Winter in Jerusalem Read online

  Later, walking back to his car, Amos had another attack of fou rire. He was forty-seven years old, he’d topped first-year law at Harvard, and what did he have to show for it? This absurd vehicle with one windshield wiper.

  ‘C’mon,’ he urged as he pumped the accelerator. ‘Pretend you’re a Merc.’

  He did not feel like calling in on Mira: she would expect him, at this time of night, to have come to make love.

  Eleven

  Danielle woke up in a room brightly lit with lamps beneath a domed ceiling painted the color of a spring sky. The stone walls were whitewashed and three feet thick; she imagined lounging in the window recesses to watch laden donkeys and Ethiopian monks in black beehive hats and all sorts of people jostling on the street outside. The walls gave out a faint, cold smell of minerals.

  She sighed, forcing herself to see this space as a hotel room, and in Israel, not Palestine. It was snowing outside, at some stage of night: her watch was on Los Angeles time and she did not know if it were evening or early morning, what day of the week or what date. She had traveled from Sydney to Los Angeles, stayed overnight; Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, overnight; Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. . .

  After she had checked in at the hotel she had gone for a walk. But the streets had retreated from her, ducking away like actors into the wings behind a screen of fatigue within her. Their house had been only five minutes on foot from the American Colony, but although everything looked familiar, nothing was exact and for a few minutes she had stood paralyzed, totally lost, although she could see the white tower of the Sheik Jarrah Mosque, right beside the hotel, and had only to walk toward it. She came across Mandlebaum’s house, walls patched up where they had been bombed. It was a museum now, in a quiet street which had been in Jordan from 1948 to 1967. Again, there was the strange tip back and forth: time and space could slide like water in a bowl.

  She got off the bed, stiff in her joints and with her feet throbbing. She had gone to sleep in her fox jacket, for the room was unspeakably cold. Ahmed had said her central heating was ‘cracked’; he’d looked sorry about it.

  Danielle walked gingerly across the marble tiles to the big brass table where some benevolent hand had placed a piece of chocolate cake, a cup of cold cocoa, and a tepid hot-water bottle wrapped in a white napkin.

  But the bathwater was hot. The bathroom was up a flight of stairs, with a view over the area of Nahlat Shimon, now veiled by night and snow. Public lighting from the street cast an orange haze and transformed the falling snow into flakes of gold.

  I remembered a permanent summertime, she thought. All four of us would walk to the American Colony in the evenings to sit by the bougainvillea, palms, and lemon trees in its courtyard, feeling cooled by the fountain. The sky was a rectangle of washing blue above the stone walls and sometimes a silver balloon would slide into it, the twinkling fist of Polaris holding tight to its string. I said, ‘Toys in the air.’ Father bought me an extra slice of cake.

  A loud buzzing noise started up just outside the bathroom window and then a voice began crying out, high, rigid, panic-stricken. It quaked up to a pitch of longing, turned to vapor, vanished, shimmered back into existence – then yearned upward again. The muezzin sounded so close he could have been standing at the other end of the bathtub. She hollered ‘Allahu Akbar!’ back at him, and giggled. A muezzin had visited Dr. Green once for medical advice – I asked him why he had only three teeth and he said Allah had taken the others to stop him eating too much.

  She realized she was very hungry herself and that because of the prayer times it must be either around midnight or four in the morning.

  After a long wait Ahmed arrived with an omelette and another hot-water bottle, which he served from a tray. He didn’t know what time it was, either. ‘Late,’ he said, smiling and shrugging.

  In the kitchen they had been discussing the testimony of the Israeli chief of staff, who last week had said, ‘All the Arabs are the same whether in Arabe, Ramallah, or Gaza. All of them should be finished off.’ And then, today, the newspaper had reported him saying: ‘To punish the parents for the deeds of the children – this works well with Arabs.’ Ahmed liked this woman with the djinn smile. He wondered why she wanted to contact the old man who gave speeches calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple; when she’d asked him to look for the professor’s name in the Hebrew telephone book he had said he could not find it. But she had tipped him all the same.

  Twelve

  Alice tottered a bit when she stepped back from her front door, laughing and clapping her hands.

