‘We’ll settle outta court,’ he said. ‘Jesus, have I had a hard time.’ He asked me to hold. I could hear another phone ringing and heard him say, ‘Great. Terrific. Can you hold? I’m talking to Australia –’ and I thought how accurate that phrase was: he was no longer talking to me.
I can say now that I love Bennie. I know he does not love me: his deep feelings end when he senses he has the upper hand.
He telephoned me again to say the first draft was brilliant, but I knew he was dissatisfied with the ending. I was, too. I refused to fly to Los Angeles for a discussion, although he offered to pay the fare. I’m not sure now why I was so stubborn – I think it was panic at the thought of having to meet him face-to-face, although the excuse I gave was ‘family commitments.’ It was my first mistake, for in fact I had done what he wanted me to do: create a problem. He needs crises to reassure himself that he is alive, and where there are none he will invent them. He craves excitement, not fulfillment, from life.
I set to work on the second draft, trusting something would turn up, a phoenix rising at the end of the story.
What turned up, however, was the first of the dolls. It was a dreary day, rain coming down in long needles. The Pittwater was as gray as anesthetic and treetops were lashing about; people in yellow or orange oilskins clambered around their boats, pumping them out and refastening tarpaulins that had blown loose in the gale. The mother possum and her overgrown baby had tucked themselves in a niche under the roof of the sundeck and Emma had spent all morning barking at them, until I shut her in the bedroom. It had a sliding door which, if she was determined, she could open by hooking a claw under it, but usually after a scolding she went to sleep. The postman must have rung the bell on the front gate, but I did not hear him. I heard Emma, at large again: her shoulders and back became a wild boar’s quills when there was some serious intrusion. The postman, a waterfall, was wedged between the wooden door and the screen inside it, saying hopefully, ‘Good dog.’
The wrapping of the parcel was so sodden that I put it in the garbage without looking at the postmark. Inside a shoebox there was a nude rubber doll of a dumpling-nosed girl with Jean Harlow hair and an open-lipped smile. It was the type that came into vogue in the early 1970s, with the ‘sexual revolution’ – that is, it had a plump little Mount of Venus, grooved, and a hole between its legs. But no anus. I’d been to a raffish, ritzy dinner party in Woollahra when these dolls first came on the market. The hostess had run to the children’s bedroom and brought out boy and girl dolls, holding them up as proof of her broadmindedness. Then the guests made them copulate on the dining-table in between the candelabra and the crumbs of baguettes. I asked why, since the dolls had everything else, they had no arseholes. The hostess said, ‘You would notice that.’ On impulse she added, ‘Vere are ze anuses, I ask you?’ She rubbed together her index finger and thumb.
I thought somebody had sent me the doll as a joke. A number of my friends knew that I was back on what they called ‘the chastity kick’; some of them were compiling lists of eligible men – no easy matter in Sydney. The bands were due to be removed from my mouth; soon I would have teeth like anybody else’s, lined up straight as milk bottles, a kind of portcullis. My best friend, Nell, was threatening to have a ‘fangs frolic’ to celebrate; there would be five guaranteed heterosexuals at it, she said. I thought the rubber sexpot was probably from her. I gave it to Emma.
A couple of weeks later when its partner, a boy doll, arrived, I gave her that, too. Nell and Katherine, the only people I could think of who might have the inclination for such nonsense, denied knowing anything. Both dolls floated and for as long as they lasted made good beach toys for the dog, so by the time the third lot arrived, their two predecessors had been chewed to pieces.
Amos called me in late winter. He had been in Australia for some weeks, at Melbourne University, and was to come to Sydney for a weekend. Of course, he did not start off by saying that; he began by saying that he was calling from the swimming pool of the Singapore Hilton, where Malay beauties were massaging his feet. I was unexpectedly thrilled to hear from him – Amos brought back for me the poignancy of trying to stay civilized, in Israel, in 1983.
He said, ‘I wrote you a fifteen-page letter. You mean to say you didn’t get it?’ It took me a while to realize that Amos was shy; much longer to know that he was a man who, yearning for comfort, rejected it.
I told him I would love to see him but added that Sydney was vast and I lived a long way out of town.
