The Red Thread Read online

  Leaning forward urgently, Strati crossed himself. “Holy Virgin and all the Saints!” he said. “I was never in a worse situation! It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, the mast and the rudder were broken, the bung was lost, and the waves were the size of a house. There I was, on all fours in the bilge water, baling for life, in the Straits between the Elaphonisi and Cape Malea! . . .”

  . . . the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clamour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith. . . . The rain had turned to hail, the wind had risen to a scream; the boat had broken and sunk and, through the ink-black storm, Strati was swimming for life towards the thunderous rocks of Laconia. . . .

  . . . The bottle was empty. . . .

  The schoolmaster’s shadow darkened the doorway. “You’d better hurry,” he said, “the caique for Areopolis is just leaving.” We all rose to our feet, upsetting, in our farewells, a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.

  YVETTE

  Gillian Rose

  YVETTE and I planned to visit Jerusalem together, where she was born and grew up. I very much wanted to go to Israel with Yvette, who was teaching me biblical and modern Hebrew, capital and cursive script. But she died before we could realise our dreams.

  Once I arrived late for a taxi at Yvette’s flat in Harrington Road, Brighton. The flat was perched high above a vociferous fire-escape, which I always tried to dampen on ascending in order to surprise her. On this occasion I’d booked the taxi to fetch me from her place, since I wanted to deliver a volume to her and then fly on somewhere else. My mind went completely blank when the impatient driver remarked blandly, “There was an old woman at the address you gave me. She didn’t know nothing about a taxi.” An “old woman”? Who? Yvette? Preposterous!

  While I copied out Rilke’s Elegies for Yvette, Yvette sent me Yeats’s “John Kinsella’s Lament for Mrs Mary Moore”:

  None other knows what pleasures man

  At table or in bed.

  What shall I do for pretty girls

  Now my Old Bawd is dead?

  I suppose Yvette’s looks could be misleading, for she was canny and crafty enough to disappear into the environment when it suited her purpose. From the moment that, unobserved, I first noticed and watched her, as she paced up and down the platform at Preston Park Station in Brighton, I knew that I was in the presence of a superior being. Green tights, a shapeless dark skirt and a mop of nondescript grey hair were but transparent media for the piercing intelligence in evident amused communication with itself, and warranting, on each turn at both ends of the platform, a grim but irrepressible smile, which spread slowly over her bare, unmade-up, delicate features.

  This lucid apparition came to me many times—crossing the Level in Brighton, in the corridors of the School of European Studies, as well as frequently at that same station platform—before I found myself being introduced to her at Julius Carlebach’s home, and the supernatural being began to acquire a measure of the natural.

  That evening at Julius’s was memorable for another reason. It was the occasion of my initiation into the anti-supernatural character of Judaism: into how non-belief in God defines Judaism and how change in that compass registers the varieties of Jewish modernity. The more liberal Judaism becomes, the less the orientation by Halachah, the law, and the greater the emphasis on individual faith in God. Julius sat at the head of the table in a dining-room which was museum and mausoleum of the Carlebach family’s distinguished and dreadful history. Portraits of his ancestors presided. Between Solomon Carlebach, Rabbi of Lübeck, Julius’s grandfather, mentioned in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus, and Julius’s cousin, Shlomo Carlebach, the singing Rabbi of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Julius’s father, Joseph Carlebach, the famous Rabbi of Hamburg, accompanied his congregation from Hamburg to their death outside Riga, with his wife and the four youngest of their nine children. The square in Hamburg where his synagogue stood has recently been renamed Carlebach Platz. In his acceptance speech in Hamburg, when Julius received the honour on behalf of his family, he pointed out to his audience that they were assembled in the same school hall where he had stood, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, on 10 November 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, when the Gestapo came and told the children that they had four weeks to leave Germany. “You could hear people collapse internally,” Julius commented on his adult audience. What happened to those children?

  At dinner, Julius explained, “An Orthodox Jew doesn’t have to worry about whether he believes in God or not. As long as he observes the law.” Subsequently, I became familiar with the notoriously inscrutable Midrash: “Would that they would forsake Me, but obey my Torah.” When we parted that evening, Yvette and I had agreed that I would visit her.

  Yvette’s dowdy and unselfconscious bearing was unable to conceal her visceral vocation as the Lover—not the Beloved: she was predator not prey. I had picked this up immediately that first time I spied on her from my station hide-out. The main room of her small granny-flat was furnished so that it conjured the atmosphere of Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. Teeming with colourful artifacts, against the backdrop of the holy city, it re-created in miniature the bazaars of Eastern Europe, displaying the wares of so many destroyed folk cultures. From every available space, photographs of Yvette’s five children and ten grandchildren listed tenderly towards her. We invariably sat opposite each other at the solid table by the window, high above the tree-lined road, and Yvette expounded to me her philosophy of love. Yvette was sixty-five years old when I first began to get to know her, and she had, concurrently, three lovers:

  What lively lad most pleasured me

  Of all that with me lay?

