Requiem (3 page)

He slipped
the note into a wallet full of other papers. Opening this chest was a dangerous
business; when the lid was lifted, the evening could be swallowed up with the
contents spread across the floor as he emptied a bottle of Scotch.

Here's
one piece of moon rock, one that holds him in a trance-like gaze for some
minutes: a photograph, taken on a bracing east-coast beach. As Tom holds it before
him the slender white border of the photograph extends outwards, dissolves and
the two subjects break their pose. One of the figures is Katie, a pretty woman
but with her mouth set hard against some bitterness. The other person is Tom.
It is a recent photograph. The hulk of a wreck lies in the background of the
shot. They have taken a
lg
weekend - Tom's idea - at
an east-coast resort to see if they can repair the damage.

Tom
collects his camera from, and thanks, the passing stranger who agreed to take a
photograph of the pair. They turn away and walk up the beach towards the wreck,
crunching pebbles underfoot as they go. Both the sea and the sky have turned
the colour of cold steel. It is well out of season, and a squall at sea has
churned up the waves, sending a stiff wind at right angles to the beach. They
have to turn their collars up to stop the wind from whipping sand in their
faces.

'I just hope it's not too late,' she says.

He rounds on
her, scattering shingle, holding on to the lapels of her coat. 'It was a
mistake. We both know it. It can be put right.'

'I
hope you're right, Tom,' she says, the wind lashing her blond fringe across her
eyes. 'Because I think the time has gone.' Then she turns and walks up the
beach, saying something about getting her things ready to go, but he doesn't
hear her properly because the wind blows the words from her lips like flecks of
foam from the waves.

He
walks on up the beach a little further, to where the wreck lies beached and on
its side, doomed a century ago on a spit of sand. Tom sits down on the rotting
hulk. A solitary grey-backed gull bobbing on the grey ocean under the grey sky
cries, 'Hark!' before flying off. A wave pounds at the shingle beach.

The
scene dissolves, reconstituting itself in its original deception, a holidaying
twosome, fixed for ever by celluloid and photo chemicals, the picture in Tom's
hand.

Moon rock.

The ottoman was full of it.

If
the circumstances of Katie's death had been different, he might have been able
to bury her properly. But the freak nature of the accident had left him nursing
a terrible sense of injustice. A storm had uprooted a tree, which had collapsed
on, and crushed, her car. Katie was killed instantly. If she'd died in an
ordinary road accident, Tom would at least have been able to attribute the
tragedy to human or mechanical error - similarly if she'd died in a plane crash
or a fire. The rage and the blame would still have been there, of course, but
what he couldn't tolerate was the utter randomness of the incident. No
mistake. No error. Just one parcel of nature destroying another through the
accident of proximity. Tom could have understood a disease in terms of its
predatory function, or an environmental disaster like an earthquake or flood in
terms of its scale. But one tree falling on one car?

No: it felt
personal. It felt directed, against him. A finger of judgement.

He lowered
the lid of the ottoman. Then he tried Sharon's number again. Still no answer.
He wondered what the time difference was. Perhaps no more than an hour or two.

Katie
had not at first approved of his enduring friendship with Sharon, whom he had
known since college days. 'Old flames should be snuffed out,' she'd said.
'Would you like it if I dredged up one of my old boyfriends every other month?'

'We
shouldn't have to lose touch with someone we once loved just because we now
love someone else.'

'It just seems odd.'

'Nothing odd about it.'

'It still seems odd to me.'

But Tom
could be a difficult person to argue with, and even though he was sensitive to
Katie's suspicions, he persisted in maintaining innocent, irregular contact
with Sharon, and she with him. And when Katie grew more secure in the
relationship, and had met Sharon a couple of times, she began to trust and
accept this friendship and also discovered in Sharon a friend for herself. The
two women had developed a closeness of their own, and although it was never
something from which Tom was excluded, it was a distinct evolution of his
former relations with Sharon.

