by Linda Grant
“Inspector Bolton, you ask the most extraordinary questions. How on earth should I know a thing like that?” I thought of Johnny and how he had this sort of conversation all the time, where you had to keep your wits about you.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Jones, I really don’t. I just find that people often know quite unlikely things, the sort you wouldn’t consider in your wildest dreams when you first look at them. Appearances can be deceptive, that’s a first law in detective work. But your husband probably knows that.”
“Tony isn’t your rank, he’s concerned with far more mundane matters, I’m afraid.”
“What rank is he, Mrs. Jones?”
“He’s a sergeant.”
“Very nice. Perhaps he’ll get a promotion. He could start with building up a little nest of informers, they’re always a good way for an energetic man to get his career going. People who play for both sides always come in handy.”
“Well, Inspector Bolton,” I said, putting on my gloves, “this has been absolutely fascinating but I must be on my way.”
“Very nice seeing you again, Mrs. Jones. You’ll have to come to us one day for a meal.”
“That would be delightful, thank you.”
“I’m sure we’ve got lots more to talk about.”
“I’m sure.
“My wife says you hide your light under a bushel. She thinks you’re much brighter than you let on, but Marjorie says that’s women’s problem, having to hide their brains. She’s very modern, in her own way.”
“Oh, I’m not modern, Inspector Bolton.”
“Aren’t you? Then I’m deceived. Or not. We’ll have to see.” He stood up, belted up his mac, put his gloves back on and tipped his hat and walked off. I sat and watched him go. I realized that he had left a pound note on the table to pay for our refreshments, enough to buy a pair of good shoes, let alone a pot of tea.
I heard the lions and tigers and other wild beasts roaring in the distance from their cages and the air was full of the smell of their excrement. It was four o’clock. The sun had gone below the horizon and I was cold. I caught the bus back to Mapu and thought for the first time that I hadn’t a clue how to get hold of Johnny in an emergency.
I WAS so glad to see him, when he came two nights later, turning the key I had had made for him in the lock, walking into the room with his patent-leather hair and the reappearance at long last of the pencil mustache. I was so glad to have a conversation without artifice or double meanings. I ran over to him and held him tightly and kissed his face. “What’s up?” he asked me.
I told him about the meeting with Bolton at the zoo. I hoped he would throw his head back and laugh and tell me I was worrying over nothing, but he didn’t. He stared at me and lit a cigarette.
“Bad,” he said. “Well, not good. I’m going to have to look into this. Maybe we’ll stay here tonight. No, I don’t think we’ll go out.”
I made us a rudimentary dinner of eggs and salad, chopping the tomatoes and the cucumbers as finely as I could as Mrs. Linz had shown me but my dice were larger and clumsier than hers and my eggs were not right. The yolks and the whites were not sufficiently bound together. My dressing for the salad was too vinegary. I did not use a good enough quality of oil.
Johnny looked down at his plate and smiled. “You never learned how to cook? Your mother never taught you?”
“My mother didn’t cook much. She refused to learn when she was a girl because her mother was trying to marry her off and when the matchmaker came she cooked him such a terrible meal he told her she would never find a husband, or at least not the kind her family wanted for her. We used to get food from the Italian restaurants, they would bring the leftovers from lunchtime to us.”
“One day I’ll introduce you to my mother. She’s a cook. And how.”
“I’d like to meet your family.”
“Now isn’t the best time but one day, sure enough.”
And by that, I felt assured he meant that in due course we would get married.
“Do you still want to be a soldier after independence?”
“Yes.” His fork moving like lightning round the plate, which he protected with his arm.
“You eat very fast.”
“You learn to do that in a big family. Kids are like wolves. They’ll steal anything from your plate if you don’t watch it. Also in the army you got your food down you as quick as you could in case they changed their minds about it being mealtime and told you to go polish your boots or dismantle your rifle or some other fun they had up their sleeves.”
