When I Lived in Modern Times (18 page)

I
TOOK
the number 13 bus to the zoo, to see the elephant named Bungo. It was on the edge of the white city and beyond it were orchards and orange groves and the villages of the Arabs, people who had nothing to do with us nor we with them. I hardly knew the country I was in, nor did I want to. I had no curiosity. I tasted the East in the foods I sometimes ate, the bean pastes and flat breads which were the legacy of Turkish rule and the salads with mint which came from the people we grudgingly shared the land with. The white city was enough for me as the kibbutz had been enough for the pioneers of Hashomer Hatzair.

I had seen an elephant before, in the zoo in London in Regent’s Park. Its skin was gray and wrinkled and I disliked its smell. I went to the zoo in Tel Aviv not from a love of wild creatures but because it was something to do when I had exhausted the private galleries. There was plenty of theater in Palestine but little of it was in a language I could fully understand, apart from the plays put on by enthusiastic amateurs among the British colonialists who mounted productions of
The Pirates of Penzance
and J. B. Priestley’s
An Inspector Calls.

The zoo was full of animals which had come from somewhere else. There was nothing indigenous to the country, whatever it was that naturally inhabited the place. It was a menagerie of foreigners like the giraffes from the Sudan, exotic and out of place. Many years later I was told that that child’s pet, the hamster, could be said to be a native for it had been discovered by a Jewish scientist in the 1920s on the border with Syria from where it was introduced to the rest of the world.

I bought an ice cream and sat on a wall eating it. It was cool enough now for a cardigan. In the sky mottled clouds had started to gather. It felt as if it might rain. The previous week I had stood on my balcony and heard the wind howling on the beach, stirring sand storms. People huddled in the cafés and ordered bowls of pea soup. Rain lashed the walls of our sparkling white building and stained patches began to appear on the
concrete. Already discoloration was noticeable. Mrs. Kulp said the foundations were cracking.

The weather changed back again and I thought that that was it for the winter, it had finished, a little disturbance. But then an inspector called.

He stood with his hat on and his mac belted tightly round his waist, his face pockmarked and lightly sweating. An ugly man, I thought. Who would want to wrap her legs around
him
and call out his name or go to sleep thinking about his body?

“Mrs. Jones,” he said.

“Inspector Bolton. How nice to see you again. You must be off duty.” I looked around for Mrs. Bolton.

“No. Not me. I’m always on the prowl.”

“Who are you trying to arrest now?”

“Not sure. It’s the worst bloody place for getting people’s identities straight.”

“What’s the crime?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“How cleverly evasive you are, Inspector Bolton.”

“Evasive. Big word for a hairdresser. I tend not to use those jaw-crunchers myself. But I’m just a grammar-school boy. Nothing posh about me. I didn’t go to the university.”

“I don’t know where I picked it up. Probably from one of the customers.”

“Would you care to join me for a cup of tea, Mrs. Jones?” He smiled and held out a hand. The hand was small and encased in a brown leather glove; it emerged from the sleeves of his coat in a dainty manner.

We left the zoo and walked along the street until we came to a café. He ordered a pot of tea for two but dismissed the display of cakes, “Unless you’d like one, Mrs. Jones. I don’t have a sweet tooth myself.”

“Not me. I’m dieting.” A diet sheet had been handed round at the salon. It was all the rage. Johnny strenuously disapproved and kept trying to force-feed me forkfuls of meat from his own plate.

“Odd thing the amount of cake that gets eaten in this country. And almost no beer. Completely upside down if you ask me. How’s your husband, Mrs. Jones?”

“Tony? Oh, awfully well. I went up to Tiberias last week to see him.”

“Call me old-fashioned but I’d have thought a wife belonged with her husband.”

“I’m sure I’m just as old fashioned as you are but I do think that during the war we girls got used to knocking about a bit on our own. Tony
arid I will be together again, just you wait and see.” I smiled at him, as sweet as the cake he had turned down.

To my horror, he opened his mouth and began to sing in a tuneless voice. “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow just you wait and see.” I looked around at the other people in the café, the Jewish mothers and their children. They smirked beneath the napkins they used to dab against their mouths. “Lovely voice, Vera Lynn, the voice of England,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you fond of her yourself?”

“Quite. But”—and here I found myself repeating Johnny—“I prefer some of the American crooners like Frank Sinatra. More up to date.”

“Ah yes, America. Funny place. Nobody’s from there, if you take my meaning. Immigrants, the lot of them. I don’t know how they get on at all. Odd business.”

“Well,” I said, “how do
you
get on
here?”

“I just do my job, that’s it. I shouldn’t have thought Marjorie and I will be around much longer, anyway. They’re phasing out the British in the Tel Aviv force. We’re overrun by Jewish policemen already. They’re a rum lot. Hard to tell whose side they’re on.”

