Winter in Jerusalem Read online

  ‘When is his doctor doing the ward rounds?’

  She didn’t know; they don’t tell the nurses. That was the son-in-law! My God, she was going to call a male nurse.

  The son-in-law was tall, slim, elegant, and wearing a gray homburg. ‘Come, Mother,’ he said in English and taking Mrs. Rubenstein by the elbow he escorted her through the double doors. Danielle hesitated, then followed in his regal wake.

  On the other side there was a wide corridor, full of people – nurses, physicians in green cotton jackets, visitors in civilian, religious, and battle dress. There was a quiet but cheerful atmosphere. The wards opened on either side of the passage; whole families were gathered around beds in some; a man wearing a white satin skullcap stood reading from a prayer book. He reached over the plastic swing table suspended above the foot of one bed and broke the challa, then poured wine into a liqueur-sized glass of lapis lazuli blue. Danielle tiptoed along, looking in doorways. A physician stood back for her to pass.

  ‘Professor Garin?’

  He pointed down the corridor. Other families were softly chanting prayers.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The doctor had followed her, ‘Are you a relation of Professor Garin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He doesn’t want visits from his relations.’

  The physician, a round little man, perhaps a Russian, looked down at the cream linoleum and chuckled. ‘Nu-he hasn’t got any. Especially he has not got a daughter from Australia,’

  She gave a huge sigh, so tired now she felt no fight left in her. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He has angina. He overexcites himself. He can go home on Sunday.’

  ‘Why won’t he see me?’

  He had small, perfect hands so pink and clean they looked brand-new. There it was – the gesture of open palms. ‘I’m a heart specialist. Not a psychiatrist.’ He seemed worn-out, as if he had been on his feet all day in an operating theater. ‘Maybe I’m in the wrong job. In my next life . . .’ His eyes twinkled and persuaded her with professional charm. He had taken her arm and was gently shepherding her back toward the double doors.

  ‘I’ve come all this way . . .’ She could hear herself whining.

  They had reached the doors. ‘You travel but you don’t necessarily arrive,’ he said. He took the dead flowers and the album and the book in its torn wrapping. On the other side again, her eye pressed against the door’s black rubber baffle, she could see his stocky torso returning down the corridor.

  The Royal North Shore nurse said, ‘You’re a nice one, sneaking in like that,’ but she gave Danielle a cup of tea and a biscuit all the same.

  Downstairs, outside, she felt as if she had plunged her head into an icebucket. It was spitting with snow and thrillingly cold. Perhaps, she thought, a taxi will go past – one headed for East Jerusalem or Bethlehem. She started to walk, juggling the umbrella. The snow was playful, dancing in circles with the wind; when the umbrella jerked back as her foot slipped in a pothole an eddy of it swirled against the side of her face in a swarm of stinging needles. My body must still be warm, she thought, from the tea. It’s twelve hours since I’ve eaten.

  This was not a built-up area and the streetlights were separated by great stretches of blackness. At her shoulder, behind her back, some sort of open space – maybe a field or wasteland – gaped like a cold, open oven. She came to another light and in its chemical orange glare saw for a moment that the old fox fur on her jacket had turned golden. But her hands -

  - Where are my gloves?

  She could not remember putting them down. Her hands were a jaundiced color under the light. They had stopped burning and throbbing; now they only ached with cold. Her watch said 8:05; she had been walking for twenty-five minutes. It seemed longer. ‘You wretched things,’ she said aloud to her boots. No car went past. The next streetlight appeared to be hundreds of yards away, and was set high. She began to climb the hill. Hands, face, and feet were aching now and somewhere in the jacket there was a split between two pelts, because a shaft of ice had entered and was slicing at her ribs. A taxi flew by, then a couple of cars full of people. She thought of trying to hitch. Just to Alice’s place. It could only be a mile or so. But this hill. And in these boots: four-inch heels.

  When she reached the next streetlight, she stopped to check her road map; halted, the rhythmn of movement turned off, she became aware of another horrifying sort of music: every fiber in her legs was jumping and fluttering as if an orchestra were playing soundlessly inside limbs with a life of their own, beyond her will. She could feel her armpits streaming and knew it was fright as much as effort.

