A Fool's Alphabet (15 page)

Pietro had doubted all the words he had heard in Israel because he did not know enough to check them, but he could not doubt the evidence of this picture.

He parted company with Harry and the guide, and went to visit the Garden Tomb, in the spot selected by General Gordon because the Holy Sepulchre was ‘too Arab'. Aware of everything that argued against it, Pietro still privately hoped that this might be the place; that if he sat quietly enough and watched, something might reveal itself to him. He encountered a problem. It was something he could not quite express, but it meant that he came away like most tourists and pilgrims, feeling uneasy. What was said to have happened, resurrection, seemed too important to have happened here, in this particular place. He tried to work out why. Was it again some kind of snobbery? Was it the inscription – ‘He is not here.
He is risen' – which instead of sounding numinous, seemed bathetic? Was it the ripe scepticism of the local people? Certainly the proximity of the East Jerusalem bus station at the foot of the slope was unfortunate. But then Christ had been born in a manger. Did these difficult surroundings in fact not constitute exactly the kind of paradoxical test of faith He would have wanted? The Son of God, born in a barn with animals; buried among trinkets and diesel fumes . . . It was not really that either. It was a problem of believing that an event of such universal magnitude could have had such a specific location – this stone, this blade of grass, these atoms. He wondered whether that made him an atheist; if not here, then where? It was more complicated than that too, he told himself, though he could no longer find the words to frame the thought.

He did, however, have his camera. With this he took several photographs of Arab children playing in the bus station with the skull-shaped hill behind them.

Harry had been to the Wailing Wall with Daoud, and they reunited at lunchtime. Daoud sat eating falafel and drinking Fanta. He had brought a friend with him he thought Harry and Pietro ought to meet, a dark-skinned, smiling man who told them his parents had come from Morocco. They were observant Jews and forceful in their Zionist beliefs, but he was not so happy.

They ordered beer and talked about the climate in Tel Aviv compared to Jerusalem, then about whether military conscription made young people more sexually active. The small talk lasted about two minutes before, as Pietro had expected, Daoud's friend began to define himself and his beliefs. Though not religious like his parents, he was a keen Zionist and believer in Mr Begin. His hatred was not for the Palestinians or even the Jordanians, but for the effete Ashkenazi Jews who toyed with the idea of giving back parts of the West Bank to the Arabs, who despised and abused Sephardic people like himself, employing them only in menial jobs the Arabs could not be made to take on.

Pietro had begun to feel light-headed on his way back from the Garden Tomb and now felt a thin sweat breaking out on his back. He imagined he had caught some chill or flu. He watched the dark-skinned, earnest face arguing, but because he felt slightly removed from the world around him found it difficult to take in more than occasional phrases. This was a new development as far as he was concerned – intra-Zionist bitterness – and he wanted to understand it. But the phrases that stuck in his mind seemed too colourful or exaggerated to be worth trusting. ‘Our parents imported to be slaves . . . like blacks in Mississippi or South Africa . . . I would be arrested as a suspicious character if I showed up where they live . . . What chance for my children if they let the Arabs have their own land? We will become the slaves again, even people like me who've pulled ourselves up.'

He was more difficult to follow than some of the people they had met. He did not use the smooth English of political debate that was polished by practice and repetition; but he was quite as angry, just as certain of his right to survival on his own terms and no one else's. In childhood Pietro had liked to choose a side to support in any debate, even if it turned out to be the ‘wrong' one – the Roundheads, the Southern States, Sonny Liston, even, when he was older, George McGovern. When a combination of experience and laziness showed him there were seldom easy solutions, he relied on balance as a substitute for commitment.

He began to be depressed in Israel because there seemed to be no ground available for compromise, no logical way in which all the parties could be even partially right. So whose experience counted for most?

In the schedule of visits Harry had arranged before leaving London there was a stop for tea at the home of a woman he had met when he was on his kibbutz. She welcomed them to her small apartment in a modern block on the edge of Jerusalem and gave them tea and cake. When Pietro thanked her for her hospitality as they were leaving she turned his
thanks abruptly away. Life was too urgent for such matters as thanks, she implied; there was no time for anything but the truth and the question of survival.

