by Linda Grant
“I suppose so.”
“Suppose I come back in a few days. I’ll bring your shirt, definitely.”
“Okay.”
“And you’ll have an answer for me, I hope.” He looked at me and I saw that he was far from certain what it would be. The thought of rejection would be in his mind until he saw me again.
“Do you think I’m being naïve?”
“Listen, these questions aren’t easy.” His voice was very tender. “They’re easy for me because I grew up in the middle of it all and I don’t have choices. You’re feeling your way in this situation. You need time. I just thought that you wanted to help and that you could do your little bit without knowing too much and getting into too much trouble. I was trying to make things easy for you, to help you make your contribution without a lot of risk. That was all. I like you too much to want any harm to come to you.” He paused and went red. I’d never seen this color on his face before. “In fact I like you a lot.”
He stood up and we walked toward the door. Before I opened it he held me tightly and kissed me on both cheeks and I wanted more than anything to stay inside the strong circle of his arms. My tears were wet on his skin.
“Don’t cry, baby,” he said. “Listen, one thing’s for sure. It won’t be me who chucks you.”
“You’ll be back at the end of the week?”
“Yes. I said so.”
I let him go and I closed the door. I heard his feet thundering down the stairs, a bass note to the “Goldberg” Variations, and I walked to the balcony where I saw him climb on the Norton and I watched him until he turned left on Ben Yehuda and disappeared. The night was thrumming. I heard power lines make music from their own vibrations in the heat.
A few minutes later Mrs. Linz came and knocked on my door. She was going out for a short time and wanted to know if I could watch out for the child.
“So. Did the boyfriend turn out to be a terrorist?”
I didn’t answer.
She smiled triumphantly. “See?” she said. “I am always right. You silly girl. You Ostjude who doesn’t know how to think.”
AFTER I had got rid of Mrs. Linz and the pianist had finally given up on the “Goldberg” Variations and gone out to some assignation at one of the cafés on the seashore, I looked in on the child. He seemed content, lying on his stomach on his bed, dressed in his little underpants and singlet, reading an encyclopedia. I took a shower but a few minutes after I had dried myself my skin was sticky once again. One evening of terrible humidity an earring had slipped off the lobe of my ear as I was walking along Dizengoff Street. My God! I hadn’t even known that the ears possessed sweat glands.
I left the bedroom and went out to sit on the balcony.
I began to consider my customers, the people whose names I had been delivering to the Irgun, how I would watch their reflections in the mirror and try to figure out who exactly they were. For I understood that in the eyes of the Jews of Palestine they were one-dimensional types, as thin as the silver veneer on the salon looking glasses: the British, with their pale skins that reacted so badly to the sun and their crazy religion which forced them to pretend to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their second-rate god, and their weakness for dogs and gardens.
I thought of a morning, the previous week, when I was in the salon and listening to me with a half-smile as I said that I thought larger, softer waves might be the next new trend in coiffure, was Mrs. Bolton, my literary friend from the beach. Looking at her in the mirror, I saw once again that she was not a pretty woman, but I had noticed how regularly she came in for her shampoo and set and how she took care of her appearance and cultivated a style of dress which was smart even though it wasn’t up-to-the-minute. She had managed to concoct a look for herself that required little thought or maintenance but suited her.
“Appearances are awfully important aren’t they?” she said, taking a cigarette from her navy leather handbag. Next came a small silver lighter. Her scarlet thumbnail clicked a little flame into life.
“Oh yes. You can’t go out looking any old how.”
“My husband and I are both very interested in how things appear.” Her hair was a fawn color. She liked it arranged in a style which she could simply run a comb through between appointments.
I remembered that I had had a conversation with her on the beach about novels and that I could not remember who had been discussed. Evelyn Waugh? Elizabeth Bowen? Ronald Fir-bank? I was not so very clever at managing my different disguises and remembering that it was perfectly possible for them to be checked against each other. So not knowing whether I was supposed to be a hairdresser or an intellectual I thought that as I was now actually playing the hairdresser’s role I should stick to that and hope that Mrs. Bolton had forgotten our literary discussions.