  The map was incomprehensible: she was sure she had passed that park, or field, or whatever it was, but the darkness was still there at her left shoulder, and across the road there was a void. Her legs said, Keep walking! and her mind answered, But we’re lost. The snow had turned back into sleet. A truck went past, and another car. She could not do it. It looked so simple when you saw other people do it, jerk a thumb – but a voice was saying, Only an Arab will stop. Even here, in West Jerusalem, it will be an Arab. There will be two or three of them in the car and you won’t have a chance. You’ll be found over in the field, or maybe they’ll go to the trouble of burying you and you won’t be found at all.

  Another car went past. The voice said, See the color of the license plates? They’re from the West Bank. I warned you.

  Her nose was running and swollen water stood at the lower rims of her eyes; vision became a dark blur. Then utter stillness. Something – a man – had moved out of the night at her back. She could not see his face nor make out anything of his form, but she knew he was large, the color of coffee, and angry with her: enraged. He had some weapon in his hand, a cosh. She stood still for him to hit her, which he did – half a dozen stunning blows on the head. He talked quietly as his arm flailed: I am here every minute, he said. If you don’t accept me, you will die forever, like an acorn thrown to the pigs. The final blow shuddering on her skull satisfied him.

  He was gone, returned to the dark.

  The car, a mustard-colored Alfa Sud, began slowing fifty yards before it pulled up level with her on the opposite side of the road. The woman tried Hebrew, then switched to English. ‘Are you crazy? Shabbat Shalom. You’re crazy to be hitchhiking.’ She gave Danielle a good looking-over, with the interior light switched on, shaking her head, allowing her hands to fly from the steering wheel to emphasize the admonishment. All right, she was a tourist, but didn’t she read the newspapers? A Danish girl had been murdered, hitchhiking down in the Negev. And her own niece, still in the army, just a few weeks ago was threatened by a man who gave her a lift – he had his Uzi on the backseat. A few years ago girls could hitchhike, but now . . . This was the Middle East.

  They looked at each other’s hair, that special index among women that measures age, social status, indicates – even in its deceitfulness – happiness and discontent. The woman’s was silvery-brown; her French roll was loosening. No paint on her fingernails, none on her face. A lawyer’s briefcase and a scuffed lizard handbag tossed to the backseat to make room for her passenger. Dutch, she said; been living in Jerusalem since just after the war. Things had changed: Begin, King of Israel! Who could have believed it? A rabble taking over. This had been the most democratic state in the world – and it still was in a lot of ways, anybody could say anything – but Elohim! a king! They could be back in the days of the Judges, petitioning God for a king so they could be like all the other nations – whom, incidentally, they had wanted to be different from – and then anointing Saul. Who, by the way, was crazy. Begin was also crazy – you’ve heard his motto? We Fight, Therefore We Are. The Sephardim kiss his photograph. And as for Peres: who’d vote for a man who lost his nerve when he was heckled, and screamed at the crowd? Begin might be crazy, but he has dignity. As for that Sharon-Arik the Unstoppable . . . Her sister was leaving the country, going back to Amsterdam. Already her son had a plastic left hand – twenty-three years old an
d a plastic hand. Who’d have children? Why have children if you have to feed them to a war machine? You know who persecutes Israel now? Israelis! Why live here if you get called an Ashken-Nazi? My neighbor – she runs a small publishing company – had a swastika painted on her car. She lived through the war. The blacks should have been in Europe in 1942. Do you know Amsterdam?

  Her shrug at Danielle’s ‘no’ was a resignation from further interest in her. Her frankness tipped upside down and became the opposite: inward brooding, resentment.

  They had reached Rahavia, and Alice’s street.

  ‘Yes, yes. Shabbat Shalom.’ Impatient to be gone, a woman living in a gale, eyes red with grit.

  The note still thumbtacked to Alice’s front door said ‘Please ring LOUDLY.’ Danielle rang a second time, then began knocking. Nothing happened. She sat on the steps to rest for a few seconds.

  When she opened her eyes again it was totally dark – the stair-well light had a timer that kept it on for only a couple of minutes – and she experienced pain that was almost audible, as if her body had become a sheet of freezing tin that shuddered and clanged as fists beat on it.

