When I Lived in Modern Times (8 page)

I wondered who he might be if I had access to him in his own language, if the idioms of the soldiers he had knocked about with for the past few years were gone and I could hear him speak in his original—his own—tongue.

The heat was receding. The mothers were standing up and shaking crumbs from their dresses and wiping ice cream from their fingers and straightening the thin sheets that covered their babies. They walked off, a line of them in colored cotton dresses, pink and powder blue and primrose yellow and green like my own, a box of sugared dragées on slim calves and ankles, making toward Ha Yarkon Street which ran along the shore. We got up and followed them. We skirted a barking dog by the café’s kitchen but it didn’t frighten me because I wasn’t alone. The sun was a red coin in the sky over the sea. The chimney of the power station at the end of the beach caught its light for a moment. The white walls of the houses gave out their own radiance.

J
OHNNY took me back and wished me good luck and from this I gathered that he didn’t want to make a date to see me again. I was surprised. I thought he liked me. We shook hands. I wanted to ask him everything: how I would find an apartment and a job and how I would make friends and what I could do to contribute to the establishment of the Zionist state. I wished I had asked him these things instead of imagining him undressed.

“Do you often drink here at the bar?” I asked him.

“Not unless I need to,” he said.

“Will I see you again?”

“It’s a small place, everyone bumps into everyone else eventually.” And I watched him drive off along the street in the deteriorating light.

I unpacked my suitcase and hung my clothes on hangers. I rested on the bed for what I thought would be a few minutes, fell into a doze and then into a sound sleep. When I woke, it was ten o’clock, it was stifling hot and I was very hungry for I had had nothing but cake and ice cream since the early morning kibbutz breakfast. I groaned and perspired and scratched a heat rash on my skin. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was red and shiny with sweat. My hair was a mess. A couple of flies banged into the walls.

The hotel’s dining room was closed. They had nothing to offer me. In the bar British officers were still drinking and the fish-eyed man was dead drunk. I resolved to go out and see what food I could find for myself. On the street I could her the sound of gramophones playing scratchy polkas near the seashore and people sat outside cafés turning their damp faces to catch the breeze. Crowds were surging along the pavements, an unceasing flow of humanity. The holy language that Moses spoke was a neon advertisement flashing above their heads, a film poster, a newspaper headline, a signpost to an amusement park or the beach.

Cake seemed to be the principal sustenance of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Netanya. The cafés sold many kinds: gateaux with cream, like the Belgians made in Soho; tortes from Vienna made with glazes of apricot jam; cheesecakes from Poland and Russia; and tiny syrupy, flaky things, decorated with small green nuts. All these you could have at any time of the day or night in Tel Aviv and it was said that if the Messiah was ever to return to the Holy Land he would have to go to the cafés to deliver his message to the people.

I sat down next to a table full of Germans. The waiter seemed to think that they occupied too much space, morose and discontented as they were, demanding glasses of water and complaining about the quality of the one cup of coffee which they managed to make last most of the evening, refusing to have the cup cleared away in case they were required to purchase something else. I knew this type from Soho, where they were, to some extent, indulged by kind hearts. In Tel Aviv, however, they were not considered exotic or even strangers. They were the crowd.

They were arguing amongst themselves. Or rather what had begun, as far as I could make out, as an intellectual discussion in which the names of Attlee, Ben-Gurion, Kafka, Macbeth and Carl Jung were mentioned, seemed to have degenerated into a squabble, perhaps over money, for one of them threw his wallet onto the table and held it upside down to demonstrate its utter emptiness. He was a short, thin balding man in a blue worsted suit. His tie was stained and a smell of stale sweat came off him.

I was trying to inquire in my limited Hebrew whether there was anything savory to eat but the waiter spoke English and so we reverted to that. No, he said. I could have cheesecake. It was nourishing. I ordered a slice.

The man with the empty wallet leaned over and asked where I was from.

“I’ve just come from Galilee.”

“No, no. The
country.
Where were you born, madam?”

“London.”

His face lit up. He turned to the other men and spoke to them in German. Some smiled, some scowled. “May I join you for a moment?” I could see no polite means of refusing. “I welcome the opportunity to talk to a civilized individual. My friends bore me. Their company is incessant.”

He wanted to know about the London theater and named particular actors and actresses whom he admired, mainly from before the war.

