Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The back of the car was warm and scented by Bennie’s kid jacket. After a while Danielle dozed off, too. She awoke to a squeaking noise: Wili was scratching his fingernail on the glass partition. He put a finger to his lips and pointed at Bennie. She slid the glass open as silently as possible. A whisper:

  ‘Princess, do you know why we are stopping in Jerusalem?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m feeling queasy. I get carsick. I’d like to ask Akram to drop me first, at Damascus Gate, so I can go to a pharmacy.’ She nodded.

  Wili added, ‘I’ll come on down tomorrow morning. Meet you at the base of Masada at nine-thirty.’

  When they drew up at the Plaza Bennie opened his eyes, swung his head from side to side and asked, ‘Where’s Jugnose? You eat him for afternoon tea, Danielle?’

  ‘Very sick. Liking vomit,’ Akram said.

  Wili had jumped from the car at some traffic lights; all his photographic equipment was still in the trunk.

  Bennie said, ‘Jesus Christ! He starts screwing us around already?’ Danielle objected that Wili was not interfering with their plans; their itinerary scheduled work on day two to begin at nine-thirty at Masada. Bennie said, ‘Oh, stuff it. I’m just going to check they changed my room so that Schultz bitch can’t find me again.’

  He returned in a good mood. ‘They moved my stuff at seven this morning. Marguerita is going to spend a lot of money ringing room 1423 and getting no answer.’ He offered Danielle a handful of sunflower seeds.

  ‘But she’ll find you through the switchboard again.’

  Bennie went on munching the seeds: his front teeth cracked the shell, his tongue extracted the kernel, his breath blew the husk from his lips – all this in one deft flow of movement. Danielle tried to do it and got an enamel-shattering bite of broken shell and pulp. Bennie spat a husk on the ground.

  ‘Uh-uh. I’ve wised the manager. The only people who need to know where I am, now know. I sent cables. Anyone who wants to speak to Bennie has gotta know his room number. The others get told he’s not staying there.’ He had ordered Wili’s box of extra camera equipment stored in the porter’s lodge: ‘In case I get sick of the schmuck.’

  She asked what was amusing.

  Bennie replied that she really didn’t understand business, did she? She did not understand that the site work today had saved three days of work by a preproduction team – saved like fifteen thousand smacks, girl. And who had the day’s photographs, in the trunk of the car? And who was going to get them out, right now, and drop them into a Kodak shop – Akram would know the closest one – to be developed? ‘I don’t need Jugnose anymore,’ Bennie added. ‘Site photographs on Masada aren’t essential.’ This evening he would calculate for her the number of minutes she had for the army scene. ‘And you can go away and play with them: SOLDIER ONE says; SOLDIER TWO says; SOLDIER THREE scratches his balls. Listen –’ Business was taking opportunities; business was about winning.

  Akram’s eyes rolled in wonder as he helped Bennie break the lock on the camera bag with a screwdriver from the car’s tool kit. Danielle watched passively.

  She was thinking, This is how he became a millionaire: through theft, through snatching people’s work for himself.

  – He’ll do the same to me, if he can.

  When he returned from the Kodak shop Bennie said, ‘I might have a tantrum in the morning. If Juggy is late, or if he complains about me getting the films developed quick-smart . . . Danielle: you ever seen me have a tantrum?’

  ‘Not a big one, Bennie.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy it. Now, let’s go to Jericho.’

  The sky was on fire as they swept along the southern perimeter of the Old City walls, past the Basilica of Agony’s gaudy facade, and turned into the Jericho Road. Bennie lit a cigar. He had left the dividing window open and called, ‘Akram – you know this song?’ He began to sing in Hebrew, a good baritone. Akram joined in, countertenor. Danielle caught the odd word – Jerusalem; Jericho; wall. They sang on and on, four verses marked off by a refrain. She glanced at Bennie’s profile in silhouette; at the back of his head his centaur curls disappeared in the dark.

  ‘I’ll translate a bit for you,’ he said. ‘The chorus goes – urn, “Jerusalem of gold, of copper, and of light, Am I not a harp for all your songs?” and then it says, “No one frequents the Temple Mount . . . and we can’t go down to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho.” Then the last verse: “We’ve come back . . . the shofar calls from the Temple Mount, dum, dum, dum, And we’ll go again to the Dead Sea, By way of Jericho.” Terrific, huh? It was written just before the ’67 war.’

  ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘Nice! For Christ’s sake – it should be the national anthem. Not that Hatikva. That sounds like the Polish national anthem: “Poland is not dead yet.” But it soon will be. The hope. What’s the good of hope? I tell you, Danielle: hope is the Jewish vice.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Her jaw was so tense she could barely move it.

  ‘What’s wrong with you now?’ Bennie demanded.

  She muttered, ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘We’re going to have dinner in Jericho,’ Bennie announced. ‘Akram knows a top place. We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Terrific, hey?’

  They had passed shabby Arab villages, Bethlehem, West Bank settlement towns, and were now winding slowly down through the Judean Hills. It was very dark, with not much traffic, but Akram was taking the descent cautiously; around a bend distant lights flashed and up close the red eyes of taillights. Bennie said, ‘Got your passport?’ Vehicles going in both directions were being checked. Three had been ordered to the side of the road; a family stood rigid while soldiers with flashlights knelt on the backseat palpating the interior; a white bassinet with a pink bunny rug was being examined by hand and flashlight. A soldier, maybe nineteen years old, put his head in the window; they held out their passports but he did not bother to look, replied with one word to Bennie’s question and jerked his head for Akram to drive on.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Routine. They always say that.’

  – As if you’d know: when you skipped the country the PLO barely existed; the West Bank and Gaza had not been captured.

  Bennie added, ‘If my father were driving on this road, he’d have a gun in the car.’

  She had opened her window to release the cigar smoke. Night air still heated by the day blew in and she caught intermittently the almost imperceptible breath of the desert. They had already passed a sign saying they were now at sea level; the car continued downward, they were a submarine on wheels diving into warm, dense stillness. The lights of Jericho glittered, disappeared, flitted once more from the depths below. Then the groves of the city, sweet Jericho, rose up and flooded the car.

  ‘Cop that,’ Bennie said, He opened his window and flicked his cigar into the dark.

  Orange blossom and balsam; a swooning fragrance. You knew why Cleopatra had asked for Jericho from Anthony as a love-gift, Danielle thought. It smelt lazy and voluptuous. The other sinful cities of the plains, Sodom and Gomorrah to the south, had been swallowed, but Jericho . . .

  It was seedy. There were fruit peelings in the streets, frightful plastic junk for sale in grime-fronted shops, goat droppings, 1958 Chevrolets with leopard-patterned seatcovers and raccoon tails on their antennae.

  Only one palace, of the Umayyads, remained – a ruin now, Akram said. The ancient city was a mound of earth – there, on the right, that hump; perhaps they couldn’t see it in the dark. Soldiers lounged against an armored car in the square. If the Gush Emumin are around, she was thinking, their presence is discreet – even though, being committed to making Biblical arguments for possession, they ought surely be staking a claim here?

  Bennie trod softly through the perfumed night; so did she. Akram, however, was at home. He had relations here – well, not many left, now. He gestured vaguely to the east. Their family orchards and fields were close by; tomorrow, or when Mr. Bennie liked, they
would go and pick fruit, But now they would have the best food, prepared by his friend: everything for their pleasure.

  We are standing fathoms below the sea, not wet; we are surrounded by desert – and a magical fecundity. She was feeling dreamy from the decision she had taken – or rather, which had taken her, while in the parking lot of the Plaza she had watched Bennie break open and steal from Wili’s camera bag. The question was, When?

  It was an excellent meal Akram ordered for them. The dishes were like those of East Jerusalem but each was prepared with a delicacy of touch with the spices on the chicken and lamb and in the combination of herbs in the salads that lifted it – the table with rose-patterned oilcloth cover, the aluminum cutlery, the thick unstemmed glasses from which they drank wine – lifted it all to a different plane.

  Although it was chilly outside, Bennie liked her idea that they should move to the terrace for coffee. The owner joined them for a while, bringing a bottle of aniseed liqueur. On the house – would they not honor him? Madame would perhaps like water with hers? Ladies sometimes did. He spoke to them as if they were royalty and he was used to the whims of princes. A cigar . . . ? If Mr. Kidron insisted, but . . . He made a gesture to one of the boy waiters who had served them using only their right hands, their left arms held immobile across their chests. The boy returned with a basket of oranges, grapefruit, and pomelos. Please: for their journey tomorrow.

