Requiem (32 page)

Tom shrugged.

'That's
not good enough. I want a promise. Now will you promise me, Tom?'

49

Rabin and Arafat were talking. The
leaders of the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization
were on the verge of agreeing to an historic compromise. The Jews and the Arabs
were talking, but Sharon and Tom were not.

Tom was
becoming more and more remote.
Tobie
had told Sharon
that he had begun to open up during their 'sessions' but felt sure there was
still more for him to face. Sharon had deliberately stood back from these
developments, hoping to give
Tobie
operating space
and Tom breathing room. She hoped - beyond hope that
Tobie
could wean him away from Katie and that she could have him to herself

But the opposite was
happening. He was slipping away from her. Day by day. Even during their lovemaking,
in which she'd surprised herself with her invention and ardour, he clung to her
like someone who felt himself physically fading. Sometimes as they made love he
seemed to gaze at her with a kind of awe and terror, as if, with a moment's
loss of concentration, one of them might be turned into an insect. He couldn't
seem to abandon himself to her, not even at the crucial moment. And that was
what she wanted from their lovemaking, from their orgasms: she wanted total
surrender, annihilation, transcendence. She wanted unconditional love.

She wanted these things
because she was sick of lying to herself. She had spent fifteen years
pretending she wasn't in love with Tom, and she was tired of it. It had
exhausted her. She had pretended all this time to Tom. She had pretended to Katie
during the years of their marriage. And she had pretended to herself. That last
lie was perhaps the biggest and the most hurtful to endure.

Sharon
knew she had lied because she hadn't dared. The inability to dare had come from
the terrible realization, as a young girl, that love must be suppressed,
disguised,
cowled
. She'd learned at an early age that
to reveal to someone the open fire, to brandish the torch in their face, was to
terrify the object of one's love, so that they leapt back from the flame. Give
all and you will receive nothing. Unmitigated love is met with unmitigated
contempt. No one, it seems, either wants or can find a use for utter devotion
and surrender.

Except Messiahs, demons and gods.

At
fourteen years old Sharon had learned this vicious, universal lesson on giving
herself unconditionally to a man more than twice her age. He had taken her
virginity and left her only with a sense of outrage that her dedication was not
reciprocated. At some deep level, in some protective sanctuary where the soul
retreats to lick its wounds or die, she'd vowed that never again would she
expose herself to so much hurt. And she'd done what almost everyone manages to
do: she'd checked the instincts of love. She'd reined love in. She'd smoke
screened it, dissembled it, thrown a cape over it, so that its brilliant and
unbearable light shone only weakly; and had been so successful in her art that
she'd even come to disguise the thing from herself.

Thus when
she first met Tom and a fist closed round her heart, she hid behind a ferocious
cool; and when still later he accidentally tumbled into bed with her one night
and the fist tightened, she drowned her instincts in alcohol; and when he got
married and she felt her breath becoming shorter, she calmly unclenched the
fingers around her heart by befriending his wife Katie, even though she knew
Katie was not right for him in the way she herself was right; and finally when
she heard Katie had died in a terrible accident, she appalled herself with the
way in which indecent hope and thanks mixed with grief. For a while she hated
herself and once again smothered her true feelings under a morass of cynical
doubts and actions. And when the almost unthinkable had arrived, and Tom had
come to Jerusalem - come to
her -
she had gone out and found a man, any
man, a young Arab man, as an antidote to the snake poison of this terrible,
paralysing, heart-gripping affliction, contriving even that Tom should stumble
in on her.

The
head and the heart. How they loved to play their games. How they loved to cheat
and lie and steal from each other.

And on this
day, with the sky a boundless blue soaring over Jerusalem, with golden domes
winking, and towers calling, and faith rising like heat ripples, Rabin and
Arafat were talking. The Jews and the Arabs were breaking bread, and Tom was
slipping away.

Sharon
reminded herself she had an errand to run.
Tobie
had
asked her to deliver an envelope to a former client who lived up near the
Me'a
She'arim
. After delivering the
letter, Sharon turned back towards the ghetto. She was curious as to how the
ultra-Orthodox right-wing Jews were going to respond to the political
breakthrough. There had already been demonstrations against the agreement,
just as some of the Palestinians, led by the fanatical
Hamas
,
were demonstrating in Gaza.

A sign confronted her at the entrance to
the ghetto:

DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM:
DRESS MODESTLY AT ALL TIMES.

It was painted in peeling gold lettering on a black
board.

DO NOT PROVOKE OUR WORST NATURES.

Modesty, she knew, meant exposing neither
her knees nor her ankles, nor her arms, and not even her elbows. She stood
outside the entrance to the ghetto in a blouse which was capped at the
shoulders, baring her arms, and in a skirt which reached only to her knees.
She'd been inside the ghetto before, suitably attired. But at that moment she
felt a sudden anger that this particular group of Jews could unlawfully annex
part of Jerusalem, imposing on all who entered the terror of their misogynist
rule. Must we be responsible for the boiling cesspit of your lust? she thought.
Must women carry your demon?

Her own demon told her to go in.

Inside,
the
Me’a
She'arim
was like
a film lot. Narrow streets, with dozens of antiquated stores literally spilling
their goods on to the pathways. Hasidic Jews scurried by, almost every one
wearing eighteenth-century Lithuanian aristocratic garb. I'm a Jew, she
thought. I love this country. But what have I in common with these people? More
than once she'd sat up all night at Ahmed's house, arguing with crazed
fundamentalist Arab friends of his who were no madder than these Jews. Two
women passed by, eyeing her askance. Their heads were shaved. She knew they
would have wigs - wigs! — in their wardrobes for special occasions. An old man
with a Methuselah beard growled at her from a shop doorway, or maybe he was
just clearing his throat. She stopped and smiled at him. He growled again.

