Choose Somebody Else Page 6

  ‘You!’ she repeated. ‘We should both be naked together.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘Stay away from me.’

  ‘I wish you would make up your mind.’

  With a sigh she sat herself down on my chair by the window. Now she was illuminated by a street lamp and I watched as she crossed her legs. Somehow, she managed to make it a chaste movement.

  ‘What is it you want from me?’ I said. ‘Why do you keep coming and coming?’

  ‘You can save me. There is no one else.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Can’t you see?’ she said. ‘Everywhere I go I am the evil one, shunned and reviled. But when I come to you, you always let me in—my sin to your virtue. That is how it always was. So now, if the two of us could combine once and for all, your righteousness would overcome my depravity.’

  ‘Or your depravity my righteousness—such as it is.’

  She fell silent for a moment, then said, ‘Sit down and I will tell you a story.’

  ‘Put some clothes on, for heaven’s sake,’ I said.

  ‘Are you afraid of seeing me like this?’

  ‘I am simply afraid. I wish you would leave.’

  ‘First, I will tell my tale.’ She slipped into her dress. ‘Once you asked me who I was.’

  ‘I don’t care anymore.’

  But she held up her hand and I let her speak.

  ‘I am not from here; I am not from now. I was the wife of the great Shabbetai Zvi. Do you know who he was?’

  ‘Of course, I know. But you’re talking four hundred years ago.’

  ‘Why does that matter? He was a great kabbalist and he understood how the holy Kabala could be contrived to reveal the mysteries of immortality. And if you have really heard of him you’ll know he was the Messiah.’

  ‘He was a false Messiah,’ I protested. ‘His father sold chickens. If he’d been born today, at best he would have been diagnosed with bipolar, locked up as a lunatic or a fraud.’

  ‘Too many words, Nachman,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to go on?’ I shook my head.

  She ignored me.

  ‘I was orphaned in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The Cossacks killed all my people. It was a massacre.’

  ‘I know what it was.’

  ‘So, a convent took me in. I was only five. But they abused and beat me. Still now, so long after it all, the sight of wooden sticks—any wooden sticks—are the only things that can frighten me. But when I reached sixteen a miracle happened. I escaped from that place. God saw to it.’

  ‘Or,’ I said, ‘someone left the door open.’

  ‘It was a miracle,’ she insisted.

  ‘So how did you support yourself?’ I wanted to hear her say it.

  ‘I did what I do best.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You know the answer. I had to eat, so I sold myself. You were there when I did it. You always paid more, much more than anyone.’

  A memory swam towards me. I saw her, thin and hungry, her legs open. From the foot of her bed to the bordello’s entrance, a line of habitués waited their turn. Of all the fallen women, she was the most sought after. When it was my turn I howled with every movement and when it was over I paid her double. In the darkness of that terrible room I remembered saying to her,

  ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘Why? Will you support me?’

  ‘You know I can’t. I have a wife, children…’

  In the smoky half-light it was Adminah’s eyes I saw as I said it, Adminah’s hair as flurries of snowflakes settled on her curls. I saw the children throwing snowballs at her as she laughed, collapsing into the whiteness. They ran to her, clambering over her, each clamouring to be the one she would hug first.

  I never knew what became of them. I left them for a chimera.

  Sarah and I lived together until Shabbetai Zvi came for her. I stood in her vestibule as she told me of the new world order. Then she shepherded me quite roughly into the street and closed the door on my bewilderment. I could hear her laughter follow me as I stumbled along the footpath. In a tavern some weeks later, an old man told me that my wife and children had moved to the adjacent town. When I reached it, I was told they had moved on to the next. And the next and the next. It seemed that no matter how far or how fast I roamed, I could never draw level with them. One night, in the acutely freezing temperatures of yet another winter, I lay down on the snow-covered banks of a river. I felt my eyelids close as snowflakes drifted over me, and beneath them I knew I was safe at last.

  And there the memories stopped until I awoke beneath snow of a different kind: of down and feathers within linen and spun cotton. I was a child in my grandmother’s huge bed—the one she would die in—and she was feeding me hot soup. At the same time, she was scolding me for having wandered alone out into the blizzard.

  ‘You could have died, Nachman,’ she said.

  ‘All along, before I even met you, I had had this idea, this feeling,’ Sarah said, continuing her tale. ‘I had heard of Shabbetai, and somehow, I absolutely knew I was going to marry him. There was nothing that would stop me from becoming the wife of the Messiah. Then he sent for me. He had heard of me.

  ‘Together we taught our followers the beauty of licentiousness,’ she continued. ‘We turned everything on its head: good was evil, evil was good. That was how God wanted it to be, for it says in the Talmud that when the Messiah comes, no longer would we need to practice the laws of virtue. By breaking them—by eating on fast days; by eating pork, or meat with milk; by breaking all the rules of the Sabbath—we would bring joy to the Holy One and He would rain down his delight on us. He would reveal Himself.’

  As I looked at her, her dress shimmering in the shadows, her hair touched by a breeze that wasn’t there, I couldn’t help wondering. She had always appeared at the strangest times; she always seemed to know exactly when I was alone; she came from nowhere at all. And the room she had once taken me to, when I thought about it, looked not to belong to any earthly structure. It was as though it had floated in the ether.

  ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to listen to any more.’

  ‘You must listen. You must come with me now. If that other one comes–—’

  ‘Other one?’

  ‘The one you judge to be your basherte. Do you want her to see you here with me?’ But she had seen me; not now, perhaps, but she had most definitely seen me. And at that moment all the fragments of memory fused. For an instant timelessness seemed to tumble and surge into the present. I remembered it all. How Adminah had come to the whorehouse, how she strode through the spaces between the beds and ripped the covers from the two of us. She had seen me on the stained silk sheets and for an achingly long moment she had just stared at us before turning away.

  I felt myself begin to sweat. It came upon me suddenly. I could almost not stand for the dizziness.

  Sarah smiled. Somehow her teeth had become small and pointed. I shuddered, and she laughed.

  ‘You remember it all now, don’t you?’ she said. ‘And you believe me. I can see you believe me.’

  What part of the madness was I supposed to believe?

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, although I knew it did and I knew it wasn’t madness. It may have sounded mad: chicken soup being able to effect marriage; the dead looking down and swaying the future; the widow of the false Messiah sitting in my bedroom. But there is truth in madness and madness in truth.

  ‘It does matter,’ she said. Now her voice was a cry. ‘If you do believe, I won’t have to be alone anymore. In all my life I have met many men but not one of them has ever been like you—then or now.’

  ‘Not even the Messiah?’

  She knew I was mocking her. ‘He tried but he was never able to achiev
e the connection.’

  ‘To what?’ I asked.

  ‘To another time.’

  I could neither gainsay her nor agree with her.

  ‘We could fly through time, you and me. I could conduct the stars so that we could be lovers into eternity.’

  It was then that I knew I would never want her again. Obscene to be bound to her forever, a phantasm, an incubus. The dizziness increased. My clothes were wet with sweat. I collapsed onto the floor and in my weakness, I must have passed out. I awoke to find Sarah standing at my feet, her muscles tensed, her teeth bared.

  I managed to raise my head. Behind me, Adminah stood, electric with fury. Her dark hair spiked horizontally, creating a searing halo around her head.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her, but my head fell back to the floor.

  ‘I’ve come for you.’

  ‘I think you are mistaken.’ Sarah’s voice was as cold as the crackling sheets on her bed. ‘I have come for him.’

  Adminah snatched the prayer book from my bedside table. She held it up in front of Sarah, much in the way one might hold a crucifix up to a vampire.

  Sarah laughed, a depraved echo that seemed to reach back into the past—hers or mine, I could no longer be sure.

  Adminah’s face was sheathed in horror. I watched as she flung the book—its prayers useless, it words hollow—across the room. It was something she would normally never have done. If a sacred text fell, you were supposed to pick it up and kiss it.

  But Adminah was beyond kissing anything. Panicked, looking around for some other contrivance to wield, she saw my grandfather’s walking stick on top of the cupboard.

  The fragrance of sandalwood flickered.

  I cried out, ‘Don’t! It belonged to my—–’ But she turned to me and in her face I thought I saw anger, love, dread. Whatever it was, it silenced me.

  Now Sarah’s smile became shaky. No longer did she give off an air of invulnerability.

  She eyed the stick as if she had seen too many like it in a past she wanted to forget.

  Adminah held it just as she would a baseball bat, cocked and ready. She knew what she was doing. From high behind her head she produced a powerful swing that collided with Sarah’s heart. It was a brutal stroke and I almost expected blood to come surging out. She tried to hold up her hands as if to resist another blow, but Adminah swung the stick again, this time hard upon the shade’s neck. Flaming white light shot out of Sarah’s eyes. For a moment, as she stood there, it was possible to see her blood pulsing violently beneath her skin.

  Then she shattered.

  Myriad crystalline fragments cascaded to the floor. No restoration possible.

  The sight and the sound of it brought me to my feet. Dazzling shards of glass were shot through with blood’s darkness and the pearl of sinew. This time it was no figment, no illusion; Sarah had vanished. The splinters of what was left of her glimmered for a moment, faded, and disappeared. I thought I heard a cry from the skies as they breathed towards dawn. I opened the curtains but there was nothing to be seen and now, only silence on the air.

  Adminah lay on my bed, pale, barely breathing. I brought her a glass of water and sat down beside her. She smiled and tried to sit up but needed my help.

  ‘I acquired you,’ I said, ‘and now it would seem you have acquired me.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You saved my life. Surely that must bind me to you forever.’

  ‘Doesn’t say so in the Talmud.’

  ‘It should.’

  She stood up and made her way unsteadily to where the prayer book lay open on the floor. She picked it up, closed it, kissed it and handed it to me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I should never have thrown it’.

  ‘What the Talmud does say is that any law may be broken as long as it is to save a life.’

  She came and lay back down on my bed. I lay beside her. She was my basherte and we were acquired. There was nothing more to do. So, I held her in my arms and she fell asleep. Which was how the Rav found us when he came to inquire of the where-abouts of breakfast. As I sat up in haste and apology I heard the slight crunch of glass beneath his feet. His smile was quite gentle as he pushed my shoulder back down and said only, ‘Sleep’.

