When I Lived in Modern Times (23 page)

I went everywhere. The zoo was gone. It had once been on the edge of town but then it was swallowed up by the neighborhood that came to surround it, whose residents complained of the noise and the smells. It was relocated, as a kind of safari park, somewhere. The Galina café where the young mothers of Tel Aviv ate ice cream in the afternoon with their babies and the Yekkes sat on the sand was gone too. Demolished the previous year. “It was in a terrible state,” Mrs. Linz said. “Neglect, as usual. It was best to put it out of its misery.”

“How strange that the most emphatically optimistic architecture ever built should have had such a short life span.”

Mrs. Linz shrugged. “I know. And we were building with an
idea
,” she said.

“It will be the end of the century, soon, the Jewish century.”

“Oh, I can’t stand labels.”

“But it
was
the Jewish century—the century when the Jews left eastern Europe and the masses went to America and entered modern life and made their contribution to the creation of the American identity. The century of the Holocaust but also of Einstein and Schoenberg and Hollywood and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and…”

“You don’t read those dreadful people, do you?”

“Of course.”

“
Ostjuden.
Like Amos Oz and David Grossman. Particularly Oz, one of those weavers of the founding myths of Zionism.”

“Well, what do you read?”

“English literature, the greatest in the world. William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston.”

“Mrs. Linz, they’re Irish.”

“It is the same thing. Anyway, I hope to live to see the next century and let’s hope it is another kind altogether, one without labels.”

Some hope.

One day, in 1947 in the city of Nice, I had walked through a high, wrought-iron gate in a stone wall on a kind of escarpment above the old town which you reached by a lift in a tunnel. It was very calm up there, with the red roofs below me and the birds singing sweetly and the dome of the Negresco Hotel, where the rich people stayed, glittering in the sunlight. For years to come I would wake up from a dream of that cemetery, of the snowcapped mountains and the blue sky and the glimpses of the sea below, the cypresses and the umbrella pines.

I walked on across the hill. The port was below me. I felt the roughness of a wall abrade my skin as I touched it. I came to a gate and on it a sign said that this was
Le Cimetière israelite.
Just inside some men were constructing a mausoleum. The sweat was on their backs.

“What’s this?” I asked one of the laborers, in my girls’-school French. It nearly came out as Hebrew.
Mah zeh?

For the Israelites killed in Poland, they told me. The Society of Israelites had urns ready. They were going to put in ashes from the crematoriums. The laborer lowered his voice. And bars of soap.

A man was walking through the cemetery. He was watching me. He saw me looking at another tombstone, a few feet away from him. He was watching my mouth move silently as I read. He was trying to make out what I was saying to myself and as he read my lips the words formed in his mind as Hebrew. So he walked over to me. I looked up, startled.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Evelyn Sert,” I said.

“Are you a Jewess?”

“Yes.”

He was my future husband. His name was Leopold, but I called him Leo.

The British officials in Cairo had handed me—“under instructions from Jerusalem”—a passport in the name of Evelyn Sert, with a notice pasted inside indicating that the bearer was prohibited from entering Palestine. And a very small amount of cash. Mrs. Bolton had boarded an airplane bound for London. We did not say good-bye. I took a third-class berth on a ship to Marseilles.

The engines were beating the waters but I was oblivious, asleep, inert, shell-shocked.

I was remembering my first home. How, when I was a child, I would come back from school sometimes when my mother was working at the salon and wander through our little rooms piled on top of each other in the higgledy-piggledy eighteenth-century flat. I would watch the weak sunshine that made its way over the roofs opposite to penetrate our sash windows and lie in pools on our carpet with its repeating pattern of thornless roses. The silver-plate coffee set, tarnished from too much polishing; the Russian samovar which Uncle Joe had bought my mother; the china dish of fading rose petals; and in a glass-fronted display cabinet like Blum’s her collection of Dresden china figurines which she saved up for, with her tips from the salon. How many? Twenty? I’d never counted. She had shepherdesses, a pierrot, a rustic youth. When I was a child they were my friends. I gave them names and invented stories for them. I
paired some of them off as sweethearts. As I grew older they seemed shallow and sentimental, striking fixed poses with their little china arms.

