Winter in Jerusalem Page 10

  ‘You bloody women!’ he said to Alice. Her faded hazel eyes through the lenses of her spectacles were super-naturally large; their very size gave the impression that they saw too much. Amos winced away from them and from her quiet remark, ‘You’re tired, love,’ which said: Such disgust, Amos? Such disillusion with politics, such a feeling of impotence with the course of events that now you are cursing Mira, whom you were in love with a year ago? How long since you’ve made love with her?

  He could tell her how long: Rosh Hashanah. Five months. He and Mira had gone to the protest demonstration outside Begin’s house that Saturday morning when they had heard of the slaughter up at Sabra and Shatila; they’d both been tear-gassed.

  But he’d got it full in the face, he was staggering, helpless; Mira had to lead him home. I was a blind man, he remembered, boiling water pouring from my eyes and nose and mouth. It wasn’t the physical pain; it was the rage. Gas! On an Israeli crowd! What have we come to? I couldn’t stop asking it.

  Afterward, the window shutters closed against the pounding heat outside, he’d lain on his bed staring at the ceiling. ‘We’re turning to savages,’ he’d said. ‘It’s just tawdry.’ Mira wanted to comfort him, but something had gone wrong with her: she’d been infected, somehow, by the mood of the day, the heat, the screaming. ‘Let me encourage him,’ she’d said. Amos wondered, Why does she try to please me like this – and why do I have to pretend? It was so seedy, so textbook. But the warmth of her mouth was luxurious and he let her continue, alone.

  He’d grinned at her when she looked up: the black stuff she’d put on her eyes again after they had showered off the poison had resmudged. ‘Go wash your face,’ he said. He still felt detached from her and was thinking about the temperature up there, outside Beirut. The bodies would be high by now, iridescent flies sizzling in their nostrils. Mira was sniveling in the bathroom; she came out and said, ‘You don’t love me.’

  ‘I do. I do.’ He did. He took her to concerts; he fed her cat when she was away; he advised her on university politics, knowing the quicksands better than she.

  When the door closed on her he was seized without warning by a fit of irritation. ‘Love me! You don’t love me. You must love me,’ he moaned to himself, thinking Mira’s thoughts. He felt trapped, violently frustrated, and began to grind his teeth. When the fit had passed he sat quietly, still naked, and drank vodka from the bottle.

  That had happened five months ago. The Black New Year, as it was called. And seven months from now, when the year changed to 5744, the letters would spell TASHMAD. Destruction. Seven months until the beginning of the Year of Destruction. Already the religious were saying that 5744 should be changed to 5745 so that Israel could fiddle the arithmetic, skip the thirteenth floor as hoteliers do, installing elevators whose boards flash 1, 2, 3, up to 12, then 14.

  Amos turned to Gideon. ‘Have you had any news?’

  They had all been avoiding the subject, all been thinking of little else during the evening, held to silence by the strong pain that exists inside a family.

  Gideon shook his head.

  ‘What are the rumors?’

  ‘We’ll be going back up there next week.’

  ‘Have you thought over what I said?’

  Gideon nodded; Amos lit another cigarette. ‘Can I have one?’ Gideon asked.

  His father said, ‘Oh, shit. You little shit. You’re going to refuse duty.’ He turned to Alice. ‘No. Stay. You, too, Tikva. We’re all going to hear what Giddy has to say.’

  Gideon had nothing to say: he was simply going to refuse duty in Lebanon. And be court-martialed. Two of his friends had made the same decision.

  Amos held his head in one palm, blowing smoke at the table-cloth. After a while he said, ‘You want to know what a court-martial is like? You think it’s a fancy show, some TV drama with you playing the hero? I’ll tell you something: I court-martialed men during the October War – little bastards who dropped their weapons and ran away from the Syrians. And you know what? It takes three minutes. Giddy, you’ll go into a room, the charge will be read, you’ll plead guilty, and that’s it. On the next convenient transport you’ll be taken to the slammer – for twenty-eight or thirty-five days, depending upon the rank of the officer who sentences you. And in jail you’ll be with a mob of hooligans – malingerers, insubordinate thugs, the alienated riff-raff of the settlement towns, kids who have no interest in politics or ethnics or any of the nice things you think about. In New York they’d be muggers; in Israel, because they go through the army, they’re in jail. Listen, you’re in a good unit, you’ve all looked after each other . . .

