When I Lived in Modern Times (14 page)

I did not know what to reply. I had as my boyfriend a man with no inner life. I could only assume later, when I read more about psychoanalysis, that if he did not dream he must have had some powerful mechanisms of repression, perhaps because he had something even more powerful that he needed to repress. Though looking at him, now, it was
impossible to imagine what this might be. Where were the hidden depths? Everything was on the surface. He was an open book.

Johnny never asked me about my dreams and I don’t know whether I would have told him or not. At night when I got into bed I would compose myself for sleep in the knowledge that I was about to enter my other life where things were as real as when I was awake. In later years, those long years of exile from myself, I came to love sleep and dreams, but now, in Tel Aviv, in 1946, what I dreamed about was my mother: of her well and young, brushing her hair in front of her dressing table, or shopping for vegetables in Berwick Street market, or showing me how to divide the hair of the head into its “ply”—the strands we would wind around rollers or twist about our fingers into pin curls.

I dreamed of the smells of foreign food from the Italian cafés and of dappled spring skies over Hyde Park, the air smelling of rain, the breeze fresh on my face. I dreamed of buying new sheets and towels at John Lewis on Oxford Street before the war, before the shortages, of my mother and me unfolding each one and holding the ends between us to examine the linen for flaws or stains. I dreamed of the smell of cigars on Uncle Joe’s suits and the eau de cologne he splashed on his skin before he came to see us. I dreamed of jam tarts and my mother’s laughter and of her bending forward to straighten a stocking seam so I could see the lace of her slip. I dreamed of the two of us listening to the wireless for the war news and of myself trying to tell that frightened pair that everything would be all right—that the war would last for six years and that we would win it—but nothing came from my mouth and I stared at them, wishing for some way to give them comfort.

A
FTER
a while, Johnny began to ask me more about the women who came to the salon. “The British women I mean.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because the information is useful.”

“To whom?”

“To those of us interested in furthering the cause of the Zionist state. Which includes you, Evelyn.”

“What will you do with the information?”

“It’s intelligence. Think of yourself as a spy. The more we know about the enemy the better. There were such women during the war.”

“My God, you’re not expecting me to make love to Mackintosh, like Mata Hari, are you?”

“Of course not. It’s just harmless information we’re after. Names, addresses. That sort of thing. You could easily copy them from the appointments book, surely?”

“Yes. I could.” He smiled at me. The stink of palm oil was gone. I had bought him a new American hair cream which smelled pleasantly of lighter and more masculine perfumes. He ran a nail brush across the tips of his fingers before he came to me. He wanted now to shower before we went to bed, afraid that the sweat on his body would offend me but I told him not to, I wanted to smell him when we made love. I didn’t want him to be a ghost, without odor.

“Come here, darling,” he said to me, stretching out his hand. “Never forget that I was a soldier and you know what soldiers do, don’t you?”

“What?”

“We occupy territory.”

So I copied out the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all our clients and gave them to Johnny.

Mrs. Linz stood watching me as I washed one of his shirts in the laundry room on the roof.

“So now you reduce yourself to a laundress,” she said.

“I’m just washing.”

“Washing for a
man.”

“Oh, why not? Really!”

“Can’t he wash his own, your terrorist boyfriend?”

“Don’t be silly, Johnny isn’t a terrorist, he’s a tailor. He may have connections but they’re with the Haganah who are hardly terrorists.”

“Is that what he tells you?” She stretched a short arm behind her back and scratched. A fly settled on her face and she slapped it away. The child was examining strands of fiber through his magnifying glass.

“What do you mean?”

“Try to use your head,” she advised me, folding up sheets. “Think. Not enough thinking goes on in the world.”

So I thought. It’s true, I said to myself, he has never told me who is getting this information I pass on. I resolved that the very next time I saw him, when he promised he would have my shirt for me, I would ask him who his associates were.

“Anyway, there’s an easy way to tell,” Mrs. Linz was saying, smoothing the child’s little shirts and socks.

“And what would that be?”

“Does he like football?”

“Yes, very much as it happens.”

“And which team does he support?”

“Tel Aviv Betar.”

“Well, then obviously he is Irgun.”

“And why is that?” Really I was exasperated with Mrs. Linz who was
always
right and who
always
knew best.