  SUPERJEWEL

  The blessed Holy One made ten canopies for Adam in the garden of Eden; for it is said: [In] the garden of God, every precious stone was thy shelter, the carnelian, the topaz and the emerald, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the garnet-cut cabochon, the emerald and gold.

  — Talmud Baba Bathra 75 a

  Once, when we were discussing our origins, my friend Bethany, a mountain girl by way of Katoomba, thought I claimed to be a jewel.

  ‘Seriously, a jewel?’

  ‘No, a Jew.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Jews.’

  ‘What’ve you heard?’

  ‘I wasn’t really listening. Bad stuff, I think.’

  ‘Nothing good at all?’

  Bethany shook her head. ‘Nope. So, wouldn’t it be better to be a jewel?’

  She spoke in italics. I found that irresistible, a sort of divine naiveté.

  She said, ‘I’m going to call you, well at least think of you as a jewel. Would you mind?’

  I shrugged. She touched the long threadlike scar which ran all the way down the right side of my face, past my chin and into my shirt, stopping at my collarbone.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ I said, my voice tapering, ‘there were two Jewels’.

  ‘I love stories.’

  ‘So come, as the kabbalists say, and see.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘Just come.’

  Once upon a time, there were two Jewels who went to Israel. I know because I was one of them. I was also the one who found the suit on the footpath outside our apartment on Ben Yehuda Street. I tried to put it on but, like the ugly step-sister struggling to squeeze her foot into the glass slipper, my body was too big for it. Always the chubby one, I gave it to Margalit and, of course, it fitted her perfectly. I offered it not just because it looked as though it had been tailored to her body, but because we can read each other’s minds. It is an attribute common to most Jewel siblings and we both understood it was the closest I would ever get to that suit’s inside.

  That night a vivid dreamscape from childhood re-conjured Wonder Woman: buxom yet limber, full-breasted and invulnerable. Wrists encased in deflector bands glittered in the sun as bullets wanged off them. She was impervious, hair-tossing, like a mare at full gallop with legs that could kick high and hard.

  At breakfast the next morning my sister said to me:

  ‘I am not that silly American fantasy’.

  ‘My dreams are not for you to enter,’ I told her.

  ‘Jewel sisters can’t always choose,’ she replied. ‘You know that.’

  Not a lot of people who aren’t, think it’s ‘cool to be Jewel’, despite Israel’s government-sponsored bumper stickers and badges; I can easily understand it. Non-Jewels don’t need reasons to hate but they rarely lack excuses. Depending on wherever and whenever Jewels stepped off the merry-go-round into time and space, the rationale behind abusing them might have been because they were too clean, lived when others died, died when others lived, dressed funny, were too poor to give, too rich to like.

  Our bureaucratically generated surnames in myriad permutations and incarnations of Fine-Gold, Silver-stone, Diamond, Pearl, Sapphire or Glass made people shudder or mock. It did not matter if we changed our names, or committed plastic perjury on our noses, the light could still vanish from our individual centres as fast as it could from anyone else’s. This was especially so in Israel, where we now live with our backs against
the wall, or to the sea, as the pioneers and the politicians have never tired of reminding us.

  In Israel, if you’re not a Jewel, you’re automatically considered one of the Other, a designation which is neither true nor sane, but no one ever said Israel made any kind of sense. I’ve known for a long time that some of my sister’s best friends are Others, but how would you know? These days in Israel, it is not as easy as it once was to tell a Jewel from an Other anymore. Except for the moustache thing: their men have them, ours generally don’t. And in spite of our many initial differences, we have gathered under one sun within the same hemisphere. Now the climate, the diet and even the (very) occasional intermarriage blur the lines. Still, we all look sideways at each other when, if we only dared look straight, we might see that we all came from the same ancestor. But that’s a different story and, unlike this one, it’s been told.

  Before we emigrated to Israel, surely we were the Other, living in a place called Galus, the Yiddish word for Diaspora. There we were taunted and told, ‘Go back to Israel—where you belong’, even though we’d been born, raised and educated in Galus, spoke the language and loved its culture as much as, if not more than, the Galutes themselves. For all that, every Friday night, at the prayer-service’s conclusion, we sang a hymn in multi-layered, Jewel-shaped harmonies so beautiful they could make you long for a place you’d never seen, make you ache, make you weep. Tears like diamonds…

  If I forget thee

  O Israel, O ancient

  Applefield of holy Beginnings,

  May my right hand lose its skill,

  My tongue cleave to my mouth’s roof.

  May I never know the sweetness of your fruit,

  My thirst, unquenched, finding in my tears

  the only water ever permitted

  To soothe my lips, bloodied with

  This unanswered longing.

  So, finally, we emigrated, went back to Israel, my sister and I. Going up, it’s called. Ascending. Can you really go back home to a place you have never seen? Jewels do it all the time. Or dream of doing it. Or lament their lack of courage to do it. Or do it and regret they’ve done it, then leave, or stay and lament their lack of courage to leave. But we went, and we stayed.