Requiem (6 page)

'It's just an ice-cream, for heaven's
sake!'

The
invocation to heaven rendered the information. Tom knocked softly on the door.
When David appeared, he looked at the pink-and-brown ice-cream running along
Tom's fingers, took off his spectacles and wept. He sat down in an old
armchair, horsehair protruding from splits in the upholstery. Tom followed him
inside without an invitation.

The
room was shelved on all four sides, lined with books. A door on one wall gave
way to a second room, offering a glimpse of an unmade bed. 'I brought you
this,' Tom said, unnecessarily.

David
recovered, patting his eyes with a grubby handkerchief. I apologize,
monsieur.
Please sit down.' He got up and moved a pile of papers from the seat of a
hard-backed chair.

'Are you going to take this before it
melts completely?'

'But of course.'
He accepted the ice-cream as if it might at any moment metamorphose into a
butterfly. Tom was relieved when he finally stuck a pink tongue into the
melting wave. 'When I saw you standing there you reminded me of someone. It was
like a scene from a long time ago. Yet you don't even look like him. He was
darker than you. His skin was of a sandier colour. He was brown-eyed; your eyes
are blue. But it was the ice-cream, melting over your fingers.
C'est
extraordinaire.
Something in your
gesture. It was our last happy moment together.'

'Who was he?'

'My father. I lost him a long time ago.'

'How?'

'In a terrible place called
Belsen
.'

Tom closed
his eyes. History flickered across his retina like an old newsreel. He made a
quick calculation from the end of the concentration camps to the present and
figured David to be about seventy-five years old. Ghosts. All haunted one way
or another.

'It's an old
story,' David said, rescuing him. 'This city is full of the details, should you
ever want to hear them. Look, my ice-cream, it is gone!'

Tom fumbled
for a change of subject. 'So many books. Have you something about Jerusalem I
could borrow?'

David took a
heavy volume down from a shelf. I would gladly let you have free use of this
library, if only that were possible. But there are some things you should not
see. Come here.'

He unlocked a cabinet,
from which he withdrew a sheaf of plastic folders. Taking the folders to the
table, he spread them out. Inside the heat-sealed transparent envelopes were
grey parchment fragments speckled with faded Hebrew script. 'You know what they
are? Pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.'

'Are they genuine?'

'Of course.'

'What are
you doing with them? I mean, aren't they priceless? I thought the scholars were
sitting on them.'

'Monsieur,
you don't seem to realize just how
many fragments were found.'

Tom
inspected the discoloured parchments closely. No secrets jumped out of them.
When he drew back, David gathered them up and locked them away.

^‘
I keep them in this cabinet,' he said. The remark
struck an odd note, almost as if he were inviting Tom to steal them.

'I
must go,' said Tom. 'I want to get up to Gethsemane before it gets dark.'

'If you are
walking, it will be dusk before you reach the Mount of Olives.'

'I'll try anyway.'

'Don't
forget the book. And thank you for the ice-cream.'

He'd left it late to
begin the walk up to the garden of Jesus' betrayal. But it had been night time
when the guards came to Gethsemane to arrest Jesus after Judas betrayed him;
there he had sweated blood; and there swords had been drawn in a skirmish
before Jesus was led away. Tom would have preferred to visit the place at
night; he might have gone up to the garden and enjoyed the warm dusk and the
sweet scents of the evening.

But this
city disquieted him. The vibration of violence discouraged the idea of moving
around alone at night. Tourists were easy prey, and though he could have made
it up to the garden before sundown, he doubted if he could make it back again before
dark.

He stood
with the massive blocks of the eastern wall at his back. Behind him the false
Golden Dome blazed in the setting sun. Across the valley, at the foot of the
Mount of Olives, stood the singular edifices of
Absalom's
tomb and the dark portals of James's and Zachariah's tombs. Behind them, on the
slopes of the Mount, was the scattering of headstones comprising the Jewish
cemetery of souls waiting to greet the Messiah on Judgement Day.

Bones, dust.

Tom's gut
trembled. His entire experience of Jerusalem had so far been mediated by an
abdominal fluttering, as if the dry landscape, with him in it, was gripped at
some corner by a vast and shivering hand. If he closed his eyes for a moment,
the trembling continued.

Forgoing the
walk up to Gethsemane, he turned back to look at the city wall. What he saw
there made his stomach flip.

The
sun was setting from across the other side of the city, flaking cloud-edges and
discharging rays of light, a scene from a child's painting. Light lanced from
the golden cupola peeping above the battlements. The walls took on the hue of
rotting parchment. Suspended on the wall, half-way between the battlements and
the ground, like a bat or bird pinning an insect, was the Arab woman in her
black veil.

Twelve feet up on the wall.

There
were no foot-holds. The wall was smooth and vertical. Yet the woman clung to
the wall by her nails. She wore the same brown robe, the same black veil
reaching below her chin. She was beckoning him.

His
bowels compressed and he felt a drop of urine hot on his thigh. There was a
roaring in his ears as the ground tilted. A crease appeared in the blue sky, as
if it were buckling under a tremendous weight. A familiar smell of spice, of
balsam, rolled over him.

The old
woman was scratching something on the wall. In letters a foot high she began to
write in Arabic script. Then she abandoned the effort, instead carefully
scratching the Latin letters DE PR …

The
wall dissolved into powder at her touch. The letters were clearly branded into
the brick, twelve or fifteen feet from the ground. The veiled woman continued
to scratch at the soft stone with her crooked index finger.

'Tom! Tom!'

He
heard someone calling his name. It could have been from another continent. The
words came keening out of the sky, like the squeal of gulls.

'Tom!'

A
hand was placed on his shoulder. The sky healed itself. His breathing came back
to him.

