The Mandelbaum Gate (4 page)

‘A
half-Jew?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which
half?’

‘Through
my mother.’

‘Then
you are a whole Jew. The Jew inherits through the mother by Jewish Law.’

‘I know
that. But one says half-Jew to mean that one of the parents is a Gentile and
the other—’

‘But
the Jew inherits through the mother. You are then a full Jew by the Law.’

‘Yes,
but not according to the Gentile parent’s law.’

‘What
was your father’s Law?’

That
was a question indeed.

‘I’m
afraid he was a law unto himself,’ Barbara had said to this questioner, a large
blond Pole. He laughed at that.

She
told him of her father in the wild upsurge of his middle age and downfall ‘He
broke his neck while fox-hunting. The horse threw him. He landed in a ditch and
died instantly.’

‘My
father died also in a ditch. Shot by the S.S. Why have you made yourself a
Catholic to deny your Jewish blood?’

‘I don’t
deny it. I’ve just been telling you about it.’

‘You
are brought up as a Gentile or a Jew?’

‘Neither.
No religion.’

‘And
your mother’s relations and your father’s relations, what religion?’

Barbara
had felt displaced, she felt her personal identity beginning to escape like smoke
from among her bones. ‘What a lot of questions,’ she said. So they drove along
the road to Caesarea through the fertile plain of Sharon, cultivated to the
verge of the road on each side. They had found the car to be cooler with windows
shut than open to the hot breeze. But not much cooler. ‘A lot of questions,’
she had said, twice, with the resigned dying-fall of a victim deprived of fresh
air and civil rights.

‘I ask
her a question, she makes a big thing of it that I am Gestapo,’ said the guide
to some invisible witness.

Barbara
said, ‘Well, it’s hot.’

He
said, ‘I ask you, because you say you are half-Jew, you say you are a Catholic,
and I ask you only what is the religion of your mother’s relations and the
religion of your father’s relations. It is a natural discussion, if you would
say to me, who are you, who is your mother, who is your father and how do you
come to be an Israeli guide, and I would answer those questions. Then I should
ask who are you, what is the family, your brothers and your sisters—’

Barbara
thought, ‘Who am I?’ She felt she had known who she was till this moment. She
said, ‘I am who I am.’ The guide spoke some short Hebrew phrase which, although
she did not know the language, quite plainly signified that this didn’t get
them any further in the discussion. Barbara had already begun to reflect that ‘I
am who I am’ was a bit large seeing it was the answer that Moses got from the
burning bush on Mount Sinai when he asked God to describe himself. The
Catechism, it was true, stated that man was made in God’s image chiefly as to
the soul. She decided, therefore, essentially ‘I am who I am’ was indeed the
final definition for her. But the thesis-exponent in Barbara would not leave
it at that. They entered Caesarea, home of ancient disputations, while she
attempted to acquaint the guide with the Golders Green Jewishness of her mother’s
relations and the rural Anglicanism of her father’s, the Passover gatherings on
the one hand and the bell-summoned Evensongs on the other, the talkative intellectuals
of the one part and the kennel-keeping blood sportsmen of the other. The Polish
Israeli was bewildered. Barbara added that her parents themselves were, of
course, exceptional, having broken away from their respective traditions to
marry each other. And she herself was of course something else again. The guide
persisted in his point: Why had she turned Catholic? If she wanted a religion
she was already a Jewess through her mother. Barbara knew then that the
essential thing about herself remained unspoken, uncategorized and unlocated.
She was agitated, and felt a compelling need to find some definition that would
accurately explain herself to this man.

He was
demanding a definition. By the long habit of her life, and by temperament, she
held as a vital principle that the human mind was bound in duty to continuous
acts of definition. Mystery was acceptable to her, but only under the aspect of
a crown of thorns. She found no rest in mysterious truths like ‘I am who I am’;
they were all right for deathbed definitions, when one’s mental obligations
were at an end. ‘I am who I am’, yes, ultimately, as a piece of music might be
what it is; but then, one wants to analyse the thing. Meantime, she thought,
the man wants to know who I am, that is, what category of person. I should
explain to him the Gentile-Jewish situation in the West, and next, the
independence of British education, and the peculiar independence of the
Gentile Jew whose very existence occurs through a nonconforming alliance. And
next, the probabilities of the Catholic claim, she thought. The fierce heat of
noon penetrated her sun-glasses. She thought, later on I must make an attempt
to explain: I’ll explain after lunch.