“I thought you said you didn’t take sides.”

“No. I don’t. As I say, I’ve never seen a side worth taking. But I’ve got a job to do and you can’t have personal loyalties when it comes to arresting people.”

“I suppose not.”

“Personally, I’ll be pleased to leave. My mother-in-law came out on a visit last year and observed that it would be a lovely country if there were completely different people in it, which is one point of view, but if you ask me it’s always going to be a land of troublemakers. In the meantime, it’s getting so we can’t really operate properly anymore as any kind of effective ruling power. We’re pretty well living behind barbed wire, as it is. In fact, we’ve rounded ourselves up.” He began to laugh at this. “Yes, that’s what we’ve done. We’re so frightened of the terrorists we’ve put ourselves in protective custody. More tea?” I shook my head.

“I’ll tell you what though, when I leave Palestine I hope I never speak to another Jew again. They’ve murdered too many of my friends. Martin, for example, excellent detective, expert in counter-terrorism. Gunned down on a tennis court in Haifa in cold blood. Another thing I saw, after they bombed the King David, half a human corpse impaled on a tree. Horrible. But that’s terrorism for you, Mrs. Jones. That’s the sort of people they are. What goes on in their minds, do you think?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Really? Is that so? I would have thought you were quite close to that point of view.”

“What on earth do you mean?” He offered me a cigarette from a silver-plate case and I did not take it because I did not want him to see that my hands were shaking. He looked at me sharply and withdrew the box.

“At the beauty parlor you must hear all sorts of things.”

“Inspector Bolton, I give perms to respectable ladies. I don’t do a short back and sides for gunmen.”

“Those Jewish women are all sympathetic, though, aren’t they?”

“I have absolutely no idea. We don’t discuss politics.” Now I wished I had taken the cigarette because I needed one.

“Really? Not interested yourself?”

“No.”

“Me neither, but it’s a bit difficult to avoid around here. Personally, I think we
should
pull out. Leave the Jews and the Arabs to fight it out on their own. It will be a mouse war. Two mice struggling over the same bit of cheese. Absolutely insignificant. You know how I describe Palestine?”

“How do you describe it, Inspector Bolton?”

“Half the size of a cemetery and twice as dead.” He began to laugh again. “I’ve heard some of the public-school types in Jerusalem say that they wish the bloody Jews could just go away so we can govern the Arabs in peace. I think they find the Yids dangerously intellectual for their taste and mine too, come to that. Of course the Jews aren’t going anywhere. They’ll stay here and have their own little civil war between themselves which the intellectuals will lose because they always do. It will be those thrusting businessmen who come out on top. That’s the way of the world.”

“Have you applied to leave Palestine?”

“No. I’ll see it out. I have a bit of unfinished business to attend to, tie up some loose ends. I want to get the people who kidnapped Mackintosh for starters. Have you any idea who they are, Mrs. Jones?”

“Inspector Bolton, you ask the most extraordinary questions. How on
earth
should I know a thing like that?” I thought of Johnny and how he had this sort of conversation all the time, where you had to keep your wits about you.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Jones, I really don’t. I just find that people often know quite unlikely things, the sort you wouldn’t consider in your wildest dreams when you first look at them. Appearances can be deceptive, that’s a first law in detective work. But your husband probably knows that.”

“Tony isn’t your rank, he’s concerned with far more mundane matters, I’m afraid.”

“What rank is he, Mrs. Jones?”

“He’s a sergeant.”

“Very nice. Perhaps he’ll get a promotion. He could start with building up a little nest of informers, they’re always a good way for an energetic man to get his career going. People who play for both sides always come in handy.”

“Well, Inspector Bolton,” I said, putting on my gloves, “this has been absolutely fascinating but I must be on my way.”

“Very nice seeing you again, Mrs. Jones. You’ll have to come to us one day for a meal.”

“That would be delightful, thank you.”

“I’m sure we’ve got lots more to talk about.”

“I’m sure.

“My wife says you hide your light under a bushel. She thinks you’re much brighter than you let on, but Marjorie says that’s women’s problem, having to hide their brains. She’s very modern, in her own way.”

“Oh, I’m not modern, Inspector Bolton.”

“Aren’t you? Then I’m deceived. Or not. We’ll have to see.” He stood up, belted up his mac, put his gloves back on and tipped his hat and walked off. I sat and watched him go. I realized that he had left a pound note on the table to pay for our refreshments, enough to buy a pair of good shoes, let alone a pot of tea.

I heard the lions and tigers and other wild beasts roaring in the distance from their cages and the air was full of the smell of their excrement. It was four o’clock. The sun had gone below the horizon and I was cold. I caught the bus back to Mapu and thought for the first time that I hadn’t a clue how to get hold of Johnny in an emergency.

