Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Kitty's husband, Sydney, is dead, and eighteen months later, she is still struggling to come to terms with his death. She takes comfort in the lives of her children, and the full comedy and crises of Kitty's circle of family and friends vividly unfold.

On holiday to Israel, in between awe-inspiring visits to the Dead Sea and the desert, she gets to know Maurice Morgenthau, reserved New Yorker and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps.

The friendship between them grows and Maurice helps Kitty gain a sense of perspective in her life. In turn, Kitty helps Maurice tell his harrowing story of survival for the first time.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 242

Sample

Kitty did not like flying and the fact that she was on her own did nothing to mitigate her fears. Each time the keen of the engines diminished, her heart sank with it; each time the wide body of the jet swooped she plunged mentally earthwards, effaced for all time. She did not like to leave the safety of her seat, where she kept the belt fastened across her lap, for fear of confounding the equilibrium of the unnatural monster in which she had paid good money to be incarcerated, and was not at all happy when others walked carelessly up and down the aisles. It was not that she was afraid of dying. Since she had been a widow, since Sydney’s death, she had looked upon herself as being totally dispensable, but when her time came she preferred to die comfortably – if possible in her own bed – surrounded neither by the marvels of hospital technology nor that of the cabin in the sky in which, from her window seat, she felt she had only to put out a hand to feel the substance of the passing clouds.

She had been up since six – although for all the sleep she’d had she might just as well not have bothered to go to bed – and the winter darkness had exacerbated the feelings of alienation with which she regarded the grisly pantomime of modern travel, with which she had difficulty in coming to terms. The railway, the car, the aeroplane – and now of course the invasion of space – had, as far as she could see, increased his mobility, but not made man any happier than when he had restricted his movements to the distance his feet could carry him. Other cultures, other religions, had made him dissatisfied with his own.


She had been getting ready for a fortnight. Trying on and sorting, selecting and rejecting, washing and ironing, making lists – on paper and in her head – and sorties to the cleaners. While others prepared for the siege of Christmas, with which she had neither affiliations nor patience, Kitty packed her case for Israel and Eilat. Her anxieties about flying, about abandoning terra firma, terra cognita, for that megalith in the sky, manifesting itself by its vapour trail by day, and its lights on wing and tail in competition with the stars at night, displaced itself on to her clothes. Should she take the thin white cardigan or the thicker blue? If the white one were thicker or the thicker one not blue there would be no problem. She would resolve the matter in the evening by putting them both on the pile in the spare bedroom, from which she would remove one next morning, only to substitute it for the other before the end of the day. Closing her eyes she tried to transport herself to the Red Sea; to test the hot sun tempered by the desert wind upon her arms. All she could feel was the warmth of the Magicoal fire in her sitting-room penetrating the sleeves of her winter dress. She turned to the weather report in the newspaper – through the window she could see fat white flakes of snow, in no hurry, making their way to the ground – Singapore, Tangier, Tel Aviv. It was no help. She accepted that somewhere the sun was shining but could not imagine it. Sydney would have advised her. He would have packed for her too. Always had. She’d put her dresses out, and he’d transform them into neat rectangles, interspersed with the virginal tissue he’d brought home from the showroom – where it was used to wrap gifts – before putting them in the case. Sydney was not here. She had learned over the long months, like a newly-born foal, to stand on her two feet. She had staggered and stumbled and little by little succeeded in remaining upright, to manage on her own. At moments like this she saw Sydney by her side so clearly she could almost touch him. There were fewer and fewer of them.


Josh had taken her to the airport. He was a good son. At Shepherd’s Bush she wished she could go back for her old, comfortable sandals: pride had made her pack the new ones not yet broken in. At Chiswick she swore she’d forgotten the passport she’d placed meticulously into a compartment of her handbag, undoing the zip to peep at it a dozen times. Josh took her hand reassuringly in his. He carried her case to the check-in, where she watched the needle on the scale anxiously for overweight, bought her a magazine she would read but not see, kissed her and waved as she entered the departure lounge where she was alone. She put one foot in front of the other as she had learned to do.

The voice of the captain – ‘your Captain’, noch – came across the tannoy: “In a few moments those of you sitting on the left-hand side of the plane will have a good view of the Bavarian Alps.”

