Chains of Sand Page 5

  Udi sighs.

  Even now, even at this red-raw moment, he cannot agree with his mother’s barely hidden indictment that Ella is not good enough for him. Ella has always been better than he deserves, stronger and more bolstering than others know. She is, during Udi’s darkest moments, a reason to hang on for the light. A reason, he considers again, to wait…

  He will say she is ill.

  And then he will tell his mother about London.

  He wonders what Ella is telling her own mother.

  It is not his fault. He did nothing to make her think he was going to propose. He shakes his head and concentrates harder than he usually would on the journey ahead.

  It will not be long now until he is home. The roads have begun to empty – despite the fact that most of the people Udi knows do not keep Shabbat – and there is only a short line of traffic, a sea of still-angry motorists flicking open palms out of windows. Udi adds his own hand in practiced impatience, but does not append a verbal insult. Soon, even these late-comers will be at home, lighting candles, blessing bread, sharing traditional dinners that older generations cling to and the younger ones pretend not to love. That he pretends not to love. That he doesn’t think he’ll miss. Brief, inconsequential lulls. Later, the roads will fill up again. With stomachs and souls lined, determined youth will spill back out into clubs and bars and other activities of which the rabbis would never approve. And Udi will be among them. And Udi will be leaving them. And the thought of this sustains him for the length of the protracted journey home.

  ***

  Batia cannot sleep, even after Avigail and Ari have left, and the last of the food has been carefully wrapped and taken home with them, or packed into air-tight containers in the fridge. For a while Oz had been sleepless too, his tossing and turning a comfort to Batia’s own restless state, but now he has released her hand from his sleeping palm and she is left with silence, which is no longer any solace at all. Noiselessly she slips out of the thin sheet she likes to wrap around herself at night, despite the heat, and pads barefoot across the bedroom floor. She does not want to wake Oz. He has been working too hard lately and is tired all the time. She worries that one day he will simply dissipate, melted by the sun he refuses to heed, or beaten by the grass he is adamant about mowing on the days when Udi forgets. She tells him to leave it, let it grow a little messy, but she says this only gently. Once you have lived in a tent it is difficult not to treasure those small things that neaten one’s life. She opens the door quietly and lets him slumber.

  In the kitchen Batia heats up the kettle and sprinkles some tea leaves into a glass ready to be watered and sweetened. She has no idea how many pots of tea she has brewed in her life, she drinks it constantly and as much from habit as desire, but it reminds her of her mother, before she was frail and forgetful of the strength for which she was once renowned. Batia stirs the golden liquid and casts a discerning glance around the dimly lit room. Everything is in order: the washed plates are stacked next to the sink ready to be put away in the morning; the over-used dishcloth is hanging from the tap to dry out overnight; and the fridge is respectfully adorned with the picture Avigail’s daughters drew after dinner. Batia straightens the brightly coloured paper remembering a time when Udi’s sketches covered every inch of the metal underneath and she, without savouring them, stuck one on top of another. She removes a shopping list to give this drawing more prominence, and stands back. Only one kitchen object lies out of place to disturb her: a coffee cup still upside down on its saucer in the sink, stained dark by the thick, coagulated contents. All of the others have been washed and put away, but this one is Udi’s, made specifically for him.

