When I Lived in Modern Times (16 page)

I
DID
not have my own gramophone when I lived on Mapu Street but I was always surrounded by music. There was the pianist next door who practiced, practiced, practiced. His apartment was filled with musicians from the Palestine Philharmonic who, on announcing their formation a decade ago, had received a telegram from Toscanini declaring that he would conduct their inaugural concert to demonstrate to the world his opposition to fascism. Consumed with terror, these émigrés from Germany and Austria had held thirty-seven rehearsals in three weeks.

I had been taught music at school, learning the system of notation and practicing scales on wooden recorders whose mouthpieces were wiped with a disinfectant-soaked rag between lessons. But from my neighbor and others in the building I learned for the first time to appreciate the great masters, and the little lessons which filled an important gap in my cultural education took place while bombs blew up the railway lines, banks were raided in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, there were paper shortages, bread rationing, and eleven new kibbutzim were established in a single day in the Negev Desert and were welcomed by the Bedouins they found there, according to the newspapers.

One afternoon, Blum knocked on my door and invited me to come and listen to a brand-new record which he had won in a raffle, having reluctantly parted with a few mils for the ticket, the proceeds going to raise money to feed war orphans who were living in makeshift arrangements somewhere in the countryside.

I was suffering from menstrual cramps which had not been improved by the consumption of some unidentifiable fried meats from a street vendor. The stomach of a sheep? It didn’t bear thinking about. Johnny never came when he knew that the curse was due. The smell of women’s blood offended him. “I had a lot of sisters when I was growing up,” he said, “and they all used to bleed at the same time. You couldn’t get into
the bathroom. I found one of their bloody rags in the rubbish once when I was a boy. It made me feel sick.”

“Didn’t you see blood on the battlefield?”

“Certainly. But that kind of blood is clean.”

So I had only my own company and I told Blum that I would join him in a few minutes.

I walked down the stairs, my back aching, and knocked on his door. He called out that it wasn’t locked. At his table, he was threading new hair into the holes on a doll’s linen scalp where too vigorous yanking by childish fists had pulled it out and made the toy partly bald. He put the doll down and poured me a glass of lemonade. Even indoors he wore his jacket.

“Now this composer, Miss Sert, in his later work became very difficult. Very difficult.” Blum blew on the shining surface of the record and polished it with a soft cloth. “He sought to rob music of everything that is worth anything. But the piece that I am going to play you now is from his early period when he was a young man living in Vienna and it is called
Verklärte Nacht
which means, of course, ‘transfigured night.’”

“What’s his name?”

“Arnold Schoenberg.”

I settled into one of Blum’s well-upholstered chairs. I felt the menstrual blood trickling inside me and I remembered, as Blum crossed the room and placed the needle on the disk, that I had only one pad left and as soon as the shops reopened I must go out and buy more. I took all precautions against pregnancy. Mrs. Linz had bossily sent me to a sympathetic doctor on Ben Yehuda Street who had fitted me with a rubber contraceptive device like the one my mother had had.

The needle touched the first groove and a sound of utter melancholy and foreboding filled the room. I shuddered. Blum sat with his fingers gripping the chair arms, a small wooden packing case of dolls’ spare parts by his side: waxy limbs and heads and torsos.

Listening to the music I thought of the saplings that had sprung up on the first bomb sites of the war and the weeds that scrambled over the rubble. I thought of the overgrown gardens that became like the forest, places of secrets and hidden things, grass growing in the cracks of disused air-raid shelters. I felt my temperature drop and there was a sudden hemorrhaging of blood from my body.

Blum got up and turned over the disk. The mood changed, there was a moment of lyric sweetness and I cried out at the beauty of it and this tenderness expanded until it overthrew the darkness. I thought my heart would break with a certain kind of sad happiness and when the record
finally stopped my face was wet with tears for I had found something that no one could ever take away from me again: the past. My mother’s face was in that sweetness, smiling at me as she looked up from her movie magazines when darkness had fallen over London, the lamps were lit and the raid had come and gone and spared us.

