When I Lived in Modern Times (13 page)

W
HAT did I
really
want to know about Johnny? Well, he stayed in my apartment two or three nights a week and sometimes I wondered what he did with the rest of his time, but not all that hard. All I was really interested in was whether or not there was another girlfriend somewhere. That he worked in a back room in the Florentin district making suits I knew because he told me. He would get on the Norton every morning after spending the night with me and disappear off down the street, blowing sand around his wheels. He never
wore
a suit, but then not many Palestinians did. It was a casual country. Who did he make them for?

“People.”

“What people?”

“The British. They come out here with tweed and worsted and they have to have something lightweight for the climate.”

“Who else?”

“Evelyn, this is boring. My work doesn’t interest me. It’s what I do to earn money. My father got me into it before the war when he realized I was never going to make a civil servant. He found jobs for all of us.”

“How many are there of you?”

“Nine.”

“Nine? That’s a
huge
family.”

“I suppose so.”

“Where do you come in? Are you one of the youngest or one of the oldest?”

“Second youngest. I have a younger sister. But I was always the baby because there was a big gap between me and the next one up.”

“What’s it like to grow up with so many relatives?”

“Like being a member of an army. I have eleven uncles and aunts by blood and more cousins than I can count. For my brothers’ and sisters’ birthdays I make them a shirt. I put darts in the chest if it’s a sister. That’s it. I use whatever color material comes to hand.”

“Will you make me a shirt?”

“Yes, if you want. But it will be like a kibbutz shirt, not fashionable.”

“I’d like it if it was made by you.”

“Give me a week.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll need your measurements.”

“I don’t know what they are anymore. I’m bigger since I came to Palestine. Not fat, more muscle, I think.”

He looked at me and sized me up. “Like a girl should be, sturdy. I don’t like these thin little English girls with no chests and skinny little arms. They don’t know how to eat. I want something I can grab hold of in bed.”

And all this time I carried on cutting and setting hair at the salon and listening to the shallow chatter of my customers. I tried to explain to Johnny that I could only retain an interest in hairdressing by regarding it as an extension of what I had picked up in the office where I started to learn commercial art: as the arrangement of forms and masses within a given canvas. Or was it a kind of sculpting of a portion of the human form with hair as the plastic material? Dyeing became for me a means of working with color. Instead of mixing oils on a palette, I would painstakingly form an amalgamation of different chemicals which in the bottle would look like no more than a muddy brown but, if the manufacturers had got the formula right, would produce the desired effect—blond, brunette, auburn. With paint, what you saw on your palette and dipped your brush into would be much the same color on the surface to which you applied it. Not so with hair dye, for hair is a living substance (emerging from the part of ourselves which is closest to the brain) so the principles of hairdressing were those of uncertainty and experimentation based, if one had it, on a sound chemical knowledge of the structure of the hair and what affected its disposition—to be straight or curly, pale or dark, thick or thin.

As well as being a minor art form, hairdressing was a far more dangerous and exact science than painting. I was regularly daubing the heads of my ladies with chemicals like hydrogen peroxide which has a tendency to decompose and suddenly explode if not stored under the correct conditions. In fact, if you thought about it in a certain way, the storeroom of a hairdressing salon more closely resembles in its potential for the damage it can inflict a small, backroom bomb factory.

“Good,” Johnny said. “If I need to make a bomb in a hurry I know where to come. To Mrs. Kulp’s ladies’ hairdressing salon on Shenkin Street. Now I’ve heard everything.”

I tried to convince him that there was
something
serious in hairdressing. During my schoolgirl visits to the National Gallery, as well as decoding the symbols contained in a lily lying on the floor and representing trampled purity, or a skull reminding us of our mortality, I would look at the changing hairstyles in the pictures. But the understanding of what the profession really was came to me not in a museum, nor in the Regent Street salon itself, but during the journey to Palestine when I sat on the deck turning the pages of the book that Uncle Joe had given me, in which I learned for the first time to think like a modernist, to look for the fault lines between the present and the past, the place where ruptures took place.

My mother, when she had cut herself off from her family and rendered invisible those old people in their beards with their nostalgic yearning for the previous century and its certainties, had considered hairdressing to be a very
modern
job. But as her own mother had, according to ritual observance, shaved her head and worn a wig, it occurred to me that once, in every town of a reasonable size in the Jewish world of eastern Europe, there must have been wig-makers. And those men, or even women, perhaps, had gathered the hair in great bags and then styled it into headpieces which their wearers would never remove, for the whole of their lives. Presumably they must have had to have their own hair regularly shorn, though my mother thought that hers had done the job herself, alone in the bedroom in the afternoons, hacking it off with kitchen scissors.

“Yeah,” said Johnny. “I remember my grandmother did the same.”

“Did you know that it was only after the exile that Orthodox women began to crop their hair and wear wigs when they got married, which makes me wonder if, now that we’re on the brink of achieving a national home, the practice can be discontinued? It’s just a Diaspora thing.”

“Good point,” Johnny said.

I told him that there had never been a time in human history when people didn’t pay the greatest attention to their hair and its adornment, that it had always been how people marked their rank, trade or sex. For reasons I could not fathom, the religious authorities had, through the ages, imagined that the sight of what was sometimes known as a woman’s “crowning glory” was likely to inflame men’s passions. I did not say that it had once occurred to me that this might be because the hair of the head made a silent reference to another growth of hair about which men were not supposed to think and which, to this day—when bosoms and legs and bottoms have all been accentuated by prevailing fashions—has never been allowed to be exposed. Though my mother combed hers and applied a light oil to make it glossy which I knew because I saw her doing it, just
once, when she came from the bath, her legs spread apart as she sat on the closed lid of the WC, her skin pink and wrapped in an emerald green Chinese robe with red-tongued dragons.

