When I Lived in Modern Times (11 page)

So there, on the beach, with the sandwiches, I was very comfortable. And yet, they sat next to me, these pleasant individuals swigging lemonade, and they were the enemy of everything I believed in.

“I grant you the Jews have been through hell but they never ask us what
we’ve
been through,” Susan said, turning to me. “You know yourself, Priscilla, what the Blitz was like. But they don’t care. It’s all them, them, them.”

“The Jewish problem,” Mackintosh said, “is that they don’t understand what is fundamental to our make-up: fair play. They see it as a weakness to be exploited. They have a ruthlessness we don’t possess, not anymore, at any rate. You know what I long for? The Golden Age. Queen Elizabeth’s time. We were bankrupt, we’d been invaded over and over again but we made something of ourselves. We were the lords of the world, back then. Now we’re just doing out duty. But it’s got to be done.”

“The problem with the Jews,” said Mrs. Sheppard, “is that they have a talent for rubbing people up the wrong way.”

“I quite like some of the Arabs,” said Norman. “They have lovely manners.”

“At least they’re not socialists,” added Sheppard. “If there’s one thing that really puts me off about Palestine it’s that there are too many Russian Bolshevists. The place is swarming with them.”

“What’s the difference between here and back home?” asked Norman. “The government’s nationalizing everything in sight. We’ll be under the red flag before the year’s out.”

“Too true.”

“Do you remember before the war,” Susan asked, “when you could get that lovely seed cake at Lyon’s Corner House?”

“Yes!” I cried, for indeed, I did remember it, could taste it in my mouth, the sponge melting on your tongue with real butter, the sharp, dusty sensation of seeds. And we began to talk about Alvar Lidell on the wireless, the sound of the big bands and cups of Ovaltine before bedtime, which reminded me of being tucked in by my mother who had closed the curtains against the sodium orange of the streetlights outside. I thought of a snowy late afternoon on Primrose Hill, the setting sun pink on the frozen ground, my hands in mittens and the velvet collar of my coat turned up while my mother struggled in galoshes along the steep, icy path.

“To get back to the Arabs,” Mackintosh said, “their difficulty has always been lack of leadership and organization and this is where the Jews beat them hollow. At the end of the day, though, the land belongs to them
and the Jews are interlopers, however it might serve our own national interests to have a European presence here. Our job is to keep each bunch from each other’s throats. That’s policy. But if you have to choose between them personally, I know which lot I prefer, the Arabs every time.”

“Andrew has read Mr. Lawrence’s book,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
,” his wife told us.

“Yes. It’s fine, very fine. I wish I’d been here in 1917 instead of at prep school when Lawrence marched behind General Allenby and we captured Jerusalem. That would have been a sight.”

“As far as I’m concerned, they needn’t have bothered,” Bolton said, looking around for more beer.

“But don’t you see the Arab virtues?” cried Mackintosh. “Their physical courage is beyond doubt, their pride in their traditions, their exquisite courtesy and their hospitality—my God! Just last January gone I had to go up to Jaffa during Ramadan when they aren’t allowed to touch a morsel before sunset. Yet they invite you in and they order tea for you and the most elaborate display of cakes, and even though they aren’t allowed to let a drop pass their lips they
insist
that you shouldn’t go without. And they have a sense of honor which I’m afraid the Jews just don’t share.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, “they’re so touchy. That they denied our Lord is a
fact
, it’s in the Bible, but if you remind them of it, why they fly off the handle.”

“Load of codswallop,” Bolton said, “about the Arabs, I mean. I don’t know where Lawrence got his ideas from, but it wasn’t this lot. You find them picturesque? I don’t. Their fawning makes my flesh crawl. All I can say about them it that they share a great dislike of any kind of work. They’re lazy and unenterprising and if they do lose ground to the Jews it will be because of their own lack of effort. You can’t accuse the Jews of that even if they’re pretty unappealing in every other way, those fat-hipped women in particular.”

