The Song Before It Is Sung (2 page)

He has often pondered the nature of the complicity between men and women, particularly in the sexual realm. It may be that
you can't have sex with a woman boss because, in the traditional sexual grammar, women are the object. He has never had any
employees, except for a Polish cleaner who lasted three weeks: she was like a pupa, strangely pale and unformed and unalive,
with many sick relatives in Gdansk. Perhaps they were bleeding her dry.

Von Gottberg went back to Germany taking the imprint of Oxford with him. And for sixty years, E.A. Mendel walked around this
little rat-maze of stone and stained glass and richly fired brick, guilty about von Gottberg.

Von Gottberg's ninety-three-year-old wife, Liselotte, and one of his children, Caroline, have received him at their country
house, which is now given over to a religious foundation in his memory. This is the house to which they fled when the Russians
approached. The old lady said Axel loved Oxford. The daughter, Caroline, now sixty-three, had slightly staring, apparently
sightless eyes, the result, he guessed, of a kind of mysticism: she could see beyond the merely corporeal. As they sat in
the garden to talk, he saw that they were both sanctified and burdened by being good Germans. When he asked about von Gottberg's
feelings towards his Oxford friends, whether he felt he had been let down by Mendel, Lionel Wray and others, Caroline looked
to her mother for an answer. When there was none, she spoke -Conrad remembers dandelion heads floating behind her, past the
latticed brick of the old house — saying that there may have been this problem: my father was a German patriot, he wanted
to save Germany from Hitler. I think that some of his Oxford friends believed he wanted glory for himself. That is my understanding.
He wrote to us the night before he died, and we did not receive this letter although my mother was told in 1946 by a chaplain
that what he had written was that he regretted most that he was unable to use his experience and his insights to help the
country he loved. And when Conrad asked her, Do you think that means he believed his friends had let him down, she said, You
should ask my mother. The old lady, who was smiling at very low wattage, said, Yes, I think he was disappointed. Yes.

Conrad was invited to supper in the vaulted dining room. Liselotte had gone to bed. He ate with Caroline and some solemn Christians;
it seemed they were subdued, still stunned by the murder of Christ, the Nazis, the beastliness of the human race, their closeness
to an authentic martyr. He slept that night under a stag's head in the local inn, the Schwarzer Bock.

But he knew that families cannot be fully trusted: they manufacture their own myths. He didn't tell them that the film of
von Gottberg being hanged, naked, might still exist.

Difficult question. Nobody and everybody. What Francine meant was why did he think he had some obligation or right to rummage
about collecting - not a very systematic collection -ideas? She said he was like a shoplifter in a supermarket. What she meant
too was that he lived in a chaotic state, constantly picking up ideas rightfully belonging to other people — and other contexts
- and trying to take them home. There was a certain portion of truth in her charges. She also implied — in fact she actually
said it that night — that he had no ideas of his own.

'That's nonsense, of course,' he said, foolishly imagining he was being asked to contribute to an entertaining theoretical
discussion. 'To understand ideas, to be interested in ideas, you have to have ideas.'

'Here's an idea: why don't you get a job?'

'I'm working on Mendel's papers.'

'Are you?'

'Yes, I am.'

'And what does that work consist of?'

'Research, reading.'

'Oh, I see. And who is paying for this research?'

'You know the answer. But remember, we very nearly had a TV deal. And there are still people interested.'

'Your life so far has been a series of nearlies. I've got some hot news for you: no one is interested in E.A. Mendel. He had
an idea in 1953 but nobody can remember what it was. That's why the publishers aren't giving you any more money and that's
why the TV deal got nowhere and why nobody wants your film version of his story. Of course I am not in the creative world,
but even I know what goes on at the cinema: morons eat popcorn while watching cars exploding and aliens turning into spinach.
They don't want some bollocks about the history of ideas.'

When Francine was angry she developed a kind of torrential force that could not be stopped. He watched her with admiration
as she gathered herself. He had the feeling that he had written the script for her, but he had no hand in the delivery. Sometimes
she started quietly, inviting him to say something provocative. At other times she wanted to deliver a peroration without
contradiction, as though she had already run through the early charges and was now simply summing up for the benefit of the
jury. A not very intelligent jury. He knew that she had a desire for certainty, for the incorrigible proposition. And this
made it very hard for her to live with someone as unformed as he was. For a while she had called him the questing vole, but
that was while she still found him amusing. Now she thought his curiosity was an excuse, a form of evasion.

Her face, with its seeping medical tiredness, had a high, feverish colour now, siphoned from the depths by resentment. Her
eyes were cloudy, the way they used to be during sex, as if her anger had produced a flash of blindness, like looking at the
sun, and her throat was becoming pink and russet, and slightly mottled — mushroom colours and textures. The violence of her
feelings towards him was causing this discoloration. Mushrooms have a strange and mysterious life cycle, much of it underground.
And on the surface Francine appeared calm, although the fungal colour was becoming more intense.

'Conrad, I go out every morning at seven, I return home at seven - if I'm lucky - I've been peering at samples and slides,
I have even seen a few patients, I have grabbed ten minutes to eat a piece of microwaved pizza in the canteen, and you have
been reading the letters and ramblings of a long-forgotten — rightly in my opinion — Oxford don, who knew just how to flatter
you by talking of your human qualities. And, guess what, the marmalade is exactly where you left it at breakfast.'

The charges were true. But his alleged human qualities seemed to Conrad to be important, if still unclear.

Francine continued: 'I have decided to leave you. I can't live like this. I need some support.'

At the time she surprised him with her resolve. A few months later she said that she had been seeing another man, the consultant
who was her boss, a man very highly regarded in obstetrics. He had recruited her to his team. He was fifty-one years old,
sixteen years older than her. That word 'seeing' troubled him. He found it hard to believe that it meant fucking. It was too
brutal. He had hung around outside the hospital for a few days and once had seen them leaving together. (He had plenty of
time to observe the disordered comings and goings of the patients while he was waiting.) What had surprised him was that he
was not present in their lives. Somehow he had imagined that Francine and John would be crippled by the knowledge of him,
that his spectral form would be visible between them, that they would be slipping away nervously, alarmed by the foolishness
of their actions; but no, they walked happily down the front steps of the hospital in Whitechapel and linked hands as they
turned down a side street. What hurt him most was that she appeared happy, carefree, girlish. Even her hair seemed to have
acquired new vivacity.

In another context, John might have looked to him like any other decent, utterly unremarkable English professional man, but
here, leaving the hospital with Conrad's wife, he had princely qualities. Here, he was a man known and admired for his pioneering
work on the incontinence in women caused by childbirth. Francine was a suitable tribute for his achievements.

She tried to dress up her defection as a gift from her to Conrad:

'I have a career, my career path is more or less fixed now, but you, you still have some growing up to do. I realised you
didn't want to be tied in this way. I am sure you will see it for the best in time.'

She always needed to tidy things up mentally, as if by naming them they were settled. It was — he thought - a scientific habit:
taxonomy applied to the emotional life.

'With my human qualities still unexplored.'

'What?'

'What you said about me and Mendel.'

'Yes,' she said impatiently. 'You and your human qualities.'

It was clear that she had come to this meeting determined to be brief and final. Her neck coloured again anxiously at the
delay.

'In medicine, we don't have enough time to investigate human qualities. We are too busy with human beings, in person.'

'And is John leaving his wife?'

'That's our business.'

'Is he too old to have more children?'

'Jesus, you can be offensive.'

'We were going to have a child, remember?'

'We were. But I had to delay, remember, when I got the research job and you found - what a surprise - that you weren't earning
as much as you expected when you went freelance.'

'Well, you're fine now as long as wifey doesn't take all his money.'

Francine asked him to leave as soon as the flat was sold - as she said, a free spirit can operate anywhere.

Actually he found that it wasn't that easy to go to Israel without friends or letters of introduction. The Israeli agents
at the airport questioned him closely about his motives and his intentions. He explained that he was going on holiday but
that made them suspicious. He stood for half an hour with his baggage, which earlier an excitable dog had okayed, while they
made phone calls. With reluctance they allowed him to proceed. At Tel Aviv the plane landed to some rousing folk music; there
they questioned him again and asked him to list the people he was seeing. There was only one, a film-location manager whose
name he had been given. The agents particularly wanted to know if he had friends on the West Bank. They wore sunglasses on
the tops of their closely shaved heads, giving the impression that office work bored them, that they would prefer to be vigorously
employed outside. And this, he thought, is what has happened out here in the Levant, as Mendel described it: Jews have become
outdoorsy people.

The Mediterranean, lapping the town, was unexpectedly glamorous, but Tel Aviv had a rackety, half-planted feel and he remembered
what Mendel had written:

Conrad took a shared taxi to Jerusalem and he found himself looking closely at the other passengers, remembering Mendel's
description of the people as odd and fascinating. Some were backpackers from New York's suburbs, he guessed, the girls wearing
little squares of cloth on their heads to indicate a willingness to muck in with the harvest and an eagerness to embrace the
spiritual challenges ahead. There were English Hasids, the men strangely abstracted as though this earth, this taxi bus, these
numerous children, these wives with the chestnut wigs and full fecundity, were in a way not fully present, unavoidably inhabiting
the same space, but ephemeral, shadows cast by their husbands' radiance.

By the time the taxi van had reached a mountain pass, he wondered how the soft pale people from North London and the eager
backpackers saw the landscape outside, now turning from the coastal plain to a tumultuous upland littered with the painted
shells of armoured cars, left — he discovered — as a reminder of the war of 1948. What did they see in these tortured, pumice
rocks and grudging trees and steep, parched valleys? Did they see a land of milk and honey, a landscape that had been deep
in the race memory all through the diaspora, or did they see, as Mendel did, an unfamiliar and unnerving otherness?

Conrad himself knows that you can hold at the same time different landscapes in your head - or in your fibres - for instance,
the broad openness of Africa and the distilled beauty of Oxford. He also finds himself seeing John and Francine conversing
about bladders and urine samples in the lab and then, back in the little flat John has taken, he sees the warm strawberry
rash rising up her throat as John, with the scientific and practical qualities, so different from his own which are essentially
meaningless, removes his scrubs and reveals his highly meaningful self to his research student, who has now forgotten for
ever that she is married to Conrad. He feels a sharp pain, as though he has in some way been erased, his very existence questioned.
And he wonders how the lovers can reconcile the madness of sex with the scientific life. The answer - the Orthodox children
with their insane side-locks seem to have been put here to illustrate his train of thought — is that we are not wholly rational,
and never will be.

To prepare himself for this trip and to think about something other than Francine and John in Whitechapel, he has read Amos
Oz's autobiography. Oz's mother was never able to adapt to the landscape; goose-girls and deep resinous forests were more
real to her than Arab shepherds and olive trees. In Jerusalem with the blinding white rocks and the thin soil, she felt lost:
eventually she killed herself, leaving the eleven-year-old Amos. And maybe this is what Mendel meant when he described the
country as strange and his kinship with the people who had been Levantised as unsettling, even frightening.

And Conrad sees Mendel, small and plump, with the tall, thin von Gottberg, approaching Jerusalem and he wonders exactly what
thoughts assaulted them, because Jerusalem is a city like no other, a city that attracts the irrational and the mystic and
the fanatic, as if there are certain loci on this earth that exhale some of the vapours of human longing that have been breathed
on them over the millennia. Once Conrad heard wild bees in a cleft in a rock in Africa, and the fanning of the wings and the
diligent murmuring suggested some message, like the intimations of music, which came from beyond the rational. Jerusalem is
the world capital of the irrational, with longing and loss and despairing hope to boot.