  Batia was barely ten years old when she realised she was able to read coffee cups. It is a gift inherited from her mother and one she believes Avigail has a talent for too, if only she would allow herself to embrace it. She doesn’t understand why all three of her children fight so hard against their spirituality. Avigail is religious, but only in the rule-keeping sense, and mainly she believes for Ezra. She wears modest clothing and is strictly kosher, but her writing is dominated by secular philosophy learned at university rather than faith learned in the heart. The boys are even more detached. Batia tries now, as much as she can, to re-invoke old customs, to encourage the boys to think about their Judaism, to understand it; but for them, for most people she knows, it is enough to be in Israel, to be a living people in a Jewish land. They have no need to cling to memories of a nation that exists only in the bible, like her family did. No need to practise the rituals that once bound them as descendents of it – a prayer, a hat, a candle in the window – small gestures but enough to distinguish them from their non-Jewish Iraqi hosts. No, her children are Israeli. There is no secret identity beneath the public one, no Diaspora otherness for them to explore and safeguard. To them, ancient practices seem irrelevant and immature. Practicalities are what they talk about, what they care about: the fight to defend the country, the struggle to survive within it. What was their conversation this evening? The Kerry talks, the hopelessness, or not, of them, the benefit, or not, of releasing Palestinian prisoners to get the talks on track. Ari and Oz disgusted; Avigail full of Israel’s culpability, visions of peace; and Udi, even Udi, joining the others in crushing such visions. ‘They would kill you in a minute,’ he’d told his sister, he who barely speaks when the topic is politics, he who is a baby still. ‘We need to just extend the fence and not speak to each other for 50 years.’ Practicalities. Pragmatism. Politics. Batia fears that something has been lost in this, this abandonment of spirituality, this neglect of religious pursuit. There is much to gain from using one’s imagination as well as one’s rationale. There is so much more one can know. There is a lot that even one upturned coffee cup can tell her. She moves over to it now.

  The first time Batia grasped the truth of her own interpretations was just before she left Iraq. Until then she had been making vague prophecies from the random shapes in the cups of friends who would place their saucer over their finished coffees and give her the leftover grinds to read: prosperity, she predicted, when she saw a ladder leading to coins; good news in the wings of a bird in flight; obstacles foreseen by a coffee-coloured mountain. Her mother used to listen carefully and nod at her interpretations, but it was only when she read her mother’s own cup that she first became certain of her accuracy. In it, she saw a tent which she interpreted as travel, an upside down baby for a birth that will take a while to appear, and a raven – a symbol of death leading to new beginnings. Batia had whispered this last foretelling, not wanting to tell it. And this time her mother had closed her eyes as she nodded, for a long minute holding them shut as though preparing for what she would see when she opened them again. Within three weeks, her husband, Batia’s father, had been arrested and hanged. A fortnight later each of them packed a single bag and fled by foot to Israel. And by the time they were in the camp and Batia’s mother discovered she was pregnant, none of them were surprised.

  For a while after that, Batia had refused to read the cups again, but slowly she grew used to the gift she possessed and she became comfortable enough to look deep inside the imagery. It has been years however since she has read the cups of either of her sons. Ari refuses to let her; he doesn’t want to know what is destined to happen during his next stint in the army. Udi has simply not asked. But Batia wants to know what is in store for him, what might happen in London, what tragedy might come from his decision to leave. She knows it is wrong for him. She is sure of it. Avigail agrees. Yet she cannot look at the cup and stands paralysed, almost more afraid that she will see a journey leading to a new life filled with joy in a place far from her, than a disaster that brings him rushing back. Quickly she turns on the tap and runs the coffee cup under the water that bursts powerfully through the evening heat.

  It is almost an hour before she returns to bed, but this is only the beginning of an insomnia that plagues her for weeks. She tries everything to rid herself of it: hot baths, lig
hter meals, calming oils. She even puts on some old Arabic music that Oz complains is too disturbing to his own sleep and switches off. Nothing however is loud enough or strong enough.

  Udi has begun to make preparations in earnest. He has not yet heard back from the immigration office and worries that his application will be turned down, but still he is on the phone every day to Ben, making arrangements. He does this in their company now. He must have been hiding for many weeks. Hiding under her nose. Oz asks him how things are coming along and she can see Udi basking under the approval of his father, his chest broadening. But she cannot believe that Oz has let her down, that this moment should be the time he has chosen not to put Udi straight. ‘It is good you want to make a success of yourself,’ he told him. ‘Go fast and come back fast. And then buy your house. And then maybe get married, yes?’ He doesn’t understand the danger. He won’t believe that Udi would ever leave Israel for good. It makes the dialogues between he and Udi impossible for Batia to bear and while they talk she retreats to the garden where she waters the neatly cut grass with her tears.

