The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  Conrad mentioned the letter to the Manchester Guardian that had so upset Mendel: Some of your husband's friends were worried about that letter. Liselotte said, When I met him in 1975, Mr Mendel said that he now believed that Axel wrote that letter because he wanted to deceive the Nazis. And literally what Axel wrote was true: where he was working as a prosecutor, he saw no discrimination against Jews in 1934. But, as you know, he tried to withdraw the letter the day after he sent it. Mr Mendel said that as a Jew he had felt that it was impossible for Axel to have written that letter without compromising himself. But he wrote to Axel in 1939, saying that he would always regard him with the warmest affection. Everyone always loved Axel, she said. And Caroline said, I think the Oxford friends thought that Oxford was, how you say, the centre of the universe. My father loved Oxford, yes, but Germany came the first.

  Conrad was invited to supper in the vaulted dining room. Liselotte had gone to bed. He ate with Caroline and some solemn Christians; it seemed they were subdued, still stunned by the murder of Christ, the Nazis, the beastliness of the human race, their closeness to an authentic martyr. He slept that night under a stag's head in the local inn, the Schwarzer Bock.

  But he knew that families cannot be fully trusted: they manufacture their own myths. He didn't tell them that the film of von Gottberg being hanged, naked, might still exist.

  PART ONE

  1

  WHO ASKED YOU?

  Difficult question. Nobody and everybody. What Francine meant was why did he think he had some obligation or right to rummage about collecting - not a very systematic collection -ideas? She said he was like a shoplifter in a supermarket. What she meant too was that he lived in a chaotic state, constantly picking up ideas rightfully belonging to other people — and other contexts - and trying to take them home. There was a certain portion of truth in her charges. She also implied — in fact she actually said it that night — that he had no ideas of his own.

  'That's nonsense, of course,' he said, foolishly imagining he was being asked to contribute to an entertaining theoretical discussion. 'To understand ideas, to be interested in ideas, you have to have ideas.'

  'Here's an idea: why don't you get a job?'

  'I'm working on Mendel's papers.'

  'Are you?'

  'Yes, I am.'

  'And what does that work consist of?'

  'Research, reading.'

  'Oh, I see. And who is paying for this research?'

  'You know the answer. But remember, we very nearly had a TV deal. And there are still people interested.'

  'Your life so far has been a series of nearlies. I've got some hot news for you: no one is interested in E.A. Mendel. He had an idea in 1953 but nobody can remember what it was. That's why the publishers aren't giving you any more money and that's why the TV deal got nowhere and why nobody wants your film version of his story. Of course I am not in the creative world, but even I know what goes on at the cinema: morons eat popcorn while watching cars exploding and aliens turning into spinach. They don't want some bollocks about the history of ideas.'

  When Francine was angry she developed a kind of torrential force that could not be stopped. He watched her with admiration as she gathered herself. He had the feeling that he had written the script for her, but he had no hand in the delivery. Sometimes she started quietly, inviting him to say something provocative. At other times she wanted to deliver a peroration without contradiction, as though she had already run through the early charges and was now simply summing up for the benefit of the jury. A not very intelligent jury. He knew that she had a desire for certainty, for the incorrigible proposition. And this made it very hard for her to live with someone as unformed as he was. For a while she had called him the questing vole, but that was while she still found him amusing. Now she thought his curiosity was an excuse, a form of evasion.

  Her face, with its seeping medical tiredness, had a high, feverish colour now, siphoned from the depths by resentment. Her eyes were cloudy, the way they used to be during sex, as if her anger had produced a flash of blindness, like looking at the sun, and her throat was becoming pink and russet, and slightly mottled — mushroom colours and textures. The violence of her feelings towards him was causing this discoloration. Mushrooms have a strange and mysterious life cycle, much of it underground. And on the surface Francine appeared calm, although the fungal colour was becoming more intense.

  'Conrad, I go out every morning at seven, I return home at seven - if I'm lucky - I've been peering at samples and slides, I have even seen a few patients, I have grabbed ten minutes to eat a piece of microwaved pizza in the canteen, and you have been reading the letters and ramblings of a long-forgotten — rightly in my opinion — Oxford don, who knew just how to flatter you by talking of your human qualities. And, guess what, the marmalade is exactly where you left it at breakfast.'

