And so, Amos: my protector.
He was grateful, at first. He was nine years older than I, but sexually we were not only separated by age, gender, and an experience of holocaust, we were also of a different species. I had been harem-raised. I knew at twelve that you put scent on the pillows as automatically as you put potatoes in water when you peel them. I had a whole aesthetic of sexual ritual and gesture. Amos seemed enthralled and horrified – like a European explorer coming across Hindu rites. There were only a few ways in which he could enjoy himself with me without feeling threatened. He liked taking me to concerts; he liked holding hands; he was grateful to me for stroking his dark steel-wool hair; he was grateful to Emma. ‘You’re both so lovely,’ he’d say. But he was more comfortable with her trollop behavior than with mine. He began to call me Jezebel, and I wondered if he remembered that Jezebel had been thrown to the dogs to be eaten. He would say, ‘Not tonight, Josephine.’ I was struck with compassion, with wanting to unlock his frigidity. I felt that if I stretched myself out as a bridge for him to cross he might reclaim that part of himself he had rejected. And that was foolish of me, too: later I realized I had been trying to force on him something he did not want – and that what I had really been doing was assuage my own desperate need for security.
He told me how he had, as he believed it, lost his wife’s love. In 1967 his unit had fought on the Golan Heights against one of the Syrian foxholes that had tormented their kibbutz. ‘We were sent in like Russians – we’d never fought like that before, flinging men at the enemy.’ The Syrians had a last resort: flamethrowers. Amos was lucky his face and neck escaped. When he came home from the hospital, his wife had turned her head away from him. I did not like the look of that burned flesh, either, but I felt tender toward it; with my head laid against his heart, I could hear the crepitations of his cigarette-ruined lungs. When Miki would not touch him he had wanted to die, he said. ‘But not for long, Jezebel. I tell you – alive beats dead. Rule One of the Israeli Army.’ He added, ‘Used to be.’
Sometimes I lay awake beside his tightly curled sleeping body that feared to be aroused. Drifting into sleep I would imagine that against my thigh lay the dense, soft barrel of a penis, and that it was mine. I have asked other women about this phantom. Those whose lives seesaw between infatuation and loathing the partners they collect one after another have laughed. But others, more alone by temperament, have admitted that yes, they have had such imaginings, and usually at moments of crisis: when they decided to leave their husbands, at the time they realized they disliked their jobs, or the way they were running their lives.
I will always be grateful to Amos for creating that cold boundary in my bed.
I had been so upset by the third batch of dolls that I gave up work on the screenplay.
Emma considered any time I was not typing was hers, so we went walking day after day, finding tracks through the bush, paths to unfamiliar beaches and over and between seamed boulders that divided one bay from the next. Sometimes we fell in the water; sometimes we were trapped by a tide gnashing at the rocks and would have to swim for it, arriving home freezing, scratched, and mapped with salt crust. I had vivid catalog dreams of the sights of the day. One was of a cormorant, a bird committee-designed: greasy-looking dark feathers, question-mark neck, and so insatiable it seems to have time only for fishing, drying out, and fishing again. Cormorants are hunger-on-wings. Their wings are odd, too: when they alight they hold them up, like heraldic birds. I dreamed a cormorant. The next night I dreamed it again, but when the bird stood on a buoy to dry itself it wonderfully changed to a black swan. The black swan – a white fan unfolding beneath dark pinions. I was so astonished, I woke and sat up. I waited with my eyes closed; maybe I dozed.
Suddenly the swan returned: a cube of brilliant light became the image of a huge white bird. Its immense wings vibrated close to its sides, ready to soar open. I was gripped with awe and a yearning to be near it. A loud voice said: I have shown you.
What?
I knew when I woke up again. I went to the typewriter and urgently rewrote the final scenes at Masada: white specks in the distance growing larger, then the air wild with beating wings as the angels swooped down to the rock, gathered the hundreds of Zealots and lifted them off to a smiling sky. Strewn on the earth was a spatter of husks, the corpses left behind for Romans to gape at.
