To Live in Peace (13 page)

“She wishes you a happy New Year,” she said to Maurice.

“Wonderful children,” Bette said.

“Josh said Begin was behaving like a Nazi and Rachel walked out.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Maurice said.

“I feel sorry for Sarah,” Kitty said. “After she’d gone to all that trouble.”

“Sweet of her to call,” Bette said, trying to pour oil upon the troubled waters. “My kids don’t even know it’s New Year.”

“5743,” Maurice said. “To find the Jewish year quickly you subtract 239 from the last three figures of
the Gregorian year and add 5000: (1)982-239=743 + 5000 = 5743.”

“The world is more than 6,000 years old,” Ed said.

“Sure. The date is poetic really.”

“She’s always been like that,” Kitty said.

“Who?” Bette said.

“Rachel. Takes after her father.”

“She’ll get over it. Stop thinking about it.”

“How can I stop thinking about it. If I wasn’t so far away…”

“I’d better go,” Bette said, seeing that Kitty was upset and that it was best to leave her on her own.

Ed and Mort sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes.

“I’ll come down with you,” Ed offered.

“It’s time I was off,” Mort said.

Kitty found Bette’s gloves.

“It’s been a divine evening,” Bette kissed Kitty. “Real homey.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“I’ll see you at class. My car will be in the shop for service.” She usually gave Kitty a lift to aerobics.

“She’ll take a cab,” Maurice said.

“May you have a real sweet year.” Bette embraced Maurice and winked at Kitty over his shoulder. “Take away 239 and add 5000. You learn something new every day.”

Against a chorus of “Happy New Years”, flanked by Ed and Mort and with Herb bringing up the rear, she hobbled in her tight skirt across the hallway.

“See you Tuesday, honey.” She put two scarlet tipped fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to Kitty. “Don’t be late.”

She exited into the elevator.

It had been her evening.

The day began much as any other. Maurice was already at his easel, putting the finishing touches of lamp black to the painting he called appositely “Agony” when Kitty had crept out of the apartment and taken the elevator downstairs to ask Joe to get her a cab.

She was nervous now about cabs. Once she had flagged down a yellow car in the street, thinking it was a taxi, and a disreputable looking driver with glazed eyes had appraised her insolently before asking if she wanted a ride. She had given him the address of Bette’s building, not five blocks away, and had barely sat down on the naked springs when she began to have her doubts. Outside Bette’s the man had held out a lazy hand.

“Ten dollars.”

“What are you talking about?” Kitty said. She had done the journey many times and had never paid more than two. “Where’s the meter?”

His lip curled. “In the trunk, lady!”

Suddenly realising her mistake, and that it was not a regular taxi, she had handed over the money and made her escape, putting the price of it down to experience.

“Morning, Mrs Shelton,” Joe said, coming from behind his desk where he was sorting mail. “Not very nice out there today. Look like it gonna’ rain.”

Kitty waited beneath the canopy while Joe, with his magic fingers, went to whistle up a cab. Unusually, it took him almost fifteen minutes. Apologising for the delay, and blaming it on the lowering skies, he opened the door for her. “Take care!”

Kitty gave the address of the church hall where she was to meet Bette and, engrossed in the shocking revelations from the Middle East which she had seen on breakfast TV in her studio, had paid off the cab before she realised, looking in her handbag where she usually kept it, that she had forgotten her key to the hall.

As she leaned on the bell, realising that it was unlikely anyone would hear against the music – the class must already have started – the first drops of rain began to fall. The passing pedestrians produced umbrellas as if from nowhere, not slowing their pace as they put them up. Kitty had not brought hers. She tried knocking. A passer-by glanced at her curiously as she hammered at the door. She was getting wet. It would be quicker, she decided, to take a cab back and pick up her key which she remembered had got left behind when she changed her handbag.

She stood on the corner, her hand raised. A cab stopped but a man in front of her, whom she hadn’t noticed, jumped in. The traffic, swishing by, made her dizzy as she watched it. Her light dress was getting soaked. To find an empty taxi in New York, as in any other city, when it was raining was like prospecting for gold. With the sound of Maurice’s voice in her ears cautioning her, she decided to walk. As she negotiated the avenues, stepping delicately to avoid the puddles, “walking” and “not walking” in accordance with the signals, her mind wandered from the forgotten key to the universal vilification of her people by the world press as they rushed to condemn Israel for a massacre they had no part in, while those who had perpetrated the crimes in the camps of Sabra and Chatila seemed to have been forgotten in an outburst of anti-Jewish hysteria.

