A Book of Death and Fish (14 page)

Sexual repression gets that bit easier, with time, if the food is good and there’s plenty of exercise. And there’s a network – you’re on a train and a family sitting opposite recognises that the fish-pendant is a symbol. It was a gift, made in stainless steel by a craftsman cousin who was glad to see you at the right end of Kenneth Street. I suppose I was going along more now for the stories and for the sense of being in a congregation when that huge groundswell lifted to follow the melody offered by the precentor. I usually went to the Gaelic services. I’d picked up a bit but not enough to follow the sermons. That was maybe just as well. The rhythms of the whole thing swept you along. And then there was the warmth in the handshakes, as you went outside. The anticipation of the Sunday dinner, roast meat and gravy, almost a smell in the air already, like smoke over the town.

The olaid went now and again to her own church up the road, the moderate Church of Scotland. There were two of these to pick from. I gave that a try but it was just like I remembered. The olaid reminded me I used to kick my feet that much they won a dispensation for me to take in the gory volumes on the Bruces and Stewarts, Wallace and Montrose. The olman would go along too, to keep the family together and because the olaid wouldn’t trust him with the dinner and even himself didn’t have the nerve to go to the loom shed on the Sabbath. He’d hand out the pan-drops before the sermon.

Now these you could understand and they usually seemed quite sensible but they didn’t have the passion and the rhythms I was now experiencing in the Free Kirk Gaelic.

There were also letters to the
Gazette
, with names under them that you recognised. Sometimes an aspiring elder but nearly always from a male. Unless radical female evangelists from Lewis wrote under pen names, like George Eliot. The issues would alternate when the editor would come in to say that correspondence on the issue was closed for now. But they went in a cycle, with a few variations, as sure as a weaver’s pattern. The tyranny of Rome. The need for vigilance in protecting our youth from the appetites induced by the unscrupulous makers of immoral films. The condoning of homosexuality by those in Parliament with a duty to legislate for the safety of all. The demon drink, of course.

The best one though was the guy who blamed the Roman Catholic Church for the Vietnam War. See, we’re free-thinkers here. This guy was ahead of the game, dislodging the haloes from these Kennedys, of Irish background, lest we forget.

Once or twice another porter or a bored houseman doc, on the night shift, would ask me how I could go along to that church when these public statements were made. I’d just tell them I took the letters as entertainment, an extreme line to challenge and debate and most people on the pews would say the same.

There’s something about hospitals. People would just ask you what you really thought, on a regular bloody basis. That didn’t happen much at Uni. Take Transubstantiation.

I remember that one, watching the son of an ice-cream maker sip from the bottle of Bardolino along with the Spanish Basque priest, after I’d attended a Mass on the far, far end of Kenneth Street. I didn’t dare risk it in case I’d get a real thirst and seize hold of said bottle. I was getting used to the non-taste of water.

This is the crunch. These guys have to say they really believe the other wine, sipped in church, becomes blood and not just any blood. The wafer, no kidding, becomes flesh and not human flesh. There’s communion all right, even amongst the breakaways – the Free Presbyterians and now the breakaways from the breakaways – but none of these guys believe that the stuff has changed its physical character. Both wine and bread are symbols.

I could see that but I still couldn’t bring myself to do the preparation for taking the step forward to take said bread and wine even on the understanding that you weren’t expected to believe it had changed its physical nature.

Doubts are good shit sometimes. Believers can be dangerous. Political ones too. But what must it have been like for a guy who fought in the Spanish war, as a communist, and lived to see the tanks roll in to Prague and then see footage of poor Jan who set himself alight. At what point do you say, this is not what I signed up for?

I’ve got to tell you about a book. It’s called the
Kitáb-i-Aqdas
which is Arabic for ‘The Most Holy Book’. This is the Bahá’í book of laws for a new age. An early critic of the Faith translated it but that was from a hostile standpoint. I was at a seminar where a keen young devotee did some research by way of just asking an Arabic speaker, present in the room, to translate some passages. The legal code was pretty Islamic.

And sure enough, not long after, a Synopsis and Codification of the book of laws was published. But not a translation of the contents. Not yet the time, the introduction said. It did say that the penalties for certain crimes were listed. But it didn’t say what these penalties were. Now one of the attractive things had been this phrase – ‘Independent investigation of truth’. Maybe I’d failed to ask the right questions.

Someone else asked exactly what the penalties were.

They were meant for a future state of society, not applicable now.

