Triple (21 page)

TRIPLE

"Ut's have some coffee," Suza said. "Or would you prefer tear,

"Coffee, please. Thank you."

"I expect you want to see Daddy. He's teaching this morning, but hell be

back soon for lunch." She poured coffee beans into a hand-operated

grinder.

"And your motherr,

"She died fourteen years ago. Cancer." Suza looked at him, expecting the

automatic "I'm sorry." The words did not come, but the thought showed on

his face. Somehow she Red him more for that She ground the beans. The

noise filled the silence.

When she had finished, Dickstein said, "Professor Ashford is still

teaching ... I was just trying to work out his age."

"Sixty-five," she said. "He doesn7t do a lot." Sixty-five sounded ancient

but Daddy didn't seem old, she thought fondly: his mind was still sharp

as a knife. She wondered what Dickstein did for a living. "Didift you

emigrate to Palestine?" she asked him.

"Israel. I live on a kibbutz. I grow grapes and make wine."

Israel. In this house it was always called Palestine. How would Daddy

react to this old friend who now stood for everything Daddy stood

against? She knew the answer: it would make no difference, for Daddy's

politics were theoretical, not practical. She wondered why Dickstein had

come. "Are you on holidayr'

"Business. We now think the wine is good enough to export to Europe."

"'Mat's very good. And you're selling it?"

"Looking out the possibilities. Tell me about yourself. rIl bet you're

not a university professor."

The remark annoyed her a little, and she knew she was blushing faintly

just below her ears: she did not want this man to think she was not

clever enough to be a don. "What makes you say thatT' she said coolly.

"You're so . . . warm." Dickstein looked away, as if he immediately

regretted the choice of word. "Anyway, too young.99

She had misjudged him. He had not been condescending. "I have my father's

ear for languages, but not his academic turn of mind, so I'm an air

hostess," she said, and wondered if it were true that she did not have

an academic mind,

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whether she really was not clever enough to be a don. She poured boiling

water into a filter, and the smell of coffee filled the room. She did not

know what to say next. She glanced up at Dickstein and discovered that he

was openly gazing at her, deep in thought. His eyes were large and dark

brown. Suddenly she felt shy-which was most unusual. She told him so,

"Shy?" he said. "That's because I've been staring at you as if you were

a painting, or something. I'm trying to get used to the fact that you're

not Eila, you're the little girl with the old gray cat."

"Hezekiah died, it must have been soon after you left."

"'Ilere's a lot that's changed."

"Were you great friends with my parentsr

"I was one of your father's students. I admired your mother from a

distance. Eila . . ." Again he looked away, as if to pretend that it was

someone else speaking. "She wasn't just beautiful--she was striking."

Suza looked into his face. She thought: You loved her. Tlie thought came

unbidden; it was intuitive; she immediately suspected it might be wrong.

However, it would explain the severity of his reaction on the doorstep

when he saw her. She said, "My mother was the original hippy-did you know

thatT'

"I don't know what you mean."

"She wanted to be free. She rebelled against the restrictions

put on Arab women, even though she came from an affluent,

liberal home. She married my father to get out of the Middle

East. Of course she found that western society had its own

ways of repressing women --- so she proceeded to break most

of the rules." As she spoke Suza remembered how she had re

alized, while she was becoming a woman and beginning to

understand passion, that her mother was promiscuous. She

had been shocked, she was sure, but somehow she could not

recall the feeling.

"'Mat makes her a hippy?" Dickstein said.

"Hippies believe in free love."

641 see."

And from his reaction to that she knew that her mother had not loved Nat

Dickstein. For no reason at all this made her sad. "Tell me about your

parents," she said. She was talking to him as if they were the same age.

lie

TJUPLE

"Only if you pour the coffee."

She laughed. "I was forgetting."

"My father was a cobbler," Dickstein began. "He was good at mending boots

but he wasn't much of a businessman. Still, the Thirties were good years

for cobblers in the East End of London. People couldn't afford new boots,

so they had their old ones mended year after year. We were never rich,

but we had a little more money than most of the people around us. And,

of course, there was some pressure on my father from his family to expand

the business, open a second shop, employ other men."

Suza passed him his coffee. "Milk, sugar?"

"Sugar, no milk. Thank you."

"Do go on." It was a different world, one she knew nothing about: it had

never occurred to her that a shoe repairer would do well in a depression.

"Me leather dealers thought my father was a tartar-they could never sell

him anything but the best. If there was a second-rate hide they would

say, 'Don't bother . giving that to Dickstein, hell send it straight

back.' So I was told, anyway." He gave that little smile again.

"Is he still alive?" Suza asked.

"He died before the war."

"What happened?"

"Well. The Thirties were the Fascist years in London. They used to hold

open-air meetings every night. The speakers would tell them how Jews the

world over were sucking the blood of working people. The speakers, the

organizers, were respectable middle-class men, but the crowds were unem-

ployed ruffians. After the meetings they would march through the streets,

breaking windows and roughing-up pashersby. Our house was a perfect

target for them. We were Jews; my father was a shopkeeper and therefore

a bloodsucker; and, true to their propaganda, we were slightly better off

than the people around us."

He stopped, staring into space. Suza waited for him to go on. As he told

this story, he seemed to 'huddle-crossing his legs tightly, wrapping his

arms around his body, hunching his back. Sitting there on the kitchen

stool, in his ill-fitting suit of clerical,gray, with his elbows and

knees and shoulders pointing at all angles, he looked like a bundle of

sticks in a bag.

"We lived over the shop. Every damn night I used to lie 119

Ken Felleff

awake, waiting for them to go past. I was blind terrified, mainly because I

knew my father was so frightened. Sometimes they did nothing, just went by.

