by Linda Grant
Once, an Arab had sold watermelons on the corner of Mapu and Ben Yehuda streets and I had imagined him waiting for the day when the desert would rise up to engulf us. But he had not reckoned with Jewish ingenuity. The Tel Aviv of the Mandate days was still there, as the ruins of Ancient Rome are still there, fragments of another, underground city, like the bones of the dead sticking up above the ground but it wasn’t sand which had buried it. Like Troy or Pompeii, it lay beneath archaeological layers of advertising billboards, peeling plaster, graffiti, forests of electrical wiring, naked neon light, natural gas tanks, Dumpsters, air-conditioning motors, transformers and air grates. Brown air. Brown buildings. Soiled vegetation photosynthesizing brown light in the disheveled gardens. Grubby cats foraging for abandoned meals in the grass, choking on chicken bones. The white city, I have to say, and this is an understatement, was an eyesore. Who knows, perhaps it was the ugliest place in the world?
“What happened to Ha Yarkon?”
“You’re on it.”
“Where are the cafés?”
“I remember cafés here, when I was a kid. But they got rid of them years ago to build the hotels. Which one do you want? Sheraton, Dan, Holiday Inn? Look. Nice hotels, very modern. All the luxuries you could ask for.”
“They’re in the way of the sea. They block the view.” The hotels rose up like high concrete castles defending the coast where there had once been cafés with noisy gramophones and the British officers’ clubs and the clubs of the officers of the Free French and the Free Poles and all the other scraps of armies that found themselves encamped in the Middle East.
“Of course they are. Tourists come here and they want a view. We give it to them.”
“Where did you get your injuries?” I asked him.
“Lebanon. Where else? You wanna hear my story?”
Look at it this way, we are the people of the Book. It is the first thousand years of Jewish history and though we have no second volume for the next two thousand years, each story a Jew tells is part of that book. We have no choice but to listen. Our history was in our story, for the Arabs of Palestine, it was the land. Without a story we’re not Jews. Without a land they’re not just DPs, they’re an abstract idea—a cause. That’s not a human being. This is the great wrong we did them.
He started to tell me how he had come from a village in the south of Poland with his mother and father when he was five years old, in 1950. “You know how they survived the war? A Polish farmer hid them. Isn’t that something? They got right through the war and then the minute it was over, the anti-Semitism started up again, like nothing had happened. Nothing! So what should they do but leave? They dumped us in Herzlea, in tents, where from the age of six my mother would send me out into the garden with a stick to kill snakes. What a country! We were terrified! My God, it was so primitive. My parents spent all their time talking about how much they missed Poland but also how much they hated it, how fantastic it was to be in Israel and how terrible the life was. Confused? I was a confused kid, all right.
“Then we got sick of the heat and the dirt and we came to Tel Aviv. Listen, it was worse. The old people, the pioneers who came out in the thirties, they sneered at us, they called us Ostjuden. You know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Now you want people who are really primitive, you look at the Moroccans and the Yemenites. Them they should have put in tents. I mean, where would they have ever seen a house before they came here? And the Ethiopians, my God. That’s Africa, isn’t it? It’s the jungle. But you know who were the worst of all? You know who I hate the worst?”
“Who? Tell me your hatreds. Let’s hear the lot.”
“The kibbutzniks. They wanted me to be a sabra. They wanted me to forget I was ever a Pole. They said, The parents we can do nothing about but the children, we can remake them in our own image.’ Like hell they could. They wanted socialism. Listen, we spent five years under socialism after the war, in Poland. What good did it do the Poles? The kibbutzniks. I’ll tell you about them, they were rich compared to us. They had swimming pools. Some socialism. I know those guys. I fought next to them in my unit during the war, not just Lebanon. I fought in ‘67 and ‘73 and ‘82 and if I have to I’ll fight all over again, but not my sons. Absolutely not. If it kills me, I’ll make sure they get rich. Stockbroker. That’s a job I would like them to have. But if we make a peace with our enemies, do you want to know who will make it? People like me. Not my stockbroker sons, certainly not the religious boys who won’t fight and those guys who come over from Brooklyn who think they can tell me I can’t drive my cab on Shabbat or eat pork and that we’ll never give up this place or that place that is mentioned in the Bible. No. The only people who get to sit at the peace table are the ones who made the war. And another thing…”
He took me to the apartment on Mapu. The glittering white surfaces were shit brown. Mercifully, palm trees had grown up in the spaces between the buildings, and overgrown oleander and hibiscus bushes hid some of the dereliction and decay. Inside, the common hallways stank.