But what were they? What about that slander about Bahá’ís believing in the death penalty? An eye for an eye. If a man should set fire to another he should be burned?

‘Penalties are indeed listed but it is clear that these are not for society as we know it now and in any case there is the possibility of mitigating such penalties to imprisonment for life.’

I was struggling.

How could you not be struggling? Knowing that one prescribed penalty for an arsonist was to burn him or her. When the guy whose seed is in you escaped from a disabled tank in the battle of El Alamein. So that was one World Religion firmly in touch.

Or was it? Next week,
The Two Minute Silence
printed a single letter on a single topic, from a main man in our Last Bastion of the Faithful, the official Free Church of Scotland, accept no substitute. It was on ‘The Majesty of Capital Punishment’. A later epistle under the same name likened predatory homosexuals to jackals. Appropriate biblical language, of course.

Which brings us to Palestine. Or rather the State of Israel which was then still occupying significant chunks of territories that their tanks had rolled through, during their own blitzkrieg in the Six-Day War. And perhaps it still is.

At the end of the year-out as a hospital porter I had plenty of dosh. I’d been depositing shift-disturbance allowance and I wasn’t drinking or smoking. Not even tobacco. It was the olaid who said I should get myself travelling. Take another year out before I got back to the course. Maybe take my fishing rod along with me. I didn’t take it on the first trip but it came along on the second.

There’s a couple of stories where some guy’s in the cack, usually for carrying out his duty as a Hebridean citizen by carrying out the act of poaching. The laird, being a sporting gent, gives him a chance. There’s three questions. They vary, story to story, island to island but one of them always is, ‘What am I worth?’

You know the answer? It’s ‘Twenty-nine pieces of silver. Because our Lord was sold for thirty and you can’t be worth more than that.’

I’ve heard that there’s a sect which places Judas Iscariot pretty high up the pecking order of apostles. He was the instrument by which we all gained the possibility of redemption. I don’t think he was the one Bob Marley was singing about, but.

I’ve a soft spot for Thomas. Remember he was the one who had to see the nail holes in the hand, to be convinced. Most guys in any of the churches I attended or in the mosque or shrine or maybe at the wailing wall, would say that it’s better to have faith. If you really must, then you can go and weigh up the evidence. Maybe I became addicted to documentary evidence at a very early age. My olman might have had something to do with it.

There was a church group organising a trip to the Holy Land. It was tempting. Most of the arrangements would be made and the itinerary rang with the resonance of The River of Jordan and The Red Sea, The Sinai Desert. Jerusalem and Bethlehem. There wasn’t a lot about the Gaza strip in The Brochure. I asked the olaid if she didn’t fancy that one herself. I could help with the spondulicks.

‘I dinna think so, son,’ she says. ‘Everybody on that bus’ll be trying to be good as gold. It’ll nae be a lot o fun.’

And Kirsty, back in Canada, was planning on a visit. What was winter to us was a mild break for her.

I signed up for a six-month spell as a volunteer on a kibbutz. It was not far from the seaport of Acre. I remembered the Bahá’í World Centre was close to there. There was a shrine in Haifa and a prison where the exiled leader had been held for many years.

And I didn’t know much about Judaism.

I suppose there was still a bit of an idea of the kibbutz as utopian community crofting. Oranges instead of neeps. (By the way you should try roasting peeled swede with Middle East spices and a dribble of salt and honey.)

I didn’t get much of a sense of oranges, far less milk and honey, when I got to the El Al office in London. These dames were scary. An up-against-the-wall search with what I assume, from my very limited experience of recent movies, was a sub-machine gun. I did not find it erotic, since you ask.

You might have heard that the flicks ceased to flicker in SY after they had the nerve to show
Jesus Christ Superstar
. The fact is that the joint was losing money. Bingo was out of the question and not even a succession of window cleaners’ confessions nor Swedish soft porn fantasia could bring in enough to cover the overheads, behind the Art Deco frontage. Pity it was boarded up because the building matched the transit shed on Number One pier. As long as it stood. It’s gone now because we’ve no shortage of period buildings worth listing, on the Island.

Still, I got the idea that the Israeli army was armed to the hilt and there was a ceasefire agreement that could make the Treaty of Versaille look like a model for a future Europe. Not much of a settlement. Sorry, bad choice of words there.