  She could not stand up, at first. Then, very slowly, antennae crept out; a foot slid into the dark, trembling to sense a step; a hand found a patch of wall that burnt it with cold. An inch at a time she moved herself toward the glowing circle on the wall of the stairwell that could save her from pitching down, neck broken, nose and teeth smashed. Suddenly she had it. Pushed. The lights turned on.

  An exquisite whiff of food seeped out from a doorway lower down.

  Its glass eye observed her for a long time, then there was the sound of bolts being drawn. A mouth breathing wine fumes spoke to her through a narrow shaft. I’m going to keel over, Danielle thought.

  ‘Please. Please,’ she said.

  There was the sound of a door chain being unhitched. Three of them looked at her: a chubby nondescript young man in a crocheted skullcap, a wan young woman about seven months pregnant, and a harridan with a brass perm who had drunk too much Sabbath wine. She wore one high-heeled shoe and held the other in her hand.

  ‘Alice has gone away.’ She made a movement as if to close the door. The gesture came of itself, shockingly naked. Danielle did what Patrick had done when he was a police roundsman: she put her foot in the door.

  ‘Give me something to eat.’

  Who had spoken? Who stared at their startled faces with eyes as blank and indifferent to their lives as a demiurge? It said, Assuage my hunger or I shall eat you. Who was it?

  - I. Barbarous with the fear of disintegrating.

  Her face twitched into apology, a smile.

  There were candles on the Sabbath table, flakes of crust from the broken bread, an asterisk where wine had spilt. They fed her, the offerings coming in wrong order – first the pudding, then slices of roasted meat, some bread. She didn’t try to talk. They whispered among themselves in Hebrew, then grew braver and discussed her aloud. When she looked up at them, their glances flinched away and they began whispering again, darting smiles at her. The harridan, both feet crushing down on high heels now, said in English, ‘You were hungry.’ Her angry, cruel eyes, a layer of iridescent blue shadow painted on the wrinkles of the lids, blinked rapidly. ‘I know what it is to be hungry.’

  The woman – ‘I’m Ruth’ – offered to drive Danielle home, causing her son-in-law to look away, abstract himself, as men do when confronted by the intimacies that only females should deal with – birth, menstruation, diapers. He stared at the curtains, a male knowing how to remain master of life by distancing himself from its mess, which at this moment was the emotional and religious mess these women were creating with their talk of driving on Shabbat. But maybe it would save a life! How could a woman walk through East Jerusalem at midnight? It was madness! Rahavia, West Jerusalem – you could walk there at three in the morning. But the Nablus Road? Those alleyways? The mother-in-law appealed to him; he studied the curtains.

  ‘No. I really don’t want you to,’ Danielle repeated but her wishes were irrelevant to this struggle between them that was as old as the laws of Judaism, as ancient as the yearnings of women to be beloved in the eyes of God. She watched Ruth thrashing in a net and thought, Men gave us God as they give us babies; our hearts open with love, our breasts with milk – but as we gaze down we meet eyes narrowed and lips mouthing, ‘temptress, slut, whore’ – yet the milk still flows.

  ‘The Law is the Law,’ he said. The wife’s attention slipped from mother to husband, her palms resting on the barrel beneath the folds of her dress. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered her. She appeared grateful as she sank behind the weight of her majestic belly.

  Danielle thought suddenly, I can’t bear this.

  ‘Thank-you-all-very-much. I’m going now,’ she said, and left.

  Fifteen

  Tikva and Gideon had leave that weekend. Tikva was driven down from Sidon in an armored vehicle, leaving before dawn on Friday morning; a few hours later Gideon hitched with an American couple, the man a diplomat, who drove him all the way from Be’er Sheva to Jerusalem in their Mercedes with a stereophonic sound system. Diplomatic staff were forbidden to offer soldiers lifts and soldiers were forbidden to accept, for security reasons. Gideon pretended he could not speak English – understood just a bit – so there was no harm done; they didn’t ask him questions. It was to guard against loose talk to well-informed and curious foreigners that the law against diplomatic rides was made. They gave him the backseat; the wife asked her husband to turn down the Beethoven, but he knew what was what.

