It is surprising how a word, a look, a letter can change one’s perception of the world, bring it tumultuously about one’s ears. Freda’s came crashing about her when she read the message on the mauve notepaper which arrived with Kitty’s postcard. After the first impact the note did not seem to convey anything, the letters of the alphabet, facing in all directions, refused to form themselves into meaningful words. ‘…your husband Harry…’ He was upstairs, in bed beneath the blue waffle-nylon eiderdown, waiting for his early morning tea. Sometimes he brought it up. They took it in turns. He was a good husband. Harry. ‘Your husband Harry’. Some said too good. It was a family joke. He treated Freda as if she were precious. She was. Or so she’d thought. They got on well. Not like Beatty and Leon, who had always confronted each other from opposite corners of the marital boxing ring – although Leon now was almost out of the count – nor Juda and Leonora, whose fragile marriage, as everyone knew, was stuck together by the delicate glue for appearances which it suited them both to keep up. It wasn’t like Kitty’s, who had been content all her life to play queen to Sydney’s king. Not like that at all. For Freda and Harry loved each other like twin souls, thought alike and, according to some, had over the years, like dogs and their owners, grown to look alike. They never tired of each other. Despite their childless state they had no need of other people. Their leisure time was spent on the golf course in the summer. They took golfing holidays to Scotland or to Spain. In the winter they played backgammon together or watched television, while Freda knitted socks and woolly hats for them both.
Kitty said it was a question of temperament and marvelled at how equable both of them were. ‘…is the father of my child’. ‘Grow fruitful and multiply’, the scriptures enjoined. Freda and Harry were unable to oblige. The early years of their marriage, the possible years, had been beset with alarms and excursions, all of them to no purpose. Later there had been doctors and hospitals and test upon test. The long road of exhaustive investigations, and their unpalatable outcome, had served only to bring Freda and Harry closer together, to be mother and father and family to each other by way of compensation for their infecundity. They managed to survive the catastrophe that had blighted both their lives – and which now was never spoken of – each in his own way. Harry devoted two evenings a week, and sometimes many hours at the weekends, to the synagogue youth club where he was father to many, and Freda had her imaginary family which never aged and which she could summon up at will. It had been enough. Or so she had thought. Until the mauve letter. In the existence of which, although she could feel the coarse notepaper between her fingers, Freda could not make herself believe. She did a quick rerun of her day, which, although she would never forget it, had hardly begun. She had woken while beyond the blue flowered curtains, the garden and the golf course in its frosty corset, the sky was still dark. She loved that first waking moment, the sleepy warmth and contentment of it, secure in her bed and Harry’s arms, where she always spent her night. They opened their eyes together. They always did. As if the harmony which they enjoyed in the day continued, of its own momentum, through the night.
“Your turn to get the tea,” Freda said.
“No yours!”
It was their morning joke which re-affirmed their love for each other and indicated that all was right with their world.
Reluctantly, as always on the winter mornings although the house was not cold, Freda had got out of bed and Harry, cherishing the limbo moments between the waking and the tea, had shut his eyes. Freda’s dressing-gown was blue. It matched the sprigged sheets and the quilt and was her favourite colour. Beatty went for dark red, the colour of the curtains in her sitting-room; her spinster sister Mirrie, yellow, in which she had decorated both the rooms of her homely flat; and Kitty for shades of gold, antique in the carpet and shaded velvet in what had once been Sydney’s chair.
