The Honeyed Peace (18 page)

He wanted to thank his friends the Poles, his true friends, his friends for life. Maybe Poles were wiser than other people, maybe they were a special breed of men. Anyhow they knew about this place and they had led him here; and he understood it so perhaps he was getting wiser too. He felt as if he were in love; it came like being hit over the head with a hammer, and you were awed and triumphant and sad, at once. He was exalted by a sense of wonder, by the glory of hope; the future had been revealed to him.

'That's a fine fountain,' said Mike Marvin.

He woke, late, with a hangover like burning rock in his stomach, like ground glass behind his eyes. He telephoned the hotel where the Poles were billeted, a dingy building they had located with some difficulty before dawn. The Poles were gone back to their Regiment. Then a sergeant called from Fifth Army Public Relations and said his editor had favoured him with a cable: get to Pisa; had American artillery knocked down the Leaning Tower, or not? Take a picture. Quick. This mattered to the Italians who bought newspapers in California. Mike Marvin never saw the Poles again.

After the war, in Los Angeles, Mike Marvin's friends were exhaustively informed of certain conclusions drawn from his travels.

All Italian ladies were titled and had been collaborationist floozies; the Poles were great people, there were none like them, none finer in the world. But his friends could not account for the bitterness in Mike, the disgust, the disappointment. Mike was an easy-going man before he went to Europe; and he had a good job now, a nice little apartment, plenty of fun: the perfect set-up. Mike did not speak of the fountain in the Borghese Gardens. He was not able to find it again, what he understood once so well; not in Los Angeles or anywhere. The peace had failed itself. If he only knew where those Poles were, he could ask them. 'Stas,' he'd say, 'Radin, you guys know the answers. How about this?'

CAFÉ IN JAFFA

Everything in this street was ugly except the voices of the men singing. She had imagined Jaffa as an ancient port rising above a flat sea, a huddled town with streets curved darkly between blind houses, curious doorways, courtyards hidden by pale walls. This was a modern Arab slum street and Jaffa was a dreary damaged Arab city. Still there were men singing which was remarkable considering that this street was suitable to scratch lice in or barter rags but not a likely place for men to lift their voices.

'Can we go and see?' the woman asked.

'It will be a poor café with poor people,' the man said.

He had not wanted to come here; it did not please him to humour women; American men must be half-wits or eunuchs or else they would long ago have beaten amiability into their women. In the Palace Hotel in Tel Aviv there would be white table-cloths, an imitation of an American band, clean civilized well-dressed people whom one knew, and the sort of evening that was enjoyable. But no, this American woman wished to see life, to explore, to waste gasoline going to dirty streets where there was nothing, except a poor café. Theo Lucacsh, who had always hated poverty, feared it now as it flooded slowly upon them, pouring through the city, pushing them back into their angular expensive apartment houses, rising, rising, in the terrible needed dark tide of the immigrants.

'I want to go,' she said, knowing perfectly well what she sounded like and knowing with detachment that all evening she had sounded as awful to him as he sounded to her. My first night, she thought, if I landed on an oasis in the Sahara, if I landed on an icefield in Siberia, I would instantly be picked up by the local playboy and he would at once offer to take me to a night club. Why does this happen? she thought, and by now they were walking in unfriendly silence towards the voices. I am a serious woman, she told herself, I am often a solemn woman, I am full of gloomy thoughts and generalizations; I am not playboy material, and I am certain that, in all Israel, Theo Lucacsh is the one, the most famous, worthless. So here, naturally, am I.

'You will not like it,' the man said, 'it will smell.'

'I am a specialist in smells,' she said sweetly, 'and I am always glad to learn more.'

A bluish neon light, which made their skin look white and dead like fish bellies, dazzled them at the entrance of the café. She saw, veiled by the glare, the stone-topped tables, the yellow-varnished wooden chairs, the greasy floor, the glass counter displaying white beans and white cheese, and one table where five men and a woman sat. One of the men had a guitar. The woman looked tired, as well as bleached by the light; she rested her head on her hand and did not sing. The men were all ugly, unshaved, and wore shirts without collars. Their hands were busy, beating time, lifting murky glasses of arak, holding cigarettes, and the hands were grimy, grained, broken-nailed from work.