While Kitty knew the allegations and exaggerations not to be true, she found herself half believing the barrage
of criticism and although the sins were the sins of others she was unable to stop herself feeling guilty. There was no doubt that the invasion of the Lebanon had brought death and destruction, and that it was a cruel business in need of a lot of justifying. Any Jew knew in his heart, however, that Israel would not kill for the sake of killing. Foreign analysts did not share the same sentiments. They blew up the horrors (accepting stories of Israel’s ferocity at face value without checking the sources) and did not even consider what western countries had done in similar circumstances without a quarter of the brouhaha.

Take the last war alone. If Adolf Hitler had taken shelter in some apartment building alongside innocent victims, would anybody have had any compunction about shelling the apartment? There had been no reporters describing the victims, cross-examining the maimed or recording on television the sobs of surviving relatives when the British and Americans – without military necessity – had destroyed the city of Dresden on carnival night, killing more than one quarter of a million people including children still in their fancy dress, or when the Allies had sent five hundred planes to bomb an open city – houses, schools, hospitals, shops, the lot – to save the lives of its own soldiers. At the time it had seemed normal. True it had been a war and in times of peace values altered, but what was going on in Lebanon was also a war despite the fact that the media persisted in treating it as an outburst of gang violence. Its partiality was following ancient and well trodden paths in using Israel’s errors and shortcomings as a stick to beat her with. The Jews of Europe had been familiar with such policies and little, it seemed, had changed.

Ruminating on such thoughts, Kitty, her head down, keeping close to the buildings to avoid the worst of the downpour, decided to take a chance and a short cut down a street which she knew was not particularly salubrious. After two months New York no longer seemed frightening and she forgot for long moments at a time the gentler world of London built to a more human scale. If it had not been for her loneliness she might almost have begun to love the city where Maurice felt so much at home. As it was, not an hour went by – no matter how involved she might be in a morning’s shopping with Bette or an afternoon’s exploration of its cultural delights with Maurice – that she did not think of her family. She was concentrating on Rachel, trying to picture her in her advanced pregnancy, she had always been so skinny, and thinking how the recent news was sure to set her wayward daughter even further apart from Josh, when having turned into the cross street she stopped – attracted by the photograph of a young girl who might have been Rachel – to read a flyer on a lamp post and realised that there was no chance she was going to make even the tail end of her class if she didn’t hurry, and that Bette would be wondering what had happened to her.

Reading the message: “Missing. Joanna
Katz-Rosenbaum
… graduate student at Long Island University…last seen in the vicinity of the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park…” Kitty became aware not through observation, she was too engrossed in her thoughts, but by a kind of tingling at the back of her neck that she had left the bustle of the avenues and the shop windows with their early winter displays behind her, and had entered a kind of no-man’s land of the underbellies of buildings and bursting garbage cans. She couldn’t understand where everyone had suddenly disappeared to. It seemed she was almost alone among the
dank shabby brownstones and conscious suddenly of feeling, apart from very wet, very isolated, very small. The street was not long and at the far end she could see the criss-crossing movement of the traffic. She tucked her handbag into the bend of her elbow and hurried on.

She wasn’t sure when she first saw them. At one moment there seemed to be no one about and the next she was advancing towards a corrugated, graffiti-covered hoarding, against which lolled three youths, one in a white suit with matching cap and two in sweatshirts, who were watching her approach. In a moment of déjà vu she knew exactly what was going to happen, although she told herself that it was not. She had faced the situation before in her nightmares, waking cold with terror to find that there had been no nocturnal prowler, no loaded gun pointed in her direction, and that she was safe. She tried to concentrate upon her thoughts of Rachel and the new grandchildren she was expecting – the three new grandchildren – but they would not come in any recognisable pattern and she took a step, Rachel, a step, Carol, a step, Sarah. She wished Josh were here, or Bette, or Maurice whom she had promised that she would always take a cab. Perhaps one would come along – a car, anything, even a person, an everyday pedestrian, a human being going about his business.

The youths, heads protected from the rain by baseball caps, were about twenty yards away and although they watched her timorous progress towards them, only their mouths moved, rotating rhythmically. She told herself that she was being foolish, but her imagination had never been fertile and she knew what she knew. She glanced to one side. In England there were always welcoming houses with their garden paths, small shops run by friendly Asians. The backs of the moist buildings stared blankly. Her legs moved, one after the other, but she did not move
them. She was aware of the proximity of the young men but kept her gaze on the decreasing distance to the end of the street and did not look at them. She remembered, as a child, closing her eyes and thinking herself invisible because she had them shut! Perhaps they couldn’t see her. Perhaps she was too small. Against the towering buildings, between their peeling pillars, she felt like Alice in Wonderland when she’d drunk the potion, minute.