On the telephone Bennie said, ‘I love it! It’s the best final scene in any movie ever made.’ He added, ‘But I think we’ve got a few problems . . .’
He asked me to Telefax the entire second draft and I did so, from an office in central Sydney that afternoon.
A day later he telephoned and said, ‘It’s a bit arty.’ His voice wheedled. ‘We’ve got a miracle problem, Daniela. The fire turned back on the Zealots by Yahweh is one miracle. One for the Romans. Now I think it gets tricky if Yahweh sends angels . . .’
I wheedled back for a while. I asked him to show the scene to the composer. I said, ‘It’s a marvelous opportunity for a musician. Bennie, you could win Best Original Theme Music.’
He is too skilled a negotiator ever to say no until the minute before midnight. He has a way of listening to an argument that defeats your confidence in it because although he is apparently paying attention to every detail, something in his manner tells you that his mind is elsewhere and he is bored. He was saying, ‘Yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah,’ drawing me into thickets of justification. I was not persuading him. I was ambushed.
I said, ‘Stop conning me. You know it’s the right ending. It’s redemption. What you dislike is the politics. You want a movie that says: Look at what a momzer Yahweh is, but we Jews won’t be beaten by Him. Israel has struggled from eternity and will struggle to eternity with God. That’s what you want – isn’t it?’ It seemed clear to me why Christianity had been a heresy of Judaism: it forgave God – all those forgiven sins were His, not ours. The wrestling match was declared a draw.
Not so with Judaism.
Bennie said, ‘Girl – you’re overexcited. How ’bout you come to L.A.?’
In those days if anyone called me a child, I became one. I replied, ‘How ’bout you bite your bum?’ and hung up.
Ten days later Bennie arrived. He telephoned first from the Sydney Hilton to check that I would be at home. I offered to meet him in town but he said, ‘My coproducer is with me and we want to go for a drive.’ He said they had flown in via Tahiti. I could picture him drinking the pale rum of the tropics and feasting himself on whatever it is they feast on in Polynesia.
‘Who’s this coproducer?’ I asked.
‘Someone fantastic.’
I told him about Amos.
‘Doncha love me anymore?’ Bennie said.
By now it was December; summer heat was adding its first increase to the weight of gravity, which by February in Sydney is so heavy people cannot easily rise from their chairs. But the weather of this weekend was exquisite. The air felt refined and eventful, brimming with summer life – the high-pitched whirr of cicadas and the sugary smell of pollen. In my garden hummingbirds stabbed their curved beaks into flowerheads, held aloft by wings moving so fast they were invisible. The gum trees all around breathed out the clean, medicinal aroma that in a few more weeks, when heat began to strain them, would change to a shimmering bluish halo and a reek of fire within. It’s a smell that arouses national unease: bushfires are fated to Australia by the inflammable sap of her native trees. My garden had a fire-colored bougainvillea, planted years before my time and now growing in a neon blaze over the shed beneath the sun deck. Visitors admired it but I didn’t like it much: its flowers were bits of paper, without scent. I kept it going for its blaring contrast with the silvery grays and pastels inside the house.
When I went to the front porch to welcome Bennie I was forgetting my appearance had changed. I suppose he might not have recognized me, with a Colgate smile. I might not have recognized him, behind black sunglasses, with his gut breaking open his shirt buttons, and his do
uble chin.
‘You’re looking two hundred percent!’ he said. He had noticed immediately, and made me aware again, of what it was that had changed. I saw then the wince of embarrassment run through him, as if I were a mirror in which he was suddenly seeing his own degeneration. Bennie did not look older; he had the appearance of infantile debauch.
He was well tanned and when he took off his sunglasses the whites of his eyes were stark.
‘You too,’ I said.
And this was Amos.
And this was Naomi, my coproducer.
