Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  - So we’re giraffes. But imagine the world without them – the little Martian horns, rainbow neck bending for the mauve-colored tongue to lick a foal: I saw that when I was fourteen years old, in the Bronx Zoo, and I whispered the secret name of God.

  ‘What’s making you smile?’ Gideon said. ‘You spill your heart, then you grin at me when I’m thinking about what you’ve said. You’re always laughing at me. You talk German to Gershon so I can’t understand.’

  ‘And you talk Arabic with Tikva. Oh, shit. I wasn’t laughing at you. I’m as proud as hell of you.’

  ‘Yeah: my sabra son. Look at the size of him! He has a military profile of ninety-two and he’s a vegetarian. Imagine if he ate meat . . .’

  Amos held his head in his hands. The fights with Miki were like this – both of them trapped into talking, usually shouting – nonsense, complaining of insults where they knew none existed, somehow always unable to speak the truth, unable to touch each other except with glancing blows.

  Gideon said abruptly: ‘You haven’t killed anybody since 1967. You’ve forgotten how heavy it is.’

  Very close; like the breeze from a bullet that misses your head.

  ‘Your bus is going in two minutes,’ Amos said.

  He had wept when Miki left. A tear came out of each eye. It was an odd experience and afterward all he had was a headache. He had not cried in 1944 when the Ukrainian had come for Mama and Christiana, but had lain for three days in a stupor, speechless.

  Then all those years later, on the kibbutz in the Galilee – which was Miki’s idea, her notion of what life in Israel should be, something like a miniature Wyoming but with warmer weather and sheep – all those years later he had made tears. He had hated every moment of kibbutz life. When she left to go home to America with Oded he had gone into the cowshed. There was a cow the size of a hippo who gave him her hot spinnaker flank as a pillow.

  He watched until Gideon’s bus had drawn out from its bay, got up, and strolled out to his car. Two parking tickets. Amos grinned. ‘Who says this is a lawless country?’ he asked half-aloud for the sake of anyone who might be listening.

  Eighteen

  Alice whipped off her beret for Danielle to take a look and just as quickly put it back on again, pulling it well down for warmth. She had gone to sleep while having her hair cut; when she awoke she discovered she had left an inch of hair all over and her neck was being clippered. ‘What have you been thinking about?’ she demanded of the hairdresser.

  The girl did not seem to know. She said, ‘Maybe my brother. He’s in the Golani brigade.’

  Danielle took Alice by the elbow and conducted her indoors.

  Alice had insisted on making the trip to see Danielle, rather than letting Danielle visit her when the doctor had ordered rest. Danielle had begged her to take a taxi and allow her to pay for it, but Alice had caught a bus to King George Street and walked from there. The day was as clear and crisp as a sheet of ice. In the Street of the Prophets she could smell the tang from a stand of pine trees – she remembered the whole city scented with pine only five or ten years ago – and in one of her balcony boxes that morning she had seen the first green ear tip of a daffodil. In West Jerusalem everyone was in a good mood for the Purim holiday, children and teenagers off school for the day already out wearing funny costumes, masks, and painted faces. Young mothers had dressed up to amuse their children and strolled along with green glitter around their eyes; some of their little ones were turned out as Arabs – or maybe it was Biblical style. Purim was the only jolly festival in the calendar; it scored Jews 1, Goyim 0, for a change; in the form of triangular pastries people ate the ears of a Persian prince.

  ‘Here,’ said Alice. ‘I’ve bought you some Hainan’s Ears. And you should see the Pious Ones, swaggering around in their shtreimls! They all got drunk last night. I’ve seen them reeling through Mea Sha’arim at Purim: that’s the Law – drunk on Purim.’ There had been only one seat on the bus, next to a Hasid. ‘He slapped his hand on it to stop me sitting there. I said to him, “Do you imagine I’m menstruating at the age of eighty-six?” and sat straight down. He pulled his hand away just in time. In a great paddy he was. Got up. Got off the bus. Polluted.’

  Alice thought Danielle could ignore Professor Garin’s conditions for meeting and that she should visit him regardless.

  ‘Beard him. He’s a guilty man. He’s ashamed of the way he has treated you and Bonny and Katherine, and now that his chicken has come home to roost, he’s in a funk. You go and roost on him.’

  ‘But they won’t let me see him at the hospital. And if he’s at home he won’t allow me through the front door.’

  Alice contemplated her food.

  They were lunching in the poolside restaurant of the hotel, seated next to a glass wall that gave a view of a small swimming pool, palm trees, and the white tower of a mosque. Alice’s Salade Orientale was described on the menu as ‘a delicate concoction of cold diced chicken in a light, curry-flavored mayonnaise.’

  She said, ‘I last ate this in a cricket club in Malaysia. You know, there was something about the British Raj: no country ever quite recovers from it.’

