‘No. I don’t want to,’ Danielle said.
‘You’re in love with me and you don’t want to?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you don’t want to.’
‘Motek, take a look.’
‘It’s what you’re thinking that counts.’
– Now she fancies she’s reading my mind. I’m not going to have a JAP mind reader rejecting me. And I do want to know her again.
Bennie said, ‘Hey, let’s have some sunshine. It’s full of vitamins.’
When he tore open the blackout curtains there was the dazzle that they should have experienced yesterday. Light bouncing off the sea below came roaring in, wrecking the room – flinging their bloodied clothes on the floor, tossing wet towels over chairs, mauling the bed. For an instant their eyes ached; the night lay revealed. Then it was just sunshine. And time for room service. It was five past noon.
While Bennie was ordering brunch Danielle went to the bathroom and examined her bruises. The wince of neon light made them more livid: most of her right side was charcoal-colored, in cabbage-rose whorls. She looked, she thought, like an eighteenth-century image of the child of miscegeny. She felt ashamed of herself. The joy of waking up, in love, seeing Bennie kissing her hand, had been draining away while they spoke, and now it was gone. Her body ached, she looked ridiculous, and she’d done something unprofessional. She had promised herself again, after smacking Bennie’s face, that she would not have an affair with him. He had not wanted to complicate the relationship either; he’d made that clear the evening he arrived in Tel Aviv. But there were so many levels of intention; suddenly the deep ones could arise and sweep those on the surface aside.
Going to bed together has given us extra reasons for hostility to each other, she thought. It’s his fault I’m in this state. If he hadn’t got stoned I would not have been in Wili’s car . . .
She turned her back to the mirror and twisted her head over her shoulder to see how badly her backside was battered: it was hideous, as if she had gangrene. Then she turned and met a steady, cold gaze: a woman’s eye was appraising her. Her demeanor was cool; it said, ‘Don’t twist the truth. Of course it was not Bennie’s fault you were in Wili’s car. It was your choice. You may fool yourself, but you can’t fool me.’
They smiled at each other ruefully, sharing another recognition: she would be tormented in the days to come by memories of making love. It was something to do with female physiology, or perhaps with the act itself, that the man left part of his body within you.
‘Hey, you look terrific,’ Bennie said when she came out. ‘The rainbow lady. Three days from now you’ll be all green – how ‘bout that? Green Danielle Green?’
The wit of a nine-year-old, she thought. ‘What did they call you at school?’
‘Aw – something in Hebrew. I can’t translate it.’
‘I hated primary school. I was the only girl there without a father, and the only kid whose mother worked.’
‘What at?’
Bonny had been styled a vendeuse in a shop in which all the clothes came from France. ‘It’s in a part of Sydney that’s like Rodeo Drive – Double Bay. Known as Double Pay. She earned – oh, ten pounds a week, plus clothes at eighty-percent discount. But she still wanted to live as if she had Arab servants.’ Danielle added, ‘She was very good-looking.’
Bennie smiled: he got the picture – Mama laid it out, for old boys. They probably called by to give Danielle a grope in the afternoons, too, when Mama was in the dress shop and the kid was on her own, home from school. So she gets married at eighteen, to escape; widow at twenty . . . The legs came from the mother – he could practically see her: one of those blonds as haughty as a camel, Vaseline on her eyebrows. They lift your wallet if you blink. ‘I’ll tell you what your mother used to look like, at your age.’
When Danielle laughed her face was as delighted as a little kid’s – that amazing gap! Mama should have had her teeth fixed. But she was a selfish bitch: wouldn’t send the kid to an orthodontist, spent the money on cocktail dresses.
‘I get it right?’ he asked.
‘Exactly.’
– But only her nasty, beautiful side. Bonny came to fear her looks. She said to me, ‘No man will ever love you if you’re beautiful. They’ll only love the outside. She’d say, ‘Don’t make my mistake.’ There was no chance of that. Unfortunately.
‘C’mon, don’t look sad. Come and sit on my knee. I promise – well, we couldn’t anyway. The waiter will be here in five minutes.’
