‘Only the main one – Monica. And it was just the other day. Well. 1982. So not long before he started to ail.’
‘What was it in the end?’
I told him the little I knew. ‘And Monica was…’ How to put it? Never mind, for now, her room-flooding quiddity. ‘She looked like a trusty in drag.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’
The colour of the day was changing. Late afternoon light on the stones, Saul had written ten years earlier, only increases their stoniness. Yellow and gray, they have achieved their final color; the sun can do no more with them. I said,
‘Well, he took Yeats’s advice. Seek perfection of the work, not of the life.’
‘Yeats doesn’t always talk sense. Like his advice to writers – never struggle, never rest. And you won’t find perfection in anyone’s life. Or in anyone’s work.’
‘I know. In another poem the poet steps back from himself and sees Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect. Well there was no danger of that.’
‘Anyway there must be a life. Yeats certainly had one.’
‘Mm. And so did Primo Levi.’ Until just the other day: on April 11 Levi threw himself down the stairwell of his apartment block in Turin. ‘Sincere condolences, Saul…I’m trying to see his suicide as an act of defiance. A way of saying, My life is mine to take, mine and mine alone. But that’s…’
‘Primo Levi – he never wasted a single word.’
A silence. Then I told him about the new apparitions – my sons…But as the day withdrew Mount Zion seemed to glow and glower (yes, a yellow light, but powerful: tiger-yellow). What was the matter with us, the mountain seemed to ask – how could we go on neglecting the only possible subject? Which was Israeli survival.
‘It’s a garrison state,’ said Saul, ‘but it’s here. And without Israel, Jewish manhood would’ve been finished.’
I at first took him to mean that the Jews would stop feeling the desire to reproduce. That was literal of me. There was another way of disappearing.
‘Assimilation,’ he said, ‘abject assimilation, and the end of the whole story.’
The story that went back 4,000 years.
But now we had to go and find Julia and Rosamund, and Saul’s sidekick Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind), and get ready for our dinner in the Old City with (among others) Saul’s old pal Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem.
Encrustation of curses
‘Stone cries to stone,’ writes James Fenton.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin.
The laughter from the armoured car…
From the same poem, ‘Jerusalem’: ‘It is superb in the air…’
Bellow and Kollek in 1987
And it is. Many, including the Sages themselves, have claimed that the air of Jerusalem is thought-nourishing. Saul, in his book, is ‘prepared to believe it’:
…on this strange deadness the melting air presses with an almost human weight…the dolomite and clay look hoarier than anything I ever saw. Gray and sunken, in the thoughts of Mr Bloom in Ulysses. But there is nothing in the brilliant air and the massive white clouds hanging over the crumpled mountains that suggests exhaustion. This atmosphere makes the American commonplace ‘out of this world’ true enough to give your soul a start.
As you pick your way from tomb to tabernacle, from shrine to icon, from cave to chasm (each consecrated to a different monotheism – so it’s hats off here and shoes on there, and hats on here and shoes off there), you gradually absorb the fact that you are wandering in the graveyard of at least twenty civilisations (their rise and fall punctually enriched by massacre, with blood flowing bridle deep). The earth ‘acts queerly on my nerves (through the feet, as it were), because I feel that a good part of this dust must have been ground out of human bone’.
—————
The air feeds thought, but it also feeds one of the opposites of thought – which is faith, which is religion: the belief in a supernatural patriarch, together with a desire to win his favour (through worship). And Jerusalem remains the planetary HQ of idolatry. It is a low-lying babel of confessions.
Look. In the Old City a black-haired man with sidelocks topped by a wide-brimmed black hat, in a black frock coat, walks at speed down this or that blind alley (his face drained of all colour by secluded study, by epic memorisations, among other causes, possibly including the sin of Onan); and he progresses quite unseeingly, like a frantically inspired poet homing in on his desk and his writing pad. The black-clad ghost is halted in mid stride by the upraised palm of a tanned and cuboid middle-aged American in a hot-pink T-shirt and polka-dot Bermudas.
‘My friend!’ the American cries. ‘My friend! Time to think anew! Oh, time to feel Jesus come into your heart. Come into your heart with such love…’
The Hasid pauses long enough to form an expression of concentrated, of distilled incredulity, and then, with a bristling flourish, strides on. Watching him go, the American sorrowfully shakes his head and mutters to himself about Israeli narrowmindedness…You see, he is a born-again fundamentalist, and his goal is modest enough: all he’s trying to do is speed up the Second Coming, which can’t get started until every single Jew has been Christianised.
Only literal evangelicals take the conversion of the Jews as a necessary precondition (for Apocalypse and then Rapture); everyone else takes it as a metaphor for the end of time. ‘I would love you ten years before the flood,’ Andrew Marvell assures his coy mistress, ‘And you would, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews.’ And the Jews too will tarry, as will their own Messiah…That hill up there, Megiddo, is earmarked for Armageddon – the last battle between good and evil. Then the dead will eventually be kicked awake by furious angels, to face the Day of Judgment.
Hitchens had recently spent time in Israel, and I wished we were there together in
