The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  'I am over it now, I think. The book is my therapy.'

  'I met Dr Freud once, a very strange man.'

  'Gosh, you have met everybody. Why is he strange?'

  'Sorry, I tend to blurt things out when I am excited. After five minutes he proclaimed, "I see you are not a snob."

  'Why?'

  'I don't know. Perhaps he has psychic powers. Please tell me more about your book.'

  'I'm finding it very hard to write because I am not sure if the life that interests me will interest other people.'

  'May I read it? Do you have it here?'

  'I've only got a few chapters typed. In my bag. I carry them everywhere. It comforts me.'

  'Will you let me read them?'

  'I would be honoured, actually, if you would.'

  The village, Silwan, is very simple. These Arab villages appear to be slowly falling down, roughly at the same speed as other parts of them are being built. A mosque, with a pencil-slim minaret, stands in the middle of the dusty, crumbling houses with cool dark interiors. They have tea and coffee in a courtyard served under a cypress tree out of the cold wind. Elizabeth is wearing a straw hat, tied around the crown with a huge floppy pink bow: the brim spreads extravagantly on one side and hangs over her eyes, so that when she talks to von Gottberg she has to raise her face slightly, which, Mendel sees, is done in a consciously provocative way. Both the women have shining waved hair, and their eyes are made up to look wide and expectant.

  'Shall we leave them?' Mendel asks.

  'All right. Elizabeth, let's meet up again at the King David for a cocktail. We'll meet you at six or so. Elya is going to teach me how to speak everyday Hasmonean.'

  'Toodle-oo,' Elizabeth says, and turns back to von Gottberg. They hear his extraordinary laugh suddenly breaking to the surface.

  'In Russia there is a saying that you sometimes feel like the fifth wheel on the wagon,' says Mendel when they are at a distance.

  'Yes, I am afraid my cousin is not happy with Roddy. He is rather earnest and works all the time.'

  'And Axel is providing a little diversion?'

  'Yes. She hopes so anyway. Where shall we go?'

  'Let's walk up through the Jewish cemetery. And then to the Garden of Gethsemane,' he adds.

  'No need to be ecumenical. I'm half Jewish, although I was never brought up with any Jewish faith. Or indeed any faith. When you are here, do you long to see where Jesus walked or where Solomon's temple stood, or to climb King David's tower?

  'Nothing to do with King David, of course.'

  'Do you see a Jewish homeland?'

  'Yes, I think Jews must have a homeland. We Jews.'

  She rests her hand on his forearm.

  'Elya, can we go back to the hotel now? I have the manuscript and I want you to read it. I won't be able to rest until I hear your opinion.'

  In the bar of the hotel she orders a Tom Collins.

  'Would you like one?'

  'I've never had one.'

  'You don't know what you are missing.'

  She removes her small hat, which is clinging to the side of her head, and shakes her dark, waved hair, as if expecting clouds of dust to emerge, as from a beaten carpet. Her hair is centre-parted, the waves tumbling in an orderly fashion to just above her collar. Mendel feels quite drunk after his first deep draught.

  'Can you read the manuscript in your room?' she asks.

  'Of course.'

  He feels suddenly bereft, and stands up.

  'Shall I meet you down here?' he asks.

  'Don't be silly. I'm coming too.'

  The lift, one of the earliest in Jerusalem, is piloted by a robed servant, perhaps a Sudanese. A Nubian. Rosamund and he stand some way apart; lifts sometimes produce this awkwardness about proximity. His room is on the sixth floor. The operator uses a brass handle to bring the lift to rest.

  'It's a little cluttered, I'm afraid.'

  In the short time he has been here he has collected pamphlets and maps and books and a Roman head and a small carpet, rolled up. After clearing a space they sit in the two padded and studded chairs, which have fanciful Ottoman legs, splayed outwards. She pulls the manuscript from her bag.

  'Here we are.'

  She stands and goes to the window.

  Outside, the Old City is glowing. The light in Jerusalem has a desert quality, adamantine in the day, but softening and golden in the evening.

