The Song Before It Is Sung Read Online Free Page B

of clouds - the clouds themselves are not visible - moving swiftly like airships over the landscape.
    And Conrad thinks that here in the Holy Land Mendel and von Gottberg may already have been aware of some sort of historical
     juncture in the relationship between Germans and Jews. On the one hand the aggrieved and resentful Germans were being offered
     a Faustian deal by Hitler and on the other the rawly human but vulnerable Jews were arriving here in their confused thousands,
     on the move again. But they could not have had more than an inkling of the nightmare that was to come.
    Von Gottberg's letters show that he was always keen for Mendel's approval: Mendel was the same age as von Gottberg, but seems
     to have arrived, like an egg, fully formed into the world and, strangely for a young man, to have come equipped with a serenity
     and wisdom. Conrad wonders if von Gottberg resented, at a deep Germanic level, Mendel's urbanity and his protean - Jewish
     - qualities. Von Gottberg's family had lived in the same pile for six hundred years, while Mendel's had arrived in England
     via Riga and St Petersburg only nineteen years earlier.
    As Conrad walks down to the Jaffa Gate and into the Old City, he finds himself under siege. He is entering a city out of an
     orientalist's sketchbook, with spice stalls and pushcarts and shops selling nuts and feral vegetables and parched herbs and
     chunks of meat; Bedouin women sit gloomily with isolated tomatoes spread on cloths, and then a group of Orthodox priests passes,
     plump from the devotion of crones, and young boys rush about with beaten-copper trays of tea and Palestinians are sitting
     at a table attached to a hookah, and now some Jews in fedoras with threads of the tallith underneath their overcoats come
     sightlessly by, and Arab children are buying candyfloss in colours that do not exist in nature, and then Conrad enters a long
     tunnel of tiny cave-shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and he stops for a mint tea in a courtyard that leads off the teeming
     street. He sees Mendel and von Gottberg here, Mendel eagerly listening out for traces of Aramaic and Russian and von Gottberg
     trying to estimate what point in history this overwhelmingly aromatic and exotic place has reached and Mendel fascinated by
     the sense he has -or is acquiring - that human objectives can easily be in conflict. As if to prove the point, German Jews
     are sniffing vegetables fastidiously, resisting Levantisation from inside their Bavarian jackets and loden coats. Conrad sips
     his mint tea - a large bunch of mint thrust into the pot - and wonders what it was like to be here without the knowledge of
     what was to come. The knowledge that has made us.
    Mendel and von Gottberg stop at the Lutheran Erloserkirche. Although von Gottberg has given up active Christianity, he is
     a believer in Christian values. Mendel, although a non-believer, is a Zionist and believes in the preservation of Jewish cultural
     values. It's strange, Conrad thinks sitting here, near the church, now accepting some pistachios and some more tea, that belief
     in the existence or non-existence of God is no impediment to friendship and understanding.
    The young Palestinians wear cheap trainers; their hair is geometrically cut. He wonders if they ever have distinctly secular
     thoughts. And he wonders if on this trip the two friends talked about Jews in Europe, because already in Germany Jews are
     under notice. On a personal level, as he knows, human beings - for example, he and Francine - can have irreconcilable differences.
     He thinks about having Francine back, if she asks, but he knows it would be impossible because he cannot imagine forgiving
     her, not so much for kicking him out, but for allowing her body to be a receptacle for someone else's semen. How can he explain
     that in rational terms? He can't. And he can't even explain to himself, as an atheist, why this idea of the transfer of human
     substance, this sacrament,