by Linda Grant
He was lonely and looking for love. He was a reader of the bittersweet fictions of Stefan Zweig. Another Yekke, but one whose backbone was not ideas but romanticism. I thought, “I can handle him.”
He asked if we could meet again the next day and I said yes.
I only slipped up once with him during our whirlwind courtship, and that was a few days later when we lunched again at the same restaurant.
As we admired the flames of the crêpe suzette the waiter brought us for dessert, there was a stir. Forks and knives clattered down on to the table. We both looked up.
Entering the salon, carried on two petite limbs, was some sort of a fairy tale: meters and meters of sea-green grosgrain, gathered and tucked and artfully diverted into a frock reminiscent of another time and century when women had nothing to do all day except ornament society.
“You’re staring at that dress as if you’ve never seen anything like it before,” he said. And indeed the expression on my face, at that moment, must have been overwhelming bewilderment. Totally unbeknownst to me, while the Jews of Palestine were into the final stages of their life-and-death struggle against the British for their future and I was sitting among old newspapers on the dusty floor of Neve Tzedek, in Paris Christian Dior had turned the clock back fifty years and launched what quite paradoxically came to be known as the New Look and this was the very first example to have reached the Riviera. He had restored to women what they had craved for so long during the bleak years of rationing and aerial combat. Their femininity. And you know, I was as enthralled and enraptured as anyone else.
So something passed into history for me, at lunch in that restaurant in Nice in March 1947—the brief moment in my life when I had been privileged to live in modern times.
It wasn’t hard to get Leo into bed, not hard at all. At first I made a mistake by being too forward, by undressing, instead of allowing myself to be undressed. I had to unlearn everything about the hotness of passion and become a kind of courtesan. I had to learn the very thing that my mother had known and that I had dismissed as being old-fashioned, and it was allure, because that is what attracted Leo.
What is that? What is the eternal feminine that men love so much? Silence. Mystery. We are blank canvases onto which they can project their fantasies and women who are successful in love understand this intuitively. The magazines tell you “be yourself” but nothing is further from the truth. Be the self they want you to be and yet always let them know you preserve something inside that they can never quite capture, that eludes them, because men are hunters and it is the thrill of the chase that excites them. All you have to do is figure out what the fantasy is, and you have caught them. My mother knew it. I learned it in a single day, watching Leo, listening to him. That’s what being a good listener means. They talk, you calculate.
He smoked small cheroots and inspected the gleam on his shoes when the shoeshine boy returned them to him. He fussed over ties and shirts. He took his money out of his trouser pockets and made neat little piles of the change on the dresser. But he was a good man, I could see that at once. He would never lose his temper and cry out Ostjude!
He said my body puzzled him. He didn’t understand the long, brown well-muscled legs and the curvaceous stomach and the heavy breasts. He said I was a paradox. I had a narrow scrape when a vendeuse in a dress shop he took me to, to buy me some frocks, said, “But madame is tanned! Have you come from the colonies?”
He moved me into his hotel. Every morning he read aloud to me from the newspaper. “Listen to this,” he said, excitedly. “The British in Palestine have decided to wash their hands of the place. They’ve said that the Mandate is unworkable. They’re handing it over to the United Nations to resolve. They’re preparing to pull out.” He shook his head, smiling. “All over the world little guys are challenging big guys. It’s amazing. Do you know what I should do? I’ve a good mind to drop everything and just go there and fight.”
I smiled to hear this. Leo in Palestine, his exquisite sensibility grappling with the appalling heat and the shortages, the curfews, the searches. Leo in the Irgun! He would be paralyzed by indecision.
“Oh!” I cried. “Do you plan to desert me?”
And he reached across the table and took my hand for a moment and looked at me, meltingly.
All this calculation was going on in my brain but somewhere else I was frozen like the winter that had gripped Europe.
One evening, walking along the Promenade des Anglais under a clear and starry sky, he suddenly turned to me and asked, “Evelyn, are you pregnant?”
