A Fool's Alphabet (21 page)

He took a dry martini, straight up, at 12.15 in a bar on Bleeker Street. His eyes watered slightly and his nose ran as the warmth of the bar, augmented by the almost neat gin,
thawed his sinuses. Next he had a beer and a cheeseburger, which he ate at the bar. The meat was rare and loosely packed; the blood from the burger made the french fries furry at the edges. He reckoned a single glass of red wine would just make him sleepy enough to drop off for half an hour back at the hotel before he needed to think about getting ready for the wedding. Without ever quite adapting to the time change he found himself negotiating with his energy reserves, borrowing an hour and repaying it with snatched sleep later on. Having taken the subway on the journey down, he felt he owed himself a taxi back. The yellow cab pulled in and whisked him over the potholes at a fixed thirty-five miles an hour. BRODSKY, Ion.

The familiar bleeping of the alarm came at 4.15 p.m. His reactions were all of London mornings, work, panic and Hannah as he reached out his hand and scrabbled frantically on the bedside table, banging down on keys, books, passport, aspirin until he mercifully quelled the noise. He lay back, his heart pounding, his head in deep fog, to see the noisy purple wallpaper of the hotel room, the white wood table and reading lamp, the blank grey screen of the television. New York. He checked the clock again. It was all right. He needed a cup of tea but the hotel couldn't oblige. He thought about finding the coffee shop that had given him breakfast but decided there was not enough time. He would have a bath instead.

He went into the bathroom and moved the slanted bakelite switch upward in its metal plate. The light came on and an extractor fan began to wind itself up in the ceiling. He bent over the bath and struggled with the faucet, a single stick that controlled temperature and speed. An icy stream pelted on to his head from the shower attachment above. Eventually the water ran from the tap at a reasonable temperature and with a force that made the tub thunder. He squeezed in a small plastic bottle of gel and whipped up the purple liquid with his hand until the surface of the water was covered
with cool, slimy bubbles. He climbed in and lay back, staring at the cracked, ungrouted tiles that whispered ‘cockroach'.

He tried to scoop off the gel and break it up with violent attacks of hot water from the tap, like a ship dispersing an oil slick at sea. Eventually the worst of it was gone and he relaxed, thinking of Harry and Martha. He had begged Harry not to go on to the club his American friends were suggesting the night before, but knew he had little chance. God knows what had happened. His own speech was going to be passable. He had written it out, learned it, then jotted a few words on a postcard to remind himself. Parents. School. Blazers. Paris . . . only ones who etc. Mr F, generosity . . . whole £5, what meant . . . H career. Radio, paper. French story . . . Martha. H's phone call re. Meets H's mother. Weekend with H in Lake District, won't mention her name . . . Bridesmaids: lovely etc. Laurie (?), Nancy, Allie esp. M's sisters X 2. All agree, Ladies and G, lucky man. Toast.

He wiped his hand across the misty mirror and shaved with care, inserting a new blade in the razor and scalding it beneath the tap every few seconds. He wetted his hair and roughed it up a bit, leaving any combing he thought necessary to the last minute. With time on his side, he dressed with care. New underwear, new black socks, old but clean white shirt, gold cufflinks. As he fitted these, he began to relax and look forward to the evening.

Thirty-three years old and it looked as though Harry and he were going to be all right. His own sense of salvation lay in his wife and daughter: it gave him pleasure to contemplate Hannah and Mary, their faces smiling (Hannah's anyway) from a photograph propped up against the bedside light. Presumably Martha would also have children after she and Harry were married. Pulling on his dinner jacket, Pietro went over to the white wood table and picked up the bottle of whisky he had bought at Heathrow. He poured some into a toothglass and diluted it with cloudy-looking water from the basin tap that eventually cleared as whatever had misted it sank or dispersed in the glass. He took a long pull and
walked over to the window. He could see the ground eighteen floors below, the headlights surging up the cross-street in the dark. He lifted his glass in a silent toast to Harry, wherever he was now, wherever he would travel. Then he went downstairs, wrapping his coat tightly around him as he turned on to the avenue with its white-lit buildings roaring against the sky.

