The Mandelbaum Gate (3 page)

‘Oh
dear,’ said Freddy. He said, ‘Is it as serious as that?’

She
said, ‘Yes’

Won’t
you be going to join him in Jordan?’ Freddy said. He noticed she was pulling at
the fraying wicker, and felt a panic about where this conversation might lead;
he could see she was feeling strongly about something or other. He was afraid
she had some tiresome deep conviction.

She
said she would not go to Jordan at all if the news from Rome was against the
nullity of his previous marriage. She said she would never see the man again in
that case.

‘Oh
dear,’ said Freddy. He said, ‘What does your fiancé feel about this?’

‘Well,
of course, he feels it’s a bit unfair. He Isn’t a Catholic himself.’

‘It
does seem a bit unfair,’ said Freddy mildly. ‘It seems a bit extreme, when a
couple of grown-up people—’

‘Do you
know,’ said this passionate spinster in a cold and terrifying voice, ‘a passage
in the Book of the Apocalypse that applies to your point of view?’

‘I’m
afraid the Apocalypse is beyond me,’ Freddy said. ‘I’ve never had the faintest
clue what it’s all about. I can cope with the Gospels, at least some parts,
but—’

‘It
goes like this,’ she said, enunciating her words slowly, almost like a chant:

I know of thy doings, and find thee neither cold nor
hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm,
neither cold nor hot, thou wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth.

Freddy
did not reply. People should definitely not quote the Scriptures at one. It was
quite absurd.

Miss
Vaughan leaned back in her chair and drew her hand over her prim hair in a
relaxed way. Freddy remained silent.

First and last being long,
middle short, Amphimacer

Strikes his thundering
hoofs, like a proud high-bred racer …

Then
Freddy rose as one who had quietly closed a door and said, ‘I must go and get
off a bread-and-butter letter to my hostess before dinner.’

2.
Barbara Vaughan’s Identity

People should definitely
not quote the Scriptures at each other, thought Barbara Vaughan, regretting her
attack on Freddy — or rather, it had been a delayed counter-attack, but he
would probably not have recognized this devious fact.

People
who quoted the Scriptures in criticism of others were terrible bores and
usually they misapplied the text. One could prove anything against anyone from
the Bible. She regretted to the smallest detail her denunciation, from the
Apocalypse, of the cool Foreign Office man. In reality she greatly enjoyed the
regretting, because it excluded from her thoughts the other problems — the
vital ones which were, for the present, insoluble. To these her mind always
came round at length, as in a concerto when the formal recapitulation, the real
thing, wins through. But meantime she fiddled up and down the scales with the
ridiculous scene with Freddy last night in the courtyard.

She sat
on a low wall, regretting on and on and generally gathering strength, beside
the Basilica of the Transfiguration on the summit plateau of Mount Tabor. She
had hired a car for herself that morning, for she was tired of the travel
agency guides. They had plenty of good information to offer, but they offered
it incessantly. Through the length and breadth of the country the Israelis
treated facts like antibiotic shots, injecting them into the visitor like diligent
medical officers. Well, they were proud of their country, and she had no fault
to find with the facts as such. The tiring aspect of every journey she had made
throughout the past three weeks was the hard work involved in separating the
facts relevant to her point of view from those relevant to theirs.

The
facts relevant to her point of view: Barbara Vaughan’s intelligence had come to
maturity in the post-graduate tradition of a great university’s English
department. She had then applied herself to music, but too late to meet her own
exacting standards: she now no longer played the cello. By constitution of mind
she was inclined to think of ‘a Catholic point of view’ to which not all facts
were relevant, just as, in her thesis-writing days, she had selected the points
of a poem which were related only to the thesis. This did not mean that she had
failed to grasp the Christian religion with a total sense of its universal
application, or that she was unable to recognize, in one simple process, the
virtue of a poem. All it meant was that her habits of mind were inadequate to
cope with the whole of her experience, and thus Barbara Vaughan was in a state
of conflict, like practically everyone else, in some mode or another.

Like
practically everyone else — and she was one of those afflicted by her gifts.
For she was gifted with an honest, analytical intelligence, a sense of fidelity
in the observing of observable things, and, at the same time, with the
beautiful and dangerous gift of faith which, by definition of the Scriptures,
is the sum of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.

‘We approach Beersheba,’ a
guide had said on her first tour, shortly after her arrival in the country. ‘Look,
all this has sprung up in thirteen years.’

The
guides of Israel irritated Barbara largely for the reason, not altogether
obscure to her, that they were extremely virile men and yet were not the one
virile man whose proximity she wanted; they were not Harry Clegg, the
archaeologist at present working on the site of the Dead Sea excavations in
Jordan. She was disposed to resist the guides’ pronouncements from this cause
alone, . even if she had not the plain excuse to object continually, ‘I’ve
really only come on a pilgrimage. I really only want to see the ancient sites.
I’m really not interested in Scotch-tape factories.’

‘We
approach Beersheba.’

Suddenly,
as it seemed, from behind a few palm-trees Beersheba had appeared in a white
dazzle of modern blocks reaching down to the great desert waves of the Negev.
The desert lapped like a sea on the glittering strips of concrete that defined
Beersheba’s outlying blocks of flats.

Barbara
Vaughan said, ‘I’m really only interested in the Beersheba of Genesis.’

‘This
is the Beersheba of Genesis.’

