by Linda Grant
AUTUMN came. One night, Mrs. Kulp’s salon was raided and nothing was taken but some jars of chemicals from the back room: hydrogen peroxide and other inflammable and unstable materials.
Then Mackintosh was kidnapped. He was taken from his house in the morning, when he had finished his breakfast and was walking past his roses, his newspaper folded in his hand. His wife, who had waved him good-bye from the door, turned away, and when she stepped back seconds later to cry out that he had forgotten his sandwiches he had vanished. She looked along the street but could not see him. A Rover which had been parked there overnight was gone. The air was limpid and she stood in her floral wrapper on the doorstep, gazing at the space he had just occupied, puzzled but not yet apprehensive. Lupins and hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies bloomed in her flowerbeds and the beds upstairs, still warm from their sleeping bodies, were not yet made. The houses glittered in the morning sun and the brightness of them as usual hurt her eyes which were weak and sensitive to sudden changes in the light. I know all this because she told me when, tearstained and desperate, having run to the police station to find out if he had arrived and having been informed that he had not been seen, she bumped into me on the Allenby Road on my own way to work and she sobbed against my chest, beating her fists against me.
“Why did we come to this bloody awful place?” she shouted at the passers-by. “Bloody Jews. I hate the lot of you.” I knew it was not real anti-Semitism, just fright, and that if Johnny had vanished in the same way I would have raged against the Mackintoshes and the Boltons of this world myself.
There was a terrible mood in the salon that morning. Women hung their heads on frail necks as if in submission to their own execution. Hair refused to curl. Mrs. Kulp and I smiled and smiled, our smiles pasted onto our faces with the strong glue of our own convictions, but everyone who was in that morning knew Mrs. Mackintosh. “What harm did they do to anyone?” the women asked each other, helplessly.
The Jewish customers felt nervous and outnumbered. They drank coffee and buried their heads in magazines or loudly proclaimed the shame of it all. Only one, Mrs. Held, began to discuss quietly but emphatically her pleasure in the news of the hanging of the Nazis at Nuremberg the previous month. “I recite their names,” she said. “Frank, Frick, Streicher, Rosenberg, Kaltenbrunner, von Ribbentrop, Sauckel, Jodl, Keitel and Seyss-Inquart. Not in this world anymore, none of them. So we have justice, we have finished one piece of business at least.” She took out her compact and reapplied her lipstick and blotted her cheeks with powder, looking defiantly about her when her face was done.
She had once been a miller’s daughter and lived in a wooden house by a river on a flat agrarian plain in eastern Poland. She remembered the threshing machines and the stones that crushed the wheat and the clouds of flour that rose like downy heaven. She remembered her father’s tallis, hanging on the back of his chair and he and her brothers walking to the wooden shul. She remembered the exiles coming from Russia, the Red Jews who had escaped after the failure of the 1905 revolution and who took refuge in their town, and the pogroms that followed soon after. She remembered the journey to Palestine when she was ten years old and the gangs of Jewish and Arab laborers digging foundations into the sand dunes. She recalled watching Mayor Dizengoff’s house being built, the same one which was now the art gallery, and a town so small that he would ride out on a white horse every morning to inspect it in his light, high-buttoned coat and a black bowler hat. “He was the first mayor of Tel Aviv but it felt like he was the first prime minister of Palestine.” And that, she said, was only twenty-five years ago.
“I was there at the birth of a city,” she said, turning to the other customers, the frightened and outraged British women. “And who among you can say that?”
She told me all this as the women of the colonial regime must have retreated that morning into their own memories: childhoods under the Raj and the smells and sounds of India; the denuded landscapes of the Pennines and the cold winds blowing through slate-roofed towns; hills spread like butter with yellow broom in springtime; a bus up the Brompton Road on a September morning when the windows of the shops were filled with the autumn styles and children’s names were being embroidered onto tapes and sewn into school uniforms, and pens and pencils and compasses were purchased and put tidily into satchels with a square of sandwiches in greaseproof paper and a twist of sweets.
So we were all homesick in our own way, for each of us has a past and carries it inside us and you can never put it away. It always returns at moments when you least expect it, such as a November day in a brash violent city when a decent man had been kidnapped and his wife tried to shut from her mind the various fates that might await him, knowing that there were terrorists who were always armed wherever they went and would shoot on sight and perhaps even, one or two of them, for the pleasure of it.
“Who’s got Mackintosh?” I asked Johnny when he came that night.
“We have.”
“As a result of my information?”
“Of course.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“That depends.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Not if they don’t hang Dov Gruner. We might flog him though, in retaliation for flogging one of our boys.”
“That will be a humiliation.”
“Yes. It’s a humiliating punishment.”
Three days later Mackintosh had not reappeared but the news of his abduction was eclipsed by something else and passed out of sight altogether, as if it had never happened. In Haifa the British Army were tear-gassing and clubbing illegal immigrants whom they were herding on to deportee ships bound for Cyprus, the new prison island that was the fate of the DPs in the aftermath of the King David bombing. They killed a sixteen-year-old called Isaak Klausenbaum who was the leader of a defiant band of concentration-camp survivors. The immigrants were screaming and running from the ship with blood on their faces and the tear gas rose from the decks in a dense cloud. Women were holding babies whose eyes had disappeared into their swollen flesh from the gas. The reports of this event made me feel sick. When I ran my comb through the hair of the wives of the men who had carried out these atrocities, I wanted to stab its tail into their skulls.