He said, ‘I understand the geography. Seven hours. We crossed the northern coastline, saw something called Darwin, and I fastened my seatbelt, ready for Melbourne. Seven hours later we got there. How are you going to defend this country?’ I told him we couldn’t, but we kept an army, navy, and so forth, to be polite.
Of all the things to do and see in my barbarically glorious city, which on hot fine days looks to me like a shipwreck of bright-skinned mermaids and sailors washed ashore, Amos wanted to visit the zoo.
I told him to take a taxi from the airport, then a ferry, so that he could see something of the harbor, the famous and ugly Opera House (an albino tropical plant root-bound from too small a pot), and the famous and ugly Harbour Bridge (shaped like a costive tortoise suspended between stakes). We Sydneysiders are proud of these monuments; their cost was awesome. I was to meet him at eleven next morning.
As I drove toward the smog, I had a bet with myself that he would not notice my new smile. I won, but Amos did realize something was different: ‘You’ve had your hair cut?’ he said.
We lived in different worlds.
As we were shaking hands I noticed his kippered skin had been smoothed from a few weeks in mild, damp Melbourne and that the navy pullover he was wearing was cheap lambswool, probably from Myers. His tough-guy bearing – big chest, slim hips, and legs held rigid at the knees, jutting chin, small, pouted lips – could have won him a role, I thought, as a detective in a French movie: a plainclothesman from Marseilles who’d seen it all, but still had a heart. His look was of military service; I mentally placed Bennie beside him and saw a rebellious thug.
‘I had to get away from Israel,’ Amos said. ‘Everything is degenerating there.’ He had been enchanted by his ferry trip from Circular Quay to the zoo, but when I asked him what it was that had particularly attracted him he could not say; it was just Sydney Harbour, the yachts, the ocean liners, the great cargo tankers. Nothing specific.
I had not been to Taronga Park for years; it was agreeably changed. As cruel institutions go, it seemed kinder – at least to some of the birds. Ibis and peacocks roamed through luxuriant gardens which, when Katherine was a child, had been acres of concrete. We saw the snake house, the languid kangaroos and wallabies, the horrible tiger cage, and the seals who mewed to each other underwater in voices that we could feel vibrating through the walls of their pool. Amos loved the giraffes in a paddock with a view across the harbor. A foal galloped on bamboo legs, teetered, then folded itself down like a telescope.
We took our sandwiches to a bench by one of the artificial lakes where the iridescent ducks begged brazenly. A sign said PLEASE DO NOT FEED . . . Amos threw them crusts. ‘It’s okay. They can’t read,’ he said. Liquid silver spouted as the ducks fought each other. Then around a curve of the lake a black swan came swimming fast. Its gaze focused down on the water made it seem bashful. Amos threw more bread, the swan snaked out its neck, swallowed, then turned to face us. It was a fine, full-grown bird, as composed, as it stared at us, as a king.
Amos had never seen a black swan. ‘Okay – who’s painted it?’ he said. ‘Swans are white. What’s going on?’
The bird came ashore on its red frogman feet. Amos had walked forward to the lake’s fence to feed it by hand.
‘They can be savage,’ I said. ‘Don’t tease it.’ He was trying to make the swan come closer. Suddenly the curved serpent straightened into a rod; Amos leaped back shaking his hand.
‘You bastard!’ he said. The
swan was eating the food he had dropped. Just before it slid back into the water it gave a kind of salute, raising one wing. There, hidden by the black plumage, was a sheaf of long white feathers like the pages of a manuscript fanning open.
‘Look!’ I said – but Amos could not see that the swan was hiding a film script beneath its wing.
‘You’re really funny,’ he said. He was smiling in amazement at me. ‘Tell me – is all your family odd?’ Later that afternoon, because he seemed at loose ends, I asked him to stay for the rest of the weekend. We were both embarrassed.
