When I Lived in Modern Times (12 page)

“Yes. Of course.”

“You have bought his watermelon?”

“Yes.”

“Delicious cool things. He brings them every day from one of the Arab villages a few miles away. No more than three or four miles. He brings them on a camel. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“He leaves the camel in Jaffa and he transfers the watermelons on a cart. Now the problem for us is this: we, the residents of Tel Aviv, are spearheading the twentieth century. We are the cream of pre-war Berlin society, we are what remains of the Wiemar Republic, in exile. We have here in our Jewish city some of the best-educated men and women in the world. We have scientists and historians and musicians and lawyers and doctors, everything. The Arab on the street is simply an illiterate man who knows how to sell watermelons. Can an industrious, well-organized minority who are the receptacle of all the most advanced ideas of the modern age be governed and dominated by a majority so patently inferior to us in energy and education and administrative experience? Can we be governed by feudalism and blind devotion to religion and tribes and sects and blood feuds? No. Impossible. Such an arrangement could never work. Our misfortune is that
we
must rule
them
because we are modern.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “we can send Gropius to see if he can redesign their tents.” We both laughed.

“But no,” she continued. “It is not comic. It’s a tragedy.”

“Where is the rest of your family?” I asked her.

“Gassed,” she told me. “My mother and my redheaded uncle and my redheaded cousins.”

“Why didn’t they come here?”

“They did come, for a visit in 1937, but they abhorred the socialism and the disorder. They preferred England and it is true the English are civilized, come what may. They went back to Berlin to arrange their affairs and they never got out.”

Mrs. Linz was employed as a stenographer in a large office. Sometimes we took the bus to work together and sometimes we went afterward for a coffee at the Noga café where the intellectuals met and there was dancing at weekends. I saw all the art I could find in Palestine. It was curious stuff, the painters influenced by a Paris training and they depicted the white city in murky colors with stark leafless trees, as if it were an overcast November day in the Bois de Boulogne.

But there was an abstract painter who sometimes came to the Noga and spoke of the vibrancy of the sky and the air in motion, of the local light and the essence of the expanse. It was the soul of matter, form and content that he was trying to express, he said. “The atmosphere is the substance,” he told me. “The posture is sometimes the soul.” And I nodded and sipped my coffee, not understanding.

In the evenings, the child would crawl around in the garden getting his clothes dirty. He was a solitary presence in our building where everyone had come from somewhere else. The palm trees and orange trees and
bougainvillea and the torrid, steamy summer heat and the British shouting at us through megaphones were what was real for him. He reminded me of myself at that age. He was a child without grandparents or other relations and the little society on Mapu, full of immigrants and strangers, was all the world he knew.

O
NE lunchtime a few British officers were abducted by the Irgun from their club at the Yarkon Hotel. The streets were flooded with security forces, sweating troops tearing up the pavements and barricading them with sandbags. On my way to the salon, I passed Bren gun nests at Mogen David Square and there were constant cordon and search operations. The kidnappings accelerated. The city was out of bounds to all ranks, and the soldiers in their red berets whom we mockingly called the anemones were armed and went around in pairs like nervous couples. The railway tracks were blown up, trains were dynamited. One drama followed another. There was no relaxation. The policemen’s wives whose hair I shampooed and set complained that they hardly saw their husbands anymore, they were busy till all hours rounding people up and interrogating them.

In the apartment building, everyone grew hot and quarrelsome as the curfew dragged on. Mrs. Linz missed her concerts. Mrs. Kulp missed the cinema. Blum missed sitting with his cronies, eating cake. I missed having the life of a normal young person, free to go to parties and other entertainments where I could meet young men.

But our country continued its march of progress. They laid the cornerstone for a new scientific institute in Rehovot. The scientists were planning to plant castor trees in the Negev because they grew anywhere and from their fruit you could extract products which could be turned into nylon. And if you had nylon you could make anything, from women’s stockings to mosquito nets. They were going to try out machines that would turn salt water into fresh and invent devices which would make electricity for blocks of flats by exploiting the difference in temperature between the basement and the attic. They were going to grow grapefruit and oranges as big as footballs and pipless giant tangerines. They were going to build an electronic brain.

“If the child stays in Palestine he will definitely work there one day,” said Mrs. Linz who had taken him to watch the inauguration of the
institute. “This is our future, you know, pioneer industries, plastics, everything up to date.”

“Like magic.”

“Yes, magic but on an industrial scale.”

The child was learning to take his own pulse with his mother’s wristwatch. We looked at him, admiringly. “The new Jew,” I said.