  'God it's a marvellous sight. I'll order from the bar. What would you like? I'm going to have another Tom Collins.'

  'So am I,' says Mendel, giggling. 'When in Rome . . .'

  Once he has started to read, he looks up only to smile until a waiter in a white uniform with a red sash over his shoulder appears.

  'Wonderful,' says Mendel, but she doesn't know if he is talking about his second Tom Collins, which he drains excitedly, or her novel.

  'Do you mind if I have a shower? I'm dusty.'

  'No please, go right ahead. This is very, very good, moving, this opening scene of the break-up. You are a marvellous writer.'

  He can hear the shower — the showerhead is enormous, as big as a French sunflower drooping at sunset. The sound of the water on the marble, by way of her body, distracts him. She is in his bathroom, just through there, naked.

  She comes out in a bathrobe with a white towel around her head.

  'Elya, I wonder, are you the sort of man who needs a woman to ask him a direct question? I think you are, so let me ask it: would you like to make love to me?'

  At twenty-four, he is finally naked with a woman. Their lovemaking is not awkward, as he had feared his first sexual experience would be. She anticipates his uncertainties.

  'Oh Elya, you are so beautiful.'

  He knows he is not beautiful, but he finds her tone and the way she speaks to him intoxicatingly strange, as though she is from another place, one where he has never been, one which has its own language. He finds as they make love that he has passed through into a world that was always there, but behind a screen, indicated to him only by rodent scratching or the calls of small, unseen nocturnal animals.

  When he comes, far too quickly of course, he weeps with joy as she breathes Tom Collins into his ear.

  'You probably thought I was providing cover for Elizabeth.'

  And the idea that she has set out to seduce him makes him feel doubly esteemed. They lie in bed and eat green-and-mother-of-pearl pistachios as the softening sun leaves the ancient walls in shadow, but lingeringly embraces the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque of Omar, like a favourite child before sleep.

  He wonders if she feels the same sense of being blessed as he has next to her. She can't, but still he feels that he has never been happier and that this moment has somehow resolved — perhaps as Axel's thesis and antithesis is resolved — many of the contradictions in his life.

  'Now read on, Elya.'

  He reads aloud now and she is thrilled by his understanding and his extraordinary, liquid, exotic cadences, which make her book seem more human, richer, than she could have hoped. He reads, thrilled by the feel of her thigh against his. He worries that he is too plump or too hairy, but he soon loses himself in the book. She has an extraordinary, comic grasp of social relations and tensions, as well as a sardonic wit. The heroine, Claudia, has a bold approach to life: It's not only our fate, but our duty to lose our innocence.

  'Do you believe that?' Mendel asks her.

  'I don't think I'm talking about sexual innocence. More that we should not be under any illusions.'

  'As Joseph Butler said, things are what they are. Why should we wish to be deceived?'

  'Exactly. Whoever Joseph Butler is, or was.'

  He knows that they will make love again soon and he feels that he is living in a moment that can never return. He reads:

  'Do you have feelings Claudia?' Esmond asked.

  'Of course I have feelings. Do you?'

  'Yes I do. Of course I do, but they are not important to me. I try to be more decent, more civil tha
n I feel. That is how I get by.'

  'Do you have feelings, Elya?'

  'I do.'

  'Do you have feelings for me?'

  'That's a strange question under the circumstances.'

  'You wept, but perhaps you wept because you had lost your innocence. We hanker after innocence.'

  He puts the book down and turns to look at her. He is still wearing his glasses, which he fears loom rather large now that he is naked.

  'I have the most extraordinary feelings for you. Quite astonishing, even frightening. I feel blessed.'

  He can't get over the fact that he is lying next to this young woman, that her breasts are now touching his chest, that he met her only yesterday, that she says he is beautiful.

  'Were you very hurt?' he asks.

  'I was terribly hurt. Rationally I knew he was highly unsuitable, but that didn't stop me loving him. Do you think women sometimes embrace hurt?'

