When I Lived in Modern Times (15 page)

O
N
the fourth of August the siege was lifted and the dead city came to life once more. The news vendors’ kiosks were mobbed, people flocked to the zoo to see the baby monkeys, Finkel was playing Hamlet at the theater, the watermelon man was back on the corner and the ice-cream parlors were open again, where I went at once to sit on a high revolving stool, lick at a strawberry sundae and wonder what flavor pistachio might be. Mrs. Kulp’s salon reopened and the ladies of Tel Aviv had their hair shampooed and set, permed and restyled because whatever else is true you will never in a million years overcome a woman’s concern about her appearance.

Johnny stayed away for at least a week after the siege was over. “You okay?” he asked as he swung through my door, grabbing my face and thrusting his tongue into my mouth. “Hey, let me look at you. What a doll. What’s this, a new dress?”

“Where have you been?”

“Here and there, darling, here and there.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said, as I sat on his knee with my arms around his neck on one of my uncomfortable chairs. “This information I’m giving you. Who is getting it?”

“Those who serve the interests of Eretz Israel, of course.” He stroked my hair.

“And who are they, exactly?”

“Oh. It’s
that
kind of conversation.” He lifted me off his lap and reached into his packet for a cigarette. He lit two and gave one to me. I sat down opposite him. The evening sun cast long shadows on the tiled floor. “Does it matter?” he asked me.

“I don’t want to be a dupe. Or a dope.”

“Don’t you think that the less you know, the safer you are?”

“But I’m implicated.”

“Not much.”

“But what if that passport you got me hadn’t passed muster, or they’d found the other one, what would I have said then?”

He shrugged. “There are always risks.”

“Yes, but
what
am I risking this for? What am I involved in? Don’t I have the right to know that much?”

A pianist had just moved in next door. He was practicing the “Goldberg” Variations. The notes slithered about the building sounding as if they might have been composed yesterday instead of three hundred years ago.

“Doesn’t that guy ever shut up?” Johnny said. “What is that stuff?”

“Bach. He’s putting on a concert next month.”

“Count me out if he offers you tickets. I like something more lively. You heard Frank Sinatra?”

“Yes. Let’s get back to the subject.”

“God, this place is bloody hot. Got any lemonade? You know, in the house where I grew up in Jerusalem, we had a fan on the ceiling. It was a very old house, from the time of the Turks. I don’t know why those Yekkes who came from Berlin or wherever didn’t think to put something like that in when they built these places. Madness. Everything up to date and modern but they don’t spare a thought for the climate. The Arabs,
they
know how to build houses for the heat. Maybe one day I’ll take you to one of the villages, you’ll like it, they’re very colorful people. You could…”

“I’m losing patience, Johnny,” I said, and stamped my foot.

He looked at it, my foot in a red leather sandal. I loved red shoes in those days, and matching red handbags. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But understand that whatever I tell you will mean
more
danger, not less. You know what you’re asking? I’ve tried to protect you, to keep you marginal. I didn’t want you to be too involved. Listen, I could have had a very different kind of girlfriend, a type I’ve known all my life, we would have absolutely no secrets from each other. We would be fighting at each other’s side. One day, when the real war comes, we would be on the roof together, we would both have guns in our hands and we would be firing them. But that’s not what I want, I chose you because you are a very, very pretty girl, because you are all alone here, because you have guts and…”

“Because I’m your way in to the British.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t the first thing I thought. It only occurred to me after I saw you with the blond hair and the new name talking to that policeman.” It was the night we became lovers.

“You used me!”

“Darling, isn’t it better to be used than to be of no use to anyone?”

I could make no answer to this. I wanted to be loved purely, for who I was alone. But I didn’t know if such love existed. I still don’t. So I said nothing.

“Who are you? You owe me that.”

“Well, my name is not exactly Levi Aharoni as it is not exactly Johnny but a name means nothing. A name is just something on a document. It
tells
you nothing. To you I’m Johnny and that’s as it should be. You don’t need to know my real name as long as you know
me.
What else?”

“You support Tel Aviv Betar. Does that mean you were in the Betar youth group?”

“Yes, naturally. I was a very tough kid.”

“And does that mean you are in the Irgun?”

“Yes.”

“Not the Stern Gang?”

