The Mandelbaum Gate

Part
One

1.
Freddy’s Walk

Sometimes, instead of a
letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal
verses — rondeaux, redoubles, villanelles, rondels or Sicilian octaves — to
express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He
always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one’s duty
in life to be agreeable. Not so much at the time as afterwards, he felt it
keenly on his conscience that he had said no word between the soup and the fish
when the bright talk began; he felt at fault in retrospect of the cocktail
hours when he had contributed nothing but the smile for which he had been
renowned in his pram and, in the following fifty years, elsewhere.

‘Oh of
course, Freddy Hamilton. Everyone loves old Freddy my dear; Freddy’s sweet.’

Freddy,
of so many British consulates throughout his subdued, obedient career, would
have been touched to hear it; he would have smiled. He did not really want to
excite any sort of passion in his friends, or linger in their minds under some
inflammable aspect. A very boring guest or a very entertaining one could
provoke all sorts of undesirable feelings in people — revulsion,
heart-quickenings, murderous attachments, the sort of emotions that had always
led to trouble at school and university, and they led to international
incidents as well.

He
liked to get his verses off quickly so that there should be no apparent sign of
effort on his part. As he walked through the amazing alleys of the Orthodox
Quarter of Israel’s Jerusalem which teemed so dangerously close to the
Mandelbaum Gate, he started thinking of a triolet in his long-practised manner
to catch the next day’s Foreign Office bag into Jordan. Freddy had just come through
the Gate. He had diplomatic immunity and so was permitted to pass through the
Gate every week-end from Israel into Jordan and back again; from Jerusalem to
Jerusalem. Few people passed from Israel into Jordan; there were difficulties,
and for Europeans a certificate of baptism was required. Foreign diplomats
were not allowed to pass by motor-car, which was understandable, as papers and
bombs might be concealed in a car.

Freddy
carried his week-end luggage — a zipper-bag — and took his usual route into the
New City. It was the hottest day so far of 1961. He had refused the taxi-cab
that waited at the Gate; he hated taking taxi-cabs anywhere in the world; he
felt morally against the tips, as all his uncles before him had felt.
Excepting, of course, one uncle, the one who had messed up the money in the
thirties and absolutely ruined the family, and who had not felt strongly
against giving away tips to cabbies and so on. As Freddy turned a corner he
came into collision with a tiny dark-eyed boy with fluffy side-hair falling
down his cheeks, too fine as yet to be formed into shining ringlets like those
of his male elders among the Orthodox sect. The child’s nose bumped into Freddy’s
knee, and Freddy took him by the hand to steady him out of his bewilderment. A
bearded, befrocked old man with a very large face muttered in Hebrew to the
infant, who had already regained his bearings and was busy studying Freddy from
head to feet. A woman of unguessable age, wearing lots of black clothes,
snatched the child away, and he trotted off, his legs in their long woollen
stockings moving like swift shuttles to keep up with his mother, but he still
craned his head round wonderingly at Freddy. The woman scolded the child
meantime, evidently trying to impress on him the undesirable nature of Freddy.
Freddy walked on behind the heavily garbed pair, feeling decidedly in the wrong
for having touched the child’s hand; they had probably taken him for a modern
Jew, one of the regular Israelis of whom this sect disapproved perhaps more
heavily than they did of the honest unclean foreigner. Well, thought Freddy,
to continue …

… would have preferred

To make my grateful feelings heard,

But every time articulate

Scarcely a word.

It was not a triolet after
all. Joanna, his hostess on the other side, had been extremely agreeable to him
since his posting to Israel. He had spent three week-ends in her cool villa,
and she loved to have these bread-and-butter verses. There would have to be an
additional stanza, perhaps two. Joanna was to visit him over here in Israel;
she had not yet been to Israel. He would have to remind her about her visa, and
tell her how best to make the crossing. It was not a triolet after all, but a
form of rondeau. There was the business of Joanna’s getting a visa, and he
would meet her on this side of the Mandelbaum Gate. The intensity at the Gate
was quite absurd. One could understand the border incidents where soldiers
would flare up an incident suddenly and unaccountably. But there at the Gate
the precautions and suspicions of the guards were quite absurd. No Israeli
money allowed into Jordan, no Israeli postcards, the Jordanian police almost
biologically unable to utter the word ‘Israel’. The Israeli police were
inordinately dramatic:

‘Safe
crossing,’ they would say as one left the emigration hut. The Israeli porter
would run and dump one’s baggage half-way and run for the life of him back to
his post. The Jordanian porter would wait till the path was dear; he would run
the few seconds’ space to pick up the bags and run for the life of him back to
his post. They dramatized everything. Why did people have to go to extremes,
why couldn’t they be moderate? Freddy bumped into a man in European dress,
rushing out of a shop as they all did. The man said something in Arabic. Freddy
had thought he was a Jew. You couldn’t tell the difference sometimes. Some of
them had extremely dark skins, almost jetters. Why couldn’t people be
moderate?