“Miss Sert,” Blum said, in the long silence that followed the last notes. “Do you know the story of this music?”

“The story?”

“Yes, of course, there is a story. The music is a setting of a poem by a great German poet of the last century, Richard Dehmel, who was one of the foremost representatives of the
Zeitgeist
movement, which means the spirit of the times. A shocking individual who chose subjects for his work which are quite unsuitable for poetry such as the alleged miseries of the working classes. He also held dubious ideas about the mystical powers of intimate relations between men and women which he believed to be the only basis for a full development of the personality and even for a spiritual life, though what
that
might be I cannot say. Personally, I find him a sensationalist.”

“Tell me the story of the poem,” I said, feeling a strong affinity with this German precursor of all the ideas of free love I held dear.

“Its sentiments are repulsive though the music almost allows one to forget it.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Herr Blum,” I cried,
“do
go on.”

He glowered at me. “For a young lady brought up in the capital of the most civilized country in the world, you lapse into terrible manners, Miss Sert.” I thought this rich coming from him, one of Tel Aviv’s shark landlords. However, I apologized. I could not say that my sanitary pad was filling with blood and I wanted him to get on with it so I could slip back to my own apartment and find the last unused one.

Blum cleared his throat and began. “A man and a woman are parading through a park on a clear, cold moonlight night. ‘The bare cold grove’ Dehmel describes it as, the moon coursing above the high oaks and not a cloud to obscure the light of heaven.
Very
atmospheric, yes?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Then there is an outburst, the woman confesses to a terrible tragedy. Now we find that this pair are not husband and wife, not at all, they are lovers! ‘I walk in sin beside you,’ she tells him. It seems that she had met a man she did not love, and yearning for a purposeful life, for motherhood and the respectability of a wife’s station, she married him. Soon after, she realizes she has made a dreadful mistake for now not only has she met the man she is telling all this to, but she also finds she is carrying a child by
her legally married husband. You might think she would be filled with shame that she had betrayed her husband but it turns out that the man she believes she has betrayed is in fact the lover! And why? Because our poet believes in the authenticity of true love and rejects the bourgeois conventions of marriage.

“Now the lover has an astonishing reaction to what he has heard. A decent man would order her to return to her husband, he might even find in himself the arousal of a great abhorrence for this lady, but far from it. He instructs her that the child waiting to be born should not be a burden on her soul (and this is where we hear the duet between violin and cello that I observed you liked so much), that he forgives her transgression against him, though one wonders about the poor husband in all this. He tells her that this miracle of nature has transfigured what might have been a night of tragedy. This will transfigure the other’s child,’ he tells her. ‘You will bear it for me, from me / You have brought radiance on me / You have made me a child myself.’ And the whole wretched business ends with them clutching each other as they walk off, no doubt to a life of living in sinful relations, such as I observe all around me in the so-called Jewish city.”

“Gosh,” I said.

“Gosh? What word is this?”

I giggled. The story seemed to me to be both highly wrought and silly, typical of what Meier and the ideological free-thinkers on the kibbutz would have described as the diseased, melodramatic social relations of the last century. No doubt my mother might have found this story very beautiful but I regarded it as only a staging post en route to the free, open, liberated ideas of my own times.

Later that evening I asked Mrs. Linz if she knew the piece and the poem.

“Of course,” she said. “This young woman’s big mistake is to believe that her future lies with a man. Look, she has rushed into marriage merely to fulfill some bourgeois conventions. Then she finds a lover and what does she do? She tries to recreate the exact same conditions with him. This is not a new woman, this is the oldest kind of woman that there is, who believes that fulfillment only lies in doing a man’s laundry. You know what I think of that?” She made a fastidious little spitting motion with her mouth.

“Why did you have a child?” I asked her, passing over my fruit bowl. She helped herself to a peach and then waited with it in her hand. “A plate?” she said. “A napkin and a knife? You don’t expect me to bite into it do you?” Oh, there were always formalities with the Yekkes.