When we arrived at Avalon, after dark, Emma behaved shamelessly. Amos was good with dogs, as people who feel unloved often are. She flung herself on the floor at his feet, belly up, and he smooched with her while I breaded and fried some veal and threw together a salad. The meal was skimpy, but he was ready to be charmed by everything: the house, the dog, the possums that arrived during dinner for bread and sugar. He came with me on Emma’s evening run at the surf beach. It was high tide, so we had no trouble with the swags of brown kelp that can be booby-trapped with bluebottles. There was phosphorus in the water. He’d never before seen the cold fire that sparkles around your feet in the dark. When I finished throwing a ball for Emma and returned to him, I found him playing with the phosphorus – but as a scientist might, scooping up handfuls of water, trying to determine its various qualities. I guessed he had never had a chance to play in childhood; at that stage he had not told me what had happened to him during the war in Europe. I began, at that moment, to try to adjust my vision to his. It was a flaw in my nature, and, I suppose, in that of many women, to accept, out of some inchoate sense of pity, burdens that were not my own. Sharing, I discovered, does not halve the weight; it doubles the quantity of unhappiness.
Amos made fewer wisecracks that evening. But he was barricaded with them again next morning, and tense with politeness about keeping out of sight until I had showered and dressed, when he scuttled into the bathroom in a shoddy new checked dressing gown.
The day was overcast and drizzly; Lion Island was hidden in mist. I was piqued that the view was so poor and the weather too miserable for fishing from the jetty, but he said, ‘This is paradise. I tell you – you’ve got yourself into paradise.’ He seemed happy to do nothing more than sit around and talk, but I became restless and in the afternoon I coaxed him out for a walk. The neighborhood is hilly and we had to go slowly because he was short of breath. ‘What are you? An Orstralian paratrooper?’ he asked. ‘I tell you – you’ve got a military profile of ninety.’ We’d got back to the war: Gideon was out of danger because the government was frightened of stimulating the Yesh Ge’vul mutiny by dealing too harshly with the situation, he said. When Gideon had been released from jail he was told – unofficially – that he would not be sent back to Lebanon.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.
‘My dear, I don’t talk about those things.’
I felt foolish; I’d forgotten that Amos was in the army reserve, and there were oaths of secrecy. I said irritably, ‘I could never live in Israel. It gave me the creeps, knowing every male between eighteen and fifty is armed.’
‘There’s a reason for that. Oh, fuck it – I don’t want to argue with you, okay?’
I realized he meant he did not want to argue because he was certain of winning.
We moved to the steadier ground of politics: when the government might fall, if Mapam would split from Mapai, the future for General Sharon, the Labor Alignment leadership issue. In Jerusalem Amos was part of a group working to unseat the Alignment leader (‘a piece of shit’), who, ‘with a disastrous war, the economy falling to pieces, the Americans turning against us – in those circumstances probably can’t win an election.’ He lived politics; he had that obsession with power and powerlessness that in centuries to come may seem as quaint as schoolmen’s debates about angels on the head of a pin. I had begun listening not to what he said about policy issues, but what he was saying about himself.
It was then I remembered Shula’s remark about his cynicism; I knew from my own experience how we cling to what we have made of ourselves – how we see the world – and that surrendering it is terrible. I’d felt as if I was being battered to death – and I was, in a way. The old was being murdered. It occurred to me that Amos, having developed his mind so highly, would have a worse time of it than someone less formed. He could even be violent; the thought of it made me uneasy; I’d been told he was an eloquent, even suave public speaker. He must have known his language in private conversation was harsh; I suppose he believed he burned out his anger with words. However, everything he said about politics was so well argued, sensible, and concerned with the national good that I felt cheap for criticizing him to myself. He was saying:
‘Israelis now want three things – Greater Israel, a Jewish state, and a democracy. They can have any combination of two, but not the three. A democratic Greater Israel means the Arabs will take over Parliament, and that will end the Jewish state. A democratic Jewish state requires us to give up the West Bank and Gaza, so we lose Greater Israel. What we’ve got now is a Jewish Greater Israel, with the result that we’re degrading morally, spiritually, and intellectually. A few years back I was talking to Koestler . . .’
‘Arthur?’
His eyebrows asked: How many Koestlers are there?
‘. . . who wrote in 1948 that our system of election to Parliament was so obviously ill designed and counterproductive that, within a year or so that fact would be clear to everyone, and it would be changed. It wasn‘t.’ He kicked an invisible stone. ‘I tell you, the reform of our system of election . . . We need a Messiah. Better still, his Old Man.’
I remembered the Sephardi hairdresser. ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked. I’d made the common mistake of assuming that the antireligious are atheists.
For the first time he looked at me as if I were, after all, a student not really sound enough for an honors class.