  'I don't know enough about women, to tell the truth. So far I've always been considered rather safe in a taxi.'

  'No longer, Elya. Those days are behind you.'

  She slides on top of him: it is almost unbearably sensual to feel her body on his. She sits up, astride him. She utters tiny shrieks and her eyes seem to cloud over. He feels exalted although he has a nagging sense that his life and his emotions have been too quickly and easily subverted.

  Down in the bar they meet Elizabeth and Axel, both a little tight.

  'Elya was reading my book. Sorry we're late.'

  Axel is leaning back on his seat, in a lordly way, at his ease.

  'They are cousins, you know,' he says.

  Elya wonders if he imagines that this is drawing them closer. He sees that Elizabeth and Axel and Rosamund are complicit. Perhaps they think it is amusing that he should be drawn into this menage. All the things he had never experienced, until an hour ago - Rosamund wiping herself with a hotel towel, dressing again with such insouciance, dabbing scent behind her ears and hooking up her brassiere deftly and re-attaching her stockings — these things to them are routine. He feels hurt, as if he is being patronised, but as he has never been able to strike an attitude for long he soon gives in to this warm, physical well-being, while still going over the precious details, both the magical and the practical, of their love-making. At the end of the lounge an Egyptian band starts to play 'Happy Feet', and Rosamund immediately jumps up and leads Axel on to the dance floor.

  'Are your feet happy?' Elizabeth asks him. She looks at him in that over-the-shoulder fashion; her lips are deep red and shiny.

  'Cheering up.'

  'Shall we give it a whirl?'

  'I don't really dance, I must warn you.'

  'Just hop about enthusiastically. That's the secret.'

  The band gives the song a certain Middle Eastern plangency; he doesn't care how foolish he looks as he tries to follow Elizabeth. She holds him quite firmly; of course he has danced before, but now he too is in on the secret: dancing is a sort of surrender to the sensual, to the clear message that music is life, and life is love and sex and longing, strangely and incomprehensibly distilled. And he sees that there are various forms of understanding that are not susceptible to strict logic, but which still have very real effects.

  Rosamund and Axel appear next to them suddenly, and she blows him a kiss. Axel leans over to him, affecting a heavy German accent. 'Zeitgeist. Good, nein.

  An army officer cuts in and he finds himself dancing with the officer's wife. She is bright and cheerful, like the small birds in cages attached to the walls in the Old City, incessantly flitting and chirping dutifully.

  'Lovely girl, Elizabeth. And what do you do?'

  'I teach at Oxford.'

  'Oh gosh, you must be jolly clever.'

  'Not really. I am like a monkey, I learn tricks easily. Are you enjoying living here?'

  'Nobody likes us, not the Arabs and certainly not the Jews, which makes life a little trying.'

  'Yes, I have relatives here who seem to think it's all my fault.'

  Jolly argumentative, aren't they, don't you find? They argue like billy-oh about almost anything.'

  'It's an old Jewish tradition. It's the Midrash: life must be constantly examined.'

  'Gosh, jolly interesting. Actually, I try to keep out of politics. Richard says it's best.'

  'I'm sure he's right.'

  'I know that Hitler is being beastly to the Jews, but Richard thinks that Hitler is right about the communists. They're the real problem, he says.'

  Later the four of them leave the hotel and go off to a house in the Old City and smoke hashish. It's almost dawn when Elizabeth and Rosamund leave to go home. Roddy will be waiting. Axel hugs Mendel briefly and says, 'Lovely, lovely girls.'

  When Elya lies on his bed again, he can smell Rosamund's perfume faintly and, he imagines, the more mysterious scents of her body. He thinks of his mother at home in Hampstead sewing intently as his father reads the newspaper.

  Dear Mama. Tonight I lost my virginity and smoked hashish for the first time.

  She would be happy: she thinks her own life is too ordered.

  And he thinks about what Axel said to him as they inhaled the hashish: I must go back, Elya, dear friend. Please understand.

