When I Lived in Modern Times (24 page)

He listened to my “confession” in silence. It was agony waiting for him to speak. Finally he said, “The child is mine. This other man will be forgotten. Let him rest in his grave in peace. Our life together will be tender. Come here, come to me.”

So I knew that he remembered the poem, for
of course
he would have played the music,
Verklärte Nacht
, which Blum had made me listen to one afternoon in the white city, when I thought I knew everything and how everything would turn out.

Instead of denouncing me, Leo had chosen to take the part assigned to him. “Why should the child you have conceived be a burden on your soul?” he whispered. “Why should I condemn and sentence you? There is only the heart that loves and suffers, this is all that matters.”

And as he kissed me, he later said, he felt the radiance fall on himself. Which was just as I’d planned.

It was a new twist on an old trick. Why did he fall for it? Why didn’t he smell a rat? Of course the poem was familiar to him but isn’t the very power of romance its familiarity, that we tell ourselves the same old stories over and over again? Is there any new way of saying anything that is to do with love? I don’t think so. The heart finds its familiar grooves and runs along them and the music emerges, the song of all time.

My daughter Naomi came to visit me in Tel Aviv, though reluctantly. She had grown up to be a girl with no interest in either art or music. She has a hard, analytical mind. She enjoys tricky sums and statistics and became a lecturer in international relations at the London School of Economics. I went to listen to her once, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. She hardly remembered anything of our time in America, before her brother died and Leo turned his back on California and brought us to London.

I had thought she and Mrs. Linz might get on, for Mrs. Linz votes for any communist candidate she can find or else for members of the Arab lists. Once a week, with her stick, she takes the bus to Jerusalem and makes her way to the office of the human-rights organization where despite the painful stiffness in her hands she types up Palestinian testimonies of the atrocities committed by our army. Heartrending stuff. She brings them home sometimes for me to read. I can’t stomach too much, it makes me sick to think anyone would do these things, especially a Jew. The Palestinians are themselves, of course, capable of equally ghastly deeds such as torture but, as the people I met from the camps had taught me, suffering very rarely ennobles. Primo Levi is the exception, not the rule.

Naomi, however, does not accept Mrs. Linz at her own estimation of herself. For the first time Mrs. Linz met her match.

“Mrs. Linz, do you not understand that you were doing
exactly
the same thing as the British?”

“Explain,” said Mrs. Linz, her arms folded across her chest.

“Colonialism assumed that it was bringing enlightenment to benighted peoples. You Zionists took exactly the same attitude to the Arab population, and of course to the Jews from North Africa and the East who followed. Your ideas are inherently colonial.”

“So we should have left them as they were, in their primitive darkness?”

“You should have respected their culture.”

“This was not a culture. Where was their music, their literature?”

“That is
your
idea of a culture.”

“Oh, you are a relativist and a reactionary. People like you make me sick, you post-modernists. You believe in nothing. You have no center.
Who are you? You have no idea. You think everything is the same, when it is not. Your generation never lived through evil times. One thing is not as good as another. If you wish to argue with someone, go and see my son the atomic scientist who in 1967 left Stanford University and came back to defend his country. Why? Was he a soldier? Of course not. He went to a kibbutz where the men had been mobilized to their units and he drove a tractor for the summer. The country was swollen with jubilation and
hideous
patriotism and everyone was so triumphant. It was ghastly. You could not get away from the
arrogance.
My son has brought together two ideas as dangerous as each other—nuclear weapons and right-wing Zionism. I could have rid myself of this child, in the womb, you know. There were people who could have performed the operation. I was mad not to have done so. It would have saved me and the rest of the world a lot of trouble.”

And so the argument went on as I stood at the balcony and watched the sun setting and thought of the pictures I used to paint of a street of long ago, and a ship sailing along the shore, its red and black funnels belching black smoke.

I wanted to say to Naomi (but knew that I was no match for her intellect), “Listen to me for a change. Don’t you understand that we have no choice but to live through the portion of history that is allotted to us?”