Since
Katie's death Sharon had telephoned twice, and had written two letters, but Tom
hadn't felt able to reciprocate. Now he felt ready to see her. She was one of
the very few people he could contemplate speaking to.

He dug out a
Sunday-newspaper supplement with advertisements for bucket-shop air flights.
He'd already ringed one with a pen. They operated a round-the-clock service, so
he gave them a call.

Five minutes
later he'd booked a flight, paid for y credit card. The flight was leaving the
following afternoon. His hands trembled slightly as he began to throw things
into a bag. A photograph of Katie smiled approvingly from the mantelpiece. He
turned it face-down. He didn't want her to watch him packing.

Travel
fever had him tossing and turning in his bed that night. Then at 3 a.m. he was
awoken by the usual tapping on the door. He didn't answer it. He lay awake,
listening, knowing that it would be repeated at regular intervals. He knew who
it was. He had answered the door before, and there was never anyone there. He
knew the hand would continue to knock on the door until exactly 4.15. Then it
would go away.

Tonight
it seemed to him a little more urgent. But he wouldn't answer it. He knew who
it was.

3

The plane landed out of
the astonishing blue heavens at Tel Aviv airport, seeding passengers on to the
hot tarmac. Still unable to contact Sharon, he took a bus to Jerusalem. He
disembarked at a bus station teeming with alien life and was awed by the number
of young women wearing the olive drab of army combat gear. Good-looking Israeli
girls toting Uzi automatics.

He
was still gazing after one of them when a boy wearing dark glasses and a
Walkman thrust a leaflet into his hand. It offered the incentive of one free
beer to stay at a backpackers' hostel. He was still reading the handbill when
an elderly Hasidic Jew with grey locks and a farouche beard smiled at him from
under the broad brim of a black hat, sliding another note into his hand. This
second leaflet was printed in Hebrew; on the reverse in English it said:
'AMERIKANS = AMALEKITES.
The daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with
stretched necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a
tinkling of their feet.
NO TO NEW AIRPORT.'

Tom thought he'd recognized the quotation.
'Isaiah?'

The old
Hasid shrugged, gesturing that he had no English. Then he scurried away to
press his leaflets into the hands of two baffled Australian backpackers.

Tom
hailed a Mercedes taxi, giving the driver Sharon's address, and the cab whisked
him under the medieval walls of Old Jerusalem. Banners waved in the wind. Flags
and streamers fluttered in the breeze high above the battlements of the Old
City wall. The Golden Dome of the Rock breasted blue skies. Glimpsed from the
speeding taxi, honey-coloured light flaked the clouds, licked ancient brick,
discharged long shadows from the antique portals. It was like the picture on a
gilt-edged stamp he'd collected at Sunday school as a child, the stamp
completing the set.

It was his
first sight of Jerusalem.
Thou art beautiful, 0
my love, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.

It
was a Jerusalem which didn't exist. A Jerusalem he would never see again. He wanted
to order the driver to stop so that he could get out of the cab, climb across
the perforated, gilded frame of his vision and walk into history. Instead he
watched the vision recede through the rear window of the Mercedes. He heard
voices from behind the city walls.
Thou art beautiful.
And gradually the
old citadel sank behind the hill as the taxi coursed along the
Shekhem
, north-east of the city.
Terrible as an army
with banners.
This was childhood and mythology crystallized in the view
from the back of a cab. It was a day of innocent arrival.

When
he saw his own reflection in the smoked-glass doors outside Sharon's apartment,
he thought he looked like a
golem.
A man in an unfinished state. An Adam
in creation, awaiting the final breath of God. There was something incomplete
about him, some vital spark gone astray.

He
rang the bell again. Perspiration gathered around the hand-grip of his suitcase
as he waited. Still no answer. He pressed a neighbouring bell, and a sleepy
voice crackled over the communication system.

