‘What do you mean “you’re bored”?’
‘I don’t know how to be any clearer,’ Nell said, making no attempt to disguise her irritation. ‘I’m bored, Laura, I am, quite simply, bored. Look at our life, look at our friends. Every day, every week, every bloody year, the same people, the same places, the same conversations.’ Nell spoke with a fluency which suggested her thoughts had benefited from considerable rehearsal.‘I look at us and rather than the lively, cutting-edge, we’re-going-to-change-the-world sort of people we always planned to be, or rather I planned to be, I see two women slouching towards middle age, drab and dismal and dragging their best years behind them.’
Clearly she and Nell had very different perspectives, indeed Nell would be hard-pressed to find any support for her view. As for the whole middle-age caper, Laura had made a conscious decision before she turned forty to jettison middle age forever. Middle age was a figure in a sensible skirt with twinset and pearls, a figure which had passed away along with earlier generations, a figure which had nothing in common with Laura.
‘Speak for yourself,’ she now said. And as she turned into her brother’s street,‘Can we postpone this talk until after dinner?’
‘Of course,’ Nell replied.‘Who am I to upset the Jewish family?’
If the feeling in the car had been bad, worse was lodged within the timber and glass interior of Daniel and Melissa’s home. The atmosphere was crisp and careful, with Daniel and Melissa skirting round each other like athletes before a race. Their twenty-three-year-old son Nicholas was the immediate source of tension. During his schooldays Nick, like his father before him, had been drawn to a greater observance of Judaism – although more of a hobby than his father’s energetic calling. But in the past few years the hobby had become an all-embracing commitment. Not only had Nick overtaken his father, he had decided to study for the rabbinate; worse still, he’d chosen a college in America. Daniel was elated, but Melissa together with Sophie, a cool, slender twenty year old studying at the Film and Television School, were not impressed.
‘Daniel’s defection was one thing, and took some adjusting,’
Melissa said to Laura and Nell as she prepared the dinner. ‘But it’s far worse when it happens to your son. God knows we have little in common now, but when he’s finished with this rabbinical nonsense we’ll have nothing.And he’ll find himself one of those wives with a wig and the clothes sense of a nun, who’ll have baby after baby and she and I will have as much to talk about as I now have with Daniel’s
meshuggeneh
pals.’ Melissa took a hefty swig of non-kosher vodka and tonic.‘My son tells me nothing. Nothing. If I ask, he says there’s no point talking to me because either I won’t understand or I’ll ridicule. And when I mention I’ve stayed with his father all these years and have provided a home in which both of them have lived as observant Jews, he looks at me as if he despises me.’
She was sobbing now and, when the tears would not stop, excused herself. A few minutes later she returned to the kitchen red-nosed and dry-eyed, refreshed her drink and applied herself to some California rolls and some bite-sized fishy things – ‘For we girls,’ she said indicating the platter. ‘To have with drinks.
Our
drinks. My husband and son won’t go near this stuff.’ She added a clump of chives, a couple of curls of lemon peel, a small dollop of something dippable and stood back to appraise. The platter was, as with all Melissa’s platters, a work of art. She slid it along the bench, then pulled a couple of bowls from a cupboard, slammed them on the bench, filled one with olives, including two olives which had fallen to the floor – ‘A dollop of non-kosher botulism would be good for them’ – and the other with sliced dill cucumbers reeking of garlic. If the expression on her face could have translated to action, she would have spat in each bowl.
Melissa was clearly out of patience.
‘You know Daniel’s planning an extended trip to Israel?’
Laura did know because Melissa had mentioned it several times.
‘And now that Nick’s going to America, Daniel will probably spend some time there too. I may as well not have a husband.’ She looked from Laura to Nell.‘I envy you, I really do.’
As she finished arranging the hors d’oeuvres she talked about what it was like to have a husband who put so many things ahead of her, who would prefer to spend his leisure with a crop of men smelling of chicken fat, men who not only didn’t know her but wouldn’t want to know her.
