Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  That night Amos made love to me, tentatively and without expertise; he was baffled when I cried.

  As it turned out, because of other events I would have returned to Israel anyway.

  My father died. Alice telephoned me with the news and my first reaction was triumph. This changed to anger, then sullenness against the enemy who, by slipping away, defeats one’s great purpose. I wanted to return to Jerusalem to see for myself that his house was empty.

  He had willed his apartment and everything else to Marilyn, except for the money to cover my plane fare from Australia to Israel. Whether he intended me to sit shiva for him or that I should return ‘home’ I don’t know. I could not attend the funeral and the initial mourning period because on New Year’s Eve, Tuesday December 31, 1983, while I was buying food in Avalon village to tide me over the holiday, Mrs. Wellsmore set my house on fire.

  I saw the two firetrucks hee-hawing past as I came out of the supermarket and did not relate them to myself. By the time I got home there was a crowd in the street outside, an ambulance, ambulance men pressing an oxygen mask over Mrs. Wellsmore’s face where she lay on the pavement, and some kind soul was nursing Emma, who screamed and groaned. When she saw me she stopped, and I stumbled up to her and stroked her head for a few seconds. There was a barbecue stench and her hind legs seemed to have melted into reddish-black molasses. Then one of the policemen asked me to come with him. He was a big man, more than six feet tall, and he held my head against the blue cotton of his shirt. Through his hands covering my ears I felt the reverberation of the pistol shot his companion fired.

  Mrs. Wellsmore, who otherwise would be in jail for arson, is in an asylum for the insane. She had sent me the dolls as a warning that ‘everything must be destroyed.’ I had to be punished for living in her house, she explained to the police. While I was out shopping the bougainvillea had told her to set the curtains on fire.

  I spoke often by telephone to Amos and Alice, whose David had died. Both warned me that the situation in Israel was worse than ever: the economy was moving toward hyperinflation, the government was rudderless, and the war dragged on, costing Israel a million dollars a day and another life every week; the Shi’ite revolt was growing. Not only was it 1984; the Jewish calendar year also spelt out the word Destruction, Amos said, and there was an atmosphere of doom and superstition. Rabbi Kahane was becoming more popular. General Sharon, the architect of Operation Peace in Galilee, was not finished politically as everyone – he meant, the Left – had believed six months earlier. There had been bombings in Jerusalem: buying a pair of shoes in Zion Square on Thursday night, Amos had to run outside in his socks while the bomb squad investigated a suspicious briefcase. After his months of chewing nicotine gum, in Australia, I could hear that he was smoking again.

  I left Sydney at the end of January, on a tourist visa. When Amos met me at the airport his face had resumed its crumpled brown-paper look. I went to bed in his spare room and slept twelve hours on the lumpy iron-framed bed. Next day I visited Alice – and later in the week went to my father’s place.

  This winter in Jerusalem was not as cold as last year’s, but times were harder. Walking from Rahavia to Jabotinsky Street I could see small signs of decay: cars were dilapidated – dents in the paneling had not been beaten out, broken taillights gaped – and people’s clothes had a scruffy look, as if dry cleaning were now a luxury. The local matrons were not going as often to the hairdresser to be set and sprayed – but Marilyn:

  Marilyn had discovered shampoo, and a pure wool well-cut gray dress with a white Peter Pan collar. A sticker on her front door said in English LET MY PEOPLE GO.

  In the hallway she introduced me to someone called Clovis, aged about twenty and with a forehead no lower than a chimpanzee’s. ‘My tenant,’ she said. He seemed an obliging one, particularly in the matter of tattooing her white neck with love bites.

  ‘Clovis is full of the Spirit,’ Marilyn said. He grunted appreciation, and went on gnawing at his thumbnail.

  We all went to the kitchen where there was a photograph of Jesus on the refrigerator. Clovis was ordered to open a bottle of wine and then sent out to do the shopping while Marilyn and I settled down to get mildly drunk, although it was before noon.