No one likes Tel Aviv. The tourists make their way from the airport straight to Jerusalem which has history, it has “soul.” I rarely go. I can’t stand the place. If Mrs. Linz had her way, she’d evacuate all the inhabitants of the Old City, blow up everything—the Wailing Wall, the churches, the Dome of the Rock—and build something useful, like a hospital. I agree with her.

Tel Aviv is dirty and chaotic but at least it’s alive, not a museum. Now that we’ve destroyed Beirut it is the only city left on this far Mediterranean coast that can really be called the Levant, a mongrel metropolis of aliens among aliens. By the bus station there’s a shanty town of illegal immigrants, mainly from Thailand and Romania. They’re not Jews. As far as they’re concerned, Israel is just another rich country, like any other. Which reminds me of that line from the Book of Jeremiah:
Behold, I will gather them from the North country, and gather them from the uttermost parts of the earth.
Maybe that has been the purpose of this place all along, to be a magnet for strangers.

Yesterday, I went to the Carmel Market to buy our fruit and vegetables and meat. I took the bus back up Ben Yehuda. The streets still smell mysterious to me and the palm trees still rustle above my head, the light seems a little older than it does in the suburbs. I could hear the sound of
the “Goldberg” Variations on Mrs. Linz’s CD player as I climbed the stairs.

Mrs. Linz unpacked the shopping. She showed me a letter that had come from America, from Blum’s grandson, a Seattle millionaire who made his fortune from the computer industry. He wants to do up our building, return it to its former glory. Already a few places have been restored around the top end of Bialik Street, at Idelson and Hess, and they stand out like a sore thumb in the brilliance of their whiteness. They make my heart judder when I see them. The past is always returning to us.

Johnny, for example, isn’t dead, he’s somewhere in the city right now. Perhaps I’ll bump into him one day, though it’s a bigger place than it used to be. Only a few weeks after our wedding Leo had looked up from his copy of the
Herald Tribune
which he scanned every morning for news from Palestine.

“Ha! Listen to this. An underground Jewish army has assaulted an apparently impregnable British citadel in the heart of a Jewish city. They have shot their way in and shot their way out taking all the Jewish prisoners with them and gone to ground.”

“What do you mean?”

“There has been, Evelyn, a mass breakout at Acre prison. All our freedom fighters are now at liberty, except for that poor boy Dov Gruner. It came too late for him.” He shook his head in sorrow and pity, for the British had hanged Dov the previous month.

As marriages go, mine turned out to be a successful one and only those who have never married themselves would ask if it were happy or unhappy. It was an accommodation, a partnership. It was a life not a love affair and there is a difference. Love affairs belong to the young or to those who don’t have a life, or not a proper one, at any rate. Leo and I had a life. But all those years, after I had been turned back on the brink of the great homecoming, mine was a heart in exile, a heart that is thwarted. The only consolation I can draw from this is the thought that perhaps the heart that has loved and suffered is the only one worth having, and Leo told me once of a talmudic saying, that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

When your child dies, something in your brain becomes dead flesh, you’re never whole again. My son—the son of Johnny and me—died at the age of six. He was killed by a balloon at his own birthday party. He was blowing it up when he stopped and took a breath. The balloon ran screaming down his throat, wrapped itself around his windpipe and in a minute or so he was dead. I was at the end of the garden, in my studio, when this happened, putting in a few more minutes to yet another painting of the white city and a strong wind howling on the sand of the seashore.
“What kind of mother is late for her own child’s birthday party?” I found that Naomi had written in her teenage diary.
“Mine.”

The death made Leo and me hard but in different ways. Both of us were in mourning for the dead child and we lit a candle in a glass for him, every year on the anniversary. Leo shook his fist at the heavens and cursed God. We looked around for someone to blame but we could find no one to pin it on but the Supreme Creator. There was no one else to bear a grudge against, no one to sue. Leo took on God as his personal adversary. “Look what he’s doing to us now,” he shouted, but I became the opposite. I was tired of hearing about the never-ending sorrows of the Jews. I watched the world go to war with Israel and time after time Israel always won.