She was almost level with the hoarding against which the three youths lounged, staring at her; she could hear the beat of her heart but not the fall of her feet. She wondered if she had forgotten about God, who must be here amongst the rusty railings, the uneven paving stones, and found herself in extremis addressing him. She apologised for not waiting for a cab as she had promised Maurice, for being so foolish, for not listening to Josh who had told her a hundred times to take care in New York (a city renowned for its violence), and for thinking that the criminal acts which took place were directed towards other people, towards satisfying the requirements of the statisticians, and that they couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her. She tried to remember the words of the shema, the universal prayer of Jews used thrice daily and in distress, but could get no further than the first words although she had known it by heart since she had been a child, had learned to
pronounce it before she had memorised her nursery rhymes, to lisp its syllables before she could even read.

“Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be his name, whose glorious kingdom is for ever and ever. And thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy might…” She had certainly done her best although since Sydney’s death she had been slipping a bit. “…And these words which I command thee this day shall be upon thine heart: and thou shall teach them diligently to thy children…” She had done that all right, or rather Sydney had. He’d been as strict with Rachel and Carol as he had with Josh – not that it had done any good in Rachel’s case, she had no time for the religion. Maybe when she had a child of her own she’d change her views…

From the corner of her eye she could see the sweatshirts and the white suit, all of which looked as if they could do with a wash. If she survived the next few seconds she would survive. Maurice would have known what to do. He had survived the concentration camps. He was a survivor. Kitty had never been put to the test.

Until it came to the crunch you never knew how you were going to react in a given situation. Often you surprised yourself. Some years ago she had been having pains in her stomach and Lennie Silver, who was their family doctor and had looked after them all for years, had sent her to have an X-ray. They’d taken a couple of pictures then the radiographer had frowned and told her to get up off the table. “We’ve seen enough, Mrs Shelton. We don’t need to keep you any longer,” and she’d gone home and pruned the roses (they were still in Hendon then) with the tears pouring down her face wondering whether Sydney would marry again and how Josh and Carol and Rachel were going to manage without her. She
had thought herself philosophical when it came to her own mortality but she had been scared out of her wits at what she thought was the prognosis, desperately lonely and afraid. As it turned out she had been eating too many peaches (she never could digest stoned fruit) and a course of anti-spasmodics had seen her right as rain.

The young men were strung out in front of the graffiti (she could just make out a few of the words which were not very polite), standing quite still as if they had been pinned like butterflies against the corrugated iron. Kitty tried not to look, neither to the right nor the left, but straight ahead as she drew level with the trio. “Keep going,” she told herself, “just keep going.” As she passed the watchers she felt a pull, as of a current, drawing her towards them (although it was ridiculous), and that as the only human beings within sight they must, were destined to, make contact. She kept her eyes on their sneakers, each pair more disreputable than the last. The six laced feet, at bizarre angles at the ends of nonchalantly crossed legs, did not move. She counted them silently. One…two… She was level with them now. Three…four… She had been stupid after all, how Bette would laugh when she told her of her fears.

There was a movement beside her, towards her, she tried to hurry but seemed to be suspended between the buildings, reviewing her life although she knew that it was over.

“Pardon me, Ma’am.” The white suit confronted her, blocking her path, but she knew that the others were behind her.

“Do you have any idea of the time?”

Time.

Time.

She had been silly.

They only wanted to know the time.

She looked at the watch with its gold bracelet which Sydney had given her for their last wedding anniversary. She squinted at its tiger’s eye face.

“Five past nine.”

The aerobics class started sharp at eight-thirty to accommodate the working pupils – in this town women such as herself, without careers, were almost invisible – she was certainly going to be late.

“Five parst nine!” The youth who towered over her imitated her accent. Perhaps she wasn’t going to get away so quickly after all. She felt something cold against her throat and recognised, weak with fear now, the blade of a knife.

“I don’t want to have to use this,” a menacing voice drawled. He wasn’t kidding. The man in front of her reached for her watch, pulling at it and hurting her wrist. If he’d waited a moment she would have given it to him. A watch was a watch, it was not so important. He tugged, his black fingers with their ragged nails against her pale skin. She opened her mouth to scream with the pain of the twisting, burning flesh but an unpleasant hand covered her mouth from behind, and the sound subsided into a stifled sob as, surprising herself, she fought to hold on to her handbag with her passport, her little bit of England, and for breath.