  My father had died so happy, she said, because he had known that soon Israel’s population would be augmented by three million Russian Jews. It seemed there had been a hitch to the Temple Mount project, so in his last months Garin had turned his attention to the refuseniks. Apparently the Lord – I was never sure who Marilyn meant by this – was about to release a plague on the Pharaoh of the North (she explained: Uri Andropov) in punishment for denying exit permits to Soviet Jews. Throughout northern Europe people were ready to welcome the Prisoners of Zion who would be freed when Pharaoh fell to his knees. They were storing food, bedding, and medical equipment; someone had bought a castle in Sweden and converted it to a hospital. She did not mention the oil well of Deuteronomy 33:24 that would turn the shekel into gold; the newest large-denomination shekel notes, as Amos had pointed out to me, had a printing error on them that showed precisely what the currency had turned into.

  He had been appalled that I was going to spend the morning with Marilyn. But I had changed enough in a year to find her somehow beguiling. Her monologue seemed to me now a kaleidoscope that constantly formed new patterns within itself, and if I just listened – as you just look through a kaleidoscope, without growing angry that it does not make something ‘true’ – I could sense an interplay of images in her mind (and my father’s) that was enchantingly full of surprises. Surprises and paradoxes abound in real life: Amos had said to me the day before, driving back from Lod, ‘You know who’s won this war? The thing we crushed: Terrorism.’

  Toward the end of the bottle, Marilyn fetched from the study an envelope marked ‘For Miss Danielle Green, by hand.’ Inside were my baby photographs and some snapshots of the whole family, Geoffrey standing, my parents seated, me aged about three sitting on my father’s knee waving a chocolate at the camera.

  I put the envelope in my handbag and walked out into the cold, smiling uncontrollably on the outside and the inside. The photographs had put back together things that time had pulled apart. He had loved me. And I him. I’d been his ‘baby doll,’ his ‘angel,’ his ‘little mouse’; he’d carried me on his shoulders along the Street of the Prophets and I’d waved to the Ethiopian priests and all the people below, while I rode in a chariot. I felt the exaltation of that again.

  He’d told Marilyn, ‘I can’t see her. She’ll tell Bonny I’ve gone bald.’

  I was to have lunch with Alice and thought I should try to sober up first. I walked from Jabotinsky Street and found a seat in Einstein Square, near the Van Leer Foundation building. It’s a quiet part of town and at this time of day was almost deserted. I sat there oblivious of the cold as I thought about the challenges that still faced me in Israel. One was Amos: I had discovered he had begun drinking quite heavily in the evenings and, I felt, now that he was home again, didn’t really want to live with me.

  The other challenge came from Alice.

  David’s death had not diminished her, as I had expected it would. In fact, she seemed brisker and younger, moving with a sprightliness that was almost uncanny. Some of the sharpness I remembered from school was back in her eyes – and her tongue. When I told her about my relationship with Amos, that it had begun in Sydney after the doll affair, she stared at me for a while, then remarked, ‘So he wasn’t wasting his time.’ I tried to explain that I did not think he and I would stay together, that it was understood I was only a visitor, that I had a life of my own. Alice replied, ‘A life of your own?’ and her eyes locked on mine, demanding, When will you ever have a life of your own? What you’ve had, so far, is a succession of men to hang on to – father, husband, lovers, now Amos, your father-substitute lover . . . She said aloud, ‘I don’t think that phrase “a life of one’s own” means much for a woman, you know, unless she is the equal in spi
rit to the men she associates with. If she merely has a job of her own . . . I see so many who are just hard-working parasites attached to male hosts.’

  I’d blushed, and after a moment whined, ‘But I want to be special to someone.’

  Alice sighed out her disappointment while I sat looking at the rug in her parlor, thinking, You handed me a torch in childhood, and I’ve dropped it. Every few yards.

  The muzziness from the wine was beginning to clear from my head. I thought, She thinks she’s teaching me something I don’t already know. I mightn’t have always known it, but I do now. And what next? What happens to the parasite when it drops off the host? It becomes a bigger, better, more successful parasite?

  I looked at my watch; unless I caught a bus now, instead of walking, I would be late.

  The young man I’d met on the ramparts, the queen who couldn’t work his Nikon, was seated next to a window. The hourly radio news that is relayed on all buses – in case the country is attacked – was being broadcast. I yelled above it, ‘Hello. Did you get in touch with Wili Djugash?’

