Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘I haunt him,’ she said dryly.

  Amos didn’t find that amusing, either.

  They had arrived somewhere. Phil helped her out and the three of them set off toward an ill-lit series of lanes to terrace houses on a steep hill; not far away they could see the Zion Gate in the wall of the Old City. Amos started to swear. This used to be a slum, he explained. ‘But if you forget about the Wolfson apartments – reserved for arms manufacturers who are also connoisseurs of art – Yemen Moshe is . . .’ He joined thumb and index finger to make a rough circle and kissed them apart. ‘Only left-wing people can afford to live here, only the ideologically sound . . . Shit, Phil – where are we? Which is Mira’s place?’

  They had walked along one cobbled lane, but that was not the right one, then entered another that looked identically, neatly antique. They were now in a third.

  Phil said, ‘How should I know? I haven’t been to her new house.’

  The eagle-head swung around. ‘Phil: is Israel at war? Have we moved the house to confuse the enemy? God, why do women move? They actually enjoy doing it. You know, there is not an armchair in the world that some woman has not moved.’

  Phil thought they should try an alley to the left. Amos said, ‘The solution to everything is interior decoration. In my next life -’

  ‘You said you were going to be a New Zealand botanist.’

  Amos grabbed Danielle’s elbow to save her slipping. There’s a pogrom coming for them, kiddo,’ he said to Phil. His yellow eyes glared into her face, like lamps, for a moment. ‘Danielle, be smart: the smart reincarnation money is on interior decorators. In Fiji. Ah!’

  They had found it. ‘Mira’s bijou,’ Amos said.

  As the door opened Danielle realized she was rather seriously underdressed. Her fox whimpered as she took it off and hung it beside a burgundy Persian lamb. The mink collar of a scarlet cape hanging below a Chagall lithograph squealed rudely.

  Why have I worn this jumper knitted with a kangaroo across the front and a koala eating gumleaves on the back? she wondered, as she looked at Mira’s black taffeta skirt and peacock-colored silk jacket over a blouse so exquisitely ruffled it might actually have been done with goffering tongs. A Siamese walked up, sniffed Danielle’s boot and walked away with its tail in a flagpole. Mira, coiffeured and manicured, was saying, ‘Everything is in chaos’; she asked them to excuse the mess. Tim-tim (the cat, Danielle gathered) was being simply foul. . . Mira was dark, and in her forties. She lectured in nineteenth-century English literature, Amos had said. She asked sympathetically about Bennie: if there was anything she could do? If he needed a doctor. . .?

  Ten people were gathered in the salon. There were more taffeta ruffles; one of the men was wearing Bally shoes, Danielle noted, and the painting in an alcove did appear to be a genuine Matisse. They were talking about books: a man in a black velvet jacket with a pipe he used like a conductor’s baton was saying, ‘Jonathan, anyone who has not read Flaubert is doomed. It is a serious illness, like . . .’ he hesitated to think of what such ignorance might be like, ‘. . . never having seen Jerusalem. You will lose weight, you will grow pale, your hair will fallout.’

  Ah-ha! they shouted at the appearance of Amos, Phil, and Danielle. Two of the men tried to stand up to greet them but they had to struggle and kick their legs to rise at all from the low leather-covered settees. Jonathan managed to uncoil himself and stand upright; the others made do with thrashing about, and the women stayed seated, waving. Danielle realized she needed to pee.

  She had plenty of time, in the bathroom, to examine the elegant tiling and smell the expensive soap. The door, once shut, would not open again. She tried knocking and calling ‘Yooo-hoooo,’ then sat on the edge of the bidet to wait, thinking that after all it was a good thing Bennie had not come: Flaubert was not his forte. After fifteen minutes Amos opened the door.

  ‘Why are you hiding in the bathroom?’ he demanded. Enlightened, he added, ‘You see? This is Israel. You spend a quarter of a million bucks on an apartment and the bathroom door – ah, fuck it. I told Mira. . .‘

  He seemed to have told the rest of them, too: when Danielle went back into the salon and sat beside Phil the room felt jagged. Conversation was skidding everywhere, darting around and away from an epicenter: politics; the war.

  The man who loved Flaubert said, ‘Rabbi Kahane is a terrorist. He’s no better than Arafat.’