  I answer that I gave my soul

  And loved in misery,

  But had great pleasure with a lad

  That I loved bodily.

  Flinging from his arms I laughed

  To think his passion such

  He fancied that I gave a soul

  Did but our bodies touch,

  And laughed upon his breast to think

  Beast gave beast as much.

  When I protested at this ceremony of lust, Yvette’s reply was prepared: Yeats’s “Last Confession” was elaborated by Swinburne:

  No thorns go as deep as a rose’s,

  And love is more cruel than lust.

  Yvette described my idea of creative closeness in relationships as a “total” and, by implication, totalitarian attitude. However, she insisted that while the number of her former lovers was too great to count, she had only been in love five times. This was an important distinction to her, and she appreciated having it confirmed by Miriam, her youngest child and only daughter.

  Yvette was formidably well read. She had been married to an academic who taught English at the Open University, but now, in the mid-1980s, she was working as a secretary at the University of Sussex. Yvette regularly attended lectures and conferences, and she always posed with studied diffidence the most well-aimed critical questions, which presupposed her command of whatever literature was at stake. She was, however, deeply Francophile, and her staples were Proust—she reread À la Recherche in its entirety, once a year, in her antique, slightly foxed Pléiade edition—and Maupassant, all the passages and stories expurgated from school editions. She also had a sly but ardent passion for the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. And these authors, whom she inhabited, knowing them to be both enticing and rebarbative, were the source and confirmation of her philosophy of human relationships.

  One Sunday, with the rain singing out of the secular silence, I met Yvette by chance walking in the unusually deserted Preston Park. We recognised each other
with pleasure from afar. Yvette came up close to me and put her hand on my arm. I already knew that her daughter, Miriam, after years of not being able to conceive, including an ectopic pregnancy, with the consequent loss of one of her fallopian tubes, was now, at long last, expecting. Yvette said in a factual and unemotional tone of voice, “I have cancer of the breast. I have to wait for an operation.” She paused to gauge my response, which was guided by her evident dispassion, and then she added, “Miriam and I are now two ladies-in-waiting.”

  Yvette was divorced from her husband. It had been he who had initiated the decisive break after they had had five children together. Yvette stressed that the shock of their unanticipated separation did not derive from the closeness of their tumultuous family life, but from the fact that their partnership had always sustained much extra-marital activity on both sides. Several small children would be deposited in the coping hands of Nanny as Yvette snatched a furtive and hurried rendezvous with her current liaison. “I loved my man,” she would defiantly assert of her former husband. Although she felt that she and her daughter Miriam, in particular, had been utterly deserted by him, she refused to rewrite history. Coming from a family in which my mother divorced both of her husbands, and, in addition, denied that she ever loved them, I found Yvette’s aggressive vulnerability refreshing.

  Yvette was the most enthusiastic and inventive grandmother. She couldn’t spend enough time with her grandchildren, and she was especially close to Miriam’s two children, who lived downstairs in the main body of the spacious Victorian house that Yvette had bequeathed to her daughter. She frequently visited her favourite son and his wife in Southampton with their older children. Another son would visit from London with his Sephardi wife and their two children, and the remaining two sons lived in Israel and Australia.

  Yvette was completely devoted to pleasure without guilt. This was what made her such an attentive and encouraging confidante. She would listen with rapt attention to my confessions of pain and rage, but invariably dismiss my scruples, overcoming the nihilism of the emotions by affirming the validity of every tortuous and torturing desire. Although I was thus tutored by her, I watched with squeamish propriety as Yvette playfully squeezed her three-year-old grandson’s balls and penis. “Aren’t children meant to emerge to independence with a residue of resentment from the fact that it is the mother who accidentally arouses but explicitly forbids genital pleasure?” I ventured with theoretical pedantry in remembrance of Freud, and of the narrow border between child care and child abuse. Yvette positively relished my staid inhibitions, which she dismissed airily as contrary to the universal and sacred spirit of lust. A Grand Mother indeed.

  In the far, dark corner of Yvette’s main room there stood a heavy veneered chest of drawers with a pride of family photographs jostling on top. The three bottom compartments of this tallboy were jammed full with pornographic material, which, one day, after I’d known her for quite a while, Yvette showed to me. The photographs were almost entirely of women, clad in enough to titillate, and revealing proud genitals in various contrapposto positions. Yvette possessed very little male pornography, not because it is less available, but because it didn’t interest her.

  When I remarked one day, in a different context, that I couldn’t reconcile her grandmotherly identity with her prodigious sexuality, she looked sadly and wisely at me as the one corrupted by unnatural practices: “Have you forgotten the connection between sex and children?” She was, of course, partly right.

  Yvette’s inexhaustible animus could be traced to her unsentimental disapproval of her own mother, as a mother and as an Israeli. According to Yvette, her mother, now in her nineties and living in a home in Jerusalem, had barred her children from loving or esteeming their father. Yvette’s infinite fury at this ban had bestowed on her the lifelong celebration of lustful love. This vocation was inseparable from the rage at her mother, but also, and deeper still, it was inseparable from her secret concurrence with her mother concerning the intellectual inferiority of the male. Her contempt was overlaid, and therefore indiscernible to the untrained eye, with a much more explicit contempt for the resentful ruses of preyed-upon females.