They had dressed in bath towels. She perched, then relaxed against him.
‘You know what we are?’ Bennie said. ‘We’re war orphans. And we know it. That’s the difference between you and me, and everyone else. You know why I hate Israel? I tell you, I hate the place. It’s a whole country full of losers who are kidding themselves, trying to believe it’s all going to work out in the end. They go on believing in a personal God who looks after the Jews. If I weren’t an optimist . . .’
His physical presence, his eyes so close they blurred into one, the rasp of his beard on her cheek, overwhelmed her and instead of trying to think, she nuzzled at him like a calf to its mother.
‘Why are we making Eleazar?’ she murmured.
‘I dunno. Because I want to be rich. Because I think Ariel Sharon is going to take over the country . . .’
‘Bennie!’
‘No – listen – don’t give me that left-wing crap. If there’s a de Gaulle in Israel, if there’s somebody who can stitch it together again, it’s Sharon.’
‘They’ll never forgive him for starting the Lebanese war.’
‘Rubbish. He was fired, remember? Israel will have to get back self-respect after messing up in Lebanon. And Sharon’s got the hero-stuff Israelis need.’
‘All the good people will leave.’
‘The good people? This is the Middle East, girl. This is a country of schwartzes now. Sixty percent Sephardi.’ He removed her hand from his crotch. ‘The waiter is coming. Listen – we’re going to eat on the balcony. Then you’re going to stay here and rest, and I’m going to leave you alone. I’ve got the plane hired for tomorrow –’
‘I can’t. I can’t face a small plane yet.’
‘I’ll do the aerial stuff. I’ll be gone a few days. You’re to sit in the sun. Sit in the Salt Sea and read the newspaper. Sleep. They told me at the hospital, The woman has delayed shock. Let her sleep. They said, She’ll cry a lot; she’ll think she’s dying. But you’ll be getting better, okay? Here’s breakfast!’
She hid in the bathroom until the waiter had gone.
Bennie had ordered lavishly. They were both hungry at first, but Danielle soon realized that her appetite had gone; she picked at the cucumber and chewed an olive. Bennie said, ‘I can eat for two. Do you think I’m pregnant? You hire me a photographer who cuts his arm off, and a Palestinian pretending to be Greek. You haven’t got me pregnant, too, have you?’
She tried to be amused. It was blindingly bright on the balcony but her mind felt misty. It drifted. With effort she could bring ideas into focus, but they slipped away again, returning her to the desert by night, waiting for the car to explode. It was no use; she felt somber and said somberly, ‘What about being war orphans . . .?’
‘You make money. You eat while you can.’ He held back his head to lower a crescent of honeydew melon into his mouth. ‘You don’t get attached. That way you don’t lose anything.’
‘But you’re attached to me. I know it intuitively.’
That was typical, he thought. As soon as a woman was old enough to have crow’s feet, she believed she was psychic. It was vanity. She looked in the mirror, saw the face was on the way out and said to herself, ‘But I’ve got psychic powers.’
‘Sure I am. We’ve got a contract.’
– My mother is psychic. She never goes to Diezengoff, but the one day in almost twenty years when Bennie is sitting on the sidewalk in Die
zengoff, something tells her to go there. She wasn’t going anywhere; she was just wandering around looking at the shops. She thought I was in Hong Kong. – She knew there was going to be a war, in ‘67. I’d been four months in the army. She said, ‘Bennie, you’ve got three days’ leave. You’re pale. They’re not feeding you properly. I’m taking you to Cyprus for the weekend.’ And when we got there she said, ‘Now we’re staying here, until the war is over. I want you alive.’ She said, ‘Your father will never speak to you again.’ She said, ‘You’ll never be able to go back.’ She said, ‘Your bubeh in New York can get you American citizenship. She knows a senator. I can’t give you much money. But you’ve got your health. You’ll survive.’ She said, ‘Israel isn’t for you. You should have studied Talmud, like my father. I don’t want you driving trucks, and tanks. I don’t want a dead hero.’ Now I’m a hero and I should be feeling great. When you haven’t done it, you think it’s everything; when you have – you know it’s nothing.
