Winter in Jerusalem Page 3

  He drank the milk while she was still pouring it, throat and chest vibrating with a noise like a propeller.

  Alice hid the saucer in her mailbox in the foyer and the milk container beneath her morning’s copy of the Jerusalem Post. She said to Arik, ‘Off you go, before she comes,’ and climbed back up the stairs. He washed himself, then strolled outside to the pavement and sprayed a new Alfa Sud that had been parked there overnight. When Alice’s landlady came downstairs soon afterward, she noticed that the door of her new car stank. She turned back into the foyer and shouted in English up the stairwell, ‘You bloody old woman with cats,’ and repeated it, more vividly, in Hungarian.

  The landlady was given to emotional upheaval and overeating, and had a permanently sore back from getting about in very high-heeled shoes. On the days she saw Alice striding out in a woolen suit and walking boots, beret at a jaunty angle over her white hair, Ruth muttered to the window panes, ‘Old skeleton. English lesbian.’

  ‘Get out of my building!’ she’d say. ‘This isn’t the British Empire anymore. This is the Israeli Empire. And you’ll never give it away, Peacenownik!’

  She daydreamed about evicting Alice, moving herself into the top-floor apartment, and on its balcony having summer evening parties with handsome men. When she heard David slowly climbing the stairs or Gideon pounding up them three at a time to Alice’s apartment, she would open her front door and croon, ‘Shalom. Going up for some fun?’

  For Gideon, Alice’s spare bedroom was permanently available for a night or an afternoon with his Yemenite girl, Tikva. They were both twenty, both in the army.

  The day Gideon, blushing as deeply as the marvel he held by the wrist, had pushed her through Alice’s front door the old woman had cried, ‘A celebration for the eyes!’ The girl’s beauty restored confidence in a generous God. Along her upper lip a faint gray mustache was the essential flaw, the perfecting inconsistency, in her appearance. After army service Tikva hoped to get a job as a typist.

  When Alice announced, ‘I’m going to switch off my hearing aid now and have a rest,’ the pair of them would stare at the rug, then tiptoe from the curtained-off parlor.

  Alice worried that the bed was too small for them. Tikva was of average height, but Gideon’s body had grown in one of those leaps one saw often in kibbutz-born children, as if nature wanted to erase all at once the constriction of the centuries. He was almost six feet three with a smile as open as daybreak, a son so different from his father that it was hard to believe, as it is with the males and females of certain birds, that they were of one species. There was sweet nature, health – and the faintest hint of swinishness – about Gideon, not all excused by his age or the army, but due to being one of the new breed of men in Israel. Each month he washed her windows, leaving gray trickles around the edges. At the beginning of summer he appeared with a mouth full of nails and a hammer to re-rig the canvas awning on her balcony. They would sit under it drinking mint tea, surrounded by geraniums and the hot, antiseptic smell of the pine trees. Alice said, ‘If something happens to me – if I have a fall – you won’t let them take me to hospital will you, love?’

  Gideon nodded and looked away.

  She had ready a cocktail in a drawer of her bedside table and had explained to Gideon what each pill was. He had listened as if it were just an army routine, another task to perform. Sometimes she regretted the absence in him of Jewish ecstasy – and despair. Gideon had grown up knowing that thirty-two years in the army lay ahead, three of them full time, then reserve duty until he was fifty. ‘Its not a birthright Jacob would have envied,’ Alice told him. He and his friends had a hybrid quality: grafted to the warrior needed by the state there was a branch of Esau’s peasant temperament. Gideon’s father, Amos, said when his eyes rested on his giant son, ‘The New Jew,’ and his lips buckled with a smile like paper being burnt.

  At a pinch Gideon would help Tikva take off her parka; Alice remembered David, at almost the same age, kissing the insteps of her feet as he removed her shoes, calling her Elfe – she, already a woman of forty. He’d been as sentimental as any German boy.

