When I Lived in Modern Times (17 page)

But she stared at me as if I were mad, for Mrs. Linz was a Yekke through and through and some formalities were sacrosanct.

It was a little cooler now. Even I noticed it. The air in the evenings was balmy rather than sweltering and I looked forward to the winter with feelings of delight. I went to the kitchen and made coffee for us both and cut slices of a cake I had bought from the café on the corner of the street in this city in which it was possible, when the British did not try to stop you with their megaphones, to live almost entirely out of doors. I was thinking,
while I waited for the grounds to percolate, of what a strange thing a Jew was, how many forms we took. As I did so, a Jew with a beard and a long black coat and curious twisted curls hanging from in front of his ears passed on the other side of the road.

“Look at this,” I called out to Mrs. Linz.

She walked into the kitchen and I pointed at him, retreating along the street toward Rehov Ben Yehuda.

“Oh, those curiosities. They exist in the eleventh century. They have no dynamism at all. They live the lives of vegetables. It is a pity you don’t have a camera to record his image, for people of that type will be extinct within the decade.”

I
DID
not look to Johnny for intellectual company—I had enough jaw-jaw with Blum and Mrs. Linz and her friends. To tell the truth, I was consumed with lust for him. Perhaps he was a kind of physical addiction of the kind that only comes upon you once or twice in your life. I thought about his body all the time, its hardness, the way he felt inside me, his skin with a rash of freckles across the top of his chest, the scar I licked, the hard lips, the roughness of the khaki trousers he wore and his hands unbuttoning them and my own trembling as I pulled my dress over my head. I wanted to give him all the satisfaction he wanted, to watch his face while he reached his climax and cried out in Hebrew things I did not yet understand. I had the shirt he had made for me now. It was blue. I never wore it outside, for as he said, it was just a kibbutz shirt, but as soon as it turned cool enough I slept in it.

When he didn’t turn up at the apartment, and it was impossible because of the curfews to go out with Mrs. Linz to a café to listen to her intellectual friends discussing the latest ideas from Europe beneath a pall of brownish smoke, I would sit on my small balcony drinking coffee, wishing I had a sketchbook and pencils or even a camera so I could try to record the sights of Tel Aviv in such a way as to make sense of my world. Or even a school exercise book in which I could keep a journal.

But most of all I wanted to draw Johnny, and so I went and bought paper, together with some good pencils, and I persuaded him to lie on the floor by the balcony and pose for me. I was planning in my mind a painting I would execute one day which would show him with the white city and the roaring waves and the wide sky in the background: the new Jew and the new Jewish city. I wanted to paint the shadows that the bones of his pelvis cast on his stomach and the long toes and the lines that were beginning to appear round his eyes and the precise shade of reddish-purple that his balls were.

When I first asked him to pose for me he agreed, but reluctantly, because he believed that this was something only women did. He said he felt a fool, lying there immobile being looked at. He said he was worried that the finished picture might fall into the wrong hands and he would be a laughing stock. I asked him, point blank, whether he had had many lovers before me and he blushed and told me that the girls he had grown up with were very strait-laced. The Irgun girls, in particular, had no time for romance.

“But I couldn’t have been the first,” I said, puzzled, for he knew what to do exactly.

Now he went an even deeper red. “During the war…” he trailed off. So I suppose he meant prostitutes. “And a kibbutz girl from time to time.” He did not like this kind of talk, it embarrassed him. I wondered if I embarrassed him too. I had never met anyone attached to him. I did not know a single friend. “But that’s to protect you, darling,” he told me.

I made my pencil study and he looked at it. “Is that how I appear to you?” he asked, coldly.

“Yes. How do you see yourself?”

He shrugged and changed the subject. I tried to explain the history of representation to him but he knew almost nothing about painting. I took him to the art museum on Rothschild Boulevard in the house that had once belonged to Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The street was broad and shady, a sandy promenade ran down the center lined with tall trees, the name of which I didn’t know and Johnny knew only in Hebrew. People strolled up and down as if they were in Vienna or Berlin. Newspaper kiosks stood at each intersection and we looked at the mansions that the city’s first citizens had built for themselves before the first war.

Inside the museum we examined dim old brown pictures of rabbis which seemed to form the bulk of the collection.

“Is this it?” Johnny asked, frowning. “This is art?”

“No, no. I thought there might be something more modern.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

That afternoon he showed me the teeming life of the white city, the garment district where he worked and where the earliest examples of Bauhaus buildings could be found, before the architects had figured out a way of adapting them to the climate, when they did not understand how important it was to make sure that each room had enough windows so they could create a cross-wind and before they had thought of the
brise-soleil
, the little ledge that cast a shadow into the interior. I saw shops stocking everything, run by people who came from everywhere, and though they
spoke to each other in Hebrew
everyone
, I noticed, counted out money in their own language. We passed a store selling nothing but brushes—“If it has bristles, I stock it,” the owner proudly told us. And indeed he had yard brushes, toothbrushes, bottle brushes, scrubbing brushes and something that wasn’t a brush but had bristles: a selection of doormats. “They brush the underside of the shoes.”