Mrs. Linz let me in. She leaned on a stick. “Arthritic hip,” she said, curtly. The khaki shorts and shirt were long gone, so were the crumbling rubber sneakers. She had a mass of well-cut, curly white hair but otherwise she was dressed in a skirt and a blouse and a string of pearls like any nice German woman of her age. I walked into the apartment. The same furniture, the same brass bowls, the same Arab dress, arms akimbo. The bookshelves were still packed but now there were paperbacks. The only difference.
“Where is the white city?” I asked her, after I had sat down and she had poured me a glass of Coca-Cola, cold from the fridge.
“It turned brown,” she said. “A matter in part of poor maintenance but also corrosion from the salt air. The law that protected the tenants was a disaster for the buildings. Blum was not the only one who had no money to maintain his investment. It was a correct idea, of course, but it had consequences which we did not foresee.”
“You were the Weimar Republic in exile,” I said, remembering. “How old are you now, Mrs. Linz?”
“I am eighty-five.”
I arrived in October when the weather was starting to cool down. I walked the streets of the city. The trees were so much bigger now and mercifully they cast a bigger shade. I still don’t know the name of those trees that grow along Rehov Allenby and Rothschild Boulevard where one day in 1948 David Ben-Gurion had gone to the art gallery which had once been the home of Mayor Dizengoff in the days when the town was small enough so that he could ride out each day in his high-buttoned coat on his white horse and inspect it. Among the brown paintings of rabbis Ben-Gurion had declared the state and the Palestine Philharmonic played “Hatikvah,” which was now the national anthem, and in doing so became the Israel Philharmonic. Then they went home and the next day the war started.
The religious people had gone, they’d left for Jerusalem or B’nai Brak. They think Tel Aviv is Sodom and Gomorrah. “I used to think the Hasidim were vegetables,” Mrs. Linz said. “But now they have woken from their slumber. They still live in the medieval times, but now they are medieval types with guns.” Where Mrs. Kulp’s salon once stood there is a place where you can have a tattoo or a ring inserted in your nipple. The thought makes me sick and I always turn my head away when I pass. Next door there is a bar where the homosexuals drink coffee for, despite every other change, Tel Aviv does remain the place where you can eat cake at any time of day and night. There were no British in their shorts, shouting at you through megaphones, just boy and girl soldiers with their rifles. “Wanna score?” they asked each other.
I traced the steps of my weeks spent on the run. I turned off from King George Street, a shabby thoroughfare of bargain-basement shops, into the alley and the stone lions still stood but less like statues and more like models of extinct creatures in a science museum. The telegraph lines were covered in some kind of creeper. The city’s first buildings, the ones with traces of Odessa and Kiev in their concre
te bones, were derelict. I walked through the Carmel Market on my way to Manshieh and that was just the same. The same foodstuffs on sale, the same pimps, the same prostitutes doing their shopping, just different nationalities because it’s the Russians who control the trade now. It made me smile, this. With vice, nothing changes.
But at the end of the street where Manshieh should have started there was nothing. It had vanished from the earth, only the mosque remained, and where the houses had been a bus terminus and a parking lot in the shadow of the skyscrapers of the bourse. “What happened?” I asked an old man passing by, with his shopping.
“To what?”
“To the houses, the people?”
“What do you mean?”
“There used to be a place here. It was called Manshieh.”
“Oh yes, that’s true. It was mainly an Arab neighborhood. We chased out the people and then we demolished it. I don’t know why they didn’t blow up the mosque too. You know what they did? They used the minaret to post their snipers during the war of independence, in which I fought, incidentally.”
