Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The woman returned each evening at six o’clock to remove the bedspread. They had not spoken to each other; they had no common language. At five o’clock that evening Danielle began to draw pictures of what had happened: she wanted to show them to the maid to explain her state. At first she drew the car overturned, herself and Wili trapped inside (like Patrick and his Thames TV girl), then her figure crouching in the desert clasping the dove, then Bennie and Akram dragging Wili from the wreckage. She sketched carefully at first but the drawings began to have an urgency of their own and turned into cartoons, then abstracts. She had only a pencil and a few different-colored ballpoint pens; the need for proper colors became a frenzy. She had cosmetics: eyeshadow pallets, lipsticks, kohl pencils.

  When the maid entered she found the sick girl sitting on the floor in an ocean of paper that she had covered with scrawls. She had drawn on everything: on her own notebooks, on all the hotel stationery in the room, all over the newspaper, on the room-service menu; the bedroom mirror was an explosion of lip-stick; in the bathroom she had scribbled in gold eyepaint and black on the glass and these colors and the same design were what she was repeating, now, on the pages of the telephone book. But she was smiling. The maid had not seen this crazy one smile before. She cleaned the mirrors and helped Danielle gather together her drawings.

  Later that evening Danielle answered a knock and met someone from the hotel management.

  ‘You’ve been in a car accident?’ he said.

  She nodded. He asked if he might come in, then walked up and down the room, glancing in corners. After a while he said, ‘You’re an artist?’

  She shook her head. She had no idea what he was talking about, but he seemed benevolent; he made small talk, asking about her work. She told him about Eleazar. He sat on her bed and smoked five cigarettes while they chatted about movies. When he stood to leave he said, ‘We’ve got an excellent masseuse in the hotel. Do yourself a favor.’ He said he would book her for a massage at eight A.M.

  She was awake at seven-thirty when he telephoned her to say, ‘Get up. Get dressed and go to the lower ground floor.’ She felt different this morning; yesterday was a bit of a blank, as were the days – she did not know how many – before. But this morning she felt almost alert. It seemed the resort was for invalids, as well as vacationers, and according to a brochure the hotel’s lower floors were set up with exercise equipment, spritz baths, and a mineral pool. A couple in the elevator said that some Scandinavian country allowed trips to the Dead Sea as a claim on the national health scheme. Was she here for a cure? By accident, she replied. And from what country? She was confused by the question. But before they had bumped stage by stage to the lower ground floor she had said, ‘I’m not sure. Maybe I live here.’ The husband cocked his head, puzzled. ‘You’re a guest worker on a kibbutz?’ Danielle nodded. He held out his hand and she shook it limply. ‘Good for you,’ he said.

  The masseuse was a Georgian – ‘No, darling, not a Russian,’ she said. Her thick body strained the seams of her uniform while her hands, strong enough to heave coal, felt like butterflies. She put a stethoscope on Danielle’s belly and linked it to a machine: battle noises ricocheted. ‘World War Three,’ she said. ‘Inside you.’ An hour and a half later Danielle woke up; the masseuse was offering her a glass of mineral water. From her disjointed explanation Danielle gathered that the flow of energy in her body had been disturbed, but the masseuse was putting it right. She was to return the next morning, for work on the bruises.

  Waiting for the elevator she saw the wife of the movie chief.

  ‘Look at my hand.’ The woman extracted it from her walking apparatus and very slowly, like a lobster claw, opened it with an act of will rather than muscle and nerve. ‘I couldn’t do that three days ago. They say that in another week . . .’ She gossiped on about her joints, not noticing – not caring? thinking it normal? – that she was addressing a person who was lime-green and indigo from shoulder to ankle. The intense selfishness of the sick was soothing, Danielle realized. Maybe they drove the staff mad but they made few claims on each other, oddly detached by their personal obsessions from much prying or attempts at contact. They spoke softly, they moved slowly. They were fully united only in an unvoiced dislike for the vacationers, who ran about, made noise, and did not have the time to listen to them describe the course of their aches and pains. We are like shades, she thought, asking each other briefly how each has landed in this hell. When the crippled woman had made her own report she waited for Danielle’s and nodded as she stared at the bruises; she too had been massaged by Bella the Georgian. ‘A genius,’ she said. ‘You know how she developed her technique? She worked in a lunatic asylum in Moscow. She cured hundreds of mad people.’ For a moment they looked directly into each other, bright-eyed, sharing with affection a mutual burden that did not need a name. ‘Come and see me,’ the woman added. ‘I have a house in Jerusalem.’ She had others in Rome, London, New York, and Los Angeles, according to her card.