“I never was in London,” he said, “but the culture is beyond dispute. They say that Tel Aviv is like a symphony. If it is we’re still tuning up. I am surrounded by
Ostjuden.
“

“Who?”

“Jews from the East. Poland. Russia. That sort of place. Very primitive people really, peasants or just a generation removed. Rural middlemen, or else slum dwellers in the cities.” He held out his hands in a gesture I couldn’t read because it wasn’t English.

“My mother’s family came from Latvia,” I told him coldly. “So I am
Ostjuden.
”

“Really?” He looked me up and down. “Then I’m surprised. You seem quite cultured.”

“What was your profession in Germany?”

“I was a lawyer.”

“Do you practice law here?”

“No.” He sat up straight with his hands clasped in front of him on the table. His fingers had a number of nicks or small cuts on them. “The law I knew about—Weimar law—no longer exists.”

“What do you do?”

He smiled, but it did not soften his face, it merely broke it up into irregular sections. “I mend fractured hearts, the shattered hearts of children.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Of a sort. But not human flesh and blood. I stand in a back room in a street off the Allenby Road and repair dolls and when my work is done the little girls who come to pick up their toy, their friend, dry their tears for their doll is better. I do not smile quite as readily for they pay me a pittance.”

And this was the fate of the educated Germans who came to Palestine. They thought they had found a road to freedom but it was a cul-de-sac. He told me about the other men at the table. “Bloomingfeld, here, a banker in Vienna but in his spare time he practiced a little conjuring for the entertainment of his children. Now he is Bloomingfeld, the King of the Magicians. He is a headline act in the music halls of Haifa. Gutsman has done the best of all of us. In Hamburg he imported furniture from France. Here he is a French polisher and in considerable demand.” And so he went round the table cataloguing the little indignities of his friends, and if I learned anything during my time in Palestine it was that it is one thing to survive, quite another to survive intact, and this was the second lesson I was to receive in a class which had begun that evening on the kibbutz when I met the nearly drowned men and was surprised not to find them pleasant or polite or compassionate.

The man from the doll’s hospital was named Herr Blum. He wanted to meet me for coffee the next day and talk to me of literature and art and
music, but I fobbled him off with an excuse. I was sorry that they should have come undone, but they were creatures of the past and I was facing forward to the future. Also, I was worried that he might start touching me for money, and I had none to spare for him.

The Jews of Palestine called Blum and his friends Yekkes, which was the word for jacket because however hot it was they never stripped to their shirtsleeves. They formed a somber formal presence in the country and were badly out of place in the clear, unforgiving Mediterranean light but later I understood that the word was also a pun, an acronym of
Yehudi Kashe Havanah
—a Jew who has difficulty understanding. And indeed the Yekkes never did understand the country it was their fate to find their refuge in for if, by their names and by the racial calculations of the Nuremberg Laws, they were Jews, in their hearts and their minds they were Germans.

I noticed some gaudily dressed women lurking about and because I had grown up in Soho I knew exactly who and what they were and assumed that they were Arab girls because in the endeavor to build the new Jew from the ground up in our new home we would not, of course, be needing Jewish prostitutes.

“Why does everyone sit outdoors in cafés?” I asked.

“Because it is too hot to remain inside, of course. We sit by the sea trying to catch the breeze.”

“It’s not what I expected.”

“What is not what you expected?”

“Palestine.”

“Nothing is what anyone expects.
Especially
Palestine. That’s life. Or life as I have found it. Where do you stay?”

“The Gat Rimon Hotel.”

He leaned forward and there was a yellow glint in his eyes. “You have the money to pay for it?”

“I have some money, yes.”

“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in an apartment?”

“Of course, but I don’t have one and don’t know how to find one.”

“Would you like me to assist you?”

“Is that possible?”

“Certainly, though there will, of course, be an accommodation.”

“You mean a fee?”

“Yes. A finder’s fee.”

“Which will be how much?”

“Twenty pounds.”

“Absurd.”

“Ten.”

“Two.”

“Five.”

“It still seems exorbitant.”

“Look behind you. What do you see? Many apartments. Which of these needs a tenant? Do you know? No, you don’t. I know. The men are come back from the war. They get wives. They get children. They have to have a place to live. You think you are the only person to need an apartment? No, you are not.
Everyone
does. And I can find you one.”