  David came to lunch bringing a bunch of white and pale purple irises, pretending gaiety, but with sad eyes. He had turned seventy a few months earlier and had given up the room he had been allowed to keep after retirement at the Givat Ram campus of the university. ‘No head for figures anymore,’ he’d said, tapping above his ear. He had fine hands. Sometimes he held them out and remarked sardonically, ‘Worker’s paws,’ while Alice had thought, sardonically, ‘Yes – and what destruction they have wrought.’ They’d met on the day in 1939 when he had arrived as a refugee in London and had been lovers ever since – through all his other love affairs, his marriages, through World War II, when he had worked on the Manhattan Project, and since then, in Israel, on God-knows-what. When Hiroshima was vaporized she’d shouted at him, ‘What an intellectual debauch you have enjoyed – and what a hangover!’

  David – he still called himself Heinrik in those days – had replied mildly, ‘That’s why I need you.’

  ‘You’re pale, darling,’ she said.

  ‘I have been loitering in the city.’ He was already acquiring that shrunken look, as if life were leaking from him somewhere. They tried to chat about politics and university gossip. When he stood to leave, the world capsized; he saw black space and pulses of yellow lightning.

  ‘Elfe! Elfe!’

  She could not rise quickly enough to help him. David lurched and fell back again on the settee.

  They allowed silence. Then:

  ‘So. I’m collapsing now. Like our country. Poor Israel. Poor me.’ His charming, weary smile returned, but Alice did not see it. She sat looking into her palm, cupped inside the other in her lap, a serene old woman watching the end. It was not just a bad government and a vile, unjust war, matters that could be fixed up by installing a different group of politicians; the spiritual values of Zionism were dying. She saw the decline everywhere, in people like Amos . . .

  ‘When I was young . . .’

  - When I was young I believed that after the Great War there could be no more wars, and that the Revolution in Russia would save the world. My heart broke when I realized what Stalin was doing. There’s been nothing since to compare with that agony, not even Hitler.

  ‘. . . I was a mad optimist,’ Alice said aloud. ‘Now I’m just an optimist. Buck up, love. Life’s too long to be gloomy.’

  After lunch Alice felt worn out. Her nap turned into a deep sleep from which she woke with a little yell when the doorbell rang. It was already darkening outside. From her parlor window she could see the sky over the Mountains of Moab thick with snowclouds.

  ‘That will be Danielle,’ she told herself and wondered how often the poor girl had tried to ring her: the telephone system was a scandal.

  ‘I’m doing it as fast as I can,’ she called through the door, kept double-locked against burglars, who were brazen enough for even top-floor apartments. There was no reply from the other side, where there were four steep steps immediately in front of the door so that whoever was standing there was first seen from above.

  ‘What color is your hair these days?’ Alice called. She did not catch Danielle’s reply and realized her hearing aid was turned off.

  The end of the barrel of an automatic rifle reared at her and the humiliation of never knowing one’s moment of death lifted. Alice held herself erect, knowing she must stay conscious, must watch it all.

  Seven

  Her lithe stride up the steps of the bus and her hand waving from the sleeve of a tatty fox jacket created another image for Wili: that jacket when it was glossy and thick; Danielle caressing its sleeve, saying, ‘Patrick gave it to me.’ Pause; her trying to look brazen: ‘I suspect it fell off a truck.’ Fragments of the past rushed together and Wili reexperienced his dislike of Danielle’s spouse. He’d not been surprised when he read that Reilly had been killed in a car accident and that the popsie traveling with him was suing
for the ruin of her face. That was Reilly: cocksure and knockabout. Danielle had been pregnant, Wili remembered, and had flown back to Australia. The thought occurred to him: she’ll barely know what happened to me.

  ‘Princess,’ he whispered in a tone that was reverent and smug, valuing her, suddenly, as someone to talk to, someone new who would learn the whole story, firsthand, from him.

  Then he remembered he had just been robbed of five hundred dollars in cash. There was a beetle-eyed policewoman not twenty yards away; Wili decided he had better do the normal thing and report the theft. He wasted twenty minutes at the police station. They offered to drive him home. ‘Thanks awfully, chaps, but Wili will make it alone.’ He had to show them Danielle’s shekels before they would let him go off by himself.