“ We call it the Lehi, but no, I’m not in the Stern Gang. Between us and Lehi there’s a big difference. The Irgun and the Haganah are not allowed to be armed except during an operation. The Lehi have orders to be armed twenty-four hours a day and to shoot soldiers and kill them whenever they have an opportunity. Their idea is that the mothers in England will be shocked and say, ‘Bring our boys home.’ It’s a good plan on one level, but I’m not going to kill someone on sight, just because of where they were born. It would be barbaric. If they hang my comrade Dov Gruner, then I might change my mind, but for the moment, no.”

“Did you blow up the King David Hotel?”

“Not me, personally.”

“Did you kidnap the British officers?”

“Yes.”

“The names and addresses I’ve been giving you, are they for future kidnaps?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t think you are putting me in danger?”

He shrugged again. “To only a small degree. Listen, there are people
clamoring
to help us, to get themselves killed if necessary, all kinds, students, craftsmen. They all want to go on operations and they give me a headache saying, ‘If you don’t take me I’ll go join the Lehi.’ I have to find a way of giving a piece of cake to everybody. We have people inside the police, we have girls who disguise themselves as prostitutes. Did I ask you to do that? No. There’s a girl from Rehovot, she meets British officers, she takes them to her room, then our guys are waiting outside. What I ask you to do is harmless by comparison. And remember, Evelyn, it was not me
who gave you an alter ego. You had that already, two in fact. You’d made your own cover.”

“And you assumed that I would support the aims of the Irgun, the violence, the bombs. I’m telling you, I don’t.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“I don’t support terrorism.”

“Terrorist? I’m not a terrorist, I’m a freedom fighter. Were the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto terrorists?”

“They were up against evil.”

“So am I.”

“Oh for God’s sake, the British aren’t evil. You’ve lived amongst them, you know that.”

“As individuals, no, many of them are not. In fact some have collaborated, they bring us arms if we pay them. How do we always know when there’s going to be a search? Because our intelligence is very strong. One of them said he wouldn’t take any money for information but he wanted my watch, he wanted a souvenir from a terrorist. It was my bar mitzvah watch. I told him to go to hell.

“But they’re anti-Semites, you know. They don’t think they are but their distaste for Tel Aviv tells you everything. Find me a goy who loves Tel Aviv. Yerushalayim, easy. That’s the Holy Land, but here, there’s nothing distracting them from Jewish-ness. We’ve got no sites of antiquity to offer them, no beautiful landscapes, no places of pilgrimage. Nothing but Jews. Jewish everyday life. They can manage the Jews when we’re something special, Yehudi Menuhin, perhaps. The world is big enough for a few special Jews. It’s the ordinariness of the Jews they can’t stand. The millions of ordinary Jews with nothing particular to contribute, the Jews from Yemen, from the Polish ghettos, the Jewish riff-raff going about their business being Jews. The Jew-haters think Tel Aviv is just a city with too many Jews making a mess in their precious desert. They don’t want anything here but picturesque Arabs in their robes to take photographs of so they can go home and stick them in an album and say to their good chums, ‘Look what I saw when I went abroad.’ “

“Yes, but there are other means to…”

“No. There aren’t.”

“Ben-Gurion thinks so. So did my Uncle Joe.”

“Yeah? I wonder what your Uncle Joe really thought. Where do you think we get our money? We have a man who goes to London every few months, goes round all the rich guys. You want me to check with him whether he has your Uncle Joe on his list? As for Ben-Gurion, he’s another fool. Listen, until the King David we had a pact with the Haganah
and now the pact is finished because Ben-Gurion doesn’t want to be associated with us. He doesn’t want his hands to be seen to be dirty. So technically, you can tell yourself with good conscience that you were supplying information to the Haganah but through the intermediary of the Irgun.

“As for myself, the Haganah say we mustn’t fight the British by force, only by demonstrations and bringing in illegal immigrants. Bring in illegals? Who did that? Us. Before the war we brought twenty-two thousand Jews to Eretz Israel. That’s twenty-two thousand Jews we saved from Hitler,
we
saved, not them. And those who we tragically could not save? Evelyn, ask yourself, how can we be sure it won’t happen again? By having an army. And how will we have an army? By having our own country. And how do we get our own country? By having an underground army to drive out the people who are preventing us from having our country. This is simple. This is logic. There’s nothing complicated about it. What I am doing now, I will be doing after the state is created.”