But they were what I thought of on the ship that took me away from Palestine, my mother’s face floating into my mind, as it always would in the years to come when the weather was cold or I was lonely and longed to be a child again. I was at the center of the universe in the middle of all the slightly grubby chintz domesticity, where my mother had built one nest of seduction and allure for her lover and another of safety and love for me.

That place of refuge was where I lived for the first part of the voyage. I thought I would stay like that forever and that they would land me on the shore and I would be a vagrant, a derelict person crying in the sunshine. I painted myself thus, in my mind’s eye, a grossly pregnant woman who was also one atom of the flotsam and jetsam of postwar Europe.

But Palestine had taught me something, the hardest lesson: that there is no choice but to act, to take charge of your life. You can indulge your inertia only so far and then you have to snap out of it. In the end you
must
do something. From then on, I thought about nothing but my situation, driven into exile on the very eve of the Return. What to do? What to do?

I lived on my wits and on the tough kibbutz survival skills I had been taught plus a large bottle of Guerlain’s Shalimar which I slathered myself with every morning. I stole the perfume from a shop in the rue du Suede. I remembered Uncle Joe’s maxim: “The only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you are skint.” I was reassembling my femininity but it was hard because my hair was so very short. It was almost like Jean Seberg’s in
A bout de souffle
, but that was ten years in the future. I looked like I might have just come out of a camp, except I wasn’t thin.

After we met, in the cemetery, Leo took me to lunch at an expensive restaurant on the Promenade des Anglais.

I told him a story, then he told me his. He was a great talker, Leo, not in an argumentative way, not like the Jews who, as the old joke has it, if you bring three together you have ten opinions. No, he was a
descriptive
talker, a user of adjectives and other embellishments which I’d forgotten about in Palestine where verbs were the thing, verbs. The doing words.

As I listened I was watching him. I saw the well-pressed suit, the formal knot in his tie and the way he counted his change twice and carefully calculated the percentage of the gratuity, not, I surmised, because he was mean, but because he was precise. I looked at his face. He was a small, slightly built man but with a certain elegance of figure. He was a Jew from Berlin who went to America in the 1930s, a violinist in one of
the studio orchestras, playing on the soundtrack of the movies. That’s him you hear on “Some Enchanted Evening” if you’ve ever seen
South Pacific.

He was lonely and looking for love. He was a reader of the bittersweet fictions of Stefan Zweig. Another Yekke, but one whose backbone was not ideas but romanticism. I thought, “I can handle him.”

He asked if we could meet again the next day and I said yes.

I only slipped up once with him during our whirlwind courtship, and that was a few days later when we lunched again at the same restaurant.

As we admired the flames of the crêpe suzette the waiter brought us for dessert, there was a stir. Forks and knives clattered down on to the table. We both looked up.

Entering the salon, carried on two petite limbs, was some sort of a fairy tale: meters and meters of sea-green grosgrain, gathered and tucked and artfully diverted into a frock reminiscent of another time and century when women had nothing to do all day except ornament society.

“You’re staring at that dress as if you’ve never seen anything like it before,” he said. And indeed the expression on my face, at that moment, must have been overwhelming bewilderment. Totally unbeknownst to me, while the Jews of Palestine were into the final stages of their life-and-death struggle against the British for their future and I was sitting among old newspapers on the dusty floor of Neve Tzedek, in Paris Christian Dior had turned the clock back fifty years and launched what quite paradoxically came to be known as the New Look and this was the very first example to have reached the Riviera. He had restored to women what they had craved for so long during the bleak years of rationing and aerial combat. Their femininity. And you know, I was as enthralled and enraptured as anyone else.

So something passed into history for me, at lunch in that restaurant in Nice in March 1947—the brief moment in my life when I had been privileged to live in modern times.