  The charges were true. But his alleged human qualities seemed to Conrad to be important, if still unclear.

  Francine continued: 'I have decided to leave you. I can't live like this. I need some support.'

  At the time she surprised him with her resolve. A few months later she said that she had been seeing another man, the consultant who was her boss, a man very highly regarded in obstetrics. He had recruited her to his team. He was fifty-one years old, sixteen years older than her. That word 'seeing' troubled him. He found it hard to believe that it meant fucking. It was too brutal. He had hung around outside the hospital for a few days and once had seen them leaving together. (He had plenty of time to observe the disordered comings and goings of the patients while he was waiting.) What had surprised him was that he was not present in their lives. Somehow he had imagined that Francine and John would be crippled by the knowledge of him, that his spectral form would be visible between them, that they would be slipping away nervously, alarmed by the foolishness of their actions; but no, they walked happily down the front steps of the hospital in Whitechapel and linked hands as they turned down a side street. What hurt him most was that she appeared happy, carefree, girlish. Even her hair seemed to have acquired new vivacity.

  In another context, John might have looked to him like any other decent, utterly unremarkable English professional man, but here, leaving the hospital with Conrad's wife, he had princely qualities. Here, he was a man known and admired for his pioneering work on the incontinence in women caused by childbirth. Francine was a suitable tribute for his achievements.

  She tried to dress up her defection as a gift from her to Conrad:

  'I have a career, my career path is more or less fixed now, but you, you still have some growing up to do. I realised you didn't want to be tied in this way. I am sure you will see it for the best in time.'

  She always needed to tidy things up mentally, as if by naming them they were settled. It was — he thought - a scientific habit: taxonomy applied to the emotional life.

  'With my human qualities still unexplored.'

  'What?'

  'What you said about me and Mendel.'

  'Yes,' she said impatiently. 'You and your human qualities.'

  It was clear that she had come to this meeting determined to be brief and final. Her neck coloured again anxiously at the delay.

  'In medicine, we don't have enough time to investigate human qualities. We are too busy with human beings, in person.'

  'And is John leaving his wife?'

  'That's our business.'

  'Is he too old to have more children?'

  'Jesus, you can be offensive.'

  'We were going to have a child, remember?'

  'We were. But I had to delay, remember, when I got the research job and you found - what a surprise - that you weren't earning as much as you expected when you went freelance.'

  'Well, you're fine now as long as wifey doesn't take all his money.'

  'I'm glad you said that, because you've reminded me that underneath all that airy-fairy charm you are just a vicious little prick. People like you who sneer at honest endeavour
and science and actually doing something for people, while reading the fucking Guardian and having an opinion on everything, from politics to football, to, I don't know, immigration and the Iraq War, without really having any in-depth knowledge of any sort, are the real worry for this country. Anyway, now you can go and explore your human qualities in depth and at leisure.'

  Francine asked him to leave as soon as the flat was sold - as she said, a free spirit can operate anywhere.

  Mendel and von Gottberg had gone to Palestine for three weeks in the winter of 1933; he decided to follow in their footsteps. He took a loan on his credit card. He was encouraged by the fact that the surrealists advocated depaysement, the policy of uprooting yourself from your home country, to increase your sensitivity and understanding, qualities he was clearly in need of. Although he could only afford a week of depaysement, it seemed to him a good moment to go. The seventeen boxes of papers, which he had arranged and re-arranged and tried to catalogue, reproached him with his lack of progress. The problem was that he was looking at the letters for a kind of meaning, some hints from Mendel to him, perhaps some clues to his own destiny.

  Actually he found that it wasn't that easy to go to Israel without friends or letters of introduction. The Israeli agents at the airport questioned him closely about his motives and his intentions. He explained that he was going on holiday but that made them suspicious. He stood for half an hour with his baggage, which earlier an excitable dog had okayed, while they made phone calls. With reluctance they allowed him to proceed. At Tel Aviv the plane landed to some rousing folk music; there they questioned him again and asked him to list the people he was seeing. There was only one, a film-location manager whose name he had been given. The agents particularly wanted to know if he had friends on the West Bank. They wore sunglasses on the tops of their closely shaved heads, giving the impression that office work bored them, that they would prefer to be vigorously employed outside. And this, he thought, is what has happened out here in the Levant, as Mendel described it: Jews have become outdoorsy people.