“For example, I expect you’re an expert in the ways one can completely transform one’s identity through hairdressing and cosmetics. Dark roots are always a giveaway. You know all about that sort of thing, don’t you, Priscilla?”
“Er, yes,” I replied.
She looked at my reflection in the mirror and I looked back at hers.
“My husband is encouraging me to write a detective novel, like Miss Christie and Miss Sayers. Think up a plot, scatter the clues about, how hard could it be?”
“Pretty hard, I’d have thought.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You just need an understanding of human nature. It all comes down to psychology in the end, that’s what George says. He’s a lot brighter than people give him credit for. He’s always telling me I’d make a good spy. Or perhaps it might not be a detective novel at all but a spy novel. You’d make an excellent spy yourself, Priscilla. What do you think?”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re a good listener and you’re in an occupation where people tell you their secrets. Don’t you hear all sorts of gossip—love affairs gone wrong, operations, adultery?”
“What use would that be to anyone?”
“It’s a lever, Priscilla, a little lever into people’s lives.”
“What do you mean? To blackmail people with?”
“Oddly enough, blackmail has never interested me. The financial gain seems pointless. I’m in agreement with Machiavelli, who said, as I’m sure you know already, that knowledge is power.”
Mrs. Bolton said she had studied classics at Durham University and having passed the civil-service exams had gone to work at the Home Office in London, sharing a flat with two other girls, in Pimlico. One of them was Bolton’s sister. He was a grammar-school boy. She didn’t care about marrying beneath her. It was a meeting of the minds, really, she said. The wedding took place the year before the war broke out. They had no children. Despite this solid information, I began to feel that I had no idea who exactly Mrs. Bolton was.
The day before that, as it happened, I had met a young American couple from Brooklyn, delighted to speak my own language with other native speakers who were not British, but Jews like me. They were both wearing blue jeans, turned up into cuffs above shoes they called sneakers, and I remember it so clearly because that was the very first time I ever saw those kind of trousers, on legs crossed on a pavement near Dizengoff Circle in a café where the actors from the Habimah Theater used to come after their performances. They told me that they had not sailed the Mediterranean Sea to get here but had jumped on a plane at a place called Idlewild in New York and flown to Lydda. They took this new form of transport for granted though it sounded a long and grueling journey.
They were Roosevelt New Dealers, full of energy and intelligence, and now that the husband was out of the Marines he had returned to Europe to find survivors and help them embark on the illegal immigrant ships for the Promised Land. When the current work was finished he was going to get a teaching job in one of Palestine’s Jewish universities. The wife, who was pregnant with their first child, made jewelry from silver and her necklaces and bracelets were unlike any I had ever seen before. Like the buildings we lived in,
they were quite plain and without decoration or adornment, thick curves of metal around the wrist or simple silver drops hanging from the ears. I admired the earrings she was wearing herself so much that she took them off and gave them to me. I offered her money but, smiling, she refused and it was one of the pair that had dripped from my ear-lobe onto the pavement on Dizengoff Street and nearly got lost.
I expressed amazement at their optimism when everything to me seemed so fraught with danger. “We don’t think about the past, Eve,” the woman said.
“Why not?”
“We’re Americans.” And they both began to laugh.
“Listen,” the husband told me, “we were brought up in the American way, each generation doing better than the one that went before. My grandfather came to Ellis Island with nothing. All the Jews who came, it was like a match hitting the touch-paper on a rocket, the rocket of American immigration. My father started a business, he made a lot of money, he put me through college. I have my Master’s in chemistry. We’ve wound up with more than the wildest visionary of Lublin had ever dreamed of and all of this we did honestly. We didn’t have to pay bribes or beg favors from some tsar or assimilate to Christianity or use our muscle to threaten anyone. Every penny we earned was through hard work—the American work ethic—and our God-given Jewish brains. It’s the same for my wife, her family too, the same story. What do we learn from this? That anything is possible.”