“What did you do?”
“I drove the Arabs out of Jaffa. What the hell did they think they were doing there? This is the Jewish city! Tel Aviv. The Arabs can go find their own place.” He spat on the ground. I watched him go off, lugging his shopping. Every few yards, he stopped for a rest and looked at the sea and looked at the towers of Jaffa and sucked from a plastic bottle of a brightly colored orange drink.
I walked toward Neve Tzedek. At least that remained. As the white city of Tel Aviv had declined so the old original quarter had found a new lease of life.
“Who lives here?” I asked a girl.
“Yuppies.”
The school where I had nearly been a teacher was a performing arts center. I sat in the café and drank a cappuccino. The air was still and fragrant. No need of a typewriter, now, I thought.
I walked along Allenby Street which I last saw when I was abducted by the Boltons. Where were they now? I hadn’t thought about them for years. Perhaps, if they were still alive, in an old people’s home with ticking clocks and dried flower arrangements and shaking fingers bent over the crossword puzzle and the smell of incontinence. Allenby was in a bad way. The shops were run down and sold things you wouldn’t want. The people who shopped there looked poor. Poor and angry, which is a potent mixture. They jostled and shoved each other aside and shouted. Two fat, fair-haired women were having a terrible row in Russian outside a shop that advertised in both Hebrew and Cyrillic letters that it sold pork. One of the women tore open her bag of meat and threw it in the other’s face. In retaliation she reached in her bag and got out a knife. People were ringing the police on their cell phones. I looked up and saw the blue sky between the overhanging branches of the nameless trees.
I went everywhere. The zoo was gone. It had once been on the edge of town but then it was swallowed up by the neighborhood that came to surround it, whose residents complained of the noise and the smells. It was relocated, as a kind of safari park, somewhere. The Galina café where the young mothers of Tel Aviv ate ice cream in the afternoon with their babies and the Yekkes sat on the sand was gone too. Demolished the previous year. “It was in a terrible state,” Mrs. Linz said. “Neglect, as usual. It was best to put it out of its misery.”
“How strange that the most emphatically optimistic architecture ever built should have had such a short life span.”
Mrs. Linz shrugged. “I know. And we were building with an idea,” she said.
“It will be the end of the century, soon, the Jewish century.”
“Oh, I can’t stand labels.”
“But it was the Jewish century—the century when the Jews left eastern Europe and the masses went to America and entered modern life and made their contribution to the creation of the American identity. The century of the Holocaust but also of Einstein and Schoenberg and Hollywood and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and…”
“You don’t read those dreadful people, do you?”
“Of course.”
“Ostjuden. Like Amos Oz and David Grossman. Particularly Oz, one of those weavers of the founding myths of Zionism.”
“Well, what do you read?”
“English literature, the greatest in the world. William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston.”
“Mrs. Linz, they’re Irish.”
“It is the same thing. Anyway, I hope to live to see the next century and let’s hope it is another kind altogether, one without labels.”
Some hope.
One day, in 1947 in the city of Nice, I had walked through a high, wrought-iron gate in a stone wall on a kind of escarpment above the old town which you reached by a lift in a tunnel. It was very calm up there, with the red roofs below me and the birds singing sweetly and the dome of the Negresco Hotel, where the rich people stayed, glittering in the sunlight. For years to come I would wake up from a dream of that cemetery, of the snowcapped mountains and the blue sky and the glimpses of the sea below, the cypresses and the umbrella pines.
I walked on across the hill. The port was below me. I felt the roughness of a wall abrade my skin as I touched it. I came to a gate and on it a sign said that this was Le Cimetière israelite. Just inside some men were constructing a mausoleum. The sweat was on their backs.
“What’s this?” I asked one of the laborers, in my girls’-school French. It nearly came out as Hebrew. Mah zeh?
For the Israelites killed in Poland, they told me. The Society of Israelites had urns ready. They were going to put in ashes from the crematoriums. The laborer lowered his voice. And bars of soap.