He said, ‘Either you want to have a serious conversation, or you want to talk about intuition. Make up your mind.’
She was aghast at herself: I’ve done it again! I’ve behaved like a little girl. ‘Serious.’
‘Serious is making megabucks. We’re going to win an Oscar, remember? Two. Best Screenplay. Best Director. Now, eat!’
‘Maybe we’ll win Best Movie.’
‘Why not?’
At the door to her room he said, ‘I’m ashamed to be seen like this.’ The silk trousers wore a brown apron of stain. He had averted his face, grimacing, while he dragged up his fly, shedding grains of dried blood.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked.
‘Of course. Hey! I can’t stand women crying. It’s just shock. Listen, I’ve got a car waiting.’ He felt that horrible, delicious clutch in his loins, like a shudder of electricity from within. ‘I’ll be back in two, three days.’ He kissed the limp hand. ‘Shalom.’
He was gone.
Twenty-six
When the hotel door shut behind him at two o’clock in the afternoon a door of night closed upon her.
At first she tried to sleep. She drew the blackout curtains again and lay down on the bed. She had barely been aware of physical pain in his presence; now every joint flamed and her flesh throbbed. She felt like a lump of wood caught by the lick of fire. Lying still was impossible, but movement only sharpened her awareness of being damaged. She thought: my neck is broken! They’ve made a mistake – I’m going to be paralyzed.
She tried to remember what she had read of quadriplegia: it was difficult to diagnose, the nerves of a broken spine could remain connected for weeks, like a spider web, then a trivial movement would snap them. The wail of a siren fled around the room, and another, and again. She lay rigid.
Danielle knew her neck was not broken.
Israel has the best physicians in the world, she told herself. I have to trust them. They said I would be in pain – but nobody tells you what pain is, as nobody can tell you what a painting or music is, they can only describe it by reference to another sight or sound: it’s like this, it’s like that. Words are ghosts. When have I known such bodily anguish . . . ? Giving birth to Katherine – that was different because the terror in my bowels was lightened by joy and all those hours of darkness were touched by an inward voice that murmured, It’s hard, it’s hard – but your reward is coming. Push, you must push – you won’t be torn apart, I promise. Yes, you can scream. This pain will vanish and be forgotten.
She lay panting on the bed. This was different. There was no reward, no nurses around her murmuring, ‘Darling, darling – it’s opening. Three fingers now . . . we can feel the head.’ There was only pain – not so sharp, much less. Compared to childbirth.
This is like a cut finger, Danielle said. I’m just sore.
A couple of yards away, on a table, she remembered there was a packet of analgesic tablets they had given her at the Be’er Sheva hospital. She could not see them in the dark; the idea came that she should switch on her bedside lamp, stand up, go to the table, and take a tablet. But willpower had deserted her; her arm could not be bothered to reach out for the lamp; thought and action had been disconnected by a different, subtle quadriplegia. Something other than her spine was broken and she gave up hope of ever moving again. Of ever doing anything. She turned her face to the wall and waited to die.
For the rest of that day and those that followed she mourned, slept and mourned her own death and the deaths of others. Sometimes her dark companion of the road returned and made her howl with anguish. ‘Let yourself die,’ he’d say. ‘I can’t help you unless you do. You have to change – the time has come. But this comes first. Accept it,’ and he killed her in many different ways, sometimes with clubbing, sometimes with nails through her wrists. At night she sat on the balcony and looked at the sky; the moon grew fatter and floated unruffled on the glistening sea; stars in sprays hung before her close enough to pick, but she could not be bothered to reach for them because they were so familiar they seemed as worthless as everything else. When the sun shone she hid from it in the blackened room. She arose when the muscle of night contracted and in the cool, arid air she contemplated the dryness of her life, the fact that she was ugly, talentless, and alone.
She dug up memories – of thirty-four years’ longing: longing that it should not have happened, that Geoffrey should not have been killed, that her father should not have turned into a monster. Her pilgrimage seemed contemptible, another bead on a chain of follies that stretched back to childhood and forward toward the end of her days. She had been deluded at every moment; she loved no one, and no one loved her – not even Katherine.
