When I Lived in Modern Times (19 page)

B
UT
the next day, someone else came. He waited for me after work. Night was falling on Tel Aviv. He took my arm and walked me down to the beach. We sat on the cold sand under the cold stars and the sea sucked in its breath.

“You have to clear out,” he said. “It isn’t safe, anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. We know because the police are entirely infiltrated. There’s a file on you at the station.”

“Where shall I go?”

“Everything is taken care of. Go home, pack your suitcase. We’ll see you later. Make sure you’re ready.”

“When will I see Johnny?”

“I don’t know. I only take care of this end of things. You speak Yiddish?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll take that into account. Don’t worry, everything is under control.”

“What’s your name?”

“Too many questions.” He put his hand lightly over my lips. He was in his thirties, stocky, tough, a little bruiser. He spoke to me in English but I think his accent was Polish or Russian. The skin on his palm was callused.

“Can’t I even ask where I’m going?”

“Stumm.” His hand pressed harder against my mouth.

It was just before Christmas and the salon was full of British wives having their hair done for the festivities and after that would come the new year, 1947, which we hoped would be the date when we got our freedom. I felt bad letting Mrs. Kulp down.

What else did I feel? Fear, naturally. Perhaps Mrs. Linz was right. I should have refused to collude with him.

But I could not disguise the urge I felt toward what was about to happen to me, that I was to enter the dark center of our struggle against the colonial masters. I was going to the place where Johnny was, where a bomb was a cleansing, transforming instrument. I was beginning to perceive the shadowy force of the organization as it moved from the periphery of my life to encompass me. Like it or not, Johnny and I were both part of an army, illicit but powerful. It wasn’t the kind of army that took part in great set-piece battles to acquire territory and which had rules of engagement and you had a rank and a number and there were laws about what you could or couldn’t do, but it was an army nonetheless. A people’s army which operated inside what we took to be everyday life and for such a war weren’t women ideally placed to play our role?

I was moving through history, I was in it. I was no longer the hairdresser’s daughter, or the dilettante would-be artist, or the useless immigrant, or the squirreled-away girlfriend. I was important enough for orders to be issued and arrangements made and messengers sent to meet me. I was no longer adorning the surfaces of reality but altering its internal structure as the chemicals I used on the heads of my clients did.

I went back to the apartment on Mapu and packed as much as I could into my Selfridges suitcase. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. My rent was paid up. I had nothing to feel guilty about, but I was sorry not to see the child before I left. I didn’t know when I would be back.

They hadn’t said when they were coming for me. At two in the morning I fell asleep on the bed fully dressed. At seven I was woken by the key turning in the lock, the key I had had cut for Johnny. A girl came into the bedroom and told me to get up. She was dressed like a man, in khaki shirt and trousers.

“You ready?” she asked me in Hebrew.

“Yes,” I said. I told her my Hebrew wasn’t that good.

“Fine,” she said. “I speak six languages. Pick one.”

“English is all I know fluently.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

I turned back at the door to look at the interiors of my modern apartment. The white walls were various shades of gray in the early light and the wooden chairs and picnic tables were also gray. We walked down the steps. Outside the sun cast mild shadows. Red flowers were struggling over a crack by the door. Another crack, higher up, had been clumsily pasted over with brown, gravelly cement which was ugly against the white plaster. The building looked as if it were catching bubonic plague or maybe smallpox, some kind of disease at any rate.

The girl led me to a pre-war Humber and slung my suitcase onto the back seat. We drove to King George Street, turned left across from the park, and passed through a pair of obelisks into a blind alley. There was a house at the end guarded by a stone lion with hollow eye sockets on a pedestal. The house was a perfect semicircle and it was strange to eyes used to ultra-modernity, to geometry and right angles, to see a building decorated with wrought-iron balconies festooned with laundry and ornamental stone pots and on the façade a Medusa-like head beneath a stone bow.