In the bathroom Freda had washed at the blue basin, examining her face in the mirror above it for wrinkles, and to see if it was a good day for her looks. Not that it worried her. Freda was not vain. Her confrontation with her mirrored self was more of an assessment, really, a daily inventory such as she carried out on the bottles in the fridge to see if it was necessary to leave a note for the milkman. She had put a quick brush through her hair and gone down to fill the kettle. So far, so good. Better even. The family, who came unbidden almost now, the children whose voices rebounded from the blue and white tiles and whose crumbs littered the mosaic vinyl floor, had given her no trouble. While she put the cups and saucers on the tray, warmed the teapot, spooned in the tea, the water had boiled. It was at that moment that the post had come. She remembered it exactly because the clatter of the letter-box had coincided with the click of the switch on the kettle as it popped automatically out. Such minor details would be remembered. Kitty’s postcard, which had transported Freda for a few moments to the sunshine of Israel – she had played golf with Harry at Caesarea – then the mauve roughness of the unfamiliar envelope she had so innocently, so ingenuously opened. The nine words, like a bulldozer, had scooped up the happy years of her life with Harry and deposited them, like rubble, on the tip of her sterility.
When the strength which had left her returned to her limbs, she had gone back into the kitchen and taken up the tea. As usual. Everything must be as usual. It was important. That much Freda knew. She had trodden the stairs, holding up the blue dressing-gown with one hand, put the tray down in the darkened bedroom. Switched on the lamp, at which Harry had opened his eyes, as he always did, and smiled at her, the first smile of the day.
“Was that the postman?”
Freda carried his cup with its two sugars carefully, as if her life depended upon her not spilling it, to the little table with Harry’s watch and the small change he had taken from his pocket the night before.
“Any post?”
Freda put the cup down and reached into the pocket of her dressing-gown, her fingers identifying the coarse notepaper, making their own selection. They extracted the glossy reproduction of the newly built hotel against the ancient mountains. Freda did not look at Harry.
“From Kitty,” she said. “A postcard from Eilat!”
Kitty could not pretend, even to herself, that she did not know about the cable car to which one had to entrust oneself in order to ascend the citadel that was Masada. The only alternative was the narrow curves of the twisting ‘snake path’, tackled by the young with their back-packs before the heat of the day. It was the last excursion. Tomorrow she would be going home. She had bought her presents. A Star of David for Debbie, and for Lisa a tee shirt ‘I love Eilat’: for the baby, Mathew, a leather camel with sad eyes and a tiny velvet kippah, embroidered with silver thread, that would cover the fine red head when on his father’s knee he followed the Grace after Meals; a challah cloth for Carol, which she would put over the Sabbath bread; olive-wood boxes, for their cuff-links, for Alec and Josh; for Sarah, a pair of filigree ear-rings and for Rachel, a colourful Yemeni blouse. For her sisters-in-law, Freda and Mirrie and Beatty, there were ashtrays and vases of hand-painted glass; key-rings and bookmarks – in which wild flowers were preserved – for her friends at the Day Centre and the ladies with whom she played bridge. For Juda’s wife, Kitty took nothing, she never did. Leonora’s Hyde Park flat, with its priceless antiques, was no place for souvenirs from foreign parts with a value that was sentimental rather than commercial.
The only problem that remained was Addie Jacobs. Kitty had seen nothing that would compensate for the missed holiday, that would off-set the broken ankle. When she got back from Masada she would look once again in the hotel boutique. She did not want to buy Addie’s present at the airport. Other than a stone, which she had picked up in the Negev, and another from the beach at Eilat, she had nothing for herself. She would have her memories – these days it was what she lived on – and there were plenty of them, colourful and varied. The Pillars of Solomon and of Amram; the ‘world of silence’ with its rainbow fishes, its fine sand and lacy rock patterns, that she had viewed from the glass-bottomed boat; the Taba beach; Coral Island; the kibbutz of Yotvata, and her journey back to nature as it was in biblical times among the wildlife of Hai-Bar.
