Coming Soon by Zvi Jagendorf

Author:Zvi Jagendorf [Zvi Jagendorf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905559930
Publisher: Halban
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

ULLI

RUDI WAS RUNNING up steps and along corridors in a bombed building with a Russian officer looking desperately for a lost passport when he woke up to find Ulli unpacking her bag. It was late afternoon and Félix had brought her from the Mandelbaum Gate and delivered her into the safe hands of Mother Superior Schwester Clara. She was tactful and didn’t pepper Ulli with questions but helped her quietly into the room where Rudi was asleep.

The convent was tranquil after the exertions and bustle of the Christmas days. The courtyard hadn’t beeen swept and a smell of cooking hung lazily in the air. The only noise was that of the crows croaking in the tall, wrinkled pine trees of the German Colony.

Rudi rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and they looked at each other as if they had been apart for months and not five days. This was a new situation for them. Instead of Rudi returning from far away with his story of a trip full of meetings and language laboratories, Ulli was now the traveller returned from the far country, fifteen minutes walk down Bethlehem Road past the King David. When he got up to embrace her, Rudi noticed a strange perfume in her breath.

‘What did they give you to eat, liebchen?’

‘Nothing today except one of these.’

She fished out of her bag a long thin bread shaped like a flattened oval hoop. It was covered with roasted sesame seeds.

‘And this.’

She pulled out a small twist of what looked like newspaper torn out of a telephone book. When she opened it out Rudi saw that it was a fragment of a telephone book. Along the columns of names in Arabic lay a tiny mound of green dust. A strange but not unpleasant herbal smell emerged.

‘Zaatar,’ said Ulli. ‘Look,’ she broke off a piece of the hoop wetted it with her tongue and dipped it in the green mound. Then she offered it to Rudi.

Suspicious at first, he took it and observed the piece of bread as if it were a live crab or an unusual mushroom.

‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Go on try it. It should be dipped in olive oil not saliva.’

Rudi took a bite. The bread’s surprisingly sweet taste was tempered by the sesame seeds. The green stuff was salty and tart. Its greenness was in the taste also.

‘Félix says it’s hyssop. It’s what they gave Jesus on the cross. On a wet rag to make him more thirsty.’

She broke off a large piece, rubbed a finger in the zaatar and sucked away with relish. ‘I can’t get enough of it.’

‘Do you know someone called Margarian, an Armenian?’

‘Yes, he’s a lawyer, the agent for Julius’s landlord.’

‘I’ve got a vase for him and some pastries. They’re from his sister over there. Félix knows them.’

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