Usually they shouted out slogans. Often, often they broke the windows. A

couple of times they got Into the shop and smashed it up. I thought they

were going to come up the stairs. I put my head under the pillow, crying,

and cursed God for making me Jewish."

"Didn!t the police do anything?"

'Vhat they could. If they were around they stopped it. But they had a lot

to do in those days. The Communists were the only people who would help us

fight back, and my father didn't want their help. All the political parties

were against the Fascists, of course-but it was the Reds who gave out

pickaxe handles and crowbars and built barricades. I tried to join the

Party but they wouldn't have me--too young."

"And your father?"

"He just sort of lost heart. After the shop was wrecked the second time

there was no money to fix it. It seemed be didn't have the energy to start

again somewhere else. He went on the dole, and just kind of wasted. He died

in 1938."

"And you?"

"Grew up fast Joined the army as soon as I looked old enough. Got taken

prisoner early. Came to Oxford after the

war, then dropped out and went to Israel."

"Have you got a family out there?"

"The whole kibbutz is my family but I never mar.

ried."

"Because of my mother?"

"Perhaps. Partly. You're very direct."

She felt the glow of a faint blush below her ears again: it had been a very

intimate question to ask someone who was practically a stranger. Yet it had

come quite naturally. She said, "rm sorry."

"Don't apologize," Dickstein said. "I rarely talk like this. Actually, this

whole trip is, I don't know, full of the past. There's a word for it.

Redolent."

"That means smelling of death."

Dickstein shrugged.

There was a silence. I like this man a lot, Suza thought. I like his

conversation and his silences, his big eyes and his old suit and his

memories. I hope he'll stay a while.

She picked up the coffee cups and opened the dishwasher.

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_ TRIPLE

A spoon slid off a saucer and bounced under the large old freezer. She

said, "Damn."

Dickstein got down on his knees and peered underneath.

"It's there forever, now," Suza said. '~Mat thing is too heavy to move."

Dickstein lifted one end of the freezer with his right hand and reached

underneath it with his left. He lowered the end of the freezer, stood up

and handed the spoon to Suza.

She stared at him. "What are you-Captain America? 11at thing is heavy."

"I work in the fields. How do you know about Captain America? He was the

rage in my boyhood."

"Hes the rage now. 1he art in those comics is fantastic."

"Well, stone the crows," he said. "We had to read them in secret because

they were trash. Now they're art. Quite right, too.91

She smiled. "Do you really work in the fields?" He looked Eke a clerk, not

a field hand.

"Of course."

"A wine salesman who actually gets dirt under his fingernails in the

vineyard. That's unusual."

"Not in Israel. Were a little ... obsessive, I suppose ... about the

soil." *

Suza looked at her watch and was surprised to see how late it was. "Daddy

should be home any minute. Youll eat with us, won't you? Im afraid Ws only

a sandwich."

'qbat would be lovely."

She sliced a French loaf and began to make salad. Dickstein offered to

wash lettuce, and she gave him an apron. After a while she caught him

watching her again, smiling. "What are you thinking?"

"I was remembering something that would embarrass you," he said.

'Tell me anyway."

"I was here one evening, around six," he began. "Your mother was out. I

had come to borrow a book from your,father. You were in your bath. Your

father got a phone call from France, I can't remember why. While he was

talking you began to cry. I went upstairs, took you out of the bath, dried

you and put you into your nightdress. You must have been four or five

years old."

Suza laughed. She had a sudden vision of Dickstein in a

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steamy bathroom, reaching down and effortlessly lifting her out of a hot

bath full of soap bubbles. In the vision she was not a child but a grown

woman with wet breasts and foam between her thighs, and his hands were

strong and sure as he drew her against his chest. Then the kitchen door

opened and her father came 1% and the dream vanished, leaving only a sense

of intrigue and a trace of guilt.

Nat Dickstein thought Professor Ashford had aged wen. He was now bald

except for a monkish fringe of white hair. He had put on a little weight

and his movements were slower, but he still had the spark of intellectual

curiosity in his eyes.

Suza said, "A surprise guest, Daddy."

Ashford looked at him and, without hesitation, said, "Young Dicksteinl

Well, I'm blessedl My dear fellow."

Dickstein shook his hand. ne grip was firm. "How are you, professorr,

"In the Pink, dear boy, especially when my daughter's here to look after

me. You remember Suza?"

"Weve spent the morrung remmiscing," Dickstein said.

"I see shes put you In an apron already. 11aes fast even for her. I've told

her shell never get a husband this way. Take it off, dear boy, and come and

have a drink." -

With a rueful grin at Suza, Dickstein did as he was told and followed

Ashford Into the drawingroom.

"Sherryr Ashford asked.

"'Ibank you, a small one." Dickstein suddenly remembered he was here for a

purpose. He had to get information out of Ashford without the old.man

realizing it. He-had been, as it were, off-duty, for a couple of hours, and

now he had to turn his mind back to work. But softly, softly, he thought

Ashford handed him a small glass of pale sherry. "Now tell me, what have

you been up to all these years?"

Dickstein sipped the sherry. It was very dry, the way they liked it at

Oxford. He told the professor the story he had given to Hassan and to Suza,

about finding export markets for Israeli wine. Ashford asked informed

questions. Were Young People leaving the kibbutzim for the cities? Had time

and Prosperity eroded the communalist ideas of the kibbutzaiks? Did

European Jews mix and intermarry with African and Levantine Jews?

Dickstein's answers were yes, no, and not much. Ashford courteously avoided

the question of

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