“And yet you want to go back to soldiering when we have our independence,” I said, forking a piece of tomato into my mouth. The vinegar burned my tongue. “Haven’t you had enough of war? I have.”
“What do you know about war?”
“I lived through the Blitz.”
“Oh yes, that. I forgot. Civilian war.”
“It’s all war.”
“No. It isn’t. You know what? I always wanted to be a soldier, when I was growing up a tough, cocky kid in Jerusalem and Betar put a rifle in my hand and told me I was going to be a fighter one day. All my childhood heroes were Jewish warriors—King David, Spartacus, Ben-Hur. I never loved the guys like Moses, the wise guys, the sages, the prophets. No, I read my Bible to see who in those olden days went to war for us Jews. I couldn’t stand the Hasidim—you seen them? The guys with the beards who pray all day and all night? What for? If there is a God, he had nothing to do with us getting kicked out of Eretz Israel during the time of the Romans, it was lousy soldiering. When I first heard about bombs I thought they were the greatest thing in the world. Yeah, the greatest.
“I’ll tell you what war is. It’s a man’s business and if women get hurt that’s a tragedy because they’ve managed to stumble into something that has nothing to do with them. War is noise and blood and feeling you’re going to vomit the contents of your stomach. It’s obeying orders, because if you don’t they’ll shoot you. It’s stumbling around in the dark because you don’t know why you’re on this beach or going up this hill because they’re not going to give slime like you any idea of the bigger picture. It’s trying not to shit your trousers and telling yourself, ‘If I shit my trousers now no girl will ever sleep with me,’ at a time when no girl has yet and that’s the best way you can think of to stop yourself from total humiliation. But all these things you take for granted because that is what being a soldier is, and what being a man is.
“And I’ll tell you what war isn’t, and that is talking, having a conversation, like we’re having now. When a battle is going on people are silent, withdrawn, locked inside their own heads thinking whatever it is they want to think about but what they’re not doing is sharing their thoughts with anyone. I spent three days—three days and three nights—cowering in a foxhole with my mate Jim Pritchard and beyond tossing a coin to see who would crawl out into the whizzing shrapnel to refill our canteens with water we didn’t say anything to each other the whole time. Not because we didn’t have anything to say. But because we were paralyzed with fear.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and threw an empty box of Player’s on to the table. “You got a cigarette?” I passed one over to him. He looked at me. “I can tell by your face you don’t like what I’m saying. Come on, spit it out, what’s your problem?”
“I can’t,” I replied, “help thinking of the bomb at the King David. I heard that there were corpses hanging from trees. Do you condone that?”
“How long is it going to take us to live that operation down? My guess is a year. In a year people will have forgotten about it.” He then did something I had never seen him do before. He blew a smoke ring. “Good trick, eh?” He smiled and reached across the table, across my unfinished plate of food, his arm knocking over the salt cellar which poured a glittering white hill on the red checked cloth. “Listen, Evelyn, there is nothing so transforming as a bomb. If you want to reinvent a city you put a bomb in it. Everything will be flattened and you
can start again from scratch. You can impose any dream you like on a bomb site. And you know who was the greatest bomb-maker of them all?”
“Who?”
“A Jew. A Jew invented the world’s best bomb. Albert Einstein who made the atom bomb and ended the war.”
“I think it’s a bomb that will end the world, never mind the war,” I said, lighting a cigarette for myself and attempting to carry out the same trick of the smoke ring. He opened his mouth and showed me how to put my tongue to make it work. Still I failed.
“Keep out of it, Evelyn, forget smoke rings and forget war. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I tell you again, war is men’s business not women’s. Have I ever asked you to plant bombs, to carry a gun? Never and I never will, though there are girls in the Irgun who do exactly that and would love me to be their boyfriend, but I don’t like that kind of girl. It isn’t natural. It isn’t normal. Girls like things to be nice and war is not nice, no, not nice at all. But it’s how the human race has always resolved its problems and how it always will.”
