by Linda Grant
“Miss Sert,” Blum said, in the long silence that followed the last notes. “Do you know the story of this music?”
“The story?”
“Yes, of course, there is a story. The music is a setting of a poem by a great German poet of the last century, Richard Dehmel, who was one of the foremost representatives of the Zeitgeist movement, which means the spirit of the times. A shocking individual who chose subjects for his work which are quite unsuitable for poetry such as the alleged miseries of the working classes. He also held dubious ideas about the mystical powers of intimate relations between men and women which he believed to be the only basis for a full development of the personality and even for a spiritual life, though what that might be I cannot say. Personally, I find him a sensationalist.”
“Tell me the story of the poem,” I said, feeling a strong affinity with this German precursor of all the ideas of free love I held dear.
“Its sentiments are repulsive though the music almost allows one to forget it.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Herr Blum,” I cried, “do go on.”
He glowered at me. “For a young lady brought up in the capital of the most civilized country in the world, you lapse into terrible manners, Miss Sert.” I thought this rich coming from him, one of Tel Aviv’s shark landlords. However, I apologized. I could not say that my sanitary pad was filling with blood and I wanted him to get on with it so I could slip back to my own apartment and find the last unused one.
Blum cleared his throat and began. “A man and a woman are parading through a park on a clear, cold moonlight night. ‘The bare cold grove’ Dehmel describes it as, the moon coursing above the high oaks and not a cloud to obscure the light of heaven. Very atmospheric, yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Then there is an outburst, the woman confesses to a terrible tragedy. Now we find that this pair are not husband and wife, not at all, they are lovers! ‘I walk in sin beside you,’ she tells him. It seems that she had met a man she did not love, and yearning for a purposeful life, for motherhood and the respectability of a wife’s station, she married him. Soon after, she realizes she has made a dreadful mistake for now not only has she met the man she is telling all this to, but she also finds she is carrying a child by her legally married husband. You might think she would be filled with shame that she had betrayed her husband but it turns out that the man she believes she has betrayed is in fact the lover! And why? Because our poet believes in the authenticity of true love and rejects the bourgeois conventions of marriage.
“Now the lover has an astonishing reaction to what he has heard. A decent man would order her to return to her husband, he might even find in himself the arousal of a great abhorrence for this lady, but far from it. He instructs her that the child waiting to be born should not be a burden on her soul (and this is where we hear the duet between violin and cello that I observed you liked so much), that he forgives her transgression against him, though one wonders about the poor husband in all this. He tells her that this miracle of nature has transfigured what might have been a night of tragedy. This will transfigure the other’s child,’ he tells her. ‘You will bear it for me, from me / You have brought radiance on me / You have made me a child myself.’ And the whole wretched business ends with them clutching each other as they walk off, no doubt to a life of living in sinful relations, such as I observe all around me in the so-called Jewish city.”
“Gosh,” I said.
“Gosh? What word is this?”
I giggled. The story seemed to me to be both highly wrought and silly, typical of what Meier and the ideological free-thinkers on the kibbutz would have described as the diseased, melodramatic social relations of the last century. No doubt my mother might have found this story very beautiful but I regarded it as only a staging post en route to the free, open, liberated ideas of my own times.
Later that evening I asked Mrs. Linz if she knew the piece and the poem.
“Of course,” she said. “This young woman’s big mistake is to believe that her future lies with a man. Look, she has rushed into marriage merely to fulfill some bourgeois conventions. Then she finds a lover and what does she do? She tries to recreate the exact same conditions with him. This is not a new woman, this is the oldest kind of woman that there is, who believes that fulfillment only lies in doing a man’s laundry. You know what I think of that?” She made a fastidious little spitting motion with her mouth.
“Why did you have a child?” I asked her, passing over my fruit bowl. She helped herself to a peach and then waited with it in her hand. “A plate?” she said. “A napkin and a knife? You don’t expect me to bite into it do you?” Oh, there were always formalities with the Yekkes.
I went into the kitchen and got her what she wanted. She sat there in her shorts, operating on the peach like a surgeon with a scalpel, separating the hairy skin from the damp interior. “If you don’t enjoy cleaning for others surely motherhood is exactly the course you should have avoided like the plague,” I said.
“It was not intentional,” she replied. “Linz raped me.”
“My God!”
“Yes. It is true. I married him out of caprice. The following day I woke up and saw he had shed some hairs on the pillow and I thought, ‘This is going to make me sick, seeing this every morning.’ I knew at once that I had made a terrible mistake and that there should have been no marriage. So I shrugged and got out of bed to go home and he caught me by the hips and began to make love to me. I told him, ‘You cannot do this without my consent.’ But he did not need it. Of course when I discovered that I was pregnant I considered having a termination because there were plenty of unemployed doctors who would have performed it for me. But I had two reasons for rejecting that course. The first was that I was too poor and I certainly had no intention of asking Linz for the money. The second was that this child was something I had made out of my own flesh and blood and why would I want to destroy something I had created? It seemed perverse.”
“So you stayed with Mr. Linz?”
