When I Lived in Modern Times (9 page)

T
HAT night there was a curfew. Soldiers and police drove through the streets shouting orders through megaphones. I was hungry again, I was always hungry, in Palestine. I couldn’t arrange any meals for myself, there was too much disorder. Things were out of control. I sat on the balcony giving myself a headache, smoking too many cigarettes. Across the street and along it, people were doing exactly the same thing: sitting on their balconies in the nighttime heat.

I was trying to think of what to do with my life, how to find work, and I considered my options. I could go to work for the Jewish Agency in some secretarial capacity but I had no secretarial skills. And I spoke only a kind of kibbutz Hebrew, enough to get by on, not to read documents and draft responses to them.

I could become a fighter in one of the Jewish undergrounds but I didn’t know how to make contact with such a thing or what I would do if I joined up. I supposed that Johnny did something of this sort for Ben-Gurion’s Haganah—going about with a bucket and paste after nightfall sticking up posters demanding free immigration and that the British should evacuate NOW, or organizing demonstrations or forming one of the bands of men and women who met the illegal immigrants on the beach and smuggled them past enemy lines. But in the absence of Johnny I was just an enthusiastic supporter, not an activist.

I could work for the British and spy on them because people kept telling me I would make a good spy but I had entered the country as a Christian tourist of the Holy Land and I did not know how to explain why I wanted to stay on. I was worried that they would start investigating me for security clearances and discover I had made lies like tissue paper that you could poke a finger through and that my time on the kibbutz would be uncovered.

My school would be contacted for references and they would say, “Ah, the Jewish girl, Evelyn Sert…” remembering my lack of enthusiasm for
lacrosse on foggy mornings beneath leafless trees, rubbing my hands together for warmth, and my attempt to blow smoke rings with my frozen breath. My insolence and my contemptuous whispers when I thought my spinster teachers were stupid, those harmless Englishwomen wittering about gentle Jesus meek and mild and the milk of loving kindness while across the Channel all hell was breaking loose. Cretins. Appeasers, all of them. So not as harmless as they first appeared with their sagging, shapelessly happy faces.

The ashtray was full and my skirt was gray. My skin was crawling in the heat. My lungs felt lined with damp moss. Someone knocked on my door and I walked over to open it. My ankles were swollen. My heart was panting from the short exertion. On the other side was a delegation, a welcoming committee, holding coffee and tea, sugar and bags of oranges and tomatoes, slabs of white cheese and a cake decorated with macaroons. The tomatoes looked very red against the white walls and the oranges, very orange and I noticed that my brain was glad to receive some color in my monochrome modern home.

There was quite a crowd of them and they greeted me in a variety of languages. At the head of the visitation was a large, handsome, artificially blond woman near the age of fifty, with a head dressed in a mass of Edwardian curls, who entered my apartment in a stately manner reminiscent of Queen Mary on official business amongst the lower orders.

“I am Mrs. Kulp, of course,” she said.

“How do you do.”

“Delighted.” She extended two fingers.

“Thank you for the food, I’m very glad of it.”

“You’re welcome. You have the apartment with the unfortunate kitchen, I see.”

“I admire it. I like modern things.”

She smiled a smile as artificial as the color of her hair and coming toward me planted a kiss on my cheek with breath that smelled not of Parma violets as I expected but boiled eggs, a sulfurous odor. Her skin was dosed with a perfume I knew very well, Guerlain’s Shalimar.

“Shall I make coffee for you?”

“A pleasure.” She waved the others away with her arm, speaking in two or three different tongues. “The others you will meet in time. I am the president of the residents’ committee.”

“How well organized.”

“Our landlord is a swindler. A skinflint. We have to be on our guard.”

“Of course.”

“So you will join?”

“Absolutely.”

“There is a fee, a small one, of course.”

“What do you do with the money?”

“We put it aside to pay a lawyer to take Blum to court to make him maintain the building.”

“Do you think you’ll win?”

She waved her hand. “Oh, Blum will be defeated in time. No one can live long with so many enemies.”

I made the coffee and cut slices of cake and we sat on the balcony exchanging polite inquiries about each other, trying not to move, not to exert ourselves and produce a blush of sweat on our skin, a gust of bad odor.

“How did you enter Palestine?” she asked me. I told her. “Then you are a clever girl,” she replied, and put another forkful of cake into her mouth.

“Now my story may also be of interest to you.”

“I’d love to hear it,” I said, politely, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Everyone in Palestine had a tale of some kind and they were prepared to tell it to you at the drop of a hat. In a country with its face turned toward the future, our stories sat on our shoulders like a second head, facing the way we had come from. We were the tribe of Janus, if there is such a thing.

She was a Russian whose mother had been an assistant to one of the hairdressers at the court of the Romanovs and this well-placed lady had known
personally
(as her daughter would very frequently tell me) the Polish Jew Max Factor back in the days when he was make-up artist to the Imperial court, before he left for America and invented the cosmetics for the motion-picture industry. Mrs. Kulp was a refugee not so much from anti-Semitism as Bolshevism.

Setting off in 1925 on her own from the newly named Leningrad when she was around the same age as I was now, she had arrived in Hamburg and married the owner of a medium-sized department store which she revolutionized by opening a beauty salon inside it. By the thirties, her husband, more astute than she and predicting that he would shortly be spending more on the replacement of smashed windows than on stock, sold up and moved the family to Palestine where he immediately contracted tuberculosis from drinking infected milk. The disease spread through his lungs, forming cavities, and ate its way into the bronchi where, advancing through the system, it began to erode his blood vessels, causing him to spit crimson matter into his handkerchief. With rest, good food and
nursing care he might have built up a resistance against the bacillus and eventually sealed it off.