'I told you,' Theo Lucacsh said at the door. 'You have seen. Poor people. Bulgarians.'

'How do you know?'

'I understand what they are singing.'

A playboy-linguist was one up on a pure playboy; that made seven languages to date. Maybe if he would stop being so suave, so
homme-couvert-de-femmes
, if he would stop laughing melodiously, and making sly sexy compliments from a French farce, Theo would turn out to be human. After all, no one had come here for nothing, not even Theo.

She walked to the table nearest the singers and sat down, leaning back against the wall so that she could watch them, smiling at them, frankly meaning to join their party as a listener. They smiled back, showing various kinds of dilapidated teeth; the dark tired woman nodded. The men went on singing.

They sang because they loved their songs, they sang because they sang beautifully, and for rest and to escape, and now they also sang for her. They were generous with each other, allowing each one in turn to shine especially; so that all were silent for a moment while the man with the guitar played a swift complicated variation on the melody, or while the very fat man, with a clown's face, suddenly became a great tragic figure and sang as if he knew better than anyone of all the homeless. They sang love-songs and laments and tunes for gipsies to dance to, and she could not remember any voices that had sounded as fine to her, or any music she had ever felt as she felt theirs. Then without warning they began a song which she could not place, except that it seemed to mourn as none of the others had, and yet it was full of pride, and they sang it in a slow square way, building up its power.

There were tears in her eyes and she said to Theo, 'What were they singing?'

'It is the Bulgarian national anthem.' His face looked older, as if he shared a heavy wisdom with these men.

'Why?'

'It is where they were born. They loved it until they could not.'

It was apparently the hour to eat and the men made gestures of invitation to her and asked Theo Lucacsh, in stumbling Hebrew, whether he and the lady would join them. Theo said with relief that they had already eaten, but many thanks; and she watched a pale waiter bring plates of the sick white beans floating in oil, and other plates of drab paste that looked like some acne salve but was probably mashed brown beans for a change, and dry bread, and saw them making a cheerful meal of these horrors, washed down with more glasses of the clouded arak.

'Bulgaria must be a wonderful country,' she said to Theo.

'It is all right.'

'How did they learn to sing like that?'

'Why don't you ask them?'

'My Bulgarian is rusty.' She had four languages, which in Israel was rudimentary and hardly enough to get on with.

'They are Sephardic Jews; talk Spanish.'

She did not ask why, or know that through five hundred years these people had kept, deformed and loved, the language of their first home, but now, feeling very shy, she said to a thin bald man who sat nearest her, 'I want to thank you; I have never heard such songs.'

The man was evidently delighted that she spoke Spanish and answered in a language she understood but was not exactly the Spanish she had been taught.

'You have just come to Israel?'

'Yes.'

'You will not live here,' he said, taking in something more about her than her face or her clothes or her hands.

'No, I am only a visitor.'

'American? English?'

'American.'

'We are all from Sofia, here. We came three months ago. We are digging sewers. All except that friend,' pointing to the man with the guitar. 'He is of the upper classes, he drives a truck.'

The other men laughed.

'There is a big need for sewers in Jaffa,' the fat man said, and they laughed again.

Theo asked a question in some language she did not know, perhaps Bulgarian, and her neighbour said, 'We do what is needed. I was Professor of Economics at the University in Sofia. We do not have much economics in this country just now, but as my friend says, we must have sewers. My wife,' the man said suddenly and the dark woman bowed charmingly but seemed too tired to speak, or had nothing to say, or was not thinking of any of them but had only come here to listen to the music and think of other places.

'Will you be here in ten days?' the fat man asked.

'I think so.'