They
drove slowly through the streets. Barbara looked from the houses to the desert,
and from the desert to the houses. Beersheba was the place where the patriarch
Isaac, blind in his old age, mistakenly gave his blessing to Jacob, who had
posed as his elder brother Esau. The old man, uneasy, felt the son’s hands and
arms, which were gloved in the hairy skin of a goat, and was taken in by the
disguise. ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob,’ said the old man. He felt the arms
and hands — ‘but the hands —’ The mighty blessing, once bestowed, was
irrevocable. Smooth Jacob, not tough, hairy Esau, got the spiritual inheritance
and took the place that the Lord had reserved for him among the Fathers of
Israel, such being the ways of the Lord in the Middle East. Barbara reflected
that God had not been to Eton. Jacob would have made a marvellous Jesuit … She
said, Well, only the desert and sky look in character, but I suppose it’s the
authentic site. I feel sleepy.’

‘This
is Beersheba, the birthplace of Jacob, the Father of the Twelve Tribes of
Israel. We have a new school for immigrants. To teach them trades and Hebrew. I
show you.’

The
modern town indeed had its own beauty. As they were driving hack through the
streets Barbara caught sight of a brass plate outside a dark glazed shop
doorway. It read Detective Agency.

‘What
do they want with a detective agency in a new town?’

‘Many
things. The last three, four years there have been maybe some divorces.
Population, thirty-two thousand. See, we have here a clinic with also an
extension.’

That was how it had been
since her arrival.

‘I’m
really interested essentially in the Holy Land.’

‘This
is the Holy Land.’

Saul
Ephraim, of course, had been the most sympathetic. He knew Harry Clegg. One
could relax with Saul. And once, when he advised her, ‘Be tough with these
official guides. Don’t let them bully you. Tell them you only want to see
places of antiquity. You can see modern housing estates and shopping centres
anywhere in the world,’ — for some reason she then replied, ‘It’s all antiquity
in the long run.’ The archaeologist had shrugged in his casual, Jewish way. ‘In
the long run!’ he said. ‘The modern flats won’t last as long as Herod’s
water-pipes have lasted.’

People
should definitely not quote the Scriptures at each other, thought Barbara, as she
sat on the wall up there at Mount Tabor. She looked down on the green and blue
of Galilee, while her mind gazed equally at the problems of years ago, of last
year, last week, yesterday, tomorrow.

Saul
Ephraim, her only real friend in this country, frequently brought to mind one
of her cousins in their student days, when they had lingered over the supper
table on long argumentative Sunday evenings at Golders Green, while the tall
flowers outside the french windows seemed to grow silent and more silent. She
was conscious of Saul Ephraim in this aspect as he spoke of Herod’s network of
sewers and water-pipes and told her how these had recently been turned to use
again by the new State. He was an unbeliever, well and accurately versed in the
Old and New Testaments, with a conscientious indifference to their relevance
outside the field of an antiquarian’s interest. This was a type of mind Barbara
could understand and cope with.

On the
occasion of his telling her to be tough with the guides, they had been at Jaffa,
where they leaned over the sea-wall, contemplating, as they talked, the old
harbour, which was too shallow to accommodate modern shipping. Some way behind
them stood the reputed house of Simon the Tanner, where the apostle Peter
lodged when he was fetched from Led to come and raise Dorcas from the dead. It
seemed the occupant nuns would not allow visitors on that day. Barbara again
experienced a feeling that had overcome her in the recent weeks, when she had
actually reached the site she was seeking: it was a feeling of abrupt
indifference, as when at Nazareth. she had taken great pains to find a shrine
entitled the ‘Mensa Christi’ — reputedly a slab of rock once used by Christ as
a table. She had climbed a long, hot hill from curiosity to see the object and
to find out what legend attached to it. But on arriving at the small building,
she had found it locked. Near by, a gnarled old Franciscan monk, the custodian,
sat dozing on a stone, the key in his hands. She did not trouble to approach
him. She did not by then possess sufficient interest in the ‘Mensa Christi’ to
do so.

So it
was at the house of Simon the Tanner at Jaffa. Saul had gone round to the back
door to try to gain admittance. She said, ‘Don’t bother. I’m not all that
interested,’ he gave up the attempt, with only one series of unanswered bangs
on the door.

They
had leaned over the sea-wall, surveying the ancient sea. Beside them was a
paved courtyard leading into some low-built dark doorways. A woman from the
interior screamed, then wailed, and finally emerged into the courtyard sobbing
loudly. She was an Arab girl wearing a tight, short Western dress, very
unkempt. She was upheld by two other women. Her dress was torn from her
shoulders. She had obviously been roughly treated. She was hurried by her two
women friends into another dark doorway. They were followed by two men, Arabs
in European clothes. One of the men stopped to look at Barbara. He seemed to
recognize her. His gaze caused her to take a special note of his face. He was
blue-eyed. Where had she seen him before? Was he the guide at Joseph’s Workshop
at Nazareth? The woman was wailing still from within the house.

‘I
think one of those men is a guide,’ she said to Saul when the blue-eyed Arab
followed the others.

‘You’ve
got guides on the brain. No, they aren’t guides,’ he said.

She
said, ‘Oh, of course, I remember. He’s the man who comes to see Mr Hamilton at
the hotel — a life-insurance agent.’

‘A
what?’ said Saul.

She
then remarked, without relevance, that the Scriptures were specially important
to the half-Jew turned Catholic. The Old Testament and the New, she said, were
to her — as near as she could apply to her own experience the phrase of Dante’s
vision —’bound by love into one volume’. Then, perceiving that Saul Ephraim was
giving serious thought to what she had said, she gave a timid English laugh,
and added that of course she realized one could make a fetish of the
Scriptures.

She had hired a car early
that morning and had driven northward through the Judean hills to Galilee. The
scene with Freddy Hamilton resembled an alcoholic hang-over. On the way, she
began to feel a sense of her own identity, and realized that this was in fact
what she bad begun to lose amongst the answers she had been obliged to devise
to the questions of Israelis since her arrival in the country. She recalled
that day she had been driven by a guide along the road to Caesarea … It was
eleven in the morning: