Ishmael's Oranges (18 page)

‘It's just more talk,' he said to Hassan. ‘They can't do a thing for us. Our lives are here now. Your children will grow up here, not in the Sinai.'

‘For now,' Hassan said, clapping him on the shoulder again. ‘But who knows? Anyway, so it's not a good time to be bringing home a Jew, that's all I'm saying.' Salim nodded. It seemed the easiest
way.

As they said their goodbyes, Hassan said, ‘Oh by the way
–
there's something else for you. Nadia thought I shouldn't give it to you, but she still thinks you're a little crybaby.'

He pulled a folded envelope out of his back pocket, grubby from a month of heat and pressing. Salim knew what it was instantly. The postage mark was from Lebanon, a stamp of green cedars against a red field.

It sent a memory through him like a knife, of his mother standing on the balcony in Nazareth with her letter and her secrets.
You died to me then, Mama. I mourned you years ago.
Seeing evidence of her now, alive somewhere, was like watching a ghost
rise.

Through the roaring of blood in his ears, he heard Hassan talking. ‘They heard about Baba's passing. Rafan writes that he couldn't come either
–
busy just like his clever brother Salim. But he sends his address and phone number and says you should pay him a visit. Plenty of girls in Beirut, you know. The sun is warmer there, and so are the women. Mama says hello too. For what it's worth.'

A week later, Jude turned nineteen
–
and Tony boasted he'd cajoled Alex into hosting a birthday dinner for her. The southern Golds, as Alex called them, could usually only stomach one Jewish gathering per season.

‘I told him you could be getting up to no end of trouble in this big
goy
world, bring shame upon the family unless we reined you in,' Tony said. ‘Besides, can you imagine your mama calling up and squalling that her
schmendrik
brother-in-law was ignoring her little
tchatzkah
and letting her run riot around town?' His voice rose to a pitch of horror.

‘Dora would never call me a treasure,' Jude grinned.

‘Aye aye. She knows you too well.'

The prospect of this birthday dinner cast the first shadow over her time with Sal. They had talked, briefly, about meeting each other's families. But she could not imagine marching into Alex's Regency home in Portland Place and introducing him as her… what? She didn't even know what he
was.

‘So he's not your boyfriend?' Ruth Michaels had asked her at the Jewish Society that day. Sal dropped her off on the way to see his brother, his lean arm over her shoulders and those dark eyes so alive and aware like a rich splash of colour on a dirty white page. He'd kissed her goodbye on the steps of the little flat in Manchester Square where the Jewish Society met. The place belonged to the chairperson, Ruth
–
a Jewish debutante who Tony insisted on calling
Bec
as he did with every Jew north of the river; he liked to claim, ‘I've never met a Hampstead Jew without being
shidduched
with his virgin daughter Rebecca.'

‘He's a friend,' she'd answered Ruth, and inside she'd thought with secret scorn:
my best friend – better than you, better than any of you
.

Salim returned from Hassan's with his face full of unshed tears. She thought it must be because of his father, or because of talking about home. Or because of her. ‘Is it because I went to the Jewish Society meeting?' she asked him, her chest tight with worry and remorse. She'd gone partly to see how he'd react. But he'd not even blinked
–
just kissed her goodbye saying, ‘Have a good time.'

Now he looked at her in astonishment, and said, ‘No, no. Not you. I had some unexpected news, but it's nothing.'

Then he sat back down and took her hand in his, cold and rough after the day. ‘My Jude,' he said, raising her hand to his eyes as if they hurt him. ‘My Jude,' he said again. ‘I don't care where you go, as long as you come back to
me.'

How, then, was she going to break the news of the birthday party to which he was not invited? She waited until the last minute, on her birthday morning.

Blissfully unaware, he met her that morning in the coffee shop with a bunch of roses and a small box. The necklace inside was gold, broken by some curling letters that he said represented her name spelled out in Arabic. ‘Judith can mean
God be praised
,' he said, ‘I looked it up. This is
God be praised
in Arabic, because it's how I feel from knowing
you.'