“For a few months. He’s a very boring man. The hair that came off his head on to the pillow is all gone now. He is very bald. And he is fat. Once I thought he had the body of a Greek god. Now he merely has the body of a middle-aged Greek, which is precisely what he is, one of the Jews from Salonika.”
“I didn’t know there were Jews in Greece.”
“There are very few now. In 1939 there were Jews there but they were largely exterminated. They eliminated the ones from Salonika and Rhodes and Crete and Corfu. The Salonikans were a terrible crowd. They all came from Spain originally, after the expulsion, the same year, incidentally, that Columbus discovered America. Did you know that?” I shook my head. “It’s ironic, I think. Anyway these Salonikans, having lived under a very benign and intellectual Moorish rule, were then left to their own devices in Greece and fell into a trough of mysticism which in turn degenerated into oriental sorcery and they became obsessed with all kinds of nonsense such as magicians and miracle-workers and fortune-tellers and amulet-makers, let alone being plagued by disasters such as piracy from the sea and epidemics of typhus and leprosy. Which shows, I think, that we People of the Book are no better than anyone else and must be dragged kicking and screaming toward reason as our Arab friends must also be.
“It was only when the Ottoman empire was falling apart that the Salonikans entered into modern life and developed a European intelligentsia. And so it is here. With the defeat of the Turks in the Middle East, it is possible for existence to assume its true pace which is its trajectory into the future. My husband arrived with his mother and father as a baby in 1910 and coming to mature years just as the first crush of Berliners arrived was exposed to some mental fresh air. Hence he is now a physicist and has the offer of a post at Stanford University in California which he is anxious to take up.”
“What an interesting story,” I said, thinking that I must have seen these Greek Jews on the streets of Tel Aviv, but how to recognize the
m? “Do they maintain any habits or customs that they brought from Greece?”
“Well, I can only speak of the poor Salonikans. All they have left, now, the few that survived, is one little legacy which reminds them of the past and you know what it is?” She laughed. “Not great works of literature, not music or painting or philosophy but their food. Yes. Linz made me make little meat pies which he called pasteles de carne from beef and eggs. He said his mother would prepare them for him when he was a child but mine were vastly inferior to hers. As he so frequently told me. Of course even the name of this dish tells you that it came originally from Spain.”
“Is Linz a Greek name?”
“Not at all. It is my name. I am Linz.”
“You didn’t take his name when you married?”
“Of course not. Why should I?”
“But how is that possible?”
“Anything is possible, Miss Sert, you simply have to make your feelings known, very, very firmly. In the office where the marriage took place, they said I could not be legally called Mrs. Linz so I insisted that if on the documents I was Mrs. Carasso in real life he would be Mr. Linz!”
“Perhaps you should call me Evelyn,” I said.
But she stared at me as if I were mad, for Mrs. Linz was a Yekke through and through and some formalities were sacrosanct.
It was a little cooler now. Even I noticed it. The air in the evenings was balmy rather than sweltering and I looked forward to the winter with feelings of delight. I went to the kitchen and made coffee for us both and cut slices of a cake I had bought from the café on the corner of the street in this city in which it was possible, when the British did not try to stop you with their megaphones, to live almost entirely out of doors. I was thinking, while I waited for the grounds to percolate, of what a strange thing a Jew was, how many forms we took. As I did so, a Jew with a beard and a long black coat and curious twisted curls hanging from in front of his ears passed on the other side of the road.
“Look at this,” I called out to Mrs. Linz.
She walked into the kitchen and I pointed at him, retreating along the street toward Rehov Ben Yehuda.
“Oh, those curiosities. They exist in the eleventh century. They have no dynamism at all. They live the lives of vegetables. It is a pity you don’t have a camera to record his image, for people of that type will be extinct within the decade.”
I DID not look to Johnny for intellectual company—I had enough jaw-jaw with Blum and Mrs. Linz and her friends. To tell the truth, I was consumed with lust for him. Perhaps he was a kind of physical addiction of the kind that only comes upon you once or twice in your life. I thought about his body all the time, its hardness, the way he felt inside me, his skin with a rash of freckles across the top of his chest, the scar I licked, the hard lips, the roughness of the khaki trousers he wore and his hands unbuttoning them and my own trembling as I pulled my dress over my head. I wanted to give him all the satisfaction he wanted, to watch his face while he reached his climax and cried out in Hebrew things I did not yet understand. I had the shirt he had made for me now. It was blue. I never wore it outside, for as he said, it was just a kibbutz shirt, but as soon as it turned cool enough I slept in it.
When he didn’t turn up at the apartment, and it was impossible because of the curfews to go out with Mrs. Linz to a café to listen to her intellectual friends discussing the latest ideas from Europe beneath a pall of brownish smoke, I would sit on my small balcony drinking coffee, wishing I had a sketchbook and pencils or even a camera so I could try to record the sights of Tel Aviv in such a way as to make sense of my world. Or even a school exercise book in which I could keep a journal.