  “What about Ella?” is all she herself can manage to ask Udi, as many times as she feels he will stand.

  One Friday, Avigail remarks that she looks tired. Or perhaps she is ill? She feels ill. With every passing day the dread in the pit of her stomach grows a little, consuming her, consuming time, which contracts as the moment to mourn her son approaches. In preparation, she begins to wear black. She tries not to look forward each morning to the moment that he emerges from his bedroom into the kitchen where she waits. She experiments with not buying Coke – he is the only one in their house that drinks it. One afternoon, she does not call him to ask what time he’ll be home. Then one Sunday, there is a letter. It arrives unencumbered on the top of a small bundle so the horror strikes her as soon as the postman, who she has taken to waiting for, delivers it into her hands. Seeing the official typed envelope amidst the pile of bills, she knows at once. Or, she thinks she knows. Because in fact, as she inspects it more closely, she realises that it can’t be from the British immigration office after all, for she has seen this kind of envelope before, many times, and each occasion has been accompanied by this same, familiar dread.

  She will have at least a few more months with her son. Batia’s hands shake, but for the first time ever she carries this letter to Udi’s desk without the feeling that with it she is delivering his death warrant. The envelope feels lighter than usual, like it contains life. And that evening, Batia sleeps.

  ***

  Now

  3

  I don’t know, is it weird to think about this right after fucking Sara? Sorry, having sex with. It’s not making love is it, we’ve only just got together, but as always I can hear Mum and Gaby in my head. Anyway, this is the random event I am thinking about while also hoping these aren’t the sheets with the chocolate stain and listening to Sara breathe…

  It was, I think, the first term of my second year at senior school. So I was 12. Definitely still 12 since I distinctly had not yet had my barmitzvah. If I had then I would already have kissed Nicole Blatter and entered into a profound six week relationship and may have told her instead of my father. As it was, on the day that Mr Pike made me dress and undress continually for the entire length of a lunch break because I’d been too slow, again, at getting dressed after football, I stormed from the coach stop into the house, and then told the tale to my father. It was pre-Internet, pre-email, but he worked from home three afternoons, his office stacked with A4 binders, his desk littered with highlighters and perfectly sharpened pencils with rubbers on the end.

  “He didn’t even give me a warning. Just straight away gave me the lunch detention.”

  My gripe, I clearly remember, was the unfairness, omitting then from my own consciousness the fact I recall now, which is that Mr Pike had told me to hurry every week for the entire term. Although, I never actually tried to be slow. Rather I couldn’t fathom how some boys didn’t seem to mind not drying between their toes after a shower even though everybody knew that’s how you picked up verrucas. Which is what I told Mr Pike.

  “What exactly did he say to you, Daniel?” my father asked, putting down a stack of papers. My father even now has a way of speaking that bestows the most serious of conversations with a sprinkling of humour and the lightest exchanges with a dash of gravitas. He was wearing MC Hammer-style trousers that we had absolutely banned him from sporting in public but he insisted upon at home, believing himself to be the epitome of cool. Or maybe not caring that he wasn’t. He pushed his glasses higher up his nose.

  “I dunno. Something about all of us being spoiled and he doesn’t care if we are 10 per cent off we can get ready 10 per cent faster.”

  “What?”

  “And then he just fired the detention at me. And Dad, literally the whole lunch break I just had to get dressed, get undressed, get dressed. Ridiculous.”

  “Right,” said Dad. “Right.”

  The following morning my father walked with me up the path to the school. Since we were usually late (my mother busy dropping Gaby at her girls’ school 20 minutes in the opposite direction and Dad and I thus left to our own devices), I consented each morning to a ritual we’d had going since prep: I would walk ten metres or so, turn around, wave to Dad who was still in the car at the bottom of the path, see Dad wave back, walk again, turn, wave…and keep doing this until I’d rounded the corner at which point I had to sprint the rest of the way since the whole production clearly added to my lateness. Dad is probably entirely unaware that I still do this: I look back for his waving arm, I stop at least twice on my way to my car. I don’t even care if passersby see. Back then of course I would have cared, but since we were so late, nobody else was around to bear witness, and my reputation was safe. Following one’s Dad into the actual school building, through the halls and to the staff room, is a different matter altogether.

