Another day, Toni leans against a guard rail at a busy corner in downtown Jerusalem. She gobbles her falafel lunch while she watches the milling crowd. Most interesting to her is the group of girl soldiers clustered in front of the falafel kiosk. Stunning, every one of them, their gazelle-like loveliness not the least bit marred by the khaki pants and jackboots and the rifles slung over their shoulders. The girl soldiers lean into one another and laugh and rebuff the flirtations of passing boys. Their hands dance in the air as they shout over one another’s voices. Their lips move incessantly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to march in a column with girls like these? To camp in the desert, become swarthy and muscled, and present herself at Janet’s door one day: Captain Goldblatt in uniform.
“Shalom, motek,” says a voice near her ear.
Toni turns to see a ruddy, impudent face, laughing eyes. A boy is perched on the guard rail beside her, looking down. He’s one of the chakh-chakhim, the greasers who gather on street corners and harass the passing girls. When did he show up? On his knee rests a paper bag of sunflower seeds. He spits out a shell, smiles, revealing strong, white teeth.
“Are you American?”
His voice is eager. His eyes gleam as he says “Amerika-eet.” She frowns as she considers how to answer. This dark-skinned boy is clearly a Mizrahi, a Middle-Eastern Jew. Michal told of how thousands of them came from Arab lands after ’48, how the new State of Israel struggled to absorb them. For years they lived in tent camps and crowded housing projects. They are poorly educated and primitive compared to Europeans, Michal said, and there are “social problems,” but, Michal insisted, the army is doing an excellent job of assimilating the second generation. Toni feels she should be kind to anyone who was raised in a tent camp. On the other hand, the chakh-chakhim are crazy for foreign girls, who are supposedly a softer touch than the hard-nosed Israelis. Better not to get involved. She shakes her head and looks away, hoping he’ll get the message.
“Not American? Dutch? Swedish?”
He leans forward to catch her eye. She shakes her head again, more severely this time.
“So? Where are you from?”
He sounds miffed, as if Toni were the one being rude. At the same time, he inches closer along the rail.
“Nowhere!” she snarls, her patience gone.
“Ooh wah! That’s exactly where I’m from. Nowhere. We must be neighbours. Huh? Maybe we grew up on the same street.” He throws his head back to laugh. “You are so tall. Are all the girls of your country so tall?”
“Chamor! You are a donkey!” Toni spits. A feeble insult, childish, something out of the Hebrew language primer. She looks quickly toward the kiosk, but the girl soldiers have left. Perhaps she too should vanish into the noonday crowds. She strides up the long slope of Ben Yehuda Street, but she can feel him close behind. He wants to follow? Fine! She’ll take him on a wild goose chase. Up and down the baking streets they go, around corners, and across intersections until her head rings, her throat aches, her eyeballs burn. The boy sticks like glue. He seems not the least bit out of breath.
“Hey, tall girl. What’s the hurry?”
Having gone in a big circle and arrived back in the centre of town, at Independence Park Toni darts down a path between flower beds in search of a drinking fountain. As she bends over the fountain, the boy’s face comes close, like he means to kiss her. Toni picks up a rock.
“Is it because you are a lesbian, you are so cold and heartless?” he says.
It takes several moments for the question to sink in. The Hebrew word is unmistakable—“lesbeet”—so, too, his ugly smile. As she stands dumbfounded with upraised arm, he jumps forward, rises on tiptoe, presses his mouth to hers, and shoves his tongue inside. He has a surprisingly large, fleshy tongue that licks in quick circular motions, seemingly not wanting to leave any surface untouched. His sly hand gives her right breast a squeeze. She jerks violently, but he has already sprung back on nimble feet and is dancing away.
“See, not so bad with a boy. Bye-bye, lesbeet,” he calls over his shoulder.
“You have to go somewhere for erev Shabbat,” Brenda wails. “You can’t stay here all alone.”
She’s been trying to persuade Toni to come with her to a Hassidic-style happening with the Singing Rabbi from San Francisco. Brenda makes a tragic face at the thought of Toni staying behind in the abandoned dorm. On Friday evenings the building empties out as students join family or friends for a festive meal, and the halls become still as tombs.
