When I Lived in Modern Times (22 page)

The Mediterranean was packed with traffic, on it and above it. The captain pointed out the tiny shape of a troop-carrier. We turned south. We flew over the Sinai desert where Moses and the Children of Israel had wandered for forty years. Jesus only wandered for forty days and forty nights. Forty years! Beat that, goyim, Uncle Joe had once said.

“They’ve been Jews for absolutely centuries,” someone was saying, “and most of that has been spent in exile, one way or another. Why do they want to change their tune now?”

I thought of Johnny at the end of a rope, his tongue hanging out.

“You’re green, dear. Need the sick bag?”

I nodded. I vomited into a paper envelope.

“Can’t be long now.” She smiled.

Then I turned my head and was sick on her lap. The sick, a thin porridgy stream tinged with green bile, dripped from her skirt and onto her right leg, down the calf and the ankle and settled on her shoe.

A
S
I say, scratch a Jew and you have a story. Mine is no more significant or interesting than anyone else’s, but get us to stop telling it! That you will never do, if the Jews are still here in another millennium.

One day I returned to the white city, but when I say one day, I mean many, many years later when my marriage had been the greater part of my life and my husband was dead and one of my two children dead.

I flew the length of the Mediterranean Sea, over Rhodes and Cyprus.

I came out into the airport which was in the same place as the one I had left fifty years before, though barely recognizable from that airfield which had been not much more than a collection of sheds. There was a badly executed mural on the wall in the baggage area depicting the heroic struggle of the Zionist project, just like one that Leah and I might have painted at the kibbutz, and it seemed to me that it was not at ease in this neutral, international space before you surrendered your bags to the eyes of customs control. Under it, dark shadows of men gathered, bearded, black-hatted, black-clad. They held boxes from New York stores, containing more black hats. Time had twitched and drawn them from a forgotten crease in the past. They made their way to the Eldan desk to rent cars and cell phones. They spoke Hebrew with an American accent. They disappeared into their cars or into the shared taxis that went to Jerusalem. Above us, departing passengers ate pizza and watched planes from many countries zigzag back and forth on the runway. The security people looked at everyone with X-ray eyes, convinced that they could see through our disguises and to who we really were.

I had given my account of myself at the embassy in London. A Jewish widow who wished to rest her bones in the Promised Land stood in her Harrods coat before them and listened, smiling, while they told me that if I wanted to make
aliyah
I would need a
ketuba
, my mother’s marriage certificate. But there is no
ketuba
, I said. And my grandmother’s? Lost somewhere in Latvia or handed on, maybe, to one of her children whose
names I did not even know. These difficulties were still being examined and discussed, and memos written and rabbis consulted and community leaders addressed as I entered Israel on an extended tourist’s visa. A private detective I had engaged was searching the burial sites of the East End of London for the graves of my grandparents. We need records, the men from the Jewish agency said. Give us documents. Go and dig up the past.

From the past there is no escape. The past is
everything.
Meier on the kibbutz was right.

I left the terminal and got a cab with a driver with scars on his face who tried to cheat me on the fare. “In the Jewish city?” I thought, in my innocence.

We were on a six-lane highway. The traffic on its own was a nightmare. After a while, when we had turned across a bridge above the freeway and entered a grimy metropolis of some kind, I said, “Where am I? Where have you taken me?”

“Tel Aviv. Where you asked to go.”

“This isn’t Tel Aviv.”

“You been here before?”

“Yes. Before independence. Where are all the white buildings, where is the white city?”

“You’re in it.”

“That can’t be.”

“Listen, it may have been white once, but it’s not white now. You want nice apartments, go to the suburbs, go to the dormitory towns.”

In the distance the skyscrapers rose like white swords from the business district in the south, near the little minaret of Jaffa.

Once, an Arab had sold watermelons on the corner of Mapu and Ben Yehuda streets and I had imagined him waiting for the day when the desert would rise up to engulf us. But he had not reckoned with Jewish ingenuity. The Tel Aviv of the Mandate days was still there, as the ruins of Ancient Rome are still there, fragments of another, underground city, like the bones of the dead sticking up above the ground but it wasn’t sand which had buried it. Like Troy or Pompeii, it lay beneath archaeological layers of advertising billboards, peeling plaster, graffiti, forests of electrical wiring, naked neon light, natural gas tanks, Dumpsters, air-conditioning motors, transformers and air grates. Brown air. Brown buildings. Soiled vegetation photosynthesizing brown light in the disheveled gardens. Grubby cats foraging for abandoned meals in the grass, choking on chicken bones. The white city, I have to say, and this is
an understatement, was an eyesore. Who knows, perhaps it was the ugliest place in the world?