  Luckily, it turned out that my father is a legend. Actually. Not just to me. He’s tall, genuinely, not just for a Jew, and back then his hair was still jet black, his frame not exactly muscular but badminton-strong. Mr Pike barely resisted when Dad yanked him up from his seat and just centimetres from his face told him that if he was going to perve on children he better do it somewhere else and if he ever EVER heard of him harassing his son again, he’d be slapped with a lawsuit for racial discrimination as well as abuse and he didn’t care if Pike did have a fetish for circumcised penises, he’d better stay away from mine. He followed this of course with a formal letter to the headmaster – which, let’s be honest, Dad was far better at than physical violence should it have come to this – and I’m sure subsequent correspondence followed; but that day my father went down in school history. It was revealed to me that he did, sometimes, shout, and all of us in Year 8 learned the meaning of ‘10 per cent off’.

  So, is it strange to remember this after having sex with Sara?

  She is breathing heavily. I actually hadn’t thought she would stay but we’ve been flirting casually for a couple of weeks – ignoring the fact that when we were 15 I went out with her best friend – and, well I wasn’t going to say no.

  Sara is no stranger to 10 per cent off. Approximately 30 per cent of my school year were 10 per cent off and Sara has been out with approximately 15 per cent of them. She was part of the ‘yeah you’ crowd too. We, the cool Jews – not the geeks or the introverts or the religious, or in hindsight the better occupied – drawn from North West London’s vast array of private schools, and of course the Jewish Free School. With gelled hair and bomber jackets we gathered as 13 year olds on Saturday evenings outside Edgware Station, then at 15 with curtain cuts by the all-night bagel joint in Golders Green before graduating in our later teens to Hampstead Maccy D’s. ‘How ’you?’ Air kiss. ‘Yeah, you?’ We were too cool and there were too many people to greet, apparently, to utter a properly punctuated salutation. Anyway, since there were 100 boys in my year, but for a while we didn’t do much below the waistl
ine, and in later years our relationships began to last, I reckon that Sara has seen two and a half circumcised penises that I am familiar with.

  “What’s the time?” she whispers.

  It is four in the morning. Sara turns away drowsily. We collapsed into bed for the first time two hours ago, but I can’t sleep.

  Maybe it’s my mother. How Freudian would that be? But she probably has no idea that I still do this nightly, this trick she taught me, that I can’t sleep, apparently, if I don’t. ‘Imagine each person you’re worrying about in a space-suit,’ she told me; me aged eight, reading novels too adult for me, watching The X-Files, listening to my parents talk about the IRA; she sitting patiently at the end of my bed, holding my foot in the dark. ‘Do up all the zips. Put on the gloves, the boots, the helmet. Okay? They all in? Good. Now visualise each person smiling at you, waving. They’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to them. The suit will protect them. The power of the mind, Dan, is an amazing thing.’ It became habit. Like counting sheep. Ignoring Sara’s breathing, I try now to put everyone into their astronaut suits. There is Gaby, her helmet is on, she waves. Check. Next, Dad. Check. Now my mother. I can’t quite visualise it. She will not wave. She furrows her brow, gives me that look, the one that tells me she’s on to me.

  I turn back towards Sara and caress her bottom, hoping she won’t mind being woken. Hayley did sometimes. She’d hit my hand away and pull the cover tighter under her. Sara stirs, smiles.

  There hasn’t been anyone I’ve been really into since Hayley. We broke up almost three years ago now, but eight years with one girl will do that to you, I guess.

  Sara turns to face me. This has the disadvantage of removing her bottom from view, and introducing middle-of-the-night breath. The smell of hers makes me suddenly paranoid about my own and I close my mouth.