Brenda has soft blue somewhat bulgy eyes and buck teeth over a wet lower lip. In honour of the Sabbath she’s dressed in an embroidered Yemenite blouse, blue skirt, and dangly earrings, while her brown hair is done up in a loose French roll. She looks down upon Toni, stretched out on her narrow cot, with eager, good-hearted, gormless sympathy. Unbearable!
“I do have somewhere to go,” Toni blurts out. “I’m visiting an old friend. Janet Bloom. She’s a folk singer. She’s on the radio sometimes.”
“Wow! Neat!”
The words “folk singer” and “radio” have the desired effect. Brenda’s jaw drops and her eyes fairly pop out of her head.
“Maybe you’ve heard of her?”
“No! I haven’t. Sorry.”
Brenda moans in apology as if it’s a personal failing of hers not to have heard of Janet Bloom, but, in truth, there’s no reason why she should. Though Toni pricks up her ears whenever she hears a female vocalist on the radio—in buses, cafés, the dorm—so far the performer announced at the end of the song has never been Janet.
“How do you know her?”
Toni hesitates, then tells her about Camp Tikvah (briefly) and of how last fall at a folk music concert at the Jewish Y she ran into someone who told her that Janet, of all people, had already made Aliyah. Toni ferreted out an address, wrote, and eventually Janet wrote back. Just the one postcard: “Hey there, Voice-From-the-Past. I’ve been performing around the country. Did a spot on the army radio show. Hoping for a record contract (keep your fingers crossed). This funny little country will blow you away. Ya gotta come.”
Instead of signing her name, Janet drew a self-portrait in the form of a guitar with stick legs and arms (one waving) and above the fingerboard, a face framed by long, streaming hair.
After Brenda dashes from the room, Toni lies back on her bed and listens to doors slam, goodbyes called, the roar of departing buses, and the fading of footsteps on the street below. Shadows deepen. A stillness descends, broken now and then by a distant shout or blast of a horn. The encounter with the chakh-chakh replays in her head, thoughts of what she might have done differently, his parting shot: Bye-bye, les-beet. The Hebrew word is almost identical to the English, but worse, overly familiar and indecent, like the boy’s slimy tongue. She jumps up to pace the room, gaze out the window at the empty streets and the hills turning mauve in the failing light. The loneliness Brenda warned about sinks into her chest. She hadn’t really planned to visit Janet just yet, but now the idea takes hold. Surely, after waiting so long and proving she’s not too eager, and after such a miserable day, she has earned the reunion at last.
chapter 15
There are no buses after sundown on erev Shabbat, hardly any traffic on the eerily empty streets. Toni hikes the long winding road toward Beit HaKerem, and by the time she reaches the neighbourhood, black night has descended, snuffing out landmarks, blotting out street signs. She wishes now she could have phoned ahead, but who owns a luxury such as a telephone in Israel? Old-timers, not newcomers like Janet. After searching the well-treed but poorly illuminated streets, she finds the house at last, in a cul-de-sac on the edge of a wadi. No lights on the porch either. She has to feel with her fingers for a bell. She hears the slow shuffle of slippers, the creak as the door opens a crack, revealing a dim glow from the hall and an ancient face with a beaked nose and squinting eyes.
“Around the back,” the voice croaks. “They have their own quarters. I don’t interfere.” Then, as Toni is about to retr
eat, the elderly figure leans forward to peer more closely.
“What are you? Boy or girl? Ach, never mind, as long as you are serious. We need serious young people in this country. We don’t need freeloaders and lazybones, these, what do you call them, these hippies. In my day, we weren’t afraid of work. Do you know what it means to work?”
The accent is familiar—German-Jewish—as is the tone, a cheerfully belligerent grumbling Toni has become accustomed to on street corners and bus line-ups. Everyone has to outdo the other in displays of fortitude and martyrdom. Before she can respond, the creaky voice mutters, “Go on! Around the back, I said,” and the door is shut tight, leaving the porch in utter darkness again.
