Rock Me Gently (19 page)

I sobbed until I was empty of tears. Finally I wiped my streaming face with my pillowcase and returned the photograph to its place beneath my mattress. It was then that I saw it. Frances’s poem for me. Lying back on my bed, I began to read it as I waited for the girls to return. I now realised that we found in each other the solace and security we could not find anywhere else. And as ardently as I desired to leave the convent before something worse could happen to me, I knew I could not. It was my duty to stay, to become part of the awful machinery. The girls trusted one another and we knew there would never be an act of betrayal among us. We had nothing else - no money, no toys, no holidays. Nothing, except each other. And maybe that was all that mattered.

Chapter
11

Miriam and I sat on her back steps, drinking coffee. The Carmel Hills were faint purple mounds in the distance, hazy in the sunset. The drone of bees stirred the air in her garden.

‘I envy you living here.’ I looked about me. ‘It seems so peaceful.’

Her face creased as she smiled at me. ‘It is now, but life in Israel is far from enviable. Remember, it hasn’t always been peaceful and probably won’t be again in the future. Israel knows more about war than it knows about peace.’

‘Why do you think that?’

She shrugged her small shoulders. ‘There is something in Jews that arouses an insanity in other people.’ Her expression turned quizzical, her brow lined as if she were trying to solve a puzzle in her head. ‘The German cruelty towards the Jews was a singular kind of madness - all we wanted was to live a normal life without fear and persecution. Build a better future for ourselves.’

I nodded, and we sat in silence for some time. I thought about persecution, and the orphanage, and sipped at my coffee. I wanted to tell Miriam everything. I remained silent, staring at the changing light on the hills.

My kibbutz mother and I had traded the outlines of our lives by now, but I had only given the convent the scantest of mentions - an explanation to fill in the years eight through twelve. I couldn’t do more, not yet. It would break me down, and I wasn’t ready to deal with it. For the time being, the rising pressure within me seemed eased by talking of safer things: stories about the boarding school I had been sent to after the convent, stories of Nana and Pop, of my dad.

As the twilight deepened, the moon threw light on the clusters of houses scattered throughout the kibbutz.

‘Houses without people,’ said Miriam.

‘Where are the people?’

‘You’re the people, the new ones coming here. But the trouble is, most of you don’t want to stay on the kibbutz. You want your frivolities, your buses and your department stores and your pavement cafes. Not you, I mean. I’m talking about the others, the
sabonim.’

I took a slow sip of coffee.
‘Sabonim?’

‘The word means soap.’ She traced a circle on the table with her finger, as if rummaging through some special jar full of memones.

‘That’s what the kibbutzniks always call the new arrivals. Like the soap the Germans made out of the ones they gassed. What can you do but make a joke? Listen, I was in Auschwitz, I know it was no joke. But we didn’t all die under torture. And if we went on to live, they thought we were soap anyway.’

I held my coffee cup in both hands, looking at her.

She smiled sadly at me. ‘Not much of a joke, I’m afraid. The important thing about the Jewish people is that we are here, alive, vital, together, expressing ourselves on the ruins of our near-destruction, and that is everything.’

‘You’re in a good mood today,’ observed Cydney. ‘I’d say you look like an English sunbeam. I mean it as a compliment.’

Cydney’s capacity to forget petty arguments and live in the moment made her generous. She was all-forgiving and did not sulk, and in the instant that she crossed the dining hall to sit next to me for breakfast, it was as if there had never been any trouble between us.

I grinned at her. ‘It’s my birthday.’

‘Wow! Happy birthday.’ She shoved her spectacles back up her nose and smiled. ‘You must like getting older, do you?’

I laughed as I picked up my fork. All around us was clatter and conversation as the kibbutz ate. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘You spend a lot of time with your kibbutz mother. What do you guys talk about?’

I looked up, a piece of melon speared on my fork. ‘Anything. I don’t know. Why?’

She buttered some toast. ‘Just curious. Everyone always talks about her, you know. She’s like a legend here. What kind a things?’

‘Whatever we feel like. She’s an easy person to talk to. Once in a while she gives me a little lecture -’ I leant back in my chair, and made a poor attempt to imitate Miriam’s German accent. We both, laughed at my failure.

‘She sounds terrific,’ Cydney said. ‘Hey, I’d like to join you on your next visit, maybe. What do you think?’

I shrugged. ‘Sure. Of course you can.’