She limped forward, leaning on a walking stick, the hand on the silver knob wearing a platinum wedding band on the ring finger and a huge pale sapphire in the shape of a heart, the same color as her loose silk dress and the worm of a vein at her temple. She had fair hair and a weasel face like that of the waitress Bennie had eyed on Diezengoff. I left Amos to entertain them on the balcony while I hid myself away preparing drinks and food. I used the wrong knife, a Sabatier with a ten-inch blade, to slice a lemon, and cut my finger. The sharp pain released a shiver of tears and as I stood in the kitchen sucking the thin wound I realized that Bennie and Naomi were married. They were probably on their honeymoon.
Betrayal, humiliation, dignity. The sequence worked itself out and I was able to join the others feeling detached, and wondering what trick Bennie would try next. Naomi was lying in a deck chair, one arm trailing over the side as if she had drowned there. She had little to say – she thanked me for a glass of mineral water – but sat gazing into the crystal heart on her finger as if trying to read something in it. She too had a suntan but the skin around her eyes, which had been protected by sunglasses, was tinged pale blue; she seemed a creature who had lost her will. Amos asked her stiff, trivial questions which she answered in a small Californian voice.
Half an hour later Bennie blundered and said, ‘Hey, Marguerita, what’s . . . ?’ Of course! ‘Naomi’ was the widow Schultz. Bennie had settled out of court, all right.
He was leaning on the balcony rail beside Amos; we three were talking about Israel but Bennie, as usual, had half his mind on other things.
‘So this is what it’s like to live in Sydney,’ he said. ‘Dolphins in your back garden.’
A school had come somersaulting into the bay. ‘Naomi’ stirred to life and stood up. Oh! – she loved dolphins; they’d seen none in Tahiti . . . Amos offered to take her down the track to the beach.
When they had gone, I said to Bennie, ‘Neat’.
He grinned and the fat under his chin flattened as it pulled up toward his ears.
‘We had the full Orthodox thing. She converted to marry Raphael. They both thought it was a joke, but it satisfied his parents, and the rabbinate.’
‘Do you now own the whole company?’
He weaved his head: it was not as simple as that; she had good lawyers. They had drawn up the marriage contract.
I asked why she had changed her name. Bennie shrugged. ‘New life. You know?’ He added, ‘It was the only way out. For me.’
The old defiance shot through his eyes: ‘Listen – I’m a real good husband,’ but he could not maintain it, his body was laughing inside, shaking him, and he started to giggle – until a whoop of energy escaped. I was laughing, too; we hugged each other, shuddering with laughter, pressed so close the boundaries of our skins got lost and we were clasping not one another, but ourselves, in silence.
After what was an eternity, very short and very long at the same time, Bennie said, ‘Look out – they’ll see us.’ We could see them: Naomi had tucked up her dress and was standing crookedly in the water, one hand outstretched to the dolphins as if calling them, but they were already diving out of the bay. Amos stood on the beach behind her, watching with his hands on the hips. His head was cocked to one side.
By the time they returned, Bennie had told me: I was fired.
The contractual situation, he said, was straight-forward: I had twice refused to come to L.A. to discuss the drafts (although he had offered to pay my airfare), and I was insisting on an ending to Eleazar that was ‘impossible. Technically impossible, religiously impossible.’ Didn’t I understand the political clout of the rabbinate in Israel? Not to mention that the Hasidim when aroused were capable of taking the law into their own hands: did I want, maybe, that filming would be forced to stop? Or that he would have stones thrown at him? . . . I let his monologue flow on until abruptly I was furious. He was offering me elaborate excuses for stealing my copyright. As he had shoplifted to pay for his adventures in the Tel Aviv brothel, as he had stolen Wili’s film negatives, as he had stolen (with some legal complications) Marguerita’s share of the company, Bennie was now stealing my work.
‘Whose name will be on the credits as writer?’
Bennie drew himself up. ‘Mine. I’m writing it, now. It’s almost fixed – I can go to shooting-script stage in another few weeks.’