  ‘Thy hair is as a flock of goats that cometh down from Gilead! Oh, let me look at you. The screenwriter!’

  For Danielle it was always amazing to connect Alice with her age, to see her shaky on her legs as a woman of eighty-five had a right to be, for she was such a girlish creature, her eyes so bright with communication, her voice so gay – and with all that she had a quality of knowing, of knowledge of the goals of life. She looked a schoolgirl nine hundred years old.

  Danielle thought: She brings out in me the urge, almost uterine, to exaggerate; to make everything brighter and more dramatic.

  ‘My God, Alice! This place smells like a coal mine,’ she said, and they went off into peals of laughter.

  ‘The wicked landlady will not fix the gas for me. I’ll go up in a fireball one day. And the prime minister will blame the PLO.’

  ‘There’ll be summary vengeance.’

  ‘Yes. A couple of planes will whiz up to Lebanon and bomb some camp.’

  They deflated.

  ‘You’ve come at a sorry time,’ Alice said. ‘I didn’t think I’d live to see . . .’

  Chastened, she looked at the floor. – We’ve lost it all so quickly. All the fun of the 1930s and of the fifties and sixties has gone. Israel was ‘God and us’ in those days.

  ‘You’re limping,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t fall sick here.’

  She led Danielle into the kitchen where the reek of gas hammered their noses until the kettle was boiled for tea, and the stove could be turned off. Alice had herbal ointment for foot blisters and made Danielle remove her soft red leather walking boots, red leg warmers, and the socks with toe pockets.

  ‘Toed socks!’ she said. ‘I invented them, I believe, for my trip to Moscow in 1925. I knew I was going to freeze and wouldn’t be able to wash.’

  Danielle looked around at the leaky stove, the refrigerator that made digestive noises, the cold-water sink. Alice saved pieces of string and plastic bags; they were heaped on a peg behind the door; she had breadcrusts stored in a plastic container and bean sprouts growing feebly in a jar by the window. Danielle wondered if she were getting enough to eat.

  ‘It’s not Darling Point, with harbor views,’ Alice said. She had sold everything when she turned sixty-five and run off to Israel again. After a while snapshots had arrived: Alice outside the children’s house of the kibbutz; milking a cow. A note said, ‘When I came here in 1930 it was half-swamp and we slept in tents. The achievement!’ Looking at the frugality of her existence in Jerusalem Danielle wondered at the ends of life, the loose fringes to its garment: Miss Sadler – suffragette, pacifist, Communist fellow-traveler, Zionist, abortion-law reformer, feminist radical, member of Amnesty International, and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. She had wanted to save the world. Now she saved plastic bags. And she seemed happier than ever.

  ‘Since you’re getting on a bit . . .’ she said tentatively. Alice was tottering about the kitchen, refusing help with the tea things. She gave a snort.

  ‘You think I should return to Australia? Yes. It would be more comfortable.’ There was gaiety in her eyes. ‘But, my dear, the spirit. At my age, it’s the spirit.’

  ‘Won’t it travel?’

  ‘It does not need to. It’s contented everywhere. Especially here.’

  They went to the parlor where there was an electric heater and a blue woolen curtain enclosing the room’s warmth. Danielle
was unwilling to yield up her cheerfulness, but as she settled herself on the settee beside a pile of Listener magazines she experienced a sudden thud, as if her armor had crashed to the ground. Without intending to she began relating her problems: Eleazar was her big chance, but she would not be paid much until the script was complete (and accepted), so she had gone into debt to keep herself going: ‘I’ve had to put up my house in Avalon as collateral.’ There were difficulties with the producer, who wanted her to move to Los Angeles, but she could not leave Katherine alone in Sydney during her first year at university. Then there was the dog. ‘The dreadful woman from whom I bought the house, Mrs. Wellsmore, is staying in it while I’m away, minding Emma. She has a diet of gin, cigarettes, and aspirin, and I expect she smokes in bed.’

  Alice listened to the undercurrent, to Danielle’s voice saying, ‘I’ve reached a crossroads – and I’m lost.’ A few months ago her letters had sounded so confident; she had announced: I’m through with men! Radical celibacy equals peace of mind.

