‘I strolled back to the dock gates. There was still no hurry. I repeated to myself that I was going to Israel, said the word over and over like an incantation, and a port worker who went by must have thought I was going a bit crackers in the midday sun. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. I would get to Haifa, so then where would I go? Jerusalem is the capital city of Israel, I said, therefore it is natural to go to that place. But would I lodge there for good, or fix something up near the desert, or work in orange groves on some kibbutz or other, or stay close to the sea? Sooner or later I would have to make myself useful. Where would I pray if the need arose, as it surely will? I’d find a synagogue – no difficulty there! – to give thanks for my arrival. I had my yarmulka, so they would let me in. I hadn’t left my old life in order to settle for less. Israel was, I told myself, the only country in the world I could go to after England. It will supersede England in my mind – a great change, but it will be done. For once in my life I have to prove myself right in a fundamental choice, not out of fate, egotism or force of circumstance, but due to a religious reason that is at the very middle of me.
‘I walked back to the boulevard. A tram was going by, and I almost ran after it. Both sections turned a corner before I could make up my mind to get on. My body and spirit played a game, joining forces to perform a trick I didn’t fall for. A car bonnet passed close as I crossed the road, its hooter screeching. The heat was terrific, coming out of an emptiness I thought had been left behind. (They said there was a heat wave in Greece at the moment.) That emptiness was caused by my leaving you and Rachel. I sat on a seat by some stunted bushes, a huge ship rearing on the other side of the railings. It is impossible to leave anything behind. The past stays with you, or that’s how it feels at the moment, a part of your irreducible torment that you see reminders of again and again, memories that render down and become one more contribution to the unconscious.
‘The whistle of a departing ship reminded me that time went on and there was less possibility of retreat, no matter what going forward might mean. We will survive, the three of us, whatever happens, because in our different ways we have already learned never to be afraid.
‘The ship set off through industrial mist and sailed among the isles of Greece. I ate a meal, slept for an hour, then looked from the rail at rocks and ashy mountains poking their summits out of the clear blue mirror of the sea. It was only now, seeing the last markings of my departure from what to me was the old world, that all nerve seemed to go, and the questions began. The effect was terrifying, striking at the most vulnerable part and at the worst moment – as of course it must. I had not expected it, when I ought to have done, though even if I had braced myself, the effect would have been no different. There was little use denying or avoiding it. I was down among the jellyfish, make no mistake about that.
‘Everything I thought appeared to me as the truth, and the denials that immediately countered it were also nothing but the truth – as if the experience I had let myself in for was determined to change even the basic chemistry of my mind. The journey so far had been full of interest. I had been on the move, and there had been little time to think, but now, not only was I alone, and a passenger who had nothing to do while crossing the sea, but I was back on a ship, in the place where I had spent most of my life before finding out who I was and what my connection with the past had been.
‘I should have known. I had not given sufficient forethought to avoiding the most obvious pitfalls of my transference. Not only was I back in my former life with an intensity neither desired nor anticipated but, having no connection with it in a working capacity (nor any urge to be so), was doubly lost. Every facet of me that I was, or had been, or intended to become, fell away and left me as a monument of nothingness. I felt ice inside me, growing every second as I stood at the rail, a coldness that made my teeth clatter and my body shake, the extent of the ice inside me increasing until its volume went far beyond the size of my body and became an iceberg into whose space and constituents I had entirely disappeared.
‘I don’t think I would have come out of it – I would have thrown myself overboard and drowned, that’s one thing I am certain of – if one word had not come to my rescue. I don’t know how much time passed: perhaps not much, but in a few moments the word had dissolved my paralysis. The sound activated itself from the disciplined service I had been part of for thirty-odd years, but it also formed the definition of something that had been with me ever since I had been born. The word, which began to melt the iceberg that encased me, was fear. Fear had been with me for as long as I could remember, a fear mostly half-buried, usually totally so, from as far back as even before I was born. It had led me into every situation of my life, perilous or not, thrown me into all changes, even this one. It had earlier ushered me into becoming a merchant seaman, a very good move, thus allowing me to conquer fear, as I thought, once and for all. Perhaps it also pushed me into the present move, and that’s why I allowed it to happen.
‘As I stood by the rail therefore, contemplating my final move out of the iceberg and into the sea, the word fear spoke itself plainly through to what remained of my consciousness. I heard it, and the spark that struck warmed me back into the world. “You’re afraid,” I said to myself, “stricken with unholy and destructive fear.” And discipline took up the call, and expanded on it with words that made me sweat, but which stopped my helpless trembling. That single word brought me back to life, but the word attached itself to many others, before I banished it for ever. Early in my seafaring life an old captain said to me: “Fear God, but nothing else!” The natural and no doubt healthy scorn of the young caused me to pull the saying into myself and then forget it. But as the word came to me I realized that all my life I had been driven everywhere by fear, and even had feared life itself. During the final move that was being made away from it, which when completed meant that I would be able to fear God and nothing else, savage fear made one last attack upon me, but as I walked a free man away from the dusk and down the companionway, I knew I had defeated it.
‘I slept in the oven of a cabin, and woke the next day refreshed and calm. The boat was crowded and scruffy, and I sat by the stern with my Hebrew grammar. After calling at Cyprus I felt almost home. I was impatient to see the hills and coastline of Israel, at times wishing I had gone there by aeroplane, but consoling myself with the fact that tomorrow I would be in Jerusalem, that next year would have become this year! In the morning I dressed and went on deck. There was a breeze, the ship rolling slightly, but no sight of land. I wondered how I came to be on a ship, waiting to see Israel rise out of the dawn, such a vast change to a year ago. But I couldn’t think backwards any more. There would be no more of that. I would like it where I was going because there was nowhere else. Every move in my life had been to the same end, but this time there was a motive for my shift of vision, a connection which I had often sensed, but missed because the evidence of my feelings had not been there.
‘The decks were crowded. Somebody claimed to see land, but it was nowhere in sight. Israelis, pilgrims and tourists jostled for a place at the rails. After breakfast we saw the coast clearly. The ship waited for a pilot boat to show us our moorings. A police launch stood by with machine-guns mounted – or maybe it was part of the Israeli Navy. The only Hebrew I spoke was that of having to do with First Seeing the Land.
‘The mist cleared. I looked through binoculars at the coast and the old Crusader town of Akko till my eyes ran from the strain. I saw the docks of Haifa, and the long back of Mount Carmel with modern buildings crowding the northern spur. A notice said no photos were allowed. It was a busy harbour, with plenty of traffic. People were waiting by the sheds to greet lucky passengers. There were cars and lorries beyond the dock gates, and pedestrians in summer clothes. Gangways were lowered, but it took an hour to get through tedious landing formalities.