But most of all I wanted to draw Johnny, and so I went and bought paper, together with some good pencils, and I persuaded him to lie on the floor by the balcony and pose for me. I was planning in my mind a painting I would execute one day which would show him with the white city and the roaring waves and the wide sky in the background: the new Jew and the new Jewish city. I wanted to paint the shadows that the bones of his pelvis cast on his stomach and the long toes and the lines that were beginning to appear round his eyes and the precise shade of reddish-purple that his balls were.
When I first asked him to pose for me he agreed, but reluctantly, because he believed that this was something only women did. He said he felt a fool, lying there immobile being looked at. He said he was worried that the finished picture might fall into the wrong hands and he would be a laughing stock. I asked him, point blank, whether he had had many lovers before me and he blushed and told me that the girls he had grown up with were very strait-laced. The Irgun girls, in particular, had no time for romance.
“But I couldn’t have been the first,” I said, puzzled, for he knew what to do exactly.
Now he went an even deeper red. “During the war…” he trailed off. So I suppose he meant prostitutes. “And a kibbutz girl from time to time.” He did not like this kind of talk, it embarrassed him. I wondered if I embarrassed him too. I had never met anyone attached to him. I did not know a single friend. “But that’s to protect you, darling,” he told me.
I made my pencil study and he looked at it. “Is that how I appear to you?” he asked, coldly.
“Yes. How do you see yourself?”
He shrugged and changed the subject. I tried to explain the history of representation to him but he knew almost nothing about painting. I took him to the art museum on Rothschild Boulevard in the house that had once belonged to Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The street was broad and shady, a sandy promenade ran down the center lined with tall trees, the name of which I didn’t know and Johnny knew only in Hebrew. People strolled up and down as if they were in Vienna or Berlin. Newspaper kiosks stood at each intersection and we looked at the mansions that the city’s first citizens had built for themselves before the first war.
Inside the museum we examined dim old brown pictures of rabbis which seemed to form the bulk of the collection.
“Is this it?” Johnny asked, frowning. “This is art?”
“No, no. I thought there might be something more modern.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
That afternoon he showed me the teeming life of the white city, the garment district where he worked and where the earliest examples of Bauhaus buildings could be found, before the architects had figured out a way of adapting them to the climate, when they did not understand how important it was to make sure that each room had enough windows so they could create a cross-wind and before they had thought of the brise-soleil, the little ledge that cast a shadow into the interior. I saw shops stocking everything, run by people who came from everywhere, and though they spoke to each other in Hebrew everyone, I noticed, counted out money in their own language. We passed a store selling nothing but brushes—“If it has bristles, I stock it,” the owner proudly told us. And indeed he had yard brushes, toothbrushes, bottle brushes, scrubbing brushes and something that wasn’t a brush but had bristles: a selection of doormats. “They brush the underside of the shoes.”
Walking beside Johnny I noticed how gradually the architecture changed and stopped being quite so modern and the style and idioms of the construction became completely unrecognizable to someone like me who had only ever seen the Georgian terraces of London, or the red-brick rows of Victorian villas at Hammersmith or, at the outer limits of my childhood world, the pre-war red-roofed semi-detached houses that frayed the edges of London, each with its own garden, front and back.
Because I was English and not American, came from a place with a continuous past, I did not understand then that when immigrants settle, they try to rebuild the land of their origins. These buildings, some of the earliest in the city, before the big population explosion of the 1930s, grew out of a yearning to construct Odessa and Moscow and Warsaw, and once inside them to try to forget the perpetual blue skies and the yellow, implacable sun.
I was surprised that we stopped long before the city gave out, w
here the streets grew very narrow and seemed to belong in a different town altogether. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing with my bare arm.
“The slums.”
“Who lives there?”
“Not Yekkes, that’s for sure.”
“But who?”
“The usual mixture. Arabs. Poor Jews, really poor. It’s dangerous and dirty. You don’t want to go there. Listen, during the war they had cases of bubonic plague. It’s a cesspit. One day we will raze it to the ground.”
It was called Manshieh and it frightened me. It was full of disease and squalor and it was like a small cancerous sore on the free and healthy body of the Jewish city.
That night Johnny stayed with me and slept by my side. After we had drifted into sleep in each other’s arms I was woken by sounds and when I opened my eyes I realized they were coming from him. He was asleep but mumbling, fragments of Hebrew and even of English, and a long shudder ran through his body. Suddenly he screamed and I cried out, “What is it Johnny?” but I saw that his eyes were shut and that he was still sleeping.
Next morning I said, “Johnny, darling, you had a nightmare last night.”
But he only looked at me and said, “You know, Evelyn, that’s impossible, because I told you that I do not dream.”
So then I knew that what Johnny had told me, that it was possible to have no interior life, was incorrect. Everyone has. He just didn’t recognize its existence.
Later that day I talked to Mrs. Linz about the slum district and she asked me if I ever heard the muezzin, the man who called the people to prayer at the mosque, and I said I hadn’t, for I had not known there was such a place in Tel Aviv. From then on I listened for it and sometimes I caught a trace of that alien sound though it was a long distance for it to travel, up the long boulevards to the white city where nothing was old and everything had an explanation.