People were being shot almost every day. Some nights I was woken by machine-gun fire. The gangsters and the terrorists were vying with each other to see who could claim the highest death toll. Another man went to an unmarked grave, killed when the car he was driving which was full of explosives blew up. Posters appeared on the walls and at first I couldn’t read them but gradually, as I learned more Hebrew, the messages swam into my consciousness and another dimension of the city revealed itself, one which promised us that very shortly we would be free.
A plainclothes policeman was found shot dead in broad daylight standing at a bus stop near his house. His name was not released for some time but when it was I saw that his wife came in every fortnight for a shampoo and set.
“Did you do that, Johnny?” I said.
“No. Not us. It was the Lehi. Just coincidence. Don’t you know that’s not our style?”
The soldiers who were disembarking in Palestine, and the officials back from their leave, were talking about a strange upheaval in the world beyond this little part of the Mediterranean’s rim. They were talking about the terrible, terrible cold that was across Europe. They spoke of gales sweeping the coast of Britain, trees uprooted, ships run upon the rocks and the Straits of Dover the coldest place on the continent. A Siberian wind was crossing Italy, that peninsula of sunshine and plenty, with Bologna under snow and two men frozen to death in Milan.
But the worst fate awaited Germany where the shadow of death stalked through its houses, the temperature fell to minus 23 degrees and there was almost complete industrial paralysis.
“In Germany,” Blum said, “they are freezing to death while here in the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, I observe that it is 15 degrees in the metric system of measuri
ng temperature. What does this tell us? And when you add to this the tidal wave in Japan and then the earthquake in that unfortunate country, one understands that our enemies, the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese, as well as the current foe, the British, are being punished for their crimes against the Jewish people. I do not speak of God. I don’t believe in that, let’s just call it fate.”
I watched the cold on the newsreels. I watched them foraging for fuel and food and aiming pickaxes at the frozen ground to bury their dead. “Let them read the Book of Lamentations,” Blum said. “They want to know how to survive everything life can throw at them? Come and learn from the Jews. We have a whole book about it.”
Mackintosh was dumped on the street near Dizengoff Circle one morning, a week after his kidnapping. They had flogged him. Not long after that, the Mackintoshes went home to England for good. A picture postcard arrived at the salon from Newquay where they were taking a rest cure, going for long walks along the shut-up winter promenade. It was very peaceful, Mrs. Mackintosh said, but bitterly cold and the rationing seemed worse than ever.
I TOOK the number 13 bus to the zoo, to see the elephant named Bungo. It was on the edge of the white city and beyond it were orchards and orange groves and the villages of the Arabs, people who had nothing to do with us nor we with them. I hardly knew the country I was in, nor did I want to. I had no curiosity. I tasted the East in the foods I sometimes ate, the bean pastes and flat breads which were the legacy of Turkish rule and the salads with mint which came from the people we grudgingly shared the land with. The white city was enough for me as the kibbutz had been enough for the pioneers of Hashomer Hatzair.
I had seen an elephant before, in the zoo in London in Regent’s Park. Its skin was gray and wrinkled and I disliked its smell. I went to the zoo in Tel Aviv not from a love of wild creatures but because it was something to do when I had exhausted the private galleries. There was plenty of theater in Palestine but little of it was in a language I could fully understand, apart from the plays put on by enthusiastic amateurs among the British colonialists who mounted productions of The Pirates of Penzance and J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.
The zoo was full of animals which had come from somewhere else. There was nothing indigenous to the country, whatever it was that naturally inhabited the place. It was a menagerie of foreigners like the giraffes from the Sudan, exotic and out of place. Many years later I was told that that child’s pet, the hamster, could be said to be a native for it had been discovered by a Jewish scientist in the 1920s on the border with Syria from where it was introduced to the rest of the world.
I bought an ice cream and sat on a wall eating it. It was cool enough now for a cardigan. In the sky mottled clouds had started to gather. It felt as if it might rain. The previous week I had stood on my balcony and heard the wind howling on the beach, stirring sand storms. People huddled in the cafés and ordered bowls of pea soup. Rain lashed the walls of our sparkling white building and stained patches began to appear on the concrete. Already discoloration was noticeable. Mrs. Kulp said the foundations were cracking.
The weather changed back again and I thought that that was it for the winter, it had finished, a little disturbance. But then an inspector called.
He stood with his hat on and his mac belted tightly round his waist, his face pockmarked and lightly sweating. An ugly man, I thought. Who would want to wrap her legs around him and call out his name or go to sleep thinking about his body?
“Mrs. Jones,” he said.
“Inspector Bolton. How nice to see you again. You must be off duty.” I looked around for Mrs. Bolton.
“No. Not me. I’m always on the prowl.”
“Who are you trying to arrest now?”
“Not sure. It’s the worst bloody place for getting people’s identities straight.”