“You’re a tailor.”

“For the time being, but soon I’ll be in the army again, our army, this time. Maybe I’ll even be a general, who knows? I’ll be respectable. But until then I pick up my gun with or without permission and I fight.”

“So when you’re not seeing me, you’re killing people.”

“No, wrong. You see because I’m good at impersonating the British, what I do is assume the disguise of different ranks. Then when, say, we want to find some rifles, I go to the gate at the barracks at Sarafand while the troops are in the mess hall and I tell whichever soldier is on duty that I have come to relieve him. There is an urgent message, he must go and find his sergeant. I take his place, I let my friends into the weapons store. And people say afterward, ‘Oh, I walked past and there was a private on duty. He gave me a light for my cigarette. He had a Yorkshire accent.’ Then they go looking for this Yorkshire private and they can’t find him. Next time I’m a lance corporal from Manchester, or a captain from Norwich. Sometimes I do altogether different things, but those we’ll pass over.”

“Like kidnapping the officers?”

“Correct.”

“Why did you release them?”

“We didn’t have anywhere safe to keep them.”

“What about the bombing in Jerusalem. Most of the people who died were Jews.”

“Yes. It’s a tragedy. But it’s war.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Yes. What do you want to do now?”

“You mean do I want to get on the bike and go to the Galina café to eat ice cream?”

“No, no. I’m not that callous. I mean do you want to chuck me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you need to think about it.”

“I suppose so.”

“Suppose I come back in a few days. I’ll bring your shirt, definitely.”

“Okay.”

“And you’ll have an answer for me, I hope.” He looked at me and I saw that he was far from certain what it would be. The thought of rejection would be in his mind until he saw me again.

“Do you think I’m being naïve?”

“Listen, these questions aren’t easy.” His voice was very tender. “They’re easy for me because I grew up in the middle of it all and I don’t have choices. You’re feeling your way in this situation. You need time. I just thought that you wanted to help and that you could do your little bit without knowing too much and getting into too much trouble. I was trying to make things easy for you, to help you make your contribution without a lot of risk. That was all. I like you too much to want any harm to come to you.” He paused and went red. I’d never seen this color on his face before. “In fact I like you a lot.”

He stood up and we walked toward the door. Before I opened it he held me tightly and kissed me on both cheeks and I wanted more than anything to stay inside the strong circle of his arms. My tears were wet on his skin.

“Don’t cry, baby,” he said. “Listen, one thing’s for sure. It won’t be me who chucks
you.”

“You’ll be back at the end of the week?”

“Yes. I said so.”

I let him go and I closed the door. I heard his feet thundering down the stairs, a bass note to the “Goldberg” Variations, and I walked to the balcony where I saw him climb on the Norton and I watched him until he turned left on Ben Yehuda and disappeared. The night was thrumming. I heard power lines make music from their own vibrations in the heat.

A few minutes later Mrs. Linz came and knocked on my door. She was going out for a short time and wanted to know if I could watch out for the child.

“So. Did the boyfriend turn out to be a terrorist?”

I didn’t answer.

She smiled triumphantly. “See?” she said. “I am always right. You silly girl. You
Ostjude
who doesn’t know how to think.”

A
FTER
I had got rid of Mrs. Linz and the pianist had finally given up on the “Goldberg” Variations and gone out to some assignation at one of the cafés on the seashore, I looked in on the child. He seemed content, lying on his stomach on his bed, dressed in his little underpants and singlet, reading an encyclopedia. I took a shower but a few minutes after I had dried myself my skin was sticky once again. One evening of terrible humidity an earring had slipped off the lobe of my ear as I was walking along Dizengoff Street. My God! I hadn’t even known that the ears possessed sweat glands.

I left the bedroom and went out to sit on the balcony.

I began to consider my customers, the people whose names I had been delivering to the Irgun, how I would watch their reflections in the mirror and try to figure out who exactly they were. For I understood that in the eyes of the Jews of Palestine they were one-dimensional types, as thin as the silver veneer on the salon looking glasses: the
British
, with their pale skins that reacted so badly to the sun and their crazy religion which forced them to pretend to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their second-rate god, and their weakness for dogs and gardens.