  He walked to Jaffa. There he changed into laborer’s clothes, waited, and at four o’clock took a shared taxi to Gaza. It was dark by the time he arrived and trudged off through the mud alleyways between concrete-block houses.

  ‘An opportunity arose today,’ he told his friends that night. They were always on the lookout for opportunities because they were free, taking no orders – not from Moscow, not from Damascus, not from Tehran, not from Fatah. They floated and waited. Waited: to win the honor of real men – in a big bang! or in the ‘factories for men’ the Israelis prepared for them, the jails. While they waited they kept busy with their usual work, ‘our high jinks,’ as they called it. They burgled, they traded in false passports, they robbed tourists, and sometimes sold hashish.

  They despised Wili and were polite to him; among themselves they called him ‘our useful parasite.’ Over the years Wili had been obliged to be especially useful to one of them, Issa, who’d lived in London and called himself Jazzy. It was Jazzy who’d told Wili to think up a photographic assignment for himself in Israel.

  ‘We need some photographs ourselves,’ he’d explained. ‘You’ll be doing nothing illegal, Wili, I promise you.’ Wili was not in a position to refuse. ‘I’d be delighted. Delighted,’ he’d said. He made Jazzy sick.

  Inside the bus two women soldiers checked the passengers against the luggage. There was a brief commotion when nobody claimed a red nylon haversack. The soldiers blew their whistles; the bus stopped; people started making for the exits. Then a sleepy gingerhaired youth remembered it was his, the soldiers shouted at him, and the others, grumbling, returned to their seats. Reassured that there would be no explosions on this ride, they set off again.

  Danielle had chosen to sit next to a lump of a woman in an army uniform who allowed her the window seat. She spoke French. ‘We have problems in Israel,’ she said and her thick-lidded eyes strayed suspiciously over Danielle’s hair, as if it might be one of them. ‘Terrorists.’

  ‘I was born in Jerusalem,’ Danielle replied.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘Nice for you.’ She turned away and began searching inside a large black handbag while Danielle watched in astonishment. She was so used to assuming sisterhood among women that hostility from a female stranger was an experience to think about.

  The soldier drew out a letter handwritten in Hebrew and read through its three paragraphs twice. A large tear rolled down her cheek. It was followed by others. After a few seconds she leaned forward with her head and arms on the handbag and sobbed loudly. Danielle looked around at the other passengers. All were either young and in uniform or, if older, in nondescript civilian dress. She caught an eye here and there and each told her the same thing: Don’t interfere. The passengers did not talk to each other; there was a subdued inward-focused air, a discontent. It did not go along with the ‘general bond of love in Israel’ she had been led to expect.

  Timidly, she patted the heaving back, wondering if offering the soldier a peppermint candy would be taken as an insult. After a while, when there was no response to her comfort, Danielle decided to ignore the noise alongside her.

  Once clear of the chaotic traffic around the bus terminal they moved fast into the outskirts of the city, an area even shabbier than the center, with rows of decaying concrete apartment blocks, each one’s functional ugliness increased by the dozens of solar-heating panels and tanks on its roof. The suburbs looked as if they had been flung up in a housing emergency without time to plant gardens then, or since. Vacant lots were strewn with building rubble and rubbish in such an easy way it seemed not illegal but a municipal policy in favor of littering. ‘Tel Aviv is beautiful,’ people had told her; she realized they meant it was emotionally beautiful, its existence a triumph of the spirit. But there was something unnerving about the ugliness, because it suggested people were willing to turn their lives into corridors, to narrow their sympathies and be stifled now in the service of the future. Ten thousand times in Jewish history Jews had said, Our present pain will bring joyous rebirth. But this was the rebirth. And this bit of it, at least, looked like another ghetto.

  The housing, she thought, seemed inside out: bedding and rugs hung over balconies, revealing to the eyes of the street the activities within. Women were leaning from their apartment windows, pinning laundry onto clotheslines stretched across the outside walls of the buildings. Time cracked.

  - I remember handing clothespins to my mother, who was leaning out the window, hanging sheets on the line. It rained. We laughed and cheered and ran out with every bowl and saucer. We had baths, then washed the clothes in the bathwater. Geoffrey was still alive then. He and I washed the kitten, for which Papa gave him a beating.

