Alice had heard her but decided to stay in her own world a while longer. ‘I think democracy is a system of bribery, and it’s working worse and worse in every country you look at. Well, that’s the way of things – everyone needing to protect his own tiny pile of goods and flesh. So he thinks.’ She gave Danielle a nudge to let her know she was now ready to answer her: ‘It takes years to learn to love,’ she said.
To avoid the crowds they decided to leave via the Lion’s Gate but it too was clogged with tourists. A guide with one group was explaining how, in 1967, Jerusalem was captured through this gate and that a military decision was made not to shell the Old City – although the Jordanians had used shells in '48 and had destroyed the Jewish Quarter. The tourists listened to the self-righteous rigmarole spinning on and on. ‘We took Jerusalem on foot. Here, look, the bullet holes.’ They peppered the iron cladding of the Lion’s Gate doors. Who wanted to take photographs? He rammed his index finger through a hole. A member of the tour group asked him to adjust the angle of his head – there was a shadow on his face, spoiling the shot. Smile for us. The cameras seized him.
In Danielle, a rift opened. Real photographers – like Wili – used the light as it was; he posed nothing. He grabbed the instant. He’d been quick. Wili had had two arms.
‘I’ll get a taxi,’ she said.
When they were settled in the backseat Danielle started to weep. Alice patted her knee, but Danielle said jaggedly, ‘Don’t comfort me. I’ve got to go back to a script conference with Bennie, and –’
Alice closed her eyes and waited.
You need patience with the turmoil of the young, she thought. Bennie had been in a fearful state about the accident when he had telephoned her from the Dead Sea and asked her to contact Professor Garin.
The old brute was unmoved. Marilyn had shown more concern, Alice recalled, although she could not resist remarking that ‘the Lord has taught Danielle a lesson’ – and when I inquired what the lesson might be, she had the gall to reply, ‘If you came to church, Miss Sadler, you’d find out.’
‘Bennie can be very trying,’ Alice said.
Danielle blew her nose. Abruptly she was able to get a grip on herself. ‘You know what? We had a car accident near Masada. And Wili’s arm has been amputated. It’s Bennie’s fault. And mine. We were getting on each other’s nerves.’ She realized she was botching the explanation. She turned to face Alice and stared into magnified, steady eyes. Alice was thinking, The same reaction as Bennie’s: guilt, exaggeration, oversimplification, self-punishment. You and he are a fine pair.
‘Who was driving the car?’
‘Wili.’
‘Just so. It could have been your arm, instead of his.’
Danielle had not thought of that. There, see her swoop on the crumbs of comfort. But guilt’s twin is irresponsibility, Alice was thinking. When Bennie came swaggering into my apartment last night it was like allowing an orchestra through the door, all out of tune. I thought my head would split, from his boasting and his cigars. Then he burst into tears and wanted to know what he should do about Wili: put him on the payroll for life? It was something to do with workers’ compensation, for which he had no legal responsibility, but his lawyer had told him he was probably morally responsible. When I pointed out that it was up to the driver to drive properly he said, ‘You’re damned right. Little schmuck.’ And that was the end of it. He ate a whole box of matzoh and smacked my backside when he left. She hoped Danielle would be less callous.
Danielle saw that Alice had gone to sleep.
The shopping had taken longer than she expected and there was no time to change. She thought, I’ll go like this, and ran across King George Street in her sneakers and jeans. It was already five past five. Bennie was not downstairs and the hotel staff was rearranging the furniture. When she rang his room, he said, ‘They threw me out for smoking. Bloody Shabbas.’ The Sabbath elevator stopped at every floor and of course his suite was at the top of the building. When he swept the door open she saw he had shaved and that he was in a good temper.
‘I called New York. You know what? My shares are up. I’ve made a few grand.’ Thirty or forty – he wasn’t sure.
Danielle felt as if he were an acrobat who had back-somer-saulted and landed with his feet on the highwire. Again.
‘Capitalist pig,’ she said. ‘I’m only working until seven-thirty.’ She explained she was going to make her own dinner tonight, and noticed he was at once on the alert. ‘I haven’t enough for you.’