“Because if he supports Betar he was in the Betar youth movement, that lot of crypto-fascists Jabotinsky started. He will have spent his boyhood marching around with guns shouting death to the Arabs, death to the British, dreaming of a Zionist state that covers the whole Middle East and furthermore he…”

That was all I heard. I ran down the steps to my own apartment. But I did not have time to ask Johnny if he was a terrorist because before I saw him again the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing nearly a hundred people, many of them Jews. Everyone knew they were hiding out somewhere in the white city. All hell broke loose.

Now Tel Aviv was cut off from the rest of the world and we, its residents, were cut off from each other. An absolute curfew prevailed. The official communiqués said that anyone seen on the streets would be shot on sight. The phones were dead. Everything was silent and in the stillness of the air,
from my balcony, I could hear the roar of the sea on the beach as it might have sounded long ago, before the men and women gathered on the dunes to possess the sand and build on it and to dream their town into existence out of nothing.

Someone from the building pushed a note through my letterbox in Hebrew.

“What does this say?” I asked Mrs. Linz, for I could hardly read the language.

“Oh that, we’ve all got one. It’s a biblical quotation,” she said.

“Read it to me.”

“It says,
Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee, hide thyself, as if it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.
Very comforting, I’m sure.”

Blum looked at his. “It’s taken from the prophet Isaiah,” he told us.

“I had no idea you were religious, Blum,” Mrs. Linz said.

“I am not. But I read Isaiah from time to time. He is full of gloom and despair and baleful warnings to the Jewish people. He suits our age. I prefer him to Tolstoy.”

“Barbarian,” said Mrs. Linz. “Read Thomas Mann and Musil. Dare to be modern, Blum.”

The troops came in their red berets, those anemones, and set up barbed-wire pens on each street corner. Every able-bodied man between fifteen and fifty was rounded up to be searched and every woman or girl between fifteen and thirty-five also. We gathered at the front door of the building. I saw an ill-assorted group from the apartment opposite being marched along in a line—men in shorts and shirts, Yekkes in pressed suits, women in housecoats, a lady in a dressing gown carrying a parasol to protect her skin from the sun. I saw the stragglers prodded with clubs and a man who dropped his hat did not stop to pick it up.

“This is familiar,” Blum said.

Two girls in summer frocks with chiffon scarves covering their hair were held for a long time and eventually forced at gunpoint into a truck and driven away in handcuffs. An energetic, pushy press photographer from an American newspaper tried to take their picture but they covered their faces. “Shit,” he said, turning to a soldier. “You mean to tell me those girls are gun-girls? Bombers?” He shook his head. “Pretty, too.”

Then the soldiers came to us. A woman on the ground floor complained to an officer that she had not been able to take her terrier for his walk. “To do what is natural for all of us, sir,” she explained, delicately.

The officer was sympathetic. “I have a Yorkshire terrier myself, as it happens. Lovely breed. Well, a call of nature is a call of nature. Can’t let the animals suffer. No, not at all.” He called over a private and gave him instructions.

“Simchah is to be walked twice a day,” she told me. “How civilized the British are.”

Mrs. Kulp, once she had established that her son, the trainee manager at the King David, was unharmed, was offended by her own situation. She had not been removed from the building for questioning. “Don’t worry, madam,” a lance corporal had told her. “It’s just the young ones we’re after.”

Mrs. Kulp went red. “But how old do you think I am?” she asked, thrusting her bosom at him. I could hear by his voice that he was from somewhere in the Black Country. There was a rash of pimples on his forehead and his white, sweating skin had been badly damaged by the sun.

“Fifty?”

“How dare you.”

“Let’s see your papers, then. We’ll find out how old you are.” He walked off, muttering under his breath, “Bloody Jews. Mutton dressed as lamb, the lot of them.”

A group of us were assembled on the pavement and marched down to the interrogation cage. Of the women, there was myself, Mrs. Linz and a girl actress from the Habimah Theater who swore at the troops in three languages. “What have we done now?” asked a young lieutenant, smiling. The girl said she’d heard that they had set up their HQ at the theater and damaged some of the props for a future production of
Hamlet.

“Chazzers!
” she cried.

“What’s a
chazzer?
Anything nice?” the lieutenant asked us. No one spoke. “Somehow, I suspect not. I’d look it up in the dictionary but I don’t know what language it is. Best forgotten, perhaps.” He winked at me. “Can anyone else offer any light relief?” He turned to Mrs. Linz. “Know any good jokes?”

