Winter in Jerusalem Read online

  ‘Do you believe in miracles?’

  The soldier fiddled with the clasp of her handbag. ‘Maybe.’ Her tone was offended. She hesitated, then asked the question that had been flickering between them for some time. ‘Are you Jewish?’

  ‘Yes. My father is.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You aren’t, then.’

  ‘I’m not Christian, either,’ Danielle replied but the soldier was not interested in her anymore. She shrugged and took out some knitting.

  In a week Bennie would arrive. He’d said, ‘So spend a few days with your father, smell the air in Jerusalem, look at the colors, then you and I will start work. I’ll hire a car and a chauffeur. Later we’ll do it by helicopter and small plane. I’ll even hire a stills photographer for you.’ For you, she’d thought.

  He had come around to her side of the desk and pressed his fist against her chin, making clicking noises with his tongue. ‘You’ll win an Oscar,’ he’d said. Later that afternoon when she reminded him that she had already worked four months on the project and made two trips from Australia to see him he’d said, ‘Do I owe you some money?’ and while he was reading something on his desk had scribbled a check for fifteen thousand dollars which, Danielle noticed afterward, he had predated to the day that it had been due.

  The diesel engine churned throatily, someone snored, and the bus began climbing into the foothills. Abruptly the air became chillier and some passengers stood up to take parkas from the luggage racks. They passed Bab el-Wad and signs that directed to Castel, Abu Ghosh, Mevasseret Zion. The names whispered the languages of waves of conquerors. At last they had come to the beauty Bennie had promised her, not ravishing, as he had described it, but as she remembered: austere and gentle. The hills had a female roundness, as if here a woman had lain stretched to receive into herself a sky god and waited an eon, for her skin was cracked in long horizontal seams of stone, like ribs. Her nakedness had been covered in part with young forests of pine; elsewhere black-green cypresses as pointed as spears spurted upward. She thought, This is the real Helen, still breathing.

  Lying by the side of the road were burnt-out armored vehicles: trucks, what looked like a homemade tank, a destroyed bus. They were painted with a reddish antirust substance to preserve them as memorials of the war of 1948. Glitter from a hilltop drew her eye: up there was a sculpture of giant silver-colored spears clustered as if grasped in a mighty fist. She felt dizzy. These memorials were for a war that had torn her life as if it were a boot rag. And in a few more hours – a day, maybe, for she felt a cowardly tiredness overcoming her – she would have to confront the torn-off part: Professor Dan Garin, as Dr. Daniel Green was now known. The spears seemed to threaten from above with a message as ancient as the stories of Creation; looking up at them – they could have been held in Yahweh’s fist, or Jupiter’s, or Agamemnon’s – she recalled some lines of Virgil she had translated for Alice. But the Latin words and the exact music of the poetry had escaped and she remembered only the meaning now: When Aeneas fled Troy, he carried his father on his back into exile. That bastard, Danielle thought. He did not send one penny for my education.

  On another hilltop there was a Jerusalem dormitory suburb, a great round structure of lion-colored masonry that seemed at first to be a medieval castle, but on closer examination turned out to be a stone honeycomb for individual families. Ahead a tower soared.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked the soldier, who had finished a sleeve.

  ‘The Hilton. From whichever road you approach Jerusalem you always see the Hilton.’

  ‘What bliss.’

  She was staying there?

  ‘I can’t afford to. But I like the idea of Hiltons – they’re so uniform. So orthodox.’

  ‘Of course it is kosher,’ the soldier agreed, somewhat surprised.

  They passed the civic welcome, which she translated. Clipped shrubs planted on the right-hand side of the road said in Hebrew, ‘Blessed Are They Who Ascend to Jerusalem.’

  ‘May I kiss you?’

  The soldier understood immediately; she rubbed her cold nose and cheeks against Danielle’s face, crooning something in Hebrew.

  Eight

  Danielle glimpsed him a dozen times, first at the Jerusalem bus terminal, then from the windows of her taxi, but each time he turned away and was transformed into some other old man. After a while a voice in her head said, ‘Stop looking for. Just look.’ The city rolled out before her like a magical path that revealed the past and concealed the future, and did this all at once so that for an instant she felt time sliding backward and forward, like water in a tipped bowl, and was as giddy and exhilarated as if she had been dancing in a circle.

