Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Herod had hired good architects: you have to admire the old brute, she was thinking.

  The palace was sited to make the best of the climate and the view, which was staggering – like standing in the bow of a ship in a gale. Below was an ocean of seething rock; the cliff face beneath the palace’s lower levels was unscalable. Someone had told her that men from the Israeli army had tried to climb it; she could not remember if they had succeeded or not, but that was irrelevant: they were not risking boiling oil poured from above while a tyrant laughed. Had he experimented with that test of his fortress on some of the more agile slaves? She could bet on it. The atmosphere was beginning to seep through to her now, Herod’s fear of the beautiful, greedy Egyptian queen disturbing his sleep, in Jerusalem, and driving him to this crazy undertaking. At ground level in summer shade temperatures reached one hundred and thirty degrees. He must have killed thousands, making them climb with slabs of marble for his dining room walls.

  She rotated her shoulder blades, loosening up now, sensing Eleazar’s disgust when, exhausted from flight and the horror that lay behind him in the capital, he had scrambled on board this lifeboat and found it set up as a seraglio – gold paneling, marble baths . . . The nation was in ruins, irreparable; in Rome the Emperor was thirsty for the last trickle of its blood: ‘Take Masada, my dear Flavius, and the East will become calm.’ When that Emperor destroyed Jerusalem, he crucified so many hundreds of Jews he ran out of wood, and those not sold as slaves he had torn in the circus.

  – And this is what Eleazar found: a mosaic-walled steambath.

  And yet . . . They could survive here! Herod had planned well in his terror of Cleopatra. There was food for all – and weapons enough for a year or more. They had only to hold off the siege until summer when the tremendous impress of the sun would drive the Romans away. Yahweh must preserve them through another spring, into summer.

  But He had not; He had forgotten to love them.

  She remembered that armored units of the defense forces took their oath – ‘Masada shall not fall again!’ – up here. Maybe where that figure . . .

  A late-afternoon breeze buffeted his loose silk shirt. Bennie stood alone, close to the parapet of the upper palace, one arm extended. With the sun behind him his honey-colored skin looked darker. He was talking to something in the air – she couldn’t make out what it might be – then she saw the way he held his hand steady, as if for a bird to alight on it. Maybe one of the blackbirds that nested beneath the casement. But Bennie was bracing himself for some larger creature – that was it! a falcon – he was seeing a hunting falcon return to him from the desert.

  He turned slowly, smiling.

  ‘Don’t frighten him.’

  She waited.

  Then, ‘Watch out, Danielle! He’s getting bigger. Christ! It’s turning into an eagle – he’s going to rip my throat –!’

  The parapet was only a couple of feet high but Bennie – thank God – was moving back from it. He rotated his hand so that now the palm faced upward, and he gazed at the invisible thing resting there.

  ‘Look at it,’ he whispered. ‘It’s pure white.’ He drew his eyes away from his hand and looked at her. ‘You turned it into a dove.’

  She did not dare touch him or speak again. How could he be hallucinating so wildly? Maybe the hash was particularly strong – or maybe he was pulling her leg. She felt mentally queasy.

  ‘Would you like it?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  He walked toward her carefully, both hands cupped around the dove. ‘Promise you won’t lose it,’ he said.

  The evening breeze had vanished and there was silence. Around them drifted the seamless garment of the universe; the thread of it they knew, earth’s sky, was transfiguring to gold.

  Danielle walked backward, still holding her dove, then turned and ran.

  Wili was thirty yards away, waving frantically.

  When they reached the funicular landing the driver said, ‘You crazies! The last ride was fifteen minutes ago.’

  The kibbutznikim who ran the cafeteria grumbled and cursed but agreed to stay open long enough for them to drink coffee. The last tourist buses had gone and in the parking lot there were only the white Mercedes and Wili’s red Alfa Sud. Danielle sat hunched over, inside herself. At length she said, ‘Bennie can’t afford a drugs charge. He won’t be able to make the movie here. If we tell them he’s still up there . . .’ Up there, alone, he could break his neck, or freeze. Once the sun went the temperature dropped abruptly. And there was no electric light.