  ‘You bet,’ Gideon replied. ‘Every one of us can dismantle a bus by now. Do you know how much stuff we’ve smuggled? What you can fit inside the chassis of a bus when you remove the cladding . . .? Dad: guys are getting ready to go into business with the things they bring back. One bus broke down and started giving out a wonderful smell; when the driver opened it up to look for what was wrong he found the whole thing full of bottles of French perfume . . .’

  Amos whacked at the smoke. ‘That’s irrelevant.’ But it’s not, he thought; it’s a symptom of the rot. He said, ‘Gideon, this government is scared. The army is scared.’

  He was thinking, Ever since the war of ‘73 rebuilding national morale in the army has been critical. We’re on a seesaw – the mad confidence after ’67 was shattered in ’73, but you’re too young to remember how terrifying it was during that October when we thought we’d lost the country, when we were going to be slaughtered to the last . . . child. So national confidence has been built up, built up – to the point where our idiot leaders have picked a fight we can’t win. We’re demoralized, the Arabs are equally demoralized. It’s too absurd!’

  He said, ‘The army is scared because refusal of duty is unknown in Israel. How many of you are there in Yesh Ge’vul? A couple of hundred? Unless there are thousands of you, unless there is a general mutiny against the war – you know what the reaction will be? Punish the ringleaders. Grind their faces. When you get out of jail you’ll be ordered to Lebanon again. That is my fear. Oh, yes – you didn’t think of that, did you? And what will you do? Serve another sentence? And another? This war is not going to end quickly. For the moment forget your ethics, forget politics and Begin and Shamir and Sharon; forget The Little Thing, then The Big Thing – oh, it’s all right in front of Alice, she knows about those dreams, that Israel could reorganize Lebanon and then do the Big Thing in Syria and Jordan. We had an attack of imagination, we thought Israel was invincible, we’d recouped the dignity we lost in ‘73 and we could rule the Middle East. Forget all that and remember this: we survive on bluff. We cannot run away from Lebanon. We’ve got to see it through, whatever the cost, because once Israel starts running to sand . . . Do you know why you exist? Because your grandmother read Mein Kampf and believed every word of it was seriously meant, but she could not convince my father until September 1939. She was a realist. I’m a realist.’

  ‘It didn’t save her,’ Gideon said.

  - No, but it saved me and my sister and father. We made it to the Russian border. All our other relations stayed behind in Lodz, telling each other, This is just a war between the Germans and the Poles; when Germany has got the provinces it wants . . .

  Amos waved away the gauze of smoke. ‘That was an accident.’ His mother had been shot for stealing food. The Ukrainian who did it had been almost apologetic, his square face smiling at them, asking them not to take it personally. He had a peasant’s sense of hierarchy: first the mistress, then the maid – Christiana, our nanny who’d chosen to flee with us because she loved me and my sister. She and Mama had been stealing to keep us alive – me in particular, because I had a weak chest. My father said to me afterward, ‘Because of you I lost the light of my life.’

  That was the first injury a woman did me.

  Gideon said, ‘But you demonstrated. Before I did. You said . . .’

  ‘I said. I said

&n
bsp; ‘And you still do. You go around saying, “Our leaders are crazy.” But you want me to cooperate with them?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be thrown out of the army.’

  ‘Then you’re a hypocrite.’

  Amos’s lips buckled; the whoop of laughter escaped. ‘Giddy! What it is to be twenty years old!’ His hand ruffling the hair of his son’s big head was a little simian paw and in his eyes was the yearning that is sometimes in the faces of intelligent animals as they look at humans and try to communicate across the gulf of human reasoning. Gideon jerked his head away.