If you think the world is out to get you, how can you
not
fight back?

Mrs. Linz ran into Johnny on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt in the early 1970s. “I recognized him at once, that terrorist boyfriend of yours. Well, I was wrong on one count. He did not meet an early grave. Instead he was serving tourists with drinks and plastic plates of kosher food with plastic knives and forks, running up and down the aisles, fastening people’s seat belts. Of course you know there was no advancement for that Irgun lot in the new Israeli army. Not at all, you had to have a documented record of resistance with the Haganah. Your terrorist boyfriend, I’m afraid, picked the wrong side. Of course, he was not intelligent. I realized this at once when I spoke to him at the back of the plane.

“He was terribly bewildered about his fate, how he had wound up like this. He said, ‘Mrs. Linz, you know as well as I do that things were done that weren’t pleasant, things that people don’t like to talk about now. How is it when they tell the story of the birth of Eretz Israel they tell it like there are only heroes with no blood on their hands? Only innocent people. I wasn’t innocent, I was no victim. I did the dirty work. Someone has to and why not me? But in five minutes they forgot about the dirty deeds and pretended they didn’t happen.’ Oh, he was very perplexed. But I looked him in the eye, standing there in his nice uniform and I said, ‘Don’t worry,
I
have not forgotten what you did.’ One day when he dies his wife will want a military funeral and the amusing thing is he will have to go to the British to get one, for that is who his military record is with.”

Tonight, when Mrs. Linz was watching a documentary on television, I went and took a chair out onto the balcony. I stepped out there gingerly. God knows how safe it is. The weather is warming up again. They built the city the wrong way around—the boulevards should have gone
down
to the shore, rather than running parallel to it, to force the air up into the
town. You can hardly get any breeze from the sea at all anymore, with the hotels blocking the way.

The bougainvillea was scrambling up over the cracks in the masonry. It’s an old plant, now. I don’t know what its roots are doing to the foundations of the building or how deep the foundations were dug in the first place. The whole structure feels unstable to me. A gust of heat hit my face, heat from the traffic, exhaust fumes.

What I wanted to do, more than anything in the world, was to see someone once more. Not Johnny, my old love, who has faded out of my recollection, as all passion fades in the end. No, the person I was dying to talk to was the girl who sailed the Mediterranean Sea in search of the Promised Land in all her hope and certainty. I went back into the apartment and found my handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes. I don’t smoke much these days, just one or two in the evenings once or twice a week, with my coffee. I love the smell of nicotine, especially when it’s mixed with other unpleasant odors like cooking fat and petrol and suntan oil and people’s sweat. It is the smell of chaos, of people grabbing life by the throat, a state of mind that has always charmed me.

I lit my cigarette with a lighter Leo gave me for our fifteenth wedding anniversary and I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, she was there, sitting opposite me, looking along the street.

I stared at myself, at the stiff curls and the terrible, thick red lipstick like wallpaper paste, the artless dab of rouge on the unlined skin with a spot or two round the mouth, the badly made clothes, and I smiled. My God, there have been so many improvements in hairdressing and cosmetics in the past half-century and of course we have the Jews to thank for that: Estée Lauder, Vidal Sassoon (who, as few people know, was one of the young Jews from the East End of London who made their way to Israel in 1948 to fight for the new country, proving that even hairdressers have their uses).

“Oh
you
,” she said.

“Yes. Me.”

“What a wasted life you have had,” she said, lighting her own cigarette. “I gave you such a good start. There was no reason why you could not have made your way back here
years
ago, but you lost the courage of your convictions.” There was an ashtray next to her full of stubs.

“Don’t smoke too much,” I said, “particularly that brand, they’re killers. I don’t think my life has been wasted.”

“What do you have to show for it?”

“Peace of mind. Intellectual pursuits. What is love? It’s nothing.

“No. It’s everything. How can you live without passion?”