The El Al lunch had not been bad. A roll of smoked salmon – flanked by a lettuce curl, a translucent slice of lemon and three black olives – braised beef in its gravy, with french beans and tiny roast potatoes, and a glazed pineapple tart beneath a whorl of parev cream. The rectangular plastic sections, topped by their transparent plastic hats, in which it was served, gave it an air of unreality, of playing at food, unless it was the flavour which seemed to have been frozen and sterilised out of it. While not exactly a gastronomic experience the meal passed the time. Kitty extracted a knife, fork and spoon from their slim paper envelope and made the food last as long as possible – savouring each morsel as though her life depended on its despatch – in an effort to allay her anxiety as she thought what might have been provided with a little more imagination. Handing the carnage of the tray to the stewardess, who came smilingly to collect it, she brushed the crumbs from her skirt, folded her table away and wondered, since the diversion of the meal was over, how she would pass the remainder of the flight.
Need overcoming fear, she excused herself to the woman beside her and waited while she collected up handbag, newspapers and pad of airmail notepaper, and stood up to let her out. Making her way through the crowded aisle to the toilets, which were at the rear of the cabin, Kitty glanced at the faces in the rows on either side of the plane. Sleeping – in attitudes of abandon – reading, lost in thought, playing board games, idly returning her glance, each countenance was familiar, yet she knew no one. She recognised a Polish peasant, a renowned violinist, her grandfather; the haunted eyes of a concentration camp inmate, Carol at four reading a comic, the infant Josh in a baby sucking at its bottle. In a head of dark hair there was Rebecca and Miriam; in a brow the prophet Isaiah; her late Aunt Esther; Addie’s nephew – recently barmitzvah; a Jewish comedian; a well-known industrialist; they were all there. With a muttered apology she eased herself past the broad back of a man in a homburg. He appeared to be praying but when she’d squeezed by she saw that he was punching a pocket calculator. The plane lurched suddenly, seeming to sink and taking her heart with it. Clutching the nearest seat, Kitty wondered, was she the only one bothered by the tenuous drone of the engines, by the alienation of the situation, high above the clouds in the slim cigar of metal at the mercy of rods and pinions, human calculation and aeronautics? Were there others cold with fear and tense with apprehension who would say a prayer when the undercarriage touched the ground? She knew the statistics. Josh had told her. One thousand deaths, in thirty fatal crashes, for the 750,000,000 passengers carried by the airlines each year. You were more at risk, Josh told her, each time you crossed the road. Kitty had her doubts. As she joined the queue beyond the galley, the sun disappeared leaving a thin red line along the horizon.
When she came out of the toilet the windows were dark. In London they would be lighting the Chanukkah candles. With no Sydney to perform the ceremony for her, no family party, she was glad to be away. Alec, in Godalming, would be kindling the first light for the children; Josh would be explaining the festival to Sarah, who last year had had a Christmas tree; Rachel and Patrick would not even know.
Back in the non-smoking section Kitty fastened her seat belt. The sign was not on but she felt safer with the webbing drawn tightly across her lap. She smiled her thanks to the woman on the aisle side of her whose writing pad was now covered with spidery Hebrew script which crossed the page from right to left.
“I hate flying,” Kitty announced to her own surprise. Since Sydney had died she had been diffident about addressing strangers, feeling that she was imposing, thrusting the burden of her widowhood peremptorily upon others.
The woman shrugged, in an age old gesture. She was sun-tanned, small and dark, wearing a jersey suit.
“If it creshes, it creshes, I’m not so important.”
Kitty recognised the lilt of the Israeli accent, the philosophical approach of its people. She wished she could be as dispassionate but everything seemed to worry her.
“You come from Tel Aviv?” Kitty asked.
“Jerusalem. I’ve been to visit my brother in Hendon…”
“We used to live in Hendon.”
“Mayflower Gardens.”
“Mayflower Gardens!” Kitty said. “We were at 26. The house with the monkey-puzzle tree.” She remembered that it was no longer there. A thought struck her. “You’re not Archie Bensons’ sister-in-law?”
“Arieh Ben Zion!” The woman laughed, “I’m Ruhama.”
“It’s a small world,” Kitty said. “Archie used to walk to synagogue with my late husband. Wasn’t it you…?”
Ruhama helped her. “My husband, Moshe, was killed in the Mitla Pass in the sixty-seven war. He was a tank commander. Now they’re giving back the Sinai.” Her voice was bitter.
“I’m going to Sharm-El-Sheikh,” Kitty said. The tour had been booked to the southern-most point of that ‘great and terrible wilderness’ which intruded itself into the head of the Red Sea.
“Ofira!” Ruhuma said, giving the reef bound bay its Hebrew name.