“What happened to Ha Yarkon?”

“You’re on it.”

“Where are the cafés?”

“I remember cafés here, when I was a kid. But they got rid of them years ago to build the hotels. Which one do you want? Sheraton, Dan, Holiday Inn? Look. Nice hotels, very modern. All the luxuries you could ask for.”

“They’re in the way of the sea. They block the view.” The hotels rose up like high concrete castles defending the coast where there had once been cafés with noisy gramophones and the British officers’ clubs and the clubs of the officers of the Free French and the Free Poles and all the other scraps of armies that found themselves encamped in the Middle East.

“Of course they are. Tourists come here and they want a view. We give it to them.”

“Where did you get your injuries?” I asked him.

“Lebanon. Where else? You wanna hear my story?”

Look at it this way, we are the people of the Book. It is the first thousand years of Jewish history and though we have no second volume for the next two thousand years, each story a Jew tells is part of that book. We have no choice but to listen. Our history was in our story, for the Arabs of Palestine, it was the land. Without a story we’re not Jews. Without a land they’re not just DPs, they’re an abstract idea—a cause. That’s not a human being. This is the great wrong we did them.

He started to tell me how he had come from a village in the south of Poland with his mother and father when he was five years old, in 1950. “You know how they survived the war? A Polish farmer hid them. Isn’t that something? They got right through the war and then the minute it was over, the anti-Semitism started up again, like nothing had happened.
Nothing!
So what should they do but leave? They dumped us in Herzlea, in tents, where from the age of six my mother would send me out into the garden with a stick to kill snakes. What a country! We were terrified! My God, it was so primitive. My parents spent all their time talking about how much they missed Poland but also how much they hated it, how fantastic it was to be in Israel and how terrible the life was. Confused? I was a confused kid, all right.

“Then we got sick of the heat and the dirt and we came to Tel Aviv. Listen, it was
worse.
The old people, the pioneers who came out in the thirties, they sneered at us, they called us
Ostjuden.
You know what that means?”

“Yes.”

“Now you want people who are really primitive, you look at the Moroccans and the Yemenites.
Them
they should have put in tents. I mean, where would they have ever seen a house before they came here? And the Ethiopians, my God. That’s Africa, isn’t it? It’s the jungle. But you know who were the worst of all? You know who I hate the worst?”

“Who? Tell me your hatreds. Let’s hear the lot.”

“The kibbutzniks. They wanted me to be a sabra. They wanted me to forget I was ever a Pole. They said, The parents we can do nothing about but the children, we can remake them in our own image.’ Like hell they could. They wanted socialism. Listen, we spent five years under socialism after the war, in Poland. What good did it do the Poles? The kibbutzniks. I’ll tell you about them, they were rich compared to us. They had swimming pools. Some socialism. I know those guys. I fought next to them in my unit during the war, not just Lebanon. I fought in ‘67 and ‘73 and ‘82 and if I have to I’ll fight all over again, but not my sons.
Absolutely not.
If it kills me, I’ll make sure they get rich. Stockbroker. That’s a job I would like them to have. But if we make a peace with our enemies, do you want to know who will make it? People like me. Not my stockbroker sons, certainly not the religious boys who won’t fight and those guys who come over from Brooklyn who think they can tell me I can’t drive my cab on Shabbat or eat pork and that we’ll never give up this place or that place that is mentioned in the Bible. No. The only people who get to sit at the peace table are the ones who made the war. And another thing…”

He took me to the apartment on Mapu. The glittering white surfaces were shit brown. Mercifully, palm trees had grown up in the spaces between the buildings, and overgrown oleander and hibiscus bushes hid some of the dereliction and decay. Inside, the common hallways stank.

Mrs. Linz let me in. She leaned on a stick. “Arthritic hip,” she said, curtly. The khaki shorts and shirt were long gone, so were the crumbling rubber sneakers. She had a mass of well-cut, curly white hair but otherwise she was dressed in a skirt and a blouse and a string of pearls like any nice German woman of her age. I walked into the apartment. The same furniture, the same brass bowls, the same Arab dress, arms akimbo. The bookshelves were still packed but now there were paperbacks. The only difference.

“Where is the white city?” I asked her, after I had sat down and she had poured me a glass of Coca-Cola, cold from the fridge.