Kitty was sitting on the left-hand side of the plane. Her palms were sweating and her mouth dry. She looked straight ahead at the brown curls of the man in front of her, his knitted skull-cap secured with hair clips. What did she want to see the Bavarian Alps for? All week she had been slithering and sliding in the High Street – up to her ankles in slush each time she crossed the road – in the worst snow for thirty years. Each time you went out in the street you took your life in your hands, and the central-heating boilers in the flats had proved no match for the untoward exigencies of the weather. She had put extra blankets on her bed at night and in the evenings sat in front of her electric fire which seemed to glow with scant enthusiasm. When Addie Jacobs’ invitation came to spend the festive season in Israel, Kitty was not sorry, but she had no desire, en route, to look out of the lozenge of a window at the Bavarian Alps, Sarajevo, Salonika, Rhodes or Cyprus. When they touched down safely at Ben Gurion, then she would look.


It was her first holiday since Sydney had died. She did not count Godalming, where she had gone to stay with Carol and Alec and the children whose closeness had emphasised her own isolation, nor even Majorca where she had spent a week in their flat with Freda and Harry who had done their best to include her in the convivial rounds of endless drinks on endless sun-soaked balconies, and where it was almost home from home. Had it been Mexico Addie had suggested, or China or Brazil, she would not have accepted. In Israel, Kitty felt, Eretz Yisrael, she would not be betraying Sydney.

She had been on her own for eighteen months now and to her amazement she had survived. After Sydney’s death she had wanted to die too. There was nothing to live for. She had, at a stroke, lost childhood sweetheart, husband, lover, confidant, friend, and been herself allotted the part-time role of mother to children who no longer needed her, grandmother to grandchildren whom she rarely saw.

Despite the black terror of the days, and in particular the nights, immediately following Sydney’s death nothing, surprisingly, had proved wholly insurmountable.

People had been kind. Their comfort was trite. ‘You must pull yourself together.’ ‘Never mind.’ Never mind! ‘You’ll be all right.’ As if you could be, after almost forty years of marriage. They talked about ‘losing your husband’ as if she had mislaid her purse. Addie Jacobs, a widow herself, from the flat across the way, had put her arms around her, let her cry. It was what she needed. She had made a friend of Addie who was not her type. The children had of course helped. Josh with his practical support in dealing with the tide of paperwork which referred coldly to her darling Sydney as ‘the deceased’; Rachel with her impulsive hugs and kisses, burying her mother’s anguish in her wild hair; and Carol offering the unfailing panacea of the grandchildren. There was the family too, Sydney’s family. They tried to sustain her but when she looked into their eyes she saw Sydney beckoning her back into the past when she knew, with every fibre of her being, that her salvation lay ahead.


It was after Sydney’s stone-setting that Kitty decided there was a time to cry and a time to stop crying. The ache in her heart was no less than it had been but, realistic as she was, she saw that the moment had come to tidy it away – as she tidied her thoughts when she had finished with them – and refer to it only in the privacy of her head. No one was interested anyway. A cheerful face begot a cheerful face. From now on the plaster of her smile would cover the hurt she doubted time was ever going to heal.

The ‘stone-setting’, eleven months after the passing of the deceased was, according to Josh, customary rather than obligatory, minhag rather than din. On the way back from the cemetery, inhaling the newness of Josh’s Rover, and remarking wryly the renewal of life in the pink blossom of the almond trees that lined the road, Kitty felt it not wholly desirable that the wound, that afternoon, had been so cruelly opened when she had worked so hard during the past months to come to terms with her bereavement. The custom should be reassessed; to perpetuate it in its present form was, she felt, an insult to the memory of the dead person. A quiet moment of prayer at the graveside with the children would have sufficed. Sydney’s family, in particular Beatty, had been horrified when she had tentatively suggested it and Kitty had been inveigled into the whole razzmatazz. At the insistence of Beatty she had not only sent out printed cards of invitation to the ceremony but inserted an announcement in the Jewish Chronicle (Tombstone Consecrations) so that every scarcely remembered acquaintance had felt obliged – at the expense of previously arranged outings and rounds of golf – to turn up to ‘show respect’ to the family who would secretly have preferred to be alone.


Because it was a Sunday (‘must make it a Sunday’, Beatty said), the stone-setting stakes at Bushey seemed to have got completely out of hand. They were marked up on the board, one every fifteen minutes like a railway time-table, and with as much feeling. The headstone, which Kitty felt had little to do with Sydney and which she had selected from the catalogue while her grief was still raw, had shone achromatically in the pale spring sun. The text she had chosen: ‘In my children I speak clearly with the eternal’, was Sydney’s well-earned epitaph; a marble heart – ‘a token of love from his grandchildren’ – his testimony from Debbie and Lisa, who had adored him, and from Mathew whom he scarcely knew.

