by Linda Grant
What I wanted to do, more than anything in the world, was to see someone once more. Not Johnny, my old love, who has faded out of my recollection, as all passion fades in the end. No, the person I was dying to talk to was the girl who sailed the Mediterranean Sea in search of the Promised Land in all her hope and certainty. I went back into the apartment and found my handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes. I don’t smoke much these days, just one or two in the evenings once or twice a week, with my coffee. I love the smell of nicotine, especially when it’s mixed with other unpleasant odors like cooking fat and petrol and suntan oil and people’s sweat. It is the smell of chaos, of people grabbing life by the throat, a state of mind that has always charmed me.
I lit my cigarette with a lighter Leo gave me for our fifteenth wedding anniversary and I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, she was there, sitting opposite me, looking along the street.
I stared at myself, at the stiff curls and the terrible, thick red lipstick like wallpaper paste, the artless dab of rouge on the unlined skin with a spot or two round the mouth, the badly made clothes, and I smiled. My God, there have been so many improvements in hairdressing and cosmetics in the past half-century and of course we have the Jews to thank for that: Estée Lauder, Vidal Sassoon (who, as few people know, was one of the young Jews from the East End of London who made their way to Israel in 1948 to fight for the new country, proving that even hairdressers have their uses).
“Oh you,” she said.
“Yes. Me.”
“What a wasted life you have had,” she said, lighting her own cigarette. “I gave you such a good start. There was no reason why you could not have made your way back here years ago, but you lost the courage of your convictions.” There was an ashtray next to her full of stubs.
“Don’t smoke too much,” I said, “particularly that brand, they’re killers. I don’t think my life has been wasted.”
“What do you have to show for it?”
“Peace of mind. Intellectual pursuits. What is love? It’s nothing.
“No. It’s everything. How can you live without passion?”
“Well, when the Change came, I found I was free of all that.”
“I mean the passion of dreams, of idealism.”
“Adolescent stuff. Now, it’s the stories that interest me.”
“I don’t care about them. I only care about doing.“
“It’s why, that I care about. I want to understand you.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
“Don’t you wonder about your father? Don’t you want to find out anything about him? Don’t you want to know where your mother came from? Naomi is getting a visa to go to Latvia to try to discover how our grandparents lived.”
“Why are you so interested in the past? It’s the future that counts.”
“The past is everything. You’ll see.”
“You only say that because you haven’t got a future.”
She shook her head and lit another cigarette. “You don’t know this yet, but they really are very harmful.”
Her platinum blond hair was a terrible color. The penciled-in eyebrows were just awful. I wish I could be that age again, with all the advantages we have now of subtler shades and a less aggressive use of make-up. My own hair is tinted several different layers of gray and white and silver. I have had to explain, quite sharply, to my hairdresser here how it is done.
“Can I,” I said, “at least give you some make-up tips?”
But she turned away and looked up the street. She was waiting for Johnny, waiting for him to ride up on his Norton and take her to a movie and then bring her home and make love to her and whisper to her about how they were both freedom fighters and they were making a brand-new country which would show the world what the Jews could do when left to their own devices.
She was so proud. Proud and frightened and angry. I looked at her again before she faded away and I wanted to take her in my arms. I felt such envy for her, envy and compassion. I was envious of a wholehearted certainty I have never felt since, for a deep-seated knowledge that we were taking the right path to the future. I was so envious of beings who were whole of heart and could act from their hearts instead of the wriggling path of the intellect. But I felt compassion too, the compassion you feel for the pregnant woman who always thinks her child will be the best and brightest kid who ever lived, a child who will always love her and never disappoint her and is bound to grow up to be Einstein, not a thief or a serial killer.
But what can you do? If there is a story, there is going to be an ending and another thing life has taught me is that not many of them are about people who lived happily ever after.
The sun was down. The city was darkening. Mrs. Linz turned off the television. People were walking past our building from the theater where Mrs. Linz and I had been the previous week to see a play about atrocities committed by our soldiers in Gaza. I noticed a greasy smear on the wall from the incident last month when Hamas bombed a café and fragments of cake were hurtled through the neighboring windows. I went into the kitchen and poured us both a cold drink, for whatever else changed, after fifty years it was still hot, even in spring, and being a Latvian I’ll never get used to this damned climate.