Bennie shrugged.
They were finished before seven o’clock. Bennie had taken a couple of notes, chewed a piece of paper, and listened. His only suggestion was about a singer – ‘to relieve the tension, you know?’ Danielle said: of course there would be singing.
‘Yeah. But give one of the female singers a little role. Give her a couple of kids. Let her decide that – aw, she’ll kill them herself. Real pathetic.’
‘So who’s the singer?’
He was annoyed with himself for being unprepared with a good story, so he just talked. ‘She’s got a terrific voice. Terrific looking. Listen –’ He couldn’t help it: she was all over him. ‘You know what dames are like when they want to get into a movie, they’ll –’ he stopped himself at the coarseness that had sprung to mind, ‘hassle you.’
I’m really screwing up my chances for this evening, he thought. Danielle knows I’ve laid What’shername.
Then it came to him. ‘I met her in the lobby, just after you left this afternoon. She has a cousin on the staff who told her who I was, and . . .’
Danielle was looking skeptical, but she half-believed him. He jumped up. ‘Hey! I won’t be seeing you again –’
She watched him saunter into the bedroom. She was already thinking about preparing dinner: half the avocado, with lemon juice; then a Greek salad of white cheese dribbled with olive oil, long brown olives, the small, firm tomatoes; halvah; coffee; oranges. And for breakfast, a honeydew and the granola Alice had given her.
‘What’s this?’ she asked without curiosity. Bennie had laid on her knees a large gray cardboard box.
He helped her open it; tissue paper crackled inside. She began to scrabble it away, excited, then –
‘Bennie!’
It was a garment sold by the kind of shop with only a vase of flowers in the window; you made appointments for fittings.
‘But,’ she said. She had nothing in her wardrobe to wear with it.
He was gaping with pleasure. ‘C’mon. Does it fit?’ Perfectly. ‘Now you can throw out that monkey suit.’ Yes – she could: the fox jacket was too hot for the Sydney and Los Angeles winters. She’d kept it for Patrick, a memento of their only winter in London, two freezing Australians who’d come from a summer of one hundred degrees into snow, with no jobs and nowhere to live, and £40 between them. Patrick had scoured the pubs until he’d found where hot goods were sold. It’s a scar I can throw away, she thought. And not because of this fragrant, silk-lined replacement but because at last I’ve let go of Patrick. He can rest in peace.
Bennie was saying, ‘Hey, hey.’ His arms were around her. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’
There was, after all, enough for two. He watched while she put it together. For dessert they ate the honeydew, then had coffee and halvah. Bennie said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ The night air was cool and had a Sabbath freshness now that workday traffic had vanished from the city. They walked aimlessly, like tramps, people going nowhere in particular. Bennie slung his arm over her shoulder and they talked by following ripples of thought that led into memories and secrets. She told him about the nuns and how horrified she’d been; he told her of his terror on the night of the accident, when he’d crawled into the car. ‘You said there was a time bomb in it.’
‘I said that?’
‘Sure. You were crazy.’
The collected memory was suddenly unendurable, for it contained so much guilt for each of them. The event seemed fated by their own weaknesses –
her highhandedness the night she dined with Wili, which she had offset by offering him a job; Bennie’s fear about returning to Israel, which he had diminished by verbally assaulting her, and by getting stoned. They began to detach.
‘Well, it did explode.’
‘Yeah! You think there was a bomb? Hey, maybe Wili was a terrorist . . .’
They started constructing a plot – remember the assistant? the ‘Greek’? Wili was on a suicide mission – but everything goes wrong – because you got stoned. And Wili, while he’s a real hot photographer, is a dud terrorist, so he doesn’t set the bomb right – it was meant to blow up the Moriah Hotel and all those people with arthritis and skin sores – but he blows away his nose. It’s a circus act that’s not coming off: the lion won’t jump through the flaming hoop, the trapeze artist misses and falls in the net. And then –
‘Look, look,’ Bennie said. ‘This is what he does.’ He had his arms upstretched in a V for victory. ‘He takes a bow, very dignified.’
