Winter in Jerusalem

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  Blanche d’Alpuget is the author of seven books, including four novels—Monkeys in the Dark (1980), Turtle Beach (1981), Winter in Jerusalem (1986) and White Eye (1993). These works earned her a number of literary prizes including the PEN Golden Jubilee Award, the Age Book of the Year Award and the South Australian Government’s Award for Literature.

  d’Alpuget’s first book, Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby was published in 1977 to critical acclaim. Robert J. Hawke: A Biography (1982) was both a national bestseller and the winner of several awards. She is also the author of On Longing and Hawke: The Prime Minister.

  She has served on the boards of the Copyright Agency Ltd and the Australian Film Commission, and was the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors in 1991. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  BLANCHE

  d’ALPUGET

  Winter in Jerusalem

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Martin Secker and Warburg Limited in 1986

  Copyright © Blanche d’Alpuget 1986

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 223 0 (pbk)

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  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council and I.L. of Melbourne for material assistance in researching this book.

  - B. d’A.

  FOR MY MOTHER,

  JOSIE,

  WITH LOVE AND RESPECT

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Diary 1984

  Epilogue

  One

  She said, To Jerusalem.’ Then, to herself, ‘Yer-ush-al-ay-im,’ and felt her lips burn on the name, as if from a seraph’s kiss.

  Danielle Green was looking for something. She had just clambered out of a taxi into the chaos of Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street and if she could find a way to cross the road with two suitcases and a shoulder bag without being run over, then locate the ticket office in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station – the cab driver was shouting, There! You go!’ and pointing at a scabrous green building that looked like a large public lavatory – and if in the ticket office she could discover which, from the scores of red-and-white buses arriving and departing every few minutes, was the one for Jerusalem – if I can accomplish all that, she was thinking, without losing my traveler’s checks or my address book or my nerve, I will, for the moment, be happy.

  Fifteen minutes earlier, a clerk in the beachside hotel where she had spent the night had said, ‘You want to catch a bus?’ and had waggled his upturned hand back and forth from the wrist in a gesture indicating helplessness in the face of unreason. His expression had been relaxed, as if to say he knew that this was the way of the world: remote from good sense, self-damaging, yet mysteriously pleased.

  Last night when she had arrived from the airport and had made inquiries about traveling the following morning, the clerk had become heated, telling Danielle she must take a taxi all the way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He had crossed his arms and stared at her when she rejected his advice. In the moment of silence between them, she had realized that this man detected foolishness in everything about her – in every tourist – from voice to shoes. But then he seemed to catch the thrill of an impractical adventure. ‘So catch a bus,’ he’d replied, and smiled.

  He rather enjoyed the look of her, her contradictory appearance. She had remarkable tobacco-colored hair, shiny, and as thick as a mountain sheep’s fleece, and a fine-boned face that was almost pretty in repose. However, when she smiled or grinned, there was such a gap between her front teeth that she seemed to have played a trick, cracking herself in halves, and that, inside, there was a witch. She was dressed in a navy pullover, jeans, and elaborate boots of the same bright tan color as her hair, with a snakeskin curling around each ankle and up the calf. The boots came from a shop on Rodeo Drive. Danielle had bought them three days earlier when Bennie Kidron, sauntering beside her with his hands in his pockets, had whistled at them. ‘They’d look great on you,’ he’d said. She’d heard the message: you need clothes as equipment because you’re not attractive enough to dress badly, and she’d dashed in and bought them – five hundred dollars’ worth of consoling discomfort.

  She winced as she heaved her suitcases from the cab to the pavement of Salomon Street: the blister on her right heel had burst. The taxi driver said, ‘All right. Sixty dollars,’ but she shook her head. She had decided not to explain either to the clerk or now, to the cabbie (who at first had offered to drive her to Jerusalem for a mere ninety dollars – in dollars, not shekels), why she wanted to go by bus. She’d had two lessons already in things going wrong. Both had occurred at the airport, last night.

  At the immigration desk she’d felt sick when the clerk suddenly asked: ‘Any relatives in Israel?’

  ‘A father.’

  ‘His name and address?’

  ‘Professor D. Garin.’ She didn’t know his address; she thought he lived in Jerusalem. No – she didn’t know if he had moved recently. She didn’t know his former address in the city, but yes, yes, she was sure he lived in . . .

  The clerk was about to tell her to step aside to be questioned, but she’d pleaded: ‘I’m trying to find him. I’ve not see
n him since I was a child.’ Abruptly, he had let her pass. But within minutes she’d got involved in a debate about the rights and wrongs of what she was doing to earn her keep.