  The thought linked: ‘I remember when I was lobbying Ernest Bevin about Palestine. He was an awful fellow, such a bully and a liar. He refused to meet our delegation. So I sat in his waiting room for fourteen hours a day, for three days. He used to charge past me with his head down. Then he gave in. I was told the minister would see me for ten minutes. He and I argued for two hours, and he ended by inviting me to eat with him in the Members’ dining room. That’s a politician for you, dearest. They can’t tolerate pressure, because underneath that invisible coating of oil they wear they are not real ducks at all, but clay pigeons. You go and roost on Garin. You must come to terms with the past and transcend it, or it will dominate you.’

  Wili arrived at the same time as their slices of chocolate cake. When he saw Alice he performed his greeting routine, with an added flourish. ‘The Queen!’ he said. ‘How are you, Darling Teacher? You know, Princess, we always called her Queen Alice at school.’

  ‘I heard it as Old Cow,’ Alice said. She had never liked him, he had been one of those slippery children, sycophantic and vicious by turns, too small to defend himself adequately in the playground. But a few days after some boy had bloodied Wili’s nose that child’s satchel would be discovered slashed; Wili always had an alibi. In class he was eager to clean the blackboard or carry a teacher’s books. They were exceptionally bright children at that place, the first of the opportunity schools in the East End. Some of them were top men in medicine and law by now.

  He had left early, in 1950, telling a story that his mother needed him to go to work, but Alice had met Mrs. Djugash one day in the fish shop and she said Wili had run off; she assumed he had a messenger’s job on a newspaper. ‘It’s one mouth less, and I’ve still got five to feed.’ If there ever had been a Mr. Djugash he had not been around for years and the eponymous little ones arrived by some influence known only to their dam; the two smallest were the color of mahogany, with peppercorn hair. Wili had taken the devil of a teasing over this sister and brother. As she recalled, his nickname changed from Schnozzle to Sambo. Sometimes, when he was trotting along beside her with an armful of books, she could hear him screaming for the derision to stop. Alice had tried: she awarded him better marks for composition than he deserved, which gave him the idea he could run away and conquer Fleet Street. And oddly enough, he’d succeeded, but not as a writer. Danielle said he used to earn £1000 a week, in 1964. Then five years in jail. No wonder he’s a nervous wreck, Alice thought. His entire body was a fidget. And his voice was unrecognizable. Wili had spoken such good Cockney once – rhyming slang, not an aitch in his alphabet, and glottal stops that would strangle a West Londoner.

  No – Wili would not take ‘a coffee’; bad for the liver. But he took ‘a tea’; Alice noticed the gold ring on his little finger crooked above the handle of the cup, and its crest of a boar.


  ‘Yairs – my mother’s people came from Wales.’ The statement tripped off his tongue with the ease of many repetitions and was followed by a flick of defiance in his eyes.

  ‘Well, when is this berk of a producer-director going to arrive, Princess?’ He had brought an envelope of prints for Danielle, the pictures he had taken of her outside St. Anne’s.

  ‘I had no idea you’d taken photographs of me.’

  ‘Best eyes in the business, Princess. You can tell Whatsisface Kidron. Tell him Wili gets the snaps.’

  ‘You’ve got the job, Wili,’ Danielle said. ‘Relax.’ And then, to withdraw from the hostility that had jumped out of her mouth, before she’d had a thought: ‘He’s delighted I’ve found you. He’s an easygoing guy, very . . . fluid.’

  Wili wanted all the details: Which hotels would they be staying in at the Dead Sea? Would the aerial work be in a chopper or a plane? How many days would they travel by road? He laid a spiral-bound notebook on the table, took out a pen, polished it on the paper napkin (as he had polished his teaspoon and then not used it), and was poised to record her answers. Danielle kept shaking her head.

  ‘Bennie does everything on the spur of the moment. I just don’t know.’ She was feeling increasingly tense.

  He made some irritable scratches on the paper. ‘Princess, I have to work out what film I need, which lenses, lighting, tripods -’

  ‘Bring the lot.’

  ‘I can’t carry everything. It’s physically impossible.’

  ‘So hire an assistant. Bennie won’t mind.’

  Alice said, ‘Oh, Lord!’ In lunging forward in some gesture of surprise or pleasure Wili had knocked over his teacup, scalding her lap.

  When he had left, Alice said, ‘You made his day, promising him an assistant. Did you notice he stopped that horrid sniffing?’

  They sat in silence for a while, soothing themselves with the charm of their surroundings. Danielle was thinking, Perhaps I should move to a West Jerusalem hotel, as Wili also suggested. A voice in her head was droning: Something’s wrong. I feel bad.

  Perhaps it is this hotel, she thought – but it’s so poetic and dotty . . . I like listening to the Christian pilgrims telling each other their ‘experiences of Jesus,’ and their dreams. At breakfast that morning she’d heard one talking about a dream of a spider with a sapphire crown. ‘That’s your bad feeling toward Gerry, but you can convert it into a beautiful jewel,’ another explained. In a corner alone an officer from the United Nations headquarters breakfasted on muesli, grains of which he carefully removed from his handlebar mustache, while day after day he practiced drawings of camels in a notebook. The head waiter was the judge of his efforts; at the end of the meal both men adopted grave, mustache-stroking silence to contemplate the morning’s artwork.

