Deliver us from evil.
Then there’s Kingdom, power, and glory. It takes a lot to believe in those right now. But I’ll try it anyway. In Hope, as they say on the gravestones.
You must feel pretty ripped off. I guess it’s not the first time.
If I were You I’d be fed up. I’d really be sick of it. I guess that’s the difference between us.
I feel very unreal, talking to You like this. I feel as if I’m talking to a wall. I wish You’d answer. I feel so alone.
All alone by the telephone. Except I can’t use the telephone. And if I could, who could I call?
Oh God. It’s no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?
XII
JEZEBEL’S
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn’t happened this morning, either.
I put on my clothes, summer clothes, it’s still summer; it seems to have stopped at summer. July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep. I make a point of keeping track. I should scratch marks on the wall, one for each day of the week, and run a line through them when I have seven. But what would be the use, this isn’t a jail sentence; there’s no time here that can be done and finished with. Anyway, all I have to do is ask, to find out what day it is. Yesterday was July the Fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it. September First will be Labour Day, they still have that. Though it didn’t used to have anything to do with mothers.
But I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar.
I bend over to do up my red shoes; lighter weight these days, with discreet slits cut in them, though nothing so daring as sandals. It’s an effort to stoop; despite the exercises, I can feel my body gradually seizing up, refusing. Being a woman this way is how I used to imagine it would be to be very old. I feel I even walk like that: crouched over, my spine constricting to a question mark, my bones leached of calcium and porous as limestone. When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don’t have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I’m only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like the beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.
The danger is greyout.
I’d like to have Luke here, in this bedroom while I’m getting dressed, so I could have a fight with him. Absurd, but that’s what I want. An argument, about who should put the dishes in the dishwasher, whose turn it is to sort the laundry, clean the toilet; something daily and unimportant in the big scheme of things. We could even have a fight about that, about unimportant, important. What a luxury it would be. Not that we did it much. These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards too.
I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a stone’s been thrown. All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The geometrical days, which go around and around, smoothly and oiled. Sweat already on my upper lip, I wait, for the arrival of the inevitable egg, which will be lukewarm like the room and will have a green film on the yolk and will taste faintly of sulphur.
Today, later, with Ofglen, on our shopping walk:
We go to the church, as usual, and look at the graves. Then to the Wall. Only two hanging on it today: one Catholic, not a priest though, placarded with an upside-down cross, and some other sect I don’t recognize. The body is marked only with a J, in red. It doesn’t mean Jewish, those would be yellow stars. Anyway there haven’t been many of them. Because they were declared Sons of Jacob and therefore special, they were given a choice. They could convert, or emigrate to Israel. A lot of them emigrated, if you can believe the news. I saw a boatload of them, on the TV, leaning over the railings in their black coats and hats and their long beards, trying to look as Jewish as possible, in costumes fished up from the past, the women with shawls over their heads, smiling and waving, a little stiffly it’s true, as if they were posing; and another shot, of the richer ones, lining up for the planes. Ofglen says some other people got out that way, by pretending to be Jewish, but it wasn’t easy because of the tests they gave you and they’ve tightened up on that now.
You don’t get hanged only for being a Jew though. You get hanged for being a noisy Jew who won’t make the choice. Or for pretending to convert. That’s been on the TV too: raids at night, secret hoards of Jewish things dragged out from under beds, Torahs, talliths, Mogen Davids. And the owners of them, sullen-faced, unrepentant, pushed by the Eyes against the walls of their bedrooms, while the sorrowful voice of the announcer tells us voice-over about their perfidy and ungratefulness.