Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘Have some,’ he said, holding out the bag of small egg-shaped fruit with softly prickling skin. He did not know their name, in English. ‘We used to call them Martian’s nuts.’ He added, watching Danielle grimace, ‘Chockful o’ vitamins.’

  She was thinking, Our defense systems are working efficiently.

  She had dressed up – the Rodeo Drive boots, a cream silk shirt, her best cream trousers, and a black angora pullover knotted by its sleeves over her shoulders. Although she saw better with contact lenses, she had decided not to wear them but instead her Dior spectacles with the thin black frames. Bennie had not seen her in glasses before; he made no comment.

  ‘You had breakfast? I haven’t. Have some Black Forest cake and coffee.’ He strolled away again.

  When he returned he said, ‘Right. Now we work. How are you, motek?’ The endearment, offhand, small change, clinked into place as the cue for their act. She was just ‘Sweetheart’ or ‘Sweetie-pie’ or ‘Darling’ – showbusiness Darling – one of the herd.

  Life’s safe again, she told herself. We’ve been there, done that. Bennie’s tired of that and now he wants to play a new game. Things move fast, when he’s driving.

  – He said all that to me in one word.

  Well, that’s that, she thought.

  – Grasshopper brains.

  When he worked, however, he got himself ‘into gear’ as he called it. His appetite, which was like a constant inner erosion, vanished. He drank cold coffee; he did not notice the cigar he was sucking was unlit. His eyes did not wander over women who passed. She thought, He’s almost articulate.

  By two o’clock she felt her concentration flickering. They had worked through the major plot (the Zealots) and the minor plot (the Romans), the characterization, the locations, the themes, and had reached once more the sticking point: the motivation for suicide and the motivation for the women who had refused to die. Bennie said:

  ‘It was inspiration! Eleazar was inspired – and the women were inspired. Simple.’

  ‘We’re not dealing with simpletons.’ She heard the razor in her voice; a black sulk played over Bennie’s lips.

  – Thick, deft lips.

  ‘I need to take a walk,’ she said.

  For a moment he hesitated: she had not meant it to sound like an invitation, but it had, all the same.

  ‘I’ll make some phone calls,’ he said. The day was too far gone for him to catch his flight that evening; he would rebook on another. ‘How long do you need?’

  ‘An hour. Or so.’

  ‘Take three.’

  Typical: make it excessive, she thought. I could be back at three-thirty.

  ‘See you at five,’ Bennie said. His arms were resting horizontally on the back of the settee; he flapped a hand in dismissal. Danielle did not look back, and he watched her leave with a feeling of relief.

  He had thought about her a lot since that night whenever it was – a week ago – and had worked out what it was about Daniela that unnerved him (apart from the fact that she was too damned smart). It was this: she had too many personalities – like some good actresses, who were bitches to deal with off-stage because they played to you, and you never knew where you stood.

  He and Raphael had a motto: never screw a good actress. Bad actress – that was a different story; you were in control with them. But that Danielle. There was a part of her that held him in contempt, even though she was still infatuated with him, too scared to come up to the room, wearing glasses that kept slipping down her nose. When it suited her, she allowed the contempt to show. Of course, she was an egomaniac who thought she was right about everything. For example, the motivation: when she came back from her walk she would announce the solution. She would get that oracular, fixed expression in her eyes and say, ‘Bennie, I know . . .’ It would be some crazy piece of intuition. He would humor her. Come third-draft time Danielle would discover who made script decisions on Eleazar. He had said to her again this morning – very gently – ‘We must not lose sight of the dramatic impact,’ and she had replied, ‘That’s the editing job,’ as if it were something for the servants. She talked about the movie in terms of a search for Meaning and Truth.

  Well, he’d warned her. He’d told her: megabucks.

  He watched the heels of her boots disappear up the stairs and smiled to himself: there was a distinct possibility for tonight. Now that he had worked out that he did dislike Danielle, and why, he felt calm about going to bed with her again. She didn’t talk.

  I’ll give her the lilac jacket this evening, he thought. I’ll also negotiate on the suicide motives. The reality is that if I thug her too soon, she can refuse to write the third draft – Sarah knows how to draw up a contract – and then I could be in trouble.