  Akram came in to the cafeteria, rolling his eyes. Danielle beckoned him away from the kibbutz people.

  ‘Where is the hashish?’ she whispered. ‘Is it in the car, or has Bennie got it with him?’

  ‘Hashish?’ Akram had no idea what she was talking about.

  She said, ‘Akram, do you want to get paid?’

  Akram took deep thought. ‘Very gentleman. I say, “Please – sometimes soldiers come, make searches in motorcar.” Mr. Bennie very nice gentleman.’ There was a guard post on top of the mountain, he said; Bennie would not be alone.

  They paid for their coffee and went outside to wait. The lights were switched off in the cafeteria, a jeep arrived to collect the staff. One of the kibbutznikim wandered over to the Mercedes.

  ‘We’re making a movie here,’ Danielle said. ‘We want to see how the place looks by night.’

  He stared at Wili, the inspection of a dog with its hackles rising, shrugged, and walked off.

  By eight o’clock they were torpid with cold. The blazing desert sky had ceased to entrance them and its icy, spangled magnificence had begun to spin giddily, as if it would spiral them into itself and they would fall off the earth. Wili got out to take another look at the mountain.

  ‘There’s a light! He’s coming down.’

  Danielle told Akram to switch on the Mercedes headlights and drive as close as he could to the base of the path. ‘You wait for him. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.’ She and Wili both sneezed; she was damned if she was going to catch pneumonia by hanging around any longer. Wili claimed he had a migraine coming on. She offered to drive, but he said he could manage.

  As they got under way she closed her eyes and let out a sigh that felt as if she had been saving it for years. Wili patted her knee. He was driving carefully down the winding section of road, but when they reached the highway – hardly a highway by other standards, only one lane each way, unlit, without rails – he began to speed up.

  ‘There’s no rush now,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the lavatory.’

  She suggested he stop, but he did not want to; he wanted to get to the Moriah; he’d have an accident if he didn’t.

  ‘We’ll have an accident if you don’t –’

  It was strange, watching the ground rear up, lit by the car’s headlights, and to observe the jagged edges of stones galloping toward their faces in slow motion. Her body and Wili’s sluiced from side to side, then there was the extraordinary flight, stars whirling beneath them, thunder, a terrific crack! – the sky turning slowly under their feet a second time. Another burst of thunder . . . Then nothing. They’d been killed.

  Twenty-four

  Death was ecstatic white-gold light.

  She watched the overturned car, its wheels still spinning, and inhaled the pungent vapor of bubbling gasoline. Gallons of it spilt; were spilling.

  ‘Wili!’ she roared, ‘Wili – are you alive?’

  She could not move very well, hanging upside down from a seatbelt. She seemed to be alone in the crushed cocoon. Wili had vanished.

  She worked an arm loose and reached to where he had been; her hand met something hot and wet. She tried to grasp. ‘Wili!’

  He screamed in reply.

  ‘Are you alive?’

  He did not seem to know.

  ‘We’ve got to get out. The car is going to blow up. I smell the petrol.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he murmured.
/>
  – We are going to be burned alive. He’s unconscious again.

  ‘Open your door, Wili!’

  She jabbed her hand into the hot mess again – God knows what it is, his face? his guts? – and the pain brought him shuddering into consciousness. She held fast. Wili screamed and screamed. Then he faded once more. Danielle worked her other arm free and found a handle; it broke off as she wrenched. Maybe it was only the window handle. She felt again. This had to be the door handle. It had to open. Upside down, an astronaut, she used both hands to pry it slowly upward and pushed, pushed, gave her body to opening the door; the desert was holding it shut on the other side. One inch, two inches; a tigress energy empowered her. Six inches; ten. She could hear the metal breaking off the edges of the door as it grated over stones. She felt concerned about the petrol, but calm. She was calmly freeing her body.

  Then she was free.

  Tumbling out of the car head first, a rabbit breaking cover, she began stumbling and running, terrified. She squatted down at a distance of about fifteen yards and waited. Time went past so slowly it seemed to vanish. Then it did vanish. There was neither past nor future, but a permanent present. There was Is.