  Two days later Geoffrey was dead.

  Danielle straightened her back and cautiously surveyed the passengers again. None of the older men was vaguely familiar. He was not on the bus, as he had not been on the airplane, nor at the airport, nor in the hotel, nor in the streets of Tel Aviv passed by her taxi. Nor was he in the bus terminal, nor in Salomon Street, shopping.

  The bus had reached a highway that passed vast dark green groves of citrus trees. These were followed by a featureless plain. The soldier stopped weeping and accepted a peppermint. Danielle had taken out her map of Israel and was checking the road signs against it.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ the soldier asked. Her eyes wandered again to Danielle’s hair.

  ‘I’m trying to find out where I am.’

  ‘We are coming to the Valley of Ayalon. That is where Joshua made the moon stand still.’

  On the other side of the valley the foothills of the Judean mountains were now in view and a different sort of excitement, not the watchful anxiety of the past day, but a pleasurable thrill, began to spread through Danielle. She and Bennie would tour the whole area by car, but in the meantime she could roughly assess the landscape for ‘impossibles’: electricity and telephone lines, telecommunications stations on the tops of hills, the technology that made a nightmare of location work for historical sequences. The Sea of Galilee, people said, was useless now for Jesus movies; what audiences saw these days was a Canadian lake.

  Bennie had said, ‘This is going to be a big movie. We’ll shoot in seventy millimeter. Big views. Giant people. Real heroes.’ His feet were on his desk, he was making a mess of the end of his Monte Cristo, his shirt was open halfway down his woolly chest. The California sky behind him made a halo for his hair, which was like thick dark whorls on a centaur’s head. He looked down at the tip of his cigar and Danielle saw a luster on his eyelids that reminded her of the skin of pearls. ‘We’ll win an Oscar. Hey, let’s win an Oscar, girl.’ When Bennie smiled, it was as if a beautiful woman were stroking him.

  After a while she’d asked: ‘Have you anyone in mind for Eleazar?’

  ‘I’ll cast an unknown. For this, we use unknowns. And I promise you – they’ll be stars overnight.’

  And that too, she reflected, came from deep inside Bennie: his belief in nobodies making history.

  He said he had left Israel fifteen years earlier for a vacation in Cyprus, just weeks before the Six-Day War. At first she had believed he had taken part in it. ‘It was a mirac
le,’ he said. ‘Everyone, my parents, all our friends, thought we would be slaughtered by the Arabs. A joke went around: last person, turn off the lights. But after six days of fighting, Israel owned all Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan, the Golan Heights -’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Me! I was fighting every inch of the way.’ Listening to reports on the radio. ‘Six days. And on the seventh – He rested. That’s how it was.’

  He had not returned even for a holiday; now he was going to make a film in which the central incident was one of Yahweh’s earlier, nasty miracles: spurning His people, He had sent a mighty wind-change to sweep the Zealots’ fire away from the Roman siege engines and back upon their own ranks. When He did that, Eleazar ordered suicide for every man, woman, and child. The Zealots died free, but with an act – according to Bennie – of rebuke to God.

  ‘It’s the story of a hero struggling with Yahweh,’ he said. ‘It’s about being trapped inside something, an idea, not knowing if it’s real or an illusion. I want your script to convey . . .’ She had waited for him to finish the sentence. At last she asked:

  ‘What? The tragedy of a false premise?’

  He’d squinted through the fragrant blue smoke. ‘Danielle! Twenty-five million dollars above the line and you want to write it as a tragedy? The box, girl. Let’s not forget the box office.’ He’d begun to laugh, throwing his head back. There was something insolent and intoxicated about him; he tossed some peanuts into his mouth. ‘You want the bankers to put me in jail?’ He mumbled as he chewed the nuts, ‘You gotta think of an upbeat ending forme.’

  She had nodded, remembering the mortgage on her house.

  ‘Chinese scientists have proved that the Bible is accurate,’ the soldier said. ‘There was an eclipse when Joshua commanded the moon to stand still. It’s been in the newspapers.’