Jude was deeply moved
–
as he was, she could tell, by the flaws in his usually perfect English.

‘It's beautiful,' she said, holding it to her
neck.

‘I know you love your grandmother's chain. But I hope there's a place for this one
too.'

‘There is,' she said, swamped by the backwash of emotions.

Then, while the tide was still in full flood, she said, ‘Sal, my uncle has invited me for a birthday dinner this evening. I can't get out of it. It's just the family.'

He looked taken aback, but then resigned. ‘And I guess I don't qualify as family, right?'

‘You're not missing anything, believe me,' she said, grasping his hand. ‘Tomorrow we can go out together.'

‘Right, but…' He took his hand out from under hers, and sat back in the chair. ‘How long does this go on for? Are we pretending to our families, or pretending to ourselves?'

‘What do you mean?' Jude asked, even though she knew exactly.

‘You don't tell your family you have an Arab boyfriend. I don't tell mine I have a Jewish girlfriend. We don't sleep with each other, to make it all true. Where does this go, in the
end?'

Jude felt helpless. She could hear Rebecca scolding her.
Be brave. Be a mensch
. She raised her eyes to his in appeal and he straightened up in exasperation.

‘Okay, okay, you goose,' he said. ‘Forget it for today. Go to your party and have a great birthday. I'm sure you'll have
so
much fun without me.' His voice was light but his smile was strained, and as Jude leaned over to kiss her reassurance, her eyes closed, shutting it
out.

The party was a nightmare. Alex had not thought to ask any of Jude's friends. Instead, it was a Pesach reprieve
–
silverware, candelabras and diamonds pinching the folds of ageing white necks.

The conversation veered away from Jude's age, her studies and her father's health within a matter of minutes. It then plunged straight into a spitting rant about the coming war with the Arab world.

‘What Mr Eshkol needs is a bomb, like Truman had,' one said, his lips wobbling in indignation. ‘He's
putzing
around on the phone with President Johnson and the United Nations,' he continued, spitting over his left shoulder, ‘while the Arabs are talking about blood this and annihilation that, cutting off our shipping and shooting over our borders… if we had the bomb, believe me, it wouldn't go this
way.'

‘There goes Stanley,' Alex smiled, his freckled scalp gleaming under thin silver hair. ‘Always wanting to put the bigger boot
in.'

‘Oh come on, Alex.' Stanley's wife was deftly stabbing the other side of the chopped liver. ‘You know it's the same old story. They couldn't kill us in 'forty-eight. They tried again in 'fifty-six. Now they think Nasser is giving them another chance. When does it
end?'

‘I don't buy this rivers of blood business,' Alex replied, raising a forkful of chicken breast to his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. ‘I mean, what are the Arab leaders going to say to the peasants? Okay, blood, blood
–
blood, but no
beystsim
, no balls.' He winked at Jude. ‘They haven't got the armies to wipe us out. It's all banging on the table.'

‘Four Arab armies against Israel, and you don't think it's a threat? Not to mention the Arabs inside Israel, the fifth column. We'll be fighting outside and inside unless we take the first step. We'll never be safe without the Sinai and the West Bank, and the Arabs inside under control.'

Jude shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The Arabs inside. That was Sal. She thought of his sadness, the many things he'd told her and the silences that hid other stories he couldn't bear to tell. What could these people possibly know about
him?

She sat up and took a breath. ‘Maybe there are other things we could do instead to protect Israel,' she said. ‘Like
–
if only the Arabs inside Israel were treated fairly, if there was real justice for them, maybe that would be something. It could help for making peace with the rest of the Arabs.' Her voice came out louder than she expected.

The rest of the table looked at her
–
even Tony. Someone laughed. The woman whose name she couldn't remember pointed her fork at Jude. Yellow pearls dangled from her drooping earlobes, as if her ears were melting and dripping down her shoulders.