  ‘Slow down!’ she cried. The Old City walls were ahead, those marvelous tawny blocks of stone rising, rising, with crenellations on the topmost layer and slits for shooting arrows. She was drunk with bizarre impulses, trying to reach her arm seventy feet and let her fingers brush the Damascus Gate as they whizzed past. They accelerated through traffic lights she did not remember and she gazed back at the walls, convinced that if she looked harder she would see something on them she needed to see. The cab driver kept muttering, ‘I’m from West Jerusalem.’ He was anxious to return there. He was anxious. Slowly, as if her mind were a simple structure like a starfish limb that needed time to make the connection between sensation and grasping, slowly she perceived that something had happened, some incident was affecting everything and everyone. The idea crept all over her – from the air, from eyes in the streets, from the cab driver’s voice. People were boarding up their shops. He turned on the radio for a news broadcast, but she could not understand a word, except for the driver’s exclamation of ‘Mamzer!’

  In the lobby of the American Colony Hotel the Arab staff gathered in groups of three or four, glancing uneasily as they whispered to each other. The manager scolded them from the desk and they scattered for a few minutes to attend to the guests, then regrouped in a corridor or a corner where he could not see them.

  Danielle stared fixedly at the youngest bellboy: Ahmed, according to the white plastic nametag pinned to his jacket. The jacket was green, too tight and too short, as if he were filling in for somebody else, an unfortunate; he, Ahmed, favorite son of a sheik, was above worrying about his appearance. He exuded an amiable laziness.

  When at length he allowed his attention to be trapped, he split his face with a smile. ‘Welcome. Double welcome.’ He wanted her to stop pestering him.

  ‘Please come here.’

  He complied with the air of a benevolent merchant dealing with a customer who has set her heart on a caprice.

  ‘What is going on, Ahmed?’

  He had no idea what she meant.

  ‘I saw people, just now, boarding up their shops.’

  That was because it was cold. Or perhaps there was a holiday. In Jerusalem there were many holidays: this was the Holy City – she could see, tomorrow, beautiful shrines, Christian. . .

  She nodded.

  ‘They are killing each other,’ Ahmed said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Jews.’ His sweet smile followed her as she returned along the corridor, boots clattering on the broad flags of creamy-pink stone as slippery as satin. She ran past the carpets hanging on the walls, up the stairs, to the garden room with its luxuriant trees in pots, past the balcony where Lawrence had strolled, to the white-painted double door, and over the threshold. Alice’s number was still busy.

  Nine

  The head, hidden by a soft-brimmed khaki hat, turned up to Alice: Gideon’s cheeks were streaming with tears. He rushed past her and into the spare bedroom.

  When she entered it with a cup of tea he had stopped sobbing and looked as if he might be asleep, lying face down with his boots on, so that she was torn between anxiety to know what had happened and concern that he should recover undisturbed. However, he was awake, and swung his legs over the side of the bed to sit contemplating his b
oots.

  ‘I ran here,’ he said. He had come from the parliament building.

  ‘Take your time, love.’ But it exploded from him – the shouting: Peace Now! Peace Now! Down with Sharon! Down with Begin! and the other chant: ‘Begin, King of Israel! Father! Father!’

  A world had ended. A young man – his name was Emil Grunsweig – had been blown to pieces in front of the Knesset. For the first time since the founding of the state, Jew had murdered Jew for political reasons.

  Gideon said, ‘I’m not going back to Lebanon. I’m going to refuse duty.’

  This war has closed the gates of Eden; now Cain has murdered Abel, Alice thought. ‘You’ll be court-martialed,’ she said, and let him be, while she returned to the kitchen.