Which brings us to my jet-lagged arrival at a location which was a jolly minibus drive from the bus terminal at Haifa. I was not the only one on a quest for socialism in action. But I soon found there were other motives for signing up for a six a.m. start and porridge with warm black tea made from a stewed concentrate, served at eight.

There was a very good system to make sure that no-one was isolated. Each new volunteer was assigned to one with a few months’ experience and you both shared the same kibbutz parents. These were mentors.

First, I met Gabriele. I sensed right away I could do worse. She was pretty well my own height for a start, so it was a welcome change from stooping to get eye contact or to avoid intimidating some short guy. She was also wiry like myself but unbelievably fit. She’d go out running, in the cool of the evening, after a full day’s work in the fields. She kept her dark brown hair cropped. This must have kept her cool but it also kept her streamlined. She had a sharp nose and that’s where I got into trouble first. It was probably a mistake to say she reminded me of Concorde.

No amount of backtracking seemed to help. How it was a compliment – cordiality and co-operation and very elegant lines…I began to realise I was in the company of a very serious woman. I even learned to shut up for long enough for her to tell me why she was here. She was German. Her father was no Nazi – he had been a student of architecture, called up to take his share of sending high explosives, to destroy fine buildings and intimidate the Poles into a quick surrender. He had suffered, like the other survivors and that had not stopped when he reached Vienna, after deserting from the crumbling Eastern Front.

I saw how she sat at the feet of our kibbutz father. He was a very short man. I’d watched him lead work parties. I still couldn’t figure out the physics of his strength and endurance. OK, he was low to the ground but that didn’t explain the weight he could lift on his wiry frame. There was nothing to him but he was one intense wee bastard.

Gabriele asked him about his children. He lived with his wife in this tiny apartment. Their children would visit, like us, on different scheduled nights, to spend an evening.

‘They are not our children,’ he said. ‘They are the children of the kibbutz.’

This time, I knew to bite the tongue. But I ask you to remember I’m from Lewis and at that time a fairly frequent attender of Free Church services. I should know a fanatic when I hear one.

But I think I fell for Gabriele when I heard her ask him about the people who had been on this land before.

‘They made nothing of it. Look what we have done. One side of the fence is still desert.’

By their avocados ye shall know them. I thought it but I didn’t say it. It wouldn’t have helped.

Maybe he was the only one of his family who survived. Maybe the jewellery or savings, diminished by inflation, were just enough to send one child out, before that original blitzkrieg.

Who the hell am I to say that these guys can’t see history repeating itself? As the high explosives make rubble out of concrete and bones in a place called Gaza. But you find yourself looking for a wee Palestinian boy with a sling and a sure eye. Only there ain’t no evil giant to aim for. More conscripts, probably. Like the Yanks who did, or did not, return from Vietnam.

I did join the guilt-torn German volunteer on a few excursions, on our rare days off. We took a week, in the company of a few others, sharing fuel costs, to travel from hostel to hostel.

An Orthodox man took the time to explain the significance of one of the world’s iconic Walls. He wasn’t a guide and he wasn’t trying to convert men. He was showing kindness to a visitor. Gabriele had touched the one in Berlin but women were not permitted past a fence erected here. The man with the ringlets then bought us steaming and fragrant falafel so he could continue his story.

An Arab shop-owner in Jerusalem old city made us tea and went out the back door to fetch mint, leaving his select items of Bedouin jewellery scattered about the table in front of us. I did think of getting an example for my new German friend but I bought one for my mother instead. We got talking. He just shrugged when we said we were kibbutz volunteers. Well, now we were travelling we would see what we saw and make up our own minds.

He met us in the street that evening and guided me to a café I could trust. He had a word with a man and fixed a price for our group. I was brought into the kitchen. We could have this or that. I pointed here and there and he brought out heaped plates for us all. We savoured the marinated aubergine, the roasted artichoke, wrapped in vine leaves. The saffron rice, the small pieces of grilled lamb on skewers, the round bread from the clay oven.

We happened to be at a hostel on another kibbutz by Ein Gedi on a feast night. They called it the Sabbath though it wasn’t yet Sunday. There was chicken roasted with mild spices and there was white wine for those who wanted, produce of Israel.

Last day of freedom, I went with Gabriele to the memorial sites in the new Jerusalem which was not that shiny. We saw the stained glass windows, designed by Chagall. I was quite fit then but I was breathless. It was not enough to visit one place as a reminder. Even then I could tell there was something compulsive in the need to cross the threshold of every structure which linked to the Holocaust.