“It’s interesting how a bottle of dye can turn you from one thing into another,” Johnny was saying. “Just that little bottle and you fool them.”

“I wonder if I sometimes fool myself, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m with the British and they treat me as if I’m British I
feel
British, not a Jew at all. If I have a passport in the name of this Priscilla Jones, who’s to say I’m someone else, apart from myself? I mean if I suffered from some form of amnesia and forgot completely that I was Evelyn Sert who would I be then?”

These questions puzzled me but they did not interest Johnny. He shrugged. “I know who I am,” he said. “It’s not a problem.”

Looking at him, I was reminded of those pages in the book that discussed the cubist portraits of Picasso. By showing the human face as a series of disjointed planes and angles, Picasso had demonstrated that who or what a person was depended entirely on your point of view. The new way of looking at things, apparently, reflected the relativity of the Einsteinian science and of the age we lived in which lacked a single, unifying truth or belief but saw life as fragmented and discontinuous. And this, perhaps, was the difference between Johnny and me, for he merely wore a mask which deliberately set out to deceive, behind which he clearly knew who he was, while I seemed to contain several selves and each of these seemed to me as valid as the next.

But I couldn’t talk to Johnny about any of it. It was impossible to get him interested in ideas and perhaps that was part of his attraction. He simplified everything so that the way in front of us was clear, undivided and without mystery. To live, one needed nothing but common sense and native wit. “There is a
natural
way of doing things,” he would tell me. “Only follow the natural way and you will never get into trouble. Don’t think too much. Just do it.”

Drinking lemonade on the balcony, I told Johnny all about Mrs. Paget-Knight and we marveled at the mentality of people who could send their children away from them at the age of six, though I wondered if the communally owned babies of the kibbutz did not grow up with the same air of detachment. If their matter-of-fact attitude to sex was based on some inability to conceive of intimacy with another and if they would ever be capable of falling in love, which is after all a form of possession. I had talked to Johnny before about life on the kibbutz and of free love and of the ideas of Bertrand Russell but he thought that they were rubbish.

“A man wants a woman for himself and vice versa. Anything else is like borrowing a library book. Look at you, alone in the world. Why should you be a library book? No. You want a home. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come to Eretz Israel. You
are
home, Evelyn.”

So with Johnny all the complicated ideas were made easy and living in the present tense was reduced to a few energetic necessities—making love and making war. I leaned across and kissed him and pushed my tongue into his mouth and bit his lip. He unbuckled the belt on his khaki trousers while I undid the buttons on his khaki shirt. I took my own blouse off and he unfastened my brassiere and held the weight of my breasts in his hands. Soon we were down on the floor of the square white box that was my living room, writhing, making the beast with two backs and our lovemaking tousled my platinum blond hair.

One morning I woke out of a pleasant dream. Johnny and I were walking through an orange grove together. He reached up and picked a fruit for me, straight from the tree and peeled it and put the segments into my mouth. My tongue broke their outer skins and the juice ran down my throat. I looked at my hands and I saw my veins run orange. The sun shone mildly and we walked on, to the sea. The sand was white and abundant. We walked into the waves, fully clothed and stood on tiptoe, submerged beneath the surface and when we got out we were dry at once. It was odd and funny and inconsequential. A good dream and I reached across and touched Johnny awake to tell him about it.

He looked at me blankly, his eyes still sticky with sleep. “Does this have a point, this story?”

“No. It was just a nice dream. What do you dream about?”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“I don’t dream.”

“Of course you do.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Never?”

“Never. I have never had a dream in the whole of my life. I have my dream when I’m awake. The dream of Betar winning the cup.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It is to me.”

“What happens when you go to sleep?”

“Nothing. I’m asleep.”

“Didn’t you have dreams when you were a child?”

“No, never. Listen, I exhaust myself during the day. I go to bed, I’m unconscious until I get up. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. This dream you tell me you just had, why should I envy you for that? I’m glad I don’t have to deal with such chaos every night.”

“But dreams are messages from our subconscious.”

“I don’t believe in the subconscious. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t believe in it. It’s neurotic, the product of a mind that is confused and conflicted and doesn’t see things as they should be. You give me a problem and I can solve it. I don’t think there is any problem so big that I’m not capable of finding a solution if I apply my brain to it. I don’t worry about it, I don’t have anxiety, I don’t brood. It’s like repairing the Norton. Everything is straightforward if you know how the machine was built. Everything has an internal structure which is visible to the naked eye and logical. In Eretz Israel, so help me God, there will be no head doctors.”

“God?”

“A figure of speech. My father uses it a lot.”

“But you’re speaking as if the most important development in twentieth-century thought never existed.”

“What development is that?”

“The ideas of Freud. His understanding of the human mind. Look at its influence. Look at surrealism.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ve never heard of Salvador Dalí?”

“No. He sounds like Freud, another neurotic old-world type. What I know about Freud is this. He lived in Vienna at the turn of the century. The place was a nest of anti-Semites. No wonder people felt crazy. They had no fresh air to breathe. They were claustrophobic, frightened. It was the time of the Dreyfus case. There was hysteria against the Jews. The anti-Semites were the hysterics, not us, but they drove us to the same state as them. Head cases. Crackpots. Women with other women. Men with men. All unnatural. And Freud tells me I want to marry my mother. You haven’t seen my mother. She gave birth to nine children and her bosom is hanging down by her waist. My father can keep her. Now see what you’ve made me say. I insulted my own mother. That’s what Freud brings out in you.”