Susan was bored and wanted to bathe. All of us except Bolton got up and walked toward the water, our feet sinking in the sand. We laughed and threw balls at each other while Mackintosh struck out toward the horizon and Bolton sat on the beach drinking beer, watching us and smiling, and watching the other people on the beach too, for he was a policeman through and through and felt that he was on duty all the time.

M
RS
. Kulp was becoming less interested in hairdressing and more obsessed by her battle with our landlord. She walked around the exterior of the building and looked for cracks in the concrete. She showed me places where the brilliant surface had begun to discolor and turn brown as if some toxin was eating away at it from the inside. She brushed away encrusted salt. There was no doubt that our brand-new home was in the early stages of deterioration. It was like a young child struck down with a terrible illness and Blum was doing nothing to arrest its decline. His life was spent either mending dolls or sitting in cafés eating cake.

Mrs. Kulp kept threatening to move to an even newer apartment, one of the kind built on columns so that the dust and heat from the street flowed under the house instead of rising up to its windows. Sometimes she spoke of leaving Tel Aviv altogether and transferring her business to Jerusalem where everything was made of stone and things remained cool indoors instead of the concrete city which all the day sucked the heat through its thin white walls until at night you could not breathe and everyone was driven out into the cafés.

“So why don’t you?” I said, exasperated by her complaints. Because, because…she had a clientele, she had an admirer and because she yearned for the respectability of a stable, rooted life. It embarrassed her to be a wandering Jew.

Up on the roof, where we did the washing and strung out our clothes to dry, I met Mrs. Linz, a sturdy, dark, curly-haired woman with short legs and powerful calves who was in her thirties and always knew best. She didn’t pay much attention to how she looked, habitually wearing khaki shorts and a khaki shirt with old black plimsolls in summer, but I found her grumpily helpful.

“Not like that, like this,” she said. “Not this place on the washing line, here is a better place. You bought from that store? You are mad. Go to this one, it’s cheaper and better quality. I will write down the address. You
want to know this? Why ask me? How should I know? My former husband,
he
knows. I will ask him on your behalf.”

She lived in the apartment immediately below my own, had lived there since the day Blum first opened its doors, then with her husband and now on her own with her child, a boy of ten who trapped flies and pinned them down by their wings and tried to look at their eyes through a magnifying glass.

“The child is curious,” she said. “The eye of a fly is what interests him and I will not interfere. He will be a scientist like his father.”

“Where is he?”

“Not far. He waits for a visa to go to America. The child wishes to go to America too and he can if he chooses, but I will not go.”

“Why not?”

“All Americans are conformists.”

“I see.”

“Like the Germans, who are so very, very boring.”

“Though not in recent years.”

“That is because of obedience. But they will be punished now.”

“Yes, at Nuremberg.”

“No. The trials are not punishment but revenge. They will see the fate that is in store for them when they find that they are no longer capable of producing great music and literature. I don’t speak of art because I have no interest in painting. It makes me sick.”

Mrs. Linz’s apartment was decorated in the same style as those of all the intellectual or socialist immigrants of the previous decade: the tiled floors sluiced down with water every day, the walls entirely lined with books, the decorative copper bowls, the ugly German furniture and in her case, pinned to one wall, arms akimbo, a curious dress which had been collected from an Arab village by one of the volunteer assistants of Mrs. Violet Barber at the folk museum in Jerusalem.

Like all the Yekkes, she devoured literature. “I have always been a student of your great novelists and poets, Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson of course, but also the moderns, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde.”

“Joyce, Yeats and Wilde are all Irish.”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“No, not really.”

“I’m sure you will find, Miss Sert, that it is.”

“I think I know the literature of my own country.”

She waved her hand. “Ireland should be glad to be part of a nation which has produced such culture. They are writing in the English language, after all, instead of their own original barbaric tongue.”

I told her about my six weeks on the kibbutz. “If ever Palestine will be remembered,” she said, “it will be for the kibbutz, its greatest achievement, the only socialist experiment which had really worked. If the British go, there will be war with the Arabs, you can be quite sure of that, and I will take the child to the kibbutz, and leave him there for the duration.”

“You won’t stay with him?”