“Do you have a wife?”

“No. No wife. I had one, and children.”

“Were they…?”

“No. We divorced in 1936. She went to America with her sister and brother-in-law and my son and daughter. Why has the conversation taken this turn? Why do you ask such impertinent questions, miss?”

“Never mind. Please excuse me. What kind of an apartment is available? Where is it?”

“On Mapu Street, off Ha Yarkon, just behind us. Very nice. Only ten years old. All the modern conveniences.”

“When can I view it?”

“Tomorrow morning, if you like.”

“What will the rent be?”

“The rents are fixed by the District Committee. They are unalterable. However, you may wish to offer the owner a consideration of some kind. To be paid weekly. And a deposit.”

“Why, if the rents are fixed?”

“You ask too many questions. I find you unduly inquisitive which is not attractive in a young girl. If you wish, I will meet you here tomorrow, at ten o’clock and we will visit the prospective apartment. Do you agree?”

“Yes. I agree.”

I walked along beneath the dry rustle of palm leaves and the night air smelled of a dozen things I didn’t know. I passed uncurtained windows where people sat, their dark heads bent over books. I looked up and saw windows like ribbons above the stairwells, emitting strips of tangerine light. Buildings stood on stilts, slim columns of concrete, and the gardens crept under them. Jewish cats yowled under a Jewish moon.

Y
OU are late,” Herr Blum said, when I arrived at the café the next morning.

I looked at my watch. “Only five minutes.”

“Seven.”

“Not all watches are the same,” I replied, angrily. “They run slow or stop. It’s not as if we have Big Ben to set them to.”

“The country must learn to set its watches accurately and in synchronicity with each other. Otherwise we are…”

“We are?”

“Lost. Don’t fiddle with yourself, miss.”

“What was I doing?”

“Your hands are too active, keep them still.” I was undoing a black button at the collar of my polka-dot dress because my neck was moist.

We walked a short distance and turned one block inland. The whiteness of the façades was so dazzling I would find that it would hurt my eyes to look upon my own front door in the middle of the day. Blum pushed open the door and we walked up three flights of stairs and he put the key to a lock.

“Now you are home,” he said, gesturing with his hand and smiling at me, that smile with no humor or warmth.

I had four rooms and every one was completely square and painted white and there were no cornices to soften the edges of things. There were no curtains at the windows, but gray metal venetian blinds. The place was sparsely furnished: a couple of wooden tables of different sizes and folding chairs. It was furniture ignorant of the existence of upholstery or the concept of comfort and ease and lounging about. On these chairs you would sit bolt upright, and pay attention to what was around you. They were chairs to command engagement with life.

There was a small kitchen and I was surprised to see that the cupboards seemed to be attached to the wall and to each other, all of a
piece. A long counter running across them connected the sink and the cooker and there was a refrigerator. It was achingly up-to-the-minute, the last word in modern design.

“This is called a fitted kitchen,” Blum said. “I read an article about it in the paper. It was thought up by German woman who emigrated to the Soviet Union and our architects who came from Germany imported the idea to Palestine. Whatever next, eh?”

“It’s amazing,” I said, running my hand across the Bakelite handles of the cupboards. I had a vision of myself cooking meals in this kitchen, perhaps even holding dinner parties. But I could not cook, just boiled eggs and cheese on toast.

The bathroom didn’t have a bathtub, but a cubicle with a shower. In the bedroom, which was the same size as the sitting room, was a marital bed, and instead of a wardrobe a line of cupboards formed a continuous wall.

“A lot of space for one person,” Blum said.

More space than I had ever known.

“And the wireless, which is a
luxury
, is included in the price. No telephone. There’s a long waiting list. If you wish to send a message or receive one, you must inquire at the newspaper kiosk. They will accommodate you.” I nodded. “So now we go to see the landlord.”

We walked back down the stairs, which seemed more unkempt and dirty than the apartment. The windows were smeared, dust gathered in the corners of the steps and the banisters were stained.

