The Song Before It Is Sung (3 page)

And into this place - they arrive on donkeys from Transjordan — come Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg. Even on a donkey it
is clear that von Gottberg is born to ride. Whereas Mendel has only once ridden - coincidentally on a donkey - on the beach
in Bournemouth. In the photograph of the event, the donkey wears a straw hat and the infant Mendel is holding an ice cream.
He wears a sailor top and small black spectacles, so that he looks like a bee, a Jewish bee. Mendel tells friends gleefully
that on the outskirts of Jerusalem they were stoned by Orthodox Jews. Von Gottberg's feet, in calfskin boots, are almost trailing
in the powdery dust.

Outside the King David Hotel where they are staying, a photographer captures them. Mendel is smiling, a smile that Conrad
recognises across sixty years. It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse
of the surrounding features. Von Gottberg has his arm around Mendel's shoulder: some way behind them is the stone fagade of
the hotel, and behind that a glimpse of the Old City. In this photograph they look as though they have been posed for Nazi
propaganda, the tall, athletic, aristocratic Count Axel von Gottberg, of Pleskow, and the smaller, softer Elya Mendel, of
Hampstead, who could be thought by the ill-disposed, from his complicit smile, to have cabalistic knowledge. Conrad knows
that look, intensely curious, half-amused, expecting something entertaining to happen, as happy to hear gossip as a new idea.
Conrad is staying in the old Petra Hotel, not far away, but he ventures into the King David to get the fabled view of the
Old City from the terrace.

The Old City glows in the late-afternoon light. It is not obviously a Jewish city: he can see churches and the Dome of the
Rock and beyond that the cemeteries rising above the Garden of Gethsemane and up the Mount of Olives. The walls are mainly
Ottoman with some Crusader sections, but the stones were quarried near by and re-used after every conquest, so that this city
-viewed from above the swimming pool from which the voices of children are rising - is as no other city he has ever seen,
semaphoring significance. And this is the pattern: ideas and creeds are now represented by unheeding stones as the ends of
human longing. For two thousand years - longer if you count the Mesopotamian diaspora - the Jews have held this landscape
in their minds. But over there, pulsing, is the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammed ascended on a horse for
his Night Ride to Mecca, and beyond that on a hill is the spot where Jesus ascended into heaven, and then beyond that the
hills of the Judaean Desert, which seem to have a separate illumination, so that they are pale and bleached, with the dark
shapes of clouds - the clouds themselves are not visible - moving swiftly like airships over the landscape.

And Conrad thinks that here in the Holy Land Mendel and von Gottberg may already have been aware of some sort of historical
juncture in the relationship between Germans and Jews. On the one hand the aggrieved and resentful Germans were being offered
a Faustian deal by Hitler and on the other the rawly human but vulnerable Jews were arriving here in their confused thousands,
on the move again. But they could not have had more than an inkling of the nightmare that was to come.

Von Gottberg's letters show that he was always keen for Mendel's approval: Mendel was the same age as von Gottberg, but seems
to have arrived, like an egg, fully formed into the world and, strangely for a young man, to have come equipped with a serenity
and wisdom. Conrad wonders if von Gottberg resented, at a deep Germanic level, Mendel's urbanity and his protean - Jewish
- qualities. Von Gottberg's family had lived in the same pile for six hundred years, while Mendel's had arrived in England
via Riga and St Petersburg only nineteen years earlier.

As Conrad walks down to the Jaffa Gate and into the Old City, he finds himself under siege. He is entering a city out of an
orientalist's sketchbook, with spice stalls and pushcarts and shops selling nuts and feral vegetables and parched herbs and
chunks of meat; Bedouin women sit gloomily with isolated tomatoes spread on cloths, and then a group of Orthodox priests passes,
plump from the devotion of crones, and young boys rush about with beaten-copper trays of tea and Palestinians are sitting
at a table attached to a hookah, and now some Jews in fedoras with threads of the tallith underneath their overcoats come
sightlessly by, and Arab children are buying candyfloss in colours that do not exist in nature, and then Conrad enters a long
tunnel of tiny cave-shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and he stops for a mint tea in a courtyard that leads off the teeming
street. He sees Mendel and von Gottberg here, Mendel eagerly listening out for traces of Aramaic and Russian and von Gottberg
trying to estimate what point in history this overwhelmingly aromatic and exotic place has reached and Mendel fascinated by
the sense he has -or is acquiring - that human objectives can easily be in conflict. As if to prove the point, German Jews
are sniffing vegetables fastidiously, resisting Levantisation from inside their Bavarian jackets and loden coats. Conrad sips
his mint tea - a large bunch of mint thrust into the pot - and wonders what it was like to be here without the knowledge of
what was to come. The knowledge that has made us.

Mendel and von Gottberg stop at the Lutheran Erloserkirche. Although von Gottberg has given up active Christianity, he is
a believer in Christian values. Mendel, although a non-believer, is a Zionist and believes in the preservation of Jewish cultural
values. It's strange, Conrad thinks sitting here, near the church, now accepting some pistachios and some more tea, that belief
in the existence or non-existence of God is no impediment to friendship and understanding.

The young Palestinians wear cheap trainers; their hair is geometrically cut. He wonders if they ever have distinctly secular
thoughts. And he wonders if on this trip the two friends talked about Jews in Europe, because already in Germany Jews are
under notice. On a personal level, as he knows, human beings - for example, he and Francine - can have irreconcilable differences.
He thinks about having Francine back, if she asks, but he knows it would be impossible because he cannot imagine forgiving
her, not so much for kicking him out, but for allowing her body to be a receptacle for someone else's semen. How can he explain
that in rational terms? He can't. And he can't even explain to himself, as an atheist, why this idea of the transfer of human
substance, this sacrament, should be so painful to him.

He feels cold now as the sun goes down. The Old City seems to be closing down too: as the shopkeepers pack up, the bare electric
light bulbs strung out along walls are beginning to shine bright. The sky above the courtyard is the colour of dark crustaceans,
a pigment with a mineral content, elemental specks of colour not fully ground in. Tomorrow he will follow von Gottberg and
Mendel along the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha to see where Christ died and the madness began.

The Arab owner of the Café tells him that his brother lives in London. These days everyone in the whole world has a brother
living in London. And Conrad has had this kind of conversation many times. It always leads to misapprehensions and pointless
exchanges of information, which become increasingly stilted.

'You know Hackney?'

'Yes.'

'My brother say is very bad.'

'It is a poor part.'

'Many Jews.'

The protocols of Zion will be next, or the theory that Mossad bombed the Twin Towers.

'Thank you for the tea.'

'Wilcome to Jerusalem. I born here.'

'Thank you. I was born in Cape Town.'

'Israelis take my home.'

'I am very sorry.'

'You wilcome. No pay.'

In his hurry, he turns the wrong way and is lost. Where, a few alleys away, all was movement and bustle, he is now in almost
empty lanes stalked by cats. An Arab child stares at him. From a dim doorway a woman calls the child; he hopes this is not
a response to seeing him. He wonders how he appears in his khakis and T-shirt. Perhaps he looks sinister. These jumbled alleys
and turnings and stairways have no obvious plan. He passes a small Café, half of it below street-level, where a group of young
men is watching a football game on television. The field is so green he thinks the football must be taking place in Germany
or Scandinavia. The verdure in this chalky, bone-coloured place looks lurid and unreal. A goose-girl would happily lead her
gaggle of geese across it. He comes out of an alley into a square, and there ahead of him is an Armenian church. From the
church he hears someone chanting, perhaps a priest. He puts his head inside the heavily brocaded doorway, into the scented
and lamplit vestibule. A man, perhaps a verger, directs him towards the Jaffa Gate. God bless you, he says, as Conrad walks
out past the church under an arch, the stone strung with electric wires which also drape doorways and blind balconies.

Can we know anybody else? Other minds? Can I know von Gottberg and Mendel, or even Francine? Does John already know her better
than I do? Or maybe we find what we want in other people, and so we never know them.

Although he has a talent for quotation, he didn't quote Eliot in reply because he doesn't believe its implied meaning, which
Eliot probably picked up from Buddhism, that life has patterns according to which we must try to harmonise ourselves. Life
has no purpose: that is its stark beauty. That's one lesson he learned from Mendel. Here, as he walks, he hears all sorts
of prayers and imprecations rising, those who are dispatching them evidently unaware that nobody is listening.

Sitting high in the Ottoman crenellations above the Jaffa Gate he sees the casual outline of two Israeli soldiers against
the crustacean sky. If life has no meaning then this city, with its tumultuous longing and bitterness, is a monument to the
power of delusion. And this delusion also has a kind of beauty; and he remembers what George Grosz wrote, that the commanders
in the field paint in blood.

The imams are calling as he walks back, and from a mezzanine room, somehow awkwardly stranded by ancient architectural upheavals
- these old buildings and stones are jumbled and reordered after thousands of years of recycling - he hears wild, muscular-Jewish
music, and then he sees the shadows on the wall of men dancing. The shadows at least are hurling themselves about in a madcap
way, as though the harvest had been good or they were moonstruck or - more likely - expecting the Messiah at any minute.

His room is small and sparsely furnished, with a view of a courtyard. Actually it's less of a view than a meniscus, a little
sliver of wall and some stone paving down below, glazed by the passage of feet. He likes strange, unknown rooms. They give
him a low charge of excitement.

Conrad cannot sleep. He lies pleasurably in the mean bed and thinks, tries to think, more measured thoughts about Francine.
He understands her contempt for him. His grandmother's house in Cape Town had flypaper in the kitchen; many of the little
shops in the Old City have it, hanging down over the strange cuts of meat or the sticky pastries. He remembers as a child
waiting to see a fly landing on the paper: and this is how Francine sees him, waiting idly for some minor sensation, while
she goes out on the world's business. And it is true that helping women deliver their babies as she does, sometimes having
to slice them open just above the pubis, is activity of an entirely different order. Once upon a time they had discussed films
and books and ideas; she had been charmed by his inchoate eagerness. What charmed her then now seems infantile to her. The
scientific life has got to her, as though all those chemicals and miserable people and - let's face it - death, have somehow
driven her into the arms of the superior class who deal with the real world, who have the power of life and death and who
know folly and self-indulgence when they see it. Francine cannot bear to see people chomping their way to the grave, slurping
sweet drinks or puffing on cigarettes or dipping into buckets of popcorn: in her estimation he is really just a high-minded
version of these slobs who exculpate themselves from the consequences of their own folly in torrents of banality. And this
is one of the reasons he loved Mendel, because Mendel never ceased from exploration. And Conrad sees now, in this cell just
outside the resonant walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, that what happened to von Gottberg and Mendel must be explored even
though he cannot justify it to Francine — God knows he has tried - and it may be that the only reason is that he owes a debt
of love to Mendel, who recognised his human qualities, and gave him a surprising legacy.

He sees more clearly now. In the morning I will begin to put this story in order, as Mendel wanted. He sees Mendel's creased
smile, and he sees von Gottberg standing before Freisler, his hands crossed in front of him, ready to be sacrificed.

And von Gottberg was almost exactly the age I am now.

MENDEL AND VON Gottberg are standing outside the boundary of the Dome of the Rock, which they know as the Mosque of Omar.
The dome is gleaming. It is too bright for this climate, a great gold cupola high above Jerusalem winking and conducting heat
and radiating it out over the Old City, like the RKO Radio Pictures trademark.

The faithful are gathering for prayer and the muezzin are calling. It's a sound that stitches together the Muslim world, a
defiant, plaintive, poetic call. They stand under the shade of a cypress as the worshippers arrive and wash themselves at
the tiled basins into which water gushes from giant bronze spigots. Water and paradise are closely associated. The faithful
drift into the mosque, its magnificence and space and colour the simulacrum of paradise. Down below, in an alleyway, Jews
are praying in front of the Western Wall; their heads nod and dip and nod again. They are not worshipping the giant blocks
of stone in front of them as it appears, but they are inspired to piety by the remains of Herod's temple. It is their direct
line to their real and imagined past.

They often discuss the purposes of history. To Mendel's amusement, von Gottberg sees patterns in history.

As they leave the haram, von Gottberg stops and holds Mendel's arm.

'Elya, I am going back to Germany.'

'Don't leave us.'

'I have to go.'

'Why?'

'My country is sick.'

'Can I ask why you, especially, have to go?'

'It's my country. Somebody has to take care of it.'

Mendel thinks that his friend sets too much store by his own destiny.

They walk out of the Old City down towards the Kidron Valley. Mendel walks surprisingly quickly, efficiently but not gracefully.
He and von Gottberg have often talked on Addison's Walk in the spring, deep in fritillaries, scilla and windflowers, and in
the autumn brushing through leaves and the spiralling, helicoptering seed pods from the limes. Perhaps it reminds von Gottberg
of Unter den Linden.

Von Gottberg has cherished his talks with Mendel, more than anything at Oxford. They have argued about the nature of ideas;
Mendel has begun to tire of philosophy, but loves the history of ideas. He doesn't see - he is wilfully blind - the forces
behind history and philosophy. Sometimes in Oxford von Gottberg has detected a certain loneliness in his friend. He loves
the company of women, but he is a virgin. Von Gottberg knows that Mendel observes his easy successes with women and so he
plays them down and sometimes he withholds information from him.

As they walk down the dusty track into the Kidron Valley, they are, in their Oxford fashion, discussing philosophy. Under
their feet are flints and stones the colour of bones; some of them may be bones. There are tombs here cut into the rock. The
biggest, Absalom's tomb, has a hole high up on its face, as though a mortar shell has gone right through the rock.

Mendel says that Jerusalem is a place of irrationality. Von Gottberg thinks that Jerusalem is just a stage in man's journey
to self-consciousness.

'You should remember what Hegel said: "The actual is rational."

'Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Sonorous nonsense.'

They love high-minded walking.

At Absalom's tomb, in fact the tomb of a member of one of the Hasmonean priestly families at the time of Christ, they buy
some bread from a Bedouin, who heats it on a brazier (it is very cold, although there is some sun on the high ground) and
the Bedouin gives them a twist of paper with coarse salt in it. The bread is sprinkled with a dried herb, perhaps oregano.
Mendel says that this bread has been baked since the time of David, and the herbs come from the mountainsides. He takes pleasure
in this continuity.

'Count von Gottberg and Mr Mendel.'

'This is my cousin, Rosamund Bower, Mr Mendel.'

'Elya, please. This is the land of the muscular Jew. In fact a wholly new breed of informal Jew, who likes outdoor activity.
Absolutely delighted to see you in daylight.'

'You were deep in discussion,' says Elizabeth. 'Interesting, I hope?'

'Yes, Axel was trying to tell me that I misunderstand the nature of human ends.'

'And do you?'

'Not always.'

'Does he, Axel?'

'It's hard to say, because nobody can agree on human ends.'

'Too clever for me, I'm afraid. I'm rather simple,' she says, laughing girlishly in the direction of von Gottberg.

Mendel notices her small, childish teeth, which are strangely lascivious. He has never before thought of teeth as part of
the sexual weaponry. The second woman who he has at first decided is the less attractive, the alibi type, he sees now has
a dark, rather serious look, which suggests a rich inner life. Her lips appear to be naturally outlined in some mineral substance.
She leads Mendel towards some caves.

'I think it is amazing that these tombs are carved out of solid rock.'

'Yes,' she says, 'the tomb with the hole in the top, Absalom's tomb, has that hole because it was completely buried over the
centuries and grave robbers got in from the top.'

'I wonder how long it took to carve out. But of course time, and any idea of its short supply, probably hadn't occurred to
the Hasmoneans.'

'Do you always talk so profoundly?'

'Believe me, I'm far more superficial than I appear. It's just a habit you cultivate in my line of work. What's yours?'

'I was at Oxford for a year, in fact I used to see you always surrounded by acolytes. Now I am trying to write a novel.'

'What sort of novel are you writing?'

'I'm a great admirer of Virginia Woolf.'

'Marvellous writer. I've met her.'

'Did you like her?'

'She frightened me. She sent me a postcard afterwards, saying any time I was in London I should knock on her little grey front
door and she would let me enter.'

'Rather risque.'

'Yes, I thought so.'

'And did you knock on her front door?'

'No, I was too nervous. Far too nervous. We met last night briefly, but I didn't catch your name a few minutes ago, I'm afraid.
Rosalind?'

'Rosamund.'

'Why were you following us?'

'Well, we're not actually following you. It's just that your friend Axel arranged last night to meet Elizabeth here and she
thought I should come to protect her. Is he very voracious?'

'I think he is. Surrounded by servants all his life and milkmaids, of course.'

'Is he a Nazi?'

'Good God, I hope not. No, he's far too intelligent for that.'

'Oh look, they're wandering off.'

They follow the other two at a distance in the direction of the small village that stands above the valley. All around are
graves, slabs of stone, some neglected, one or two with small piles of rocks on them.

'What are you doing here?' he asks.

'Oh, Elizabeth and I are cousins, as she said. She is a little bored here, I think, so she invited me to stay. She and Roddy
have an old Turkish house, very solid. I was in Italy trying to write my novel, so I came by steamer to Haifa. Do you know
I heard about you all the time in Oxford, but we never met.'

'More's the pity.'

'You're supposed to be brilliant. Dazzle me.'

'Am I supposed to be brilliant? To tell you the truth I talk far too much, but only the credulous are taken in. Will you tell
me about your novel?'

'Are you interested or being polite?'

'I'm deeply interested.'

And she sees that he is. He smiles but it is not patronising or cynical. His eyes, behind his glasses, are very dark, the
irises abnormally large. As they walk up through the olive trees where goats are foraging in their irrepressible, intelligent
way, she tells him that it is the story of one young woman watching as her lover is taken from her by a friend.

'Has this happened to you, or is that too direct a question?'

'They always say write what you know.'

She is no older than him, but he has seen that life can quickly produce wariness; the blitheness of extreme youth has gone,
but still she has a kind of directness he finds attractive. At Oxford he soon discovered that he was drawn to these intelligent,
upper-class girls. She stares down the dry wadi, in the direction of the Dead Sea.

'I am over it now, I think. The book is my therapy.'

'I met Dr Freud once, a very strange man.'

'Gosh, you have met everybody. Why is he strange?'

'Sorry, I tend to blurt things out when I am excited. After five minutes he proclaimed, "I see you are not a snob."

'Why?'

'I don't know. Perhaps he has psychic powers. Please tell me more about your book.'

'I'm finding it very hard to write because I am not sure if the life that interests me will interest other people.'

'May I read it? Do you have it here?'

'I've only got a few chapters typed. In my bag. I carry them everywhere. It comforts me.'

'Will you let me read them?'

'I would be honoured, actually, if you would.'

The village, Silwan, is very simple. These Arab villages appear to be slowly falling down, roughly at the same speed as other
parts of them are being built. A mosque, with a pencil-slim minaret, stands in the middle of the dusty, crumbling houses with
cool dark interiors. They have tea and coffee in a courtyard served under a cypress tree out of the cold wind. Elizabeth is
wearing a straw hat, tied around the crown with a huge floppy pink bow: the brim spreads extravagantly on one side and hangs
over her eyes, so that when she talks to von Gottberg she has to raise her face slightly, which, Mendel sees, is done in a
consciously provocative way. Both the women have shining waved hair, and their eyes are made up to look wide and expectant.

'Shall we leave them?' Mendel asks.

'All right. Elizabeth, let's meet up again at the King David for a cocktail. We'll meet you at six or so. Elya is going to
teach me how to speak everyday Hasmonean.'

'Toodle-oo,' Elizabeth says, and turns back to von Gottberg. They hear his extraordinary laugh suddenly breaking to the surface.

'In Russia there is a saying that you sometimes feel like the fifth wheel on the wagon,' says Mendel when they are at a distance.

'Yes, I am afraid my cousin is not happy with Roddy. He is rather earnest and works all the time.'

'And Axel is providing a little diversion?'

'Yes. She hopes so anyway. Where shall we go?'

'Let's walk up through the Jewish cemetery. And then to the Garden of Gethsemane,' he adds.

'No need to be ecumenical. I'm half Jewish, although I was never brought up with any Jewish faith. Or indeed any faith. When
you are here, do you long to see where Jesus walked or where Solomon's temple stood, or to climb King David's tower?

'Nothing to do with King David, of course.'

'Do you see a Jewish homeland?'

'Yes, I think Jews must have a homeland. We Jews.'

She rests her hand on his forearm.

'Elya, can we go back to the hotel now? I have the manuscript and I want you to read it. I won't be able to rest until I hear
your opinion.'

In the bar of the hotel she orders a Tom Collins.

'Would you like one?'

'I've never had one.'

'You don't know what you are missing.'

She removes her small hat, which is clinging to the side of her head, and shakes her dark, waved hair, as if expecting clouds
of dust to emerge, as from a beaten carpet. Her hair is centre-parted, the waves tumbling in an orderly fashion to just above
her collar. Mendel feels quite drunk after his first deep draught.

'Can you read the manuscript in your room?' she asks.

'Of course.'

He feels suddenly bereft, and stands up.

'Shall I meet you down here?' he asks.

'Don't be silly. I'm coming too.'

The lift, one of the earliest in Jerusalem, is piloted by a robed servant, perhaps a Sudanese. A Nubian. Rosamund and he stand
some way apart; lifts sometimes produce this awkwardness about proximity. His room is on the sixth floor. The operator uses
a brass handle to bring the lift to rest.

'It's a little cluttered, I'm afraid.'

In the short time he has been here he has collected pamphlets and maps and books and a Roman head and a small carpet, rolled
up. After clearing a space they sit in the two padded and studded chairs, which have fanciful Ottoman legs, splayed outwards.
She pulls the manuscript from her bag.

'Here we are.'

She stands and goes to the window.

Outside, the Old City is glowing. The light in Jerusalem has a desert quality, adamantine in the day, but softening and golden
in the evening.

'God it's a marvellous sight. I'll order from the bar. What would you like? I'm going to have another Tom Collins.'

'So am I,' says Mendel, giggling. 'When in Rome . . .'

Once he has started to read, he looks up only to smile until a waiter in a white uniform with a red sash over his shoulder
appears.

'Wonderful,' says Mendel, but she doesn't know if he is talking about his second Tom Collins, which he drains excitedly, or
her novel.

'Do you mind if I have a shower? I'm dusty.'

'No please, go right ahead. This is very, very good, moving, this opening scene of the break-up. You are a marvellous writer.'

He can hear the shower — the showerhead is enormous, as big as a French sunflower drooping at sunset. The sound of the water
on the marble, by way of her body, distracts him. She is in his bathroom, just through there, naked.