Katherine is sick of me, Danielle thought; she said as much on the telephone. As for my clever career: what a joke! I’ve been a gun-for-hire, writing manipulative junk for advertising agencies, then sentimental junk for television, and now rubbish for the movies. My ugliness goes beyond looking like a gap-toothed witch. I have an ugliness of mind that no orthodontists or hairdressers or cosmeticians can alter: I’m stuck with it. I’m a whorish woman, as my father predicted about Bonny and me. Who was I to hit Bennie in the face for stealing Wili’s films? He’s honest about being a crook. He’s not self-righteous, like me.
Every thought of others was a rebuke; each quality of theirs marked a lack in her.
I’m not intelligent, just sharply skilled in deceit, she thought. I learned in high school how to trick the teachers and the kids into believing I had better wits. I was as dumb as the girls who sat at the back of the room and never spoke. I had the nerve, simply, to interject with questions and arguments . . . Maybe they saw through me. Alice did. She knew I was more cheek than intellect but she played along with the game. When I first dyed my hair she said, ‘Ah-ha! You are taking a road . . .’ I can’t remember the rest, but she had been amused. She had dyed her own hair, she said, until she was fifty, when she asked herself: Whom am I trying to deceive?
. . . I no longer know what color mine is: brown, I suppose. But which brown? Chocolate? Honey? Mouse? Not even to know the color of one’s hair . . . I’ve been drawn to the fake all my life.
The foreshore below was lit with orange electric light. She hated it because its brilliance diminished around the edges of the lake the chill purity of the moon. She thought, How like the Israelis to violate moonlight: stoic virtues without the graces. Warm hearts, giant national passions, but no courtesy, no sense of harmony . . .
She watched her mind tricking her again, leading her off into criticism of the wrong in others, when its proper course was to examine her own faults. For a while she wondered what would happen if she let herself drop from the balcony to the concrete below. But she was too small even for that. It was only four floors. Some staff member would be awake, would hear the thud as she landed. He and others would gather together her unstrung puppet limbs and take her to the hospital, where they would patch her up. As they were patching up Wili. As they could not do to Geoffrey, or Patrick.<
br />
I wept for neither, she thought. My tears were for myself, robbed of my brother and my husband. I didn’t cry for them to return for their own sakes, but for mine.
This truth was so painful it pierced her heart and opened the way to a well of tears that did not gush but somehow seeped upward into her eyes drop by drop. It was as different from the crying of self-pity or excitement as cheerfulness is different from joy. She felt as if she were not weeping for them but that brother and husband were inside her chest mourning themselves. They used her tenderly, clearing channels to allow a flow of emotion that gradually changed from sorrow to love. It was a feeling without desire or yearning, complete in itself.
For a while she felt happy and believed she had nothing more to learn. But that passed, too, and the dark returned. Sometimes she telephoned room service and had food brought up. Staying awake until dawn she would sleep until midday, then heave herself off the bed when the maid arrived. She lay in a chair while the woman dusted and vacuumed around her. The maid was an Arab or a Sephardi and each time she had finished the cleaning she would waddle up to Danielle, lay her leather palm on Danielle’s forehead, and nod. She seemed to know something. Her fat cheeks were as unlined as a baby’s, but up close her strong brown eyes had a penetrating and chastened wisdom, as if they had seen the secrets of many beds, many bathrooms, in their time, and knew what misery was. When she left, her sweat smell hung in the air for minutes afterward.
Danielle began to crave the calloused hand pressing its heel on her forehead. She had long ago decided to give up writing Eleazar – what was the point of burdening the world with further distractions? – but one afternoon, lying underneath the maid’s hand, she felt energy passing from it into her wilted mind and limbs, a faint stirring of interest in . . . in the mysterious order hiding inside life. It felt no bigger than a drop of rain to the desert without and within. However as the hours dragged toward night, she became aware of this drop’s deep penetration.
Winter in Jerusalem Page 21