As they walked back to the hotel, Pietro said to Harry, ‘Don't tell me; I don't understand. You're the only person who hasn't said that to me yet.'

‘You don't understand,' said Harry.

‘Of course I don't. And sometimes I feel my attempts to understand just make people more annoyed. My ignorance is like a sore to them. My questions are distrusted as though they're not only ignorant but in some odd way prejudiced as well.'

Harry laughed.

‘And do you understand?' said Pietro.

‘Good God, no.'

It is the evening. It is their last night and they are back again with David and Sarah, Harry's friends. This time they are in their flat, and a couple of other guests are expected.

Pietro is sweating under his shirt. He can feel a film crawling over his back, like traces of fixer clinging to a photographic print. His head feels hot and stuffed up. The sensation is not altogether unpleasant; he also feels insulated and secure. The problem is that his brain feels as clogged as his sinuses; his thoughts are as impaired as his breathing. He drinks beer and takes some nuts from a little dish on the coffee table.

David and Sarah's son, a small boy called Ben, totters round the room. He has black curly hair and a slightly hectoring manner when he calls out to his parents. Pietro thinks briefly about the boy's upbringing. No doubts for him about where to live. His parents have made the decision. This land is natural to him. Soon he will be in the army, preparing to fight for it.

The doorbell rings and Pietro feels a start of disappointment, for which he guiltily corrects himself, to see that the guest is Shimon, the man whose political certainties he had
found close to remorseless on their second night in Jerusalem.

Shimon sits next to him on the 1950s sofa, drinking canned orangeade. Pietro talks to him about pictures, and Shimon lends half his attention, with a patient, quizzical air, as though to a child's presentation before the main event.

The doorbell rings again and Sarah bustles out to answer it on stocky denimed legs, her hips brushing the armchair in which Harry is sitting with a vacant expression while Ben loudly explains to him some aspect of his school.

She returns with a woman who looks quite out of place.

‘This is Martha, an old friend of mine from school.'

Martha is dressed in loose-fitting beige wool. Her chestnut-coloured hair is caught up at the back and falls in artless but rather exact waves to her shoulders. Her wide-set eyes are of a bright, candid blue enhanced by discreet make-up.

David pads over, pushes his grey-framed spectacles up towards his tangle of curly hair ‘Would you like a drink?' he says. ‘We have beer, orange juice, wine . . . some whisky.'

Harry has lost the vacant expression. He is unconsciously smoothing down his hair at the back as he begins to tell the story of their visit to the Jewish settlement. ‘. . . on the very edge of enemy territory, armed to the teeth, and he wants to know who sets the crosswords!'

His body is facing Shimon, but his eyes are looking at Martha. She laughs in a carefree manner. It is a sound they have heard from no one else for three days.

‘. . . in Boston,' she is saying, in reply to some query. ‘I knew Sarah in school. We were like best friends for a while.' Her voice has a slight interrogative lilt, as though she is seeking confirmation from Shimon, or Pietro, or Harry for these episodes in her past. ‘We were like best friends for a while? Then I met this guy?'

She has an uninhibited laugh, which she tries to restrain, apparently from a sense of good manners. When she moves her hands to take something from her handbag or to replace her drink on the table, there is a certainty and elegance in her action.

Pietro wonders if he is going to make it through the evening. When he stands up to go to the dinner table his stomach feels weak. Hummus appears on his plate, with olives and cucumber salad. He is not sure what he is hearing, or what he is seeing. Why is this woman who seems to have stepped out of a Park Avenue elevator sitting next to this bearded man with his thick rubber-soled shoes?

Can this man really, already, be saying this: ‘I don't mind the Arabs. Let them stay and live here with us if they want to. But they must understand their place. Most of them do. Deep down, they are not really a military people. They know this land is ours. Even their own books tell them that. If they want to stay as hewers of wood and drawers of water, then we should allow them to. The danger is among people who want to deal with them, to treat with them and give them land.'