But
why? At Caesarea they had looked at the historic ruins and the recently
excavated ramparts of Herod’s city; they looked at the prehistoric
Mediterranean Sea and were refreshed by it. The man was dogmatizing about dates
and events at Caesarea, the most important of which was, to him, the recent
moment when excavations by a team of archaeologists had begun. They ate lunch
at an outside table under an awning. The guide said:

‘In
Poland the Catholic priests used to lead the pogroms.’

‘Well,
they shouldn’t have,’ she said.

‘Why
are you Catholic?’

Why?
Why did she trouble about these questions? The man was a hired guide. She was
paying for his services. Anywhere else one would take up a properly resentful
attitude. But here in Israel it was unthinkable; one paid their travel agency,
they were hired, but these facts appeared irrelevant to the relationship. Here
on this territory the Israeli guides were far more autonomous in their
attitudes than any French citizen on home ground, or any English guide in
England. The Israelis generally did not merely show one round, they guided, whether
they were official guides or not. It occurred to Barbara that all in some
degree rather resembled the Irish and the Welsh in their territorial
consciousness, and she was reminded, too, of the games of her childhood where
one’s own chalked-out area, once won, contained whatever features one said it
did, neither more nor less. She kept remarking to the guide that the country
was beautiful, since this was easy to say, being true. It duly pleased him. He
said, ‘I swam for it,’ and explained that he had arrived as an illegal
immigrant on a ship in 1947, and had swum ashore by night.

She had
returned to the hotel after the trip to Caesarea in a state of exhaustion and
nervous panic that reminded her of the sensations she had experienced as a
result of anaemia, for a few months, some years ago. She was now in good
physical health; it was spiritual anaemia, she ruthlessly decided, that she was
suffering from. Instead of saying goodbye at the door and tipping him like a
tourist she acted on a desperate placatory impulse and asked him in for a
drink. Then, immediately realizing that she was yielding to a familiar
weakness, that of humouring the constitutional tyrant, she now recalled having
parked the fellow on Freddy Hamilton, who was reading a newspaper in the quiet
green courtyard, and had said she would be back presently. She had taken a long
time to come down from her room, and when she did she found the huge guide had
begun to expand on the adventures of the past day. Courteous Mr Hamilton had
seemed more than merely courteous, he was listening with deep interest. The
guide was checking off the fingers of his left hand, one by one, as he said, or
nearly sang, ‘I gave her Abu Gosh, I gave her Ramle where is Arimathea for the
Christians, I have given her Lod as you call Lydda, traditional birthplace of
St George —’

‘Patron
Saint of England,’ said pleasant Mr Hamilton.

‘Correct.
I gave her Haifa, I have given her Mount Carmel —’

‘Ah,
here’s Miss Vaughan,’ said Freddy Hamilton. ‘Ah, Miss Vaughan, I’ve been hearing
an account — let me …’ He rose to help her to pull up a chair from another
table. The guide continued, on his right hand, ‘I gave her the grotto of the
Prophet Elijah, I gave her, then, the Persian Gardens and the Temple of the
Bahai Faith.’

‘Ah
yes, I’ve heard of the Bahai Faith. Very interesting. Very decent people, I
hear. Founded after the last war. Money to burn.’

‘In
this the lady was not interested. She did not wish to visit the Bahai Temple.’

‘I
think we did enough for one day,’ Barbara said.

‘A very
full day,’ said Freddy.

When
the Israeli had gone, Freddy said, ‘Nice fellow. Seems to know his job.’

‘I
found him insufferably overbearing.’