“It turned brown,” she said. “A matter in part of poor maintenance but also corrosion from the salt air. The law that protected the tenants was a
disaster for the buildings. Blum was not the only one who had no money to maintain his investment. It was a correct idea, of course, but it had consequences which we did not foresee.”

“You were the Weimar Republic in exile,” I said, remembering. “How old are you now, Mrs. Linz?”

“I am eighty-five.”

I arrived in October when the weather was starting to cool down. I walked the streets of the city. The trees were so much bigger now and mercifully they cast a bigger shade. I still don’t know the name of those trees that grow along Rehov Allenby and Rothschild Boulevard where one day in 1948 David Ben-Gurion had gone to the art gallery which had once been the home of Mayor Dizengoff in the days when the town was small enough so that he could ride out each day in his high-buttoned coat on his white horse and inspect it. Among the brown paintings of rabbis Ben-Gurion had declared the state and the Palestine Philharmonic played “Hatikvah,” which was now the national anthem, and in doing so became the Israel Philharmonic. Then they went home and the next day the war started.

The religious people had gone, they’d left for Jerusalem or B’nai Brak. They think Tel Aviv is Sodom and Gomorrah. “I used to think the Hasidim were vegetables,” Mrs. Linz said. “But now they have woken from their slumber. They still live in the medieval times, but now they are medieval types with guns.” Where Mrs. Kulp’s salon once stood there is a place where you can have a tattoo or a ring inserted in your nipple. The thought makes me sick and I always turn my head away when I pass. Next door there is a bar where the homosexuals drink coffee for, despite every other change, Tel Aviv does remain the place where you can eat cake at any time of day and night. There were no British in their shorts, shouting at you through megaphones, just boy and girl soldiers with their rifles. “Wanna score?” they asked each other.

I traced the steps of my weeks spent on the run. I turned off from King George Street, a shabby thoroughfare of bargain-basement shops, into the alley and the stone lions still stood but less like statues and more like models of extinct creatures in a science museum. The telegraph lines were covered in some kind of creeper. The city’s first buildings, the ones with traces of Odessa and Kiev in their concrete bones, were derelict. I walked through the Carmel Market on my way to Manshieh and
that
was just the same. The same foodstuffs on sale, the same pimps, the same prostitutes doing their shopping, just different nationalities because it’s the Russians who control the trade now. It made me smile, this. With vice, nothing changes.

But at the end of the street where Manshieh should have started there was nothing. It had vanished from the earth, only the mosque remained, and where the houses had been a bus terminus and a parking lot in the shadow of the skyscrapers of the bourse. “What happened?” I asked an old man passing by, with his shopping.

“To what?”

“To the houses, the people?”

“What do you mean?”

“There used to be a place here. It was called Manshieh.”

“Oh yes, that’s true. It was mainly an Arab neighborhood. We chased out the people and then we demolished it. I don’t know why they didn’t blow up the mosque too. You know what they did? They used the minaret to post their snipers during the war of independence, in which I fought, incidentally.”

“What did you do?”

“I drove the Arabs out of Jaffa. What the hell did they think they were doing there? This is the
Jewish
city! Tel Aviv. The Arabs can go find their own place.” He spat on the ground. I watched him go off, lugging his shopping. Every few yards, he stopped for a rest and looked at the sea and looked at the towers of Jaffa and sucked from a plastic bottle of a brightly colored orange drink.

I walked toward Neve Tzedek. At least
that
remained. As the white city of Tel Aviv had declined so the old original quarter had found a new lease of life.

“Who lives here?” I asked a girl.

“Yuppies.”

The school where I had nearly been a teacher was a performing arts center. I sat in the café and drank a cappuccino. The air was still and fragrant. No need of a typewriter, now, I thought.

I walked along Allenby Street which I last saw when I was abducted by the Boltons. Where were they now? I hadn’t thought about them for years. Perhaps, if they were still alive, in an old people’s home with ticking clocks and dried flower arrangements and shaking fingers bent over the crossword puzzle and the smell of incontinence. Allenby was in a bad way. The shops were run down and sold things you wouldn’t want. The people who shopped there looked poor. Poor and angry, which is a potent mixture. They jostled and shoved each other aside and shouted. Two fat, fair-haired women were having a terrible row in Russian outside a shop that advertised in both Hebrew and Cyrillic letters that it sold pork. One of the women tore open her bag of meat and threw it in the other’s face. In retaliation she reached in her bag and got out a knife. People were
ringing the police on their cell phones. I looked up and saw the blue sky between the overhanging branches of the nameless trees.