Masada was the highlight. Kitty had been looking forward to it. It was one of the trips she had always meant to take with Sydney on their visits to Israel but they had never managed it. From the moment when, as a child, she had first heard the story of the zealots and their tragic end, from the lips of her Hebrew teacher, it had intrigued her. She knew that in recent years the site had been excavated by volunteers from all over the world, that the archeological digs had unearthed miles of walls and thousands of coins dating from the time of the revolt. But it was not the finds that fascinated her. It was the stand of the few against the many, of the weak against the strong; the last fight of those who gave their lives for political, religious and spiritual freedom – choosing death rather than submission – that gave the name of the lonely and impregnable fortress in the Judean desert its magic. Kitty had been up since dawn and had got used to the early starts. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if once back home she set her alarm for five o’clock, out of habit, although the highlight of her day would be neither the wonders of the deep nor the romance of a citadel, but a journey to the shoe repairers or a stint in the kitchens of the Day Centre.
It was Maurice – who for the first time sat next to her on the seat in Avi’s bus – who had prepared her for the cable car (although Kitty had already been aware that she must ride in it when she booked the tour), Maurice who had brought her fear of heights and of falling into the open and had encouraged her to confront them.
He was a strange man. After the excursion to the ill-fated Canyon of the Inscriptions, and the drive down to Sharm-El-Sheikh, Kitty had looked for him among those who had boarded the bus on the other trips but he had not appeared. She had been aware of an initial feeling of disappointment, which the new sights and fresh discoveries had soon dispelled. Yesterday, after a half-day tour, she had spent the afternoon, her last at leisure, in a deckchair. Dozing, and meditating on the holiday which she had enjoyed more than she had ever hoped she would, and her family which she was looking forward to seeing, she was aware of, but did not listen to, the familiar orchestra of noises from the pool. She wondered if Josh would be at the airport to meet her, whether Sarah had put any weekend food in her flat – it would not, of course, have entered Rachel’s head – whether Carol and Alec would bring her grandchildren, whom she had missed, from Godalming on Sunday afternoon to visit her.
She must have fallen asleep in the sun. She was woken by the public address system with the adenoidal consonants of its announcer. She recalled thinking how disruptive the calls were, how they disturbed the vacational calm, when her attention was suddenly aroused. At first she thought that she had been mistaken. Her mind, affected by the sun, was playing her tricks. She opened her eyes and waited. There was nothing to be heard but the screams of the splashing children from the shallow end of the pool. She must, she thought, have been dreaming, and lay back once more in the chair. She had barely closed her eyes when there was a crackle from the amplifier and a loud and unmistakable request: “Mrs Kitty Shelton to the telephone please…”
It was she who was being summoned, beyond any possible doubt. She took the call at the bar. The pool-man handed her the receiver.
“Kitty…?”
She recognised the Central European accent beneath its New York overlay.
“This is Maurice…”
He wanted to take her for dinner to Yoske’s Fish Bar in the town.
“If bone china is made from ground bones,” Sarah said, “why are we allowed to eat from it?”
She was calling from the kitchen and Josh, at the end of his day, was scarcely in the door. He stood still for a moment, key in hand. It was not the question which stopped him – there were many of them these days – most of which he was unable to answer. At unexpected moments, when they were driving home from a theatre, drifting into sleep at night, sometimes when they were making love, Sarah would ask him ‘who wrote the Talmud?’ or ‘are we allowed to leave our organs for medical research?’ It was not the questions which stopped him in his tracks. It was her use of the first person plural. Already Sarah considered herself Jewish, at one with his mother and his aunts, Beatty and Freda and Mirrie, and his sisters, Rachel and Carol; already her knowledge, gleaned from Mrs Halberstadt on Wednesdays, from her own searching and her voracious reading on the subject, went deeper and was wider than theirs. When Sarah did something she did it properly, a characteristic she had inherited from her father, who by following his own precepts had risen high in the diplomatic service. It was this attribute that had sustained her in her advertising work, which earned her a salary which almost equalled Josh’s. Sarah understood the ideological bric-à-brac of ‘things,’ as she understood people and their need for them. Her talents lay in transforming thought into visual images and latent dreams into the manifest. Given a household cleanser, a package holiday or a potato crisp, Sarah, with her alchemy, her book of spells, could make them indispensable.