  Akram was driving at seventy miles an hour when, rounding a bend, he saw the single headlight focused on the ground. The Mercedes overshot by a hundred yards; Danielle saw red eyes rushing back toward her. The silence squealed.

  Time was back. She got up and ran forward, shouting at Bennie to stay away. Wili was dead and the car would explode any minute now. She tried to grab his clothes but he shoved her backward and, while Akram held her, crawled through the door she had opened. There was a lot of yelling. Akram let go of Danielle to help Bennie. She couldn’t understand what they were saying so she wandered away again to escape the blast.

  She felt sorry that Bennie was going to be killed.

  – He gave me a dove, she thought.

  She lay down, curved herself around its smooth elliptical form and went to sleep hearing them still shouting – people were always shouting here – in the distance.

  Twenty-five

  When they awoke the desert and blood were gone, washed away in the shower, and a sword of light split the room: they had not properly closed the blackout curtains; midday sun intruded.

  Bennie and Danielle had gone to sleep around dawn. He woke first and turned on his side to watch her, a small-boned unconscious creature whose limbs, bruised navy and purple, lay limp on the other side of the bed. He had let go of everything – butted his head and shoulders through the door of the red car, untied Wili from the seatbelt, dragged him out, carried him to the Mercedes, steeled himself to the blood spreading over his trousers through their flight to the Be’er Sheva hospital, and then, in her room –

  He’d helped her remove her shirt and jeans; blood crackled as the chrysalis of clothing broke open. The woman who stepped out came from temple rites; she’d smeared her belly and limbs with gore and her hair was wild from thrashing against the earth.

  At the hospital they’d said: He won’t die. A smashed arm, a shattered nose. He’ll be okay.

  You should see what a landmine does.

  Or a hand grenade.

  You should see shrapnel wounds. But – nu – more Israelis go this way; more are killed in car accidents than in all the wars – ’48, ’56, ’67, ’73 . . . Lebanon. If you work in a hospital you see what we really suffer from: enantiodromia.

  From what?

  We tear ourself apart.

  But we’ll fix your friend’s face. Please – draw his nose, how it used to be. Like that! We make noses, not trunks. We’ll make him a real nose . . . The arm will have to go. Good thing you knew to tourniquet it – but let me give you some advice: next time, loosen the tourniquet every twenty minutes. Don’t feel bad about it – you saved his life with that tourniquet. He can get a prosthetic arm.

  You believed the car was going to explode? It did! Seconds later?

  You performed a mitzvah: the greatest.

  Long life to you! Just put the woman to bed. Let her rest. Here’s some cream for her bruises.

  Long life!

  They had arrived back at the Moriah at two in the morning: Danielle had said, ‘I want you to stay.’ An axe stood within her: in each eye he saw the glint from an edge of its double blades. I’m going to know you, and I’m going to change that expression on your face, Bennie had thought.

  She was waking up, bruises blooming in tattoos on her thighs and hips and upper arm, a tiny cut on her chin from the desert flint she had fallen on. He picked up one of her hands and raised it to his lips: the smell of earth and blood was gone though there were still dark crescents under her fingernails.

  She saw the sheen on his eyelids and came fully awake with one thought – not a thought: a state: she was in love. He was what she needed; he’d given her a dove, like the man in her dream.

  ‘Yesterday, in the palace, you gave me a dove.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  He did. Sometimes he could recall a trip. He’d practiced, back in the dawn of the seventies, when he and Raphael experimented with acid and mushrooms and everything else that you didn’t have to put into your arm. Great movies: four great movies. They’d made Running Hot on nothing: none of them had any bread. Raphael had sold Marguerita’s grandmother’s diamonds and a rosewood chest, so they could hire the crane. The witch had nine lives – she’d been in the helicopter with Raphael but had escaped with a busted leg.

  When I read the telegram from Brazil I felt like a husk, he remembered. I sat shiva for Raphael, and that bitch Marguerita had talked about money, about how much she’d get. On the praising day I smoked a joint for Raph, and we had a long conversation: he told me about Masada; he said I could go on alone but I had to make a big movie. He said, ‘Get rich, Bennie, get big. It’s very small, inside a wooden box – but you won’t mind it, if you’ve been big first.’ I’ve grossed twelve million in the past eighteen months.

