The Song Before It Is Sung Read Online Free Page A

was never able to adapt to the landscape; goose-girls and deep resinous forests were more
     real to her than Arab shepherds and olive trees. In Jerusalem with the blinding white rocks and the thin soil, she felt lost:
     eventually she killed herself, leaving the eleven-year-old Amos. And maybe this is what Mendel meant when he described the
     country as strange and his kinship with the people who had been Levantised as unsettling, even frightening.
    And Conrad sees Mendel, small and plump, with the tall, thin von Gottberg, approaching Jerusalem and he wonders exactly what
     thoughts assaulted them, because Jerusalem is a city like no other, a city that attracts the irrational and the mystic and
     the fanatic, as if there are certain loci on this earth that exhale some of the vapours of human longing that have been breathed
     on them over the millennia. Once Conrad heard wild bees in a cleft in a rock in Africa, and the fanning of the wings and the
     diligent murmuring suggested some message, like the intimations of music, which came from beyond the rational. Jerusalem is
     the world capital of the irrational, with longing and loss and despairing hope to boot.
    And into this place - they arrive on donkeys from Transjordan — come Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg. Even on a donkey it
     is clear that von Gottberg is born to ride. Whereas Mendel has only once ridden - coincidentally on a donkey - on the beach
     in Bournemouth. In the photograph of the event, the donkey wears a straw hat and the infant Mendel is holding an ice cream.
     He wears a sailor top and small black spectacles, so that he looks like a bee, a Jewish bee. Mendel tells friends gleefully
     that on the outskirts of Jerusalem they were stoned by Orthodox Jews. Von Gottberg's feet, in calfskin boots, are almost trailing
     in the powdery dust.
    Outside the King David Hotel where they are staying, a photographer captures them. Mendel is smiling, a smile that Conrad
     recognises across sixty years. It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse
     of the surrounding features. Von Gottberg has his arm around Mendel's shoulder: some way behind them is the stone fagade of
     the hotel, and behind that a glimpse of the Old City. In this photograph they look as though they have been posed for Nazi
     propaganda, the tall, athletic, aristocratic Count Axel von Gottberg, of Pleskow, and the smaller, softer Elya Mendel, of
     Hampstead, who could be thought by the ill-disposed, from his complicit smile, to have cabalistic knowledge. Conrad knows
     that look, intensely curious, half-amused, expecting something entertaining to happen, as happy to hear gossip as a new idea.
     Conrad is staying in the old Petra Hotel, not far away, but he ventures into the King David to get the fabled view of the
     Old City from the terrace.
    The Old City glows in the late-afternoon light. It is not obviously a Jewish city: he can see churches and the Dome of the
     Rock and beyond that the cemeteries rising above the Garden of Gethsemane and up the Mount of Olives. The walls are mainly
     Ottoman with some Crusader sections, but the stones were quarried near by and re-used after every conquest, so that this city
     -viewed from above the swimming pool from which the voices of children are rising - is as no other city he has ever seen,
     semaphoring significance. And this is the pattern: ideas and creeds are now represented by unheeding stones as the ends of
     human longing. For two thousand years - longer if you count the Mesopotamian diaspora - the Jews have held this landscape
     in their minds. But over there, pulsing, is the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammed ascended on a horse for
     his Night Ride to Mecca, and beyond that on a hill is the spot where Jesus ascended into heaven, and then beyond that the
     hills of the Judaean Desert, which seem to have a separate illumination, so that they are pale and bleached, with the dark
     shapes