  A woman Danielle matched with the scarlet cloak said, ‘Worse! Because he’s a Jew.’

  ‘ “Because he’s a Jew!” ‘Amos was back. ‘Don’t talk horseshit, Shula. The famous Jewish concern with morality and legality and nonviolence is the product of-’

  Apparently they all knew what he was going to say, that it was the product of Diaspora life, a eunuch’s virtue, because as he did they shouted him down with remarks like ‘Judaism is above all a legal system. Yahweh is a legal God.’ Danielle sat quietly, trying to hear what they were really saying.

  Phil whispered, ‘We have turned out to be the ghosts at this banquet.’ Amos had told them about Gideon’s court-martial, and he had explained his study of the Right. ‘Then Mira added you were writing a movie about the Zealots.’ That piece of news, Phil said, had turned the conversation to the graffiti in the religious districts, the slogans saying ‘In Blood and Fire Israel Fell – In Blood and Fire Israel Shall Rise.’ And from them, to Rabbi Kahane.

  Flaubert had lit his pipe in agitation. The low-grade terrorism we need to control the West Bank will in time be the low-grade terrorism the Israeli government needs to control the rest of the country.’ He sucked and blew. ‘State terrorism and private-enterprise terrorism are in the same rut.’

  Phil whispered, ‘He’s right.’

  Jonathan, who was fair and seemed a bundle of languid affectations – Winchester? Eton? Danielle wondered – said, ‘I didn’t come to this country to . . .’

  She thought, But why did you come to Israel? Why did you leave Sloane Square, you rich wimp?

  Mira said, ‘Neither did I.’

  Danielle was thinking: Israel is the country in which Jews can’t be gassed and roasted. They can live forever here, from generation to generation. It’s a duty to stay in it.

  The sense of things coming unstuck was like vapor off black water.

  Amos said, ‘So Jacob desires Rachel, but lifts the wedding veil and finds he’s been married to ugly Leah.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ they cried.

  ‘But nothing. We wanted it to be beautiful. It isn’t. Our dusky brethren have seen to that – and we have too, by treating the Sephardim as resident aliens for thirty years. But we’re good ‘n married to them. And meanwhile Israeli policy has made terror respectable. It’s an administrative matter when we make reprisal raids.’

  How could he! Shula wanted to know. Amos was going too far. Israeli schoolchildren should be massacred at Maalot and we accept it like sheep? Our diplomats are murdered. . . What alternative?

  When the noise had lessened, Amos said, ‘I didn’t say there was an alternative. I said there are consequences.’

  Mira offered Danielle crackers and cheese.

  Jonathan murmured he would prefer the Stilton. ‘And what are the consequences?’ He made it sound idle.

  ‘In our lifetime this country will become another nasty little Middle Eastern state.’ Amos tipped his chair backward and defied them all, arms crossed over his chest, grinning.

  His cynicism! Shula was sorry – she realized Amos was upset about Gideon – but his cynicism was disgusting. And intolerable. ‘Zionism, Herzl’s Zionism, was a moral appeal for a home for homeless people. Its authority was and is our ethical compassion. Look at what we’ve done for the Arabs in education, medical services, financially! Look at what we’ve done for the Sephardim – my God, we didn’t even know the blacks existed – who arrived here in tens of thousands, illiterate, penniless.’

  Flaubert’s admirer said, ‘My dear Shula, that is all true. But we have also reduced the West Bank Palestin
ians to the legal status they enjoyed under the Ottoman Empire. The happiest moment of our lives, as Amos has implied with admirable brevity, was imagining the delights that lay before us: Jews in our own land, on the brink of a great adventure.’

  Amos gave Flaubert a nod of thanks,

  Someone said that Begin had taught Israel to hate: ‘He’s presented the rest of the world as corrupt and dangerous, and now our kids believe every gentile carries a knife.’

  Danielle was thinking, I am listening to the spirit of the age. Which is fear. But it’s out in the open, in Israel. There’s no muffler.

  Amos grinned at him. ‘Have you noticed, Hirsh, that nothing shapes reality like violence?’ he asked.

  The room missed a beat.