Walking beside Johnny I noticed how gradually the architecture changed and stopped being quite so modern and the style and idioms of the construction became completely unrecognizable to someone like me who had only ever seen the Georgian terraces of London, or the red-brick rows of Victorian villas at Hammersmith or, at the outer limits of my childhood world, the pre-war red-roofed semi-detached houses that frayed the edges of London, each with its own garden, front and back.

Because I was English and not American, came from a place with a continuous past, I did not understand then that when immigrants settle, they try to rebuild the land of their origins. These buildings, some of the earliest in the city, before the big population explosion of the 1930s, grew out of a yearning to construct Odessa and Moscow and Warsaw, and once inside them to try to forget the perpetual blue skies and the yellow, implacable sun.

I was surprised that we stopped long before the city gave out, where the streets grew very narrow and seemed to belong in a different town altogether. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing with my bare arm.

“The slums.”

“Who lives there?”

“Not Yekkes, that’s for sure.”

“But who?”

“The usual mixture. Arabs. Poor Jews,
really
poor. It’s dangerous and dirty. You don’t want to go there. Listen, during the war they had cases of bubonic plague. It’s a cesspit. One day we will raze it to the ground.”

It was called Manshieh and it frightened me. It was full of disease and squalor and it was like a small cancerous sore on the free and healthy body of the Jewish city.

That night Johnny stayed with me and slept by my side. After we had drifted into sleep in each other’s arms I was woken by sounds and when I opened my eyes I realized they were coming from him. He was asleep but mumbling, fragments of Hebrew and even of English, and a long shudder ran through his body. Suddenly he screamed and I cried out, “What is it Johnny?” but I saw that his eyes were shut and that he was still sleeping.

Next morning I said, “Johnny, darling, you had a nightmare last night.”

But he only looked at me and said, “You know, Evelyn, that’s impossible, because I told you that I do not dream.”

So then I knew that what Johnny had told me, that it was possible to have no interior life, was incorrect. Everyone has. He just didn’t recognize its existence.

Later that day I talked to Mrs. Linz about the slum district and she asked me if I ever heard the muezzin, the man who called the people to prayer at the mosque, and I said I hadn’t, for I had not known there was such a place in Tel Aviv. From then on I listened for it and sometimes I caught a trace of that alien sound though it was a long distance for it to travel, up the long boulevards to the white city where nothing was old and everything had an explanation.

A
UTUMN
came. One night, Mrs. Kulp’s salon was raided and nothing was taken but some jars of chemicals from the back room: hydrogen peroxide and other inflammable and unstable materials.

Then Mackintosh was kidnapped. He was taken from his house in the morning, when he had finished his breakfast and was walking past his roses, his newspaper folded in his hand. His wife, who had waved him good-bye from the door, turned away, and when she stepped back seconds later to cry out that he had forgotten his sandwiches he had vanished. She looked along the street but could not see him. A Rover which had been parked there overnight was gone. The air was limpid and she stood in her floral wrapper on the doorstep, gazing at the space he had just occupied, puzzled but not yet apprehensive. Lupins and hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies bloomed in her flowerbeds and the beds upstairs, still warm from their sleeping bodies, were not yet made. The houses glittered in the morning sun and the brightness of them as usual hurt her eyes which were weak and sensitive to sudden changes in the light. I know all this because she told me when, tearstained and desperate, having run to the police station to find out if he had arrived and having been informed that he had not been seen, she bumped into me on the Allenby Road on my own way to work and she sobbed against my chest, beating her fists against me.

“Why did we come to this bloody awful place?” she shouted at the passers-by. “Bloody Jews. I hate the lot of you.” I knew it was not real anti-Semitism, just fright, and that if Johnny had vanished in the same way I would have raged against the Mackintoshes and the Boltons of this world myself.

There was a terrible mood in the salon that morning. Women hung their heads on frail necks as if in submission to their own execution. Hair refused to curl. Mrs. Kulp and I smiled and smiled, our smiles pasted onto our faces with the strong glue of our own convictions, but everyone who
was in that morning knew Mrs. Mackintosh. “What harm did they do to anyone?” the women asked each other, helplessly.

The Jewish customers felt nervous and outnumbered. They drank coffee and buried their heads in magazines or loudly proclaimed the shame of it all. Only one, Mrs. Held, began to discuss quietly but emphatically her pleasure in the news of the hanging of the Nazis at Nuremberg the previous month. “I recite their names,” she said. “Frank, Frick, Streicher, Rosenberg, Kaltenbrunner, von Ribbentrop, Sauckel, Jodl, Keitel and Seyss-Inquart. Not in this world anymore, none of them. So we have justice, we have finished one piece of business at least.” She took out her compact and reapplied her lipstick and blotted her cheeks with powder, looking defiantly about her when her face was done.