'Was I
walking too fast?' she said in good Hebrew. 'Or too slowly?'

The old man
said nothing. She went farther, finding a knot of young men standing on the
street corner, discussing the peace talks. She heard the words 'traitor' and
'betrayal'.

'Rabin
and Arafat are the peacemakers,' she said loudly. 'You should give thanks to
God. These men are risking their lives for peace!'

The
young men stared at her in astonishment, their eyes swimming behind their
spectacles. She walked on, feeling the drills of their eyes in her back and her
buttocks.

Get out of here,
she told herself.
What are you trying to do?

She passed
deeper into the ghetto. Ghetto! How odd that the rest of the world used the
word to describe a place from which it was difficult to escape, where here they
made it a cultural fortress, a place where outsiders, time, even history, could
not get in.

Get out. This is no place for you.

She leaned
her back against a wall sprayed with religious graffiti and took out a
cigarette. As she made to light it, something cracked hard against the wall
beside her head. Her unlit cigarette fell to the ground. There was a puff of
dust in the air from the wall, and at first she thought she'd been narrowly
missed by a bullet. Then she saw a stone had fallen at her feet.

Get out! Move!

But she
shouted defiantly, 'I'm a Jew! This is my country too! You don't represent us!'

As
she looked around she saw a cluster of bearded and bespectacled young
Hasids
, all staring at her beadily. The stone could have
been thrown by any one of them.

Is this what you wanted? Is this it?

She
turned and walked back out of the ghetto by the way she came in.

Back in her car, she
held a handkerchief to her face and wept. Not because of what had happened in
the ghetto, or because she was frightened - which she was — but because of Tom.

Tom couldn't
love her because he was possessed. He was possessed by the idea of his dead
wife, and ideas, Sharon knew, could claw people apart like demons. Ideas were
like spirits - no, not
like
spirits, they
were
spirits. Some were
good angels and some were unclean spirits. They manipulated you, tempted you,
wrestled with you, led you by the nose. They could harm you. Love was a spirit
- who would deny it? A good angel or a filthy wind? How else could you explain
human behaviour? When the angel-demon of love was in you, your temperature
rose, your hands wouldn't do what you told them to do, you would find yourself
walking to places you knew you shouldn't go. You lied in your own heart, as she
did over Tom.

And Tom didn't have room
for the angel-demon of love because he was possessed. He was like the city,
Jerusalem. A city that proclaimed love from every tower and curved dome, every
spire and slender minaret. And yet it had no room for love because it was a
city possessed by the unclean influence of fundamentalism in all quarters.
Self-obsessed religious rages and theological fevers. The towers and walls of
Jerusalem were crawling with diseased demons, with
djinn
,
ranged around the battlements, defending the walls against the armies of
love, armies who looked eerily like the defenders themselves. . .

So with Tom.
He was an occupied zone. She couldn't come near him. She couldn't tell him, so
she sat m her car outside the walls of Jerusalem, and wept.

50

'So. There we have it,'
Tobie
said. 'The mystery is solved. There's really no more
to be said.'

Tom was
distracted. He was distracted by the thought that Sharon was just about to
leave the building, and his brain was on fire with some of the things she'd
said to him the previous night. That morning she'd already left for her work at
the rehabilitation centre before he'd had an opportunity to talk with her. They
had a Weather-house agreement. Tom would go for his sessions with
Tobie
only at the time Sharon was leaving; that way they
could put a distance between Sharon's professional interest in his progress and
their relationship. But it was becoming more and more difficult. He knew that
Tobie
and Sharon talked: confidentiality was, according to
Tobie's
precepts, just another level of hiding. He, in
turn, talked with Sharon about the sessions. But the previous night Sharon had
said some things which had astonished him.

'Huh?'

'I said it's
really all over. Yesterday you told me everything, and you told me Katie had
been responsible for writing those things on the blackboard. What more is to be
said?'

Tom looked at
Tobie's
smiling face, scenting a trap. That afternoon
they'd been joined not only by Christina, but by two other women - Rachel, whom
he'd never seen before, and Rebecca, who was a resident at the centre. Rachel
had sympathetic brown eyes and soft, black curls; but for the deeply engraved
lines of harassment, she could have been a model. Rebecca looked like a
potential serial killer. The three younger women leaned forward in their chairs
as if expecting imminent revelation.
Tobie
lounged
back in hers, knees together, hands relaxed in her lap.

'Why does that sound as if you don't mean
it?'

'Don't I
mean it? Is there some reason,' said
Tobie
, 'why I
shouldn't mean it? Katie wrote on the blackboard, even though she was dead.'

'You may not
believe in ghosts,' said Tom, 'but there are plenty of people who do.'

'I believe in ghosts,' said the serial
killer.

'And me,' said Christina.

The third one, Rachel, smiled sweetly.

'Did I say I
didn't believe in ghosts?' said
Tobie
. 'Did I?'

'Yes,' Tom
said bitterly, 'you probably have some neat theory which admits them without
having to believe in them. No doubt you can rationalize them away. I say
ghost.
You say
guilt.'

'Neat
theory?
Darlink
,
there's nothing neat
in my life, I promise you. But if you want to know what I think about ghosts,
it's this. We laugh, don't we, at those medieval ideas of ghosts and spirits
and demons. Modern psychology has words for these: "hallucination", "projection",
"transference". This is the modern orthodoxy, and that's the litany.
It all comes out of the disturbed self, doesn't it? But in two hundred years,
maybe they discover some new orthodoxy, and they have more understanding about
energy, spirit forces which can influence people. Then they titter and laugh at
our simplistic twentieth-century psychology. So, Tom, why don't you give me
some credit for having a fucking imagination just once in a while?'