A couple of weeks after their abduction, at the beginning of July, the three captains kidnapped from the officers’ club were dumped in the middle of the street, groggy with chloroform. Each had been given a pound note to cover the wear and tear to his uniform.

One afternoon, I passed Johnny sitting in a café on Ben Yehuda Street, looking terrible. It was the first time I had seen him since he dropped me off at the hotel and wished me luck. He barely looked up when I approached his table.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, of course. Even with the blond hair. It suits you. Very glamorous.” He mashed the remains of his cake with his fork. “How are you getting on?”

“Very well. I have an apartment and a job. I thought I’d have run into you before now.” I was wearing a blue dress and white high heels and I had no need to worry if my seams were straight for my legs were brown and I didn’t need stockings.

“Yes. Well, I’ve been a bit busy.”

“With what?”

“Oh, this and that.” He pushed the plate away.

“Were you arrested at all?”

“Me? No. I’ve got some fake British papers.”

“How did you get them?”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” He grimaced at his coffee. His hair was not sleeked back with palm oil and his shirt was soiled and creased.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“What’s up? Don’t you know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. How could you?” He stared miserably out of the window. “I still can’t believe it. It’s just…” He began to speak in Hebrew, a long, low, angry mutter. He lit a cigarette without offering me one. I took one from my own packet, on the table. He looked at it. “Sorry,” he said, dully. “I have no manners today.”

“Something has happened. Can you tell me?”

“If the words don’t turn to ash in my mouth.”

I considered that he might be in fear of being arrested for black-market offenses. I looked around to see if there were any policemen in the café and saw one.

“There’s a cop here,” I said, whispering. “Should you go?”

He looked up. “Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might be in trouble with the police.”

“Well, I’m not, though there has been a catastrophe. An absolute disaster.”

I was trying to think of what might have happened. “Has an immigrant ship sunk? Someone you know been killed?”

“No, no, nothing like that. That would…Well, never mind.

It’s this: my team, Tel Aviv Betar, has been eliminated in the first round of the tournament. And at home, too. And we,
we
are supposed to be the cup specialists. We won in ‘40 and ‘42. Now we’re out for the count and to Ness Ziona. If Yalovsky gets back from the Jewish Brigade in time, my God, they’re going to win the whole thing. It’s a tragedy.”

After a bit, the penny dropped. I said, “Is this football you’re talking about?”

“Of course it’s football. I’ve supported Betar since I was old enough to go to matches. They’re my brothers. In fact my brother Yasaf plays for them, in defense. Now, nothing. Nothing to look forward to. We’re out, finished. I can’t believe it.” He shook his head.

I stared at him. “I don’t understand why this is important. It’s only a game.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Why does football matter to you?”

“It’s our national sport. I love all sports. I like boxing—Joe Louis, what a contender! I like tennis and golf, everything. If I ever went to London do you know what I’d do? I’d go and see Arsenal play. That’s the other team I support. I read in the paper that they’ll be going back to their stadium this season. It was requisitioned for something during the war, I can’t remember what. Arsenal at home. That would be something.”

“But
why?
Why should you care about people who live a thousand miles away?”

“Because,” he said, “a man must have a cause to follow.”

“What about the creation of the Zionist state?”

“That’s different. Football is about dreams. The Zionist homeland is gong to happen. It’s inevitable. The British
will
go. We can get them out, it’s only a matter of time, but whether Betar or Arsenal will win the cup this season—that’s not a certain outcome and it’s not dependent on my own actions.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn’t and I never would.

After a long silence, he looked up. “Well, enough of my miseries. Are you free? Would you like to do something?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sullenly. He had asked me nothing about myself.

“Listen, let’s hop on the bike and go for a spin.”

“All right,” I said, but only because despite his disheveled appearance, or perhaps because of it, he seemed very handsome and women are affected by that kind of thing, such superficialities.

I had noticed, by now, that something was missing. “Where’s your mustache?”

“Gone, for the moment. It comes and goes.”

“Why?”

“According to whether I need it or not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind. You don’t need to.”

His mood had lightened, a little. We walked down into the street and I got on the bike and we rode through the city, my hair streaming. We drove along the shore past Jaffa through sand dunes and Johnny pointed out the spots where new towns would one day be built on the site of Philistine ones: Ashdod, Ashkelon, their names were. Further on was Gaza and then the border with Egypt but we did not go that far. We turned back and flew through Palestine under starry skies and came home to my flat.