“None that I would care to tell from inside a barbed-wire fence.”

“Suits me,” the lieutenant said and turned away to light a cigarette. He looked down at his clipboard and ticked off our names. Someone behind me started whistling “God Save the King.” It did not seem to be a patriotic gesture.

“Put a sock in it,” the lieutenant said. “Or I’ll put one on you.”

“These are not very cultured expressions,” said Mrs. Linz.

A squad of soldiers entered our building. I was holding the fake passport Johnny had given me and I was frightened. Frightened that they
would find, in the kitchen drawer, the passport of Evelyn Sert who had been granted a visa several months ago to enter the Holy Land as a tourist of sites of Christian interest and who should not be residing in a Jewish block of flats in a Jewish city with nothing of any historical or archaeological significance.

In the cage, the lieutenant walked off and a sergeant came up to me and looked at the Priscilla Jones passport. He was a sturdy youngster with short legs and a mottled face. “Funny place to find yourself, Mrs. Jones,” he said, looking at the others from the building.

“I know,” I said, lowering my voice. “Pretty frightful, really. Bloody Jews, but I try to rub along.”

“Where’s Mr. Jones?”

“Tiberias.”

“Why aren’t you with him?”

“We’re saving to start a family and I have a job here in Tel Aviv which pays quite well and after all Tony
is
trying to get a transfer.”

“If you ask me, you’d be happier in Jerusalem. Not so infested if you take my meaning.”

“Yes, so I’ve been told.”

“Beautiful place. Very historic. The stones breathe history.”

“Really?”

“I’d move there if I were you. The policy regarding Tel Aviv seems to be to leave them to it, the Jews I mean. And they can have it as far as I’m concerned. This place is a dump. The Christians are all pulling out. There won’t be a Gentile copper here before the year’s end.”

“Then I’ll certainly look into jobs in Jerusalem.”

He stared at the others in the interrogation cage. Looked at Blum arguing with Mrs. Linz about something and the girl from the theater with her arms crossed and an unhelpful expression on her face.

“Personally, I don’t know how you can stand them. Talk, talk, talk, the whole time, I don’t know how they can hear themselves think. Silence is golden, is my motto. If I had a long enough leave I’d go back home and hire one of those boats on the Broads for a week. You glide through the water, everything’s still, if you close your eyes you think you’re…Anyway, where was I?”

“Homesick, I’d say.” And I smiled at him.

“Too true.” He handed my passport back “All in order. Good luck, miss. I mean madam. Sorry for the inconvenience.” And I was released.

It took considerably longer for Blum, Mrs. Linz and the actress to return and when they did, Blum was grumbling, Mrs. Linz was smiling
contemptuously and the actress was loudly threatening to offer her services to the Lehi.

Stories were circulating now from other detainees in the cage. Someone said he’d heard about a man who had been caught out on the street during the curfew. Asked if he was a Jew and replying that he was, he had been bludgeoned with a truncheon.

Blum said it was a shame that the British sent out to rule Palestine were not “of the very best type.”

The actress said there was a single type. “Colonialists, with a colonial mentality.”

The argument rumbled on for a few more hours. We were running out of food and getting hungry. The army only allowed us out for a short period each day to go shopping and often you could not reach the front of the queue in time. To solve the problem the troops started to drive around in trucks with bread and water, demanding payment but they were mobbed in minutes and the soldiers too frightened to collect the money.

Mrs. Kulp wanted to open the salon during the two hours when the curfew was lifted. “Women will still be women,” she said, “whether or not we live under martial law.”

“This isn’t martial law, is it?” I asked her.

“It soon will be,” the actress shouted.

“Are you frightened?” Mrs. Linz asked me.

“No,” I said. But I was.

“This is nothing,” she said, “during the Arab riots…”

“The Arab riots? You call that something to worry about?” said Blum. “I remember in Berlin when the SS…”

I remembered the air raids in London, when we were buried alive in the tube station, listening to the ground shaking above us, the theaters and shops shuddering on their foundations and wondering if we would survive the night. These memories were not held in common with the inhabitants of the apartment building on Mapu but with the soldiers who had moved past our street and were setting up their barbed-wire interrogation cages on Frishman.