  Their kibbutz had been in the Galilee, in spring as green as Ireland, with brown sheep up to their bellies in pasture and whole hillsides and valleys suddenly, briefly, in glory with wildflowers. The earth would sigh in her sleep one night and next morning her breath on the fields was visible in an acre of red poppies or a streaming mile of purple lupins, or buttercups. Alice had taught English during the day and at night sat in the bomb shelter with the children. There was a mountain behind their settlement, honeycombed at its peak. Nightly fire spat from the cells of the comb. In summer the mountainside itself caught fire – maybe the Syrians threw a lighted cigarette from their bunker, or maybe it was a fragment of glass concentrating the heat among the dry summer grasses; in summer the flowers died and the grass turned to ashen bristles revealing a black skin beneath. Gideon had been terrified of the mountain. His father had tried to reason him out of his fear, explaining it was people – not the mountain itself – who made fires by day and deadly fire by night, but Amos’s arguments had only seemed to increase the child’s sense of horror.

  Alice felt weary as she moved around the kitchen, preparing a supper for Gideon – grating carrots, slicing capsicums and cucumbers. He was still vegetarian. It had been an irreligious kibbutz, but they maintained the meat and dairy laws in the kitchen for the sake of the income from foreign tourists staying in the guest-house. However they behaved at home, diaspora Jews liked to keep kosher in Israel. She remembered the day Gideon had decided he would not eat flesh; he was about four years old. I was leading him into the children’s dining area when he said, ‘I’m not having meat.’ I said, ‘But supper will be dairy.’ When I looked down into his solemn face I realized he meant something else. ‘Meat is killed animals. It’s terrified animals.’ He was pleading with me to understand for him something he knew but could not express. A month later the June war began. Gideon was calm throughout. ‘Daddy will come back,’ he insisted, and, ‘Daddy’s been nearly killed, but he won’t die.’

  His psychic power had vanished as inexplicably as it had alighted, with only his vegetarianism as a reminder – to Alice – of its existence. Amos was too intellectually vigorous for such ideas, which he grouped under the general heading of ‘Swiss mysticism.’ He thought all mountain scenery conflicted with a reasoning life – and after his marriage collapsed, he left the kibbutz. For the past six years he had taught law at the Hebrew University full time, ‘Like a proper Yid.’

  Alice sighed as she assembled the vegetables in a glass salad bowl. Something – that war fever, the grandeur of an army on the move, of a hundred thousand men all urged in one direction, will-less but seized with a mad delight in the energy of their numbers – something had swept Gideon over the border to Lebanon nine months ago. One night the telephone rang and it was he, shouting, ‘Alice! I’m in Beirut!’ He sounded as if he had discovered the secret of immortality. Even Amos, who for weeks before had said, ‘We cannot attack – there is no justification for an offensive,’ even he had gone, cursing the government as fascist and knowing from the outset that they would not stop at the Awali River but would go all the way to Beirut – and even to Amman and Damascus, if Fortune smiled. ‘Giantism – Israel has an attack of giantism,’ he’d said. But he’d gone; he’d wanted that delicious bite which promises: kill thine enemy that you may live. What bitter fruit it had been.

  Gideon had brought back bottles of Arpege and Veuve Cliquot, which now needed dusting; his father had returned empty-handed and silent. He was not fit enough for active service. ‘I’ve been an ambassador,’ Amos said. ‘Honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.’ He had handled the foreign press.

  This would be the end for Gideon: court-martial, jail, dishonorable discharge. No job for him. No room for him in Israel. And Amos would die from a broken heart: two sons in voluntary exile, yordim. It was a word with doom inside it, ‘those who have descended.’

  Alice could hear Gideon continuously dialing the telephone, probably trying to get through to Amos. Then she heard ‘Father?’ and switched off her hearing aid.

  Ten

  Later that evening Amos telephoned her, his voice sounding as if he had smoked sixty cigarettes in the past few hours. She knew how he would be sitting, leaning his forehead against the heel of his hand; his hair was rigid, his face was hollowed in the cheeks, and his skin kippered from compulsive smoking. For an ugly man Amos was one of the most attractive Alice had known, never without a girlfriend since Miki had left him and taken their elder boy off to New York. He had fought to keep Gideon and bring him up single-handed, rebuffing women eager to move in. His only surviving relation, an older sister, did his washing every week – ‘So why have a woman live with me?’ Alice had answered, ‘For your soul.’ She had also tried nagging him about cigarettes: ‘Alice, lung cancer is a Western luxury. It takes time. It’s for the goyim.’