But I did not really intend to invite her. I had tried not to mention my visits to Miriam to anyone. I was possessive of her and didn’t want to waste a moment of my time with her. After all, she was opening doors for me. Doors of perception that I would have hammered at for years before they moved an inch.

Helping Miriam sort books in the library one afternoon, she said, ‘So tell me, what brought you to Israel? I don’t think you’ve ever told me.’

The gramophone was playing Mozart, but so softly that the quiet parts were inaudible and the loud parts were a crackling buzz.

‘No big mystery. I spent a good part of my childhood in that crummy orphanage. I used to dream of the world outside full of people and adventure, and I swore to see it all some day.’

‘Oh? Well, you’d best get out there and see a bit of Israel, then. Your time here is over soon, isn’t it?’

The thought sent a pang of apprehension through me. ‘I’ve been asked by my room-mate to join her and two boys on a trip to Jerusalem, but I’d rather stay here.’ Especially since one of the boys was Rick, who had been blatantly flirting with me for weeks now. Much too dangerous to go away anywhere with him.

Miriam looked amazed. ‘But why? Take my advice: don’t let your life go by without you. None of us gets any other life than this one, and it’s a shame if you don’t make it happen the way you want it to.’

‘Yes.’ I turned a book over in my hands.
Pride and Prejudice.
‘But life’s not always that easy, is it?’

She shook her head with a quick grimace. ‘It’s not supposed to be easy. It’s life.’

‘No, what I mean is that sometimes there’s not much we can do to stop things from getting away from us.’ I groped for the words to explain myself. ‘It’s like an avalanche. Once events start rolling, once you make your first mistake or even just your first real decision, there’s not much that you can do after that. Everything is out of your control.’

I was gripping the book too tightly. I turned away, shoving it in the shelf.

Miriam smiled softly, touched my arm. ‘Judith, listen to me. I understand you. I understand what your life has been about. I know how it feels to grow up alone, without love and hope and all the things that give life meaning. I know how much that can damage you. I know how it can turn the whole concept of trust into the most terrifying thing in the world.’

My throat tightened as I looked at her. Her blue eyes were soft and kind. ‘Maybe it’s time we opened that parcel, Judith, what do you think? We can look at those pictures together. What we talk about is entirely up to you. I might ask you to explain something that I’m not clear about, but that’s all. Basically, you decide. Is that all right?’

I nodded my head.

‘It’s entirely up to you.’

The weight of the past rose up to stifle me, and my first instinct was to run away again. But we had come too far for that, Miriam and 1. For a moment I saw all of my roads converging inevitably to this one, leaving me no choice. I needed to do this. I needed to open up.

I took a deep breath and began to talk.

It occurred to me as I spoke how long I had carried the unshared weight of my feelings about the past: for years my waking and many of my sleeping hours had been filled with that sullen, secret ache. I had already told Miriam the bare facts of Mum leaving me at the convent; now the shadow of the emotions I had experienced passed gravely over my consciousness. The anguish, the sense of desertion, the fierce camaraderie among the girls. The terror that came with the nuns’ footsteps.

‘There were - well, we were afraid of almost all of the nuns, but two of them in particular - Sister Mary and Sister Columba ‘

As I started to find the words for my feelings about the two monumental nuns, with their white-wimpled black uniforms, I felt nearly overwhelmed. My lungs dilated and sank as if I was inhaling a warm moist thin air, and I smelt again the warm moist thin air that hung in the bath at the convent above the sluggish pea-soup-coloured water. I saw myself rising in the cold morning and filing down with the others to early Mass and trying vainly to mouth my prayers against the fainting sickness of my stomach.

I spoke impatiently, gesturing with my hands as if I was catching the dark details that flocked about me. I could feel a flush rising in my neck, creeping over my jaw as I struggled to tell Miriam how Sister Mary had broken my nose, how we had all been viciously beaten at one time or another for the flimsiest of reasons. In the most intense moments of the story I still watched her eyes to see if she was listening, and I saw that her head did not move, that her eyes did not leave me, and I felt the warmth of her interest.

Finally I came to the scene I revisited in my dreams and stopped. The slippery, treacherous rocks. The raging sea. The line of children.

‘The thing is -’ I could not go on.

‘What is it?’ asked Miriam, watching my face.

I had never put into words, aloud, just exactly what the thing was. I was dizzy with the fear of it, the palms of my hands suddenly sweaty. I steadied myself with a hand against the table, feeling the wood silky under my palm.

‘I had a friend.’ The words seemed large and foreign in my mouth.

Miriam nodded.

‘And the thing is, she ...’