I knew too, because they had told me, that they were utterly contemptuous of the Irgun. They were bright, sunny idealists without any shadow in their souls. They believed with all their hearts that we were going to build the new Jerusalem. We didn’t have a name for our new country in those days. They called it Zion. It would have a political system that would be the envy of everyone else. It would have Nobel Prize winners in literature and science. It would be the accretion of three thousand years of Jewish wisdom. And all this could be achieved by patient diplomacy and negotiation for if you began with violence you would end in violence and no Jew should lower himself to have blood on his hands.
They loved the sun, the heat and the date palms and talked about how the Jews of America would one day come here for their summer vacations instead of Florida or California. Here there was everything you could wish for, and everything was Jewish too. The whole waterfront could be developed as a playground with well-priced hotels offering all kinds of leisure facilities. So they smiled into the future, holding hands, drinking strong coffee and eating almond pastries as the new child grew inside her. I enjoyed the hour I spent in their company, before they gathered up their things and walked off down the street, insisting on paying my bill too.
To which camp did I belong? Not to theirs, though God knows I wanted to badly enough—the people-with-big-souls party who thought with their hearts and their morals. I did not believe that the laws of Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were going to win us a country and even if they did I somehow doubted that we would be a light unto the nations. Not with Blum and Mrs. Kulp and Mrs. Linz in it, people who were there because they had no choice and if you asked them would rather be somewhere else. Nor was I enamored with Mrs. Bolton’s lot, who were all shadow and no soul, who believed in nothing and for whom nothing was at stake, certainly not their own future and their children’s future, if they ever had any.
This left the Johnny scheme of things, those who had never entered as a diver into the unconscious world, the pragmatists who said, “Listen, darling. What’s the problem? Everything is simple. We drive them out. We make it impossible for them to stay.”
With hindsight it always seems easy to do the right thing, but we were trying to decide something in those days that people don’t often get a chance to have a say in and it was this: would we be a free nation after two thousand years of wandering or would we always be a subject race? Would we be ghetto Jews or new Jews? You know, when you face a decision like that, you have to think very, very carefully. The chance might not come again for another two thousand years. You have to be very sure. But you do have to decide, you can’t avoid that.
I chose Johnny’s way in the end, the way of the bombs, the kidnapping and murder because I decided to throw in my lot with the tough Jews. We had had our thinkers and now what we needed were fighters, Jews who scared the living daylights out of people. The other choices had their merit, but Johnny’s seemed to promise the most certain outcome. Now, of course, knowing what we know, perhaps I would have decided differently but the future is a door into a darkened room and however much you fumble for the light switch you will never find it. People are always telling me that they knew what was going to happen, how it would end up here, but that’s not how I remember it.
We were all idealists in our own fashion and we did what we did from a good heart. As I sat on my balcony at dusk, watching the soldiers move along the streets, shouting orders at us through megaphones, the date palms heavy with fruit and the air heavy with heat and sweat, I thought: “We’ll force them out. We’ll make them see that they have no choice. The terror won’t last long, and then we’ll have a country and there’ll be peace. Some of these men will come back one day as tourists. They’ll lie on our beaches and we’ll sell them ice cream.”
Time was rushing, it was streaming through me like fast beams of light. I could hear a radio in the apartment below me playing the music of one of the swing orchestras, on the next street the sound of hammers and saws and drills and concrete mixers, a new building under construction, and further away still traffic along Ha Yarkon. There was no peace here, no tranquility, just an ardent sense of life going on. The two-thousand-year-old exile had its beloved child, our city, Tel Aviv, and I was going to stay here to watch it grow up.