‘As if that were the whole point – to fall arse over tit –’
‘– in front of three thousand kids.’
They were shrieking with crude hilarity. Families gathered in the glow of Sabbath candles heard laughter outside.
‘You know – I haven’t produced a comedy since Running Hot. How about, after Eleazar, we do a comedy?’
‘With terrorists and vitamins!’
‘We’ll set it in Peru. They got flying saucers there – common as dogs’ balls. Raphael told me. Okay, so the terrorists, disguised as Rolfing masseurs . . .’
There has got to be an alternative to evasion, Danielle thought.
Raphael and I used to rap like this, Bennie remembered. I had so many good ideas when Raph was alive.
‘Raphael was mad, by the way,’ he said. ‘He didn’t own a pair of shoes. He owned one set of clothes. When they were in the wash, he wore a sarong. As soon as he married Marguerita she bought him Bloomingdale’s – and he gave it all away to a black kid he saw clipping a hedge.’
We hedge, Danielle thought. ‘So she did it again?’
‘And he did it again.’
‘That’s marriage.’
Their shouts of laughter rang through the night. And what’s funny, Danielle wondered, about a man and his wife hurting each other’s feelings? What’s funny for Wili, now?
They had wandered to the entrance of a public garden, a small inky area scented by spring flowers. A pearl shone in the Passover sky. Bennie looked down at her and the moonlight mirrored itself along his eyelids. She was filled with longing and fright.
I can’t go to bed with you tonight, as you are planning, she thought, because sex makes me childish. And when I’m childish, I get hurt.
Bennie said, ‘There’ll be a seat inside.’
Out of the orange glare of a streetlamp they had to stand still for a while to allow their eyes to adjust to the unlit garden. After a few minutes they found themselves in a shimmering, vaporous light, enough to see their way to a bench under a trellis. Across the valley the lights of a West Bank settlement town signaled. At night one saw parts of the fiery ring of fortress towns built to defend Jerusalem.
‘That must be Giloh.’ Her tone was dull.
– And Absalom sent for Ahithopel, the Gilonite, David’s counselor, from his city, even from Giloh. The books of Samuel had been Bennie’s favorites, David his favorite ancestor. He began to sing.
She recognized the tune and that it was different from his childhood Israeli songs, which sounded Russian. The words were unfamiliar; she picked out Lord, and in the last line, Israel.
‘What is it?’
‘A psalm of David.’
‘Which one?’
‘I dunno. It says in the last line, Redeem Israel. From its troubles.’ He took a cigar from his breast pocket and a gold lighter with a clipper attachment. The gadget, which she had seen before, reminded her of Wili’s folding knife-fork-and-spoon set. A thought that was feathery around its edges began to assemble itself: that Wili had played an extraordinary role in their lives, that they were seated together in a cocoon of anguish and tenderness because of that . . . creep. He had given them something to share that had uncovered them to the bone.
After a while she said, ‘I’m frightened of you, because you make me come to terms with – or see – weaknesses in myself that I don’t like thinking about . . . that I’m not good-looking enough, that I’ll be rejected and abandoned. I feel I have to defend myself against you. It’s the worst thing, to be permanently scared of being hurt.’
Bennie felt his heart swell. ‘I’ll never abandon you,’ he said.
They did not talk much on the walk back to the Plaza. Between every stop of the Sabbath elevator ascending to the top floor Bennie kissed her face.
In the morning they stood on the balcony and admired the Old City and the dark green patches of garden that could be seen from this height but, from street level, were hidden behind walls.
‘I got Alice to contact your father,’ he said. He was winding her wet curls around his fingers. Neither could stop touching the other and their fingertips had an extra sense, like that in the hands of the blind.
She told him she had given up. ‘I was sure he’d come around. But now –’ Nothing is resolved, except that now what I thought was a homing call turns out to be a noose of unfinished business. He spoiled me so much when I was little. He used to hide chocolates in his pockets for me to find.
She had been speaking aloud.
‘Still looking for ‘em?’ Bennie said.
