‘By sharing a taxi I was in Jerusalem at midday. I sat in a café with my suitcases, watching people go by and sampling that smell of musk and spicy food on Ben Yehuda Street. Using the café telephone I located a hotel with a vacant room. It turned out to be somewhat modest, and I was told I was lucky to get it with so many tourists crowding in, but it was a place to sleep and leave luggage while I wandered around.
‘There was less heat than on the coast. The sky was blue when I stood below a windmill and saw the crenellations of the city walls. I wanted to reach out and touch them, but they were too far away. So I looked. I looked at the walls and at Mount Zion for half an hour, impossible to exult or brood after so long, only to stand still and look with steady recognition at a scene I had heard of and read about even from my Bible days at the orphanage. The agony of being without a past was over, however bleak the future might be.
‘Many tourists were coming and going, bringing a babble of languages from all over the world. I walked at my usual quick speed between some houses and down the hill, as if I had been there before, across the valley and up to the Jaffa Gate. At the open space inside I bought a glass of freshly pressed orange juice, glancing at the people as I stood and drank.
‘Pushing my way down David Street, I had to step around places where the road was up. It was as if I had arranged to meet someone and was already late. I stopped a soldier and asked the way to the Western Wall. It used to be called the Wailing Wall, but I learned in the taxi, when one of the passengers corrected me in a very brash way, that it doesn’t have that name any more.
‘So much space in the middle of a cramped city came as a surprise, but once you’re in there’s no doubt where the Wall is. A soldier examined my haversack, for bombs, I suppose. Then I put on my yarmulka and went into the enclosure. There’s a place for men, and a place for women, which I suppose neither you nor Judy would like! I stared mindlessly for a few minutes, before letting my hand touch the stone. When the Hashemites from over the River Jordan occupied this area no Jews were allowed in, I was later told. The Wall cut off the sky, but was a lightning rod in contact with it. A few people on either side were praying, wearing shawls and weaving back and forth. Without intending, my forehead was touching the Wall. How long I was there I don’t know. I was with you. Then I was with myself only. I was mulling on all I had discovered about my mother, reliving every event up to her death. Perhaps if she hadn’t died we would both have been here.
‘I lost a sense of time when my hands touched the Wall, unable to let go because it seemed alive. If ever there was a man in a dream that man was me, but the dream knew what it was doing, even if I didn’t. I pressed the Star of David from my mother to the rough surface to prove that one of us had come back to where we belonged. The action comforted me, however outlandish it might seem to you – and in some ways seemed to me when I realized what I was doing.
‘After dark I walked to the Jaffa Gate and out of the City. Back in my room, with a dull bulb glowing, I felt calmer. It is my home for the moment. I’m reminded of when you were in your room in London, as I try to stamp my own personality on to it, even though I may be here only a few days more. My half dozen books are on a shelf, my map on the wall, and the sextant on the dressing-table. All I need for the moment is this small room, and I feel richer than Solomon at knowing it is in Jerusalem.
‘I still don’t know why I left you and Rachel, but there was no other way. I feel pared to the bone by the mindless search which has now come to a stop. The fact that there is no going on will take getting used to. Unless the unified heart is wholly committed to life, no one can truthfully speak of the oneness of existence. There had to be a stop. It is irreligious to strive for the absolute, which is beyond human comprehension. A deeper meaning can only be found by searching within a closed circle, through actions rather than words, but actions that are good rather than evil. One must cultivate justice, love and mercy, in so far as one’s life and one’s country are spared to let you do so.
‘The place I have chosen is the one that by birth was chosen for me. I am under no illusions. That too would be a sin, because we know, or should, that illusions pave the way to greater evils than those which might already be close by. Israel is in the middle of the world, and I can’t help feeling that it is a rock on which the stability of the world depends. At the same time it is a country like any other, while also like no other country. You have to be here to feel it. First impressions count for much, even though they might amuse those who have been here so long they have forgotten what their first impressions were – if such a thing is possible.
‘I speak to people in the cafés, and my poor knowledge of Hebrew – though it is improving – brings comments as well as a few laughs, but I use it without any self-consciousness. Someone generally speaks English, so it’s not difficult to start a conversation. I mostly listen, however, to what goes on among the others, being too diffident about putting in my no doubt naïve opinions. What they are, I have formulated over the past year, and confirmed during the time I have been here. If I had no such opinions how could I have been here in the first place?
‘While life is normal, one senses a faint electricity of danger in the air. At least I do, though perhaps that’s because I’m still a stranger. Maybe it’s only a more-than-usual feeling of existence, an urgency, liveliness and tension coming from three million people back in their own land after having been denied it for so long, and determined to survive in spite of all adversities. But such a feeling as mine only makes life seem more real, because I’ve long been used to the feeling, as one always was on a ship, and especially during the war. Maybe it’s best for me to have come, after all, to a country where danger of some kind is never felt to be absent. Not that there isn’t a need for such vigilance everywhere. Explosions occur in London as well as in Israel, and no doubt will continue to do so – though I haven’t heard of any here as yet. It is a factor of modern life, and also the kind of evil that has always been with us, which indiscriminately strikes every time at the innocent. Various countries have no option but to live with it, and to contain it till, like a visitation of the plague to which a healthy country cannot finally succumb, it goes away. Whatever there is to live with will, after a while, seem ordinary enough. To be surrounded by enemies is a form of reality, and in this country life goes on as normally as anywhere else. It is a new nation still, not thirty years old, going through flux without end, from inside and out. But it will endure, no matter what, and to be here fills me with a joyous will to live.’
23
She read the letters from Tom after supper. There were no secrets from Judy. They placed their armchairs by the fireplace, each with their separate side-light and pot of coffee, enjoying that silence when children are in bed. Tom had been gone a month, and until each letter came it seemed to Pam as if she had never known him. But the letters brought him vividly back, even more so when she read them to Judy. The only part that remained was Rachel. When Tom was present Rachel looked like him, but when Tom was away it was Tom who resembled Rachel, so that whatever she felt, she was fundamentally linked with him. Life with Judy and the children seemed settled, yet the flat was only a half-way house until the time came to be on the move again.