Blum opened the door of a ground-floor apartment and with one pace I left Palestine. A clock was ticking in its walnut case. Dark wood cast a pall of gloom on the white walls. Carved wooden chairs with high backs and maroon velvet upholstery were arranged like soldiers in lines around a table whose legs imitated the feet of lions. On the table was a brass bowl which held two bananas and an orange. Along one wall was a row of walnut glass-fronted bookcases and the spines of the volumes, in German and English, matched the uniform brownness of everything else. A chandelier strung with necklaces of crystal beads and drops hung from the ceiling, almost reaching the table as if it were made for taller rooms than this. Flies droned and even though it was still morning I felt hot and sleepy while beyond the window the sky stuck to its blueness and the sound of a loud gramophone drifted up from the seashore.

“Where is the landlord?” I asked Blum.

“I am the landlord. I am he. Blum.”

“But you’ve tricked me.”

“No. I am owner and middleman all in one.”

“Don’t think you can fool me,” I cried, stepping toward him, a sandaled toe near his foot, fit to stamp. “I’m not paying you the finder’s fee. And what about the consideration? Why do I have to pay that?”

“
Fräulein
, as the saying goes among my circle. I did not come here from conviction, I came here from Germany. Understand?” I nodded. “Good. Now understand also that I am not a socialist but a capitalist. The only way we were able to acquire Palestine was to buy it from the Arabs, meter by meter, stone by dusty stone with the money we raised from Jewish capitalists all over the world. I arrived in 1936 with my furniture and a sum of money. Not large, not substantial, but enough to ensure my future. I could not find work in my profession. I saw that there was a great influx of refugees all with somewhere needed to live and that I could exist comfortably on their rents. I paid for this building to be constructed. I even said yes to the architect when he wanted to put in that unfortunate kitchen. Just one, I said to him. As an experiment, to indulge an artist. But socialism is everywhere. It cannot be eradicated. The District Committee has brought in a law that protects the tenants by telling me what rent I can charge them. I cannot live on what they pay so I must labor with my hands fixing dolls, and I must tell you that no one in my family for four generations has fallen to a manual trade.

“I am not dexterous. I am clumsy. I am not neat and my eyesight is not the best. Dolls bore me as do puppets and other marionettes which are sometimes sent to me to fix. I don’t like their dead, glassy eyes. I am full of neuroses. Birds’ legs, for example, frighten me. And their beaks. All in all I am entirely unsuited to my work and I do not prosper in it. That is the answer to your question. Every pound you pay me on top of the absurdly inadequate rent is a few less dolls for me to repair. Yes, we will forget about the finder’s fee but you can have this apartment only if you pay to me directly my additional consideration.”

“That’s immoral.”

“Everything is immoral.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“No, perhaps not.” He smiled, with small pointed yellow teeth behind yellow lips. “But you can dream, if you wish. I have stopped. Each man must look to himself. And you, young lady, give the appearance of a degree of financial comfort. I don’t ask how you acquired this. I don’t ask what you are doing here. I don’t ask anything about you at all. I ask only that you pay me a sum which you can conceivably afford. Besides, you will not be here long, you will be married before the year is out and I will have to find a new tenant. Perhaps you already have a fiancé?”

“No.”

“Then we will try to find you one.”

I was beaten. Here I had an apartment; beyond these doors I did not. I told him I would return to the hotel to collect my things and cash my banker’s draft. He extended his hand to me to shake on the deal. He shook hands very firmly. His nails dug into my palms.

I walked back to the hotel, shuddering slightly when I thought of my own doll, Mathilda, falling into his hands. When I outgrew toys I gave her to Gabriella’s little sister who had never had anything so nice and sat her on a shelf and worshipped her from afar, taking her down every three months to change her outfit, according to the seasons.

In the afternoon I returned to the apartment and was handed my keys in exchange for a folded pile of pounds. I climbed the stairs and let myself into my new home and sat on a folding chair and looked around me, enraptured by my wooden chairs and my streamlined kitchen.

Later, as the room grew hotter, I moved to the balcony. Along the street, on the corner, an Arab in a quaint tarboosh had set up a stall selling watermelons, big and red and juicy and cool they looked to me, tantalizingly cool. How odd that a fruit which was red—the color of heat and danger—should be sweet and watery and cold. I was disinclined to make my hot, weary way down the stairs to the street to buy my watermelon. I watched the Arab on the heat of the pavement with his guaranteed coolers and I wanted what he had and I didn’t. I supposed he was watching us, the people who built on sand, and thinking that if he waited long enough, patiently, the sand would return to engulf us.