I gasped. “Why do you say that?”
“I was just looking at you as you walked beside me, in silhouette, in that white dress. And now your face is very white, under the moon.”
“Yes. I am.”
“But it’s only been three weeks. Surely…”
“No. You’re right. I was pregnant when I met you, I didn’t know, though. I have only known for a few days.”
He was silent. And summoning every atom of the Jewish will to survive against all the odds, I said this, which I had been preparing for some days: “The transgression wasn’t against you, it was against myself. After my parents were killed I was so lonely. Everyone was affected by the war, I wasn’t the only one to lose someone, but it was different for me, I had no one left. I met someone. I had a great yearning—for a purposeful life and for happiness. I had a yearning for motherhood. I wanted a child at my breast, I wanted to watch a child growing up in a family that loved it, as I was loved. I wanted someone to love me but it was a child whose love I craved.
“I chose a father for that child. I allowed my body to be embraced by his, though I shuddered with repulsion when I did so. I realized that he would always be a stranger to me, because I didn’t love him and never could. Nonetheless, we married. My baby will not be illegitimate. This is my husband’s child. Seven weeks ago he died. His heart gave out at the age of twenty-six. There was a weakness there all along.
“And even when he died, I didn’t love him because you don’t choose love, it chooses you. I came to France to recover my equilibrium and I met the man I should have met first. You are the one I was looking for. You are the one who should have fathered my baby. Even if my husband were still alive, it would be you I was unfaithful to, if I let him kiss or touch me. Life has taken its revenge on me. I shouldn’t have been so headstrong, I should have waited. I should have waited for you. And now I’m waiting for the sentence you will pass on me.”
He listened to my “confession” in silence. It was agony waiting for him to speak. Finally he said, “The child is mine. This other man will be forgotten. Let him rest in his grave in peace. Our life together will be tender. Come here, come to me.”
So I knew that he remembered the poem, for of course he would have played the music, Verklärte Nacht, which Blum had made me listen to one afternoon in the white city, when I thought I knew everything and how everything would turn out.
Instead of denouncing me, Leo had chosen to take the part assigned to him. “Why should the child you have conceived be a burden on your soul?” he whispered. “Why should I condemn and sentence you? There is only the heart that loves and suffers, this is all that matters.”
And as he kissed me, he later said, he felt the radiance fall on himself. Which was just as I’d planned.
It was a new twist on an old trick. Why did he fall for it? Why didn’t he smell a rat? Of course the poem was familiar to him but isn’t the very power of romance its familiarity, that we tell ourselves the same old stories over and over again? Is there any new way of saying anything that is to do with love? I don’t think so. The heart finds its familiar grooves and runs along them and the music emerges, the song of all time.
My daughter Naomi came to visit me in Tel Aviv, though reluctantly. She had grown up to be a girl with no interest in either art or music. She has a hard, analytical mind. She enjoys tricky sums and statistics and became a lecturer in international relations at the
London School of Economics. I went to listen to her once, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. She hardly remembered anything of our time in America, before her brother died and Leo turned his back on California and brought us to London.
I had thought she and Mrs. Linz might get on, for Mrs. Linz votes for any communist candidate she can find or else for members of the Arab lists. Once a week, with her stick, she takes the bus to Jerusalem and makes her way to the office of the human-rights organization where despite the painful stiffness in her hands she types up Palestinian testimonies of the atrocities committed by our army. Heartrending stuff. She brings them home sometimes for me to read. I can’t stomach too much, it makes me sick to think anyone would do these things, especially a Jew. The Palestinians are themselves, of course, capable of equally ghastly deeds such as torture but, as the people I met from the camps had taught me, suffering very rarely ennobles. Primo Levi is the exception, not the rule.
Naomi, however, does not accept Mrs. Linz at her own estimation of herself. For the first time Mrs. Linz met her match.