“What’s the crime?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“How cleverly evasive you are, Inspector Bolton.”
“Evasive. Big word for a hairdresser. I tend not to use those jaw-crunchers myself. But I’m just a grammar-school boy. Nothing posh about me. I didn’t go to the university.”
“I don’t know where I picked it up. Probably from one of the customers.”
“Would you care to join me for a cup of tea, Mrs. Jones?” He smiled and held out a hand. The hand was small and encased in a brown leather glove; it emerged from the sleeves of his coat in a dainty manner.
We left the zoo and walked along the street until we came to a café. He ordered a pot of tea for two but dismissed the display of cakes, “Unless you’d like one, Mrs. Jones. I don’t have a sweet tooth myself.”
“Not me. I’m dieting.” A diet sheet had been handed round at the salon. It was all the rage. Johnny strenuously disapproved and kept trying to force-feed me forkfuls of meat from his own plate.
“Odd thing the amount of cake that gets eaten in this country. And almost no beer. Completely upside down if you ask me. How’s your husband, Mrs. Jones?”
“Tony? Oh, awfully well. I went up to Tiberias last week to see him.”
“Call me old-fashioned but I’d have thought a wife belonged with her husband.”
“I’m sure I’m just as old fashioned as you are but I do think that during the war we girls got used to knocking about a bit on our own. Tony arid I will be together again, just you wait and see.” I smiled at him, as sweet as the cake he had turned down.
To my horror, he opened his mouth and began to sing in a tuneless voice. “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow just you wait and see.” I looked around at the other people in the café, the Jewish mothers and their children. They smirked beneath the napkins they used to dab against their mouths. “Lovely voice, Vera Lynn, the voice of England,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you fond of her yourself?”
“Quite. But”—and here I found myself repeating Johnny—“I prefer some of the American crooners like Frank Sinatra. More up to date.”
“Ah yes, America. Funny place. Nobody’s from there, if you take my meaning. Immigrants, the lot of them. I don’t know how they get on at all. Odd business.”
“Well,” I said, “how do you get on here?”
“I just do my job, that’s it. I shouldn’t have thought Marjorie and I will be around much longer, anyway. They’re phasing out the British in the Tel Aviv force. We’re overrun by Jewish policemen already. They’re a rum lot. Hard to tell whose side they’re on.”
“I thought you said you didn’t take sides.”
“No. I don’t. As I say, I’ve never seen a side worth taking. But I’ve got a job to do and you can’t have personal loyalties when it comes to arresting people.”
“I suppose not.”
“Personally, I’ll be pleased to leave. My mother-in-law came out on a visit last year and observed that it would be a lovely country if there were completely different people in it, which is one point of view, but if you ask me it’s always going to be a land of troublemakers. In the meantime, it’s getting so we can’t really operate properly anymore as any kind of effective ruling power. We’re pretty well living behind barbed wire, as it is. In fact, we’ve rounded ourselves up.” He began to laugh at this. “Yes, that’s what we’ve done. We’re so frightened of the terrorists we’ve put ourselves in protective custody. More tea?” I shook my head.
“I’ll tell you what though, when I leave Palestine I hope I never speak to another Jew again. They’ve murdered too many of my friends. Martin, for example, excellent detective, expert in counter-terrorism. Gunned down on a tennis court in Haifa in cold blood. Another thing I saw, after they bombed the King David, half a human corpse impaled on a tree. Horrible. But that’s terrorism for you, Mrs. Jones. That’s the sort of people they are. What goes on in their minds, do you think?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Really? Is that so? I would have thought you were quite close to that point of
view.”
“What on earth do you mean?” He offered me a cigarette from a silver-plate case and I did not take it because I did not want him to see that my hands were shaking. He looked at me sharply and withdrew the box.
“At the beauty parlor you must hear all sorts of things.”
“Inspector Bolton, I give perms to respectable ladies. I don’t do a short back and sides for gunmen.”
“Those Jewish women are all sympathetic, though, aren’t they?”
“I have absolutely no idea. We don’t discuss politics.” Now I wished I had taken the cigarette because I needed one.
“Really? Not interested yourself?”
“No.”
“Me neither, but it’s a bit difficult to avoid around here. Personally, I think we should pull out. Leave the Jews and the Arabs to fight it out on their own. It will be a mouse war. Two mice struggling over the same bit of cheese. Absolutely insignificant. You know how I describe Palestine?”
“How do you describe it, Inspector Bolton?”
“Half the size of a cemetery and twice as dead.” He began to laugh again. “I’ve heard some of the public-school types in Jerusalem say that they wish the bloody Jews could just go away so we can govern the Arabs in peace. I think they find the Yids dangerously intellectual for their taste and mine too, come to that. Of course the Jews aren’t going anywhere. They’ll stay here and have their own little civil war between themselves which the intellectuals will lose because they always do. It will be those thrusting businessmen who come out on top. That’s the way of the world.”
“Have you applied to leave Palestine?”
“No. I’ll see it out. I have a bit of unfinished business to attend to, tie up some loose ends. I want to get the people who kidnapped Mackintosh for starters. Have you any idea who they are, Mrs. Jones?”