  Bella had told Danielle to take twenty minutes of sunshine on the balcony and she saw the emperor’s wife again that day, seated in a deck chair among a row of others, gazing in reverie at the water. A young boy ran from his parents and dived head first into the Dead Sea, to surface screaming. The parents and other tourists carried him to a fresh-water shower on the beach, all talking at once and rebuking each other. The row of heads of the invalids swayed back and forth like a stand of wheat struck by a wind, then fell still again, uninterested.

  Danielle returned to the darkness inside, and Patrick’s death.

  She had not asked if his car had rolled. Now she wondered if he too had experienced that ecstatic flight on a whirlwind and had been swept so high that the stars were a carpet for his feet. She tried to concentrate on Patrick but found instead she was thinking about Geoffrey or Wili – poor, hopeless, horrible Wili – and Bennie, or at other times, about the man Amos. He had been severely wounded in the Six-Day War, Alice said. There was no sign: he did not limp, his arms were his own. Her mind rambled without discipline; repeatedly she called it back to Patrick, putting the scraps together.

  They had lived with each other fewer than four years, she recalled. Their first house was a basement apartment in King’s Cross.

  – We were a pair of young dragons intertwined. Below ground level, an inferno of lovemaking.

  On weekends they would surface to buy fuel from a hamburger joint that stayed open until three in the morning. Once a troupe of performing dwarfs was there. They had capered around her and Patrick and told jokes in a ribald patois that was neither English nor not-English. One had cried, ‘Take me up! Take me up!’ He had put his hand up Danielle’s skirt and pressed her thigh. Something in the indecency had robbed it of offense, as if his were the touch of a wise one. She remembered but still did not understand what the little monsters had meant; she had felt like a queen to them.

  It was three o’clock in the morning. Hours ago the moon had sailed over the roof, off toward the Judean Hills, and by now would be diving into the Mediterranean. She told herself, I must try to sleep.

  She felt she had not been asleep at all when a shout in the room woke her. A voice cried, ‘Hooray! Hooray!’ – it was the peasant girl cheering forward her wonderful bull as they galloped through a meadow to freedom. Clasping his giant neck she looked the size of a dwarf.

  – To be alive!

  – I forgot. I thought I was remembering – but I was forgetting what an adventure it is to be alive.

  She wanted to get back to work on Eleazar immediately.

  As she and Bennie had told each other often, the timing of the suicide scene would determine the whole movie. In Los Angeles they had watched the TV videos made after the Jonestown mass suicide and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. Danielle had timed at thirty seconds the onset of an unbearableness that transformed into boredom; Bennie at a minute and a half. ‘That’s the time people spend on a roller coaster,’ he said. ‘You think a
musement parks all over the world haven’t got the timing right? I tell you – the public wants ninety seconds of horror. Then the brain goes blank.’ I’ve had a blank in time, too, she thought.

  She sat up in bed and snatched her watch from the shelf beside her. It had been broken during the accident and its hands stood permanently at a quarter past eight. That was the question that had been niggling at the back of her mind for – what was it? three days. There had been something wrong about the gap in time from when the car ran off the road and turned over twice and when it had blown up. Even though the engine was still running, in gear, the wheels spinning madly like the legs of a beetle on its back – even though with each second petrol vapor was spreading . . . there had been an eon before fire had engulfed it. Bennie had been at least ten minutes behind them; another three – maybe five – pulling Wili out. And only then, a quarter of an hour later, had the blast made all three of them dive for cover.