She had once been a miller’s daughter and lived in a wooden house by a river on a flat agrarian plain in eastern Poland. She remembered the threshing machines and the stones that crushed the wheat and the clouds of flour that rose like downy heaven. She remembered her father’s
tallis
, hanging on the back of his chair and he and her brothers walking to the wooden
shul.
She remembered the exiles coming from Russia, the Red Jews who had escaped after the failure of the 1905 revolution and who took refuge in their town, and the pogroms that followed soon after. She remembered the journey to Palestine when she was ten years old and the gangs of Jewish and Arab laborers digging foundations into the sand dunes. She recalled watching Mayor Dizengoff’s house being built, the same one which was now the art gallery, and a town so small that he would ride out on a white horse every morning to inspect it in his light, high-buttoned coat and a black bowler hat. “He was the first mayor of Tel Aviv but it felt like he was the first prime minister of Palestine.” And that, she said, was only twenty-five years ago.

“I was there at the birth of a city,” she said, turning to the other customers, the frightened and outraged British women. “And who among you can say that?”

She told me all this as the women of the colonial regime must have retreated that morning into their own memories: childhoods under the Raj and the smells and sounds of India; the denuded landscapes of the Pennines and the cold winds blowing through slate-roofed towns; hills spread like butter with yellow broom in springtime; a bus up the Brompton Road on a September morning when the windows of the shops were filled with the autumn styles and children’s names were being embroidered onto tapes and sewn into school uniforms, and pens and pencils and compasses were purchased and put tidily into satchels with a square of sandwiches in greaseproof paper and a twist of sweets.

So we were all homesick in our own way, for each of us has a past and carries it inside us and you can never put it away. It always returns at moments when you least expect it, such as a November day in a brash violent city when a decent man had been kidnapped and his wife tried to shut from her mind the various fates that might await him, knowing that there were terrorists who were always armed wherever they went and would shoot on sight and perhaps even, one or two of them, for the pleasure of it.

“Who’s got Mackintosh?” I asked Johnny when he came that night.

“We have.”

“As a result of my information?”

“Of course.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“That depends.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Not if they don’t hang Dov Gruner. We might flog him though, in retaliation for flogging one of our boys.”

“That will be a humiliation.”

“Yes. It’s a humiliating punishment.”

Three days later Mackintosh had not reappeared but the news of his abduction was eclipsed by something else and passed out of sight altogether, as if it had never happened. In Haifa the British Army were tear-gassing and clubbing illegal immigrants whom they were herding on to deportee ships bound for Cyprus, the new prison island that was the fate of the DPs in the aftermath of the King David bombing. They killed a sixteen-year-old called Isaak Klausenbaum who was the leader of a defiant band of concentration-camp survivors. The immigrants were screaming and running from the ship with blood on their faces and the tear gas rose from the decks in a dense cloud. Women were holding babies whose eyes had disappeared into their swollen flesh from the gas. The reports of this event made me feel sick. When I ran my comb through the hair of the wives of the men who had carried out these atrocities, I wanted to stab its tail into their skulls.

People were being shot almost every day. Some nights I was woken by machine-gun fire. The gangsters and the terrorists were vying with each other to see who could claim the highest death toll. Another man went to an unmarked grave, killed when the car he was driving which was full of explosives blew up. Posters appeared on the walls and at first I couldn’t read them but gradually, as I learned more Hebrew, the messages swam into my consciousness and another dimension of the city revealed itself, one which promised us that very shortly we would be free.

A plainclothes policeman was found shot dead in broad daylight standing at a bus stop near his house. His name was not released for some time but when it was I saw that his wife came in every fortnight for a shampoo and set.

“Did you do that, Johnny?” I said.

“No. Not us. It was the Lehi. Just coincidence. Don’t you know that’s not our style?”

The soldiers who were disembarking in Palestine, and the officials back from their leave, were talking about a strange upheaval in the world beyond this little part of the Mediterranean’s rim. They were talking about the terrible, terrible cold that was across Europe. They spoke of gales sweeping the coast of Britain, trees uprooted, ships run upon the rocks and the Straits of Dover the coldest place on the continent. A Siberian wind was crossing Italy, that peninsula of sunshine and plenty, with Bologna under snow and two men frozen to death in Milan.

But the worst fate awaited Germany where the shadow of death stalked through its houses, the temperature fell to minus 23 degrees and there was almost complete industrial paralysis.

“In Germany,” Blum said, “they are freezing to death while here in the
Jewish
city of Tel Aviv, I observe that it is 15 degrees in the metric system of measuring temperature. What does this tell us? And when you add to this the tidal wave in Japan and then the earthquake in that unfortunate country, one understands that our enemies, the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese, as well as the current foe, the British, are being punished for their crimes against the Jewish people. I do not speak of God. I don’t believe in that, let’s just call it fate.”

I watched the cold on the newsreels. I watched them foraging for fuel and food and aiming pickaxes at the frozen ground to bury their dead. “Let them read the Book of Lamentations,” Blum said. “They want to know how to survive everything life can throw at them? Come and learn from the Jews. We have a whole book about it.”

Mackintosh was dumped on the street near Dizengoff Circle one morning, a week after his kidnapping. They had flogged him. Not long after that, the Mackintoshes went home to England for good. A picture postcard arrived at the salon from Newquay where they were taking a rest cure, going for long walks along the shut-up winter promenade. It was very peaceful, Mrs. Mackintosh said, but bitterly cold and the rationing seemed worse than ever.