For Kitty it would be a day out along the coast of the triangle of land that lay barrenly, with its mountains and its desert, between Africa and Asia. For Ruhama there was blood on the sand.
“My oldest son, Baruch, was shot down in the Yom Kippur war,” Ruhama said.
Kitty thought of Josh, safe at home.
“…my baby, Amos, is doing his army service.”
Kitty was silent. In the diaspora they collected money for the defence of Israel. She tramped the streets for Jewish Women’s Week, for their personal contribution. It was blood from stones. In the cold and in the wet she went from house to house knocking on doors. It was a thankless task. Sometimes, in the bigger houses, the au pair was instructed to tell her that no one was at home when upstairs she distinctly saw the curtains move. She wrote receipts, awkwardly, on windy doorsteps, for derisory sums when inside there were hothouse flowers and luscious smells of exotic meals wafted from the kitchens. Frequently there were excuses. She’d heard them all. ‘I haven’t been to the bank.’ ‘I’ve run out of cheques.’ ‘I’m late for an appointment.’ She’d offer to call back but it was never convenient. Kitty didn’t suppose it had been very convenient for Moshe Ben Zion to give his life defending the Mitla Pass, nor for his son Baruch to die at the controls of his Skyhawk. At the more humble homes she often fared better. Women surrounded by mouths to feed would reach deep into their purses, and pensioners, living on their own, were proud to contribute, secure in the fact that they would not be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice like Ruhama Ben Zion.
“Arieh – Archie – sent my ticket,” Ruhama said. “It was his ruby wedding. They gave me a week off from my job. I work in the supermarket six days a week, eight in the morning until seven at night. In the evenings I teach at an Ulpan.”
The supermarket all day and English to foreigners at night! With the absurdly high rate of inflation in Israel Kitty knew that Ruhama’s situation was not unusual. She felt ashamed of her soft life in unthreatened territory.
“It was wonderful,” Ruhama said, speaking of the ruby wedding. “All the family. Do you have a family?”
Kitty took out the photographs she carried in her handbag.
“This is my daughter, Carol, her husband Alec, and the children; my daughter Rachel – she’s getting married in the summer – and my son Josh…”
Kitty looked at Ruhama but she did not flinch.
“…with my daughter-in-law, Sarah. She’s converting to Judaism.”
Sarah’s decision had been announced to Kitty on her birthday. She could not have had a better present. Much as she loved Sarah there was always at the back of her mind the displeasing thought that were she and Josh to have children they would not be Jewish. The Shelton name would, in Sydney’s eyes, have been disgraced.
The catalyst for the decisive step that Sarah was taking had been her love for Josh. Although apparently not committed as his father had been, Sarah had come to realise that – despite his denials – Josh and his religious heritage were one; that his Judaism went deeper than the practices he did not observe; that its tenets were a component of his corpuscles, its precepts embodied in his bones. It was a part of Josh she had no access to. His mother, Rachel and Carol, his uncles and his aunts, had more right of entry to the core of his being than she. If Sarah was motivated by jealousy it did not invalidate her decision for which there was another consideration. By marrying Josh she had overnight become allied to Judaism although she had not embraced it. She was asked questions as if she had joined the rabbinate instead of just getting married to Josh. ‘Why do they consider themselves the Chosen People?’ and ‘Why do they always wear little hats?’ She felt constrained to answer the queries, which until she had consulted Josh, left her floundering for replies. In marrying him, she had, she discovered, become one of ‘them’ without becoming one of them. She wanted to be able to answer the questions, to be accepted by Carol and Rachel and by Aunty Beatty and Uncle Juda, who looked at her as if she was from another planet. She was. She knew nothing of Sabbaths that began on Friday, Festivals threaded like golden markers through the year, laws and customs whose origins and minutiae fascinated her. She wanted to understand where Josh came from, what was his creed. “I would like to become Jewish,” she said. The resolution was her own. It echoed the prayer of the most famous proselyte of all. ‘Where you go, I will go…’ She wanted to share the fortunes of the Jewish people the darkness as well as the bright joys of their triumphs. ‘Your people will be my people…’ She would identify with national aspirations. ‘Your God will be my God.’ She was prepared to serve as a witness to Israel’s religious commitment. ‘…where you die, I will die, and there shall I be buried.’ She would defend Jewish beliefs and practices even to the grave. She went weekly for instruction to a Mrs Halberstadt but it was Kitty who took her by the hand.
In Kitty’s kitchen Sarah was initiated into the mysteries of kashrut – forbidding the eating of certain foods, including animals that had neither cloven hooves nor chewed the cud – the prohibition against the blood which carried the life of the animal, and the injunction that the killing must be done in the most humane way. The laws, Kitty told her, had a deep moral significance which raised the trivialities of the daily round into a continuous act of worship. They could no longer be defended on grounds of hygiene, but must be regarded as a kind of spiritual calorie count, intended to prevent obesity of the spirit and insensitivity of the soul. They refined the character, raised man from the beast, and as such were perennially valid.