“No. I will return to Tel Aviv. Don’t look shocked. The English evacuated their children to the countryside, to the farms during the war. It was reported in the papers. The kibbutz ideal doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’m too much of an individualist.”

“That was my problem,” I told her.

“Listen,” she said, after we had got to know each other better. “You and I are of a type. We are the kind who break the walls with our bare hands.”

On curfew nights, we used to sit on her balcony fanning ourselves, while the child crawled around our feet inspecting ants, and she sewed and mended, and we wiped away the sweat. Down the street you could catch a glimpse of the sea in the fluorescence of moonlight.

“You have come too late,” she advised me. “Oh, you should have been here in the beginning, in 1933, when
I
arrived, one month exactly after I saw the window of a Jewish shop smashed and I told my mother that I was leaving and would never set foot in Germany again while Hitler was alive and my uncle said that I may be a Jew but I should consider myself a German first. Because of the end he met I wish I had been proved wrong and he right but I
was
right. Only nineteen and already I knew better than the man who was supposed to be the head of my family, but you see my mind had been trained by political theory.

“The shock of my arrival! Nothing like Berlin but the atmosphere was absolutely
marvelous
for a young person, it was brotherly, everyone knew everyone, no one had any money. I had been in Berlin already an ardent feminist and socialist so to come here was like arriving in a great social experiment where we would begin all over again to make a new Berlin, a city for the masses and for the intellectuals, where we would build a modern life for ourselves. It was not just me, all of us who arrived, leaving behind a homeland somewhere else and finding this new, unfamiliar homeland, were making history in our way.”

So young a city, and already it had a legend.

“Twice a week you went down to the harbor at Jaffa when the ships came in from Europe and looked to see if there were any acquaintances. We all expected it to be not a big city but at least a little Berlin. My God, it was more like a town in the Wild West that I had seen at the cinema. There was no anchorage and you had to be taken to land in this little boat. I remember I stood high on the railing and a huge Arab in a red tarboosh and strange trousers yelled at me in German, ‘Jump,
meine Liebe
.’ Then the Jewish Agency took me in a
diligence
—do you know what that is? No? It’s a funny taxi for six people and one horse and this one stank to high heaven. We arrived at a new immigrants’ home in Allenby Road which was a large hall with iron bedsteads and army blankets and there were a few people sitting at the end with contraptions made of fire and talking in a language I thought was not human. They were my first Yemenites.

“The conditions were terrible in those days,
terrible
, but I wrote home to my sister: ‘Believe me, this place has a fabulous potential for becoming a truly socialist state because here there are no class distinctions—how can there be when there are no classes? So the only thing that must happen now is to stop the immigration so things can develop naturally.’ Ha! What an idiot.

“But you know I couldn’t find a job. I had no training for this country, I didn’t even know the language. German, I knew. English I knew,
of course
, for the literature, the
marvelous
literature. But Hebrew was beyond everybody except the religious boys from the
yeshivot
.” She wrinkled her nose. “Those
Ostjuden
.”

“I have heard this expression before, Mrs. Linz,” I said, “and I feel I must inform you that I am of those
Ostjuden
.”

“Then,” she said, “we shall have to advance you to a higher level in life but it should not be too difficult. You are quite cultured already.” I tried to interrupt her with an expression of outrage, but she pressed on.

“Anyway, I arrived in May 1933 and the first job you could call a job was in 1937. Four years. Four years of hard labor, supporting myself by hook or by crook. I was a waitress, I was a maid, factory worker. And on Fridays I put on the one good thing I had to wear and went into Mina’s where dinner cost the horrendous price of three piastres but there were four courses and at least I was in a pioneer city full of young workers, all in our teens and twenties. The streets belonged to us.

“At first my boyfriends were German. It was inevitable. They were the only people I could communicate with in my own language but I grew to dislike them intensely. They hated the light and they were always taking the bus to Jerusalem at every opportunity they could get to hide in its
shadowy alleys and cool their blood amongst its cold and ancient stones. Some years it even snows in Jerusalem but it never snows in Tel Aviv. Have you been in Jerusalem?”