In the doorway of the synagogue stood one of Harry's English friends with a flat, open basket of yarmulkes, around which he had wrapped his arm like Nell Gwynne. Pietro stood at the other door, watching the guests climb up from the street, banging their hands together. There were so many fur coats at the height of the influx that it looked like a migration of wild animals, pouring in a soft, scented flock into the warmth.

Downstairs it had been pandemonium as the photographer tried to arrange the groups. Most of the bridesmaids were only half dressed, in expensive lingerie and heavy make-up, so the ushers, tuxedoed and with hair slicked back, stood around watching, sipping soft drinks and smoking. The bridesmaids ran around the hall, gossiping, adjusting their hair at a dressing table, and always evading the beseeching grasp of the photographer.

He had done his best, and with the guests all seated, the much-rehearsed procession was due to begin. The inside of the synagogue glowed in the candlelight. The ends of the pews were decorated with white lilies. Pietro walked at funereal pace, as directed, up the carpeted aisle. Ahead he could see Harry standing alone beneath the chuppah, a canopy that had been erected since the day before. As best man he should have been up there already, but the MC had insisted that he walk up the aisle as there would otherwise have been odd numbers.

An elderly rabbi began to read in Hebrew from the scriptures. To Pietro's ears it sounded primitive. He thought of the desert lands and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac to the cruel god, Jahweh, foreign and remote. He looked down over the
rows of faces, the men in their white yarmulkes, the women hatless and smiling up at the platform. Outside were the shops of Madison and Lexington, Italian suits and wine merchants with wooden floors and shelves designed to look like Montaigne's study near Bordeaux. And on the pavements were pretzel sellers hunched over braziers, the flash of burger restaurants and big American cars barging through the gridlocked traffic. Inside the synagogue the people spoke of a foreign land and an ancient God, with no sense of paradox in their devotion. He thought of the web of the diaspora, its filaments stretched around the earth, even to this, the largest Jewish city in the world, which was still not their own. The unimaginable histories of the families passed through his mind: persecution and exile, immigration, labour and patience, none of which was visible in their cultured New York faces. He pictured the Great Hall at Ellis Island with its ambitious tiled roof and little star-shaped windows around the inner balcony; down on the floor the throngs had surged, a boat-ride from the Battery, as though at the gates of heaven: tired, bewildered travellers clutching their children and their bags, feeling the press of hands on their elbows as members of Jewish societies from Hester Street came with the offer of rooms. In the sound of the rabbi's voice there was a sense of grandeur, something more numinous than he had found in Christian churches, but also something cold, a suggestion of a will that would not relent.

Harry's face was contorted in what Pietro took to be happiness. Twice he smiled broadly and seemed to be on the verge of laughter. A younger rabbi gave an informal talk in English. There was no singing, no prayers. Harry trod on the glass with an enthusiastic stamp of the left heel, the congregation shouted ‘
Mazel tov
', and the ceremony was over.

Still it was calm on the streets, not like a megalopolis of the future, gleaming and frenzied. There were only the rattling cabs and the tall buildings with their quaint Thirties fittings. Harry wanted a photograph of himself on the street with
headlights going past in a waving ribbon of red. Pietro squatted on the pavement as Harry and Martha finally cleared the crowds of well-wishers to stand by the door of their limousine. He aimed the camera at the lights of a yellow cab and fired. You want a cliché, he had told Harry, you can have it. Then all the guests at once were looking for taxis, so he decided to walk a few blocks on his own. He found that Elliot had materialised from the darkness and was walking alongside him over the big paving stones. Another usher with curly hair and round glasses suggested they stop for a drink on their way to the hotel. They were somewhere in the Fifties, quite far east, and suddenly the coloured awnings with their frequently Irish names, the glowing light from behind curtained windows that signified strong drink and warm air, were nowhere. Two blocks north, despairing, they pressed into the strip light of a burger chain outlet and found a staircase. Upstairs was a deep bar, fitted like a Victorian pub in London, with room enough to hold two hundred people, another world within a world. They drank bourbon, which tasted fine here, though never the same in England, and talked about Harry, feeling a touch of guilt that they were not already in the queue to shake hands.