  – I’m a real nice guy and I’ll be real nice to her, this evening.

  Danielle crossed King George Street, changed into jeans and sneakers, then realized she did not know where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do. She could buy a new watch – that would be a useful activity – but the West Jerusalem shops were already shut for the coming Sabbath. In East Jerusalem many would not reopen until five; if she wandered along Salah el-Din Street looking for a watch shop some helpful young or not-so-young man would trail behind, until he had worked up the courage to grab at her bum.

  She had a sense of being out of rhythm with herself, and jittery. Of course, she and Bennie were getting ready for the argument they would have this evening – but it was more than that.

  She wrung her hands – sometimes she did that, unconsciously, when she was in a quandary – then noticed what she was doing, and noticed that her hands enjoyed each other. They were silky and her nails were long. Of course! They had done no housework for almost two months. Since leaving Sydney she had not cooked a meal, used a washing machine, watered the garden, fed the dog, picked and arranged flowers, ironed a blouse (there was no iron in the painter’s apartment; she had searched), staggered outside with a garbage can . . . She had been out of touch with all the small activities that, back in the seventies, she, they, feminists, everyone with a sense of justice, had condemned as ‘shitwork’ – but that, in recent years, she had found fundamental for well-being.

  For a sense of groundedness, she thought. We should have demanded that men share housework not because it’s nasty, but because it’s soothing.

  ‘I’m going to cook,’ she said aloud. In the Old City the Christians would have their shops open.

  The painter had an African string bag on a nail beneath the spirit mask.

  She now knew the fastest route, through the Independence Gardens, along Mamilla, straight up the hill to the Jaffa Gate. Spring was beginning to blossom, there were flashes of flowers and light perfume in the Gardens, but she was in too much of a hurry to enjoy them now that she was craving contact with the deep odors of fruit and vegetables, nuts and raisins . . . and those glass bins of spices that give out scents to lift your head from your shoulders. She could buy cardamom to froth with the coffee, and dried oregano, and salty white cheese.

  In fifteen minutes she was at the top of King David Street – or Suq el-Bazaar, depending on politics, language group, and all the rest of it. There were sandbags outside the Jaffa Gate and there seemed to be more police and soldiers around than usual. She reached the entrance to the souk and saw why: the place was packed solid with Passover and Easter pilgrims. Merchants who on other Fridays would have boarded up their premises were leering beside their mounds of dried apricots and jute sacks spilling coffee beans, shouting, ‘Yes, please? What is it you are wanting? We have it –’ and dispatching nephews and cousins of nephews to run to other shops for whatever it was – halvah coated with chocolate? – that some potential customer had fancied he might have an interest in buying. A boy tried to sell her dried Holy Land flowers, a crucifix, and a transistor radio; a donkey was being unburdened of a Christ; a couple of tourist hippie girls were poised to steal a scarf with silver thread through it, and someone in the vicinity w
as smoking hashish. What about a genuine Roman glass? Or a Hebron plate – here, beautiful painting of Jesus on it, His face . . . ? Or the Virgin? His brother from Bethlehem who carved this wonderful, exact Virgin in tears also sells exciting pictures of ladies and gentlemen. Together. Or would she like ladies together with ladies? More nice for her? She was Californian, yes? There was also a Buddha . . .

  She took a stranglehold of the string bag with her wallet in it and elbowed ahead. The fresh produce was further down through an alleyway to the left, as she recalled.

  Abruptly she had to throw herself against the stone wall. She either had missed her turn or had confused the point at which the labyrinth did a sudden switch of personality and became the Via Dolorosa, a street that broke in half and ran in two disconnected parts through the Old City. Toiling toward her were a group of people carrying wooden crosses on their backs, led by nuns. They had reached a Station of the Cross and all paused, blocking the way. Danielle ducked her head to avoid a blow from a passing cross. Then she saw that this melodrama was not all, that following those on foot were nuns on their knees, three of them, aged at least sixty. A snail’s thread of blood traced itself out behind each of them and she could see darker patches seeping upwards into their black skirts. She felt her skin goose-step. A nun was right beneath her now, and as the crone gazed up to the Roman letters carved above a doorway she muttered, ‘De fiends. De filty, rotten, stinking murderers.’ She banged her head on the ground and crawled on. There was a hissing and clicking noise: a Japanese was taking photographs.