She led me up the stairs into a room with a Victorian bed, like the one my mother slept in all my childhood, made of metal shaped into flowers and leaves but this one had only an army blanket on it. Other than that there was a chair. I stayed in the room for several days and fairly regularly she brought me food but no information. I had nothing to read. The window looked out on to the back of other buildings but the blinds were lowered. I missed the sea. The room had a strange smell that was familiar but I couldn’t pin it down. Then I remembered. It was the smell of the rooms of my mother’s flat when the furniture had gone to the sale room and it stood, almost empty, on my last night in England before I embarked on the journey that would take me to Palestine. A smell that said that other people had been here before me.

Boredom made me lose count of time. The girl brought me some books, eventually. One volume was the poems of Jabotinsky, the philosopher of the Irgun. I read this:

It sounded like blackshirt stuff to me. The American couple and Mrs. Linz had been right about that. But Johnny would never have read it. He only read newspapers.

I began to paint pictures in my mind. I painted a picture of the view from my balcony on Mapu, the sea at the end of the street across Ha Yarkon. I painted the cars parked outside the buildings and the new Jews hurrying or strolling along toward their jobs or with bathing costumes and towels toward the beach. I wanted to paint a picture where you could smell the fragrant air and feel the sun on your bare shoulders and because all this was taking place in my imagination and not the difficult world of pigments I was able to accomplish my ambition.

Then I painted Johnny standing naked on the balcony and the pictures grew more and more pornographic and had less and less to do with art until they stopped being paintings and became something else.

I think Christmas came and went.

The girl came back with a box and handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a wig.”

“Why do I need a wig?”

“Because where we’re going they’re not used to seeing blond girls.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

I opened the box.

“This is the kind of wig the religious women wear,” I said. “What the hell’s it made of? Horsehair?” I put my nose to it and it smelled of horse and someone else’s scalp-sweat.

“Maybe. It was the only kind I could get.” She laughed. “My grandmother who came from Bialystock wore a wig like that.”

“I can’t wear this.”

“Miss, you have to.”

I put it on. There wasn’t a mirror. She looked at me. “The wig is okay but now the clothes aren’t. You need more modest ones.”

“Well, I haven’t got anything like that.”

“Fine. I’ll go and buy some.”

She came back in fifteen minutes with the kind of garments I had sometimes seen for sale and wondered who would ever buy them.

“Put them on.”

“You’re rude,” I said.

“Who cares?” she replied.

I got dressed. She began to laugh. “If Efraim could see you now.”

“Who’s Efraim?”

But she only laughed at me again and I thought, “So now I know Johnny’s real name.”

“I think,” she said, “we call you Gittel from now on. A nice Yiddish name.”

“I don’t speak Yiddish.”

“Okay, Miriam. Miriam Levin. A dutiful wife. You speak any French?”

“Yes. A little.”

“Good. You are an orthodox French lady from Paris. Your Hebrew isn’t too hot because you haven’t been here long, maybe just since before
the war. The only Hebrew you know is the kind you pray in.” She was laughing so much she had to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“You’re a hard girl,” I said.

“Yes,” she said proudly. “I am.”

“Men don’t like that. Johnny—I mean Efraim—doesn’t.”

“Don’t make me turn nasty. Efraim will marry an Irgun girl one day. You’re nothing. A little diversion. He’s already been formally censured.”

“Over me?”

“Yes. I don’t know what’s got into him. To run these risks for something like you.”

“What do you think I am?”

“Irrelevant. Come on, let’s go.”

It was late morning. We went down the dim stairway into the bright sunlight of Tel Aviv, blinking, shielding our eyes. We got into a different car from the one I had been brought in and drove down the Allenby Road south toward Jaffa. My face beneath my wig stared out behind the windshield at the women whose heels clicked on the pavement, their silk or nylon stockings swishing together. I wanted to jump out and run my comb through their hair.