  Over the telephone he said, ‘I’m going to kill Gideon.’ He was going to break his arms. Gideon was behaving like a self-indulgent child: of course the war was rotten, and the government was rotten, and there was a civil war in Israel, the nation sinking into primordial tribal hatreds – blacks against whites, religious against secular, Likud against Alignment, new towns against kibbutzim. ‘But this is not the time to give up!’

  ‘Please don’t shout.’

  The sound of his indrawn breath could have been a sob but he was only lighting another cigarette. ‘Alice, if Giddy throws it in -’ What would he have done it all for?

  He sat for a long time remembering what it had been like to be starving, to be so buckled with hunger that gnawing wood was a comfort. Then returning from Russia in 1946, to a void: house, street, shops, synagogue – the whole had vanished. Two little Polish girls were playing with a hoop; one pinched her nose and exclaimed, ‘Yech! A Yid!’

  He locked his apartment and went down to the street where his car was parked on the pavement. The car population of the city had bred wantonly in the past couple of years: the country was on a spending and gambling spree, wages fully indexed, everybody chasing goods before inflation snatched them further away. His landlord wanted Amos to buy the apartment, for one hundred thousand dollars. He’d been saving for six months, going without this and that. The car, a 1978 Cortina, needed servicing and had only one windshield wiper.

  It was raining lightly as he drove into town and the wiper, without its mate, looked absurd thrashing away alone. Against the other window the lobster joint of its lost companion twitched in sympathy. He found a parking spot on Hillel Street and entered the humous restaurant where military people ate and where he, sometimes, met friends. The place was so popular there was often a line. The owner thought of himself as a character and had signs on the walls saying CHEW DON’T TALK and SWALLOW DON’T CHEW. If allowed a year he would not be able to exhaust the subject of how his wife ran off with another man. The story – installments, additional details, important points – came with the humous: you ate, he smoked a cigar and told you about his wife. The only people he left alone were the rough boys from Intelligence whose aura of disciplined violence, that special relaxed-after-the-kill air of theirs, announced their identity.

  A university acquaintance in uniform left some younger men and came to join Amos. He had been on reserve duty
in Sidon, he said, and began talking in the compulsive monotone of fatigue, as much to himself as to Amos.

  ‘. . . arresting people suspected of terrorism. Any whom we thought might be PLO, we handed over to Shin Beth for questioning. One of the men we’d picked up drove a Mercedes. I had two Yemenites helping me. They said they knew this man was PLO. I asked how. They said the Mercedes: it was a mark of preferment. Then they said, “Questioning him is a waste of time.” Amos, I didn’t know what they meant at first. They were kids – one was nineteen. He said, “We’ve been ambushed five times in the past month. Why waste time questioning him?” And then the other put in, “We could use a nice car.” I forbade it. I quoted military regulations. I quoted Talmud. Nothing touched them. Legally, politically, ethically . . . They kept on saying, “We’ve been in this town for eight months. We’ve got a week’s leave.” ’

  He ordered another Turkish coffee.

  ‘And then?’ Amos asked.

  ‘Next morning they came to me and said that during the night the suspect had tried to escape. His Mercedes is out there. Somewhere.’

  They smoked in silence for a while. There were only half a dozen tables in the restaurant, the owner was in the back making coffee, and it was unusually quiet. Weapons were stacked against chair legs and walls, the diners focused on their dishes of humous and salad, tearing spongy round loaves to use as scoops, chewing not talking, fathoms deep for a while in an animal calm.

  Amos said, ‘My son is going with a Yemenite girl. Beautiful creature. She doesn’t speak. Blushes if you look at her. Tikva – her name is Tikva.’ His eyes brimmed with horrified amusement. Then all at once they were both roaring with laughter, intoxicated. Amos had a rich baritone and after the first words the young soldiers, grinning, bemused, turned around to listen, then join in singing. A couple clapped their hands over their hearts as they bellowed with him the national anthem, Hatikva.