'Then you must come to the Odeon Ciné Theatre, on the principal street, a week from Friday. We are giving a Bulgarian comedy; there are some of our real actors here and new ones who are trying. We have the theatre only on Sabbath night when it is forbidden to show pictures.'

'He is directing the play,' the Professor of Economics said. 'He was
régisseur
at the Royal Theatre, but they would never have let him put on such a foolishness there.'

'The play is called
Three Times Married
,' the fat man said, smiling with all his stained teeth and all his stubbled chins. 'It is to make us laugh. I will leave two tickets for you at the box office.'

'I would love to come. Will you take my card so you won't forget my name?'

They passed her card thoughtfully among them, bowing in turn as if to acknowledge a formal introduction, and each said his own name, but she did not get the names and felt absurd and hoped this interlude of politeness would not prevent them from singing again.

The man with the guitar looked at the others and plucked a chord, in question; all the little oily plates were empty. Throwing his head back, and immediately resembling Caruso, the fat man started a song.

'Is everyone in Israel different from what he seems?' she whispered to Theo.

'No. None is. If you know how to see.'

He was no longer concerned to please her, no longer interested in possible rewards, and it was not his business to educate her. How could they ever understand anything, even if they wanted to? He was glad he had come; he wished he had come alone, which he never would have done. He was at home with these men; he had been a lawyer in Bucharest, and was luckier than they because he had left sooner, but otherwise they were the same and poverty did not frighten him so much and besides it was only the beginning. This was something the American also would never understand, something she took for granted and did not feel; she did not know what it was to be in your own country with your own people, and to know you were of the same family, reunited, after a long cruel journey.

The men were singing very fast now, the music whirling and spiralling higher and faster, the fat man bearing time with a fork, the guitarist bent close over the guitar, sweating and smiling, an old man with a brief-case, who had been accurate in his singing but remote, now waving his half-empty glass, and finally the song ended, crashing, roaring, and all of them, even the tired woman, laughed with pleasure at what they had made.

'I love them,' the American woman said.

'Why?' Theo asked. She was not entirely impossible; she had a sort of child's charm in that her feelings were quick and definite, and no doubt as quickly forgotten.

'Because they're happy.'

Theo Lucacsh stared at her, too surprised to answer, and then too angry, too repelled by her ignorance to want to answer.

'They insist on being happy,' she said, 'even if only for an hour, now at night, in this café. It's the bravest, hardest thing there is, to be happy somehow, anyhow, for a while, no matter what.'

'You are of course American,' Theo said coldly.

'Why is everyone so idiotic about Americans, where do you get your ideas? From Betty Grable Technicolor musicals? Americans probably know as little about happiness as any people on earth.'

'It is late. Tomorrow they have their sewers and I have my factory. We should be going.'

'I'm sorry, I forgot the time.'

She stood up and thanked them, searching in her mind for handsome phrases, and the tired woman smiled goodbye and the five men kissed her hand, correctly, one after the other and she said, 'I will see you at
Three Times Married
,' and walked out of the café, feeling that she was leaving a palace where she had been entertained with great elegance by hosts who might someday allow her to become a friend.

She took Theo's arm and said, 'I'm so grateful to you for bringing me here, I'll always be grateful. It isn't a bad street really and that's my favourite café anywhere.'

He lifted her hand and kissed it with mechanical intimacy. Children, he thought, fortunate stupid children. They could still hear the men singing as they drove down the unlighted street towards the new crowded city.

THE GERMAN

The German had lived in Havana for eleven years and no one liked him even before there were political or patriotic reasons not to. He was well known in the cafés around the water-front, in the night clubs and at the Jai-Alai; and everywhere he gave offence. He spoke with sneering condescension to waiters and shouted insults at the Jai-Alai players if he had bet money on them and they were losing. When he tried to be friendly he was even more deplorable, and there was something very wrong about his eyes. He was simply a man of no value and the fact that he was rich and owned a successful business, dealing in cameras and photographic equipment, did not improve his standing. There were other Germans, but he was always known as 'The German '.