‘Is this communism, young lady?' she said. ‘Alex, your niece is a communist. It's all free love and peace for you young people today, isn't
it?'

‘I'm not a communist,' Jude retorted. ‘You don't have to be a communist to believe in fairness. Not all Arabs want Israel to vanish. They were hurt too, they lost their homes and their families.'

‘You kids don't know from Moses,' Stanley boomed. ‘I'm very sorry for the poor bloody Arabs but they brought it on themselves. They had every chance for peace, again and again. Half the country, their own government
–
they could have had it all. Every time their leaders threw it back in our faces. We turned that desert into a garden, gave them proper water, hospitals, schools, roads! In return they shoot at innocent people, cut our trade off and threaten to annihilate us, to finish what the Nazis started. So tell me who's being unfair
now?'

‘They kicked the United Nations peace force out of the Sinai so that no one would be there to witness it,' his wife said, her words tumbling smoothly out over his. ‘And when the Egyptians and their Nasser close the Red Sea to us, we'll be bottled up like fish in a
jar.'

‘It was our land to begin with,' another elegant, eager voice said at the back of the room
–
a lawyer, Jude remembered. ‘Our ancestral land, a gift from God. At the end of the day the man who doesn't believe in that can't really call himself a
Jew.'

Fury filled her, beyond anything she'd known since the moment she'd turned her back on Peggy's front door. She knew they were wrong in her heart, from her time with Sal, from his human doubts against their diamond-hard certainties. But she couldn't find the words to tell them exactly
how
they were wrong, and what the truth might
be.

As the conversation spun beyond her again, she caught Tony's eye at the end of the table. He gave her a reassuring smile but all she could think was
you never said a word. You're happy to be one of them. You're clever but you're not a mensch
. And she gave him her sweetest smile
back.

The BBC World Service woke Jude up on the morning of the fifth of June, to prove Alex's friends exactly right about one thing at least. The Israelis would strike first. Egypt had an even ruder awakening, when the boys and girls of the Israeli Air Force flew their Dassault Mirages over the border and dropped tarmac-penetrating tonnage on the heads of sleeping Egyptian planes.

A few hours later, Jude heard that Jordan had shelled Israel and Israeli bombs were now falling on Jordanian airstrips. The Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem were rising. Israeli troops were poised on the border of the West Bank. Blood was being shed in the streets
–
Arab against
Jew.

They'd only spoken twice since her birthday party, each conversation a hurried set of excuses, a mere shadow of the closeness she'd thought they had. But that day she stayed in her room and waited for him, her windows closed against the world outside.

The smells of the student halls crept through the cracks under her door
–
brown, dirty notes of burned toast, wet clothes and cheap beer filling her nostrils. She'd never noticed them before, but now they were hateful, the stink of the smallness of ordinary lives.

She waited
–
for Salim to come to her, to rage and shout like Stanley about the blood-hungry Jews and their murderous guns. And she tried to remember what they'd said at the party about having no choice, having tried for peace again and again, about Arabs bringing it on themselves.

He didn't come that day, nor the next. She began to imagine that their time together had been a fantasy. Each evening, the corridor was full of footsteps and laughter, the shrieks of people on their way out to bars, to the pictures. The sounds turned into an ache inside her. She tried to call him; the telephone rang and rang, until she hung up. For the first time she tasted the sourness of jealousy burning in her stomach.

But on the fourth day of fighting he
came.

Jude had arrived home from class, switched on the radio and prepared to shut out another day. Turning on the tap, she brought a handful of lukewarm water to her face, pressing her eyes and feeling the wasteful patter of drops onto the rug. The BBC's monotone filtered through her wet fingers. Israeli soldiers were nearly victorious
–
they were rolling through Palestinian streets in the newly conquered West Bank and Gaza; the burning desert of the Egyptian Sinai was theirs, and the stony hills of the Syrian Golan.