When it was over, the prayers and the address and the infiltrating of the fashion parade among the gravestones (many darting off at tangents along the paths to visit their own loved ones), they had gone back to the flat. Kitty had been against a big ‘do’, but Sydney’s relatives, spear-headed by Beatty, had prevailed. Glasses in hand, as if they were at a cocktail party, the company spoke of holidays, the recession, mutual friends, and carefully avoided any mention of Sydney’s name. Like a sea anemone the visitors swallowed Kitty into their protective midst while the waitresses, in their white aprons, with smoked salmon and with tea, laid balm upon the freshly opened wound. Afterwards, with their well meaning words of consolation, they left her on her own again.


She had filled the days.

She worked in the Jewish Day Centre caring for those older and less fortunate than herself. In easing the pain of others she discovered an analgesic for her own. Her head was occupied if not her heart and she tried to keep it like that. It took her mind off the other; off the deep, empty, cold, dark chasm that had been left by Sydney. She worked mainly in the kitchens, finding an appreciative and extended family for her boiled beef and carrots, her latkes and her biscuits with the jammy portholes. She had taken over from Sophie de Groot who with gazpacho and crème frâiche had tried to introduce some haute cuisine into the place and was broigas when the old people complained in disgust that the soup was cold and the cream sour. She had become a member of WIZO, throwing herself into the work for the welfare of women and children in Israel – regardless of colour, race or creed – and played bridge, two afternoons a week, with other widows in the flats. In addition there was the synagogue Ladies’ Guild to which Kitty was now able to devote more of her time.

The evenings had been harder to fill. She had discovered that she was no good on her own. At Josh’s suggestion she had enrolled in an evening class and ventured out each Tuesday into an alien world. In ‘Listening to Music’, she stuck out, she felt, like a sore thumb. Apart from the fact that she had never heard of, and certainly could not spell, Messiaen, there was something else. Her shoes were smarter, her clothes better and her outlook narrower than the rest of the class, who had for the most part come straight from work, bringing with them an aura of tube trains and the evening newspapers. They were friendly enough, but in the canteen during the coffee break she was unable to contribute to the conversation about the labour leader of the GLC (whose name she did not even know), the new bus fares, or arguments concerning the means of production. She was a fish out of water and knew nothing of rent and landladies, football matches and launderettes, concerts in Smith Square and Saturday morning shopping. She stuck it out and was delighted when on the records Josh bought her she could distinguish flute from piccolo, harp from cymbal, tuba from trombone. There was a world out there, she realised, which not even Sydney with his erudition and his Torah had discovered, a world one tiny corner of which she had started to explore. But she was no Columbus. She found the Evening Institute with its hard chairs and dusty classroom quite a strain and was happy and relieved to get back to the flat with its deep pile carpets, its polished, reproduction furniture and its memories.


Its memories. Apart from the ‘keeping busy’ at which Kitty had become adept, it was all she had. She could not erase Sydney from his chair in which no one else had ever been allowed to sit, from her heart where he was always secure. Alone at night she spoke to him but there was no reply. That was the worst part. Telling him of the children, of Josh and Carol and of Rachel as she had been wont to do, discussing the bits and pieces of her day. Now, her voice reverberated from the rag-rolled walls, its echoes losing themselves in the velvet drapes. There was so much to tell. Sarah, Josh’s gentile wife, was being converted to Judaism – how Sydney would have liked that; Rachel and Patrick were getting married, what a carry on there had been about the wedding too; Carol and Alec were looking for a bigger house and she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Carol weren’t pregnant again, she recognised the signs. Most important of all, she was herself taking a big step. She was going to Israel. It was as if she needed Sydney’s approval before she could be allowed to enjoy herself. She had been going with Addie. It had been Addie’s idea. They had booked up at the last minute, a cancellation. Then Addie had slipped on an icy kerb breaking her ankle and Kitty, encouraged by Rachel and by Josh, had elected to take the trip alone. Looking round the plane at friends, at families who seemed to be enjoying themselves together, she was already beginning to have qualms.


A ‘hassid’ with beard and sidelocks in the long silk coat – tied with its gartel separating the spiritual half of his body from that which was not – and the black hat of the ultra orthodox Jew, left his aisle seat and walked to the front of the plane. When he reached the curtain that segregated the first-class passengers from the hoi polloi he turned and faced the cabin, glancing nervously from side to side. Kitty watched as his hand reached across his chest and inside his coat. Her heart stopped. A hijacker. It was her punishment for coming away without Addie. For enjoying herself without Sydney. She wondered whether they would make a silent toast to her at Rachel’s wedding. Whether her grandchildren would remember her. She wanted to say something to the woman who was sitting on her left, but her tongue was fastened to the roof of her mouth; to press the button for the stewardess, but her limbs were immobilised with fear. There had already been an incident in the departure lounge where the X-ray machine had revealed a gun in a suitcase. Security guards had been called and amid excitement had discovered a toy pistol being taken to a child for Christmas. In the old days it had been better. When she had gone to Westgate, with Sydney and the children in the car. No flying at a mad 30,000 feet over Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Munich. No hijackers either, threatening the lives of innocent hostages.