  ‘It’s not necessary, dear. These kids can sleep on their feet. It’s the first thing the army teaches them – learn to sleep any time you get the chance. And the second thing . . .’ he took a quick look over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes?’ She was young, maybe his second wife, attending to what he said with an expression of reverence in her round, translucent blue eyes. Gideon’s were closed.

  ‘The second is: how to finagle the system. To survive Israeli Army training! . . .’ He laughed to himself. Gideon decided he liked the American, whose accent was similar to his father’s. He listened for a while longer, then indeed went to sleep. He dreamed of Tikva. She kept changing, appearing one moment in azure robes, then in white; then wearing something he could not make out because they were in darkness and she had taken his hand to lead him through a subterranean corridor, some sort of labyrinth, over an underground river. There was a fire in the distance. ‘Look – our children,’ she said, and children came running toward them with outstretched arms, wanting Gideon to pick them up, but they were out of reach.

  When he awoke, the music had stopped, the man and woman were silent; they had passed Sodom and were on the flat road beside the Salt Sea, that area of utter stillness. The car purred and they three breathed. Nothing else lived, not a tree, not a blade of grass; it was nonbeing in an exquisite, sculptured landscape. Dun-colored towers rose beside a stretch of turquoise water, hardly water at all, more like a beautifully-colored embalming fluid. The English name for it was better: Dead Sea.

  ‘You’ve had a good sleep,’ the woman said.

  ‘I dreamed.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ She turned around to stare at him, as if dreaming were a curiosity reserved to special people. ‘What about?’

  ‘My soul.’ He remembered he barely spoke English. ‘I dreamed my soul.’

  She sighed. ‘Did you hear that, Stanley? This young man has been dreaming about his soul.’ Her glance rested on the Uzi lying beside Gideon; he had slept with his right hand resting over the trigger mechanism.

  Stanley flicked a look in the rear-vision mirror, amused, quizzical. ‘That must have been an edifying experience.’ He said it fast, too fast for anyone who was not fluent. Gideon gave an idiot smile. Stanley tried again. ‘Been up in Lebanon, have you?’ Same smile, same uncomprehending shake of the head. ‘Habla inglés,’ Stanley said to his wife. She clattered the cassette boxes, chose a Vivaldi; Stanl
ey patted her knee. ‘Good. Something lively.’

  The great Masada mountain loomed at their left shoulder as the car was pursued by its shadow through this valley where nothing lived.

  Gideon was looking forward to meeting Alice’s friend, the woman who would write a movie about Masada. He would try to tell her what he had experienced, wearing his new fatigues, that first time he had climbed the Serpent Path up to its summit, how his heart felt the size of a cabbage, bursting – my ancestors! A race of giants! – with pride, incredulity, awe. Maybe what one of the Americans in his unit said was true: that memory is not something stored inside people’s brains but is, rather, a field outside the dimension of time – and the brain is just like a television set that can be tuned to receive it. The American said scientists were now working to prove this, and that he was, too – he had returned to Israel ‘to tune myself to our past.’ They had all experienced shivers of it, on Masada.

  Their sergeant had undone his pants and sent a thread unraveling hundreds of meters down to the skeleton of a Roman camp. ‘Look here, you young fuckers – this is what we’re going to do to the Arabs.’ He’d ordered Gideon to drink water; next day he’d ordered him to climb ten times up and down the mountain beneath the Monastery of Temptation. ‘Next time I say piss, you’ll piss,’ he’d said. Gideon was not going to tell the Australian that. He’d told Tikva.

  The Australian woman did not turn up. They telephoned her hotel, but she had not returned all day and the message Alice had left in the morning, inviting Danielle to dine that night at Amos’s apartment, was still pigeonholed beside her room key, the desk clerk said. Alice fretted: ‘I should have pinned a note on my front door for her,’ and ‘She probably doesn’t know there’s no transport on the Sabbath – she could be stuck anywhere.’ Amos was in a bad mood: he had cooked for six people – himself, Gideon, Tikva, Alice, Alice’s friend, and Mira – and only four had turned up. At the last moment Mira had telephoned to say she had to visit her sister-in-law, but would try to come over for coffee. By nine-fifteen she had not arrived.