The Mandelbaum Gate

  ‘Freddy, that’s an odd thing for you to say,’ said Matt, suspiciously.

  ‘He’s not in the brightest of spirits, dear,’ Joanna said, angry at her husband’s tone.

  ‘Not in character,’ Matt said. ‘Freddy, tell us honestly. Have you really lost your memory? Is it true? Or is it a matter of expediency? I think you’ll be frank with us.’

  ‘We’re on your side, either way,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Then is that what the Foreign Office suspects?’ Freddy said. ‘Is that what they’re thinking?’

  ‘In fact, I did hear a rumour that they’re anxious about something,’ Matt said. ‘Something in the security line.’

  ‘I lost my memory all right,’ Freddy said. ‘I haven’t a due what happened to me. Matt, you old humbug, what a question to ask me.’

  Joanna hugged Freddy. ‘We’re on your side, anyway,’ she said. ‘You should let the doctors question you and try to bring back the events. They do it by a process of association.’

  ‘I can wait a while,’ Freddy said. ‘What actually happened is bound to come back.’

  What actually happened to Freddy between the late Saturday afternoon when he lost his memory in Jordan and the early Tuesday afternoon when he regained it in Israel was to come back to him a little later — the outlines of his movements forcing themselves back to him, at first, in a series of meaningless threads. The details followed gradually, throughout the days and into the years ahead and occurred, then, in those fragments, more or less distorted, which are the normal formations and decor of human memory.

  The little heated fuss in the garden had blown over. That was definitely one of the things he remembered on his return to Israel. ‘The trouble with you,’ Freddy had heard himself tell his friends, ‘is you blow neither hot nor cold.’ Blow cold, blow hot, it had all blown over. Matt drove Barbara back to the convent, and Joanna, cheerfully breezing-down the recently inflamed atmosphere, left the house with them, a bulky parcel of groceries in her arms. She was holding it like a baby. The parcel was not tied with string; it was loosely bundled together in brown paper; one could see portions of a sugar-package, a bag of flour, and a tin of something sticking out of the upper end of the bundle, like an infant’s head. Joanna had said that, while the car was out, it would be a chance to take that stuff to someone or other, one of her poor Arab families. Freddy had seen many such bundles of groceries being borne out of houses, at home and abroad, by many such busy Englishwomen, killers of two birds to the stone, all through his life. At home, the Welfare State had done nothing to change their habits. The scene was all the more typical in that Matt had already gone out to the car, thrusting past her, without any attempt to relieve his wife of the bundle; there was no hint of expectation on her part that he should do so. Freddy’s aunts and sisters, all their school friends and the wives of Freddy’s school friends had been for ever dashing out of the house to get a place in the car, with breathless parcels of groceries entwined in their arms, while the husbands pushed past them to the driver’s seat.

  This had been the last scene to impress itself on Freddy’s mind before he mislaid the records. He was on the road, his head bare under the hot sun. He waved good-bye as the car drove off, with Barbara beside Matt in the front and Joanna in the back.

  After that his actions and thoughts were as follows: He returned to the house and felt it to be suddenly empty. He thought he had better go up and rest. As he went towards the staircase he passed the letter tray. Two letters had arrived for him by air mail from England. This was not unusual. Quite often his mail, having arrived at his office in Israel after he had left on Friday afternoon, would be put in the diplomatic bag and sent through the Gate to the Consulate in Jordan; one of the consuls would then have it sent over to the Cartwrights where they knew Freddy was staying. And so it was quite to be expected that Freddy should find a letter or two lying on the tray addressed to him, at any odd hour of the week-end.

