The Mandelbaum Gate (5 page)

‘See
here, Barbara,’ said her grandfather at Golders Green a few hours later, ‘these
are the bitter herbs which signify our affliction in Egypt….’ He enumerated
the items on the Seder table, the eggs, the cake, the paschal lamb.

She was
familiar with the scene from previous Seder nights, but her grandfather,
knowing she had not been formally instructed and had no Hebrew, was careful
each year to explain everything. There was always a great deal she was ignorant
of, which the other grandchildren, her cousins, took for granted. But she recognized
the excitement of this Feast when, as a child, she and the other children had
sat up late with their elders at the exotic table, every face shining with
candlelight, every morsel of food giving a special sensation to her mouth, not
only because it tasted different from ordinary food, but because on this night
every morsel stood for something else, and was food as well. The children drank
wine and deliverance with it…. The unleavened bread, crisp matzho that made
crumbs everywhere, was uncovered. ‘This is the poor bread which our fathers ate
in the land of Egypt.’ Barbara had understood from her fifth year that it was
not actually the same wafery substance, here on the table at Golders Green,
that had been baked by the Israelites on the first Passover night, and yet, in
a mysterious sense, it was: ‘This is the bread which our fathers ate …’

‘This
is the night,’ said her grandfather, an unageing man, to Barbara, now so
conscious of having turned sixteen, ‘when we give thanks to God for our
ancestors’ redemption. He split the sea for us and we passed over on dry land.’
She listened, as if she had not heard it before, while her cousins, now grown
old, between eighteen and twenty-one years of age, took their places. Like
herself, they had been recognizably intellectuals, with an additional bent for
music, before they had turned fifteen.

The
cousins, undergraduates in philosophy, law and medicine, were gathered in
purposeful concentration round the Seder table, where usually, on summer evenings
after supper when the table had been cleared, they leaned over the shiny wood
surface far into the night, loquacious on the subjects of Nietzsche, Freud,
Marx, Mussolini, Hitler, and the war impending. Now they were about to intone
in due order the responses on the subject of the Exodus from Egypt into the
Promised Land.

A small
dark girl of eight was present, a refugee orphan from Germany who had been
allotted to this family in the emergency parcelling-out of rescued children in
those late nineteen-thirties. Her eyes were wonderful pebbles in the
candlelight.

The
young men pushed back their skull-caps, for the room was warm with mesmeric
ritual as much as with actual heat.

It was
only a few months ago, in the Christmas holidays, that Barbara and these alert
young men, her cousins on the Jewish side, had reached the conclusion one
evening that agnosticism was the only answer, their atheist mentors having
erred on the dogmatic side. But here and now they were suddenly children of
Israel again, Barbara always included, because, after all, blood was blood, and
you inherit from your mother’s side.

In
former times, Barbara, being the youngest member of the Feast, yet knowing no
Hebrew, had repeated after her grandfather the euphonics of the question reserved
to the youngest of the company. But tonight the German child was repeating in
Hebrew the question:

Why is
this night different from all other nights?

It is
different, Barbara had thought. The elder Aaronsons hoped she would one day
marry a Jew, a doctor or a lawyer, somebody brilliant. They did not believe
that her Gentile relations could be particularly well-disposed towards her. As
for love, how could you expect it? The elder Aaronsons said, Barbara, bless
her, she’ll make a nice match in five, six years’ time. They felt she would
compensate for her intractable mother, who now never came to the family
gatherings but only wrote letters from Paris.

Her
grandfather intoned joyfully. He was in good voice. The very old Auntie Bea’s
rings twinkled on her moveless hand as the candles flickered in a little
draught. Michael, her closest friend among the cousins, for Barbara’s benefit,
murmured an English rendering of the versicle liturgy to the accompaniment of
his grandfather’s deep patriarchal boom, and the young men’s gruff responses:

If He had brought us out of
Egypt,

and not sent judgement upon them,

It would suffice us.

If He had sent judgement upon
them, and

not upon their gods,

It would suffice us.

If He had sent judgement on
their gods and

not killed their first born,

It would suffice us.