‘Did
you? Oh well, you know, we’re foreigners here now. One inclines to forget that.
British to them means something different from British to us, I’m afraid.’

Saul
Ephraim, to whom she had recounted that day’s excursion in detail, said, ‘You
seem to be unlucky with our guides. Not surprising. You’re British. Well, that’s
all right, more or less. You’re a Catholic convert — O.K. But you’re a half-Jew
as well. The three together are a lot.’

‘I
should have thought being a half-Jew would be held in mitigation of the rest.’

‘You
ought to know better.’

She did
know better. The family on her mother’s side at Golders Green, with whom she
spent half of the vacations of her youth, had proved as innocently obtuse about
her true identity as had the family at Bells Sands, Worcestershire, with whom
she spent the other half.

Barbara, on the summit of
Mount Tabor, conscious of the Holy Land stretching to its boundaries on every
side, reflected wearily upon her reflections. She thought, my mind is impatient
to escape from its constitution and reach its point somewhere else. But that is
in eternity at the point of transfiguration. In the meantime, what is to he
borne is to be praised. In the meantime, memory circulates like the
bloodstream. May mine circulate well, may it bring dead facts to life, may it
bring health to whatever is to be borne.

At
Bells Sands — it was the Easter vacation, just after her sixteenth birthday —
her energetic tennis-playing grandmother, with hair discreetly dyed the colour
of steel, sat on the arm of a chair in her white pleated dress, swinging one of
her long sinewy legs, brown summery legs in good condition; the party was
gathered in the dining-room after tennis; it was tea-time. Her grandmother took
a teacup from the tray offered by the young, round-shouldered parlour maid.
Barbara had been saying she must go and pack. Her cousin Arthur, then at Sandhurst,
later killed in North Africa, was to drive her to the station.

‘Must
you go tonight, darling?’ said her Vaughan grandmother. Barbara passed round
the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Why not go up with Arthur in the morning? Stay and be
comfy.’

‘No, I’m
expected. It’s the Passover. An important festival.’

The
warmth of the spring oozed in through the french windows as if the glass were
porous. The silver teapot danced with light and shade as a breeze stirred the
curtains. The air was elusively threaded with the evidence of unseen hyacinths.
So it must have been before she was born, when the family understood that her
father was going to marry the Jewess, and there was nothing left to say.

‘Well,
I admire you for it,’ said her grandmother.

The
young men were eating the cucumber sandwiches two at a time.

‘For
what?’

‘Your
loyalty to your mother’s people. But honestly, darling, it isn’t necessary. No
one could possibly blame you for skipping it. After all, you don’t look as if
you had a drop of Jewish blood. And after all you’re only half. I assure you no
one minds.’

‘I’m
awfully fond of them, you know. I don’t feel the least temptation to give them
up. Why on earth—?’

‘Yes, I
know you’re fond of them, it’s only natural that you should be. Only I want you
to know that I admire you for being so loyal, darling. I think I’m right in
saying that we all of us admire you.’

‘Grandmother!’
said Barbara’s other cousin, Miles. ‘Grandmother, shut up.’

‘There’s
nothing to admire, no effort,’ Barbara said. ‘The Aaron-sons don’t call it
loyalty when I stay here. They take it for granted.’

‘Well,
I should hope so, Barbara dear. This was your father’s home and it’s yours,
too.’

Barbara
perceived that she had courage, this lithe grandmother of hers. It took courage
for her to speak steadily of her son, her favourite, her disappointment in
life, now dead from a fall while hunting. It had been an indigenous sort of
death, but the mother would have preferred him alive with his unfortunate
marriage, all the same.

‘Well,
there’s time for another set before you change and pack, Barbara,’ said Uncle
Eddy, gazing out at the sky as if he could tell the time by it. The lawn lay
beautiful as eternity. A servant was calling in Eddy’s two children from an
upper window; presently their high voices came quarrelling from the shrubbery
and faded round the back of the house. There was a stir in the beech leaves
like papers being gently shuffled into order. The drawing-in of an English
afternoon took place, with its fugitive sorrow.