  A deep breath turned into a sigh. ‘The worst problem is I think I’ve fallen in love with the producer-director. He’s a crook.’

  Alice folded her hands and closed her eyes. There was some weakness in Danielle’s nature that drew her to tainted men – including Patrick, for whom she’d grieved for years, although he was a drunk and unfaithful. As a child there had been an incident with one of Bonny’s admirers. Of course, living alone with her mother, who was more or less a geisha . . . Rich men paid the rent and the school fees for Bonny, who was a real beauty and as high-handed as a duchess, her haughtiness that of a woman made bitter when still young. The mother had been kept in furs and the daughter in trifles like Swiss watches. But it was always on the edge, and the girl had been scarred: she looked for God in men, someone to save her.

  ‘You told me you were never going to fall in love again, after – what was his name? – the last one?’

  ‘James.’ Danielle’s voice was glum. She’d helped James get a lead role in a production of Arturo Ui, whereupon he’d turned layabout, and wouldn’t help with the shopping.

  Sipping the hot clear tea, Alice contemplated that aspect of women that whispers, ‘You’re not really good enough; you’ll never achieve what you could if you were a man.’ The serpent says, ‘But if you love a man, if you become his soul for him, you can guide him to happiness – and that will be an achievement.’ She had listened to its seductive murmur for more than sixty years.

  Danielle, also sipping tea, pictured Bennie – he with the Filipino servant, he who ate all his meals in restaurants, who drove a white Corniche (discounted at $40,000 a year, thanks to the tax laws of California), Bennie Kidron: supermarket shopping?

  ‘Is he a real crook?’

  ‘He has a certain reputation in Los Angeles. He had money troubles after his partner died in a helicopter accident. The partner, Raphael Schultz, was the’ – she grimaced – ‘genius auter, as they say. He was famous in the seventies for low-budget, cult movies.’ Kidron was the salesman of the team; he raised the money, he did deals. ‘Now he wants to be a director. I doubt if he could direct traffic – and he’s hired me because he needs a writer who will feed him every line. But he’s full of charm, when it suits him. And always full of cheek.’ Bennie had said, ‘I’m gonna make fifteen, twenty million out of this. I need fifteen.’ What he needed it for was not clear. Danielle was now sitting in silence, realizing she was already deeply in conspiracy with Bennie, that her discretion about his greed sealed it like a vow.

  There was a delicate query in Alice’s raised eyebrows.

  ‘We’re not lovers!’ she replied quickly. ‘Nor does he give the slightest sign of finding me interesting.’

  So much the worse, Alice thought.

  Alice had a habit of punctuating conversations with periods of quiet during which she sat with her eyes closed. When she opened them it was the signal to begin a fresh topic. Danielle enjoyed the orderliness this gave, but she dreaded what had to come next: her father.

  ‘I tried to find his telephone number . . .’

  ‘You shall find it, my dear. You have to. You knew you had to return to Jerusalem, and now that you’re here you know you must find him. Your mind will never have peace until you do. You told me that yourself, once.’

  ‘But it’s not in the Hebrew phone book.’

  Alice thought that a poor excuse. Danielle should know how small Jerusalem was, that ‘everybody knows everybody.’ There were invisible structures, like the crystalline lattice in a saturated solution. All the pre-Independence people knew each other; all the German-speakers; all the Anglophones; the Second Aliya; the Herut people. The country was a laminate of clans.

  ‘He’s religiously – how that word is misused – active,’ Alice added. ‘My born-again Christian girls know of him.’ And David had told her: Professor Garin, retired, was still as troublesome as he ever had been since 1948 when his crusading against the Arabs had not been recognized for what it was: a form of madness. It was restricted, however, to a single area of his mind so that Garin had been able to continue his research, begun under the British who had sent him to Palestine, and had attained the status of professor in the medical school where his work on viruses had been outstanding. For thirty years he had been writing pamphlets calling for the rebuilding of the Temple (prophecy said that on its third building the Temple could not be destroyed). Alice had seen them occasionally. They usually began with the motto ‘He who rules Jerusalem rules Israel, and he who rules the Temple Mount rules Jerusalem.’ Since 1967 Garin’s pamphlets had been taken more seriously. She gazed at Danielle, whose face had become small and anxious with questions beneath its rug of copper hair.