  He and Akram withdrew, leaving the bottle of arak on the table. Danielle waited until the coffee waiter had gone, too. They were alone on the terrace beneath a pergola heavy with bougainvillea; small insects swarmed to the light above and somewhere outside a goat bleated.

  She said, ‘I’m not going to argue with you about what you did today. I just want to make something clear.’

  The legs of their chairs grated backward at almost the same moment. Bennie stood still; erect, but not tense. ‘Don’t close your fist,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’ The blow knocked his head ninety degrees.

  She sat down again carefully; under the table she shook her hand to dissipate the sting.

  Bennie thought, She’s not angry because I took Wili’s films. That’s her excuse, the self-righteous bitch. She’s mad because I had Marilyn last night. What Danielle still wants is to get laid.

  She saw pleasure in his eyes.

  – I’ve made a fool of myself.

  ‘More arak?’

  ‘Thanks. Just a bit.’

  He winced as he took a mouthful, excused himself, and went out to the pavement to spit.

  ‘I didn’t mean to cut you.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ He grinned. ‘Yesh Ge’vul, huh? Like the son of that friend of yours.’

  ‘Yesh Ge’vul.’

  ‘You know, Danielle, your Hebrew is getting better. The accent is good . . . Now, listen: I’ve got us top-floor rooms at the Moriah Hotel. I’m getting up at dawn to see the sunrise over the Dead Sea. I’ll work on the march scenes for you as soon as we book in.’

  He’s let me off the hook, she realized.

  When Akram rejoined them at the table she was explaining her idea for juxtaposing the opening scene – maybe behind the credits – of the Mediterranean waves with an image of the Dead Sea’s stillness. ‘To me they make together metaphors about life and death, and how the soul is balanced between them. But I’ve no hope of getting that across unless . . . ’

  Bennie, lounging in his chair, was staring at her with eyebrows raised. She sat with her head bowed, fiddling with spoons and crumbs on the oilcloth, talking as if to herself.

  ‘. . . because it’s ungraspable,’ she was saying. ‘Water is –’

  ‘You bet,’ Bennie said. ‘C’mon. I’ll pay the check and we’ll go.’

  Twenty-three

  While they waited, he asked, ‘Am I going to make it? Will I get there?’

  There was the thirty big ones he needed, in his hand, all his own, to invest as he wished, diversify: energy resources – they were nonrenewable, so the price could only go up; new tech – if you got onto the right buzz on that. Look at Wang, a Chinaman, one of the richest guys in the world, now. The trouble with movies: you could put your heart and soul in them, for zero return. Movies were fashion. Flavor-of-the-month. He was telling her: he could lose not just his pants but his balls as well, on this one.

  He was haunted by the fear of having arrived too late in the field, ‘Like Israel,’ he said. ‘If Jews had come here a century earlier they could have done what they liked to the local inhabitants – killed ’em all, like you did in Australia, and nobody would have sneezed.’ What’s Israel now? ‘A pariah, for doing the same thing everyone else did, but a bit too late.’ After a while he added, ‘The movies need a new golden age. But the home-video industry might save me. What’s going to happen to me, girl?’

  ‘You’ll make it,’ she said, and wondered, Why do women nurse men?

  It was still dark on his balcony; directly opposite them a denser blackness gaining in volume marked the Mountains of Moab. Had Moses stood there, gazing across at the land on which he, of the Desert Generation, would never be allowed to set foot? Bennie wanted to know. ‘Or maybe they murdered him, like Freud said, because his Law was too harsh?’

  ‘Maybe. Moses was a murderer himself. Maybe he had to pay for it, in the end.’ Danielle sighed: dawn was taking its time in coming. But now, at last, there was a sucking-down of night, the sky became paler, paler, and then – just there along the mountain ridge, its color-of-nothing changed to a line of pink. There were no clouds, not a wisp of something more substantial for the light to play upon. Pinkness seeped upward into air; a momentary breeze lifted the stench of sulphur from mineral baths further along the shore; there was not one bird song, all around was silence, except for the low metallic churning of a generator below the hotel’s grounds. A bit of greenery, some grass, and a few dispirited-looking date palms grew in the garden below but apart from that there was nothing to see other than desert encircling a jewel. The Dead Sea.