I thought of a morning, the previous week, when I was in the salon and listening to me with a half-smile as I said that I thought larger, softer waves might be the next new trend in coiffure, was Mrs. Bolton, my literary friend from the beach. Looking at her in the mirror, I saw once again that she was not a pretty woman, but I had noticed how regularly she came in for her shampoo and set and how she took care of her appearance and cultivated a style of dress which was smart even though it wasn’t up-to-the-minute. She had managed to concoct a look for herself that required little thought or maintenance but suited her.

“Appearances are awfully important aren’t they?” she said, taking a cigarette from her navy leather handbag. Next came a small silver lighter. Her scarlet thumbnail clicked a little flame into life.

“Oh yes. You can’t go out looking any old how.”

“My husband and I are both very interested in how things appear.” Her hair was a fawn color. She liked it arranged in a style which she could simply run a comb through between appointments.

I remembered that I had had a conversation with her on the beach about novels and that I could not remember who had been discussed. Evelyn Waugh? Elizabeth Bowen? Ronald Fir-bank? I was not so very clever at managing my different disguises and remembering that it was perfectly possible for them to be checked against each other. So not knowing whether I was supposed to be a hairdresser or an intellectual I thought that as I was now actually playing the hairdresser’s role I should stick to that and hope that Mrs. Bolton had forgotten our literary discussions.

“For example, I expect you’re an expert in the ways one can completely transform one’s identity through hairdressing and cosmetics. Dark roots are always a giveaway. You know all about that sort of thing, don’t you, Priscilla?”

“Er, yes,” I replied.

She looked at my reflection in the mirror and I looked back at hers.

“My husband is encouraging me to write a detective novel, like Miss Christie and Miss Sayers. Think up a plot, scatter the clues about, how hard could it be?”

“Pretty hard, I’d have thought.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You just need an understanding of human nature. It all comes down to psychology in the end, that’s what George says. He’s a lot brighter than people give him credit for. He’s always telling me I’d make a good spy. Or perhaps it might not be a detective novel at all but a spy novel. You’d make an excellent spy yourself, Priscilla. What do you think?”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you’re a good listener and you’re in an occupation where people tell you their secrets. Don’t you hear all sorts of gossip—love affairs gone wrong, operations, adultery?”

“What use would that be to anyone?”

“It’s a lever, Priscilla, a little lever into people’s lives.”

“What do you mean? To blackmail people with?”

“Oddly enough, blackmail has never interested me. The financial gain seems pointless. I’m in agreement with Machiavelli, who said, as I’m sure you know already, that knowledge is power.”

Mrs. Bolton said she had studied classics at Durham University and having passed the civil-service exams had gone to work at the Home
Office in London, sharing a flat with two other girls, in Pimlico. One of them was Bolton’s sister. He was a grammar-school boy. She didn’t care about marrying beneath her. It was a meeting of the minds, really, she said. The wedding took place the year before the war broke out. They had no children. Despite this solid information, I began to feel that I had no idea who exactly Mrs. Bolton was.

The day before that, as it happened, I had met a young American couple from Brooklyn, delighted to speak my own language with other native speakers who were not British, but Jews like me. They were both wearing blue jeans, turned up into cuffs above shoes they called sneakers, and I remember it so clearly because that was the very first time I ever saw those kind of trousers, on legs crossed on a pavement near Dizengoff Circle in a café where the actors from the Habimah Theater used to come after their performances. They told me that they had not sailed the Mediterranean Sea to get here but had jumped on a plane at a place called Idlewild in New York and flown to Lydda. They took this new form of transport for granted though it sounded a long and grueling journey.

They were Roosevelt New Dealers, full of energy and intelligence, and now that the husband was out of the Marines he had returned to Europe to find survivors and help them embark on the illegal immigrant ships for the Promised Land. When the current work was finished he was going to get a teaching job in one of Palestine’s Jewish universities. The wife, who was pregnant with their first child, made jewelry from silver and her necklaces and bracelets were unlike any I had ever seen before. Like the buildings we lived in, they were quite plain and without decoration or adornment, thick curves of metal around the wrist or simple silver drops hanging from the ears. I admired the earrings she was wearing herself so much that she took them off and gave them to me. I offered her money but, smiling, she refused and it was one of the pair that had dripped from my ear-lobe onto the pavement on Dizengoff Street and nearly got lost.

I expressed amazement at their optimism when everything to me seemed so fraught with danger. “We don’t think about the past, Eve,” the woman said.

“Why not?”