  Danielle was still pressed against the rock when Alice appeared.

  ‘Dearest! What joy.’

  She saw the desert suntan and that Danielle was pale underneath it. The Friday procession tended to get out of control, around Easter, and however Israelis laughed at its naive barbarity, it sickened them. ‘It sickens me, for that matter,’ Alice said.

  She, too, was food shopping. They went along in silence, Alice guiding the way to the fresh food market while Danielle held her elbow to steady her over the uneven alleyways. Alice couldn’t hear in crowds, she could only talk. She said after a while, ‘Some of those nuns have saved their whole lives to make a pilgrimage, and when they arrive in Jerusalem they’re rutting to touch the holy places. I’ve seen them fight each other to crawl through a doorway in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to get at the crypt. The disgusting Armenian priest on duty would kick their behinds to make them hurry so he could demand sixpence a head from the next lot who wanted to kiss the ground. One Easter he asked two bob. A big brute, prowling his small domain. He flattened a Greek Orthodox brother . . . was that in the thirties? I can’t remember.’

  She was wondering when Danielle would try to tell her about the car accident – her normal way in the old days was to announce good or bad fortune instantly, and expect you to join in rejoicing or disappointment. It was a pleasant surprise to find her less of an egotist.

  She continued, ‘You’ve never seen Christendom in spasm, have you? You’ve never seen the tide that swells up from Passion Sunday, through the vernal equinox, Lady Day and Palm Sunday – when the pilgrims trot down from the Mount of Olives on donkeys, waving palm fronds and singing. Then Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, when they fast – and then Easter Day, when all the bell towers roar and ring and the walls themselves chant, “He Is Risen!” . . . The older ones easily forget that the Pope was kind enough to pardon us in 1962.’ She whinnied.

  Danielle was grasping her arm so tight she was hurting. Alice patted her hand and it loosened a little.

  ‘You should experience Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. It was wonderful until recently, but now the terrorists say they are going to bomb Manger Square, so it’s all sandbags and body searches – soldiers kneeling beside machine guns as you drive into the town. Funny, what we kneel to . . . I took Gideon to the Church of the Nativity a few years ago. When he saw the rubber doll in its white nylon dress and the red velvet manger he had an attack of fou rire. It’s a nervous reaction he gets from his father. I told him, “You mustn’t laugh,” but he couldn’t help it. He kept saying, “A plastic baby” and we had to go outside. I tried to explain to Giddy what an enormity it’s been that in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the masses have been served up concrete in place of the metaphors of religious language. He listened, too – until I said, “And that includes the story of the Promised Land. Read your Kabbalah. It was never a territory. It’s the land within.” When I told him that, his face turned into a barricade.’ Danielle has something of that look about her at this moment, Alice noted and thought, I’d like to introduce her to Father Gilot. When I brought him to Giddy it was already too late: Amos had taught Giddy to distrust religion, and Giddy lacks his father’s discrimination. He must, poor child, being in the army. ‘It’s all been vulgarized, you see,’ Alice said aloud. ‘You can make passion popular, but not truth.’ She added ‘Amos has read the Kabbalah. He has no illusions about territory. But I’ve seen the battle-hunger in his eyes, when he was younger. When I asked him, “What would happen, Amos, if we all got revenge for everything?” he replied, “We’d all be happy, my dear.” He had the wit to laugh.’

  They had reached the entrance to the fruit and vegetable souk, a cavern fragrant with fresh food and stinking from dead. Alice averted her eyes from the butcher shop where the head of a baby camel swung from a hook through its nose. Danielle said, ‘Erk!’ Then: ‘I feel like buying that thing – for Bennie.’

  ‘You’re angry with him. Why?’