‘Daniel and I used to have so much fun. Films, picnics, jazz concerts.We used to mesh so well together, but now –’ Suddenly she stopped, her gaze directed to the door. Daniel had entered the kitchen.
‘And we could have a life together again,’ he said.‘Even better than before.’
He spoke softly, but each word was clear and resonant, eerily so. And then he turned away. He left the kitchen, he left the house and walked down the path to a sheltered alcove at the end of the garden. To be alone, to collect himself, to try and find his balance in a life which was crumbling. It had come to this, he was thinking, the wife who had once been his saviour was now ridiculing him and demeaning his choices, and making no attempt whatsoever to bridge the gap between them.
‘Share this with me,’ he had begged when he first became interested in Judaism. ‘Come to
shule
. Join one of the women’s study groups.’
But she had never been interested, not then nor now. She knew she was Jewish, she said, she didn’t need to eat it and wear it, and she certainly didn’t need to make a lifetime’s study of it.
He brushed some leaves off a garden bench and sat in the shadows watching the house. In the early years he had persisted, hoping she would change her mind. And then one day it dawned on him he liked having his religion to himself. Indeed, if she were to change her mind now, and the arrival of the Messiah was far more likely, Daniel would be at pains to talk her out of it. His religion was his only comfort and she would spoil it for him, not through deliberate malice, he had never believed she wished him harm, but through a certain shallowness. It was an awful observation to make about your own wife, but there was no avoiding it: Melissa seemed without passions, without longings, or at least none he could discern. As for his own yearnings, as obvious as a face without a nose, she had always been blind to them.
His parents hadn’t noticed them either. Yet from his earliest years he had been aware of an emptiness cutting deep within him, an abrasive hollow which filled so much space and yet demanded itself to be filled. He remembered as a young boy drawing a picture of his family: mother, father and himself – Laura was yet to be born; the parental figures had bodies shaped and clothed, but his own torso was an empty circle.
It was how he had always been, a person with a hollowness hard within him, and spawning a yearning so amorphous yet so voracious, and little notion how to satisfy it. Yearning not wanting. Wanting knows its target, yearning is far less specific – although he had known since boyhood that lining his emptiness was the Holocaust. It was a reluctant knowing and one he preferred to avoid, yet he was convinced if he could somehow fill the gaping hole inside him he would submerge, quieten, his Holocaust heritage. He saw an analogy with the Eildon Weir, a vast manmade catchment not far from Melbourne which had drowned out an unwanted landscape. What worked so well in geography and metaphor he hoped would work for him.
But despite his efforts it didn’t.While still a boy he tried friends, but they were so unpredictable that sometimes the yearning cut even deeper. And Etti’s terrified opposition notwithstanding, he had tried horseback riding, but soon he learned it was the idea which appealed, the freedom of bare-backed speeding over a deserted beach, not the uncomfortable reality of falls and aching muscles and a face full of flies. He tried sex when he was older, but this was before the sexual revolution reached Melbourne, and the abandon which might have made sex a useful solution was strangled in guilt and elastic girdles. He had tried dope too, so much dope that the five-year period before he met Melissa was a soggy blur.
Finally he tried Melissa, and at last he seemed to settle. She was Jewish but without a Holocaust background, a good-looking woman who wore her Jewishness as elegantly as her silk shirts and Georg Jensen jewellery. She was fun, she was spirited, and she threw herself into sex with an abandon of the highest order. She blanketed the emptiness and he thought he was cured. But then they married, and Nick and Sophie arrived, and there was money to be made, and with Melissa always so involved with the children the yearning started to gnaw again.
He drowned his pains in work. He had been drawn to computer technology for much the same reason he would later be drawn to religion: it seemed such a private and benign source of succour. By the time Nick and Sophie were at school, his company was a major computer payroll supplier and he was already exploiting the possibilities of the new digitalisation. At the age of forty he was a millionaire several times over. But despite his successes he was still restless, his chest still gaped achingly, and he was lonely too. Not surprisingly, when the rabbis turned up at his door he welcomed them in.