  Danielle began thinking, Survival is the condition of everything else, but it is only a condition of what has value; it may have no value on its own account. Out of the silence Mira’s voice lifted to say, ‘If only women were in charge . . . ’

  A woman exclaimed, ‘I refuse to be labeled a feminist, but what Mira suggests . . . ’

  Danielle thought of asking, ‘In refusing feminism, what do you think you are rejecting?’ but didn’t have the nerve. The war of the sexes was shaping up; she and Phil, wordlessly, agreed to remain noncombatant.

  Phil said to her, ‘All this worry about morality . . . What about the economy! It’s impossible to have one-hundred-percent wage and salary indexation and one-hundred-and-thirty-percent inflation without . . .’

  She nodded.

  He made a gesture as if tearing his hair. ‘This country has been sleeping in a featherbed, economically, and they refuse to wake up. They believe it will be feathers forever. But I tell you: it’s going to turn into nails. And world Jewry – that is, America – won’t pay for Israel forever. Especially in the state it has reached.’ His chest collapsed. ‘Maybe the export of adrenaline will save the shekel.’

  He shut his eyes, then blinked a couple of times. ‘Can you sleep here? I can’t. Or I have nightmares.’

  Hirsh was saying that Golda Meir had proved to be the most stupid prime minister: she lost opportunities to make peace; she had to share the blame for the October war . . .

  ‘She had a vocabulary of five hundred words,’ someone agreed.

  What are women? Hearts! Governed by a great muscle that goes squeeze-squeeze-squeeze.

  Golda didn’t start any wars!

  No, but –

  Danielle said, ‘So do I – have nightmares, that is. I’ve even had . . . sort of . . . visions. That’s never happened to me before. There’s something about this city . . .’

  Phil smiled wearily. ‘I saw my father in the street three days ago. My mother and I and my brothers escaped through Switzerland in January 1939, but he stayed on in Warsaw to look after the business. He died in a cattle truck in 1942. And I saw him in West Jerusalem.’

  She felt very curious. The dead alive, the living dead, he had written. ‘Did you speak to him?’

  Phil shook his head. ‘You know,’ he said after a while, ‘it’s something ontological, rather than psychological.’

  She could not think of any response. At length Phil added, ‘It’s that which makes the mystic Right so interesting: they’re on to something, some underground disturbance . . . You know your father wants to throw the Moslems off the Temple Mount?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe it will take another fifty years. But it’s an idea with a taproot that in this soil . . . I’m glad to say. I’ll be dead.’

  Amos, who had gone in to fight for the female side but had switched to the male, had heard the end of the sentence. ‘Phil! What’s this defeatist talk? What do you mean you’re going to die? That’s your Keynesian fairy stuff again. He was the fairy who said, We’ll all be dead in the long run.’

  The glint in his eye caught Danielle like a whip. She wanted to do something to ease his pain, to stroke him, as you would a wild creature distraught at being caged. She leaned over and patted his knee.

  ‘What is it?’ Amos demanded. She had startled him. ‘You want to go home?’

  To Phil he said, ‘Listen, baby, in Israel we’ll all be dead in the short run. Haven’t you noticed that time moves more quickly in this country?’

  Phil said, ‘Yes, and I want to go home.’

  At the American Colony Amos helped Danielle from the back-seat. ‘Are these Ay-rabs looking after you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He double-clicked his tongue. ‘That’s what they’re here for, Madam: they collect the garbage, they pick up the dog shit, they bring you the meal you’ve ordered . . . Have you ever tried to order a meal from an Israeli waiter? I tell you, don’t bother. He won’t bring it. You order chicken, he’ll give you fish; you order fish, you’ll get a steak.’

  On impulse she kissed his cheek. If he moved it was only to flinch.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Phil called.

  In her room the force of the evening gathered in retrospect around a trifle, an exchange between Amos and the small, passionate woman called Shula. She was, Danielle guessed, in her mid-fifties; from various remarks she had realized that Shula was Palestinian-born and as a girl had worked ‘illegally’ – that is, against the British. The males had reined back their powers of debate when arguing with Shula, in whose burning gray eyes and sun-battered skin one could see a lost, fair prettiness. All night she had clung to expressing self-pity she made national: everyone else was in the wrong and to blame for the state of Israel; she – Israel – was by nature perfect. Amos had objected aggressively until Shula had said: ‘I understand you perfectly, Amos. Underneath you’re all tears. But you’ve turned them into acid – and being cynical is all you’ve got. What happens when you lose that?’ Amos had squirmed in his seat, grinning. He said, ‘I’ll toss in my chips.’ But he could not resist a comic flourish. ‘Hey, Phil,’ he called, ‘is that psychological – or ontological?’