I
WAS
so glad to see him, when he came two nights later, turning the key I had had made for him in the lock, walking into the room with his patent-leather hair and the reappearance at long last of the pencil mustache. I was so glad to have a conversation without artifice or double meanings. I ran over to him and held him tightly and kissed his face. “What’s up?” he asked me.

I told him about the meeting with Bolton at the zoo. I hoped he would throw his head back and laugh and tell me I was worrying over nothing, but he didn’t. He stared at me and lit a cigarette.

“Bad,” he said. “Well, not good. I’m going to have to look into this. Maybe we’ll stay here tonight. No, I don’t think we’ll go out.”

I made us a rudimentary dinner of eggs and salad, chopping the tomatoes and the cucumbers as finely as I could as Mrs. Linz had shown me but my dice were larger and clumsier than hers and my eggs were not right. The yolks and the whites were not sufficiently bound together. My dressing for the salad was too vinegary. I did not use a good enough quality of oil.

Johnny looked down at his plate and smiled. “You never learned how to cook? Your mother never taught you?”

“My mother didn’t cook much. She refused to learn when she was a girl because her mother was trying to marry her off and when the matchmaker came she cooked him such a terrible meal he told her she would never find a husband, or at least not the kind her family wanted for her. We used to get food from the Italian restaurants, they would bring the leftovers from lunchtime to us.”

“One day I’ll introduce you to my mother. She’s a cook. And how.”

“I’d like to meet your family.”

“Now isn’t the best time but one day, sure enough.”

And by that, I felt assured he meant that in due course we would get married.

“Do you still want to be a soldier after independence?”

“Yes.” His fork moving like lightning round the plate, which he protected with his arm.

“You eat very fast.”

“You learn to do that in a big family. Kids are like wolves. They’ll steal anything from your plate if you don’t watch it. Also in the army you got your food down you as quick as you could in case they changed their minds about it being mealtime and told you to go polish your boots or dismantle your rifle or some other fun they had up their sleeves.”

“And yet you want to go back to soldiering when we have our independence,” I said, forking a piece of tomato into my mouth. The vinegar burned my tongue. “Haven’t you had enough of war? I have.”

“What do you know about war?”

“I lived through the Blitz.”

“Oh yes, that. I forgot. Civilian war.”

“It’s all war.”

“No. It isn’t. You know what? I always wanted to be a soldier, when I was growing up a tough, cocky kid in Jerusalem and Betar put a rifle in my hand and told me I was going to be a fighter one day. All my childhood heroes were Jewish warriors—King David, Spartacus, Ben-Hur. I never loved the guys like Moses, the wise guys, the sages, the prophets. No, I read my Bible to see who in those olden days went to war for us Jews. I couldn’t stand the Hasidim—you seen them? The guys with the beards who pray all day and all night? What for? If there is a God, he had nothing to do with us getting kicked out of Eretz Israel during the time of the Romans, it was lousy soldiering. When I first heard about bombs I thought they were the greatest thing in the world. Yeah, the greatest.

“I’ll tell you what war is. It’s a man’s business and if women get hurt that’s a tragedy because they’ve managed to stumble into something that has nothing to do with them. War is noise and blood and feeling you’re going to vomit the contents of your stomach. It’s obeying orders, because if you don’t they’ll shoot you. It’s stumbling around in the dark because you don’t know why you’re on this beach or going up this hill because they’re not going to give slime like you any idea of the bigger picture. It’s trying not to shit your trousers and telling yourself, ‘If I shit my trousers now no girl will ever sleep with me,’ at a time when no girl has yet and that’s the best way you can think of to stop yourself from total humiliation. But all these things you take for granted because that is what being a soldier is, and what being a man is.

“And I’ll tell you what war isn’t, and that is talking, having a conversation, like we’re having now. When a battle is going on people are
silent, withdrawn, locked inside their own heads thinking whatever it is they want to think about but what they’re not doing is sharing their thoughts with anyone. I spent three days—three days and three nights—cowering in a foxhole with my mate Jim Pritchard and beyond tossing a coin to see who would crawl out into the whizzing shrapnel to refill our canteens with water we didn’t say anything to each other the whole time. Not because we didn’t have anything to say. But because we were paralyzed with fear.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and threw an empty box of Player’s on to the table. “You got a cigarette?” I passed one over to him. He looked at me. “I can tell by your face you don’t like what I’m saying. Come on, spit it out, what’s your problem?”

“I can’t,” I replied, “help thinking of the bomb at the King David. I heard that there were corpses hanging from trees. Do you condone that?”

