by Linda Grant
Boredom made me lose count of time. The girl brought me some books, eventually. One volume was the poems of Jabotinsky, the philosopher of the Irgun. I read this:
From the pit of decay and dust
Through blood and sweat
A generation will arise to us.
Proud, generous and fierce.
It sounded like blackshirt stuff to me. The American couple and Mrs. Linz had been right about that. But Johnny would never have read it. He only read newspapers.
I began to paint pictures in my mind. I painted a picture of the view from my balcony on Mapu, the sea at the end of the street across Ha Yarkon. I painted the cars parked outside the buildings and the new Jews hurrying or strolling along toward their jobs or with bathing costumes and towels toward the beach. I wanted to paint a picture where you could smell the fragrant air and feel the sun on your bare shoulders and because all this was taking place in my imagination and not the difficult world of pigments I was able to accomplish my ambition.
Then I painted Johnny standing naked on the balcony and the pictures grew more and more pornographic and had less and less to do with art until they stopped being paintings and became something else.
I think Christmas came and went.
The girl came back with a box and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a wig.”
“Why do I need a wig?”
“Because where we’re going they’re not used to seeing blond girls.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
I opened the box.
“This is the kind of wig the religious women wear,” I said. “What the hell’s it made of? Horsehair?” I put my nose to it and it smelled of horse and someone else’s scalp-sweat.
“Maybe. It was the only kind I could get.” She laughed. “My grandmother who came from Bialystock wore a wig like that.”
“I can’t wear this.”
“Miss, you have to.”
I put it on. There wasn’t a mirror. She looked at me. “The wig is okay but now the clothes aren’t. You need more modest ones.”
“Well, I haven’t got anything like that.”
“Fine. I’ll go and buy some.”
She came back in fifteen minutes with the kind of garments I had sometimes seen for sale and wondered who would ever buy them.
“Put them on.”
“You’re rude,” I said.
“Who cares?” she replied.
I got dressed. She began to laugh. “If Efraim could see you now.”
“Who’s Efraim?”
But she only laughed at me again and I thought, “So now I know Johnny’s real name.”
“I think,” she said, “we call you Gittel from now on. A nice Yiddish name.”
“I don’t speak Yiddish.”
“Okay, Miriam. Miriam Levin. A dutiful wife. You speak any French?”
“Yes. A little.”
“Good. You are an orthodox French lady from Paris. Your Hebrew isn’t too hot because you haven’t been here long, maybe just since before the war. The only Hebrew you know is the kind you pray in.” She was laughing so much she had to wipe the tears from her eyes.
“You’re a hard girl,” I said.
“Yes,” she said proudly. “I am.”
“Men don’t like that. Johnny—I mean Efraim—doesn’t.”
“Don’t make me turn nasty. Efraim will marry an Irgun girl one day. You’re nothing. A little diversion. He’s already been formally censured.”
“Over me?”
“Yes. I don’t know what’s got into him. To run these risks for something like you.”
“What do you think I am?”
“Irrelevant. Come on, let’s go.”
It was late morning. We went down the dim stairway into the bright sunlight of Tel Aviv, blinking, shielding our eyes. We got into a different car from the one I had been brought in and drove down the Allenby Road south toward Jaffa. My face beneath my wig stared out behind the windshield at the women whose heels clicked on the pavement, their silk or nylon stockings swishing together. I wanted to jump out and run my comb through their hair.
THERE are slums in every city but why should there be slums in the newest, most modern city in the world? How can human life degenerate so fast? Why can’t we live our idealism? The unpleasant girl was taking me to Manshieh. I didn’t want to go. The car pushed through the peddlers and hawkers and pimps and prostitutes and people with the scars of diseases I didn’t want to think about. It was raining again and the air smelled of rotting vegetables and shit.
“Why here?”
“Because it’s a no-go area for the British. It’s out of bounds to troops and the people will murder the police if they show their faces. There are lots of stabbings. Watch your back.” She smiled, joyously. She’d have liked it if I died a sudden and violent death. “The ones you have to watch out for are the Arabs. Ramadan is coming, it’s on its way. They want everyone to close their cafés, like them. Not a chance. Why should we put up with their religious craziness? Haven’t we got enough of our own?”
What was that place? It was chaos. It was dirt and disorder, squalid and stinking. The white city didn’t touch it. Perhaps it had its own charms but I couldn’t see them.
We pulled up outside a two-story house. The façade had crumbled off in patches. We went inside. The girl went away for a while and left me. There was a blue cloth on the table and on it a folded Hebrew newspaper with an oil stain across its front page. On the wall hung a sentimental painting of a saucer-eyed child standing in an orange grove. On a shelf was a brass menorah and a pair of brass candlesticks. Fat and spices thickened the air. A cat came up and rubbed itself against my leg. I hate cats. I reached out to pet one when I was a little girl and it scratched my hand. It was a shop cat. It was trained to feed off rats. It knew nothing of fur-stroking and meowing. I sat and listened to a clock ticking in a cheap tin case. The wig was giving me a headache. I didn’t know whether or not I could take it off.
