NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything. Some of us are in banking, or we have shops, or restaurants. Some are politicians.”
    One of the Jewish restaurants was The Bomb House Lane Glatt Kosher Restaurant, where I heard Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish, English and Hebrew spoken, all at once, sometimes in the same sentence, under a picture of David Ben-Gurion and another of a girlish Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone in the place wore a yarmulke, even the funny little man depicted on the menu. Because this
glatt
kosher restaurant was in Gibraltar some of the dishes on the menu were Moroccan. The cook—along with most cooks, cleaners, bus drivers and waitresses in Gibraltar—was Moroccan. A good proportion of the Jewish diners had come from Morocco.
    Glatt
indicates a specific sort of kosherness in meat. The word
glatt
is Yiddish for “smooth” and signifies that after the animal was ritually slaughtered by a
shochet
, its lungs were examined and found to have no punctures. It also suggests that in life it had no imperfections on its skin: a cow with no spots, a calf an even shade of brown, a monochrome chicken, a fluffy little prancing lamb, a goat that was above reproach. The opposite
of glatt
is
trayfe
(or
terefah)
, meaning “torn”—and that could be a creature with a punctured lung, or a fatal laceration, or a suppurating wound. All this was discussed in the Talmud (which advocated the eating of several species of locusts, providing they were not
trayfe).
It was also somehow related to the idea of sacrifice—that if a lamb was worthy to be slain, it had to be the sort of lamb that would win a blue ribbon at a county fair. God loved you for sacrificing your best, most impressive animal.
    Dietary laws fascinate me for the way they mingle good sense with utter foolishness. But for me the glatt concept was purely academic. I told the waiter I was not a meat eater and ordered fish.
    My sea bass was grilled. It was a kosher fish, no imperfections, with both fins and scales. (Every fish that has scales also has fins, but not vice versa.) But when I stuck my fork into it the middle was still frozen andtasted
trayfe.
When I sent it back to be thawed and recooked, they obliged me. The bill was nineteen dollars—twelve handsomely engraved Gibraltar pounds—and so I complained, but it was no use.
    Soon they would have competition from Mr. Wong and his joint-venture Chinese restaurant.
    In the Jewish Social and Cultural Club a leaflet on a notice board announced Hillel Tours’ “Annual Trip to Spain.” It sounded as though this destination was remote—a journey to a far-off land—when in fact, if you walked down Bomb House Lane and looked west you could see Algeciras, and after a ten-minute stroll north you could spit to La Línea, where once there had been bullfights (Molly Bloom: “the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear”).
    But because Gibraltar has turned its back on Spain, Spain seems remote; and the Gibraltarian’s face is averted from Morocco. It seems irrelevant that Gibraltar occupies one side of the Bay of Algeciras. It is an inward-looking place, and in spite of its majestic position on the Mediterranean, hardly anyone seems interested in the water.
    The exception to this apparent hydrophobia are the members of the Mediterranean Rowing Club, who scull a thirty-foot four-man boat called a
yola
, a very beamy craft made in Florence.
    I went to the club, hoping to go for a row, but the Gibraltarians who showed me around said that the day was too windy.
    “The prevailing wind is a westerly—a fresh, cool one, like today,” said Alfie Brittenden, one of the club’s rowers. “The Levanter is an easterly that brings humidity. Sometimes the Levanter makes a cloud form on the Rock.”
    “Do you ever row across the Straits?” I asked.
    “Occasionally we row to Morocco, for an annual charity event. But it’s very hard. There’s a four-knot current and rough water.”
    “I was wondering whether I might bring my