T
HERE
are slums in every city but why should there be slums in the newest, most modern city in the world? How can human life degenerate so fast? Why can’t we
live
our idealism? The unpleasant girl was taking me to Manshieh. I didn’t want to go. The car pushed through the peddlers and hawkers and pimps and prostitutes and people with the scars of diseases I didn’t want to think about. It was raining again and the air smelled of rotting vegetables and shit.

“Why here?”

“Because it’s a no-go area for the British. It’s out of bounds to troops and the people will murder the police if they show their faces. There are lots of stabbings. Watch your back.” She smiled, joyously. She’d have liked it if I died a sudden and violent death. “The ones you have to watch out for are the Arabs. Ramadan is coming, it’s on its way. They want everyone to close their cafés, like them. Not a chance. Why should we put up with their religious craziness? Haven’t we got enough of our own?”

What
was
that place? It was chaos. It was dirt and disorder, squalid and stinking. The white city didn’t touch it. Perhaps it had its own charms but I couldn’t see them.

We pulled up outside a two-story house. The façade had crumbled off in patches. We went inside. The girl went away for a while and left me. There was a blue cloth on the table and on it a folded Hebrew newspaper with an oil stain across its front page. On the wall hung a sentimental painting of a saucer-eyed child standing in an orange grove. On a shelf was a brass menorah and a pair of brass candlesticks. Fat and spices thickened the air. A cat came up and rubbed itself against my leg. I hate cats. I reached out to pet one when I was a little girl and it scratched my hand. It was a shop cat. It was trained to feed off rats. It knew nothing of fur-stroking and meowing. I sat and listened to a clock ticking in a cheap tin case. The wig was giving me a headache. I didn’t know whether or not I could take it off.

The girl came back with a middle-aged man and a younger one. “I recognize you,” I said to the boy who was a year or two older than me.

“Who are you?”

“Remember the kibbutz?”

“No.”

“You must do. We learned Hebrew together.”

“I don’t know where I learned Hebrew. It was a long time ago. Maybe a year. I have enough to do in life without remembering things.”

But I knew it was him and that he recognized me. I saw the tattoo on his wrist. I remembered the number, even. It had a 2 and a 7 in it. I think his name was Moishe, but names changed here, no one stuck to the same one for very long.

“They’ll take you,” the girl said.

“Where are we going?”

“To the safe house. Where you stay for a while until things calm down.”

“How long will that be?”

“Who knows?” Perhaps she meant, who cares? She turned her back and went away. I was left with the two men.

We walked along the alley, which was slippery with the rain. “When will I see Efraim?” I asked them.

“Who?” they said.

How can you know someone if you don’t know their name? How can you love them if you cannot even fix them long enough to say, with any certainty, who they are? If everything is fluid and in the process of self-invention how can you make a home for yourself in our own life?

“Johnny,” I whispered and two tears coursed down my cheek.

“What’s the matter?” the middle-aged man inquired. “Is it personal or political?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

“Good.”

I looked at him. How many of these tough, stocky little Jews could a country hold? Men with thinning hair and big forearms, who smoked cigarette after cigarette and whose sentences always threatened to run through many languages, whose home was in themselves and their own simple ideas of what was right and wrong and what they wanted.

The house they took me to was no different from the one we had just left. They showed me to a bedroom with an army cot in one corner. I put my suitcase on the floor, sat down on the one upright wooden chair and began to cry. I cried in silence. Outside, beyond the peeling green paint of the wooden shutters the rain had stopped. The world stank of bruised
tomatoes and rancid fat and very faint on the air an indescribable smell, except that all smells come from something specific and this one derived from a man who lived two houses away, who had been wounded in a gunfight and whose leg was turning gangrenous.

I vomited on the floor. Moishe came in. “What’s this? Sick?”

“I can’t stay here,” I told him.

He wandered out again and came back with a tin bucket and a floorcloth. He kneeled down and wiped up my mess, then he left and shut the door behind him.