‘Of course. I think He’s a cunt – excuse me – but, of course. My dear, what is our life but chipping away at that huge mind?’ He reverted to a comedy routine: ‘Einstein said life is relative; Marx said . . .’ And so on.
Next morning he gave me a peck on the cheek with his lips. A few hours after he had left a messenger arrived with a plastic tube wrapped in lime-green tissue paper and with a red bow on top. Inside the tube was a red rose on an eighteen-inch stem and a great deal more ribbon arranged in a spiral pattern.
I had to call Nell and tell her. Nell inherited a lot of money which she has managed to squander with unflagging cheerfulness. She’s had two husbands, left one, and the other, she says, died of bad temper because she was so extravagant. Her dinner parties of more than a decade ago, in the days when she could afford them, were known for the drama of their cuisine: raw duck with beetroot; radish sorbets; tuna ice cream. ‘It really is delicious,’ she would coax well-bred, terrified guests, looking from one to the other with her big, open, untidy face, trying to guess what it was that was holding them back.
‘For pity’s sake!’ she shrieked. ‘Is it worth it, I ask you? Is it worth cooking for them and listening to them and . . .’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Give the thing to Mrs. Wellsmore immediately. Before it bites.’
I cut the stem and put the rose in a vase. It died that evening.
In any event, I forgot to thank Amos for the flower when I telephoned him. I called him because that afternoon the detective had asked me if there was anything to do with my work or with Israel that could have provoked someone to send me the third lot of dolls.
They had been delivered soon after the rose. When I opened the shoebox and saw the mangled contents I managed to get to the bathroom to vomit. I now know who sent the dolls and can see that the action made sense in its own terms: when we constrict our sympathies tightly enough anything becomes reasonable. At the time the dolls were a mystery to me and the detective, who had the smooth reddish skin and bright smile
of a chronically short temper. ‘There are a lot of angry people in the world.’ he said.
Amos said, ‘Jesus, you’re alone up there.’ He offered to come back to Sydney the following weekend and arrived in time for dinner on Friday. Emma was so alert with tension that at first she would not let him through the front gate. We talked until three in the morning, listing all the people I could remember meeting in Israel. Finally he asked, ‘Could it be your father?’
I had never fainted before. It makes blackness, like an anesthetic. When you come to, your hands tingle. Amos had lifted me onto the sofa and was kneading the nape of my neck, saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that.’ When I sat up he pulled me to his chest and held me lightly there, rocking a little now and then. He told me what had happened at another interview Phil had had with Professor Garin: Phil had said something about me and my father had replied, ‘My dear man, you puzzle me. I have a young housekeeper, an American gel. I do not have a daughter.’ Amos added, ‘I hate crazies. Especially crazies in politics.’
I said, ‘I’m going to bed. Do you want to come with me?’
He said he would put on his pajamas. I put on mine, and turned out the lights. We did not make love, but lay still along-side each other, each, I know, wishing we were elsewhere – anywhere – yet not knowing how to escape. At last he said, ‘I’m going to sleep,’ and did so, instantly. It’s said they learn to do that in the army. I stayed awake for the rest of the night, in the guest bedroom.
At breakfast he said, ‘Things between me and Mira have not been good, but all the same . . .’
But all the same there are certain things we are all incapable of resisting: fantasies.
And so, with the unreason and inevitability of a dream, I obliged Amos to become my lover. A month later he moved to Sydney, and spent every weekend at my place.
At first I thought I knew what I was doing: I wanted the sense of security that can come to a woman through bonding a man to herself. No accident, I think, that at this time I chose a partner with an underside of violence. You fight fire with fire. But what is the original fire? I believe it’s the many forms that vulnerability takes in the minds of women if they are imprinted, often at an age too young to remember properly, with a violent example of male rule. It’s a female – and a Jewish – fear of The Other Side. Over decades I’d built a shell – certainly it was imperfect – but for day-to-day, twilight living it was good enough. It had splintered under the impact of the third doll. I saw myself naked, now, as I had been then, four years old and witnessing my father try to kill my mother. I’d thought, ‘I’m next!’ The image of her broken, on the floor, lived in the basement of my memory. When I opened that third parcel of dolls I was a house that screamed from cellar to attic.
Winter in Jerusalem Page 27