She heard the cheep of the tannoy and the captain, her captain, clearing his throat. He was going to tell them he was being forced at gun point to fly to Beirut, Damascus…

“For your information…” His voice was deliberately calm.

Perspiration covered Kitty’s top lip.

“We shall be serving lunch in five minutes…”

The hassid withdrew his hand from his pocket and with it a black book. Swaying back and forth, blocking the path of the approaching drinks trolley, he began to pray. Kitty was no drinker but decided that if the trolley ever reached her she would ask for a large vodka, regardless of whether or not it would agree with the tranquillisers which Lennie had prescribed and which she had taken.


She forced her mind from thought of air disasters – ‘Four Hundred Passengers and Nine Crew’ – and hijackings – ‘Dead-line Passed All Hostages Shot’ – and tried to concentrate on Rachel’s forthcoming wedding.




Sydney would have been pleased. For longer than Kitty could remember he had been talking of Rachel’s wedding, looking forward to the day when he would lead her to the marriage canopy and deliver her safely into the arms of some suitable husband at which point – the forging of another link in the chain of Judaism – he would feel a great weight of responsibility lifted from his shoulders. He had not been so concerned about his elder daughter. Of course he had been pleased – delighted – when Carol had married Alec, but there had never been any doubt that she would do the right thing. Rachel was a different matter. The path had not been smooth. At eighteen she had left home for university and to the outward eye disengaged herself from the shackles of orthodox Judaism in which she had been reared and from the company of its adherents. She kept Kitty up to date with the cyclorama of unsuitable boyfriends who walked at regular intervals in and out of her life. Sydney did not want to know. He had designated a fund for Rachel’s wedding; bought the champagne which lay waiting in Issy Miskin’s cellar. It was as if by preparing the way he would, like Circe, entice Rachel along it. Sometimes by way of conversation, as if to prepare him for the worst, Kitty would tell him of the son or daughter of people they knew who had married ‘out’. He was not interested. Not responsible. It was not his worry. He worried about Rachel. When she abused the Sabbath. Ignored the dietary proscriptions. Incorporated the Holy Days into the calendar of her secular year. Sydney had died before bringing his carefully laid plans, his hopes, his dreams, to fruition.


Before Rachel announced that she would marry into the Klopman family. Kitty thought often about this irony, the unfairness of the trick played by fate on Rachel’s father and pondered, when she did so, on Sydney’s whereabouts and the ‘world to come’ in which she could not whole-heartedly believe. If it existed, to be sure, Sydney would be there, ‘a ministering angel’ among the ‘disembodied souls of the righteous’.

Unable to convince herself of any independent existence of the spirit, Kitty had taken her doubts to Rabbi Magnus. In an attempt to explain how the body, while of use on earth, was dispensable in the hereafter, he had employed the analogy of the moon traveller. ‘While on the moon man is totally dependent on his space-suit. If it is damaged he will die. But once he returns to earth he can throw off its restrictions to move about as he pleases.’ Kitty prayed nightly that released from the space-suit of his body, in which during his last months he had suffered so miserably, Sydney would have heard the good news about Rachel’s wedding. There were, it was true, irregularities of which he would not have approved but then he had never been one for compromise. Toeing the line of his religious beliefs Sydney did not deny the importance of sex – the Torah (where the subject was dealt with frankly) spoke to real people with real passions – but considered that it had no place outside the marriage bed. More pragmatic in her approach, Kitty was able to turn a blind eye to the fact that Rachel and Patrick, though not yet married, had set up home together in a borrowed council flat. When she saw that he not only loved, but seemed able to curb her headstrong Rachel, she had taken Patrick to her heart and was able, although she did not condone it, to put the irregularity into context. It was not the same world. By holding rigidly to his beliefs Sydney had tried to make it stand still.


When the time came for her to meet Patrick’s parents, Kitty should, she knew, have invited them to her flat. Sydney, a stickler for protocol, would have insisted. Not yet at ease however in the mantle of her widowhood, she had become so agitated at the thought of the hospitality she would have to provide, that when Hettie Klopman had telephoned her she had gladly accepted the invitation for dinner at the house in Winnington Road. Apart from he. . .