  For all that time she had somehow known the car would explode. Wili had said something. So many things had happened at once as they began to run off the road; she had been hypnotized by the sight of the desert rushing toward them and the feeling of hallucination. But she and Wili had kept on talking to each other, and he’d said . . .

  – He said, ‘We’ve got no brakes!’ Then, when we were airborne, he said, ‘They’ve killed us. Get out if you can.’

  That still did not make sense.

  There was no clock in the room. After a long while someone bad tempered answered at the reception desk. It was four in the morning, he said: was there anything else she wanted? Maybe a string quartet? No? She only wanted to know the time? Would she be ringing again, to ask when it was five o’clock?

  ‘Don’t be rude, or I’ll complain to the manager,’ she said.

  ‘Lady, you complain to the manager, you’ll get nothing to eat.’ He hung up.

  I’m back in Israel, she thought.

  She waited a few seconds and rang again.

  He answered with, ‘What do you want now?’

  ‘I want you to tell me where Mr. Kidron is. Benjamin Kidron – he’s left a message at the desk, saying where he is. Please find it.’

  ‘ “Find it. Find it,” she says.’ He went on in murderous-sounding Hebrew. Then, ‘The date today is . . . one moment, he has written in Roman letters. Lady, I speak, I don’t read, English. You want I wake up someone else?’

  She asked to be called at six A.M., when an English-reader would be on duty.

  Bennie was in the Tel Aviv Hilton: she had to follow all the instructions he had left before the receptionist there would connect her to his room.

  He said, ‘You ring me at six-fifteen to tell me Wili’s car was going to explode? It did explode. I saw it. You saw it. Akram saw it. Listen – I had to go to a nightclub in Jaffa, great Yemenite singer there – I’ve been asleep for just half an hour. Can we – ?’

  ‘Oh, damn you.’

  Bennie said, ‘Tsk, tsk.’

  The Yemenite opened her huge black-coffee eyes. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said to Danielle.

  ‘Who was that woman?’ the Yemenite asked.

  ‘Nobody. Go to sleep. You’re going to be a movie star, okay?’

  For his taste she had too much body hair, and she was too young for the part he had offered her – as leader of the Zealot women who had disobeyed – but she would be fine as someone else, a singer. He’d get the casting director to tell her that her acting was lousy so the role was being given to another, and that Mr. Kidron was disappointed. He had not wanted to go to bed with her; she had persisted. And then she had given a running commentary: You’re wonderful – you make me feel wonderful – you’re the best – you’re such a man – you make me feel . . . As if it were a social event, a civic reception, and he was there to be given a prize.

  ‘Hush, motek’ (he could not remember her name). Hush? Why hush? she’d asked. Don’t you want to know . . .? Oh, you’re tearing me apart. It’s wonderful.

  He’d thought: Some know; some cotton on. Most ruin it.

  Elohim speaks to me in silence. ‘Because I’m concentrating,’ Bennie had replied.

  Over the years he had trained himself to yearn toward release, then hold back, and this delicious agony of willpower had become a life habit.

  At least it’s exercise, he thought.

  He had a routine for discovering their names: when they woke up he’d say, ‘Hello. I think my name is Bennie Kidron. What’s yours?’ – as if they had both lost their inner selves during the night.

  She told him her name; he gave her his card, asked her to write in English to L.A. – no, no, not to him, to this man, Hal Mathews, the casting director. The car was waiting; he had to rush. Yeah, next year in Jerusalem . . . Do you mind eating downstairs? I have to lock the room . . . documents.

  ‘Come on, donkey, give me breakfast,’ he said to Akram, who had another giggling seizure, but handed over his bread roll filled with a hard-boiled egg and sprinkled with olive oil and marjoram.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ Akram said.

  ‘Don’t be anti-Israel.’ More laughter.

  Bennie could see that Akram (who had accompanied him to the club last night) was busting to ask about the singer, so he told him – ‘like a gorilla, horrible – a man’s better off with a wife.’ Akram had seven kids.

  They had stopped again at Jericho on the way back from the Dead Sea to buy fruit for the children and Akram had taken Bennie through the ghost towns on the fringes of the city. Mud walls, reed roofs, the refugee houses were as quiet as graves.