  The Mediterranean, lapping the town, was unexpectedly glamorous, but Tel Aviv had a rackety, half-planted feel and he remembered what Mendel had written:

  I have realised — it was a true revelation — that I have a kinship with these strange Levantines, who are like relatives one hasn't seen for twenty years. They make me uneasy, even afraid. German Jews, who are arriving by the thousand, are going mad at the disorder, seeking bus timetables. They cannot believe that the buses do not depart on time, if they arrive at all. Axel finds the food oily. It is oily, but I have convinced myself that it is my ancestral cuisine. I eat on bravely.

  Conrad took a shared taxi to Jerusalem and he found himself looking closely at the other passengers, remembering Mendel's description of the people as odd and fascinating. Some were backpackers from New York's suburbs, he guessed, the girls wearing little squares of cloth on their heads to indicate a willingness to muck in with the harvest and an eagerness to embrace the spiritual challenges ahead. There were English Hasids, the men strangely abstracted as though this earth, this taxi bus, these numerous children, these wives with the chestnut wigs and full fecundity, were in a way not fully present, unavoidably inhabiting the same space, but ephemeral, shadows cast by their husbands' radiance.

  By the time the taxi van had reached a mountain pass, he wondered how the soft pale people from North London and the eager backpackers saw the landscape outside, now turning from the coastal plain to a tumultuous upland littered with the painted shells of armoured cars, left — he discovered — as a reminder of the war of 1948. What did they see in these tortured, pumice rocks and grudging trees and steep, parched valleys? Did they see a land of milk and honey, a landscape that had been deep in the race memory all through the diaspora, or did they see, as Mendel did, an unfamiliar and unnerving otherness?

  Conrad himself knows that you can hold at the same time different landscapes in your head - or in your fibres - for instance, the broad openness of Africa and the distilled beauty of Oxford. He also finds himself seeing John and Francine conversing about bladders and urine samples in the lab and then, back in the little flat John has taken, he sees the warm strawberry rash rising up her throat as John, with the scientific and practical qualities, so different from his own which are essentially meaningless, removes his scrubs and reveals his highly meaningful self to his research student, who has now forgotten for ever that she is married to Conrad. He feels a sharp pain, as though he has in some way been erased, his very existence questioned. And he wonders how the lovers can reconcile the madness of sex with the scientific life. The answer - the Orthodox children with their insane side-locks seem to have been put here to illustrate his train of thought — is that we are not wholly rational, and never will be.

  To prepare himself for this trip and to think about something other than Francine and John in Whitechapel, he has read Amos Oz's autobiography. Oz's mother was never able to adapt to the landscape; goose-girls and deep resinous forests were more real to her than Arab shepherds and olive trees. In Jerusalem with the blinding white rocks and the thin soil, she felt lost: eventually she killed herself, leaving the eleven-year-old Amos. And maybe this is what Mendel meant when he described the country as strange and his kinship with the people who had been Levantised as unsettling, even frightening.

  And Conrad sees Mendel, small and plump, with the tall, thin von Gottberg, approaching Jerusalem and he wonders exactly what thoughts assaulted them, because Jerusalem is a city like no other, a city that attracts the irrational and the mystic and the fanatic, as if there are certain loci on this earth that exhale some of the vapours of human longing that have been breathed on them over the millennia. Once Conrad heard wild bees in a cleft in a rock in Africa, and the fanning of the wings and the diligent murmuring suggested some message, like the intimations of music, which came from beyond the rational. Jerusalem is the world capital of the irrational, with longing and loss and despairing hope to boot.

  And into this place - they arrive on donkeys from Transjordan — come Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg. Even on a donkey it is clear that von Gottberg is born to ride. Whereas Mendel has only once ridden - coincidentally on a donkey - on the beach in Bournemouth. In the photograph of the event, the donkey wears a straw hat and the infant Mendel is holding an ice cream. He wears a sailor top and small black spectacles, so that he looks like a bee, a Jewish bee. Mendel tells friends gleefully that on the outskirts of Jerusalem they were stoned by Orthodox Jews. Von Gottberg's feet, in calfskin boots, are almost trailing in the powdery dust.