Sarah watched while Kitty soaked her meat for half an hour in water, drained it for a further hour sprinkled with coarse salt, on a special board. She listened while Kitty explained that the prohibition concerning the mixing of meat, or meat products, with dairy foods extended to cooking utensils and even the plates on which the meals were served. In Kitty’s kitchen there were cutlery, china and saucepans for the ‘meat’ dishes and some, in different designs, for the ‘milk’. There were two specially designated washing-up bowls, with their own cloths and brushes, and tea-towels in distinctive colours. By her side in the kitchen, watching her prepare for the festivals, listening, while Kitty explained that each commandment must be carried out as beautifully as possible according to one’s means, Sarah discovered that around her was a world of warmth, affection and stability and that it was just such a home that she wanted to build together with Josh.
She did not ask Kitty for the formula for she realised there was none to give. The haven that Kitty had created with Sydney, and now strove to perpetuate on her own, was based on a practical code embracing both the highest level of human love and the most humble domestic chore – to which Sarah did not have the key. That some of the practices were irksome there was no doubt. Josh found them so. Looking beyond them, Sarah was aware that they represented a shared sense of purpose in what seemed the most commonplace things. The symbols were intangible. The rewards, in her mother-in-law’s face, in her life, were visible. Kitty knew that her replies, in response to Sarah’s increasing flood of questions, were inadequate. Sydney would have known the answers but he would not have spoken them. Not to Sarah.
The mayhem in the cabin presaged the end of the journey, which was confirmed by the captain, together with the information that the temperature in Tel Aviv was some eighteen degrees higher than it had been in London. After Kitty’s internal flight south it would be higher still. A steward, picking his way through aisles awash with debris, handed out landing cards. Kitty took one. He did not give one to Ruhama who was going home. Looking at it – name, address, date of birth, place of birth, destination – she realised that there was no helpmeet, no Sydney, beside her and that she must fill it in. Sydney had always taken it upon himself to do these tasks, just as she had automatically carried out such chores as were necessary in the home.
Kitty knew that today things were arranged differently. Carol and Alec in Godalming shared the responsibilities of Peartree Cottage, the children, and their lives together equally. She could not imagine Sydney changing nappies and washing dishes as Alec did, and she had not herself adjusted to the endless filling in of forms with which her daily life seemed now to be strewn. Sometimes, in the case of shares and their allotment, or declarations for the tax inspector, they appeared to be couched in a language with which she was not familiar. She was doing her best to master it but found it hard, as beginnings always seemed to be. She discovered, in small things of which she knew nothing – insurance policies and paperwork relating to the car – how Sydney had sheltered and protected her and that every day there were new skills she must learn.
The pressure on her ears announced the plane’s descent. A screaming baby demanded attention, and a sickening and prolonged crunch directly beneath her directed her thoughts once more to her morality, although she knew it was the landing gear. The other passengers, trussed into their rows like battery chickens, seemed unperturbed. Kitty, stiff with fear, could not understand it. She picked up the magazine from the fish-net pocket attached to the seat in front of her and with clammy hands and fingers which were not steady, flicked through its pages. The maps of the world crisscrossed by the thin red lines of the air routes, diminished her; Bordeaux and Bucharest, Addis Ababa and Alice Springs; she had seen so little of it, knew even less, felt her own insignificance in the pale blue expanse of the named and numerous seas. In less than five minutes, if – God forbid, which she doubted – the plane did not crash with herself blown to smithereens, she would be in Israel which boasted four of them. Next to her, her neighbour was chattering about the whereabouts of her passport, speculating as to whether there would be anyone at the airport to meet her. Kitty did not answer. She did not feel like talking. As if her words would fall like stones upon the fuselage causing it to shatter. She gripped the arms of her seat with knuckles that were white as the engines whined, and the magazine fell from her lap to the floor. She heard the sound of prayers and added her own silent one. Inadvertently glancing towards the window, she saw the white sands of the seashore looming towards her at an unnatural angle, the skyline of Tel Aviv beneath her gaze. She was convinced, as they descended, rapidly now, over the grey-green water, that any minute she would be with Sydney, all her troubles, all her problems would be over, and wondered would her children mourn. There was a jolt. She had been right. The plane glided swiftly, smoothly along the runway fighting a battle of opposing forces with the airbrakes. She dared to turn her head, amazed that round her there were smiling faces and that she was alive. Together with others, rhythmically, spontaneously, she started to clap.