IDID not have my own gramophone when I lived on Mapu Street but I was always surrounded by music. There was the pianist next door who practiced, practiced, practiced. His apartment was filled with musicians from the Palestine Philharmonic who, on announcing their formation a decade ago, had received a telegram from Toscanini declaring that he would conduct their inaugural concert to demonstrate to the world his opposition to fascism. Consumed with terror, these émigrés from Germany and Austria had held thirty-seven rehearsals in three weeks.
I had been taught music at school, learning the system of notation and practicing scales on wooden recorders whose mouthpieces were wiped with a disinfectant-soaked rag between lessons. But from my neighbor and others in the building I learned for the first time to appreciate the great masters, and the little lessons which filled an important gap in my cultural education took place while bombs blew up the railway lines, banks were raided in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, there were paper shortages, bread rationing, and eleven new kibbutzim were established in a single day in the Negev Desert and were welcomed by the Bedouins they found there, according to the newspapers.
One afternoon, Blum knocked on my door and invited me to come and listen to a brand-new record which he had won in a raffle, having reluctantly parted with a few mils for the ticket, the proceeds going to raise money to feed war orphans who were living in makeshift arrangements somewhere in the countryside.
I was suffering from menstrual cramps which had not been improved by the consumption of some unidentifiable fried meats from a street vendor. The stomach of a sheep? It didn’t bear thinking about. Johnny never came when he knew that the curse was due. The smell of women’s blood offended him. “I had a lot of sisters when I was growing up,” he said, “and they all used to bleed at the same time. You couldn’t get into the bathroom. I found one of their bloody rags in the rubbish once when I was a boy. It made me feel sick.”
“Didn’t you see blood on the battlefield?”
“Certainly. But that kind of blood is clean.”
So I had only my own company and I told Blum that I would join him in a few minutes.
I walked down the stairs, my back aching, and knocked on his door. He called out that it wasn’t locked. At his table, he was threading new hair into the holes on a doll�
�s linen scalp where too vigorous yanking by childish fists had pulled it out and made the toy partly bald. He put the doll down and poured me a glass of lemonade. Even indoors he wore his jacket.
“Now this composer, Miss Sert, in his later work became very difficult. Very difficult.” Blum blew on the shining surface of the record and polished it with a soft cloth. “He sought to rob music of everything that is worth anything. But the piece that I am going to play you now is from his early period when he was a young man living in Vienna and it is called Verklärte Nacht which means, of course, ‘transfigured night.’”
“What’s his name?”
“Arnold Schoenberg.”
I settled into one of Blum’s well-upholstered chairs. I felt the menstrual blood trickling inside me and I remembered, as Blum crossed the room and placed the needle on the disk, that I had only one pad left and as soon as the shops reopened I must go out and buy more. I took all precautions against pregnancy. Mrs. Linz had bossily sent me to a sympathetic doctor on Ben Yehuda Street who had fitted me with a rubber contraceptive device like the one my mother had had.
The needle touched the first groove and a sound of utter melancholy and foreboding filled the room. I shuddered. Blum sat with his fingers gripping the chair arms, a small wooden packing case of dolls’ spare parts by his side: waxy limbs and heads and torsos.
Listening to the music I thought of the saplings that had sprung up on the first bomb sites of the war and the weeds that scrambled over the rubble. I thought of the overgrown gardens that became like the forest, places of secrets and hidden things, grass growing in the cracks of disused air-raid shelters. I felt my temperature drop and there was a sudden hemorrhaging of blood from my body.
Blum got up and turned over the disk. The mood changed, there was a moment of lyric sweetness and I cried out at the beauty of it and this tenderness expanded until it overthrew the darkness. I thought my heart would break with a certain kind of sad happiness and when the record finally stopped my face was wet with tears for I had found something that no one could ever take away from me again: the past. My mother’s face was in that sweetness, smiling at me as she looked up from her movie magazines when darkness had fallen over London, the lamps were lit and the raid had come and gone and spared us.