I grabbed a handful of ice cubes from their bucket and flung them into the bougainvillea. Then I sat down peacefully.
Bennie was grinning. He had worn his thug’s sunglasses to sack me; he twitched them off his face and said, ‘I’m going to do something that’s not to my advantage.’ His eyes were shining with pride. ‘Here.’ The slip of paper he handed me was a check for a quarter of a million dollars. It was what I would have earned if the contract had run its normal course. Minus the profit points. Bennie said, ‘Be nice, don’t make hassles. Don’t get that Sarah involved. I warn you: I’ve got better lawyers than Sarah. If you try to sue me, you’ll waste yourself.’
‘What about the profit points?’ I asked.
Bennie’s expression was scandalized. ‘Danielle! I’ll never let you down – I told you that in Jerusalem. When the movie is made and the receipts are in . . . Listen: I’ll pay you. Maybe not five, but two, three –’
‘Five!’ I said.
He sighed. ‘For you, five. I give you my word.’
The appearance of Amos and Naomi in the doorway cut the current that flowed between Bennie and me.
Bennie said, ‘I think, Naomi, it is time for us to leave.’ He stroked Amos’s back as he said ‘Shalom.’ Amos still looked puzzled, watching Naomi limp toward the white Daimler, the chauffeur helping her into the back.
‘What sort of guy marries a cripple? She was in a helicopter crash . . . I mean, it’s kind of him to have married her, but . . . ?’
Amos, when I had explained to him as much as was explicable, spent an hour walking up and down the living room, swearing and kicking at objects that weren’t there. He lapsed into Polish and Hebrew and would turn to me with incomprehensible questions. In English again, he asked: was it true I had breached the contract? Didn’t I know – for Christ’s sake! – its terms? And there remained the question of copyright: I could prove I owned it . . . And what about the profit points? If the film were a success I stood to earn up to an extra million dollars. Did I imagine that bastard would hand over . . . ? He was getting away with murder. And I trusted him! That was beyond all logic.
Love is.
‘He’s ruined your career!’ Amos said.
I had started making lunch.
‘You’re chopping up celery as if nothing has happened. Women! God Almighty . . .’
Amos insisted on knowing Sarah’s home number and spent an hour on the telephone to her. He came out of my study fierce with triumph because he now understood the contract. Sarah was as furious with Kidron as he was, he said – but it was sticky: if I tore up the check, Sarah could get an injunction.
They had both missed the point: I had had the pleasure of creation. In the meantime. I had enough money for a three-year holiday.
‘If you rip up the check, Sarah will fight for you. She’ll be able to delay production so long that Kidron will lose his financial backing. You can ruin him, she says. He’s been bankrupt before. If he goes to the wall on this one, he’s finished.’
I knew that already.
‘Money is all that Bennie has got to live fo
r.’ I said.
Amos sat down heavily. When his face was in repose its underlying worldweariness and distress showed in every line and angle. The phrase he had not used for weeks returned: ‘You’re a lovely woman.’ I felt ashamed of what I was keeping from him – that if I had not loved Bennie, I would have gone ahead and ruined him. But I did love him. Through desire, possessive love, anger, hatred, despair, and humiliation, I had arrived at equanimity about him, which is wrongly thought to be evenness of mind but is a state of balance in the soul. It’s a state that admits only love.
‘I’m being practical,’ I said. ‘What, having ripped up a fortune, do you and Sarah propose that I live on?’
Now that he felt himself in charge of my life, now that I was not Jezebel but just a woman, one of that species condemned at birth to passivity, Amos was transformed. He came over and ran his hands through my hair. In five days he had to leave Australia.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if you rented out this house and came back to Israel for . . . ?’
A while. He could get Katherine into the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; there would be no difficulty importing Emma . . . I could picture it, too: a ready-made family of females around him, replacing those he had lost.
Winter in Jerusalem Page 28