  ‘Oh, the script –’

  Alice noted the alert, nervous glances Danielle was casting everywhere. She knew it could be hours or months before the effect of the performance on the Via Dolorosa had worked its way through her. That’s the trouble with these quick-witted hard-driving types, Alice was thinking: they’re unkind to themselves. When they have an emotional shock, they hit it like a brick wall. But she’d been a joy to teach as a child . . .

  She said, ‘We have to bargain. I do it by turning stone deaf. Good-bye. Follow me.’

  They wanted much the same stuff: cucumbers, carrots, a melon, herbs. After a while Danielle became aware of peace spreading to her from the small beauties of the food she handled.

  ‘That nun,’ she said.

  Alice switched on again.

  ‘That Irish nun –’ Her voice snagged.

  Come on, come on, Alice thought. You want to be Jewish, you face up to anti-Semitism.

  ‘– perhaps she was cursing the Romans. But if she wasn’t –’ Danielle was sniffing melons to check if they were ripe. ‘If I’d been born in Europe a few years earlier . . .’ She nodded to the grocer that the melons would do, he could weigh them. ‘I mean, how odd that I should have got to this age, without any sense of . . .’ Her face, turned to Alice, was puzzled. ‘You know, I thought it was glamorous. To be a Jew.’

  ‘Did you indeed? Of course, your generation has had that luxury. But I don’t remember it like that. I remember that you wanted to be like everyone else, but one day when you were about twelve, you and Bonny came to the school concert, both of you dressed up like courtesans. You were wearing an Omega watch that you’d got for your birthday from Bonny’s current gentleman friend. That was a Saturday. On Monday that little swine Helen Kelso said as you were going in to chapel, “My mother says your mother is a loose woman. And you’re just a Jew.” Have you forgotten you were expelled for a month, for blackening the Kelso child’s eye? Have you forgotten I put my job on the line, so they wouldn’t chuck you out for good, and came and coached you on the weekends?’

  Danielle was looking abashed. Alice shook her head. In Hebrew she said, ‘I’m deaf, not blind. You reweigh them with your hand off the scale.’ To Danielle she added, ‘You were more honest about it then than you are now. You didn’t think it was “glamorous” – you saw it was inescapable. And you were furious. You demanded to be excused from attending chapel from then on.’

  Danielle allowed Alice to bargain for two lemons. The
man wanted to sell no fewer than five. He worked himself into a rage over four carrots: four kilos, she meant. No: four carrots.

  ‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying,’ Alice piped at him. ‘And she can’t understand you, so it’s no use abusing her.’ To Danielle she said, ‘I’ve known him for years. We have the same fight every week. Ah – you see, he’s saved me a ripe avocado.’

  The man waddled around to their side of the stall and rearranged both their shopping bags so that the more delicate items were on top. Then he gave a satisfied upward jerk of his chin. Danielle thought: Arab.

  ‘They’re feeling the economic crisis that’s coming,’ Alice said. ‘But they’ve no conception of how bad it will be. Even Amos refuses to think of what’s around the corner. I told him, inflation will reach a thousand percent next year, and he scoffed. He’s distracted by the war, like everyone else.’ She could see that Danielle was not listening to her; however, she was delighted by the changes she could sense in the girl already. Nobody was unaffected by Israel, but the effect was negative for many. It was especially confusing for Jews, whatever their temperaments – cold fish or firebrands. Oooh, firebrands! Her mind was wandering a bit, Alice realized; she got tired in the souk – there was too much stimulation.

  ‘You know, there was not a cause – female suffrage, the war in Spain, vivisection – that didn’t involve my heart and mind. I loved being a firebrand. It’s so much easier to reform the world than to reform yourself. You need not surrender anything if you’re forcing others to give up their wicked ways. Reform is so democratic. And don’t we all worship democracy?’ She and Bernard Gilot discussed their dreams for an anarchy: ‘It will come, it will come – when man is complete,’ Alice said.

  Danielle said, ‘I now remember that scene at school about anti-Semitism. You said, “The Holocaust is within the power of each of us. And we must each overcome it.” I thought I knew what you meant. But I’ve forgotten.’ She tapped a finger against her ear, miming for Alice to tune in.