The Mandelbaum Gate Read online

  She had said, in a lazy casual way — for by this time they were fairly at ease with each other — ‘Sometimes I think we ought to chuck out the politicians from world government and put in the Pope, the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama instead. They couldn’t do worse and they might do better.’

  Freddy had reflected on this without undue seriousness. ‘There would have to be a Greek Patriarch as well,’ he said, ‘and then the Buddhists and the Hindus would want their say. There would be no end to it. But it’s a good idea. I imagine there would be objections from the Jews to the Chief Rabbi. Most of these Jews here are unbelievers, so far as I can gather.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Miss Vaughan. ‘I think they believe in a different way from what you mean. They believe with their blood. Being a Jew isn’t something they consider in their minds, weigh up, and give assent to as one does in the Western Christian tradition. Being a Jew is inherent.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ Freddy gave a little laugh.

  As if he had not spoken at all, she continued. ‘As a half-Jew myself, I think I understand how—’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to say … I mean … One says things without thinking, you know.’

  She said, ‘You might have said worse.’

  Freddy felt terrible. He groped for the idea that, being a half-Jew, she might be only half-offended. After all, one might speak in that manner of the Wogs or the Commies, and everyone knew what one meant.

  He now noticed the Jewishness of her appearance, something dark and intense beyond her actual shape and colouring. Freddy felt worse. It was a diplomatic as well as a social error, here in this country. This was the first year of the Eichmann trial. Freddy felt like a wanted man who had been found hiding in a dark cupboard. He felt an urge to explain that he was not a mass-butcher and that he had never desired to become a Sturmbannführer, Obersturmbannführer, Superobersturmbannführer. He said, ‘I like your young guide. How did you come by him?’

  She said, ‘He’s a friend of a friend of mine, another archaeologist who’s working on the stuff at Qumran just now.’ Plainly, she was embarrassed by his embarrassment.

  Freddy clutched at the subject of the Dead Sea scrolls as at a slice of melon in the Sahara. He said: ‘That must be enormously exciting. I want to visit the place myself some time soon.’

  But she was occupied with her reaction to Freddy’s distress. She began to speak, with furious exasperation, about the Israeli, a former Czech, who had been allotted to her as a guide to the holy places. He had been overbearing. He had been obstructive. He had taken her on a trip to Nazareth and had wanted her to whizz through the whole scene in half an hour, whereas she had insisted on spending the day there. He was a fanatical Christian-hater who had wanted to show her the cement factories and pipelines of Israel instead of the shrines, and had been reluctant to drive her to the top of Mount Tabor, the probable scene of the Transfiguration, and she had not insisted because this in-sufferable man … It emerged that she herself was a Roman Catholic.

  Anxious about the extremity and urgency of her tone, Freddy looked round for the waiter. He said to her: ‘Let’s try the white wine.’ He ordered two glasses, and called after the waiter, ‘But it should be chilled.’ He said to Miss Vaughan, ‘They are inclined to serve it warm.’

  The waiter appeared with two glasses of local white wine. In them were floating two chips of ice, rapidly melting from their original cubic form. Freddy and Miss Vaughan were silent until the waiter had gone. The ice melted entirely in the hot evening air. Freddy smiled at the two glasses on the table. Eventually, they even sipped the lukewarm mixture. ‘They simply don’t understand about wine at most of these hotels,’ Freddy said. Well, it was a relief, at least, that they could have an English giggle about something.

  Freddy now wondered if it was his long walk through the Orthodox quarter in the afternoon heat that had put him on edge. He felt decidedly afraid of Miss Vaughan. She fidgeted with the ring on her engagement finger. She looked very strained. Perhaps she, too, was feeling the heat. However, he was resolved to be agreeable in view of his blunder last week.

  She said, ‘Your geraniums are flourishing.’

  He had given her two of his pots of geraniums before leaving for Jordan last week. They were special geraniums. He had smuggled them across from Joanna’s prize collection.

  He said ‘Good. I was hoping Dr Ephraim would look in. I want to consult him about a Hebrew teacher.’

  ‘He had to return to his wife and family.’

  ‘Oh yes, quite.’

  ‘He might give you Hebrew lessons himself. They don’t get well paid at the University here.’

  Well, I was sort of hoping that.’

  She said: ‘Before I go to Jordan we must arrange a meeting.’

  ‘When are you going?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  It was a puzzle to him that she had not already gone to Jordan. She kept saying she was ‘waiting to go to Jordan’. He wondered if she waited for a visa. If they suspected her Jewish blood she would not get a visa. But, on the other hand, if she had a certificate of baptism and kept quiet it should be easy.

  He saw that she was pulling at a fraying piece of wicker on the arm of her chair.

  Iambics march from short to long …

  She said, ‘I’m glad to have the geraniums. I water them every morning when the post arrives. It takes my mind off things. I’m waiting for a letter to arrive before I can go off to Jordan.’

  ‘If it’s a question of a visa, perhaps I could help,’ said Freddy.

  ‘Thank you, but you can’t help,’ she said.

  ‘The Christian shrines over there are far more interesting than here,’ he said. ‘At least, there are more of them.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I hope to be able to see them soon. In fact, I’m hoping to get married quite soon to an archaeologist who’s working over there. The one who’s at the Dead Sea area.’

  ‘I’m sure I could help if it’s only a matter of a visa.’

  ‘I’m waiting for news from Rome,’ she said. ‘He has been married and is divorced. It’s a question of whether his marriage can be annulled or whether it can’t be annulled. I mean annulled by the Church. If it isn’t annulled by the Church then the marriage is off. There’s a fifty-fifty chance.’

  ‘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 dr
ew 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 s
ite 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.’