Winter in Jerusalem
Page 30
‘But set it in South America, okay?’
I said, ‘Bennie – eat! Enjoy!’ and he laughed.
An hour later Marilyn and I were driving north on a new road, not marked on our map, and were more or less lost when, over the crest of a hill a dinosaur appeared. I don’t know what sort – Merkavah? Tyrannosaurus Rex? Its great neck was out-stretched and its flanks caked in gray muck from the swamp. It had eaten and was lumbering home. I pulled to the side of the road to let it pass and as I looked up at the mud-covered belly a man riding above on its back waved. I knew then that whatever became of my relationship with Amos I was unwilling to live in his country. It was too noisy; the dinosaurs had woken up.
I have, however, been detained here.
After the northern warmth Jerusalem was unpleasantly cold. I returned to it the day before we were due to visit Gideon’s grave to mark the first month after his death.
Amos seemed easier.
After so many restaurant meals I was looking forward to cooking, but he said, ‘You spend enough time in the kitchen,’ and we went to a Hungarian restaurant for dinner. He talked about his work. I had been careful not to touch him but walking home, affected by food and three glasses of wine, I linked my arm through his and when we closed the front door, we started kissing. His penis erected in a spasm, then subsided again. I made a half-witted remark. ‘Want to go to heaven?’ I asked. He nodded, but when I got into bed beside him his face was rigid and his body felt cool, as if the blood supply to its surface tissues had been cut.
I said, ‘It’s not meant to be an ordeal, you know.’
He asked, ‘But what is meant?’ and I felt so sad for him I gasped.
Amos said, ‘You’ve been wonderful. Please don’t ruin it. Don’t start crying.’ After a while he added, ‘You’re a grown-up woman. You know what I mean?’ I stroked his hair for a while, then went to my room; I awoke feeling unwell.
But because I was the last and least member of the family, so to speak, who had seen Gideon alive there was special significance in my making the trip to the cemetery. At least that was so in my view, if not in Amos’s and all the others who came that day to stand on the hillside beneath pine trees. Fresh graves of other dead youths were around us: in twenty-one months Operation Peace for the Galilee had cost in lives twenty years of terrorist attacks on northern settlements, and here was Gideon laid beside soldiers in the war he had refused to fight.
Amos and I drove home in silence. As we turned into his street he swore: his parking spot on the pavement had been taken by a large white Mercedes.
‘That’s Akram,’ I said. ‘I sent him a postcard from Tiberias and told him I was here.’
‘Did you ask him to take my parking spot, too?’ Amos muttered. Just then Akram came out of the apartment block; with him was a man I didn’t know, a big handsome fellow.
I said, ‘I’ll get out and say hello to them.’
Akram flung his arms around me and kissed my cheeks; he’d come to invite me to a traditional wedding ceremony in his cousin’s village, Abu Gosh. I shook hands with the cousin; we chatted on the sidewalk for a few minutes until Amos, having found another place to park, walked up. He nodded to them and went straight on into the building, with his head down. I said, ‘I’d better go.’
‘Who’s the big dude?’ Amos asked when I caught up to him on the stairwell. I told him about the invitation to Abu Gosh.
‘They’re brigands in that village,’ he said. ‘It suited them to side with us in the War of Independence and since then they’ve been anathema to the rest of the Arabs.’ He added, ‘They’re a bunch of jerks. Abu Gosh used to make its living by robbing travelers on the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem road. Nobody can trust those bastards.’
I felt abashed, and irritable with him, as I had been when we first met.
‘Stop trying to fight the world,’ I said.
He replied, ‘Spare me the banalities.’
He had done no housework in the time I was away and the apartment was dirty and dusty. He paced about saying, ‘This place is a pigsty,’ but made no effort to clean up. I said I would fix the place after I’d made lunch. The kitchen table was littered with newspapers but I coaxed him to sit at it, to talk to me while I prepared the food. I took out the big meat knife and when I began sharpening it he winced at the fingernail-on-blackboard noise.