Harry, hoisted aloft in his chair, shaking the white traditional handkerchief with Martha, wore the look of terrified hilarity he had worn when Dave Snyder pointed the way back to the hotel from the top of an icy mogul field in les Houches sixteen years earlier. The guests stamped and clapped as he wobbled backwards and forwards, his seat precarious as the men holding his chair on their shoulders tried to keep him steady against the pull and tremble of the others.

Almost all of Martha's friends seemed to be on diets. The plates of salad, steak and vegetables, the piled dishes of dessert and extra, celebratory morsels of hors-d'œuvre or chocolate were carried back untouched by teams of skilful waiters, close-shaven in white tuxedos, with uncomplaining manners and neat hair.

The speeches came sporadically and some seemed unprepared. Eventually, between dances, there came a moment when Martha's father, a white-haired man who had been acting as master of ceremonies, called Pietro to the little wooden platform at the end of the room. Looking over the clustered tables of guests, their faces turned eagerly towards him, Pietro felt isolated. A space of polished dance floor separated him from the nearest humanity; it was no more than five or six yards, but it might have been the Delaware. He pulled out the piece of card and began. His eyes searched for some sympathetic face in the crowd, but he could fix only on a white-coated waiter who was standing assiduously still, as though not to interrupt important proceedings. Pietro found himself imagining the waiter's life. Brooklyn? Queens? Some outlying borough where no tourist went . . . He noticed that although his voice was steady his left leg was shaking. It had assumed some independent life he was powerless to control. He could see Martha's father look down quizzically at the trembling platform beneath his feet.

What he said sounded platitudinous to him, but he said it with conviction and he could tell that the guests were not in a critical mood. He kept it short, as instructed, and when he had negotiated the final stretch and found himself nearing the end, he began to relax his concentration.

‘. . . and I'm sure all my fellow-guests from the other side of the Atlantic would agree with me that the hospitality laid on today by Martha's parents' – he swiftly consulted his postcard – ‘Lee and Abigail has been absolutely overwhelming. It has been a wonderful experience for us to come over here and find such a warm welcome from people on the other side of the world – to find hotels booked for us, taxis ordered, flowers in the room and suggestions for how to pass the morning – to say nothing, of course, of this magnificent banquet here tonight. All this, all these people trusting and helping one another because of the occasion we are here to celebrate, the love and marriage of two people dear to all of us, Harry and Martha. And I hope you won't think I'm
exaggerating if I say that I for one have never experienced such generosity and warmth as over the last twenty-four hours here in Jerusalem.'

He had begun the next and final paragraph, the toast itself, before he realised that the noise from the guests was not just encouragement, but a gasp and then laughter as well. He felt his dress shirt entirely filled with the beating of his heart. It had become instantly soaked. How could he have said it? It sounded anti-Semitic, snide, appalling. All the effort he had made and then to stumble like this, to spoil his friend's wedding at the critical moment . . .

Speechless, he gazed down at his card, on the words that should have led to his way out. He could not gauge whether the sound in the room was of mirth or anger or contempt. Somehow in the synagogue he must have become confused. All those speculations about New York, the biggest Jewish city in the world, and about what immigrants had thought when they arrived had muddled him. Brooklyn, Samaria, Hebron, Galilee, Queens . . . Christ. Jocular excuses half formed at the edge of his mind, but they all came to him in even more insulting shapes. Jerusalem, New York, what does it matter . . . No.

He took a long breath and grasped the microphone stand. ‘I meant New York. I was confused into thinking about that beautiful city because . . . because that is where Harry and Martha met one evening when I was there!' He sensed a narrow exit from his shame. ‘Jerusalem was where they fell in love, the city of peace. To fall in love in Jerusalem and to be married in New York . . . ladies and gentlemen, these are two people with a sense of style. To have conducted the most important incidents of their lives in what in my view are the two greatest cities in the world.'

It wasn't up to much, it sounded like a fashion magazine, but he was free and running for cover. A swell of generous agreement pushed him on his way. He went through the bridesmaids' names with disdainful precision, raised his glass and moved smartly back to his seat, lowering his head against
the volume of forgiving applause. At the table he had time to drink deep of the wine he had till then avoided.