance from Egypt, there came an evil beyond compare in the cursed city of York.
When news of the massacres of our holy martyrs reached the barons who were in great indebtedness to my master Josce, they resolved with great wickedness to obliterate their debts and the lenders along with them, and all their families and community alongside. Richard Malebisse and his squires all did conspire most foully to annihilate those whose only crime was to have lent them sums of money that they did require and to worship the one true God.
One night when there was fire in the city by an unknown hand and all was confusion, some of this most cursed company broke into the house of Josce’s associate Benedict of York, who had died of his wounds after the massacre following the coronation of the King. They most cruelly slaughtered his widow and all his household, seized all his property and set fire to the building.
When news of this abominable deed reached my master Josce, he was filled with foreboding. He gathered his household and sent urgent word to others of our community to make all haste with him to the castle.
The constable of the castle, William de Badlesmere, had often sheltered Jews from the mob on the word of the sheriff of the city, who was entrusted by the King to ensure that no harm should befall those who furnished so much of the finances of the realm.
Outside we heard the foul shrieks and oaths and the bloodthirsty stamping of the mob and smelt the burning of timber, and our hearts failed us. We put our holy books and our possessions into bundles and made haste to the castle along with Josce and his wife and his sons.
Now the constable protected the hundreds of souls who had put themselves at his mercy, placing them in the tower of the castle on the top of the mound so that they might remain safe in a very strong place.
But the Lord’s face remained turned away from us. A few nights later a great calamity arose when the uncircumcised, enraged by the flight of Josce and his followers, cruelly slew all those left in Josce’s house and set it on fire with all still left within it.
A great and terrible shout went up from the mob when this grand house, which was like a small palace, was consumed by this conflagration. As the flames leapt into the sky, so the greed and bloodlust of the mob took added fire from the sparks. Waving their clubs and their swords and their spears and roaring for vengeance for the crucified one, they ran to the house of every Jew and pulled the inhabitants from their beds and with their knives to their throats told them to submit to the water of idolatry or else be put to death.
Some were baptized into that blasphemous faith but others bravely stayed true to the one God and many deeds of heroism by our blessed martyrs were recorded. They stayed steadfast and refused to embrace the one who was crucified, for which they were hewn into pieces and even buried alive.
The next day the constable left the castle on business, we knew not where. Then the people started saying to one another that he had gone to betray us, that he would deliver us to the mob so they could steal all our possessions.
The sheriff gave orders to recapture the castle from the people of the covenant who were sheltering there. But when word went out that the castle was barricaded, the mob seized their clubs and their spears and their knives and surrounded the castle in a frenzy for blood, throwing rocks and fiery bolts at the walls of the tower and bringing a monstrous beam of timber shod at the end with iron to batter down the gates.
A shout went up for the priests to join the holy work against the children of Satan, and they flocked like the crows of the air with their vestments flapping and with their blasphemous books held on high as they pronounced their evil decrees against the followers of the one true God, roaring with a sound that would freeze the dead: “Destroy the enemies of Christ!” and stirring the blood of the mob into an ever greater frenzy of murderous rage.
When the children of the covenant saw the savage multitude beyond the castle walls, they rent their garments and wept and cried out to heaven that they had been forsaken. Others fell on their faces and prayed, and said to one another: “The will of God is being done. Let us be strong and accept our fate bravely and embrace it with joy as the proof of our faith.”
Upon these words the sons of Josce and other young men spoke hotly to our elders thus: “What, are we men of upright bearing or are we as low as the worms? Should we meekly surrender to those who deny the oneness of God? Are we to pass into the next world on our knees or with our heads held high?”
Now there rose men of high standing in our community of souls. With great bitterness they spoke against our hot-blooded youth, charging that they had caused the unbelievers to rise up against us through their insults and recklessness. The salvation of our people could never lie in war-like acts upon our tormentors. Such deeds would only serve to enrage them still further. We should rather be silent and show neither our hand nor our faces to our besiegers but remain out of sight. This would perplex our assailants and after a period their rage would die down like a fire that had consumed all its wood.
To which some of our number murmured assent, while others cried out that it was through just such accommodation by our great ones that the people of the Lord had revealed their weakness to the bloodthirsty; and still others were amazed and knew not what to think, so great was their terror and confusion.
But I was already suffering the torment of the damned. For was it not I who had brought these monstrous acts upon the heads of my people? Had I not brought down the wrath of heaven upon all of us, so great had been my sin?
* * *