  Outside the King David Hotel where they are staying, a photographer captures them. Mendel is smiling, a smile that Conrad recognises across sixty years. It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse of the surrounding features. Von Gottberg has his arm around Mendel's shoulder: some way behind them is the stone fagade of the hotel, and behind that a glimpse of the Old City. In this photograph they look as though they have been posed for Nazi propaganda, the tall, athletic, aristocratic Count Axel von Gottberg, of Pleskow, and the smaller, softer Elya Mendel, of Hampstead, who could be thought by the ill-disposed, from his complicit smile, to have cabalistic knowledge. Conrad knows that look, intensely curious, half-amused, expecting something entertaining to happen, as happy to hear gossip as a new idea. Conrad is staying in the old Petra Hotel, not far away, but he ventures into the King David to get the fabled view of the Old City from the terrace.

  The Old City glows in the late-afternoon light. It is not obviously a Jewish city: he can see churches and the Dome of the Rock and beyond that the cemeteries rising above the Garden of Gethsemane and up the Mount of Olives. The walls are mainly Ottoman with some Crusader sections, but the stones were quarried near by and re-used after every conquest, so that this city -viewed from above the swimming pool from which the voices of children are rising - is as no other city he has ever seen, semaphoring significance. And this is t
he pattern: ideas and creeds are now represented by unheeding stones as the ends of human longing. For two thousand years - longer if you count the Mesopotamian diaspora - the Jews have held this landscape in their minds. But over there, pulsing, is the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammed ascended on a horse for his Night Ride to Mecca, and beyond that on a hill is the spot where Jesus ascended into heaven, and then beyond that the hills of the Judaean Desert, which seem to have a separate illumination, so that they are pale and bleached, with the dark shapes of clouds - the clouds themselves are not visible - moving swiftly like airships over the landscape.

  And Conrad thinks that here in the Holy Land Mendel and von Gottberg may already have been aware of some sort of historical juncture in the relationship between Germans and Jews. On the one hand the aggrieved and resentful Germans were being offered a Faustian deal by Hitler and on the other the rawly human but vulnerable Jews were arriving here in their confused thousands, on the move again. But they could not have had more than an inkling of the nightmare that was to come.

  Von Gottberg's letters show that he was always keen for Mendel's approval: Mendel was the same age as von Gottberg, but seems to have arrived, like an egg, fully formed into the world and, strangely for a young man, to have come equipped with a serenity and wisdom. Conrad wonders if von Gottberg resented, at a deep Germanic level, Mendel's urbanity and his protean - Jewish - qualities. Von Gottberg's family had lived in the same pile for six hundred years, while Mendel's had arrived in England via Riga and St Petersburg only nineteen years earlier.

  As Conrad walks down to the Jaffa Gate and into the Old City, he finds himself under siege. He is entering a city out of an orientalist's sketchbook, with spice stalls and pushcarts and shops selling nuts and feral vegetables and parched herbs and chunks of meat; Bedouin women sit gloomily with isolated tomatoes spread on cloths, and then a group of Orthodox priests passes, plump from the devotion of crones, and young boys rush about with beaten-copper trays of tea and Palestinians are sitting at a table attached to a hookah, and now some Jews in fedoras with threads of the tallith underneath their overcoats come sightlessly by, and Arab children are buying candyfloss in colours that do not exist in nature, and then Conrad enters a long tunnel of tiny cave-shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and he stops for a mint tea in a courtyard that leads off the teeming street. He sees Mendel and von Gottberg here, Mendel eagerly listening out for traces of Aramaic and Russian and von Gottberg trying to estimate what point in history this overwhelmingly aromatic and exotic place has reached and Mendel fascinated by the sense he has -or is acquiring - that human objectives can easily be in conflict. As if to prove the point, German Jews are sniffing vegetables fastidiously, resisting Levantisation from inside their Bavarian jackets and loden coats. Conrad sips his mint tea - a large bunch of mint thrust into the pot - and wonders what it was like to be here without the knowledge of what was to come. The knowledge that has made us.