At one time she had greeted Josh with the current worry about a product which was temporarily defeating her; how to market a chocolate biscuit or whether she could get away with the assertion that a washing machine had a ‘pretty face’. She would spend all evening staring at a perfume bottle or pondering how to make an orange identify in the public mind with a tablet of Vitamin C. These days it was her affair with Judaism that preoccupied her. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Although the fundamental beliefs in his religious heritage, instilled by Sydney, were firm, Josh had drifted away, together with most of his contemporaries, from the practice of his religion. It had been more a case of spiritual and ritual back-sliding than a conscious decision, although sometimes – when he thought of the fate of the Jews in Germany or their present plight in Soviet Russia – he questioned the value of Jewish distinctiveness. He had not forced Sarah to become Jewish, although their children would not be unless she did. He had not asked her to. She had simply announced her decision on their delayed honeymoon in Arizona. As the sun rose over the Grand Canyon, picking out like some unseen conductor, in pink and green and ochre, the creviced contours of the rocks, Sarah turned to him.
“I would like to become Jewish,” she said.
It was her wedding present to him.
She had asked for his help. Josh was no scholar as his father had been, but he had done his best, pointing her in the right direction. He introduced her to Reform Judaism, which took the attitude that modern conditions rendered the observance of many of the ancient laws impracticable, but to his surprise Sarah said that what the movement had to offer differed little from what could be found in certain forms of Christianity. She preferred the Orthodox way of life, the timeless authority of Rabbininc Judaism, harnessed at one end to the revelation of the Torah to Moses, and at the other to the arrival, one day, of the Messiah when there would be peace on earth. Josh had thought that the strictly decorous Reform services, where families prayed together, would appeal to her; but Sarah enjoyed the informal atmosphere of the Orthodox synagogue – where the Ladies sat in a special gallery – with its talking and gesticulating, its comings and goings, more reminiscent of the market place where public readings of the Torah had originally been held, than a house of God. Rabbi Magnus’ synagogue, which she had attended with Kitty, made Sarah feel, she said, at home. In its confines, she was conscious of a spiritual sense of reciprocity with God and found the relaxed atmosphere conducive to spontaneous prayer.
Her workmates were intrigued by her decision. Across a table on which an aerosol can of lavender-scented polish awaited the ballyhoo which would hopefully make it indispensable in a million homes, or before the blowup of a car destined to make the paterfamilias dissatisfied with his own, Sarah spoke of Judaism’s concern with the education of the child, respect for the aged, the comforting of the sick, of the stressed need for constant improvements in human relationships to colleagues who thought it had all to do with not eating pork.
Josh was learning too: that a mans’ word must be his bond (in particular in the case of a promise made to the poor), that to shame a person in public was one of the gravest offences, according to the Talmud. The dietary restrictions themselves – although it was many years since he had observed them – acquired new dimensions when Sarah explained that they not only imposed restraint but taught moral freedom; that the exercise of control over what went into the mouth promoted a positive spiritual attitude towards life and a guard over what came out of it. ‘Who is strong? He who subdues desires.’
At the end of a demanding day bent over his dental chair, Josh’s desire was now for Sarah. He could not answer her shouted question about the bone china. She would have to take it to Rabbi Magnus or Mrs Halberstadt. As he closed the front door he became aware of a strange smell which seemed to have possessed the flat.
In the kitchen Sarah was peering into a saucepan. Josh embraced her then followed her gaze. The aroma was coming from a greyish, watery mass.
“What on earth’s that?” He kissed Sarah’s hair, her ear.
“For your mother,” Sarah said. “Gefülte fish. She’s coming home tomorrow.”
Josh looked at what should have been, according to his book, feathery, carrot topped balls of specific dimensions, and wondered if Sarah had forgotten some vital ingredient. He took her in his arms and turned off the gas beneath the mess in the saucepan.
It was not like his mother made.