She returns with a woman who looks quite out of place.
‘This is Martha, an old friend of mine from school.’
Martha is dressed in loose-fitting beige wool. Her chestnut-coloured hair is caught up at the back and falls in artless but rather exact waves to her shoulders. Her wide-set eyes are of a bright, candid blue enhanced by discreet make-up.
David pads over, pushes his grey-framed spectacles up towards his tangle of curly hair ‘Would you like a drink?’ he says. ‘We have beer, orange juice, wine . . . some whisky.’
Harry has lost the vacant expression. He is unconsciously smoothing down his hair at the back as he begins to tell the story of their visit to the Jewish settlement. ‘. . . on the very edge of enemy territory, armed to the teeth, and he wants to know who sets the crosswords!’
His body is facing Shimon, but his eyes are looking at Martha. She laughs in a carefree manner. It is a sound they have heard from no one else for three days.
‘. . . in Boston,’ she is saying, in reply to some query. ‘I knew Sarah in school. We were like best friends for a while.’ Her voice has a slight interrogative lilt, as though she is seeking confirmation from Shimon, or Pietro, or Harry for these episodes in her past. ‘We were like best friends for a while? Then I met this guy?’
She has an uninhibited laugh, which she tries to restrain, apparently from a sense of good manners. When she moves her hands to take something from her handbag or to replace her drink on the table, there is a certainty and elegance in her action.
Pietro wonders if he is going to make it through the evening. When he stands up to go to the dinner table his stomach feels weak. Hummus appears on his plate, with olives and cucumber salad. He is not sure what he is hearing, or what he is seeing. Why is this woman who seems to have stepped out of a Park Avenue elevator sitting next to this bearded man with his thick rubber-soled shoes?
Can this man really, already, be saying this: ‘I don’t mind the Arabs. Let them stay and live here with us if they want to. But they must understand their place. Most of them do. Deep down, they are not really a military people. They know this land is ours. Even their own books tell them that. If they want to stay as hewers of wood and drawers of water, then we should allow them to. The danger is among people who want to deal with them, to treat with them and give them land.’
Pietro shakes his head to clear it. Shimon is leaning forward at the table, stroking his beard. ‘If some deal is offered we have to say no. We have to start a war if necessary so the weak-minded among us don’t fall for that trick.’
Harry is countering with his experience at the Wailing Wall. He has been approached by a Hassidic man wanting him to go to a school to examine the Talmud so he can learn about his true roots. ‘This yeshiva business . . . it sounded appalling. He said if I went along he’d give me a free bed for as long as I was in Jerusalem. Frankly I’d rather share with Pietro. You get used to habits after a time.’
The food comes. Martha explains that she has long promised to visit Sarah. She is on a week’s vacation. She hopes to go to Eilat for some swimming and sunbathing. She is pleased to have visited Jerusalem but she wants to relax.
Harry is inventing new holiday plans as he goes along. ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘we’re very flexible on time. We were thinking of spending a few days at a resort ourselves.’
‘Sure,’ says Pietro, feeling the dated airline ticket for the next day in his pocket.
David is not tired tonight. At home and in control, he is forceful in his views. ‘It seems to me that the settlers and people like them are in for a surprise. Old-fashioned people like me are not going to sit back. They despise us because they think we will give in, but they don’t realise that we have a different idea of Zionism. It is an older one. It is we who were at the sharp end of the movement until they started running around with their machine guns. We are not giving in to anyone – least of all to them. Their attitude has made it impossible to have a proper debate, they have reduced it to a slanging match. But they will find that when it comes to words we are better prepared than they are. That’s one war we won’t flinch from.’
Pietro is now finding it difficult to concentrate at all. Sarah interrupts her husband. Ben comes in wearing pyjamas. He cannot sleep. Shimon lays down his knife and fork to make his point more clearly to Martha, who has accidentally strayed into his path, like a car pulling timidly off the hard shoulder of the motorway into the line of a truck at full speed. Harry is trying to deflect him with humorous asides.