  He took the two letters upstairs, glancing at the envelopes. He saw that one came from his mother and the other from Benny, and when he reached his room he was tempted to put them away out of sight, unopened. This feeling, too, was usual, his habitual reaction to letters from Harrogate where his mother and Benny resided at great expense, mistress and servant grown old together and living on that vital substance of mutual reproaches and complaints against the hotel, which formed the main themes of his mother’s letters to Freddy. Benny’s less-frequent letters were equally tedious; her religious feeling, so jolly in the hymn-singing nursery days, had become a mania and a great bore to Freddy:

  ‘Mr Freddy, the Lord knows and only He knows what it is to live with her. I have tried to bring home the Word of Jesus to her heart, but the Devil and his Minions have got her in their bloody claws. Mr Desmond gave a sermon last week that was your living Mother to a T. I have spoken to the girls, Mr Freddy, but it is up to you —’

  The ‘girls’ were Freddy’s elder sisters. They were quite capable of solving any of their mother’s problems, and took some trouble to do so. But Freddy was aware that his mother did not want a solution to her problems, she wanted a solver of problems, and no one would suffice but Freddy himself. Benny was to some extent a participant in the unspoken plot to get unattached Freddy to resign his job and come and live with them. It was an old story to Freddy, who had no intention of laying himself, a human sacrifice, on the altar at Harrogate. In the course of the years he had sometimes become alarmed at Benny’s religiosity. Her letters bore more and more graphic references to the Devil and his sulphurous regions, and more and more exhortations to Freddy himself to come home from his heathen posts to Christian Harrogate, and serve Christ rather than the Foreign Secretary. And Freddy had duly sent off his weekly letters to his mother, and to Benny from time to time, adapting their tone according to his judgement. It was largely a matter of keeping them quiet.

  Freddy, then, looked at these two letters and felt, as he commonly did, that he wanted to shove them out of sight. But as usual he decided to open them and answer them right away so that the job would not be hanging over him. He was annoyed with his mother for having written a second letter in one week, without waiting for a reply to the first; he was afraid she was getting very forgetful.

  Freddy sighed. He hung his coat on a chair and sat down in his shirt sleeves, feeling cooler and more as one getting down to business. He put on his reading-glasses. Benny first: he smoothed the thin sheets and began reading. The old story, only worse. He skimmed over it.

  Dear Mr Freddy, the time has come at last to tell you my Temptations are getting beyond human endurance…. Yesterday your Mother said … and on Tuesday, do you know what she did when I went over to the chest of drawers? She … Your mother is … I hear those Voices again in my dreams and in the early morning … Blood … Mr Freddy and those temptations come back to me that I told you of last month … You had better come, Mr Freddy … Mr Desmond says to pray … I dare not tell him all my mind as he is so good … but I have prayed … I started to speak of my fears to your sister Elsie. Rut you know how bossy she is, she would have me in a Home, so I shut up after that. Your Mother goads me on, she is a true friend of the Devil…She…She…She…I am afraid … afraid… There will be Bloodshed come out of it….

  Really, Benny is letting her imagination run wild, Freddy thought. As if the heat and humidity of Jerusalem isn’t enough to try one’s reason, without those letters…. Elsie is probably quite right to suggest Benny’s going into a Home, but that would leave Ma without a companion. Let them both go into a Home, Benny and Ma, too. Ma, of course, Freddy thought, is behind all this religious excess of Benny’s. She would goad anyone to strangle her or slit her throat, and in a way one quite sees how poor Benny feels. Freddy, looking up from Benny’s letter to reach out for the other one, caught a glimpse of himself, smiling, in the little looking-glass on the dressing table. The smile disappeared. He opened his mother’s letter.

  I fear that Benny is … isn’t quite … Benny, I?
??m afraid, is definitely … She has, of course, pilfered my garnet brooch again. Three pounds were missing from my purse and nobody but Benny had access; literally nobody. Elsie is, I’m afraid, most unsympathetic. She has a heart of iron although I write of my own daughter. I see no alternative for you but to come … Benny … Benny …

  Freddy took his letter-pad and wrote:

  DEAR BENNY,

  I have your letter and am sorry to hear you are feeling unwell just now. I hope Mr Desmond has advised you to see the doctor. You should tell Mr Desmond all your troubles you know, Benny, and if he is a good man, as I know he is, he will understand. These Ministers of Religion know that very good Christians have troubled minds from time to time.