It was
not a triolet after all, but a sort of rondeau. Freddy turned up an alley. Another
child, a girl, bumped into him in the narrow, crowded street. This time he did
not put out a guiding hand, and she slipped away with the subdued expression of
the children of this quarter, quite unlike the vivacious young of the regular
Israelis. Freddy was rather sorry for the boys with their sausage side-curls
and black knickerbocker rig-out, especially those adolescent boys who walked in
a goody-goody way, by twos and threes. It must be hell for them, he thought, to
be so different from the rest of the country, especially if they ever want to
break away. He had felt sorry for the Arab boys on the other side —underfed,
driving their mangy donkeys, thin, and in rags. He was moved to pity for all
young boys, on the whole, recalling the term-times of his youth. He was
convinced that the boys with ringlets were going through the same sort of hell,
which was the only sort Freddy knew. The ringlets, like the Gate, were quite
absurd.

‘Quite
absurd!’ On the strength of this phrase he had struck up friendships all over
the place. He was accustomed to exotic sights and squalid smells, narrow
oriental streets, and people who went to extremes, it was all part of the
Foreign Service. But outside of the Embassy, and even inside it, he never
really felt at ease with chaps until sooner or later they remarked that the
place was quite absurd.

…
feelings heard,

But every time articulate

Scarcely a word.

But you have far too long
deferred

Your visit to the Modern
State,

So choose and name the
cheerful date.

Joanna, I can hardly wait.

To meet you at the quite
absurd

Mandelbaum Gate.

He was approaching the end
of the Orthodox Jewish quarter, and had turned into a street at the end of
which rattled the modern state. There, small shops burst their sides with
business, large cars streaked along the highway, and everywhere the radio sets
told the news in several tongues ranging from Hebrew to that of the B.B.C., or
attacked the hot air with oriental jazz. Up there at the end of this orthodox
street, it was said, the Orthodox Jews would gather on a Saturday morning,
piously to stone the passing motor-cars, breakers of the Sabbath. And across
the street, streamers stretched from building to building, bearing an injunction
in Hebrew, French and English:

DAUGHTERS
OF ISRAEL, OBSERVE MODESTY IN THESE STREETS!

This, Freddy assumed to be
for the benefit of any tourist-woman who might, for some mad reason, wish to
walk in this Orthodox Jewish quarter wearing shorts or a low-cut sun dress; the
local women themselves needed no such warning, being clad and covered, one way
and another, all over.

For the
time being Freddy had been placed in rooms in a Jerusalem hotel while waiting
for an Embassy flat to fall vacant. He was in no great hurry for the flat,
preferring hotel life where one need not mix, need not entertain one’s
colleagues, and could generally escape. His colleagues at this posting seemed a
bit in-tense and know-all; they were on the young side and had not yet settled
down. Freddy noticed, crossing the street, a young woman who was at present
staying at his hotel, a Miss Vaughan. She was accompanied by a tall,
intellectual-looking Jew. Freddy put down his bag in the hot street. He wanted
to be specially civil to Miss Vaughan, having struck up her acquaintance in the
cool leafy courtyard of the hotel one evening over two long drinks, and having
then, on another occasion, inadvertently said the wrong thing; whereupon Miss
Vaughan had felt for his embarrassment.

They
crossed over to him where he waited on the kerb, and inquired if he had enjoyed
his week-end. He had once before, very briefly, met her companion, a teacher of
archaeology, Dr Saul Ephraim of the Hebrew University, who was acting as Miss
Vaughan’s guide. He had turned out to be amiable in the surprising way of the
Israeli intellectuals; it took one by surprise because one did not expect a
violin with its strings taut and tuned for immediate performance to be suddenly
amiable. Dr Ephraim spoke a slightly American tone of English, suddenly amiable
and easy as if from some resource that had been waiting under his skin for an
encounter with Freddy. He wore an open-necked shirt and flannels, his neck lean
and long-muscled. Freddy chatted as he observed these things, telling of his
week-end in Jordan: ‘I’ve got some charming friends over there.’ Ephraim would
be in his young thirties. He was anxious to hear news of Jordan.

‘Haven’t
you ever been there?’ said Freddy.

‘Not
since the war.’

‘Of
course, not since the war.’ To Ephraim ‘the war’ was the war of 1948.

‘It’s
absurd,’ said young Dr Ephraim.

An
unloading of water melons began to take place close to them. Freddy had once
been hit by the corner of a crate while passing an unloading operation at
Covent Garden. He was nervous, and moved the couple aside along with himself.

‘Both
of you come and join me for a drink when you’ve finished,’ said Freddy then,
lifting up his bag.

Miss
Vaughan was about to say something when an old bearded man out of the many,
with small ancient eyes, approached them and spoke to Dr Ephraim in guttural
Yiddish. Ephraim answered some brief thing, using his hands and shoulders to
throw off the subject to the air. The old man spoke a few more words and moved
away, muttering and glancing backward at Miss Vaughan.

What
did he say?’ said Miss Vaughan.

‘He said,
“Tell your lady-friend to dress herself properly in these sacred streets as
they have always done before.”‘

Freddy
looked at Miss Vaughan to see how she was dressed. She was wearing a harmless
blouse, sleeveless, and a dark skirt. He looked up at the admonishing banners
and smiled his smile. He smiled again at Miss Vaughan, who stood with her sharp
features and prim grey and black hair drawn back, looking less intense than
Freddy feared she really was. It occurred to him that by contrast with Ephraim she
would be in her late thirties. She was still questioning Dr Ephraim about his
conversation with the old man. ‘And what did you say to that?’