They let the topic drift away into the pale blue of day.
The next afternoon they sat holding hands in the back of Akram’s Mercedes, lurching against each other as the car sped down from Jerusalem, past the iron memories of the ’48 war, through Bab el-Wad, across the Valley of Ayalon, toward Lod. Bennie was running late for his flight. When they arrived at the airport they were allowed to stay together for only a few minutes before Security separated them. She had to watch from a distance while he opened his suitcase and answered the set questions: yes, this was his case; yes, he had packed it himself; no, he was not carrying anything for anybody else; yes, it had been in his care since he packed it; yes, he had relatives in Israel. And being searched. He was speaking Hebrew, his accent was native, his bag was searched all the same. Men with walkie-talkies patrolled the linoleum. She watched a man without a walkie-talkie cover a territory around the cafeteria where the tables were tall mushrooms.
There were no chairs: people left bombs under chairs. The man suddenly picked up a shopping bag that a woman had abandoned to run after her toddler. He disappeared with it. When the woman returned with her child and found her bag missing, she began looking around frantically; the man observed her from a distance. After a while she got the idea of accosting one of the walkie-talkie officers and the plainclothesman resumed strolling about.
One tended to forget
The hatred.
One tended to forget that a few years ago hooded figures had leapt out of walls here, in this airport, to machine-gun fifty people to death, Jews and Gentiles – they weren’t fussy, it was the daring of the stunt that counted, for daring got publicity. Terrorism lusted for headlines. She thought, If their attacks were reported by theater critics – ‘another vulgar cliché of the weapons cult’ and run on the crossword page . . .
She watched Bennie’s head being carried away on the tide of travelers. He turned, his eyes straining across the crowd. She shouted and the direction of his gaze swerved toward her. A gate opened; the flood toward it swept him through.
Akram drove her back to Jerusalem and took her that night to dine with his family in the eastern sector, down a lane, up a flight of iron stairs. He had a plastic chandelier and Swiss Alp wallpaper in the dining room. A VCR stood beside the TV set on a carved wooden chest. Akram blew dust from the vase of plastic roses with proprietorial dignity and they sat down and waited for his wife to serve them. She was shy – because she s
poke no English, he explained – and at first did not want to join them, but Danielle kept smiling and nodding, and at last Mrs. Akram subsided onto a dining chair. The younger children were made to shush and ordered from the room. They peered around the doorway giggling, and for seconds at a stretch became brave enough to take a steady look at Danielle, who jumped up, chased, caught, and tickled one, sending him into convulsions. She did it to prove she was human, underneath. ‘Western Lady,’ Akram said, and his wife nodded agreement; they made it sound as if she were neither one sex nor the other, but a hybrid species. Maybe they’re right, Danielle thought.
The domesticity – the plastic potty in the hallway, the smell of children and cooking – made her want to be home.
Next day the first of the farewells had to be made. She called again on Professor Garin, who was out, Marilyn said. Marilyn had washed her hair and was wearing a new Indian cotton dress; she invited Danielle to the kitchen for mint tea, asking after a while, ‘And how is Bennie?’
‘Fine. He left yesterday.’
Marilyn looked down then up with the uncertain expression one sees in the eyes of small, purebred dogs when they meet strangers.
You’re as hopeless as I am, Danielle thought. ‘He’s gone to New York for Passover with his grandmother. Then he’s returning to L.A.’
They bumped cheekbones at the front door. Marilyn clutched the bottle of Passover wine Danielle had brought, saying, ‘He’ll be thrilled.’ They called, Peace, Peace, up and down the stairwell.
When the door was shut, Professor Garin came out of his study. He felt frail and dispirited, as if Danielle had got the better of him. And what was worse, ever since he’d come home from hospital Marilyn had taken to scolding him. Just now she’d kept him locked up in the study for forty minutes while she and Danielle chattered in the kitchen.
Marilyn had her hands on her hips. ‘Some people would say you were very selfish not to see her,’ she said.
‘Dr. Wilensky told me: my heart can’t stand it,’ he replied.
Winter in Jerusalem Page 25