'Tom, what is it? What's the matter with
you?'

It
was Sharon. Tom turned to her, tried to speak. Words failed to shape inside his
mouth. The woman on the wall was gone. The letters engraved in the brick were
already fading, like writing in wind-blown sand.

'I've
been scouring the city for you. A neighbour told me an Englishman came to the
house. Why didn't you leave an address or something?'

'I
... I didn't know what to do.' Tom was disoriented. He looked back again at the
wall.

'What is it? Are you all right?'

'I thought I . . .'

'You're not all right, are you? Let me
look at you.'

'It's just my stomach. Really.'

'Travel gut,' smiled
Sharon. 'Had the squirts? I've got something for that. Come on, my car's over
there.'

Tom let himself be led
to the road. Blisters of sweat dripped from his brow. The bunch of keys in Sharon's
hands rippled light. Tom looked back again at the wall. 'Come on, old son. I'm
taking you back to my place.'

9

'Remember? Remember that time I
came home early and caught you?' said Katie. I caught you reading the Song of
Songs. I thought, my God, Tom's reading the Bible again. Remember me mocking
you? How I used to take the piss? And you said it was the most beautiful work
of literature ever written?'

'I don't recall saying that.'

'Yes, you did. I asked
you to read it to me. You wouldn't. That's when I knew. That's when I
really
knew.'

'Knew what?' Tom said.

10

'First we get you out of that
fleapit,' Sharon, constructing a pot of tea out of a clatter of spoons and
mugs, slammed cupboards, rattled drawers, music playing at volume, 'and into this
fleapit.'

Sharon was a loud
person. It was the thing that had originally attracted Tom. In their initial
year at teacher-training college they'd been mysteriously drawn together: fate
could have chosen to yoke together two more obviously kindred spirits, but it
didn't. On the first day, taking English class together, Sharon had arrived
late to sprawl in the seat next to Tom. He hardly caught a word of that first
lecture. He was fascinated by this large-boned woman with a yard of blond curls
and a sweater of unravelling wool, the sleeves of which reached the
middle-knuckles of her elegant fingers.

Half-way
through the lecture she'd pinched him sharply on the forearm saying, 'Lend us a
friggin
' pencil, will
ya
?'

Tom was instantly
seduced by the warm
Mancunian
tones. He never got his
pencil back, but he did embark on the most loyal friendship he ever made at
college.

There was nothing
ostensibly sexual about this early mutual attraction. Later they were to give
sex a sporting bash, yet the friendship endured even when that failed. In those
days Tom was a hesitant and inexperienced student with a late acne problem, and
they somehow managed to chum up without any of the normal boy-girl tensions.
When anyone inquired, they were very fond of invoking the sterile protection of
Plato. Except that Sharon would always say, 'Plutonic. It's plutonic.' And no
one knew what she meant, including Tom.

Tom
had hung a
Desiderata
over his bed. Sharon, invited in for coffee, read
the thing aloud in her unleavened Manchester accent, and when she came to the
line 'Avoid loud and aggressive persons for they are vexations to the spirit'
she said, 'Well, that just about tells me to fuck off, doesn't it?' Whereupon
Tom took down the
Desiderata
and binned it.

'Actually, I
don't like it,' he'd said. 'A girlfriend bought it for me.'

Sharon,
interpreting this act of compliance as massive generosity of spirit, was
touched. From that moment forward an easy sympathy existed between the two. The
bond thereafter hardened and, since that day, had remained unbroken.

There
were sizeable differences of background and temperament across which they had
to help each other in order to make this friendship endure. 'There's a Christian
Union meeting,' Tom had said during that first week. 'It would mean a lot if
you came with me.' Shrugging, Sharon had gone along without demur. Afterwards
Tom asked, 'What did you think of it?'

'You want me to be honest?'

'Of course.'

'The singing was flat.
The guitars ought to be smashed. The songs were shit, and the baked potatoes
were awful. Plus I felt stupid holding a candle all night. Honestly, Tom, if
that's your idea of a good time, I'm glad I'm Jewish.'

Tom
had blushed to his scalp. He'd unwittingly dragged a Jewess along to a
Christian Union evening. No wonder the chaplain had greeted her oddly.

'Tom, let's
be serious. The bar is still open. It would mean a lot if you came with me.'

So the
partnership survived. For Tom the Christian Union meetings eventually went the
way of the
Desiderata.
He would 'forget' to go to meetings. Not that
he'd lost his faith as a Christian, he pointed out; he'd just lost his taste
for baked potatoes. Meanwhile neither judged the other nor asked for anything
in the way of compromise. And when people asked one of them, in the way people
will, 'Hey, why do you hang around with him/her?' each would answer, 'Because
he/she never talks dirty behind my back,' in a way which immediately silenced
the questioner.

At
college Sharon had been from week to week a blond, a brunette, a
brunette-and-blond, a redhead, a raven-head, a carrot-top and whatever the
adjective is for someone with luminous green hair. Here in Israel, as she
crashed down cups and saucers, her hair was blond streaked with silver-fox. Her
face had seen too much direct sunlight over the years, but her Semitic brown
eyes suggested a young temple prostitute.

'Thou art comely,' said Tom.

'What?'
Sharon laughed, brushing a stray silver-blond tress from her eyes.

'I said,
thou art comely. You always were comely. That's why men can never leave you
alone.'

Tom had
observed this from relatively close quarters. Truth was that Sharon couldn't
leave men alone either. In her student days she constructed a heart that could
shatter and reassemble in a matter of days. Tom often found her in a deluge of
tears; worse still, he was sometimes put to comforting drunken young men, also
oozing tears over Sharon. Meanwhile very little, in those days, was happening
in his own love life.