As the meal wears on, Pietro comes close to delirium. But the voice he hears and the words he remembers are those of David. He is almost shouting to make himself heard. ‘I find myself summoned to show my solidarity ten times a day. After every newscast. Of course I give my loyalty. But when you are part of history at each moment, when is there time to sit on your own and talk to your child? When will it be possible for us ever again to put the simple human feelings of love and family back where they ought to be – at the centre of the world?’
Through disagreement from his wife and derision from Shimon, he persists, flushed and loud: ‘We can’t live in a place outside time, in a way prescribed thousands of years ago. The diaspora taught us many things. Our encounter with Europe has enriched us, not weakened us. We can never shed what we learned of humanism in Europe and nor should we want to. I’m proud of what we have assimilated and it is my right to retain that heritage, even within this old-fashioned idea of a nation state. Our battle now is not to keep everyone at a political fever pitch all the time, but to depoliticise people. One day I will sit by the well with my little son and he will tell me not that he loves his country, but that he loves his mother or that he loves a girl from the next town. And his own feelings and sufferings, his individual life will be the one important thing. That is the aim of good art, I think, and that should be the aim of our lives too. When Mandelstam was exiled and dying at the ends of the earth he read out his poems!’
Pietro feels like offering hallucinatory applause. Shimon laughs harshly. The evening dissolves for Pietro into unconnected fragments.
‘The greatest threat to Israel is not from the Arabs but from the disagreements between the Jews themselves . . .’
‘Why don’t we get a bus down together? Which hotel are you staying in?’
‘They came here after the Six Day War and the boy was born during Sadat’s visit . . .’
‘At the Yad Veshem memorial they will have a darkened hall lit by candles in which a tape-recorded voice will read out on an eternal loop the names of the one and a half million children who were slaughtered by the Nazis.’
That night Pietro sweated out his chill. He removed the soaked sheets from his bed at four in the morning, found a T-shirt and clean, dry blankets in the cupboard. In the morning he awoke clear-headed and purged. He went for a walk while Harry slept in.
He watched the changes of light on the rich-coloured stone of the city as the sun was momentarily obscured by cloud. Jerusalem, the city of peace. Temporary structures leaned against the ancient walls: much of the building was dilapidated and unrepaired, much of it carefully removed and set aside by archaeologists. In the shifting light, the masonry itself seemed to change allegiance, from one colour to another, while new evidence to be debated rose from the excavated dust.
On the plane back to London he read an article in the Jerusalem Post about how the Greeks and Coptic Christians were in dispute about who owned which part of the nave of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
In the evening he went to a pub in Maida Vale and fell into conversation with the landlord, whom he knew. ‘What was Jerusalem like?’ he asked. ‘How was the weather?’ It was a friendly question.
Later he watched a debate on television between two British politicians in which each accused the other of inconsistency in his attitude towards the problem of inflation. Then there was an item about class divisions, in which the reporter went to Henley in a straw hat.
KOWLOON
br /> HONG KONG 1980
ON THE PLANE from Hong Kong to Colombo, Pietro took out a pad of paper and began to write down his impressions of the colony for the benefit of Harry, who was supplying the text for a book about it. He had spent a week there taking photographs and was glad to be leaving. He had disliked the place, even though he had enjoyed his visit. This puzzled him.
The principal problem, it seemed to him, was the people. One of the English guests at dinner the night before had explained at length how he was going to take his car with him on his new posting in Singapore. By some complicated manœuvring, it would remain on his company’s books yet he would be able to sell it.
‘That’s not really the spirit of the law, is it?’ said Pietro, perhaps, he now conceded, naïvely.
The man looked up, his young, fleshy face suddenly still. ‘Law?’
‘Well, the spirit of the game, if you prefer,’ said Pietro, not wanting to accuse him of impropriety.
The young Englishman was shocked. ‘Game?’ he said. ‘It’s not a game. It’s life. It’s about maximising profits.’