  Two

  She was a screenwriter, about to earn $300,000 (plus five profit points) which, after years of snatching at a living – writing television soap operas by the episode; commercials – would give her financial security for the first time in her life. She was under contract to Kidron Productions. For Bennie Kidron’s special reasons the company was registered in Hong Kong and could be discovered there in a filing cabinet on the eighth floor of the Seiko Building, in the office of Peter Liu, chartered accountant. Otherwise Kidron Productions was a third-floor suite of rooms on El Camino Drive, Los Angeles, where Bennie Kidron, chairman and managing director, was to be found drunk, sober, and in between, several days each week. Danielle was to write the script for a film based on the Zealots’ Revolt, that colonial upheaval which had seen the destruction of the Temple and the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and finally, three years later, the mass suicide of the Zealots in their desert fortress, Masada. Its title was to be Eleazar, after the leader of the Zealots, who had given his followers the signal to die.

  Although it had all happened so long ago, last night at the airport, when talking to some of the people who had been on her flight, Danielle had mentioned the research she was to do in Israel and had sparked a political argument. She was chatting with a middle-aged man with kindly blue eyes and the sort of paunch that, until recent years, had meant its owner had made a success of his life. There was no warning: this mild, avuncular character abruptly wanted to fight.

  ‘Masada. Masada. It’s an allegory for what the Likud government is doing to Israel,’ he said. He shook his finger at Danielle. ‘That was a civil war, and it brought ruin. Now we have another one.’ He turned to his daughter who apparently held different views. ‘You see! The fatalism of Islam is infecting Israel and even people from Hollywood perceive things which you . . .’ He continued in Hebrew, attracting a small crowd of homecomers, all of whom seemed to agree with him. But from a few feet away a couple of young Middle East Jews muttered to each other and one yelled something at the man with blue eyes.

  She hadn’t known what to do. She’d begun the conversation in a voice of modest triumph, expecting to be admired, but now she expected that at any moment the man would turn and denounce her as another foreigner who sought to flagellate Israel – from God-knows-what base motives, malice or profit. She’d stood on the sidelines listening to the argument, until inattention had come to save her from further embarrassment and she began imagining all the things she could have told him instead, things that would have made the man with blue eyes embrace her. For example, that she was born in Jerusalem; that her parents’ other child, Geoffrey, had been shot by a sniper during the War of Independence, and before that they’d all fled their house in the eastern sector of the city . . . She imagined herself announcing, ‘I’m like a bird answering a homing call. I’ve flown from the other side of the world . . .’ Her thoughts moved to the house she’d first known, in East Jerusalem: it was built by a Turk for his wives, with stone walls that at the height of summer gave out a faint, cooling smell of minerals. And it had an internal sky, she recalled: in the biggest room the ceiling was painted shiny black and spangled with gold thorns to represent the light of stars. There was a crescent moon beneath which her nurse would lie her on cushions each afternoon, saying, ‘Contemplate Allah, then sleep.’ Danielle imagined herself telling the man, ‘I spoke Arabic, until I was four. My parents got on well with the Arabs, until –’ Until someone killed my brother. We’d moved to West Jerusalem when the War of Independence began. Geoffrey was shot in the Jaffa Road. My father’s mind snapped – not immediately, but a few nights later when an Arab doctor, a junior colleague of his before the war, sneaked into West Jerusalem to offer us his condolences. My father drove him away. That same night he turned on my mother, and me. He called us ‘daughters of Babylon.’ As soon as we could, she and I fled, all the way to Sydney. A carnival town, my mother said; we’ll be safe here. ‘So you see,’ she heard herself telling the man and his daughter, ‘this is a pilgrimage for me. I haven’t seen my father for more than thirty years. He’s old now, and living alone, I believe.’ She was thinking, I want to go up to Jerusalem full of love for him. Oh, Jerusalem – it makes me tremble to say your name.

  She had begun to smile.

  Danielle had moved away from the arguing group and gone to wait by herself at the luggage carousel. While there she had the sensation that one of the black-browed young men was standing just behind her and she clung to the strap of her shoulder bag. But when she had glanced around, he was a good distance away, watching the paunchy father with blue eyes; his expression was as calm as a lion’s.

  Three

  The cab driver, who also drove a tank, he said, put his hands on his hips and looked at the suitcases, looked at Danielle – or rather, at her snake boots and her hair – looked back at the suitcases. He had the grave expression of an insurance broker assessing damages for which his company would have to pay. ‘Forty-five dollars,’ he said. Danielle shook her head.