  The doorbell rang. Five people surged in: two women with chocolate cakes, husbands, and a political scientist from UCLA on contract to the Washington Post to write a series of articles on the New Right in Israel. Alice knew them all except the American, Phil Abrahams, who bear-hugged Amos. ‘Phil’s luggage is lost,’ they cried, and ‘We had the most dreadful experience driving here – Saul took a wrong turn and we almost ended up in the religious area. My God, we could have been stoned!’ Saul said, ‘Jerusalem on Shabbat is more dangerous than anywhere over the Green Line. Or the Red Line.’ The apartment exploded with hilarity, like applause. Look at the size of Gideon! What a son. And this was Tikva . . . Amos is always boasting, but of course we hadn’t believed . . . Such a wonder! I’m a young man again. His wife said, ‘Gershon, speak English, for Phil. Tikva might not want so much cake.’ Of course she does – and Gideon was in Yesh Ge’vul? Bravo! The youth of Israel – they had sense. We’re too old, the Desert Generation. Old men, old wounds. Look at me, born in Berlin . . . now if I’d been born in the Galilee. ‘You stick to your principles, Gideon. We’re the Desert Generation, we’ll all die out. Then you young people will be able to take over. You’ll make peace. Peace outside, peace inside – see, here is a boy whose grandparents were Polish and Russian, and a girl who comes from the Yemen . . . This is how it will happen. Through love. See, Alice agrees with me.’

  ‘She turns off her hearing aid when you arrive,’ Amos said.

  Where’s the Australian woman? Lost? Good God, and on a night like this. Should we look for her? Garin’s daughter! We will not look for her. Phil, you must interview our Professor Garin. He’s one of their mystics. A Yahwehist. A thug, like Rabbi Kahane, whom he admires, by the way – but he has English polish. The American fundamentalist Christians love him: he’s the most polite Israeli they’ve ever met. He is Khomeini with a medical degree and a BBC accent; he is our Reverend Ian Paisley. Why do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam produce such thugs? Buddhism doesn’t. Buddhism’s had not one war in two thousand five hundred years. Do you know why, Alice? Of course she does but she’s not listening. Garin should be in jail – not our Gideon. But you stick to your principles. And Tikva, you must have another slice of Shoshana’s cake. Do you know Goethe, my dear? Amos, how do you translate . . .

  Amos cut him short, in German, ‘Gershon, Tikva’s mother is illiterate. Just tell her she’s pretty and leave Goethe out of it.’

  ‘Allow an old man to be romantic. You used to be.’

  ‘I could kick your guts for encouraging Gideon.’

  ‘Why? Why? Oh, Shoshana, I’ve upset Amos. Shoshana says I’m an intelligent idiot. Amos, dear boy . . .’

  Phil had sat beside Alice saying, ‘Please don’t let me disturb you. I’m terribly tired, myself.’

  ‘I catnap.’

  ‘Wish I could.’ His big frame slumped; he needed a shave.

  Alice had switched on her hearing aid for him; he had a pleasant, deep voice. He said, ‘This country seems to be at breaking point. People have classical alienation – the sense they have no control over outside events and the fear they have none over their own lives.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Alice chirruped. ‘Maybe it’s the beginning of Wisdom.’

  He liked that; a smile like a drop of dye spreading across paper moved from the center to the boundaries of his large, good-natured face.

  ‘But why does it take so long?’

  ‘Ooooh. Our love affair with God is a great obstacle, you know. The story of Yahweh and His Chosen is the stormiest romance in history. And look what we’ve named the State! I remember the debates in the forties over what this country should be called after it became independent. There were any number of names. But we chose Israel. D’you know your Hebrew? D’you know it means “He who struggles with God”?’

  Phil picked up her hand and pressed it to his bristly cheek. Then he began to laugh, head thrown back on the brown vinyl of the settee. ‘In America . . . oh, it’s so funny – my university colleagues believe that what holds Israel together is the Arabs. What will they say when I tell them . . .’ The room had turned to look at him.

  ‘. . . it’s really a fight with God!’

  Departing after midnight the guests remarked to each other what a jolly evening it had been. When Amos was in good form . . . ‘I adore his maliciousness,’ Gershon said. ‘But he is wrong about Wittgenstein. And Hegel.’ Shoshana said, ‘Darling, shut up.’