The
German child was following the Hebrew in her book with her forefinger, smiling
with recognition. Barbara felt proud of the child in a Jewish way, and
exchanged a glance to this effect with her young Aunt Sadie, who also glowed as
Jewish women do, with approval of intelligent and happy children.

If He had parted the waters for us, and

not let us pass through it on dry ground.

It would suffice us.

The
previous Sunday, at Bells Sands, Barbara had gone with Uncle Eddy’s two
children after church to roll their bright dyed Easter eggs in a dell at the
end of their woods, where she and her cousin Arthur had always rolled their
eggs as children. Was it only last Sunday? The scene pictured itself without
warning in Barbara’s mind, light-years away, and rapidly disappeared. Only last
Sunday, the end of Lent 1939? She had a sense of temporal displacement. The
Passover Feast was coming to an end. She heard the familiar lilt of the riddle
song, ‘One Kid’, from the lips of her lolling cousins. They were supposed to
loll. It was part of the ritual. Now, that was a thing her Vaughan grandmother,
who complained of backache each Sunday after church, she being one who made a
point of sitting up well, would never understand.

Afterwards
in the kitchen, the small child helped with the washing-up. Nobody would let
Barbara do a thing. All the women were anxious to spare her a job. It was
always the same here, at Golders Green. None of her aunts, or even the old
servant, would let her wash up. Now, seeing the pile of dishes, Barbara seized
a dean dishtowel from a rack where it was hanging.

Her
young Aunt Sadie attempted to take the cloth from her in a good-humoured way
but very firmly, and vaguely Barbara was aware of a lip-silence among the women
working and clattering among the plates and cutlery at the sink.

‘Hee-ee,
you’re not kosher.’ This was her youngest Aaronson cousin, Michael, standing at
the doorway of the kitchen, with his owl-like face, horn-rimmed glasses, wide
smile, red cheeks and Jewish nose.

His
young Aunt Sadie said, ‘Michael!’

Michael
spread his hands and hunched his shoulders, pretending to be very foreign. ‘Vot
you vont in my keetchin …

Young
Aunt Sadie said to Barbara, ‘We use different dishcloths for drying the plates.
Milk and meat are kept separate. We don’t eat both ‘together, that you know.
But we don’t wash them up together, either. We keep the towels separate.’

‘Vot
you expect?’ said Michael. ‘She is neither Yeed nor Goy ees mein cousin
Barbara.’ He put his arm round her shoulder. ‘She ees a bit milk and meat in
the same dish, vot you expect?’

‘Stop
it, Michael. He’s a clown, that boy,’ said young Aunt Sadie, busy with the
women. They kept pushing him tolerantly out of the way. Barbara, too, felt
cheerful about his presence in the kitchen. The younger generation in this
household were slightly more indulged than they were at Bells Sands, where all
affection was casual, unstated, understood more or less. Barbara, who at
Golders Green came in for a share of the unequivocal benevolence towards the
young and their capers, their demands, and their wild theories, was
automatically soothed by the tolerant atmosphere in the kitchen. But still, she
was not permitted to stack the dishes away, lest she stack them in the wrong places.

‘We’ve
got special dishes for the Passover. Everything separate. The usual plates and
things are not used during the Passover,’ said young Aunt Sadie, instructively,
to Barbara. Young Aunt Sadie tried to take the place of her mother, who, since
her father had broken his neck in a ditch, had married again, this time to a
Japanese embassy official, and lived in Paris; she was a very lost limb to the
Aaronsons.

Barbara
surrendered the washing-up to her relations, feeling her ignorance in these
matters to be an abyss of details. She was aware, too, that she would never
make an attempt to acquire the missing knowledge; there were too many other
things that she had resolved to learn. She looked at Sadie and said
resentfully, ‘I’ll never learn your ways, I’m afraid.’

‘Well,
you might learn some manners,’ said quick-tongued Aunt Sadie.

‘Sadie!
Sadie! She is, bless her, a child only,’ said the very old Auntie Bea.

Michael
said, ‘And she’s been eating ham sandwiches at her tennis party this afternoon.
Not kosher, that girl.’

