Christine Brooke-Rose: Life, End of

But now, someone is unscrolling another dead sea zealotry.

So, the reality shows. Do all those young people queuing to be chosen for their quarter hour of glory realise they’re being used to occupy screen time unpaid, or paid much less? Save for the winner’s glory. Just as quiz candidates work hard for minor prizes, offered by the sponsors, far cheaper all round than actors, producers, screenwriters and such in a teleseries. And why do the young still give free advertising on their teeshirts and jeans? For forty years now. The crude process of cheating on the people is inexorable.

Well, exore it.

Do the young think? They now have nothing to complain of.

Is that a complaint?

Who’s talking? To whom? The telly?

The demographer is called Dan. Not Daniel of the den but Dan one of Jakob’s twelve sons, each of whom founded a tribe, his roughly north-central. He is, in the context of this particular old age, some fifteen years younger, and married to the highly reputable literary scholar Rebekah, also younger, a True Friend of thirty-four years’ standing. So Dan is a T.F. by marriage, a friend-in-law but truer even than that. A bel-ami.

And this is rare. The husbands of feminine T.F.s are usually polite appendages, even O.P.s, influencing the wife away, whereas the wives of masculine T.F.s merge into the professional friendship and acquire friend-in-law status or more with ease, and are never O.P.s. There are exceptions, throughout a long life, as when the husband cuts out his own wife to talk only professionally with the woman T.F. But Dan is more than not O.P. He joins in the passionate politico-historico-literary discussions with quiet enthusiasm and never imposes his own socio-scientific interests unless asked.

True, when asked, which is often, he slides into an explanation so detailed and digressive that the answer never seems to come. Even by correspondence. Asked once whether the likelihood of population growth among Palestinians is ever thought of by the politicians at the creation of the Israeli state he replies by a long e-mail giving population figures of both sides then and population figures of both sides now, but nothing on politicians then. And now, about the six billion in the world, how is it true but misleading? This on the shaded terrace. But then, he is not a teacher, who has to attract like an actor and simplify like a teleprof. And soon it’s the patient care he takes to miss out nothing that wins the rapt attention, moves and even flatters.

For professionally based friendships with women can become quite dodgy, since women have somehow not yet fully developed the art of unrivalling friendship on their own, with or without appendage (but have men?). Sooner or later, a power-glitz occurs, as with Oenone and many others. Or a priority-glitz, since women always have more people and things to look after than men. Things smaller and more scattered too, taking children to school and fetching them, unimaginable sixty years ago, shopping for the family, cooking and all the rest. Whereas a professional friendship between a woman and a married man surges quite naturally like a surfer crouching under a wave, then balancing on the wave-length with his wife as beach-witness and companion, wholly sharing and admiring, happy at the showery foam, and, if she has a profession, pleasurably listening and contributing her experience.

This is the most relaxed relationship with a man, the stimulus of otherness without the blur of sex, a relaxation eventually obtained anyway after attaining the one and only advantage of a certain age, reached now long ago. As with a gay, yet different precisely because not that.

Dan and Rebekah are here for forty-eight hours, all the way from Jerusalem for what all three accept tacitly as a last reunion with the slowly dying cripple. Who can hardly believe they’ve come all that way for forty-eight hours with an invalid as asserted, when it would be so much more normal to combine it with a longer rest from the permanent terror-time in Jerusalem. The invalid who can hardly walk or stand without lurching; who prepares a tasteful snack on trays, leaning the hip or loin against the sink or stove for contact with the centre of the earth and as long as they carry the trays; who can’t stand to peal or stir but can clamber down in agony to take guests out for dinner providing they come with a car. Which these do, rented at the airport.

The heat is heavy, and creepy-crawly as well. The snack is on the terrace shaded by a huge green parasol and a dark green mulberry tree growing from below. Iced cucumber soup, smoked salmon, cheeses, raspberries. The first dinner is in the garden of the favourite cicada-shrieking restaurant, which they appreciate so much they want to come back there the second night. Just as well since other restaurants with garden are all booked up on a Saturday in season.

Writers, recent books, educational problems, universities compared. But soon, global politics and worse, Israel and unresolvability unless both sides stop draining the past to whip up hatred everlasting, and start analysing the problems from now. Says Rebekah. By whose invitation to teach in the late 70s Jerusalem and the land of Israel are now a physical reality, a changing landscape, more real in space than in the slow spiral of time, each side stuck on the same positions, but further along. This, however, is an illusion. Easily nurtured when confined to the European media.

Dan: Until the nineteenth century very few Jews saw the idea of Israel as more than an abstract concept, in fact early Zionists even considered Uganda.

You mean there was no connexion between the idea and the land?

Well, that was invented by the religious Zionist movement which felt threatened by such an attack on Jewish identity.

Ah, identity again.

And now many are trying to de-invent that particular identity staked on the Bible. In favour of a new identity created by America: the Fight against the Terrorists. And many modern Israelis are atheists or agnostics.

Yes, I wanted to ask you, how serious is the Islamic belief in Mahomet’s death-flight to Jerusalem and back? Making it their third Holy City? Do they really need three? And do we really intend to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, even symbolically?

I don’t know. Their real struggle is for their land, from which we ejected them at the start, and continue to do so in more cynical ways. Changing the word stealing into settling.

Not to mention disgraceful treatment as second class citizens. We often go and help them pick fruit and olives in their orchards. As a gesture. Rebekah joins in.

But isn’t that dangerous? With Israeli tanks nearby?

No, they don’t attack when we’re there.

You mean you dress in white and blue?

No, but they see us arriving. At the check-point. You see, it’s all more complicated than the media show, not only now but historically. Palestine was never independent but part of Arabia, or part of the Ottoman Empire, or a British protectorate. That’s the right wing argument. But it’s true that there have always been Jews in modern Palestine, from the post-Christian Exodus to the refugees from Andalusia and Morocco after the Catholic reconquest, and the Inquisition. Then the pioneers in the 1880s, individuals not a movement, who never imagined a future state. Then the tsabars in the 1930s, secular, socialists, who started the kibbutzim, and off Dan goes into history. Moving lightly from binationalism inside one state to two separate states to total expulsion, though not necessarily in that order.

Until the Likud is formed.

For a long time the secular Jews from Europe have the upper hand, or at least there’s a fifty fifty alternation. Until Sharon, whose aggressivity causes the second Intifada, but with human bombs instead of stones, who promises security then destroys the very foundational idea of the State of Israel as a safe haven for persecuted Jews.