  ‘I wonder if I’ve done the wrong thing,’ Danielle said. ‘I’ve just spent an extra thousand dollars of Bennie’s money, by the time you add up transportation and hotel bills for a fourth person.’

  ‘A thousand,’ Alicepiped. She lived on £36 a week, which got smaller every month, chewed up by the everstrengthening American dollar. A lot of people on sterling pensions were feeling the bite. Danielle looked embarrassed. ‘Well, love, you told me yourself it was a world of illusion – not just the film at the end of it, but the whole environment.’

  Danielle hummed. ‘But there’s a moment when the guillotine drops. The budget is settled and that’s it: if a scene isn’t right, too bad. There’s no money for extra footage.’ She added, ‘And often the writer cops the blame.’

  ‘And then?’

  Danielle shrugged.’I don’t know. Legal hassles. . .’

  She’s way out of her depth with this film and so is her young crook of a producer-director from the sound of him, Alice realized.

  It looked like rain so she gave in to Danielle about a taxi home. The driver was an Arab and got lost for a few minutes in the web of small streets behind the Gaza Road. He was a loquacious, jolly fellow – owned the taxi, he said, had just got married. (Alice understood: married a second wife.) When they passed a pair of Hasidim in flying-saucer fur hats he cried, ‘Look! Look! Fancy dress every week for them. I like them. You ask, “When will the Messiah come?” They say, “Next week!” They’re happy. Every morning they get out of bed and say, “Messiah will come today.” And next morning, they say it again. Happy people. Good women, always.’ He patted his belly. On a corner there was a group of young men in ordinary dress with knitted kippot flapping in the wind, anchored to their hair with bobby pins. They had to jump back to the footpath to avoid the cab. Alice tutted at her driver.

  ‘You know what we say?’ he asked. ‘Excuse, lady: they wear shit on their heads.’

  ‘They believe they are preparing for the Messiah, also.’

  He cleared his antrums emphatically. ‘In an atom bomb. In a gun. In a tank. The daddy sleeps with a gun under his bed: what does the son learn?’ He fell to brooding and talking to himself in Arabic. ‘I want peace,’ he said.

  ‘Everyone wants peace. No one is prepared to make it.’

  He thought that was a good one, and refused her tip.

  The light was poor; the colors would be muddy. Even so Wili banged off a couple more rolls of film on the Purim festival crowds, got what he thought might be a good frame of a fat Dominican giving directions to a bunch of Israeli teenagers dressed as cowboys and cowgirls in front of the Moses Cafe. He then packed up, caught a sherut to Tel Aviv and a private taxi to Jaffa. The question was: Who? Who could they use as the assistant cameraman?

  Jazzy said, ‘Saeed. He knows some Greek. We have a Greek passport.’

  Yusuf, who specialized in altering passports, said he would need three days to fix it properly.

  ‘We have time,’ Jazzy said. ‘I know the Jewish mentality: this Kidron has not been back since 1967. I know what he’ll want to do – go and look at the Wall. He’ll want to enter the Old City, put on the cardboard skullcap, stick his little prayer between the stones: “Thank you, God. All these years on Passover I’ve said Next Year in Yerushalayim, and now I’m here.” I know them. He’ll want to spend a day feasting his eyes on el Quds. We can get everything ready.’ In imagination the details of their work were like individual notes gathering the energy of music; sensual pleasure spread through Jazzy as he pictured and saw each sequence, leading to the fountain of sound.

  They had a party. Around midnight Jazzy put his hands on Wili’s shoulders and, steadying himself, was able to lift one and tap at the side of his nose, but his finger missed and he only flicked himself on the tip. ‘Kidron will stay in the lovely, modern West Jerusalem Plaza. He is not the type for the King David. The Hilton is too far away from the Old City. The Plaza, Wili, is our bride. You and Saeed will be going into the Plaza.’ They rocked from side to side, their eyes radiating to each other the invisible, exquisite light that lovers exchange.

  ‘Bang!’ Jazzy said. ‘Bang! Bang!’

  David had his own key to Alice’s apartment. He kept a violin there that he had played well when he was younger, but had rarely touched in recent years. When she opened her front door she heard him playing a piece by Shostakovitch they both loved. His astrakhan hat was on its hall peg, his navy Aquascutum overcoat beneath it, both worn scruffy but of such quality they hung on to him. She sniffed a lapel and grimaced: he was turning into a dirty old man – he, with the shapely, soft hands that he still manicured as if they would survive forever. Not those hands, but their work, she thought. There could be bang upon bang upon bang until the planet was a brilliant firework, a display slowly fading from the cosmos. Maybe that was God’s intention: to wreck a toy that could not assemble itself into friendly play.

  She had discussed this possibility with her friend Father Gilot of the Dominicans, who came to tea on Wednesdays in a swirl of white skirts that smelled of Gauloises. Bernard Gilot, being one of those men who very young, only in their thirties, had grasped certain ideas, was inclined to agree with her that earth
was a training ground for the game of hide-and-seek with God. David had listened to them with an ironic, baffled smile.