  You must bear with my mother. She is getting old, you know, like all of us.

  I am extremely occupied just now on some important Government business, but as soon as I can get leave I shall come to join you for a few weeks at Harrogate, and we shall have a merry time.

  You know how much we all appreciate you. You must look upon me, and upon my sisters, as your friends. We depend upon you. Don’t let us down after all these years.

  Your devoted,

  FREDDY

  He wrote to his mother’s doctor:

  DEAR DR ARLINGTON,

  I understand — by the tone of letters received from my mother and our old servant Miss Bennett — that the latter is in a somewhat troubled frame of mind. I shall be grateful if you will have a look into her general health the next time you call in to see my mother. I’m afraid these old people are apt to let their imaginations run away with them.

  You know my sisters’ addresses of course, in case anything serious should be found wrong with Miss Bennett. But unless she is suffering from a serious ailment, I, for one, would prefer to keep her as active as possible. The idea of going into a ‘home’ seems to upset her; and as, of course, she has been with our family since her girlhood, I would like her to end her days in the comfort provided by the hotel, and with the feeling of being useful to us, as indeed she is.

  Yours sincerely,

  FREDERICK HAMILTON

  Next, he wrote to his mother:

  … be patient, dearest Ma. You know that Benny will give you back the brooch eventually. Are you quite sure you did not make Benny a present of this brooch? You are always so marvellous. Remember, only a few weeks ago, there was a question of the garnet brooch. I do not recall how it was resolved (if indeed you informed me) but you see Ma, Benny is … You are, of course, Ma dearest, the only one who …

  Freddy put these letters in envelopes, one by one, and addressed and stamped them. He then put them in his pocket. He went out for a walk intending to post them.

  It was nearly half past five, and a great sunset had begun to blaze across the hills of Jerusalem, darkening the valley of Gehenna that ran beneath him to join the valley of Jehosophat in the East. Freddy crossed the sandy motor track which led to the Cartwrights’ front door and picked his way to the footpath, the short-cut from the city, up which he had trudged on all his visits. He stood there, on the stony path on a ridge of the Hill of Evil Counsel which rose behind him to its summit at Haceldama, the Potter’s Field, bought, by repute, with the unwanted blood-money of Judas and serving, throughout subsequent generations, both the dead and the living, as a graveyard for itinerant paupers and a hide-out for smugglers. The all-over properties and associations of this spot were hallowed by a small, musty Greek Orthodox shrine and that ancient, frail monk who was sublimely unaware of anything in the world around him except his hen-coop and God; within the latter category were included all of the human race who crossed his territory on their sightseeing tours or smuggling business, for he seemed to look right through them into God, and treated all accordingly with mesmerized awe, having very few words actually to say to them. Freddy had always found this old monk extremely satisfying company. One could talk to him without the effort of conversation; the monk would express all that was necessary in the pose of his shrivelled body under its loose blue robe, and in the light of his dark eyes, enormous in their deep bony sockets. Freddy had once said, looking round him, ‘This is called the Hill of Evil Counsel but it should be called the Hill of Good Counsel.’ Not that the monk had ever given him any counsel, but that was how Freddy felt about the man’s responsive silence. The time Freddy had stood in the doorway of the dark Orthodox chapel and, regarding the heavy-laden altar and the exotic clusters of coloured lamps hung round it, said, ‘It’s not really my cup of tea, you know,’ the old man had conveyed his complete endorsement of that idea by some emanative gesture that Freddy could not locate in any particular movement the monk had made. Freddy, in this first hour of his absence, turned and looked up towards the field; he see from where he stood on the footpath a projecting angle of the monk’s quarters, and caught a glimpse of the blue cassock as it seemed to potter about the yard, bearing the old man’s spiritual bones and constitution inside it. He is rounding up his hens for the night, thought Freddy, and at that moment the thought also went through his head that, if necessary, he could spend the night up there. He was quite sure the monk would give him a bed and would not mind being waken up at however late an hour, since everyone was the sweet Lord to him.