  She would not tell him that she was catching a bus to Jerusalem because from its windows she could have a wider view of the countryside through which, in due course, she would march a Roman army of horses, plumed helmets, and legionnaires. Audiences would see the majesty of a column of ten thousand men winding through the hills; reality would be six hundred extras, hired for three days, being rushed from one point to another in buses, shouting and cursing and complaining about the order against smoking. Inevitably one of them would be wearing a wristwatch . . .

  She explained to the taxi driver, ‘I have a sentimental reason for going by bus. My last view of Jerusalem was from a bus, in 1949.’

  The cabbie had pioneer manners, blunt and pregnant with aggression. But he was warm-natured, too.

  ‘You weren’t born,’ he said.

  ‘I was. I was four years old.’

  He shook his head slowly, as if to remark, All women are liars. ‘Peace,’ he said, and went.

  She stood, gazing around. She had landed in the middle of a market and shopping area teeming with activity that seemed as random as an ant-heap. Civilians and soldiers in battle dress, carrying automatic rifles, were hurrying past. There was an atmosphere of rush, as if the clock would stop suddenly and lives would be petrified as at Pompeii, in the act of unfinished business. Traders shouted for custom, Arabic-sounding music blared from a record shop, the pavements were cluttered with innumerable gee-gaws for sale, and the dank February air smelled of diesel exhaust, roasting meat, coffee, and cigarette smoke. A man came at a fast trot along the gutter, carrying a large brass tray, put it in the trunk of his car, slammed the door and turned defiantly to another man who had chased him from the brass shop. They shouted and waved their arms at each other until a policewoman strolled toward them, when they stopped arguing, offered each other cigarettes and settled to a friendly chat. A child would have realized that this was a habitat of thieves.

  Danielle felt paralyzed, caught in one of those moments when it seemed inevitable that her life had brought her to this street, this market, this bus station in the Middle East. All the solid rock of reason turned for a moment to vapor beneath her feet, dispersed, and for an instant revealed a different scene. She was standing on a savannah, surrounded by tall grass; a red earth path led forward for a few yards, then was hidden by the grass; ahead of her was a mountain. She had to climb it.

  The moment of sorcery left her feeling unsteady on her feet.

  And one of them had begun to throb. She realized she must find a pharmacy and had just picked up her suitcases again when a smiling young man walked toward her with his hands outstretched.

  ‘I almost didn’t recognize you,’ he said. ‘Wonderful that you’ve come to Tel Aviv.’ He had a cupid’s mouth and long eyelashes. His brown eyes looked deeply into hers with a
n expression that was at once serious, insolent, and caressing. Danielle had never seen him before.

  Four

  She waited for him to play out his pantomime of astonishment at his mistake – he was sure she was Ingrid and that they had met in Copenhagen last summer – then told him she needed to buy Band-Aids and Mercurochrome. Menachem, the name he used to introduce himself, offered to kiss her foot.

  ‘I worship you, from the feet up,’ he said.

  She said she would prefer medication. Menachem shrugged.

  ‘I’m not going to schlepp all this luggage,’ he added and went into the schwarma stall on the pavement behind them where he fell into an argument with the owner, who repeatedly shook his head and appealed for support from a group of soldiers lounging at a chipped Formica table. They agreed that he, the stall holder, should not allow Danielle’s suitcases to stay in the place unless she or Menachem stayed with them. She did not need to understand Hebrew to know what they were saying: Who knows what’s inside? Maybe she’s a terrorist. Any unaccompanied parcel or bag in a public place . . .

  Menachem returned to Danielle, his mouth in a pout for the benefit of the men inside, but for her, crafty eyes.

  ‘I’ve told them you are my cousin from Argentina,’ he whispered and said aloud, ‘Will you agree to open them?’

  No, she thought, I will not go through that again, the gynecological examination that every traveler to Israel undergoes. – Passengers had stood morose and chastened while security officers plunged up to the wrists into their intimate possessions. A young woman was asked to step into a private room; half an hour later she returned to the public area with her cheeks flushed and, behind her glance, the desire to run. A security officer led her by the elbow. ‘We’re sorry – but we have to be careful,’ he was saying. As fingers had probed through Danielle’s belongings her sense of violation had made her swing her head suddenly, feeling that from behind, too, she was being observed. The search had continued, calmly, automatically, jangling memories in every mind: We can’t take risks; we can’t take risks. ‘Yes,’ she said.