  To capture her distance from her mother as an Israeli, Yvette gives over the narrative voice to her for the space of a story. Yvette had, after all, run away in her early twenties with a one-legged Englishman, a “goy,” as she would say. I cannot find a published version of this jumble tale, but one probably exists in Hebrew or Yiddish.

  A LEGEND ABOUT THE BAAL SHEM TOV (BESHT)—

  THE BEARER OF A GOOD NAME

  In the remote Polish village where he lived, there is a widow—shall we call her Katrilevska for she isnot Jewish. She has several mouths to feed and is hopeless and helpless. A coarse-looking peasant enters her hovel and ascertains her needs. First, he brings her firewood, fills up her stove and lights it. Then he goes back, returning with two pails of water on his shoulders and now she can boil some coffee. Lastly he brings her a warm loaf. All this at 4 a.m., and all the while the peasant hums a song in a foreign tongue, but it is very sweet. He bids her farewell and disappears. It is the Besht, and he was humming tehilim, and was back in his house just after 4 a.m., in time to pray shakhrit.

  The crucial thing is that Yvette’s mother recited this story with disapprobation—or, I wonder, was it heard with disdain by the young Israeli children?

  Yvette had two major recurrences of cancer before she died. After the first, relatively minor operation, a nip in the breast, which she valiantly displayed to select visitors, and several courses of chemotherapy, Yvette fell in love—in love, according to her own criterion—hopelessly and helplessly in love. But no Besht ever came to save her or even to console her. The object of this serious passion was thirty years her junior, a colleague of my generation. Clever, charming, promiscuous and superficial, he enjoyed Yvette’s friendship, but was genuinely disconcerted by her remorseless ardour. Yvette was monstrous: she pursued him with myriad love letters, phone calls, messages pinned to his door, unsolicited visitations. I taunted her, “Yvette, if you were a man, your actions would be seen as gross harassment.” On a later occasion, her violent blandishments unabated, I asked her, archly, what she would do with him, were he, miraculously, to succumb? Yvette replied without a fraction of hesitation, “I would chew him up and spit him out.”

  A whole generation of young women and men were bereaved by Yvette’s death. She made new friends up to the end, and she gave people, young and old, her courage to face the terrors of desire in themselves and to ease off the unstable alleviation of attributing to the Beloved our desire for those terrors. She could impart this wisdom because it grew out of the folly that she was still endlessly contesting in herself. And the cure for an unhappy love affair was always the pleasures of the ensuing one.

  Yvette practised the ars moriendi; I had long known that she would. The day before she died, her spirit intact, she listened with a look of beatitude on her simplified face to the story that I had brought with me from Leamington Spa, where I had just moved, to the Brighton hospice, where she lay in a room that formed a hard crystal of light, exposed to the raucous and merciless spring. It was a love story, and when I had finished relating it to her, and had sat quietly with her for several hours, she finally spoke out of the suffused silence, “You are now going to leave.” Then, in her own way, she gave me her blessing: “You know how I feel. You know how I feel. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. All the very best. All the very best.” I bent over her and kissed her on the lips several times, her lips reaching mine each time before mine touched hers.

  Among the many pieces of unlined file paper, cut into thirds and covered with Yvette’s old-fashioned typewriting, I found another fragment of Swinburne:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no man lives for ever,

  That dead me
n rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  I believe that I did in some sense visit Israel with Yvette, that through knowing her, I somehow reached the soul of that land of blessings and curses.

  THE GREAT CITY OF PHOENIX

  Tove Jansson

  AFTER a long bus trip through Arizona, Jonna and Mari came late in the evening to the great city of Phoenix and checked into the first hotel they could find near the bus station.

  It was called the Majestic, a heavy building from the 1910s with an air of shabby pretension. The lobby with its long mahogany counters beneath dusty potted palms, the broad staircase up to the gloom of the upper floors, the row of stiff, velvet sofas—everything was too grand, everything except the desk clerk, who was tiny under his wreath of white hair. He gave them their room key and a form to fill out and said, “The elevator closes in twenty minutes.”

  The elevator operator was asleep. He was even older than the desk clerk. He pushed the button for the third floor and sat back down on his velvet chair. The elevator was a huge ornamented bronze cage and it rattled upward very slowly.

  Jonna and Mari entered a static, desolate room with way too much furniture and went to bed without unpacking. But they couldn’t sleep. They relived the bus trip again and again, through shifting landscapes of desert and snowy mountains, cities without names, white salt lakes, and brief pauses in little towns they knew nothing about and to which they would never return. The trip went on and on, leaving everything behind, hour after hour, a long, long day in a silver-blue Greyhound bus.

  “Are you asleep?” Jonna asked.

  “No.”

  “We can get our films developed here. I’ve been filming blind for a month and haven’t any idea what I’ve got.”