She gropes her way along a path at the side of the house to a walled garden at the back of which stands a low building, some kind of shed or garage, with double doors that stand slightly ajar. Candles flicker inside. Flowers, one always brings flowers, Toni suddenly remembers, and regrets she has nothing. She rubs sweaty hands against her shorts, steps forward, stumbles against a heavy object—a clay pot, perhaps— which clatters mightily upon the flagstone path and rolls back and forth with a slow, hollow sound. Somewhere a startled cat shrieks and the doors of the shed fly open and Janet stomps out, fists balled, shoulders hunched, a picture of fury, though the expression on her face is obscured by the gloom.
“You fucker,” she howls. “You’ve got your bloody nerve.”
Toni raises her hands defensively because those fists look like they’re about to make contact with her head. But then Janet stops, freezes, peers intently.
“What the fu …?”
“Janet, it’s me. Toni. Toni Goldblatt.”
Janet’s hand covers her mouth in a gesture of wonder. Or is it dismay?
“Remember me? From Montreal. From … Jewish camp.”
“Right,” Janet says finally, but without much conviction.
“You said I should visit. I’m so sorry. I meant to write, and then I meant to phone, but they said you wouldn’t have one and that in Israel people just drop in, and I … if this is a bad time …”
“I thought you were David. You’re his size,” Janet says in a tone of accusation, as if, just by resembling this object of her wrath, Toni deserved a good dose of it herself. Then, turning on her heel, Janet makes a vague gesture over her shoulder which Toni interprets as an invitation to follow into the candlelit room. Janet flops onto a mattress laid directly on the bare tiled floor and heaped with rumpled bedding and cushions. She covers her eyes with her arm.
“Are you all right?” Toni asks.
“Yeah, yeah. Kind of bummed out at the moment. Make yourself at home.”
Toni looks around for somewhere to sit. She finds herself in a low-ceilinged, spectacularly messy room, jam-packed with astonishing objects, none of which resemble anything so ordinary as a chair. There’s a tall glass hookah, a clay drum, a pile of salt-encrusted driftwood, a spent mortar shell holding a bouquet of dried thistles, a fishing net draped across one wall and ornamented with broken seashells and coloured glass, a big round brass tray covered with dirty dishes, an empty tire lying on its side (the treads still gripping the dirt from its final encounter with a road), and a nose-less plaster bust of Elvis with a leather peace symbol covering one eye. There are empty cans and crumpled papers and books and butt-filled ashtrays and a bucket of soaking laundry and, in one corner, the ripped, foam-rubber-spewing back seat of a car. A mobile made of coat hangers dangles from the ceiling and gyrates slowly. And the whole crowd of objects—particularly the coat hanger mobile—casts crazy shadows in this flickering cave of a room.
Beside the wrecked car seat, Toni spies a passable leather hassock. Dragging it over near Janet, Toni lowers herself, sinks into the yielding material, almost topples backward but manages to hunch awkwardly with her long legs jack-knifed beneath her chin. She stares woefully at the dirty soles of Janet’s feet, while Janet continues to lie on her back in bummed-out silence.
“I forgot how tall you were,” Janet finally says from beneath her arm. “You really are as tall as David.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
Janet utters a strangled laugh.
“That sounds so high school prom and hearts and flowers. He’s my man, I guess.” Janet sighs.
Glancing around the room again, Toni now notices signs of this man. A leather cowboy hat hung over a lamp. Other masculine clothes. It had never occurred to her that Janet could be part of a couple. Awe, anxiety, and resentment chase one another around in her mind. Then something else in the room catches her eye: leaning against a wall, beneath a poster of three dancing Hassids, she recognizes Janet’s old blond-wood, acoustic guitar. It’s a comforting sight, like a long-lost friend, and she is almost inclined to give the Gibson a hug.
“What does David do?” she presently asks, not because she really wants to know, but for something to say.
Janet sits up abruptly, crosses her arms over her chest.
“He doesn’t ‘do’!” she says severely. “He just is. I mean, he does all kinds of stuff—gardening, religious studies, learning Arabic—but he’s not into that achievement shit. He doesn’t believe in identifying with a role.”
Toni bows her head at this chastisement. When she’s sure she’s regained control of her voice she says, “Maybe I should go home.”