“We’re Americans.” And they both began to laugh.

“Listen,” the husband told me, “we were brought up in the American way, each generation doing better than the one that went before. My grandfather came to Ellis Island with nothing. All the Jews who came, it was like a match hitting the touch-paper on a rocket, the rocket of American immigration. My father started a business, he made a lot of money, he put me through college. I have my Master’s in chemistry.
We’ve wound up with more than the wildest visionary of Lublin had ever dreamed of and all of this we did honestly. We didn’t have to pay bribes or beg favors from some tsar or assimilate to Christianity or use our muscle to threaten anyone. Every penny we earned was through hard work—the American work ethic—and our God-given Jewish brains. It’s the same for my wife, her family too, the same story. What do we learn from this? That anything is possible.”

I knew too, because they had told me, that they were utterly contemptuous of the Irgun. They were bright, sunny idealists without any shadow in their souls. They believed with all their hearts that we were going to build the new Jerusalem. We didn’t have a name for our new country in those days. They called it Zion. It would have a political system that would be the envy of everyone else. It would have Nobel Prize winners in literature and science. It would be the accretion of three thousand years of Jewish wisdom. And all this could be achieved by patient diplomacy and negotiation for if you began with violence you would end in violence and no Jew should lower himself to have blood on his hands.

They loved the sun, the heat and the date palms and talked about how the Jews of America would one day come here for their summer vacations instead of Florida or California. Here there was everything you could wish for, and everything was Jewish too. The whole waterfront could be developed as a playground with well-priced hotels offering all kinds of leisure facilities. So they smiled into the future, holding hands, drinking strong coffee and eating almond pastries as the new child grew inside her. I enjoyed the hour I spent in their company, before they gathered up their things and walked off down the street, insisting on paying my bill too.

To which camp did I belong? Not to theirs, though God knows I wanted to badly enough—the people-with-big-souls party who thought with their hearts and their morals. I did not believe that the laws of Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were going to win us a country and even if they did I somehow doubted that we would be a light unto the nations. Not with Blum and Mrs. Kulp and Mrs. Linz in it, people who were there because they had no choice and if you asked them would rather be somewhere else. Nor was I enamored with Mrs. Bolton’s lot, who were all shadow and no soul, who believed in nothing and for whom nothing was at stake, certainly not their own future and their children’s future, if they ever had any.

This left the Johnny scheme of things, those who had never entered as a diver into the unconscious world, the pragmatists who said, “Listen,
darling. What’s the problem? Everything is simple. We
drive
them out. We make it impossible for them to stay.”

With hindsight it always seems easy to do the right thing, but we were trying to decide something in those days that people don’t often get a chance to have a say in and it was this: would we be a free nation after two thousand years of wandering or would we always be a subject race? Would we be ghetto Jews or new Jews? You know, when you face a decision like that, you have to think very, very carefully. The chance might not come again for another two thousand years. You have to be very sure. But you do have to decide, you can’t avoid that.

I chose Johnny’s way in the end, the way of the bombs, the kidnapping and murder because I decided to throw in my lot with the tough Jews. We had had our thinkers and now what we needed were fighters, Jews who scared the living daylights out of people. The other choices had their merit, but Johnny’s seemed to promise the most certain outcome. Now, of course, knowing what we know, perhaps I would have decided differently but the future is a door into a darkened room and however much you fumble for the light switch you will never find it. People are always telling me that they knew what was going to happen, how it would end up here, but that’s not how I remember it.

We were all idealists in our own fashion and we did what we did from a good heart. As I sat on my balcony at dusk, watching the soldiers move along the streets, shouting orders at us through megaphones, the date palms heavy with fruit and the air heavy with heat and sweat, I thought: “We’ll force them out. We’ll make them see that they have no choice. The terror won’t last long, and then we’ll have a country and there’ll be peace. Some of these men will come back one day as tourists. They’ll lie on our beaches and we’ll sell them ice cream.”

Time was rushing, it was streaming through me like fast beams of light. I could hear a radio in the apartment below me playing the music of one of the swing orchestras, on the next street the sound of hammers and saws and drills and concrete mixers, a new building under construction, and further away still traffic along Ha Yarkon. There was no peace here, no tranquility, just an ardent sense of life going on. The two-thousand-year-old exile had its beloved child, our city, Tel Aviv, and I was going to stay here to watch it grow up.