“Hey, nice place,” he said, looking around. “How did you find it?”

“I met the landlord in a café.”

“Good landlord?”

“Not really.”

“Someone should sort him out for you.”

“Oh, I don’t know, he has his own troubles.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I have no real worries of my own.”

“You’re lucky then.”

He wanted a cold drink and I poured some lemonade. We sat on the balcony and listened to the interminable sounds of gramophones and dance bands rising from the cafés on the seashore, coiling their way up my street. Polkas, foxtrots, waltzes, grinding out through the cheap instruments of secondrate orchestras.

“Things sound as if they’re getting rowdy at the Scopus Club,” Johnny said. “So, Evelyn, what have you been up to since I last saw you?”

I told him about Mrs. Kulp and the salon and why I had dyed my hair. I introduced him to my imaginary husband in Tiberias and explained about
my false name. I described Susan and our picnics on the beach and her friends, the inspectors from the various police stations.

“They sound like a right shower,” Johnny said, puffing on a Player’s.

“You’re used to Englishmen.”

“True. But we never talked politics. You realize the police are anti-Semitic?”

“I don’t much like them but it’s nice to feel at home from time to time.”

“Home?”

“What did I say?”

“Home. This is your home, now.”

“It is. But I suppose if you’ve lived somewhere all your life, it’s bound to rub off. The Germans here, you’d think that Germany would be the last place they think of as home…”

“But they can’t stop going on about how bloody wonderful Berlin was. Don’t I know it.”

“Meier on the kibbutz said that people can’t live without the past.”

“Bollocks. The future, Evelyn. Keep your eyes fixed on the future and you won’t go far wrong. If you’re walking down the street which direction do you look in? Where you’re going, of course. And if you walk backwards? You get run over.”

“That’s true. But do you never think about the war?”

“No. Why should I? It’s over. Finished. That part of my life is done.”

“By the way, what do you do for a living, Johnny?”

“Me? I’m a tailor.”

Before he left he kissed me tenderly on the cheek and asked if he could come again to see me the following day. Perhaps we’d go to a film, now the picture houses were open again.

He’s a very simple man, I thought. He’s like a Bauhaus building, straightforward.

I
MET him at eight in a café at the junction of Allenby Road and Rehov Ben Yehuda, just before Allenby took a sharp turn down to the beach. Outside, a small chamber orchestra sat on folding chairs on the pavement playing Mozart and Strauss waltzes. It was composed of four men in suits and ties and a woman in an antique black cocktail dress from before the war, cut on the bias. Their faces, bent over their instruments, dripped with sweat. One of the violinists stroked the wood of his instrument between pieces, as if he was afraid it would buckle beneath his fingers in the heat. Johnny was inside, under a noisy electric fan, eating apple strudel.

“Who are they?”

“From Budapest. They were with the symphony orchestra. You know what they used to say ten years ago? Anyone who arrived off the boat without a violin case was presumed to be a pianist. Here, I’ve got something for you.” He passed an envelope to me under the table. “Don’t look now.”

“What is it?”

“A passport.”

“I’ve got a passport.”

“Yes. In your own name. This one is made out to Priscilla Jones. You might need it.”

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“Connections. Get a photograph taken and stick it in. What film do you want to see? I prefer action pictures. Is there anything on like that?”

He didn’t want me to ask too many questions. Okay. In England I might have dismissed him as a spiv but here, in Palestine, under British occupation, as far as I was concerned he was a hero. A
Jewish
hero and how many do we have of those? How many tough guys have there ever been to look up to? A few fish with sharp teeth swimming in an ocean of vegetable life—old men with beards, bent over their books.

I looked at the films listed in the paper, as the quintet entered, for the third time, the Vienna Woods. It was all just sentimental love stories so we settled for
The Picture of Dorian Gray
with Hurd Hatfield, Donna Reed and Peter Lawford. I liked Hatfield, he was darkly handsome and I’d seen him in
Dragon Seed
the year before. We left the café and I put some piastres into the tweed cap on the pavement next to the woman in the cocktail dress. She smiled at me, sweat dripping down her bosom.

In the cinema, Johnny didn’t understand the film at all and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“What was that about?” he asked me as the curtains closed.

“Double identity,” I said. “But really it’s about the unconscious, the idea that we have a self, one part of which we are conscious of and keep control over, and another interior life which is wayward and even dark.”

“Do you believe that stuff?”

“Yoohoo,” an English voice cried out from a couple of rows behind as we got up to leave. It was Mrs. Mackintosh and her husband.

