Choose Somebody Else Page 5

  I ran from her room. Outside, I remembered I’d parked my car around the block some little distance from where I stood. But whichever direction I took, I could not find it. Soon I was breathless and distraught. I tried to make my way back to where Sarah lived so I could work out the route from the beginning, but I could not manage that either. The hours went by and I became exhausted, trudging where first I had run. The sky turned ashen in the dawn. I dragged my feet around one more corner and there it was, my car, moisture condensing on its windows. Miraculously, my keys were still in my pocket.

  Nanna, I thought, if you are with me, then be with me. Don’t hide your face so she can find me again, confuse me, seduce me.

  It was after six o’clock and, in daylight, it did not take me long to find my way home. I rushed back. I had to see if the chicken soup had suffered for being left out of the fridge all night. I had let it happen once before, falling asleep when I should have been watching, and by morning a malodorous scum had fermented on top of it. The rest of the soup had turned from gold to a muddy grey-brown.

  But before I could make my way inside, I saw the Rav waiting for me in the garden.

  ‘Why would you do it?’ he asked.

  I tried to tell him that I hadn’t, actually, but the fierce judgement I saw in his eyes left me mute. The grass was wet, and I just stood there.

  ‘Would you forfeit everything,’ he asked, ‘your soul—on some strange creature insinuating herself into your life. Again. Who knows why and from where?’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ I said, finding my voice.

  ‘She shouldn’t have come here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she knew you, too, had returned.’ He turned away from me.

  I entered the kitchen, only to be greeted by Adminah.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘I came down for a snack and saw the soup pot on the sink. I put it in the fridge. It would have been ruined. And this morning you still weren’t here. Don’t you know that alone you are exposed?’

  When I said nothing she asked again, ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t concern you.’

  I turned my back and heard the door close softly behind me. Opening the fridge, I saw that not only had she put the soup inside, but she had separated the chicken from its bones. Placing it all on a platter she had stacked the vegetables neatly alongside it. At once I felt guilty. Then I found myself wondering if that soup could possibly lighten the darkness that lately seemed to have turned the gleam ghostly in her eyes.

  As I went about preparing breakfast, I saw the sun appear after a long hiatus. It was a pale, yellow Friday, jonquils and egg yolks, early morning brightness, cloud-trapped and frosty, curling through space.

  That night I served the soup with the egg noodles and carefully shaved slivers of chicken breast. I roasted three more chickens and served them with a pyramid of roast potatoes crisped in olive oil. I tossed a huge pile of green beans in sesame oil, teriyaki and flakes of blanched almonds.

  I watched Adminah as she ate and, when she pushed away her empty soup plate, she looked up at me and smiled. The tightness in my chest eased. In the end, she helped serve a dessert of soy ice-cream topped with toffee, polished and friable. I had scattered Mandarin segments and cherries on top. But, I thought, if that was the best the chicken soup could do, perhaps my Nanna had been overselling it.

  Adminah helped me clear and stack the dishwasher which we could turn on only after the Sabbath was out.

  ‘Surely, you’re not rostered on again,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I swapped with Sarah and Yossi.’ I looked at her askance.

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ she said. ‘I wanted to do it.’

  ‘I would have thought your gender bias would have hindered you from doing something like that.’

  Then I turned my attention to a frying pan which I began wiping down frantically.

  ‘Stop that,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Stop what?’ I asked, laying down the tools of my trade, nevertheless. I met her green-eyed gaze and the two of us stood there for a while, neither moving nor speaking.

  ‘What is it you want?’ Her voice was hard and flat.

  I dried my hands and stood there for another age while she waited.

  ‘You,’ I said at last. ‘I want you.’

  I came closer to her, hooking my finger under her chin and drawing her in for a kiss.

  She sighed. Her mouth tasted of summer fruits. She laid her head on my shoulder.

  ‘Is there somewhere we could go tomorrow night, just to get out of this place?’ she asked. ‘A movie. Something.’

  So, we went to a cinema and then a café where we drank cups of hot chocolate and held hands across the table.

  ‘When I go back to Israel, I mean, I want to go back; I miss home, but where will you be?’ she asked me.

  I could have told her I’d come, fly over to be with her, but I knew I’d be lying. The ticket and travel costs alone would consume my savings. Moreover, I would definitely need a job lined up in advance, and I couldn’t help thinking that jobs for cooking rabbis would be all too scarce.

  As we walked back to the car, she lit up a cigarette.

  ‘You smoke?’

  ‘Marlboro Lights,’ she said, holding the offending cylinder aloft. ‘I smoke about six a year. This is my second.’

  The days and weeks spun into springtime. Temperatures were mild and the skies cloudless. Our relationship was chaste: the odd deep kiss, holding of hands and long, transcendent conversations. Most of her free time was spent with me in the kitchen and I began to trust her with some of the more complex recipes: a whole baked snapper stuffed and curved into a bow served on a lustrous green coulis of chayote squash, broccoli and spinach. I don’t know how my grandmother knew about coulis—in fact she called them purees—but because she had included them in her recipes, I recognised her as an early adopter of avant-garde cuisine.