“But you just got here!” Then in a gentler tone: “Don’t go. Sorry. I’m not being the hostess with the mostess. My head’s kind of elsewhere. Nice to see someone from back home. Really.”
Janet rummages around in the bedding and locates a pack of cigarettes.
“Smoke?”
Toni lights up and tries to look like she does it all the time.
“Dubeks,” Janet says apologetically. “Cheap Israeli brand. But better than nothing.”
She takes a deep drag and contemplates Toni steadily out of her wide green eyes.
“Yeah, I remember you,” she drawls, as if little bits of memory are clicking into place. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
The blithe assessment stings. Toni wants to launch into the tale of all the ways in which she has become a completely new person. Her eyes catch Janet’s smoky green gaze and words fail her. Janet herself has certainly changed. Slimmer than she was at camp, her face still densely freckled but more finely sculpted, with sophisticated hollows and lines, and a grave, sad, distracted air. Her red hair is longer and less kinky than Toni remembers, cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She wears a loose cotton skirt and a gauzy blouse with a green and yellow pattern of swirling lines that seems jungle-like, bringing to mind some rare tropical salamander disappearing into the underbrush. There are beads and tiny mirrors sewn into the cloth. Janet’s necklace of silvery coins winks in the candlelight.
“So what brought you here?” Janet asks after a fretful glance toward the rustling dark beyond the doors.
Has she forgotten the postcard? Her exhortations? This funny little country …Ya gotta come. But perhaps she wants to know what motivated Toni to answer the call, why it touched a chord in Toni’s heart. She rakes her fingers through her tousled hair. Where to begin? She needs to say everything, thoughts that have accumulated for months. She starts by describing her rambles in the city, jumps backward in time to the Six-Day War, the victory that suggested the hand of God—not literally of course, because she doesn’t believe in that Old-Man-in-the-Sky stuff—nevertheless something big did happen. And Jerusalem! Four thousand years of history—battles, exiles, tragedies, dead-ends, the Jews kicked out, but never losing their ties to the land, and then she’s back to the Six-Day War. She’s no longer merely Toni Goldblatt, the kid from Snowdon, whose biggest accomplishment so far has been to graduate from high school with the fifty-dollar Steinberg’s bursary. Standing on Jerusalem’s sun-baked hills, she feels she’s swallowed thousands of years, lived thousands of lives. All this she tries to express, waving her hands and leaning forward, the hassock half off the floor. She sees her listener’s expres
sion change from gentle indulgence to strain to a grimace of endurance. She is boring Janet to death.
“I’m so sorry. I talk too much.”
She squeezes her hands together between her knees. Janet’s face lights up in a genuine smile for the first time this evening.
“Same old Toni. It’s okay. I understand where you’re at.” The smoke streams out of Janet’s mouth in a sigh. “You’re in the honeymoon stage. I felt a lot like you do when I came, which was just after the war. I didn’t plan to come. Happened by accident. I was hitching around Europe, met up with this neat bunch of freaks and someone says, ‘Let’s take a boat from Athens.’ Next thing I know, I’m on the beach in Acre. Far-out scene. People drunk with happiness because Israel didn’t get wiped off the map. Strangers hugging one another. We had a kumzits that lasted weeks. But the euphoria wears off. The daily stuff catches up with you. You need elbows and a thick skin in this country.”
“But you’re a performer. You’re doing so well!”
“Was doing well. Was starting to get somewhere.” Janet frowns and bunches her necklace of coins in her fist. “Had this fight with my agent.”
“You have an agent!” Toni marvels.
“Real asshole. David says the music biz is a rat race like any other. I dunno. Maybe he’s right. I should do my own thing. Oh well, if my career was still on track you wouldn’t have found me here. I’d be in Tel Aviv, where the action is.”
After a forced smile, she sinks back into gloomy reverie. Toni is struck dumb by the glamour of Janet’s troubles, this unfathomable otherworld of the music business. She imagines men with slicked-back hair and cigars, women in glittery gowns, fights in dressing rooms, mirrors smashed. A dozen questions dance on her lips, but all seem equally foolish. Finally, to break the silence, she asks, “Where’s David now?”
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