  She remembered she had had an insight into Amos at the time but was so tired now she had forgotten it. He had looked ferocious as he had argued with Shula.

  Twenty-one

  From Bennie’s room there was a view over the gardens of West Jerusalem and the Old City. When Wili and his assistant, who did not speak after the introductions, had been shown out Bennie led Danielle on to the balcony. For a while he leaned on the railing, drinking up the view and flicking his cigar ash into the cold, sweet day-light fourteen stories high. His eye had a purple bruise around it now but the sticking plaster was gone.

  He had no particular explanation as to where he had been for the past two days, except: ‘I been working my butt off.’

  He had rented Danielle an apartment on King George V Street, just across the road from the Plaza.

  ‘I don’t want you staying in East Jerusalem. It’s not safe. Listen, I got you a nice little place. You can have it until Passover. You’ve got a garden. You’ve got good pictures on the walls. I looked at three hundred apartments yesterday and every one was hideous. Danielle – for you I got brain damage.’ He rocked his head from side to side and said, singsong, ‘“But I like the American Colony. It reminds me of Mom and Dad and my Arab nurse.” Danielle – don’t be a pain in the ass. I’ve paid already. You want a maid? I’ll hire one.’

  She had to admit that staying in the center of town just across the road from Bennie and the American Express office would be more convenient. But according to the terms of her contract with Kidron Productions, she had to pay her own accommodation expenses: how much had the apartment cost? what did she owe him?

  ‘Nothing. The guy who owns it – he’s a real good painter – is a friend. He gave it to me.’

  She knew from Alice what short-term rents were like in the chic areas of West Jerusalem.

  ‘You can’t work in the hotel room,’ Bennie said. ‘I want my writer very, very calm. I gotta be in New York to spend Passover with my grandmother. I wanna know you’re safe. I don’t want you spending Pesah with a bunch of goys.’ He blew some cigar
smoke in her face. ‘You know what they do to us at Passover?’

  She whacked the smoke away.

  ‘Sure. It’s because we killed God.’

  Bennie grimaced. ‘Nah. It’s because we’ve murdered all those Christian babies to get their blood to soak our matzah. Listen, don’t argue. Take the apartment.’

  It was a charming, raffish sort of place, perhaps once the servants’ quarters of the Turkish house above. There was one large room furnished with rugs and divans, a kitchen in a corner, a tiny bedroom, and a bathroom. The owner’s paints, brushes, and easel were lying about; a kitchen cupboard was full of cans and jars of food and an inch of clouding black coffee stood in the chimney-pot finyan on the stove. There was something about the way Bennie was standing in the middle of the room looking at the pictures, the shelves of books, the African mask with its slanting cowrie-shell eyes – something superstitious: he did not want to touch anything.

  Danielle said, ‘Tell me the truth. What’s happened to the owner?’

  Bennie shrugged. ‘He got called up a couple of weeks ago. Now he’s missing. His mother can’t afford to go on paying the rent. I told her this terrific Australian lady, a widow . . . Listen, Danielle: people here are poor. I walked all round the Jewish Market area yesterday. They’re so poor it’s hideous.’

  She had jumped up. ‘I’m not going to stay –’

  Bennie said, ‘I don’t think the mother was telling me the truth. I think the son is in jail. Now do you feel okay?’

  That afternoon, working over their maps and the schedule in Bennie’s room, he said, ‘Hey! You want some hash? I bought some great stuff yesterday off an Armenian. He told me about the apartment I got you. The painter was dealing: he got busted – poor guy couldn’t make a living as a painter.’

  ‘So you got the key from the Armenian?’

  Bennie, as he had sometimes done before, reached over and pressed his bunched fist against her chin. ‘You’re smart,’ he said. ‘Even if you do fit me up with a PLO photographer.’

  He was sure that Wili’s assistant was not Greek. ‘But why?’ Danielle insisted; Bennie’s head swayed left to right.