  3

  WHEN CONRAD GOT back from Jerusalem, he found that the struggle for the ownership of the Holy Places had a parallel in his own life. In six years of marriage, he and Francine had accumulated quite a lot of stuff. Now he was being asked to go through an inventory to decide who had what. In Jerusalem the contest between the religions was a bitter struggle for the possession of places, many of them of doubtful historicity. What he wanted to discuss - or contend - with Francine was the human issue. How, for example, was she able to accommodate herself physically and emotionally to someone so different from him? What was it like to live with someone else, to breathe their air and experience their little night noises and foibles? Was it easy to feel a different skin against yours after nine years? And, if it was easy, what was it that he lacked that this other person had? It was a mystery, an existential mystery, and he would have liked to get to the bottom of it. But when he tried to get on to these topics, Francine saw not some interesting ontological issues but jealousy. Jealousy, tout court.

  'Don't give me the philosophical stuff. I know it's painful for you, but I love John. You have to accept that. You and I are not suited. You think running off to Jerusalem — how did you put it? - to get closer to Mendel and his German pal is somehow important. It is so damned airy-fairy. For nearly ten years you have been telling me your ideas. None of them, not one single one, has come to anything.'

  'That is not totally accurate.'

  But before she could develop the aggrieved lobster-thermidor colouring, he added, 'At least from where I am standing — admittedly the non-scientific vantage point — I would have to say that there has been some bad luck and some near misses. But yes, in material terms you are right, although you seem to conveniently ignore the fact that ideas have value in their own right. And - no, wait a second — also I accept that you believe you love John. Love is, after all, even for the people who understand the ins and outs of biology - no innuendo intended - an irrational, even subjective matter.'

  'Conrad, in case you have forgotten, we are here to discuss which of our possessions you are going to have and which I am going to have. I have made a list and I have checked the things that are unmistakably yours or unmistakably mine. After that I propose that we have a choice each, one after the other until we get to the end of the list.'

  When he looked at the list, there were items on her side that seemed far from indisputably hers. For example, any wedding presents that originated on her side of the family were treated as hers alone.

  'I don't remember your mother saying that the Boda Glass was yours. The tag read, as far as I can remember, "For Franny and Conrad, from Mummy". I remember distinctly feeling a little queasy about the "Mummy"!'

  'Look, she gave them to me. She is
my mother and she never liked you. You've had six years of use and broken about one in three of them anyway.'

  'Now I would like to break the rest of them at my leisure.'

  'Oh Jesus. I'm on call tonight. I can't spend the whole afternoon discussing every item.'

  From the bakery below, the smell of yeast fermenting was strong and pleasant. The bakery smells, the hints of artisanal life, are what he likes most about the flat.

  'I tell you what, I'll have the bed. Presumably you have one that works well for you?'

  'Oh my. I see the way this is going. You can have the bed. I'll have the desk my father gave us.'

  Her choices had a basis in economics or utility; his were provocative or whimsical. For instance, his fourth choice (how demeaning he found the system, in fact how demeaning he found all forms of practical organisation), was a small Roman head he had bought in Bristol. It was probably worthless, maybe even a fake, but he had grown fond of this modest bust of some late-Roman Bristolian in his best toga - three diagonal folds were visible under his chin - with the sightless seer's eyes suggesting some desirable and ancient ease of mind. What Ovid called otium.

  'Are you interested in what I did in Jerusalem?'

  'Not especially. I find your aimless journeys and impulses depressing. Also I know that you have no money.'

  'Not exactly aimless. But still, OK, let's keep within the world of objects. Things. As you so rightly say, we are not here to divide up our ideas, our loyalties or our finer feelings. Just the fucking bits and pieces. And talking of money, when are we selling the flat?'

  'Which I mostly paid for.'

  'I think you will find it is in our joint names. Anyway, you and John between you already have enough for a little hidey-hole in Whitechapel, it seems.'

  'You are such a bastard. I don't want to talk about John. I don't want to cause unnecessary distress.'