  As the months peeled away and the day of Adminah’s departure grew closer, I felt her drawing away from me. She no longer reached out to clasp my hand across café tables. She ducked out from under any attempt I made to kiss her, and we had stopped taking those long, lazy strolls around the neighbourhood.

  One morning before breakfast she came into the kitchen. She was pale, as though her heart had stopped pumping blood to her face.

  ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ she said, her voice low.

  ‘Can’t take what?’ I asked, but I knew.

  ‘I’m leaving in a month. I can’t pretend—I don’t know, I’m torn—I want to be with you and I want to be with my family. I can’t be with you if I go, and you can’t, or won’t, come to me.’

  ‘It’s not that I won’t. You know that.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Why don’t you just stay here?’ I asked.

  ‘My visa will run out. My brother’s getting married and I need to be there. I’ve got a place at university which they won’t hold for me. It’s much easier for you to come.’

  ‘Much. Except that I’d have no money and no means of support.’

  ‘Your issues are fixable; mine aren’t.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said.

  ‘All I know is that we’re two adults in a lose-lose situation. I’ve been there before; I don’t want to find myself there again.’

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Where?’ Once more there were nuances tucked beneath the surface of her words. Her words and everyone else’s it seemed.

  The last weeks sped by with shocking swiftness. Adminah no longer helped me in the kitchen and she seemed to know how to stay out of my orbit. When I did manage to see her, I noticed how much paler, how much thinner, she was becoming. Once when we bumped into each other in the hallway, she stiffened and stepped back from me, hugging the wall with her back.

  And now it was
Thursday, a day before the very last Sabbath Eve, not long before the students, the rabbi and his wife were to depart. The following Tuesday would see them gone and I would have to wait a month without pay before the next lot alighted on the Yeshiva’s doorstep. Every part of me stung with the thought of Adminah’s leaving. At the same time, a still small voice said, better that way. Once she had gone the wound would be cauterised. It had been nothing but a seeping torment these past few weeks. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that I’d far rather the torment than the cure.

  All I could do was serve them a meal they would remember through the temperate Jerusalem autumn and possibly into its bitter winter. I took down the rosewood box and ran my fingers through the now familiar papers. They were stained from usage and some had even become lightly adhered to their neighbours. I went straight to the recipe for chicken soup. Perhaps I hoped the magical qualities my grandmother had attributed to it would produce a more effective outcome than it had the last time. I flicked through the superfine leaves and saw there were actually six pages, not five, as I had originally thought. The fifth and the sixth had adhered to one another. Carefully I prised them apart.

  – turkey drumstick

  – tranche of top rib,’ I read on page six.

  – one medium parsnip.

  – bunch of dill and parsley to be tied together and placed in the soup twenty minutes before serving.

  The first time, the recipe had been incomplete. These now were the missing ingredients.

  I don’t know how long I sat there meditating on that extra page before going out to shop for all the items. A shiver of hope hovered somewhere around my heart.

  Friday night and I served the meal: gefilte fish, followed by my Nanna’s soup; then veal chops, succulent and savoury in a mushroom sauce resting on jasmine rice tossed with chives. Dessert was a simple, dairy-free chocolate mousse with whole strawberries.

  I shot fleeting looks at Adminah throughout the meal. It seemed that some colour, long gone from her cheeks, was returning. Once, she caught my glance and I could swear that a glimmer of a smile touched her lips

  After the meal, the rabbi called me into his study. I was afraid of the words he might use.

  ‘I think it’s time you left this place,’ he said, alarming me further. ‘It’s no longer safe for you here.’

  It was such a strange thing for him to say. I thought I didn’t understand his meaning, yet a part of me seemed to.

  ‘There is a job waiting for you, Rav Nachman. In Jerusalem. If you want it.’ I felt blood propelling itself through my veins.

  ‘What sort of job?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so different from this one. You would be cooking for a rabbi, his wife and about twenty students. No girls this time, but that is probably a good thing, no?’

  I nodded. I didn’t need any girls this time.

  ‘Room and board are included in quite a generous package. It is a small but wealthy Yeshiva backed by an American benefactor. I have spoken to the Rosh Yeshiva on your behalf. He was satisfied with my reference.’

  I went to find Adminah, but her friends told me she had already gone to bed.

  That night I lay awake, unable to quiet my thoughts. Eventually, just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard a soft knocking at my door. I did not want to see who was on the other side, but the handle turned and Adminah stood before me. She was framed by the hall light in a nightgown not quite sheer, yet not quite opaque.

  ‘I spoke to the Rav,’ she said before I could protest. ‘He told me I should come to you.’

  ‘I don’t think he meant to my bed.’

  ‘He didn’t specify.’

  A strange fragrance, elusive yet familiar, drifted through the room. As Adminah took a few steps towards me, the fragrance became richer: lavender oil, Marlboro Lights and a faint tang of crisply fried onions. Either my Nanna was watching me from somewhere in the troposphere, or Adminah’s scent had taken on some ‘constituent parts’, as my grandfather might have said.

