The Song Before It Is Sung Read Online Free
Author: Justin Cartwright
holiday but
that made them suspicious. He stood for half an hour with his baggage, which earlier an excitable dog had okayed, while they
made phone calls. With reluctance they allowed him to proceed. At Tel Aviv the plane landed to some rousing folk music; there
they questioned him again and asked him to list the people he was seeing. There was only one, a film-location manager whose
name he had been given. The agents particularly wanted to know if he had friends on the West Bank. They wore sunglasses on
the tops of their closely shaved heads, giving the impression that office work bored them, that they would prefer to be vigorously
employed outside. And this, he thought, is what has happened out here in the Levant, as Mendel described it: Jews have become
outdoorsy people.
The Mediterranean, lapping the town, was unexpectedly glamorous, but Tel Aviv had a rackety, half-planted feel and he remembered
what Mendel had written:
I have realised — it was a true revelation — that I have a kinship with these strange Levantines, who are like relatives one hasn't seen for
twenty years. They make me uneasy, even afraid. German Jews, who are arriving by the thousand, are going mad at the disorder, seeking bus timetables. They cannot believe that the buses
do not depart on time, if they arrive at all. Axel finds the food oily. It is oily, but I have convinced myself that it is
my ancestral cuisine. I eat on bravely.
Conrad took a shared taxi to Jerusalem and he found himself looking closely at the other passengers, remembering Mendel's
description of the people as odd and fascinating. Some were backpackers from New York's suburbs, he guessed, the girls wearing
little squares of cloth on their heads to indicate a willingness to muck in with the harvest and an eagerness to embrace the
spiritual challenges ahead. There were English Hasids, the men strangely abstracted as though this earth, this taxi bus, these
numerous children, these wives with the chestnut wigs and full fecundity, were in a way not fully present, unavoidably inhabiting
the same space, but ephemeral, shadows cast by their husbands' radiance.
By the time the taxi van had reached a mountain pass, he wondered how the soft pale people from North London and the eager
backpackers saw the landscape outside, now turning from the coastal plain to a tumultuous upland littered with the painted
shells of armoured cars, left — he discovered — as a reminder of the war of 1948. What did they see in these tortured, pumice
rocks and grudging trees and steep, parched valleys? Did they see a land of milk and honey, a landscape that had been deep
in the race memory all through the diaspora, or did they see, as Mendel did, an unfamiliar and unnerving otherness?
Conrad himself knows that you can hold at the same time different landscapes in your head - or in your fibres - for instance,
the broad openness of Africa and the distilled beauty of Oxford. He also finds himself seeing John and Francine conversing
about bladders and urine samples in the lab and then, back in the little flat John has taken, he sees the warm strawberry
rash rising up her throat as John, with the scientific and practical qualities, so different from his own which are essentially
meaningless, removes his scrubs and reveals his highly meaningful self to his research student, who has now forgotten for
ever that she is married to Conrad. He feels a sharp pain, as though he has in some way been erased, his very existence questioned.
And he wonders how the lovers can reconcile the madness of sex with the scientific life. The answer - the Orthodox children
with their insane side-locks seem to have been put here to illustrate his train of thought — is that we are not wholly rational,
and never will be.
To prepare himself for this trip and to think about something other than Francine and John in Whitechapel, he has read Amos
Oz's autobiography. Oz's mother
that made them suspicious. He stood for half an hour with his baggage, which earlier an excitable dog had okayed, while they
made phone calls. With reluctance they allowed him to proceed. At Tel Aviv the plane landed to some rousing folk music; there
they questioned him again and asked him to list the people he was seeing. There was only one, a film-location manager whose
name he had been given. The agents particularly wanted to know if he had friends on the West Bank. They wore sunglasses on
the tops of their closely shaved heads, giving the impression that office work bored them, that they would prefer to be vigorously
employed outside. And this, he thought, is what has happened out here in the Levant, as Mendel described it: Jews have become
outdoorsy people.
The Mediterranean, lapping the town, was unexpectedly glamorous, but Tel Aviv had a rackety, half-planted feel and he remembered
what Mendel had written:
I have realised — it was a true revelation — that I have a kinship with these strange Levantines, who are like relatives one hasn't seen for
twenty years. They make me uneasy, even afraid. German Jews, who are arriving by the thousand, are going mad at the disorder, seeking bus timetables. They cannot believe that the buses
do not depart on time, if they arrive at all. Axel finds the food oily. It is oily, but I have convinced myself that it is
my ancestral cuisine. I eat on bravely.
Conrad took a shared taxi to Jerusalem and he found himself looking closely at the other passengers, remembering Mendel's
description of the people as odd and fascinating. Some were backpackers from New York's suburbs, he guessed, the girls wearing
little squares of cloth on their heads to indicate a willingness to muck in with the harvest and an eagerness to embrace the
spiritual challenges ahead. There were English Hasids, the men strangely abstracted as though this earth, this taxi bus, these
numerous children, these wives with the chestnut wigs and full fecundity, were in a way not fully present, unavoidably inhabiting
the same space, but ephemeral, shadows cast by their husbands' radiance.
By the time the taxi van had reached a mountain pass, he wondered how the soft pale people from North London and the eager
backpackers saw the landscape outside, now turning from the coastal plain to a tumultuous upland littered with the painted
shells of armoured cars, left — he discovered — as a reminder of the war of 1948. What did they see in these tortured, pumice
rocks and grudging trees and steep, parched valleys? Did they see a land of milk and honey, a landscape that had been deep
in the race memory all through the diaspora, or did they see, as Mendel did, an unfamiliar and unnerving otherness?
Conrad himself knows that you can hold at the same time different landscapes in your head - or in your fibres - for instance,
the broad openness of Africa and the distilled beauty of Oxford. He also finds himself seeing John and Francine conversing
about bladders and urine samples in the lab and then, back in the little flat John has taken, he sees the warm strawberry
rash rising up her throat as John, with the scientific and practical qualities, so different from his own which are essentially
meaningless, removes his scrubs and reveals his highly meaningful self to his research student, who has now forgotten for
ever that she is married to Conrad. He feels a sharp pain, as though he has in some way been erased, his very existence questioned.
And he wonders how the lovers can reconcile the madness of sex with the scientific life. The answer - the Orthodox children
with their insane side-locks seem to have been put here to illustrate his train of thought — is that we are not wholly rational,
and never will be.
To prepare himself for this trip and to think about something other than Francine and John in Whitechapel, he has read Amos
Oz's autobiography. Oz's mother
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