Winman, Sarah: When God Was a Rabbit

‘Does God love everyone?’ I asked my mother as I reached across a bowl of celery to take the last teacake. My father looked up from his papers. He always looked up when someone mentioned God. It was a reflex, as if he were about to be hit.

‘Of course he does,’ my mother replied, pausing in her ironing.

‘Does God love murderers?’ I continued.

‘Yes,’ she said. My father looked at her and tutted loudly.

‘Robbers?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Poo?’ I asked.

‘Poo’s not a living thing, darling,’ she said seriously.

‘But if it was, would God love it?’

‘Yes, I expect he would.’

This was not helping. God loved everything, it seemed, except me. I peeled off the last curve of chocolate, exposing the white marshmallow mound and the heart of jam.

‘Are you all right?’ asked my mother.

‘I’m not going back to Sunday school,’ I said.

‘Hallelujah!’ said my father. ‘I’m glad about that.’

‘But I thought you liked it?’ said my mother.

‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘I only really liked the singing bit.’

‘You can sing here,’ said my father, looking back down at his papers. ‘Everyone can sing here.’

‘Any reason?’ my mother asked, sensing my withholding.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘Do you want to talk about anything?’ she asked quietly, reaching for my hand. (She had started to read a book on child psychology from America. It encouraged us to talk about our feelings. It made us want to clam up.)

‘Nope,’ I said again through a small mouth.

It had been a simple misunderstanding. All I had suggested was that Jesus Christ had been a mistake, that was all; an unplanned pregnancy.

‘Unplanned indeed!’ screamed the vicar. ‘And where did you get such blasphemous filth, you ungodly child?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘just an idea.’

‘Just an idea ?’ he repeated. ‘Do you honestly think God loves those who question his Divine Plan? Well, I’ll tell you, missy, he does not,’ and his arm shot out and pointed towards my banishment. ‘Corner,’ he said, and I wandered over to the chair facing the damp, crumbling green wall.

I sat there thinking about the night my parents had crept into my room and said, ‘We want to talk to you about something. Something your brother keeps saying to you. About you being a mistake.’

‘Oh, that,’ I said.

‘Well, you weren’t a mistake,’ said my mother, ‘just unplanned. We weren’t really expecting you. To turn up, that is.’

‘Like Mr Harris?’ I said (a man who always seemed to know when we were about to sit down and eat).

‘Sort of,’ said my father.

‘Like Jesus?’

‘Exactly,’ said my mother carelessly. ‘Exactly like Jesus. It was like a miracle when you arrived; the best miracle ever.’

My father put his papers back into his battered briefcase and sat next to me.

‘You don’t have to go to Sunday school or church for God to love you,’ he said. ‘Or for anyone to love you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, not believing him.

‘You’ll understand that more as you get older,’ he added. But I couldn’t wait that long. I’d already resolved that if this God couldn’t love me, then it was clear I’d need to find another one that could.

‘What we need is another war,’ said Mr Abraham Golan, my new next-door neighbour. ‘Men need wars.’

‘Men need brains,’ said his sister, Esther, winking at me as she hoovered around his feet and sucked up a loose shoelace, which broke the fan belt and made the room smell of burnt rubber. I liked the smell of burnt rubber. And I liked Mr Golan. I liked the fact that he lived with a sister in his old age and not a wife, and hoped my brother might make the same choice when that far-off time came.

Mr Golan and his sister had come to our street in September and by December had illuminated every window with candles, announcing their faith in a display of light. My brother and I leant against our wall and watched the blue Pickford van turn up one mild weekend. We watched crates and furniture carried carelessly from the truck by men with cigarettes in their mouths and newspapers in their back pockets.

‘Looks like something died in that chair,’ said my brother as it went past.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Just know,’ he said, tapping his nose, making out he had a sixth sense, even though the other five had proven many times to be shaky and unreliable.

A black Zephyr pulled up and parked badly on the pavement in front, and an old man got out, a man older than any man I’d ever seen before. He had goose-white hair and wore a cream corduroy jacket that hung off his frame like loose skin. He looked up and down the road before heading towards his front door. He stopped as he passed us and said, ‘Good morning.’ He had a strange accent – Hungarian, we later learnt.

‘You’re old,’ I said. (I’d meant to say ‘Hello’.)

‘I’m as old as time,’ he said, and laughed. ‘What’s your name?’

I told him and he held out his hand and I shook it very firmly. I was four years, nine months and four days old. He was eighty. And yet the age gap between us dissolved as seamlessly as aspirin in water.

I quickly shunned the norm of our street, swapping it instead for Mr Golan’s illicit world of candles and prayers. Everything was a secret and I guarded each one like a brittle egg. He told me that nothing could be used on Saturdays except television, and when he returned from shul we ate exotic foods – foods I’d never tasted before – foods like matzo bread and chopped liver and herring and gefilte fish balls, foods that ‘evoked memories of the old country’, he said.

‘Ah, Cricklewood,’ he’d say, wiping a tear from his blue, rheumy eyes, and it was only later at night that my father would sit on my bed and inform me that Cricklewood bordered neither Syria nor Jordan, and it certainly didn’t have an army of its own.

‘I am a Jew,’ Mr Golan said to me one day, ‘but a man above all else,’ and I nodded as if I knew what that meant. As the weeks went by I listened to his prayers, to the Shema Yisrael , and believed that no God could fail to answer such beautiful sounds, and often he would pick up his violin and let the notes transport the words to the heart of the Divine.

‘You hear how it weeps?’ he said to me as the bow glided across the strings.

‘I do, I do,’ I said.

I would sit there for hours listening to the saddest music ears could bear, and would often return home unable to eat, unable even to talk, with a heavy pallor descending across my young cheeks. My mother would sit next to me on my bed and place her cool hand on my forehead and say, ‘What is it? Do you feel ill?’ But what could a child say who has started to understand the pain of another?

‘Maybe she shouldn’t spend so much time with Old Abraham,’ I heard my father say outside my door. ‘She needs friends her own age.’ But I had no friends my own age. And I simply couldn’t keep away.

‘The first thing we need to find,’ said Mr Golan, ‘is a reason to live,’ and he looked at the little coloured pills rolling around in his palm and quickly swallowed them. He began to laugh.

‘OK,’ I said, and laughed too, although the ache in my stomach would years later be identified by a psychologist as nerves.