Perhaps that was why another man there owned three Ferraris, even though the speed limit on the island was 40 m.p.h. There was a market in them, he explained. He imported, finessed the paperwork, sold on expectation, reinvested. He didn’t drive. Well, sometimes at weekends. What was the point, with a 40 m.p.h. speed limit?
Pietro began to write.
Dear Harry
Here are the notes for the Hong Kong book. I have kept them very personal and anecdotal, as requested. I hope you can make something of them for your text. I’m not sure what I saw is really much good for the ‘Last Outpost’ theme of the series, but I hope the pictures will be all right anyway.
Obviously you’ll throw away some of the purely anecdotal stuff, but I haven’t had time to sift through it all myself because I’ll have to post this from Colombo in the morning. I still think you ought really to have visited Hong Kong yourself before you write it. But I leave that to you.
I went up inside a glass bubble on a monorail lift. We looked down into the atrium with its gravelled gardens and silver fountains. The bellboy was a very small Chinese who called me sir every second word and wouldn’t let me help him with the cases. On the top floor we went into another vast lounge and he put the cases down. I assumed he was tired. He said, ‘Sitting room, sir.’ I said, ‘Yes, but where’s my room?’ He said, ‘This your room, sir. This your sitting room. Bedroom upstairs.’ This place I thought was some sort of public lounge turned out to be my own sitting room. Upstairs was a vast bedroom. The place is ridiculous. It has two bathrooms, a bar and a dressing room. It is about twice the size of my entire flat in London. There are two televisions, two stereos and God knows what. The long windows overlook the harbour, and there is Hong Kong island on the other side, a sort of greyish pile with advertising signs illuminated on top of the skyscrapers. SEIKO. It is both exotic and rather prosaic. Which travel company gave you this? It is extraordinary.
In the afternoon a young Chinese woman called Polly came round. She is very helpful, so helpful in fact that it’s difficult to concentrate. She’s pretty in a traditional way, though with quite large eyes. Some European ancestry? She was keen to show me all the other hotels and all the shopping. I couldn’t see the point of this but didn’t want to seem churlish. So we looked at lots of other places. None of them is as flash as this one.
The next day I told Polly I had to go off on my own. I hired a car and drove up from Kowloon through the New Territories to the Chinese border. There’s a British military post there and I introduced myself to the man in charge, a major. He took me up the tower, to the top of the observation post, and we gazed over into China. It looked green. Watery green. Temperate, distant, large. The hills make you think of bamboo shoots and pandas. It’s pale and insipid, a bit like Cantonese cooking. There was a light mist over the trees. The temperature was cool but sticky, like an April day in England. Maybe if I hadn’t known it was China it wouldn’t have looked so exotic. I took a lot of pictures, some of them with the major, who had a limp, in the foreground.
He seemed a bit bashful and made a few excuses about not having his ‘best bib and tucker’ on, but he didn’t seem to mind. He spends a lot of time trying to keep Chinese illegal immigrants from crossing the border. It seems a bit of a game. They just round up the odd one or two and throw them back. This is not a high-security job. In fact he just sits there staring into China. He spoke very respectfully of the Chinese government and the Governor-General of Hong Kong. I offered to take him out to dinner in Hong Kong and he agreed.
It was odd to see this man here, on the rim of China. Those Scotsmen in the nineteenth century who decided to come over here in the first place. That was a strange move. From Motherwell to the South China Sea. It must have seemed a daunting distance in those days. I admire their daring. I suppose many were already out here, running drugs out of China et cetera.
The next day I persuaded Polly that I had seen enough shopping arcades and hotel bedrooms. I asked her to show me what she thought was the worst side of life here. She took me to the camps where the refugees from Vietnam were kept. It reminded me of the time I worked on a chicken farm in Wisconsin. They were like hen runs, nailed up with wire netting, cardboard and bottle tops. It was a parody of a village. No work, no economy, no jobs. Feed shoved into cages, people lying almost on top of each other. It was worse than somewhere like Madras where people just lie in the street. At least there you feel they could walk away, they can beg, they have freedom of movement, even if they are starving. But these people were also imprisoned. The camps are policed by officers of the Correctional Services Department. I don’t know how people remain human when what separates them from animals is taken away.