“Mrs. Linz, do you not understand that you were doing exactly the same thing as the British?”
“Explain,” said Mrs. Linz, her arms folded across her chest.
“Colonialism assumed that it was bringing enlightenment to benighted peoples. You Zionists took exactly the same attitude to the Arab population, and of course to the Jews from North Africa and the East who followed. Your ideas are inherently colonial.”
“So we should have left them as they were, in their primitive darkness?”
“You should have respected their culture.”
“This was not a culture. Where was their music, their literature?”
“That is your idea of a culture.”
“Oh, you are a relativist and a reactionary. People like you make me sick, you post-modernists. You believe in nothing. You have no center. Who are you? You have no idea. You think everything is the same, when it is not. Your generation never lived through evil times. One thing is not as good as another. If you wish to argue with someone, go and see my son the atomic scientist who in 1967 left Stanford University and came back to defend his country. Why? Was he a soldier? Of course not. He went to a kibbutz where the men had been mobilized to their units and he drove a tractor for the summer. The country was swollen with jubilation and hideous patriotism and everyone was so triumphant. It was ghastly. You could not get away from the arrogance. My son has brought together two ideas as dangerous as each other—nuclear weapons and right-wing Zionism. I could have rid myself of this child, in the womb, you know. There were people who could have performed the operation. I was mad not to have done so. It would have saved me and the rest of the world a lot of trouble.”
And so the argument went on as I stood at the balcony and watched the sun setting and thought of the pictures I used to paint of a street of long ago, and a ship sailing along the shore, its red and black funnels belching black smoke.
I wanted to say to Naomi (but knew that I was no match for her intellect), “Listen to me for a change. Don’t you understand that we have no choice but to live through the portion of history that is allotted to us?”
No one likes Tel Aviv. The tourists make their way from the airport straight to Jerusalem which has history, it has “soul.” I rarely go. I can’t stand the place. If Mrs. Linz had her way, she’d evacuate all the inhabitants of the Old City, blow up everything—the Wailing Wall, the churches, the Dome of the Rock—and build something useful, like a hospital. I agree with her.
Tel Aviv is dirty and chaotic but at least it’s alive, not a museum. Now that we’ve destroyed Beirut it is the only city left on this far Mediterranean coast that can really be called the Levant, a mongrel metropolis of aliens among aliens. By the bus station there’s a shanty town of illegal immigrants, mainly from Thailand and Romania. They’re not Jews. As far as they’re concerned, Israel is just another rich country, like any other. Which reminds me of that line from the Book of Jeremiah: Behold, I will gather them from the North country, and gather them from the uttermost parts of the earth. Maybe that has been the purpose of this place all along, to be a magnet for strangers.
Yesterday, I went to the Carmel Market to buy our fruit and vegetables and meat. I took the bus back up Ben Yehuda. The streets still smell mysterious to me and the palm trees still rustle above my head, the light seems a little older than it does in the suburbs. I could hear the sound of the “Goldberg” Variations on Mrs. Linz’s CD player as I climbed the stairs.
Mrs. Linz unpacked the shopping. She showed me a letter that had come from America, from Blum’s grandson, a Seattle millionaire who made his fortune from the computer industry. He wants to do up our building, return it to its former glory. Already a few places have been restored around the top end of Bialik Street, at Idelson and Hess, and they stand out like a sore thumb in the brilliance of their whiteness. They make my heart judder when I see them. The past is always returning to us.
Johnny, for example, isn’t dead, he’s somewhere in the city right now. Perhaps I’ll bump into him one day, though it’s a bigger place than it used to be. Only a few weeks after our wedding Leo had looked up from his copy of the Herald Tribune which he scanned every morning for news from Palestine.
“Ha! Listen to this. An underground Jewish army has assaulted an apparently impregnable British citadel in the heart of a Jewish city. They have shot their way in and shot their way out taking all the Jewish prisoners with them and gone to ground.”
“What do you mean?”