  He had done some research on Danielle before he’d hired her for Eleazar. She was fifth on his list, and the only woman, but it was the fact that she was a widow that had decided him. He’d thought, A widow on my side will be lucky, in case Marguerita . . .

  – Maybe I’ve made a mistake.

  He felt melancholy. If you were a hero, you were supposed to feel good.

  – I’m not going to fall in love with her – she’s terrible looking, well, she has beautiful hair and skin, and good legs: she ought to wear dresses, with those legs. She’s got skin like Japanese women: like rose petals on the insides of the thighs. But she’s a tough bitch. She haggled for a month over the percentage points. I was willing to give her three, but she screamed for five. I can’t stand that woman Sarah she uses to do her contracts. Another JAP. They ganged up on me and Sam – Danielle sat at the back of the room looking like a girl frightened on her first date while that Sarah put on her glasses and said, ‘Mister Kidron . . .’ And Danielle said, ‘Oh, Bennie, don’t you see that I can’t take less?’ Oh, Bennie. What an act! Poor little girl. When they left Sam said, ‘We’ve been thugged. By a pair of dames.’

  – I ought to hire Sarah myself, to deal with Marguerita. She’s driving me crazy: I AM A THIEF, spray-painted on the Corniche, both sides. Ferdy couldn’t sponge it off and we had to have the whole car repainted. So then she puts a rock through the windshield. She should be in jail. What did Marguerita do when we were starting out? She snorted coke and gave Raphael a hard time. She’s a platinum nose.

  ‘Bennie –?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yesterday, when we were sitting looking at the sea –’

  ‘I loved that. I loved being with you.’ And now I’ve saved a man’s life. Not even a friend’s. I can’t stand that Wili: he’s shifty and a crawler – but I saved his life. I was scared to death. Something said to me do it. Just do it. I thought, So I’m going to be burned to death, but I’ll do it anyway. Danielle, you’ve been the ins
trument of my great mitzvah: if you hadn’t tried to stop me, I wouldn’t have had the guts. I would have stood back and waited for the car to blow.

  ‘I’m in love with you.’

  ‘Do you fall in love with every guy you screw?’

  ‘No.’

  – She’s got crow’s-feet around her eyes; but the skin on her body . . . I’ve never seen such – what was it? cruelty? – in a woman’s face as last night. There’s a mystery in what that made me feel, in seeing the real thing in someone else. Cruelty is not the word. It’s the concentration of a subtle energy. Funny about her name: Daniela. ‘God is my judge.’ She probably doesn’t know what it means in Hebrew. I’m definitely not going to fall in love with her. I spend too much money on dames already.

  ‘I haven’t fallen in love for years,’ she said.

  ‘Neither have I. Falling in love is a mess.’

  – I fall in love at least every six months. Sam says if I’d get married I’d save ten grand a year. I spent forty-five thousand last year, at the Wilshire: he showed me the figures. That included what I bought in the flower shop. Sam says I must quit walking past the florist with them – get a headache; get a toothache. He says I’m pathological about buying them presents. He does what he can with offsets on the gift allowance. I won’t tell him about the jacket I’ve ordered for Daniela. I won’t tell her, either. It’ll be a surprise, when we get back to Jerusalem.

  ‘You’re all bruised.’ He stroked her shoulder.

  – Sam says I have an urge to adore women, but I resist it, so the whole thing becomes a game of winners and losers. What would he know? If you take a dame to the Wilshire she knows it’s a contract: she won’t give you herpes. She understands: the room, the Dom Perignon, mean it’s a deal. A clean deal. What would Sam know, married to Debbie for thirty-five years and never looked sideways? First and only, for both of them. Grandchildren! – do I want children and grandchildren? Jesus – Sam and his grandson go painting together. A great kid, a genius . . . Danielle could be a grandmother herself: she’s got an eighteen-year-old daughter. I could screw both of them – like I did with that crazy actress and her mother. They’re all crazy. And JAPs are the worst. Danielle’s half-JAP. Even Wili picked that up – called her ‘Princess.’ That’s her – Jewish Australian Princess. I’ve got to get out of bed – oh, oh, here we go.