After a while I heard the two of them settle down to what sounded like a game of cards.

A couple of hours later, the middle-aged man knocked on the door. “You hungry?” I shook my head.

“Fine,” he said and went away again.

Then, after more time had passed I had a rage for water. I went into the main room and they were still there, smoking and gambling. “I’m thirsty,” I said.

Moishe went out of the house and came back in a moment with a jug. He poured some water into a glass. “Here,” he said. “Anything else you need?”

“No.”

“You will soon.” He went to a cupboard and gave me a piss pot. It was from the previous century and decorated with flowers. Someone must have brought it from Russia.

I went to sleep. Night came. It was cold.

They were still up talking.

Then I was sick for a few days. I don’t know what I had. I slept a lot and when I woke up I saw the wig sitting on the chair. I was still dressed in the religious clothes the girl had given me. My flesh stank of sweat and dirt.

Moishe wasn’t around anymore. The middle-aged man, whose name was Yitzaak, came and asked me if I was better. I said I supposed I was. There was no point in telling him of my fear and loneliness. “So what?” he would say. I could hear it.

It was a country of so-what people. So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where
I
have been.
I
know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother?
My
mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend?
My
boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers. I was never going to outdo them. They had skins like
elephant hides and they brandished their suffering at you like heavy clubs. They’d bash your brains out with those clubs if they could.

Suffering rarely ennobles. I know that now. At least with Moishe his scar was visible, anyone could see it. You looked at him and you had your explanation. The suffering that was to come would not make
me
any better than I might have been, either. It didn’t give me a big soul. It hardened my heart. A callous grows around a damaged place.

Forgive us. The evil we were making was in our circumstances.

Yitzaak sat down at the table. “Want to eat?”

“Yes. Something.”

He unwrapped some vegetables from a newspaper and began to chop them up for a salad. When he’d finished he put what he’d made into a cracked blue dish. He wiped the blade of his knife along his shirt and then kissed it before putting it back in a drawer.

Then he went out. I waited for a few minutes. He came back with some slices of meat and a loaf of white, east European bread. He put some meat on a plate for me and tore off a piece of bread and lifted a handful of salad onto it. I looked down at it.

“Eat,” he said. “Eat or die.”

“I have no knife and fork.”

“Fine. Here’s a knife and fork.” They clattered on to the table. “You want salt? You want oil?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Eat or die.”

I ate. I finished most of what he had given me.

“So,” he said. “Your mother was a prostitute?”

“What!” I cried.

“That’s what I heard.”

“My mother was
not
a prostitute.”

“Fine. So she wasn’t. I don’t care either way. There’s plenty of prostitutes here. If you wanted to be a prostitute you could make a good living. The religious boys from the
yeshivot
would like you dressed like that. It would give them a thrill when you took your wig off. You want to meet a prostitute?”

“No.”

“They’re interesting people. I like talking to them. We have girls who pretend to be prostitutes to lure the British but that’s a high-ranking job. They don’t go to bed with them. They wouldn’t be so great at that. They’re very pure, the Irgun girls.”

“And I am not pure?”

He shrugged. “I don’t judge. Maybe you should meet some of our prostitutes, the Jewish girls, not the Arab sluts. You want to do something now? With me? He smiled and played with the knife that was lying on the table.

“Efraim would kill you,” I shouted at him.

“Names, names, names. I don’t know anyone called Efraim.”

“You know who I mean.”

“Yes. He talks about you a lot. He’s crazy about you. You’re right. I don’t think he wants to share. Very selfish. The Kibbutzniks, they don’t mind sharing. Moishe says you were very popular on the kibbutz.” He looked at me, a short, hard man who knew nothing of the new woman but only the old one, of which there were two kinds.

I could have taken the knife and stabbed him because when you are trying to overthrow the old systems violence is the only way, as he knew himself.

“Everything is changing,” I replied.
“Everything.”

He looked at me. “So what?”