  They were both disappointed. They had expected some brassy blare of noise or light – but what was it? Placid, soundless. ‘Just a throb from out there in the universe, brushing against the earth,’ she said.

  He peeled another orange and spat the seeds over the balcony. ‘You know what? We should have stayed in our rooms with the blackout curtains shut until eight o’clock and then – Wow! That would have been the way to see it, first time. The full bedazzle. We can’t film this crap – what did it take?’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘Ter-riffic. We got one hundred and twenty minutes and the goddamn sunrise here takes twenty-five.’

  She said a good cameraman would give the effect in ten seconds.

  ‘Yeah, but people will know. My parents will know.’

  He wove his head discontentedly. As they went in from the balcony he paused to shake his fist at the sky. ‘Yahweh – you’re an alter kocker. Hey, you know Yiddish, Danielle? I only enjoy swearing in Yiddish. Listen to this.’ While he made a speech in gibberish she thought, He makes me feel three hundred years old. And defeated. And timid. How many women in L.A. dream of earning ‘thirty big ones’ at a hit? Women can’t think like that – there is not one on the planet with a permit for such boldness. And yet . . .

  His daring was like a spell; sometimes she thought, I’d give an arm and a leg to be able to think like you, Bennie. She wondered if there was anything about her that he valued. Her professional skills seemed to her like parlor tricks.

  In the dining room he said, ‘You’re kinda mystical – this white cheese is terrific – aren’t you?’ Take more capsicum rings – the Israeli breakfast is the best in the world – he meant, well, he was a mystic, himself.

  Now tell me you write poetry, she thought. Breakfast, the outside world, was an antidote to infatuation.

  ‘I used to write poetry when I was a little kid. I was real dreamy.’ Bennie remembered how he had driven his father crazy: he was working sixteen hours a day the
n, driving, to pay off the truck. He’d say, ‘Look at the boy! We’ve got a violinist on our hands. A rabbi!’

  ‘When did you stop being dreamy?’ she asked.

  ‘When I got beaten up at school.’ – In the next village there were tough kids, blacks, who came over to the same school: illiterate parents. My mother used to drag me to school. As soon as she went they’d say, ‘Hello, Soap. Your grandmother was made into soap.’

  Aloud he said, ‘Hey! Did you see that? You know who the man in the sunglasses is? I’ll be back.’

  The man returned with Bennie; he was pleased to meet Danielle – he had not yet seen . . . what was it that had won the screen-writing award at Cannes last year? But, naturally, he had heard. And Eleazar was a . . . challenge. For a writer. And for the director, of course.

  He had soft, pink hands and soft, greedy eyes; reputedly, one of the richest men in the movie industry. Bennie would hire his studios, his technicians, his secretarial staff, his carpenters, for Eleazar.

  Were they going to the mineral baths? They should take the opportunity. He was here for his wife’s arthritis –

  ‘Megabucks,’ Bennie said when he had left them. ‘He diversified in the sixties.’ They watched his slow progress from the breakfast room. His wife’s expression had the patience of a broken-winded horse being led out to graze, but her red fists on the walking apparatus belonged to a strangler. A lifetime of anger in those hands, Danielle thought; there she was – smiling at him still, apologizing for her inadequacy.

  ‘I’ll never get married,’ Bennie said.

  Somehow, they simply forgot about Wili.

  It was so quiet here, so perfectly still, so slow, hot, and deep. When they went outside at eight-thirty and looked up at the brownpink mountains and the high bright sky, strolled across the desert highway, clambered up hillocks of mineral waste, followed crevices, and then sat down, distant enough from the resort complex to be out of range of the noise of its generators – when they rested there, with a view over the sea, they felt the air itself was sedative and healing. Yet this, Danielle was thinking, was the landscape that to the eyes of early pilgrims was a vision of hell. Here was its image, this deepest gutter in the earth. The snow of Mount Hermon flowed along the Jordan for rebirth, snowy-white, but in pillars of salt down here. Salt statues formed a submarine landscape that from a distance tricked vision, looking as if the surface of the sea had bucked into white waves. It was motionless. The eye argued with the mind, gave up, shifted, and rested on the hills all around. They were twisted into fantastic shapes, like cooled metal, like the residue from experiments – as if this valley were an abandoned laboratory and they should tiptoe, in case the alchemist was still on the premises, hiding.