  Sixteen

  The reading room in the American Colony Hotel had a gorgeous paneled and painted Turkish ceiling and was furnished as a good English common room with settees, easy chairs, and a writing desk. One entered it from the indoor garden area on the other side of which was room one. Ahmed discovered the room had been burgled when he took a tray of drinks to the reading room and noticed that number one’s door was ajar.

  They had everything tidied up by eleven P.M., had reironed the clothes thrown on the floor, put the underwear back in drawers, stacked the papers left scattered on the desk, wiped up the powder the police used to collect fingerprints. When Danielle arrived and the night manager bounded from his office with a smile and an armful of yellow and white chrysanthemums for her, there was no sign of an intruder. Look, she now had a new lock, stainless steel, with a bolt mechanism. Of course there would be no charge for her stay these past few days; the management insisted: complimentary. But, please, there were certain formalities. With the police.

  She had walked from the Sha’arei Zedek hospital in West Jerusalem! Allah be praised for giving fortitude. Maybe she had her passport and money with her, in the shoulder bag? God is Great!

  The night manager had in his pocket the international telegrammed message that said DELAYED. ENJOY. LOVE BENNIE, but now was not the appropriate time for a disappointment. He would take her himself to the police station. Yes, tomorrow. Now she must sleep.

  He could not believe his ears at first. ‘You speak Arabic?’

  ‘No,’ she said. The words had jumped into her mouth.

  He closed her doors gingerly, listening for the dead lock to thump into place. ‘Contemplate Allah, then sleep’ – she’d said it so sweetly, standing up, eyes shut, rocking with weariness.

  Jazzy had taken her jewelry, for the look of the thing, and as an added encouragement to her to move to a West Jerusalem hotel. It was worthless, gold-plated rubbish, except for a small pair of diamond stud earrings, the sort of present a man gave to a woman for reassurance. Then he did a second room, the one directly above the stairs to the right; he did not want her to think she had been singled out. The next job yielded two English passports, three thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, a couple of hundred in cash, and a cashmere pullover, so it was time well spent. He returned to the dinner dance downstairs.

  The English girl was half-drunk. Jazzy, who was calling himself Yoram to the English girl and her mother he had met in the souk that morning, picked up her limp hand from the tablecloth and, holding it in his two, raised it to his lips.

  ‘You make me struggle with myself,’ he said. ‘I have been praying, just now, for the strength to resist you. I asked God . . .’ Her breath stank of whiskey and cigarettes, even her fingernails smelt of them.

  ‘Is that why you were so long?’

  ‘Yes. When you are my wife . . .’ His gaze fondled her.

  ‘Yoram!’ She didn’t know if she could live on a kibbutz; she meant – she wasn’t ev
en Jewish – and he was a fighter pilot! She’d worry about him.

  Jazzy bowed his head. ‘My country must come first, darling.’

  He had noticed the fat headwaiter staring at him when he returned to the dining room. The last time they had seen each other Jazzy was wearing a mustache and looked older. He saw the headwaiter’s hand move distractedly to the thick growth on his own lip.

  ‘I feel bad in this place,’ he said. ‘I want to be alone with you. No – no. I promise! I won’t even try to kiss you if you hate me so much.’

  He swung his leather shoulder bag on to his shoulder, shook his arm so that the gold bracelet slopped down to the back of his hand, plucked at the creases of his mohair trousers, and glanced at the tassles on the imitation Gucci shoes. The bag was imitation Gucci, too. If the whore weren’t so tipsy she might have noticed that it had more contents than when they had arrived.

  ‘Where will I take you?’ Jazzy asked.

  She looked at him with eyes like a dog’s. ‘To the YWCA, please. I promised Mummy.’

  He drew his head back, holding his chest into his chin. ‘Very well, Angie. If that is what you want. If you reject me . . .’

  For a moment he thought she would change her mind, and invite him to try to seduce her, in which case he had his British-imperialists-who-sold-us-out-to-the-Arabs speech ready. He was due to meet his fence in half an hour.

  The policeman said, ‘You were lucky. He was a professional – he was wearing surgeon’s gloves. That type is dangerous if caught in the act. Fortunately, he found what he wanted in the other room.’