  It did not occur to Freddy that there was something irrational in this notion. But as if he recalled a decision already reached by a form of reasoning, he returned to the Cartwrights’ house and packed his clothes into his zipper-bag. Next he took his writing-pad to write a note of excuse to Joanna. None of the house servants was evident, but they were probably hanging around, and would witness his two departures from the house, one without his bag and the other with it. He took a little thought, then wrote:

  JOANNA DEAR,

  I’ve decided to return earlier than expected to attend to some private business that’s cropped up. I’ll write next week. Forgive haste. Bless you, Joanna dear.

  FREDDY

  That would not mystify. Joanna must have seen his letters on the tray before she left. He put his writing-pad into the zipper. bag and zipped it up, leaving out the letters he had received from his mother and Benny, now replaced in their envelopes. These he put in his pocket, stuffing them in with a rustle of air-mail paper, beside the three unposted letters he had written.

  Freddy went to the lavatory, not from need, but in case there should be a long journey ahead of him without access to a lavatory. Then he took up his zipper-bag and went down, leaving his note to Joanna on the letter tray. As he walked out of the door he could still hear the gurgle of the lavatory drain behind him; it was a newly installed system, but even so, Joanna had been complaining that it was too noisy and not really very reliable; one had to yank the chain in a certain way or it wouldn’t work; one had to acquire the knack.

  He crossed the motor road and saw below, where the evening had deepened, the lights of a car; it was most probably the Cartwrights’, since the road only existed to serve a few residents in the area. They were returning and he would be gone. He picked his way cautiously over a few feet of scrub-land to the rocky footpath which branched away from the main road, winding down the Hill of Evil Counsel. The sunset was at its climax, touching the spires and hills of Jerusalem so that they seemed to rise from vague darkness; in the east the Mount of Olives with its three summits, the Hill of Offence, the Hill of Olivet, and the Hill known as the Viri Galilaei; to the west, Mount Gareb; and in the north, the Scopus range. Freddy went down as it were to meet them, for in the illusory light the mountains had seemed to mingle with the domes and minarets of Old Jerusalem. He suddenly knew what he was looking for, he knew his first task, but he began to puzzle about where he could find it without going too far, or encountering any difficulty, or having to go to an hotel and waste money on a drink. Then an idea occurred to him:

  Alexandros. Freddy experienced a great sense of relief that puzzled and amused him; he entered the windy streets of the Old City feeling very young and happy — more wide-awake than he had felt for years. The
letters were in his pocket, those to his mother, Benny, and his mother’s doctor, together with those from his mother and Benny. To dispose of them quickly was his first object.

  It was twenty minutes to seven when he reached Alexandros. Most curio shops in the area were still open, but Alexandros seemed to have shut early. A light was on in the shop window and at the back of the premises. Freddy peered inside the doorway and knocked. No one seemed to be in the shop. He rattled the letter box. A few passing tourists stared at him and at the shop, and loitered, as if wondering what sort of bargain this man was after, and whether they themselves were missing something. A voice from above his head called something in Arabic. Freddy stepped back on to the street and looked up.

  ‘My friend!’ said Alexandros.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’ Freddy said.

  ‘I come.’

  As he let Freddy in, a middle-aged European couple with an Arab guide tried to follow. Alexandros spoke to the guide in Arabic, the drift of which Freddy was able to understand. As Alexandros was apparently about to refuse these late customers, Freddy said, ‘I would like to speak to you privately, Alexandros.

  Attend to them first.’ Freddy retreated towards the dark far end of the shop, as one not wishing to be observed.

  The man and woman, conversing with each other in German, pressed into the shop, sensing resistance.

  ‘I will deal with them quickly,’ Alexandros murmured. ‘They are not a serious type of customer, but perhaps they buy.’

  ‘May I use your lavatory?’ Freddy said.

  ‘Of course.’ Alexandros then spoke to the guide, instructing him in Arabic to wait with his tourists inside the shop and see that they did not touch anything. He led the way to the small closet behind the shop and Freddy followed.