Pietro shakes his head to clear it. Shimon is leaning forward at the table, stroking his beard. ‘If some deal is offered we have to say no. We have to start a war if necessary so the weak-minded among us don't fall for that trick.'

Harry is countering with his experience at the Wailing Wall. He has been approached by a Hassidic man wanting him to go to a school to examine the Talmud so he can learn about his true roots. ‘This
yeshiva
business . . . it sounded appalling. He said if I went along he'd give me a free bed for as long as I was in Jerusalem. Frankly I'd rather share with Pietro. You get used to habits after a time.'

The food comes. Martha explains that she has long promised to visit Sarah. She is on a week's vacation. She hopes to go to Eilat for some swimming and sunbathing. She is pleased to have visited Jerusalem but she wants to relax.

Harry is inventing new holiday plans as he goes along. ‘No, no,' he says, ‘we're very flexible on time. We were thinking of spending a few days at a resort ourselves.'

‘Sure,' says Pietro, feeling the dated airline ticket for the next day in his pocket.

David is not tired tonight. At home and in control, he is
forceful in his views. ‘It seems to me that the settlers and people like them are in for a surprise. Old-fashioned people like me are not going to sit back. They despise us because they think we will give in, but they don't realise that we have a different idea of Zionism. It is an older one. It is we who were at the sharp end of the movement until they started running around with their machine guns. We are not giving in to anyone – least of all to them. Their attitude has made it impossible to have a proper debate, they have reduced it to a slanging match. But they will find that when it comes to words we are better prepared than they are. That's one war we won't flinch from.'

Pietro is now finding it difficult to concentrate at all. Sarah interrupts her husband. Ben comes in wearing pyjamas. He cannot sleep. Shimon lays down his knife and fork to make his point more clearly to Martha, who has accidentally strayed into his path, like a car pulling timidly off the hard shoulder of the motorway into the line of a truck at full speed. Harry is trying to deflect him with humorous asides.

As the meal wears on, Pietro comes close to delirium. But the voice he hears and the words he remembers are those of David. He is almost shouting to make himself heard. ‘I find myself summoned to show my solidarity ten times a day. After every newscast. Of course I give my loyalty. But when you are part of history at each moment, when is there time to sit on your own and talk to your child? When will it be possible for us ever again to put the simple human feelings of love and family back where they ought to be – at the centre of the world?'

Through disagreement from his wife and derision from Shimon, he persists, flushed and loud: ‘We can't live in a place outside time, in a way prescribed thousands of years ago. The diaspora taught us many things. Our encounter with Europe has enriched us, not weakened us. We can never shed what we learned of humanism in Europe and nor should we want to. I'm proud of what we have assimilated and it is my right to retain that heritage, even within this old-fashioned idea of
a nation state. Our battle now is not to keep everyone at a political fever pitch all the time, but to depoliticise people. One day I will sit by the well with my little son and he will tell me not that he loves his country, but that he loves his mother or that he loves a girl from the next town. And his own feelings and sufferings, his individual life will be the one important thing. That is the aim of good art, I think, and that should be the aim of our lives too. When Mandelstam was exiled and dying at the ends of the earth he read out his
poems
!'

Pietro feels like offering hallucinatory applause. Shimon laughs harshly. The evening dissolves for Pietro into unconnected fragments.

‘The greatest threat to Israel is not from the Arabs but from the disagreements between the Jews themselves . . .'

‘Why don't we get a bus down together? Which hotel are you staying in?'

‘They came here after the Six Day War and the boy was born during Sadat's visit . . .'

‘At the Yad Veshem memorial they will have a darkened hall lit by candles in which a tape-recorded voice will read out on an eternal loop the names of the one and a half million children who were slaughtered by the Nazis.'

That night Pietro sweated out his chill. He removed the soaked sheets from his bed at four in the morning, found a T-shirt and clean, dry blankets in the cupboard. In the morning he awoke clear-headed and purged. He went for a walk while Harry slept in.