  He looked astonished. ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. He put his hand on the seat beside him to prevent my sitting there. ‘Do you mind awfully? I’ve got to get off now.’ He had some sort of bag beneath the seat which he heaved to his shoulder and with a girlish toss of the head made his way past me. I went one more stop, to the little group of shops on the Gaza Road, where I bought four slices of Sacher torte and a bottle of wine. It was no use being mildly drunk; I wanted to be Purim drunk – then sleep until it was time to go out to dinner with Amos and Gideon, whom I had not yet met.

  I recognized him as soon as I saw his army boots thumping down Alice’s peeling stairwell. When his head with its punitively short haircut bobbed to avoid hitting the ceiling above the final few stairs and he caught sight of me he said, ‘Danielle!’ and swung me up to him with no more effort than if he were lifting a child. The cakebox fell open. He had the high color of momentary exertion, excitement, and good health. His eyes fixed on the cake. We sat on a step side by side and ate a slice each. He was as taciturn as Amos was garrulous; he ate with one hand on my knee. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, said, ‘I’m late for duty. Till tonight,’ hugged me, and ran out of the foyer.

  Even Alice heard the explosion ten minutes later. The newspapers next day reported that the bus tore apart like a rag, releasing a fireball that went rolling across the road, where it engulfed a car and its passengers. Eight were killed instantly, two died in hospital, and another sixteen were wounded.

  All that afternoon, at first from Alice’s and later from Amos’s place, I listened to the rising wah-wah-wah of ambulance and police sirens coming from the Gaza Road, wondering if I could tolerate even a week longer in Jerusalem. Amos got home at six o’clock and asked, ‘What’s happened?’ His car radio was on the blink. I told him as much as I knew: a bus had been blown up on the Gaza Road and the area was cordoned off.

  Minutes later some Israelis came to the door. I could hear them speaking softly to Amos, who, when he sauntered back to the cluttered living room, lit a cigarette and examined its glowing tip as if seeing one for the first time.

  ‘That was the military police,’ he said at length. ‘Gideon’s dead.’

  I jumped toward him. His jaws gritted.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me. And don’t cry!’ Desperation settled on his face as the sudden marks of a fatal disease, smallpox, a cancer, diagnosed too late and now raging.

  In the guest bedroom I pressed my hands over my ears to dull the noises Amos was making as he smashed things. After a few seconds I pulled the chest of drawers across the doorway. I was too frightened to weep, and too horrified. I had lived this scene before: my father had smashed lifeless things, at first.

  When there had been no sounds for half an hour I removed the barricade and went out, stepping carefully through the broken glass and china and trying to move silently in case he was still there. Then I began cleaning up.

  Amos returned around dawn, I had replaced the chest of drawers against my bedroom door but he walked straight past. At eight o’clock I took him a cup of coffee and he said, ‘Thanks.’ He seemed tired but normal.

  The funeral was that afternoon. Then there was a week of shiva, with no formalities, just scores of visitors, arriving at all hours. Dvora (Amos’s sister), Mira, and I were constantly cooking for them or trying to find space for the food and flowers they brought. Alice did not come. When she heard of Gideon’s death her right arm became paralyzed. She could only just creep about at home and was almost totally dependent on the girls from the home-help agency. When I went to see her she looked at me as if she were blind and after a few minutes asked me to leave her to her grief. But she did lift her face to me to be kissed. Back at Amos’s house Tikva sometimes asked if she could help us and would stand in a stupor dropping tears into a bowl of cake batter before wandering off again to my bedroom. I had restocked the kitchen with china and glasses, a coffee-making machine, a juicer, a food processor, and good chopping knives. We needed all of it. Politicians of every party came and even two frock-coated Hasidim who turned their eyes away from us women and spoke to Amos in Yiddish, then recited prayers. From Tikva they accepted glasses of water, all they were allowed in a non-kosher house. We women blended easily together, as we always can when we sink ourselves in the pool of female memory that surrounds the maintenance of life.

  We – or at least, I – lived in an automatic state of doing each task as it came to hand, so I cannot remember which day of shiva it was that the world turned upside down and dragged me back to my first afternoon in the Old City. Certainly it was the same day that photographs of the young man with the Nikon and of Wili’s assistant, the ‘Greek’ whom Bennie had disliked, were published. They had been arrested on suspicion of bombing the bus on which Gideon had ridden.