“No. Not yet.” I had thought about it since arriving in Palestine. I thought of its golden dome and its fabulous past, the royal city of King David, and the extraordinary sights in a place so old and romantic. I pined too to see the desert, the River Jordan and the Judean hills and the extraordinary phenomenon of the salty wastes of the Dead Sea.

“Horrible town, Jerusalem,” Mrs. Linz said. “Absolutely mired in the past. The German colony—not
our
Germans but the Christians who came here in the last century and were absolutely pro-Nazi and were expelled by the British—their neighborhood is planted with northern pine trees. Why? A monument to homesickness, of course. It is impossible to introduce anything modern for there is a law that every building must be constructed from Jerusalem stone, every one, without exception. So of course anyone interested in building with modern materials must come here. Anyway, Jerusalem is a British city, it is the headquarters of government and everything to do with government will always be stifling and conventional though do not mistake me for an anarchist.

“So one day, when I had learned a little Hebrew, I found myself a Yemenite boyfriend and he loved going to Jaffa to the cafés of the Arabs where he felt at home. He was very homesick for the Arab way of life and the European manner in which we were building Palestine was quite strange to him. Anyway, he took me with him. The music, the decorations, it was all so very alien to
me
. I was interested, but unlike him, I didn’t want to get involved. We went to see a film at the Alhambra cinema, very posh it was. I sat for three hours and watched
The White Rose
, a very famous Egyptian film in which nothing happens except a man sings in—to my ears—a very terrible fashion. I thought, why can’t they have modern houses and modern furniture? Tel Aviv was the absolute avant-garde of modernism. All our architects came from the Bauhaus, as you must know. We were building a European city and the Arabs were stuck in the Orient. But still, it was fascinating—the big palm trees, the smell of spices and flowers, beautiful, though not my sense of beauty. And in the middle of it all the Winter Gardens, a café which was a mixture of the Orient and Germany which my Yemenite boyfriend thought was very confusing. We were both Jews but what did we have in common?
Only
that we were Jews and what, I want to know, does that mean?

“I remember this street when there were only ten houses, and the water only came twice a week. You couldn’t wash the dishes or take a shower. People used to come on excursions with picnics to see the new houses
being built because it was so exciting to see Tel Aviv develop along the shoreline and everyone marveled at how our European architects worked so hard to bring Europe to the barbaric East. We didn’t wait for the Zionist executive to draw up a plan. We just started. We
couldn’t
wait. People came, they had nowhere to live, they built houses for themselves. We’re the city of formerly homeless people. Oh, life was very hard then but it was
marvelous
for a young girl like me who wished to practice free love. Whatever you do, Evelyn, do not make my mistake and marry. I don’t know why people think that happiness lies in sharing a bathroom.

“Now things are not nice. Not very nice at all. Do you know the ideas of Judah Magnes? He is for a bi-national state but the bloody Irgun and the Lehi are doing their best to spread hatred,
abominable
hatred. I have utter contempt for those people. A question, for you. If you knew of anyone who is a terrorist would you inform the British? I’m very divided. On the one hand, terrorism is anathema so you must do it. When it comes to killing people you have to stop and think first and that Etzel shower are anything but thinkers. On the other, how can you give up a Jew to those policemen who on the day of embarking for Palestine were indoctrinated by Mosley? Or to one of our civil servants who form part of the adoring public of Mr. T. E. Lawrence and believe anything connected with Arabs is absolutely
fabulous
and who are secretly disappointed when the people here who are so much superior to them in intellect are in fact the Jews? For you know we established from the very beginning a very high standard of intellectual life. I myself arrived here with a gramophone and records.

“Undoubtedly the terrorists will get what they want and when the British go we will see the frantic joy of the population and then we will be in constant fear of being attacked. There will be a terrible war and we may be defeated and if we are not, on the day that Palestine becomes an independent Jewish state, I will weep. I will have the national identity of a country I do not think should exist. But what is the alternative? Take the man who sells watermelons on the corner of our street. You have noticed him?”