A man was walking through the cemetery. He was watching me. He saw me looking at another tombstone, a few feet away from him. He was watching my mouth move silently as I read. He was trying to make out what I was saying to myself and as he read my lips the words formed in his mind as Hebrew. So he walked over to me. I looked up, startled.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Evelyn Sert,” I said.
“Are you a Jewess?”
“Yes.”
He was my future husband. His name was Leopold, but I called him Leo.
The British officials in Cairo had handed me—“under instructions from Jerusalem”—a passport in the name of Evelyn Sert, with a notice pasted inside indicating that the bearer was prohibited from entering Palestine. And a very small amount of cash. Mrs. Bolton had boarded an airplane bound for London. We did not say good-bye. I took a third-class berth on a ship to Marseilles.
The engines were beating the waters but I was oblivious, asleep, inert, shell-shocked.
I was remembering my first home. How, when I was a child, I would come back from school sometimes when my mother was working at the salon and wander through our little rooms piled on top of each other in the higgledy-piggledy eighteenth-century flat. I would watch the weak sunshine that made its way over the roofs opposite to penetrate our sash windows and lie in pools on our carpet with its repeating pattern of thornless roses. The silver-plate coffee set, tarnished from too much polishing; the Russian samovar which Uncle Joe had bought my mother; the china dish of fading rose petals; and in a glass-fronted display cabinet like Blum’s her collection of Dresden china figurines which she saved up for, with her tips from the salon. How many? Twenty? I’d never counted. She had shepherdesses, a pierrot, a rustic youth. When I was a child they were my friends. I gave them names and invented stories for them. I paired some of them off as sweethearts. As I grew older they seemed shallow and sentimental, striking fixed poses with their little china arms.
But they were what I thought of on the ship that took me away from Palestine, my mother’s face floating into my mind, as it always would in the years to come when the weather was cold or I was lonely and longed to be a child again. I was at the center of the universe in the middle of all the slightly grubby chintz domesticity, where my mother had built one nest of seduction and allure for her lover and another of safety and love for me.<
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That place of refuge was where I lived for the first part of the voyage. I thought I would stay like that forever and that they would land me on the shore and I would be a vagrant, a derelict person crying in the sunshine. I painted myself thus, in my mind’s eye, a grossly pregnant woman who was also one atom of the flotsam and jetsam of postwar Europe.
But Palestine had taught me something, the hardest lesson: that there is no choice but to act, to take charge of your life. You can indulge your inertia only so far and then you have to snap out of it. In the end you must do something. From then on, I thought about nothing but my situation, driven into exile on the very eve of the Return. What to do? What to do?
I lived on my wits and on the tough kibbutz survival skills I had been taught plus a large bottle of Guerlain’s Shalimar which I slathered myself with every morning. I stole the perfume from a shop in the rue du Suede. I remembered Uncle Joe’s maxim: “The only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you are skint.” I was reassembling my femininity but it was hard because my hair was so very short. It was almost like Jean Seberg’s in A bout de souffle, but that was ten years in the future. I looked like I might have just come out of a camp, except I wasn’t thin.
After we met, in the cemetery, Leo took me to lunch at an expensive restaurant on the Promenade des Anglais.
I told him a story, then he told me his. He was a great talker, Leo, not in an argumentative way, not like the Jews who, as the old joke has it, if you bring three together you have ten opinions. No, he was a descriptive talker, a user of adjectives and other embellishments which I’d forgotten about in Palestine where verbs were the thing, verbs. The doing words.
As I listened I was watching him. I saw the well-pressed suit, the formal knot in his tie and the way he counted his change twice and carefully calculated the percentage of the gratuity, not, I surmised, because he was mean, but because he was precise. I looked at his face. He was a small, slightly built man but with a certain elegance of figure. He was a Jew from Berlin who went to America in the 1930s, a violinist in one of the studio orchestras, playing on the soundtrack of the movies. That’s him you hear on “Some Enchanted Evening” if you’ve ever seen South Pacific.