We went to a restaurant on the way to some water project in the New Territories. It was like a vast canteen with surly Chinese (they aren’t at all friendly) wheeling trolleys round with battered metal dishes. You didn’t know what was inside, there was no menu. I just had what Polly picked off for me. It was disgusting. But I couldn’t complain. I’d asked her to show me the other side of life; but the odd thing was that although the refugee camp was supposed to be the worst, I don’t think the restaurant was part of the low-life excursion.
She insisted I go shopping for radios and cameras and electronic things. Each shop is like the floor of a stock exchange, people shouting and trading. They have no embarrassment about greed. I tried to bargain over a camera, but he wouldn’t let me try it out and I thought I’d rather wait and get one back in London where I might pay more but at least I’d know what I was getting. I did buy you a little portable cassette thing, on the other hand. I’ll bring it back with me. I don’t know if I can resist the temptation of using it myself in the mean time. The thing that strikes you about Hong Kong is how naked the pursuit of money is. I suppose it’s prudish to object. A little hypocrisy wouldn’t be out of place, though. The Chinese are amazing. They work very hard for it. And the British and the businessmen, it’s all they talk about. Whether it’s multi-million deals and bonds or twenty-quid cameras, it’s just barter and push all the time.
Relations between the nationalities. There are none, as far as I can see. The English are completely ignorant of Chinese culture and languages and see nothing odd in this. The Chinese ignore the foreign devils. I walked through the roughest, most Chinese parts of Kowloon, down dark side streets, and no one paid me the slightest attention. You could send a tribe of Zulu albinos down here and no one would look up from their work unless they represented a business opportunity. The English and the Chinese are bonded by mutual disregard. It is odd. They are brothers in money.
I was introduced to a Scotsman who is organising the forthcoming arts festival. I asked him about local artists and he hummed and hahed for a time. Eventually he said, ‘Well, there’s a local jewellery designer. She’s a bit unstable, I think. But her designs have become very popular. I believe she is beginning to pe
netrate world markets.’
Your friend Jerry was tied up but he put me in touch with some lawyers. We went to a restaurant and met a lot of other young Englishmen. They all called each other by their surnames and shouted at the waiters, who didn’t seem to mind. We ate dim sum, which is bits of feet and head and bladder. They liked it a lot and made jokes about things called ‘sick bags’ which are flabby parcels that you prong with your chopstick. They were all very friendly and insisted I drank beer and whisky with them. I wondered how many of them would have done so well ‘back in UK’, as they say. They have an odd way of talking about it. They are very dismissive, talk about strikes and the inflation and how you can’t afford a decent house. Yet I think they are also a bit in awe of it.
That night I insisted Polly let me take her out. She wanted her company to take me to another of its international cuisine restaurants, but I was firm. She brought a lot of brochures about a new building development in the middle of central Hong Kong island. I don’t know how they are going to manage to slip another building in. It’ll have to be about three feet wide and a mile high. I think she was a bit worried about having shown me the refugee places, so she was finishing off with a strong emphasis on the good life.
I tried to get her off the subjects of hotels and service. I asked about her family and her life and if she had a boyfriend. She wasn’t affronted by this question but gave me to understand that a young woman must put her career first and there was not much chance of that with the dead weight of a boyfriend in the background.
We went to a Szechuan restaurant recommended by the major. I teased her a bit about her seriousness and her English name. Afterwards we went to a bar I’d been to with the major where women with no tops on sit in the middle of tables to serve drinks. It was very unerotic. It must be the best-known tourist trap in the place, I suppose, but Polly wanted to go there. The light was dingy and the women all looked old and uninterested. It was as if they had just taken their tops off for a medical.