To Live in Peace Read Free Page B

the doubts and the agonies, the vacillations and the weaknesses of the last days. When he put his arms around her and his cheek against hers, wordlessly, she had the impression that for the first time since Sydney’s death, after which she had wandered in the wilderness, she had come home.
    For some reason she had not expected Maurice to have a car – MM 200 – certainly not a Mercedes. Sydney, even so many years after the war, would not buy anything that was overtly German. Not because he thought he could achieve anything by boycotting German goods but because he considered it wrong for Jews of his generation, which had suffered so grievously at the hands of the Nazis, to display any symbol so incontrovertibly associated with their martyrdom.
    As they adhered strictly to the fifty miles per hour speed limit on the Van Wyck Expressway – eight lanes of traffic – passed Jewel Avenue and Flushing Meadow, which sounded more romantic somehow than Shepherd’sBush and Hammersmith, they were overtaken by blue-rinsed grandmothers, men in vests, and bearded elders in trilby hats, at the wheels of Chevrolets and Pontiacs and Buicks (which seemed to go on forever), and Kitty tried, so that she could later describe them in a letter to her children, to formulate her first impressions of New York. Beneath the puffed clouds in a turquoise sky they followed the signs, brown on white, to Manhattan. “Welcome to Queens”, and “Liberty Avenue” with its lush trees and clapboard houses, “Soul Food” and “Chicken and Ribs”. “New York City Ice Skating”. Debbie and Lisa would have liked that. “Catch a Hit Yankee Baseball.”
    “Yankee Stadium,” Maurice said, pointing out the concrete circle.
    At the traffic lights a diminutive youth in a tattered shirt smeared the windscreen with a sponge at the end of a stick. Maurice put the washers on and gave the boy a quarter.
    The temperature in the purring car with its tinted windows gave the lie to the fact that outside, according to the latest illuminated sign, it had reached the nineties. The news on the radio broadcast the latest developments in the Israeli siege of Beirut: “…despite calls for a cessation of hostilities Israel has violated the ceasefire and there is sporadic shelling in West Beirut. Israeli Defence Force tanks have moved into the central area close to the Green Line and have prevented UN observers from reaching Beirut.”
    “They’ve been cut off for a week,” Kitty said.
    “The siege is to prevent food, water and fuel from getting to the strongholds of the PLO. Unfortunately everyone suffers in the interests of nationalism,” Maurice replied. “Flags. Emblems. Passports. Anthems. Israel’s no longer a model for western civilisation, somesort of wunderkind. She’s just like the rest. ‘If you will it, it is not a dream,’ Herzl said, but I think the time has come to wake up.”
    “I keep thinking about the women and children…”
    “Israeli planes distributed leaflets urging civilians to leave the area. There are escape routes open. Thousands already have.”
    “They don’t tell you that.”
    “They’ve got the fire brigade reporting. Kids from the networks with their inevitable sympathy for what they feel to be the underdog, who come crashing in when there’s trouble anywhere, making simple divisions between the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. The less informed they are the more sensation and violence minded they become, photographing the same streets of damaged houses which the Israelis were probably not responsible for anyway.
    “They’d be amazed if you told them that in 1947 the United Nations proposed that there was to be a Jewish state and for the first time ever an Arab Palestinian state. The Jews accepted the offer: the extremist Arab leadership wanted all or nothing. It got nothing, and the Palestinian refugee problem was created. That in 1948 nine hundred thousand Jews had their property confiscated by Arab governments and