  ‘Did you know,’ she asked, ‘that in the Talmud it says a woman is acquired in marriage in three ways?’

  ‘Of course I know, though doesn’t it offend you, the notion of acquisition?’

  ‘The law’s the law.’

  ‘I’ve heard you argue against it many times.’

  ‘I’m not arguing now.’

  ‘Sit,’ I said, patting the mattress beside me.

  Our fingers interlocked. Hers were cold.

  ‘A woman is acquired in three ways,’ she repeated, again as though telling me something I didn’t know.

  ‘Firstly, through the groom’s offering of money or a valuable gift. Secondly, by a written statement of proposal, and thirdly, by sexual intercourse. Generally, all three of these obligations are satisfied, although only one is necessary to effect a binding proposal. Intercourse, however, was not really approved of till after the fact. Fines, or some other sort of chastisement, were often imposed on those who used it before. But it didn’t matter. Betrothal by that means was still considered irrevocable.’

  ‘When did you become such an expert?’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ she said. ‘But I do want you to…to acquire me.’

  ‘We haven’t spoken for over a month,’ I said, ‘and now you want me…you want to be betrothed to me?’ I used the Talmud’s archaic term. It felt safer, somehow. ‘What’s changed?’

  Still we clasped hands and I felt the blood in her fingers kindle. She was silent a long time.

  ‘I have been so miserable,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I was thinking that if we—if we did it, it would somehow close the deal and we could work it out once it…once we had…’

  ‘What sort of logic is that? As far as you know, I’m stuck here and you’re going back there.’

  As we had been speaking, her thigh pressed closer and closer to mine.

  ‘Get your dressing gown,’ I said. ‘Meet me in the kitchen. I’ll make us some hot chocolate.’ Next to one another, our bodies had become warm and I thought it would be better for us to move.

  Hands clasped, we sat opposite one another as we had done so many times before. I told her about the Rav’s offer and she began to smile.

  ‘But even not knowing what the Rav had offered,’ I said, ‘you still came to me with a…a marriage proposal?’

  She shrugged. ‘I had to do it.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I’d have grown old waiting for you.’

  ‘So, how should we go about this acquisition business, then?’ I asked her, half-expecting her to laugh and for the dream to implode, but she answered me quite seriously.

  ‘My father’s dead. You can’t give him a written statement of proposal.’

  ‘What about a brother or an uncle?’

  ‘No! We’re not doing that. I won’t be handled like a piece of merchandise. And I’m not sure I’m ready for sex to be the decider. Which leaves a gift of value from you to me to show you are ready to take on the responsibilities of married life.’

  I knew she could not be thinking of a diamond; she knew the parlous state of my finances. So, all I could do was take down the rosewood box and place it on the table in front of her.

  ‘Nachman,’ she whispered.

  And on a waft of lavender I thought I heard my grandmother sigh.

  Back in bed I could not help wondering whether my grandmother had really effected a miracle from on high? Was she hiding her face no longer? Everything had been taken care of: love and livelihood. I closed my eyes and said a prayer of thanks. Adminah’s voice on the Song of Songs was sweet in my ear.

  As an apple tree among the trees of the forest,

  so is my beloved among the young men.

  With great delight I sat in his shadow,

  and his fruit was sweet to my taste…

  I am s
ick with love.

  His left hand is under my head,

  and his right hand embraces me…

  I slept but my heart was awake.

  Listen! My beloved is knocking.

  At first I wasn’t sure whether I heard it, that soft tapping. Rising, I fully expected Adminah to be standing on the other side, acquisition on her mind. But the musky scents of patchouli and amber snaked beneath the splinter of light at my feet before I even opened the door.

  Sarah pushed at it, facing me with ‘her two breasts like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies’. Lord, would my mind never escape the loop of the Song?

  This time she wore an almost sheer garment, the colour of dark blood, flecked with silver. Tightly buttoned at the wrists, her sleeves were long and flowing—bat wings gliding through the air every time she moved.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘What I always want. What you always try to deny me. When will you learn that you are incapable?’

  ‘I am betrothed.’

  Did I really believe the ancient Talmudic word could shield me?

  ‘That innocent little girl can never give you what you need.’

  ‘You know nothing about her.’

  ‘I know that she will leave you jaded inside a single year. And inside the next, the tedium of it all will madden you.’

  ‘And you, what do you offer?’

  ‘Not permanence. Nothing decorous and stifling.’

  ‘I didn’t ask what you would not give, but what you would.’

  I was angry now. She was a spoiler. Waves of contagion seethed all around her. And yet, that disturbing shadow of incense and oil she trailed in her wake called out to me. I had to listen.

  ‘Let me come in and I will show you.’

  And despite all my misgivings I let her push past me. In haste she stripped off her clothing until she was entirely naked, a flare of whiteness in the dark.

  ‘Now you,’ she said, and in a silent, lunatic moment I wondered why my grandmother had allowed this spectre into my life. This ghost, this apparition kept appearing and disappearing. I never knew when to expect her or what she would want when she came.