It wasn’t hard to get Leo into bed, not hard at all. At first I made a mistake by being too forward, by undressing, instead of allowing myself to be undressed. I had to unlearn everything about the hotness of passion and become a kind of courtesan. I had to learn the very thing that my mother had known and that I had dismissed as being old-fashioned, and it was allure, because that is what attracted Leo.

What is that? What is the eternal feminine that men love so much? Silence. Mystery. We are blank canvases onto which they can project their fantasies and women who are successful in love understand this intuitively. The magazines tell you “be yourself” but nothing is further from the truth. Be the self
they
want you to be and yet always let them
know you preserve something inside that they can never quite capture, that eludes them, because men are hunters and it is the thrill of the chase that excites them. All you have to do is figure out what the fantasy is, and you have caught them. My mother knew it. I learned it in a single day, watching Leo, listening to him. That’s what being a good listener means. They talk, you calculate.

He smoked small cheroots and inspected the gleam on his shoes when the shoeshine boy returned them to him. He fussed over ties and shirts. He took his money out of his trouser pockets and made neat little piles of the change on the dresser. But he was a good man, I could see that at once.
He
would never lose his temper and cry out
Ostjude!

He said my body puzzled him. He didn’t understand the long, brown well-muscled legs and the curvaceous stomach and the heavy breasts. He said I was a paradox. I had a narrow scrape when a vendeuse in a dress shop he took me to, to buy me some frocks, said, “But madame is tanned! Have you come from the colonies?”

He moved me into his hotel. Every morning he read aloud to me from the newspaper. “Listen to this,” he said, excitedly. “The British in Palestine have decided to wash their hands of the place. They’ve said that the Mandate is unworkable. They’re handing it over to the United Nations to resolve. They’re preparing to pull out.” He shook his head, smiling. “All over the world little guys are challenging big guys. It’s amazing. Do you know what I should do? I’ve a good mind to drop everything and just go there and fight.”

I smiled to hear this. Leo in Palestine, his exquisite sensibility grappling with the appalling heat and the shortages, the curfews, the searches. Leo in the Irgun! He would be paralyzed by indecision.

“Oh!” I cried. “Do you plan to desert me?”

And he reached across the table and took my hand for a moment and looked at me, meltingly.

All this calculation was going on in my brain but somewhere else I was frozen like the winter that had gripped Europe.

One evening, walking along the Promenade des Anglais under a clear and starry sky, he suddenly turned to me and asked, “Evelyn, are you pregnant?”

I gasped. “Why do you say that?”

“I was just looking at you as you walked beside me, in silhouette, in that white dress. And now your face is very white, under the moon.”

“Yes. I am.”

“But it’s only been three weeks. Surely…”

“No. You’re right. I was pregnant when I met you, I didn’t know, though. I have only known for a few days.”

He was silent. And summoning every atom of the Jewish will to survive against all the odds, I said this, which I had been preparing for some days: “The transgression wasn’t against you, it was against myself. After my parents were killed I was so lonely. Everyone was affected by the war, I wasn’t the only one to lose someone, but it was different for me, I had no one left. I met someone. I had a great yearning—for a purposeful life and for happiness. I had a yearning for motherhood. I wanted a child at my breast, I wanted to watch a child growing up in a family that loved it, as I was loved. I wanted someone to love me but it was a child whose love I craved.

“I chose a father for that child. I allowed my body to be embraced by his, though I shuddered with repulsion when I did so. I realized that he would always be a stranger to me, because I didn’t love him and never could. Nonetheless, we married. My baby will not be illegitimate. This is my husband’s child. Seven weeks ago he died. His heart gave out at the age of twenty-six. There was a weakness there all along.

“And even when he died, I didn’t love him because you don’t choose love, it chooses you. I came to France to recover my equilibrium and I met the man I should have met first.
You
are the one I was looking for. You are the one who should have fathered my baby. Even if my husband were still alive, it would be you I was unfaithful to, if I let him kiss or touch me. Life has taken its revenge on me. I shouldn’t have been so headstrong, I should have waited. I should have waited for you. And now I’m waiting for the sentence you will pass on me.”