The girl came back with a middle-aged man and a younger one. “I recognize you,” I said to the boy who was a year or two older than me.
“Who are you?”
“Remember the kibbutz?”
“No.”
“You must do. We learned Hebrew together.”
“I don’t know where I learned Hebrew. It was a long time ago. Maybe a year. I have enough to do in life without remembering things.”
But I knew it was him and that he recognized me. I saw the tattoo on his wrist. I remembered the number, even. It had a 2 and a 7 in it. I think his name was Moishe, but names changed here, no one stuck to the same one for very long.
“They’ll take you,” the girl said.
“Where are we going?”
“To the safe house. Where you stay for a while until things calm down.”
“How long will that be?”
“Who knows?” Perhaps she meant, who cares? She turned her back and went away. I was left with the two men.
We walked along the alley, which was slippery with the rain. “When will I see Efraim?” I asked them.
“Who?” they said.
How can you know someone if you don’t know their name? How can you love them if you cannot even fix them long enough to say, with any certainty, who they are? If everything is fluid and in the process of self-invention how can you make a home for yourself in our own life?
“Johnny,” I whispered and two tears coursed down my cheek.
“What’s the matter?” the middle-aged man inquired. “Is it personal or political?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”
“Good.”
I looked at him. How many of these tough, stocky little Jews could a country hold? Men with thinning hair and big forearms, who smoked cigarette after cigarette and whose sentences always threatened to run through many languages, whose home was in themselves and their own simple id
eas of what was right and wrong and what they wanted.
The house they took me to was no different from the one we had just left. They showed me to a bedroom with an army cot in one corner. I put my suitcase on the floor, sat down on the one upright wooden chair and began to cry. I cried in silence. Outside, beyond the peeling green paint of the wooden shutters the rain had stopped. The world stank of bruised tomatoes and rancid fat and very faint on the air an indescribable smell, except that all smells come from something specific and this one derived from a man who lived two houses away, who had been wounded in a gunfight and whose leg was turning gangrenous.
I vomited on the floor. Moishe came in. “What’s this? Sick?”
“I can’t stay here,” I told him.
He wandered out again and came back with a tin bucket and a floorcloth. He kneeled down and wiped up my mess, then he left and shut the door behind him.
After a while I heard the two of them settle down to what sounded like a game of cards.
A couple of hours later, the middle-aged man knocked on the door. “You hungry?” I shook my head.
“Fine,” he said and went away again.
Then, after more time had passed I had a rage for water. I went into the main room and they were still there, smoking and gambling. “I’m thirsty,” I said.
Moishe went out of the house and came back in a moment with a jug. He poured some water into a glass. “Here,” he said. “Anything else you need?”
“No.”
“You will soon.” He went to a cupboard and gave me a piss pot. It was from the previous century and decorated with flowers. Someone must have brought it from Russia.
I went to sleep. Night came. It was cold.
They were still up talking.
Then I was sick for a few days. I don’t know what I had. I slept a lot and when I woke up I saw the wig sitting on the chair. I was still dressed in the religious clothes the girl had given me. My flesh stank of sweat and dirt.
Moishe wasn’t around anymore. The middle-aged man, whose name was Yitzaak, came and asked me if I was better. I said I supposed I was. There was no point in telling him of my fear and loneliness. “So what?” he would say. I could hear it.
It was a country of so-what people. So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers. I was never going to outdo them. They had skins like elephant hides and they brandished their suffering at you like heavy clubs. They’d bash your brains out with those clubs if they could.
Suffering rarely ennobles. I know that now. At least with Moishe his scar was visible, anyone could see it. You looked at him and you had your explanation. The suffering that was to come would not make me any better than I might have been, either. It didn’t give me a big soul. It hardened my heart. A callous grows around a damaged place.
Forgive us. The evil we were making was in our circumstances.
Yitzaak sat down at the table. “Want to eat?”
“Yes. Something.”
He unwrapped some vegetables from a newspaper and began to chop them up for a salad. When he’d finished he put what he’d made into a cracked blue dish. He wiped the blade of his knife along his shirt and then kissed it before putting it back in a drawer.
Then he went out. I waited for a few minutes. He came back with some slices of meat and a loaf of white, east European bread. He put some meat on a plate for me and tore off a piece of bread and lifted a handful of salad onto it. I looked down at it.
“Eat,” he said. “Eat or die.”
“I have no knife and fork.”
“Fine. Here’s a knife and fork.” They clattered on to the table. “You want salt? You want oil?”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Eat or die.”