  Antiterrorists interviewed me in the apartment. They wanted to know everything about Wili and Bennie and the car accident near Masada. They were Sephardim; the man was a flirt. Before his woman colleague could stop him he winked at me and said, ‘You’re very good friends with Kidron?’ Amos walked out of the room. Within twenty-four hours Wili had been arrested in London, traced through the national health system to the kindergarten where he was working as a teacher’s assistant under the name of William Ash.

  He may escape prosecution by becoming a witness because, it seems, the Israelis have been unable to get a confession out of the other two.

  When shiva ended, Amos went back to work at Mount Scopus. I continued to sleep in the guest room; I kept the household running. Amos had become silent; he never showed any sign of being drunk but he was drinking a good deal. Sometimes when I stood close to him, as when I brought him food, I saw something pacing behind the cage to which he had withdrawn. I decided I had to get away from him for a while, to rent a car and go touring. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You came here for a holiday.’ He made it sound like an insult.

  I invited Marilyn to come with me. Of course I would have loved to take Alice, but although she had recovered and was able to do most things for herself again, she was not well enough for traveling, so Marilyn would have to do as a companion. She was unemployed until the end of the month, when she would take up a job as a social worker for aged Jews. ‘That was why I studied sociology in the States,’ she explained. She had not understood at the time why she chose that course, but now she did: it said in the Bible ‘Comfort ye my people.’ Fortunately Clovis was unable to get leave from his work in a laundry, so for two weeks she and I ranged the Galilee, free. Visiting every church where He had said or done something was a small price to pay for the mountainsides rainbowed in wildflowers, for the flocks of brown sheep wallowing in clover, and the pastel, shimmering Sea of Galilee. Here was the easy land, the milk and honey. We lolled on the foreshores of the lake at sunset watching it dissolve into pink sky; we drank arak and Carmel wine and ate St. Peter’s fish.

  Marilyn had forgotte
n none of her hippie skills. When men pestered us she lied to them quietly, ‘I’ve got a pistol in my hand-bag’; when she complained about the bones in her fish fillets and the waiter clamped hands on his hips, demanding, ‘What do you want? Feathers?’ Marilyn smiled and replied, ‘I am just a stranger within your gates. Please take it back.’ The Lord provided her with these responses, she explained, via the Bible; she would quote the verse. Each night she spent an hour learning one and writing out its uses in daily life.

  I came down with church fatigue: too many hymns, too many candles, too many icons. One day it all blurred into a son et lumiére, a sort of low-tech movie. I was sick of Christian entertainment and of Marilyn, who spoke so often about ‘Jesus, who brought me to a place of loving surrender,’ that I replied one evening, ‘You apparently enjoy surrendering to Clovis, in particular.’ She’d been eager for a girls’ talk. I got the whole story about her life of drugs and sex and rock and roll.

  ‘I was so innocent!’ Marilyn said.

  Next morning from our hotel in Tiberias I telephoned Bennie. He ran through his usual preface of telling lies (he had telephoned Jerusalem to speak to me; he had broken his leg) more quickly than usual, to silence. Then he said: ‘You wooden believe it – that bitch of a Naomi . . .’

  What had happened was immensely complicated, something to do with the marriage contract, the coproduction contract, and her shyster lawyers. The upshot was that Marguerita had left him and they were countersuing each other. He was as thin as a pencil, with worry. He expected to spend ‘the rest of my life in litigation.’ Listen: did I want a screenwriting job? Eleazar was on the back burner; meanwhile he was going ahead with ‘a great little movie, tight, low-budget . . .’

  His interminable battles, material increases and decreases, his frustrated creativity, sounded like an allegory for the history of Israel. I remarked as much and he shouted, ‘Terrific idea. How about you write me an outline about a patriot who . . .’ Then he had a moment of dread, on his own account and on Israel’s – because maybe Marguerita would win, maybe the Moslems by force of numbers would overwhelm the Jews, and then the fine, hell-like balance to which the inhabitants were so accustomed that it seemed normal and desirable would be ended.