  ‘He’s considered a prophet, by some. He’s part of the shadow spreading over this country – it’s a fearful thing.’ The Christian girls spoke of Satan’s wing darkening the Jerusalem sky, but they meant something different: they prayed for Israel to bomb Damascus, ‘for Damascus shall be in heaps,’ the Bible said. When they mentioned Islam they said ‘Satan.’

  ‘I wasn’t prepared for something I saw at the airport,’ Danielle said. ‘What I can only describe as racial tension between some European Israelis and some Middle Eastern ones.’

  ‘The blacks! My dear, that’s what the Sephardim are called. They’re the dogsbodies – Arabs aside – and they’re blamed for everything. And, you know, I think it suits -’ The doorbell rang. ‘That will be Suzie from the home-help agency. She’ll know how to find Garin.’

  The young woman who followed Alice back into the parlor was so thin Danielle guessed she suffered from anorexia nervosa. She had pretty dark hair and eyes, but there was something feral in her expression; she looked uncertain, almost suspicious, as she stood close to the blue woolen curtain, her glance directed down over her long Indian cotton dress, thick maroon stockings, and clumpy sandals.

  ‘This is Marilyn, who’s going to clean for me today because Suzie, who normally comes, has a cold.’

  In Danielle’s warm hand Marilyn’s fingers were icy and all bones.

  ‘You’re freezing!’

  Both recoiled.

  There was a hint of perverse pleasure in the girl’s expression: ‘I lost my gloves yesterday,’ she said. ‘But Jesus will send me another pair,’ and Danielle realized there was a challenge thrown at her from Marilyn’s eyes. She thought: scavenger’s eyes.

  Alice had gone to make more tea. When she returned she found them watching each other as warily as strange cats. She could see what Danielle was thinking: that Marilyn needed a bath. She had folded the skirts of her dowdy cotton dress over her knees in a manner suggesting that invisible men, across the room, were leering at them; her hair, in particular, did smell unwashed, especially alongside Danielle, who would as soon go out without wearing scent as Alice would without wearing her beret.

  Marilyn was saying she had a brother in the movie business. The rest of the story shimmered, waiting, while she attended to the modesty of her knees o
nce more. ‘He died very young.’ She turned a brilliant smile on Alice. ‘He’s with the Lord now.’

  It’s not often, Danielle was thinking, that I meet someone I loathe on sight. But there was something fascinating alloyed to Marilyn’s repulsiveness, she found, and was curious to know more about her: why born-again Christian? (Why not est?) Why Israel? Why a cleaner’s job? – She’d said she had a degree in sociology from UCLA; her manner was that of a girl who’d grown up with servants; maybe she even came from Bel Air.

  Alice had gone off to show her the broom closet and was away a long time. She returned holding a photograph of Jesus and sat down with a thump.

  ‘Those girls have the Lord right under their thumbs, you know. When Suzie misses a bus it’s Jesus who sends her another one. She’s told me! The Egged bus company has nothing to do with it . . . How d’you think you’re going to get on with Marilyn?’

  Danielle thought not at all.

  Again Alice sat in contemplation of the troubles of the young. When she had turned eighty something extraordinary had happened – her earnestness fell away like an old skin, sloughed off. She stood naked in front of her bedroom mirror one morning and looked at her straight, thin body as if it were brand-new, its wrinkles a puppy-looseness. She was platinum and white, like an old moonbeam. And she began to laugh at herself, knowing that the body didn’t matter any longer – she could throw it out the window, go parachuting, leap on a tiger’s back – she no longer cared if she had a body or not. All the terrible heat of emotion it had generated, the turmoil and anxiety, the passions for mankind and men, all those ideas and plans that made her life fizz and spit . . . What a game they had been. What a struggle – like Israel’s: he who struggled with God. The mirror showed her a column of white marble that rose on its toes. Soon she’d been able to throw it away to join the other stones in Jerusalem – because now inside, now outside, now surrounding it, there was something else, immortal and unalterable. But one cannot explain these things to the young, she thought. One can only encourage them, try to give them the nerve to walk into fire, and pass through it: Danielle’s a plucky girl. But immature.