I ate. I finished most of what he had given me.
“So,” he said. “Your mother was a prostitute?”
“What!” I cried.
“That’s what I heard.”
“My mother was not a prostitute.”
“Fine. So she wasn’t. I don’t care either way. There’s plenty of prostitutes here. If you wanted to be a prostitute you could make a good living. The religious boys from the yeshivot would like you dressed like that. It would give them a thrill when you took your wig off. You want to meet a prostitute?”
“No.”
“They’re interesting people. I like talking to them. We have girls who pretend to be prostitutes to lure the British but that’s a high-ranking job. They don’t go to bed with them. They wouldn’t be so great at that. They’re very pure, the Irgun girls.”
“And I am not pure?”
He shrugged. “I don’t judge. Maybe you should meet some of our prostitutes, the Jewish girls, not the Arab sluts. You want to do something now? With me? He smiled and played with the knife that was lying on the table.
“Efraim would kill you,” I shouted at him.
“Names, names, names. I don’t know anyone called Efraim.”
“You know who I mean.”
“Yes. He talks about you a lot. He’s crazy about you. You’re right. I don’t think he wants to share. Very selfish. The Kibbutzniks, they don’t mind sharing. Moishe says you were very popular on the kibbutz.” He looked at me, a short, hard man who knew nothing of the new woman but only the old one, of which there were two kinds.
I could have taken the knife and stabbed him because when you are trying to overthrow the old systems violence is the only way, as he knew himself.
“Everything is changing,” I replied. “Everything.”
He looked at me. “So what?”
FINALLY Johnny came. He looked glossy and well-washed. Only football miseries could make him disheveled. “Shit, Evelyn, what the hell has happened to you?” he said, holding me in his arms. He looked around. “Have they been taking good care of you?”
“No.”
“No?”
“How could you let them do this to me?”
“What have they done?” He looked at me. “Are you angry?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I know that anger. I’ve seen it. Tell me everything, angry girl.”
I told him. He smiled when I spoke of the rude girl. He was expressionless when I told him about the middle-aged man who thought I was a slut.
“Fine,” he said. “Get your things. We’re going.”
“Do I have to wear this wig? I hate it.”
“You’re safest in the wig, but it’s up to you. You’re not stupid. Make your own judgments. It seems I can’t be around to protect you all the time. I wish I could, with all my heart I do. But it’s impossible. I have to recognize that.”
As we were walking out, he turned his head and said something in Hebrew to the middle-aged man. He spoke very fast. The man shrugged. Johnny put down my Selfridges suitcase, walked over and punched him in the face. The man was howling, blood was running from his nose. This gave me a warm feeling inside. A fatherless child, I had a man who was prepared to commit an act of violence in my defense. I looked at Johnny and was sexually aroused. If I had told him what I felt, I know what he would have said: “This is normal, it’s natural.”
For a few minutes I no longer wanted to be a free woman. I wanted to be Johnny’s little hausfrau. I wanted to be a soldier’s wife who cooked for her husband and tended his battle wounds. I wanted his children. Is it not nice to have someone to take care of you, not to have to think for yourself? Isn’t it a rest from the tumult of living?
“Where are we going, Johnny?” I asked him as he strapped my suitcase to the back of the Norton.
“Not far. Not far at all.”
“I don’t like Manshieh. I don’t want to stay here.”
“Not Manshieh. Somewhere else.”
He took me to a place I ha
d never been, called Neve Tzedek, hadn’t even noticed it in my wanderings around the city. It was a lost world, far to the south, almost in Jaffa.
“What is this place?”
“It’s old. Older than Tel Aviv.”
“How can that be?”
“Sometime in the last century Jaffa was getting overcrowded and the Jews built a suburb for themselves. Now it’s part of Tel Aviv. We’ve swallowed it up.”
We drove into a maze of sun-bleached houses built in a different style. Neve Tzedek was quietly crumbling into dust. The narrow streets were broken. Weeds and flowers grew everywhere and date palms pitched themselves up wherever there was space for them to grow. Everything was small in Neve Tzedek, including the people: the women who trudged along with their shopping, the men carrying bits of machines rendered down far below any obvious function. Stray dogs shat themselves without disturbance from embarrassed owners. There were no sounds of any traffic. No cars. It was very peaceful. It was cool but above us the sky was very blue. Johnny took me to a school.
“You can stay here,” he said. “You can pretend to be a teacher and teach the children something. Art maybe. But if there’s a fire, get out fast.”
“Why?”
“It’s an arms cache.”
“Do the teachers know that?”
“Sure.”
This was nice. It was very nice. It was pleasant. I was going to be part of a community of intelligent people. I was looking forward to it. Perhaps I really would become a teacher one day, why not?
Johnny was talking to a woman. She was shaking her head.