The Mandelbaum Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

question, she makes a big thing of it that I am Gestapo,’ said the guide
to some invisible witness.
    Barbara
said, ‘Well, it’s hot.’
    He
said, ‘I ask you, because you say you are half-Jew, you say you are a Catholic,
and I ask you only what is the religion of your mother’s relations and the
religion of your father’s relations. It is a natural discussion, if you would
say to me, who are you, who is your mother, who is your father and how do you
come to be an Israeli guide, and I would answer those questions. Then I should
ask who are you, what is the family, your brothers and your sisters—’
    Barbara
thought, ‘Who am I?’ She felt she had known who she was till this moment. She
said, ‘I am who I am.’ The guide spoke some short Hebrew phrase which, although
she did not know the language, quite plainly signified that this didn’t get
them any further in the discussion. Barbara had already begun to reflect that ‘I
am who I am’ was a bit large seeing it was the answer that Moses got from the
burning bush on Mount Sinai when he asked God to describe himself. The
Catechism, it was true, stated that man was made in God’s image chiefly as to
the soul. She decided, therefore, essentially ‘I am who I am’ was indeed the
final definition for her. But the thesis-exponent in Barbara would not leave
it at that. They entered Caesarea, home of ancient disputations, while she
attempted to acquaint the guide with the Golders Green Jewishness of her mother’s
relations and the rural Anglicanism of her father’s, the Passover gatherings on
the one hand and the bell-summoned Evensongs on the other, the talkative intellectuals
of the one part and the kennel-keeping blood sportsmen of the other. The Polish
Israeli was bewildered. Barbara added that her parents themselves were, of
course, exceptional, having broken away from their respective traditions to
marry each other. And she herself was of course something else again. The guide
persisted in his point: Why had she turned Catholic? If she wanted a religion
she was already a Jewess through her mother. Barbara knew then that the
essential thing about herself remained unspoken, uncategorized and unlocated.
She was agitated, and felt a compelling need to find some definition that would
accurately explain herself to this man.
    He was
demanding a definition. By the long habit of her life, and by temperament, she
held as a vital principle that the human mind was bound in duty to continuous
acts of definition. Mystery was acceptable to her, but only under the aspect of
a crown of thorns. She found no rest in mysterious truths like ‘I am who I am’;
they were all right for deathbed definitions, when one’s mental obligations
were at an end. ‘I am who I am’, yes, ultimately, as a piece of music might be
what it is; but then, one wants to analyse the thing. Meantime, she thought,
the man wants to know who I am, that is, what category of person. I should
explain to him the Gentile-Jewish situation in the West, and next, the
independence of British education, and the peculiar independence of the
Gentile Jew whose very existence occurs through a nonconforming alliance. And
next, the probabilities of the Catholic claim, she thought. The fierce heat of
noon penetrated her sun-glasses. She thought, later on I must make an attempt
to explain: I’ll explain after lunch.
    But
why? At Caesarea they had looked at the historic ruins and the recently
excavated ramparts of Herod’s city; they looked at the prehistoric
Mediterranean Sea and were refreshed by it. The man was dogmatizing about dates
and events at Caesarea, the most important of which was, to him, the recent
moment when excavations by a team of archaeologists had begun. They ate lunch
at an outside table under an awning. The guide said:
    ‘In
Poland the Catholic priests used to lead the pogroms.’
    ‘Well,
they shouldn’t have,’ she said.
    ‘Why
are you Catholic?’
    Why?
Why did she trouble about these