“There has been, Evelyn, a mass breakout at Acre prison. All our freedom fighters are now at liberty, except for that poor boy Dov Gruner. It came too late for him.” He shook his head in sorrow and pity, for the British had hanged Dov the previous month.
As marriages go, mine turned out to be a successful one and only those who have never married themselves would ask if it were happy or unhappy. It was an accommodation, a partnership. It was a life not a love affair and there is a difference. Love affairs belong to the young or to those who don’t have a life, or not a proper one, at any rate. Leo and I had a life. But all those years, after I had been turned back on the brink of the great homecoming, mine was a heart in exile, a heart that is thwarted. The only consolation I can draw from this is the thought that perhaps the heart that has loved and suffered is the only one worth having, and Leo told me once of a talmudic saying, that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
When your child dies, something in your brain becomes dead flesh, you’re never whole again. My son—the son of Johnny and me—died at the age of six. He was killed by a balloon at his own birthday party. He was blowing it up when he stopped and took a breath. The balloon ran screaming down his throat, wrapped itself around his windpipe and in a minute or so he was dead. I was at the end of the garden, in my studio, when this happened, putting in a few more minutes to yet another painting of the white city and a strong wind howling on the sand of the seashore. “What kind of mother is late for her own child’s birthday party?” I found that Naomi had written in her teenage diary. “Mine.”
The death made Leo and me hard but in different ways. Both of us were in mourning for the dead child and we lit a candle in a glass for him, every year on the anniversary. Leo shook his fist at the heavens and cursed God. We looked around for someone to blame but we could find no one to pin it on but the Supreme Creator. There was no one else to bear a grudge against, no one to sue. Leo took on God as his personal adversary. “Look what he’s doing to us now,” he shouted, but I became the opposite. I was tired of hearing about the never-ending sorrows of the Jews. I watched the world go to war with Israel and time after time Israel always won.
If you think the world is out to get you, how can you not fight back?
Mrs. Linz ran into Johnny on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt in the early 1970s. “I recognized him at once, that terrorist boyfriend of yours. Well, I was wrong on one count. He did not meet an e
arly grave. Instead he was serving tourists with drinks and plastic plates of kosher food with plastic knives and forks, running up and down the aisles, fastening people’s seat belts. Of course you know there was no advancement for that Irgun lot in the new Israeli army. Not at all, you had to have a documented record of resistance with the Haganah. Your terrorist boyfriend, I’m afraid, picked the wrong side. Of course, he was not intelligent. I realized this at once when I spoke to him at the back of the plane.
“He was terribly bewildered about his fate, how he had wound up like this. He said, ‘Mrs. Linz, you know as well as I do that things were done that weren’t pleasant, things that people don’t like to talk about now. How is it when they tell the story of the birth of Eretz Israel they tell it like there are only heroes with no blood on their hands? Only innocent people. I wasn’t innocent, I was no victim. I did the dirty work. Someone has to and why not me? But in five minutes they forgot about the dirty deeds and pretended they didn’t happen.’ Oh, he was very perplexed. But I looked him in the eye, standing there in his nice uniform and I said, ‘Don’t worry, I have not forgotten what you did.’ One day when he dies his wife will want a military funeral and the amusing thing is he will have to go to the British to get one, for that is who his military record is with.”
Tonight, when Mrs. Linz was watching a documentary on television, I went and took a chair out onto the balcony. I stepped out there gingerly. God knows how safe it is. The weather is warming up again. They built the city the wrong way around—the boulevards should have gone down to the shore, rather than running parallel to it, to force the air up into the town. You can hardly get any breeze from the sea at all anymore, with the hotels blocking the way.
The bougainvillea was scrambling up over the cracks in the masonry. It’s an old plant, now. I don’t know what its roots are doing to the foundations of the building or how deep the foundations were dug in the first place. The whole structure feels unstable to me. A gust of heat hit my face, heat from the traffic, exhaust fumes.