‘Which are?’
‘Ethics and morals. Going to the Gomorrah – that’s morals. Paying for the Gomorrah out of the donations bowl – that’s ethics. Morals is sex and ethics is money.’
…Now Saul had a famous laugh: back went the head, up went the chin, and then you heard the slow, deep, guttural staccato. And Saul, by the way, loved all jokes, without exception, the feeblest, the dirtiest, the sickest. But the line about ethics and morals hardly qualified as a joke to Saul Bellow: it was just a sober statement about America (and is a fact confirmed every day).
So it wasn’t Saul’s laugh that now turned all heads, that stilled the tables, that made the waiters freeze and smile – it was Julia’s. An orchestral laugh, eruptive, joyous, with a note of pure anarchy that I never dreamt she had in her.
Saul and I looked at each other in wonder…And then we all cheerfully frowned over the menus, and ordered our nice pieces of fish and our costly white wine, and the dinner at last began.
—————
She was my age and she was a widow. Her first husband, a handsome and vigorous philosopher, died of cancer at the age of thirty-five. More than this, she was a pregnant widow; and I was the father.
You know, when my erotic life got going, in the mid-1960s, I pretty soon decided that I wouldn’t encumber myself with worries about honour. Given the historical situation (what with the sexual revolution and so on), honour, it seemed to me, would be nothing but trouble.
And the human being who would go on to set me straight about all this – not by suasion but by example – was already present, that night at Odin’s. A tiny amphibian, less like a newt than a tadpole, scudding and skittering about in there, enwombed. It was Nathaniel, my first son.
In conclusion: Memoir of a Philo-Semite
June 4, 1967, was a Sunday.
In the Middle East the armies of three nation states seemed poised to attack Israel – in a campaign that Gamal Abdel Nasser, their de facto generalissimo, promised ‘would be total’; and ‘the objective will be Israel’s destruction’.
In London W9, on the afternoon of June 4, I was watching a Zionist getting dressed. She reached for an item of clothing I now knew was called a panty girdle. It was as white as bridal satin; then she reached for her skirt, which was as black as mourning ribbon; then for her blood-red shirt.
She was called…oh, my fingertips are impatient to type it out, the sonorous double dactyl of her real full name. But I have written about her twice before (in a novel, in a memoir), and her pseudonym is here preserved: Rachel.
The black skirt, the red shirt.
‘I’ve got to rush,’ she said.
Rachel looked about herself, as if she might have left something behind. And she had: she had left it between the sheets, where I still lay…Even in the 1960s you occasionally heard that tender euphemism for virginity: ‘unawakened’. What Rachel had left behind that Sunday afternoon was her unawakened self, her unawakenedness.
I was pushing eighteen, she was a year older – the same age as Israel. It was first love, our first love, my first, her first.
‘It’s half past four,’ she said.
‘You’ll be in time. It’s only two stops.’
‘But it’s Sunday. On Sundays it takes longer because they insist on watching you recover. I don’t know why. They watch you having your cup of tea and your ginger biscuit. And they close early too. Sometimes they turn people away.’
I knew exactly what she was talking about. And I was already sitting up and getting dressed. ‘I’ll put you on the bus.’
‘Hurry up then.’
We embraced and kissed and sank on to our sides; but not for long. Rachel, a Sephardi, with her ebony hair, her fine tomahawk nose, her wide lips the same colour as her complexion (like damp sand at the seashore). I was seventeen, I read poetry, and I reckoned I knew an epiphany when I saw one.
Rachel had to go to the institute, she had to hurry to the institute on a Sunday, in time to give her blood to Israel. And there was no escaping the simple truth that she had just given her blood to me.
Which would have been enough, more than enough, to activate something durable. But it was already activated, it was already there.
A flying visit to Christmas Day, 1961. After a four-hour lunch I am playing Scrabble with Kingsley and Theo Richmond (an innermost family friend). My father takes two tiles from his rack and for a teasing moment, before withdrawing them, forms the word YID. I am twelve.
Do I even know what that word means? Anyway, Kingsley gives a shrugging laugh, and Theo gives a laugh of a kind (it is not his real laugh), and I woodenly do enough to seem to smile. Even as I write I can remember how my cheeks felt: like cardboard.
During that moment I must have made several quite strenuous deductions. That Theo was Jewish;*12 that yid was a hate word for Jew; and that hatred of Jews was something that existed, and was well established. And was dark and hot and insidious and violent.*13
What did I have to go on? Only some photographs I’d seen in the Daily Mirror, back in Swansea when I was nine or ten, and this exchange with my mother.
‘…Mum.’
She could see I was worried. ‘Yes, Mart.’
‘Hitler, and all those starved people.’ I was thinking of the railtracks, the smokestacks. ‘Why was Hitler…why was he –?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Hitler,’ she said (very characteristically). ‘You’ve got blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler would have loved you.’
From that reassurance – that Hitler would have loved me – two whole novels would eventually emerge. Because novels come from long-marinated and unregarded anxiety, from silent anxiety…
—————
Rachel gave blood on Sunday. The next morning, at 07.10 Israeli time, the June War – now known as the Six Day War