I went into the kitchen and got her what she wanted. She sat there in her shorts, operating on the peach like a surgeon with a scalpel, separating the hairy skin from the damp interior. “If you don’t enjoy cleaning for others surely motherhood is exactly the course you should have avoided like the plague,” I said.

“It was not intentional,” she replied. “Linz raped me.”

“My God!”

“Yes. It is true. I married him out of caprice. The following day I woke up and saw he had shed some hairs on the pillow and I thought, ‘This is going to make me sick, seeing this every morning.’ I knew at once that I had made a terrible mistake and that there should have been no marriage. So I shrugged and got out of bed to go home and he caught me by the hips and began to make love to me. I told him, ‘You cannot do this without my consent.’ But he did not need it. Of course when I discovered that I was pregnant I considered having a termination because there were plenty of unemployed doctors who would have performed it for me. But I had two reasons for rejecting that course. The first was that I was too poor and I certainly had no intention of asking Linz for the money. The second was that this child was something I had made out of my own flesh and blood and why would I want to destroy something I had created? It seemed perverse.”

“So you stayed with Mr. Linz?”

“For a few months. He’s a very boring man. The hair that came off his head on to the pillow is all gone now. He is very bald. And he is fat. Once I thought he had the body of a Greek god. Now he merely has the body of a middle-aged Greek, which is precisely what he is, one of the Jews from Salonika.”

“I didn’t know there were Jews in Greece.”

“There are very few now. In 1939 there were Jews there but they were largely exterminated. They eliminated the ones from Salonika and Rhodes and Crete and Corfu. The Salonikans were a terrible crowd. They all came from Spain originally, after the expulsion, the same year, incidentally, that Columbus discovered America. Did you know that?” I shook my head. “It’s ironic, I think. Anyway these Salonikans, having lived under a very benign and intellectual Moorish rule, were then left to their own devices in Greece and fell into a trough of mysticism which in turn degenerated into oriental sorcery and they became obsessed with all kinds of nonsense such as magicians and miracle-workers and fortune-tellers and amulet-makers, let alone being plagued by disasters such as piracy from the sea and epidemics of typhus and leprosy. Which shows, I think, that we People of
the Book are no better than anyone else and must be dragged kicking and screaming toward reason as our Arab friends must also be.

“It was only when the Ottoman empire was falling apart that the Salonikans entered into modern life and developed a European intelligentsia. And so it is here. With the defeat of the Turks in the Middle East, it is possible for existence to assume its true pace which is its trajectory into the future. My husband arrived with his mother and father as a baby in 1910 and coming to mature years just as the first crush of Berliners arrived was exposed to some mental fresh air. Hence he is now a physicist and has the offer of a post at Stanford University in California which he is anxious to take up.”

“What an interesting story,” I said, thinking that I must have seen these Greek Jews on the streets of Tel Aviv, but how to recognize them? “Do they maintain any habits or customs that they brought from Greece?”

“Well, I can only speak of the poor Salonikans. All they have left, now, the few that survived, is one little legacy which reminds them of the past and you know what it is?” She laughed. “Not great works of literature, not music or painting or philosophy but their food. Yes. Linz made me make little meat pies which he called
pasteles de carne
from beef and eggs. He said his mother would prepare them for him when he was a child but mine were vastly inferior to hers. As he
so frequently
told me. Of course even the name of this dish tells you that it came originally from Spain.”

“Is Linz a Greek name?”

“Not at all. It is
my
name.
I
am Linz.”

“You didn’t take his name when you married?”

“Of course not. Why should I?”

“But how is that possible?”

“Anything is possible, Miss Sert, you simply have to make your feelings known, very, very firmly. In the office where the marriage took place, they said I could not be legally called Mrs. Linz so I insisted that if on the documents I was Mrs. Carasso in real life
he
would be Mr. Linz!”

“Perhaps you should call me Evelyn,” I said.