“How long is it going to take us to live that operation down? My guess is a year. In a year people will have forgotten about it.” He then did something I had never seen him do before. He blew a smoke ring. “Good trick, eh?” He smiled and reached across the table, across my unfinished plate of food, his arm knocking over the salt cellar which poured a glittering white hill on the red checked cloth. “Listen, Evelyn, there is nothing so transforming as a bomb. If you want to reinvent a city you put a bomb in it. Everything will be flattened and you can start again from scratch. You can impose any dream you like on a bomb site. And you know who was the greatest bomb-maker of them all?”

“Who?”

“A Jew. A Jew invented the world’s best bomb. Albert Einstein who made the atom bomb and ended the war.”

“I think it’s a bomb that will end the world, never mind the war,” I said, lighting a cigarette for myself and attempting to carry out the same trick of the smoke ring. He opened his mouth and showed me how to put my tongue to make it work. Still I failed.

“Keep out of it, Evelyn, forget smoke rings and forget war. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I tell you again, war is men’s business not women’s. Have I ever asked you to plant bombs, to carry a gun? Never and I never will, though there are girls in the Irgun who do exactly that and would love me to be their boyfriend, but I don’t like that kind of girl. It isn’t natural. It isn’t normal. Girls like things to be nice and war is not nice, no, not nice at all. But it’s how the human race has always resolved its problems and how it always will.”

He went and stood by the window and looked out into the dark city where the British lived, huddled behind barbed wire.

“You know, when I was in the army, a British soldier said to me, ‘We gave you a railway and schools and hospitals. We gave you a water supply. We gave you telephones. Why aren’t you grateful?’ The British aren’t so bad as colonialists go but they will never understand our ingratitude. The Empire is coming to an end, it’s collapsing in slow motion before their own eyes and it’s going to finish in looting and humiliation. They’re finished. Instead of asking me why I plant bombs, why don’t you ask the British what they’re going to do next? That’s a big question. Do you think they have thought about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. It’s not my problem. I don’t care one way or the other. Listen, we aren’t going to need the British when we have our own state because America will be on our side, the American Jews will make sure of that. Everything British will fade away and the only thing of interest which the papers here will report from London is the football results.”

I began to laugh because Johnny reminded me of a child. A great child, a wonderful one, the kind any parent would love to have. He was loyal and devoted to the things he attached himself to. He didn’t ask inconvenient questions and ignored the ways in which life turned awkward. I looked in the mirror of his mind, a confused and conflicted being, and he reflected me back, simplified.

“How are Arsenal getting on?”

His face brightened. “Pretty good. After a terrible season there’s been a major revival. I’ve got hopes for the match against Sunderland. Anyway, the English will always have their football which they taught the world to play, including us. Now for
that
I’m grateful.”

We went to bed and he began to reminisce about his childhood in Jerusalem and told me about the golden-domed mosque and the shadowy alleys of the old city. He described the burning desert in the south of the country and the sea at the Gulf of Aqaba. He told me about the archaeologists who were still searching in the Judean mountains for the legendary fortress of Masada where the Jews had been besieged by the Romans and slit their own throats rather than surrender. He talked briefly about the man he called his “captain,” the leader of the Irgun forces, and of his love and respect for him: Menachem Begin, “who will also go down in history like those guys of olden times.”

There are many different ways to make love. Some are charged by eroticism and others by the deepest affection and on this night it was the first way that we took. We did things then which are not unusual to read about in a newspaper and which even a child can see today. But in the small and insignificant British colony of Palestine, amongst a crude and
ill-mannered people with no memory of the exquisite world of the courtesan, they were voyages into the dark. We did things I thought then that no one had ever done before. We were slippery with sweat. My orgasm was ferocious and took a long time to arrive and it drew me into a few moments’ sleep. When I opened my eyes again, he was watching my face.

“Evelyn,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, I won’t let any harm come to you.”

“Yes, but who’s going to protect
you?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m a man. I protect myself. That’s the order of things.”

Just before I fell asleep again, I thought of Mrs. Linz and pitied her, the new woman who had no need of any of this.

Next morning he stayed as long as he could. I made him breakfast, salad and eggs again and white cheese and bread. In the shirt he had made me, I walked down to the street with him and watched him get on his bike and take off down to the sea front. Then I climbed the stairs to my apartment and got dressed, straightening the seams of the stockings it was cool enough to wear, painting a Cupid’s bow on my lips, and filing the rough surface of a fingernail. I parted my hair and examined the roots to see if any dark growth was showing.

Johnny had said that there was a natural way to be a man and a natural way to be a woman. He made me want to be a natural girl, as Mrs. Linz was not. Was it surprising, I thought contemptuously, that her husband had raped her, trying to turn her back into a woman instead of the weird hybrid thing she had become?