Tom ducked
towards the buzzing speaker. 'You speak English?'

'Yes.
Ummm
.'

'I'm looking for Sharon. In the next
apartment.'

'Gone away.
Ummm
.'

'What? What did you say?'

'Gone away. Gone away on holiday.
Ummm
. Back in a few days.'

The low buzz
of the intercom clicked off. He imagined a sleepy Israeli upstairs going back
to bed. It was noon.

He
stared stupidly at the hot, dusty street. All he could do was shift his weight
from one foot to the other, squeezing the moist handle of his suitcase. The
word
golem
fired in his brain like gunshot across a desert. Fresh sweat
bloomed on his brow as he made his way down the marble stairway of the
apartment block. He left the cool shadows of the building and walked out into
the brilliant sunlight of the street.

Where was
Sharon? The spontaneous act of flying out here, which at one moment had seemed
cavalier and daring, now seemed bloody silly. He knew no one else. He was a
long way from home, and he felt lonely and not a little afraid. The taxi driver
who'd brought him here had ripped him off, he was certain. He regretted his
pale appearance. He felt like a target.

Another cab cruised by,
looking for a fare. He hailed it and told the driver to head back into the
centre of modern Jerusalem. 'The block where you picked me up,' he asked the
driver on the way, 'would they be mainly Jewish or Arab people living there?'

The driver
looked over his shoulder and showed a mouthful of gold teeth. He evidently
found the question too ridiculous to answer. Tom produced the hostel leaflet
he'd been handed at the bus station.

'Would this be a decent place for me to
stay?'

The driver glanced at it. 'Might not be
too clean.'

‘Is there a hotel you could recommend?'

‘Hotel's
gonna
cost you a
lotta
money. A
lotta
money.'

‘I don't have a lot of money.'

Gamely blaring his horn at some
pedestrians, the driver said, 'I got an idea. Basic. But it'll keep you out of
some Arab hovel.'

The hotel
was situated just north of the
Me'a
She'arim
ultra-Orthodox district of Jerusalem, not far from
the Old City. A large sign had been erected at the corner of the street.

DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM!
DRESS MODESTLY AT ALL TIMES.

The taxi pulled up at a grey-brick
building. It was basic, barely clean and run on the lines of a youth hostel. A
young man with curling black locks,
kipah
skull
cap and eyes permanently aghast behind thick spectacle glass showed him to a
room. It smelled of warm dust. Tom flicked back the yellowing sheets
doubtfully. The boy assured him they'd been laundered, despite their appearance.
He accepted the room and got a discount by paying in sterling.

After the
boy had gone Tom flung open the window shutters. Long rays of afternoon sunlight
pierced the room, illuminating mote-clouds stirred by his movements. He didn't
mind the dust. This was ancient dust, mystical dust. The dust of Abraham and
Jesus and Mohammed. These were the sweepings of religion.

A
clump of jasmine grew outside the window, its cooling scent mingling with the
humid smell of the dust. He was exhausted from lack of sleep the previous night
andfrom
travel. He wanted to lie down on the bed and
drift, but he was afraid if he did, the knocking on the door might start all
over again. He prayed he'd left that behind him in England.

In any
event, he was massively stimulated by the thought of Jerusalem. His excitement
was almost erotic. He decided to go out again. Right now he wanted to take a
walk in the world's most holy city.

 4

'
Greetings,
monsieur
!’
Welcome!
Enchante
!'
The excessive
gallantry made Tom think perhaps he'd made a mistake. To get from his room he'd
had to pass through a large shared kitchen, where a diminutive white-haired
figure crouched over the sink, rinsing a cup and saucer. The old man turned. 'A
communal kitchen, yes. Please use it. The coffee is undrinkable, the tea
unspeakable. But it's free.' He gestured at a steaming urn as if presenting the
riches of Solomon. Then he thrust out a tiny hand. 'David Feldberg. Are you
Jewish?'