I had always tried to push away the memory of how Frances died. That way I could pretend to believe it had nothing to do with me.

‘She died and it was my fault.’ I took a big quavery breath. A wad of woolliness filled my throat, stopping any more words getting out.

‘Yes?’ Miriam did not seem disgusted or accusing. She did not even seem especially surprised. ‘It’s all right. Go on,’ she said, as if it were normal, a child being responsible for another child’s death. The expression on her face was not terribly sorry or offering her deepest sympathy, it was just a matter of geometry: an equal and opposite force.

It was what a person needed when they could not balance themselves any more. But I could not go there. I swallowed, and shook my head. Miriam looked at me for a long moment, and then squeezed my hand.

I was shocked when she said, ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘What do you mean?’

She caught herself and patted my hand. ‘Oh, I believe your story - but what I can scarcely believe are the similarities in both our stories.’

It turned out we had a similar experience of growing up - no affection, constant fear, physical abuse - a fundamental slavery. We went back and forth, telling stories. It became easier the more I talked, until finally I realised that I did not mind the force of her enquiries.

She sat in one of her overstuffed library chairs, the late afternoon sun slicing across her freckled face. ‘The nuns’ habit puts me in mind of a uniform, you know. A uniform often suggests community, order, identity, with the right to have total power over others, to treat people as absolutely inferior and to assert the righteousness of violence.’

The convent had indeed similarities to a concentration camp. You could not show your suffering for fear that worse could happen. A horror that had to be endured, there being no alternative.

Miriam and I talked and talked, and at last my tears came. They fell easily, no longer hindered by shame. Miriam put a hand on my shoulder. A simple gesture of affection and support. We remained like that for some minutes. Someone then banged at her door, demanding to be admitted. I wiped my eyes and left her to her visitor.

I sat awake on the compound veranda for a long time that night, smoking a cigarette, a habit I had picked up from Cydney, and staring up into the endless Israeli night. The stars blazed overhead in an icy spill as the warm wind teased my hair. Keeping my mind carefully blank, I allowed memories of Nazareth House to unroll inside my eyelids like a film.

I remembered one night when the girls were talking together in small groups in the boot-room about two nuns. Let’s call them Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy.

One girl with little red rabbit eyes said: ‘They were caught last night.’

‘Who was caught?’

‘Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy.’

‘Who caught them?’

‘The Mother Superior. A senior girl told me.’

‘But why have they both been sent away?’ I asked. ‘C’mon, tell us.’

‘I think I know why,’ Janet said. ‘I bet it’s because they nicked the money from the missions box.’

‘Who nicked it?’

‘I dunno. Maybe all the nuns went shares in it.’

‘But that was stealing. How could they have done that?’

‘A fat lot you know about it,’ Ruth said. ‘I bet I really know why Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy have scarpered.’

‘Oh, go on, Ruth,’ everyone said. ‘Go on, tell us. We won’t split on you to the seniors.’

A ring of girls craned their necks forward to hear. A small girl with olive skin and curly dark hair thrust her face into the circle of girls, breathlessly glancing around at them as if trying to catch each flying phrase in her open mouth. Ruth raised her head to listen for an approaching nun. Then, smiling uneasily, she said, ‘You know the communion wine they keep in the vestry?’

‘Yes,’ replied a hushed chorus of voices in unison.

‘Well, I bet Sister Thomas and Sister Lucy were caught swigging it together. And that’s why they’ve scarpered.’

Everyone groaned in disbelief, but the girl with the red rabbit eyes who had spoken first said: ‘Yes, that’s what I heard too from a senior girl. Those nuns stole wine from the vestry.’

The girls became quiet. I thought of the silent vestry where I had stood on the day of my First Communion and even though it had been summer, icy cross-draughts whipped my legs and my toes threatened to cramp in the cold. Although it wasn’t the church, you still weren’t allowed to speak in the vestry. That’s where the communion wine was kept, together with the priest’s vestments hung neatly on a hanger. I had waited in there, dressed in my communion veil and dress, before our procession to the altar. The white-smocked altar boy looking like the Beano’s Lord Snooty with his pale doll’s face and sleek combed hair, had swung the censer by the chain to keep the coals alight. He swung it gently to and fro against Ruth’s bottom, but stopped when she threatened to punch him. At the altar I had raised my eyes heavenwards, opened my mouth and put out my tongue a little, and Father Holland had bent down to give me the holy communion; I smelt a slight sour stink on his breath and it had made me feel a bit sick.