‘Women!’ he said. ‘Why do they make everything complicated? Why . . . ?’ He was trying to get a grip on his bitterness, but as I made a final scrape of the blade across the stone the sound seemed to twang a nerve inside him, and he jumped up.
‘You knew the bastard who killed Gideon,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t got on that bus . . .’ He moved toward me. I could feel my scalp bristling. Amos had picked up a rolled newspaper and began tapping it on the kitchen table. I was so tense a little noise came out of my throat, like a whinny. ‘It’s funny, eh?’ he asked. ‘It’s bloody funny!’ Suddenly he gave the table a terrible blow with the newspaper. ‘You knew!’ he repeated, and he hit the table again.
I said, ‘Amos, if you hit me –’
He said, ‘I’m not going to hit you. Look at you – threatening me with a knife. D’you imagine’ – he was still struggling to come out with a joke about it – ‘that armed with Haaretz . . . ?’ He gave the table another blow, not as hard as the last one, then swung his head toward me. I saw that the demon had subsided. There was a moment of stillness, then into Amos’s eyes came the panic of a creature on which a trap has snapped shut. I felt a thump of energy strike the room, like the whoof! of an explosion.
His aorta had burst.
Today is the last of sitting shiva for Amos. There weren’t as many visitors as for Gideon.
Amos haunts me. He was a tiger who has seen the bars ten thousand times, until he saw nothing but bars.
While I, it seems, am free. I will not try to make Alice believe me. I will say nothing to her of those last minutes between us. But I know that if Amos had struck me, or even if our fight had lasted a few seconds longer, I would have gone for him with that knife. But he controlled himself; in the end he stayed civilized.
Amos!
Tomorrow shiva ends; Tikva will drive me to the airport.
Epilogue
One Saturday in the winter of 1986 Marilyn visited Alice Sadler, bringing a copy of Time magazine. The People page carried a photograph of Tikva Kahalon and a caption: ‘Kahalon: New star?’ The story said:
SCREENWRITER-TURNED-DIRECTOR Danielle Green CHOSE AN ISRAELI GIRL SOLDIER, Tikva Kahalon, TO PLAY THE LEAD IN HER FIRST FILM, Moses Cafe, THE DROLL COMEDY ABOUT TERRORISTS THAT OPENED LAST WEEK TO ENTHUSIASTIC REVIEWS. NOT LEAST OF THEM FOR THE MILITARY BEAUTY’S ROLE AS AN agente provocateuse. KAHALON WILL TOP THE CAST IN GREEN’S NEXT MOVIE, The Gaza Road, A LOVE STORY SET AGAINST THE ISRAELI-LEBANESE WAR, IN WHICH THE ACTRESS WAS A PARTICIPANT. ASKED IF THIS GRIM SUBJECT WOULD BE GETTING COMIC TREATMENT, TOO, GREEN QUIPPED, ‘THE JOKE MAY YET BE ON ME.’ FINANCE HAS FALLEN THROUGH ONCE ALREADY, BUT GREEN ADDED SHE WAS NOW CONFIDENT THE PROJECT WOULD GO AHEAD.
Alice was growing frail. She sighed once or twice as Marilyn read to her. She’d heard little from Danielle for a year and had seen her only briefly while she was in Jerusalem directing the location scenes for Moses Cafe. Danielle had invited Alice to lunch at the Plaza, where she had taken over a whole floor for eight weeks, had arrived an hour late, then had to leave after twenty minutes. Alice had not been surprised: Danielle was a selfish, ardent creature.
‘Well, just look at our Tikva,’ she said. ‘See what Danielle’s new confidence is doing for them both. New confidence or new desperation; one wonders sometimes which is the stronger goad . . .’
‘It must be God’s work,’ Marilyn replied. ‘Confidence means “with faith,” Miss Sadler.’
Outside, the city was quiet because it was the Sabbath. A day-light moon had floated up from behind the Mountains of Moab. It was almost round, a white face lopped by a blue beret worn at a jaunty angle.
‘Indeed? And I have not yet forgotten my Latin derivations, dear girl. Now, if you’ll just take my arm, we’ll be off for our walk in the Old City.’
THE END