He went and stood by the window and looked out into the dark city where the British lived, huddled behind barbed wire.
“You know, when I was in the army, a British soldier said to me, ‘We gave you a railway and schools and hospitals. We gave you a water supply. We gave you telephones. Why aren’t you grateful?’ The British aren’t so bad as colonialists go but they will never understand our ingratitude. The Empire is coming to an end, it’s collapsing in slow motion before their own eyes and it’s going to finish in looting and humiliation. They’re finished. Instead of asking me why I plant bombs, why don’t you ask the British what they’re going to do next? That’s a big question. Do you think they have thought about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. It’s not my problem. I don’t care one way or the other. Listen, we aren’t going to need the British when we have our own state because America will be on our side, the American Jews will make sure of that. Everything British will fade away and the only thing of interest which the papers here will report from London is the football results.”
I began to laugh because Johnny reminded me of a child. A great child, a wonderful one, the kind any parent would love to have. He was loyal and devoted to the things he attached himself to. He didn’t ask inconvenient questions and ignored the ways in which life turned awkward. I looked in the mirror of his mind, a confused and conflicted being, and he reflected me back, simplified.
“How are Arsenal getting on?”
His face brightened. “Pretty good. After a terrible season there’s been a major revival. I’ve got hopes for the match against Sunderland. Anyway, the English will always have their football which they taught the world to play, including us. Now for that I’m grateful.”
We went to bed and he began to reminisce about his childhood in Jerusalem and told me about the golden-domed mosque and the shadowy alleys of the old city. He described the burning desert in the south of the country and the sea at the Gulf of Aqaba. He told me about the archaeologists who were still searching in the Judean mountains for the legendary fortress of Masada where the Jews had been besieged by the Romans and slit their own throats rather than surrender. He talked briefly about the man he called his “captain,” the leader of the Irgun forces, and of his love and respect for him: Menachem Begin, “who will also go down in history like those guys of olden times.”
There are many different ways to make love. Some are charged by eroticism and others by the deepest affection and on this night it was the first way that we took. We did things then which are not unusual to read about in a newspaper and which even a child can see today. But in the small and insignificant British colony of Palestine, amongst a crude and ill-mannered people with no memory of the exquisite world of the courtesan, they were voyages into the dark. We did things I thought then that no one had ever done before. We were slippery with sweat. My orgasm was ferocious and took a long time to arrive and it drew me into a few moments’ sleep. When I opened my eyes again, he was watching my face.
“Evelyn,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, I won’t let any harm come to you.”
“Yes, but who’s going to protect you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m a man. I protect myself. That’s the order of things.”
Just before I fell asleep again, I thought of Mrs. Linz and pitied her, the new woman who had no need of any of this.
Next morning he stayed as long as he could. I made him breakfast, salad and eggs again and white cheese and bread. In the shirt he had made me, I walked down to the street with him and watched him get on his bike and take off down to the sea front. Then I climbed the stairs to my apartment and got dressed, straightening the seams of the stockings it was cool enough to wear, painting a Cupid’s bow on my lips, and filing the rough surface of a fingernail. I parted my hair and examined the roots to see if any dark growth was showing.
Johnny had said that there was a natural way to be a man and a natural way to be a woman. He made me want to be a natural girl, as Mrs. Linz was not. Was it surprising, I thought contemptuously, that her husband had raped her, trying to turn her back into a woman instead of the weird hybrid thing she had become?
BUT the next day, someone else came. He waited for me after work. Night was falling on Tel Aviv. He took my arm and walked me down to the beach. We sat on the cold sand under the cold stars and the sea sucked in its breath.
“You have to clear out,” he said. “It isn’t safe, anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. We know because the police are entirely infiltrated. There’s a file on you at the station.”
“Where shall I go?”
“Everything is taken care of. Go home, pack your suitcase. We’ll see you later. Make sure you’re ready.”
“When will I see Johnny?”
“I don’t know. I only take care of this end of things. You speak Yiddish?”
“No.”