And so he came to Judaism, not the Judaism of his parents, a watery, secular, ham-in-the-fridge, Holocaust-defined Judaism, but a Judaism which meant something, and now meant everything to him. It replenished him, it gave him hope and meaning, and it gave him comfort.And he was no longer lonely. He could talk at length with the other men at the synagogue about any subject, including the Holocaust. This was the Judaism Melissa disparaged.
His parents’ Holocaust had been so painfully personal, you couldn’t question or discuss it; in fact, the only permissible role in the face of such suffering was to listen. Or at least with his mother. It was worse with his father whose silence, suggesting as it did experiences too dreadful for words, made the whole business even more untouchable. But at the
shule
he met survivors and children of survivors, many of whom, like him, had come to orthodoxy as adults. Daniel talked and prayed with the men at the synagogue and the hollow deep within him started to fill.
Only Jews care about Jews, he now believed, and the strength of Jews lay in their acting together and speaking in one voice no matter where in the world they lived. He could go to New York, or Rome or London or Belgrade and find Jews just like him, all with the same values, the same beliefs, the same vision. He truly believed that the greatest threat to the future of Judaism was not anti-Semitism, but liberal and secular Jews like his wife.
Twenty-five years together, half a lifetime, and so little in common, not even the children. Sophie, so like her mother, rarely said a word to him, and Nick, so much his father’s son, hardly acknowledged his mother’s existence. They lived like two couples under the same roof: Melissa and Sophie, Nick and himself. Even their past, his and Melissa’s, was no longer shared. An event of ten or fifteen years ago might be mentioned and Daniel would find himself recalling a vastly different situation and for entirely different reasons than Melissa. In short, what once was important to him about their life together was not to her. As to what she valued, much of the time his memory simply failed him.
He had asked himself whether he still loved her, and was too afraid to answer. There were times when she showed him a kindness, or would look at him with warmth, and his heart would leap and he would want to take her in his arms. But suspecting that old habits were stronger than new resentments, he kept his hands to himself. He wondered whether he had ever loved her, whether he had ever loved anyone properly. Certainly not his parents. He had respected them and admired them, but also resented them in equal measure. And with your children it is so difficult to know whether you have loved them properly, loved them in the best possible way. As for Laura, ten years is a huge gap between a brother and sister and love didn’t really come into it.
But he did love God. And he did love his Judaism. And he loved those Jews who greeted him at morning and evening prayers as if he really mattered. He felt at home in their little synagogue in a way he did not in his own home or his parents’ home before that.And he loved the certainty of his faith, and all the arguments, the ideas, the conundrums which filled the books of learning. The people of the book were his people and he loved being part of it.
He looked towards the house. The lights were on, there were shadows behind the blinds, a normal family home except the husband and father was loitering outside in the dark. He should go inside, part of him really wanted to, but so many things had been said, so many angry, cruel words, the most recent just two nights ago, a violent slanging match over Israel, and he and Melissa had hardly spoken since. It had been largely his fault, he had been blunt, far too blunt about his plans to spend some time in Israel before – and he could recall his exact words – ‘Those idiot Labour supporters hand over the whole country to the Arabs.’
He wished he had shown more restraint, after all, he would make his trip no matter what she thought, but sometimes his frustration burst out, surprising him more than anyone else. He was hardly aware these days of how much he bottled inside. So he exploded and she was shouting at him that Labour was the best hope for Israel, in fact, the only hope.And if only
meshuggeners
like him – ‘My own husband,’ she said in a voice oozing venom – stayed out of it, peace was a real possibility.
The argument had continued for hours. At one stage she said the best solution to the conflict was to take the
meshuggeneh
Arabs and the
meshuggeneh
Jews, stick them all in a compound, arm the lot of them, lock the gates and let them kill each other; then the moderates on both sides could get on with the negotiations. He could hardly believe what he was hearing, and from his own wife too. He yelled at her, she yelled back. He yanked her arm, she kicked his shin. She threw his Shabbat goblet across the room and dented it, he threw her Lalique sculpture to the floor and shattered it. They shouted cruel and horrible words to each other and neither made any attempt to retract.