‘Cucumber
sandwiches,’ said Barbara.

Old
Auntie Bea, who was always anxious to make the peace, and the syntax of whose
utterances was the joy of the younger generation, dried her plump fingers, and
nodding her head towards Barbara, said ‘Cucumbers! I have made yesterday
cucumbers in pickle, twenty. Thirty-six last week in the jars I have with
vinegar made, cucumbers.’

At Joppa, then, when
Barbara came to be leaning over the sea-wall, she said to Saul Ephraim, who
reminded her much of the Aaronson cousins of her youth: ‘My Gentile relations
tried too hard to forget I was a half-Jew. My Jewish relations couldn’t forget
I was a half-Gentile. Actually, I didn’t let them forget, either way.’

‘Quite
right. Why should you forget what you are?’ said Saul. ‘You were right.’

‘I know
that. But one doesn’t altogether know what one is. There’s always more to it
than Jew, Gentile, half-Jew, half-Gentile. There’s the human soul, the
individual. Not “Jew, Gentile” as one might say “autumn, winter”. Something unique
and unrepeatable.’

He
smiled as if he had heard it all before.

‘Then
why did you choose the Gentile side in the end?’

‘I didn’t
choose any side at any time.’

‘You
became a Catholic.’

‘Yes,
but I didn’t become a Gentile. It wouldn’t be possible, entirely, seeing that I’m
a half-Jew by natural birth.’

‘Well,
but look, Christianity’s a Gentile religion. It’s all the same to me, but it’s
a question of fact.’

Not
essentially. After all, it started off as a new ordering of the Jewish
religion.’

‘Well,
it’s changed a lot since then.’

‘Only
accidentally. It’s still a new order of an older firm.’

‘Did
you get your Catholic instruction from the Jesuits, by any chance?’ he said.

She
giggled. ‘Yes, in fact I did.’

‘I
thought so.’

‘You
can discredit the Jesuits but you can’t refute the truth.’

Well,
you can’t expect our population to make these distinctions. Catholic is
Gentile to them.’

‘Perhaps
I should hush it up while in Israel, that I’m a half-Jew by birth,’ she said.

‘You’d
be wiser to hush it up when you go over to Jordan. Here, you only risk an
argument, but there you might get shot.’

The wall on which she now
sat on the summit of Mount Tabor was part of an ancient fortress, the
foundations of which lay about five feet on the far side. Looking behind her she
could see the weedy floor of this excavated plot. In the self-absorption of the
hour, even this small rectangle of archaeology related itself to her life. She
recalled the dig at St Albans in Hertfordshire last summer. A Roman villa was
being excavated. Her cousin, Miles Vaughan, now married and living at St
Albans, took an active interest in the old Roman area of the city and always
entertained the archaeologists when they came in the summer to work on the
ruins. Barbara was intending to spend only a week with her cousin. She
prolonged her stay. She went down to the dig as a volunteer. Miles said one
day, ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ He said it in
an entirely jocular way, as one might say to a small boy, ‘My, you’re a big man!’
and Barbara was shaken by this. Miles had not for a moment realized how near
the truth he had struck. Neither he nor his wife, Kathy, apparently, had
noticed how dose her friendship with the archaeologist Harry Clegg had grown in
the past three weeks. They had simply ignored the evidence. ‘You’re causing a
scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ Barbara was stabbed by his tone of
voice. It affected her with a shock of self-recognition. She felt as if she had
caught sight of a strange face in the mirror, and presently realized that the
face was her own. Barbara understood then, that her self-image was at variance
with the image she presented to the world. She understood that, to them, she
was a settled spinster of thirty-seven, by definition a woman, but sexually
differentiated only by a narrow margin, sharp, clever, set in her ways, a
definite spinster, one who had embraced the Catholic Church instead of a
husband, one who had taken up religion instead of cats. It was this concept
that entitled Miles to tease her. ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara …’ But
Miles, a grown man … he was too innocent for words. She had looked at him.
Yes, he was joking. He gave her a little pat on the shoulder and went out to
the car.