“Okay, we’ll take that into account. Don’t worry, everything is under control.”
“What’s your name?”
“Too many questions.” He put his hand lightly over my lips. He was in his thirties, stocky, tough, a little bruiser. He spoke to me in English but I think his accent was Polish or Russian. The skin on his palm was callused.
“Can’t I even ask where I’m going?”
“Stumm.” His hand pressed harder against my mouth.
It was just before Christmas and the salon was full of British wives having their hair done for the festivities and after that would come the new year, 1947, which we hoped would be the date when we got our freedom. I felt bad letting Mrs. Kulp down.
What else did I feel? Fear, naturally. Perhaps Mrs. Linz was right. I should have refused to collude with him.
But I could not disguise the urge I felt toward what was about to happen to me, that I was to enter the dark center of our struggle against the colonial masters. I was going to the place where Johnny was, where a bomb was a cleansing, transforming instrument. I was beginning to perceive the shadowy force of the organization as it moved from the periphery of my life to encompass me. Like it or not, Johnny and I were both part of an army, illicit but powerful. It wasn’t the kind of army that took part in great set-piece battles to acquire territory and which had rules of engagement and you had a rank and a number and there were laws about what you could or couldn’t do, but it was an army nonetheless. A people’s army which operated inside what we took to be everyday life and for such a war weren’t women ideally placed to play our role?
I was moving through history, I was in it. I was no longer the hairdresser’s daughter, or the dilettante would-be artist, or the useless immigrant, or the squirreled-away girlfriend. I was important enough for orders to be issued and arrangements made and messengers sent to meet me. I was no longer adorning the surfaces of reality but altering its internal structure as the chemicals I used on the heads of my clients did.<
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I went back to the apartment on Mapu and packed as much as I could into my Selfridges suitcase. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. My rent was paid up. I had nothing to feel guilty about, but I was sorry not to see the child before I left. I didn’t know when I would be back.
They hadn’t said when they were coming for me. At two in the morning I fell asleep on the bed fully dressed. At seven I was woken by the key turning in the lock, the key I had had cut for Johnny. A girl came into the bedroom and told me to get up. She was dressed like a man, in khaki shirt and trousers.
“You ready?” she asked me in Hebrew.
“Yes,” I said. I told her my Hebrew wasn’t that good.
“Fine,” she said. “I speak six languages. Pick one.”
“English is all I know fluently.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
I turned back at the door to look at the interiors of my modern apartment. The white walls were various shades of gray in the early light and the wooden chairs and picnic tables were also gray. We walked down the steps. Outside the sun cast mild shadows. Red flowers were struggling over a crack by the door. Another crack, higher up, had been clumsily pasted over with brown, gravelly cement which was ugly against the white plaster. The building looked as if it were catching bubonic plague or maybe smallpox, some kind of disease at any rate.
The girl led me to a pre-war Humber and slung my suitcase onto the back seat. We drove to King George Street, turned left across from the park, and passed through a pair of obelisks into a blind alley. There was a house at the end guarded by a stone lion with hollow eye sockets on a pedestal. The house was a perfect semicircle and it was strange to eyes used to ultra-modernity, to geometry and right angles, to see a building decorated with wrought-iron balconies festooned with laundry and ornamental stone pots and on the façade a Medusa-like head beneath a stone bow.
She led me up the stairs into a room with a Victorian bed, like the one my mother slept in all my childhood, made of metal shaped into flowers and leaves but this one had only an army blanket on it. Other than that there was a chair. I stayed in the room for several days and fairly regularly she brought me food but no information. I had nothing to read. The window looked out on to the back of other buildings but the blinds were lowered. I missed the sea. The room had a strange smell that was familiar but I couldn’t pin it down. Then I remembered. It was the smell of the rooms of my mother’s flat when the furniture had gone to the sale room and it stood, almost empty, on my last night in England before I embarked on the journey that would take me to Palestine. A smell that said that other people had been here before me.