We were jostled by crowds out on to the street and nearly lost them but they appeared again, at my shoulder.

“Lovely to see you, Priscilla. And you must be Sergeant Jones,” she said to Johnny.

“That’s me,” he replied, with what I thought was a faint trace of a Welsh accent. Everyone shook hands. Mackintosh’s was dry, like old parchment.

“So you obtained your leave, at long last,” Mrs. Mackintosh said. “I’m
so
glad.”

“Yes, and it couldn’t have come too soon for both of us. I’ve missed the old girl, I can tell you.” He gave my hand a squeeze.

“Did you enjoy the film?” asked Inspector Mackintosh.

“Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Double Dutch to me, sir.”

“Tony was just saying he doesn’t believe in double identity,” I said, trying not to giggle.

“Not unless we’re talking spies. You must have to deal a lot with aliases and that sort of thing when you’re fighting crime. Up in Tiberias I’m arresting people for riding their camels on the wrong side of the road and the odd kibbutz boy who’s got too handy with a rifle.” I looked at Johnny, he was smiling slightly.

“Yes. We do. And we’re not helped by the fact the locals speak so many languages,” Mackintosh replied. “You can’t get the nationalities straight at all. Where they come from, I mean. Some of them can switch between Russian and Polish and Yiddish. And German, too, if the poor
devils have been unfortunate enough to have been in German hands. They’re the worst, I’m afraid. Absolutely unscrupulous.”

“You see in their religion they don’t have our idea of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek,” his wife told us. “It’s utterly foreign to them.”

“English is all I know,” Johnny said. “My grandma spoke Welsh but all that mumbo jumbo’s finished with now. English is the language of the empire.”

“For as long as it lasts,” Mackintosh said sadly and put his hands in his pockets.

“Well, nice seeing you again,” I said. “Let’s meet up again soon.”

“Yes, a beach picnic would be lovely,” Mrs. Mackintosh replied. “And one day you must come to us, for tea. You should see my garden. I’m having quite a success with my roses this year.”

“He’s a sad type, that Mackintosh,” Johnny said, as we walked off.

“In what way?”

“He’s reached the end of the line and he knows it. A lot of them here have no idea—
no idea
what’s coming. They don’t know what’s going to hit them. They’re going to lose that empire of theirs. India’s going independent. Africa will too, eventually. Britain’s going to be on its own, just a little insignificant speck on the map. And chaps like him, loyal servants and all that, men with a sense of duty, there’ll be no place for them. They’re finished.”

“But we won the war.”

“Come off it. The Americans did. And the Russians. The game’s theirs now. They’ll divide the whole shooting match up between them. No. Face it, Britain’s had it. People like us are the future, people who are quick-witted and know how to reinvent ourselves in a flash. You’ll see.” He whistled a Glenn Miller tune as we walked along the street.

That night we became lovers. Who seduced whom? We seduced each other. He reached his hand up to touch my face and I took it and kissed it. His hand, shaking, lay on my breast and I unfastened the buttons of his shirt. He said, “You’re so very beautiful and so all alone. I want to look after you.” He unhooked my brassiere and my breasts were under his fingers. They were new breasts then. His body was brown and perfect except for a scar on his upper arm where he had been injured by flying debris when the Canadians had bombed their own side by mistake during the Palermo landings. I kissed the scar.

Is there anything sweeter in the world than to lie with your head on the chest of your lover, smoking cigarettes after you have made love and for the first time understood why people do this, all over the world? And there is no greater aphrodisiac: sex with someone you love, which annihilates all
the potions of powdered horn and root which by sympathetic magic are supposed to imitate the phallic shapes they resemble. Was I in love with him already? Perhaps. I loved the way that he could deceive the British and play with them but inside he knew exactly who he was.

I loved also the way he accepted people at their own estimation of themselves, whatever that may be and didn’t try to guess their motives. “Life is too short to analyze the psyche,” he would say. “All I need to do is to know myself, and him I know very well indeed. I have no curiosity about other people. They will tell you soon enough what you want to know. You know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy without examining their subconscious. The signs are all there, on the surface.”

I didn’t agree, but as he pointed out, he had got by long enough on this simple philosophy and unlike others perhaps better and wiser than himself had survived five years of war and another year resisting the colonial presence of the British. Who was I to tell him that he was wrong? Perhaps we do not need to know each other after all. Perhaps our compulsion to tell each other our stories is no more than talkativeness and we would be better left in our silences, each with our own essential mystery. Though God knows how you’re going to sell that one to the Jews.