  Bennie said, ‘My parents didn’t come to Israel for this.’ He thought: my mother did not – but maybe my father did. Akram had not giggled.

  – My mother told me: ‘When your younger brother was born he came out yelling. But when I had you, I screamed and you did not. They put you in my arms while you were still bloodied from being born and you just lay there, and looked at me. I’m sorry, Bennie. I wasn’t used to Israel when I was pregnant with you. I’d only been in the country a few months. I fell pregnant here, on Cyprus, in the displaced persons’ camp . . . You’re a Jew, not an Israeli.’

  – She married the first able-bodied man she met; they had not even shared a mother-tongue, because hers was Czech and his Hungarian. ‘I was a scarecrow.’ But she conceived me, the first night. It was like that: a rage to rebuild the race. They had no idea then that the gap was six million. When you see them planted out as trees – that memorial forest we went to yesterday, or whenever – it’s difficult to believe.

  – ‘Your father will never speak to you again.’

  – ‘Your bubeh knows an American senator – knows him well: you take my meaning?’

  – I said, ‘But she’s over sixty!’

  – ‘Bennie, Bennie: when you’re older you’ll understand. Desire does not stop.’

  Sometimes he had heard his father grunting over his mother in the night. Next morning she would wash her hair.

  Daniela had washed her hair.

  I don’t want to think about Daniela, he thought. I had no time to call her back; as it is I’m late for the helicopter. The question is, will I spend tomorrow in Israel and see her again? Or should I send Akram to collect her, deliver her to Jerusalem, while I catch a morning flight to Athens? The lilac jacket has arrived. I could leave it with a note saying . . . I’ll think of something today, on the chopper. The pilot is going to let me fly it this afternoon. I must be practical about Danielle: she and I need an extra script conference, so I should stay another day. On the phone she sounded crazy. She asked me to find out something from Akram . . . God, what was it? I didn’t take a note. Sam drilled it into me: Bennie, you are disorganized, so every phone conversation, every business lunch, you take notes. People who take notes don’t go bankrupt. You want to lose two million dollars, like you did in 1976? You want to drive taxis again? Bennie – you haven’t got the financial fat; when you’ve got it, you can quit taking notes. God, I’m tired; Daniell
e’s right: this place erodes you –

  ‘Akram, you got any more chocolate? I’m still hungry.’

  ‘Too much ploughing last night.’

  ‘And I’m getting too old for it. I’m thirty-four and falling apart.’ – Akram laughs at anything; I tell him the truth and he pisses himself.

  ‘Long life to Mr. Bennie! They said at the hospital you will live to great age.’

  ‘Yeah. I could save myself years of trouble.’ – That one went over his head. Hell, he’s an Arab; only Jews understand jokes like that.

  – Sam said to me: The money you spend on dames – Bennie, you transform every one of them into a prostitute. Is that what you want? I couldn’t tell him the truth: I do. Prostitutes are unowned, they’re kind of virgins. They used to be in the temples so men could taste Elohim. The Hasid tried to tell me that when I saw him in the cathouse in Tel Aviv. I thought he was just another hypocrite.

  – My father says they’re all hypocrites, taking advantage of having a Jewish state, somewhere they could not be persecuted, but refusing to serve in the army, to work the land . . . Superstition! he’d say. ‘What’s Judaism? It’s a four-thousand-year-old superstition – and what’s it done for us? Given us Auschwitz! It makes me sick to hear Jews boasting about “the great Jewish contribution to civilization – Einstein, Marx, Freud.” I remember the contribution we made at Auschwitz. You know what they do in Mea Sha’arim? They pray for rain! We have witch doctors in this country who pray for rain and burn the national flag on Independence Day because they think the State of Israel is unholy, that it’s been made by men, and only Yahweh can make it when he sends the Messiah. Bennie, there is no God looking after us: only Jews look after Jews.’ He made a point of eating too much, and smoking, on Yom Kippur. My mother refused to cook him pork: ‘You want pig on Yom Kippur – you cook it,’ she said. She taught me how to fast. I should call her. I will, from Athens.