“But, my husband, Mr. Kulp, did not rest. Not at all. He was determined to re-create what he had had before—a grand panjandrum, he called it, selling everything from socks to divan beds, on Allenby Street. The ice box in this very apartment was almost certainly purchased from my husband’s store.” As she told it, Kulp flogged himself to death trying to import luxury goods to sell to a market of British Mandate officials and the rising Tel Aviv bourgeoisie. His lungs became a mass of cheesy material. The bacilli spread to his kidneys and killed him, six years after he first set foot on Jewish soil.

Mrs. Kulp was left alone to fend for herself. Widowed, with a son who worked now as a trainee manager at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, she set out to build a second life for herself as the owner of a hairdressing salon in the center of the city. She had an admirer among the crowd of hopeless German émigrés, who she suspected was only interested in her for her money, and she was probably right for if she had feminine charms, they were invisible to me.

Her feet were swollen in her shoes. I saw her grimace with pain. I knew what it meant to stand on your feet all day when you are past your prime of life. I saw my mother stand and she was younger than Mrs. Kulp.

Outside the curfew seemed to be over. The quiet was disturbed by engines revving and the amplification of soldiers’ voices in the street. It was late but the heat hadn’t lifted, would not lift until dawn and fresh breezes blew in from the sea and cooled my sweat-soaked sheets. Mrs. Kulp’s perfume was in my throat and lungs, heavy and putrid. Apart from the boiled egg on the breath and the perfume, there was a chemical stink about her, exuding from her skin—it was the smell of hair-dressing preparations but instead of making me want to vomit, it reminded me of my mother and of my past life and I wanted to walk across and rest my head in her ample sateen lap.

“What,” she was asking me, “was your profession in England, Miss Sert?”

W
HAT kind of hair is difficult to perm?” Mrs. Kulp asked, fanning herself with a copy of the
Palestine Post
that she had returned to her apartment to fetch for this purpose. I noticed she had surreptitiously half-eased off her shoes.

“Two kinds. First, hair that is dyed with compound henna containing copper salts. When it is waved the copper combines with the sulfur present in the hair to produce copper sulfate.”

“Correct. Another kind?”

“Hair already bleached with hydrogen peroxide.”

“Very good. When would you use a razor cut?”

“When you want a better taper on the points of the hair.”

“And you would perform this kind of cut on dry hair?”

“Never. Always wet.”

“Which is the most reliable brand of colorant for the hair?”

“Inecto. My mother traveled to Paris before the war and was very impressed by L’Oréal but they were virtually out of production during the Occupation.”

“Name two types of popular cut.”

“The Liberty cut and the Maria cut.”

“True. Do you have the cold wave with you?”

“Yes. Here it is.”

“I have never heard of this make. I use Toni.”

“Yes. But it’s almost impossible to obtain in Britain.”

“Some products leave acid burns on the scalp.”

“Yes, the inferior brands but we never had any problems with this one.”

“Can you obtain any more?”

“I don’t think so. I brought this for my personal use.”

When, on a spring morning in London—the flat half-empty, and my mother’s faded furniture already sent to the saleroom—I was packing my
Selfridges suitcase, I spent a long time wondering whether or not I should find a place in it for my hairdressing paraphernalia: the combs and brushes and Sheffield steel scissors, which were as much a part of my cosmetic repertoire as my face powder, rouge and lipstick. I didn’t know what kind of a life I was going to make for myself in Palestine but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t continue to cut and style my own hair. I knew how, and it saved the expense of paying someone else to perform what I could do more than adequately myself. Before the salon was sold I had used my keys to let myself in one night and went to the stockroom and removed as large a bottle as I could carry of what was then the most precious commodity in the world of coiffure—cold wave.

People think that hairdressing is a puerile, superficial art but if you don’t know your chemistry you’re in trouble, which is why my mother always read the
Hairdresser’s Weekly Journal
, not just to keep up with the new trends but also to understand why she had the occasional failure with a certain technique. She would read these articles aloud to me, so I knew, as well as my times tables, that when you perform a perm the alteration in the structure of the hair is brought about by an electron reaction on the oxygen content. The old technique, the hot perm, where each curl was attached by a wire to a giant contraption suspended above the lady’s head, involved an alkaline reaction produced by the evaporation of the chemical by heat. The British had undertaken the research for the cold perm but it was the Americans who developed and popularized it. With the cold wave, it was an acid rather than alkaline reaction created by treating the curler with a chemical solution. You stopped the reaction by applying a neutralizing fluid.

When we went to war it became extremely difficult to get hold of cold wave; despite protests on behalf of the beleaguered women of Britain, starved of beauty, the government refused to make room for it on the convoy ships that brought essential supplies from America and Canada, and the chemicals involved in its production were diverted to the war effort. But there were certain individuals who by some means or other had acquired the formula and could obtain the ingredients on the black market. The brand my mother liked to use was Lustron but it was rationed and she sometimes obtained a supply from a company in Liverpool which manufactured it under the name of Barri. The owner was a Jew, as it happened, who came into my Uncle Joe’s cigar store on business visits to London and on my mother’s behalf Uncle Joe undertook certain transactions with him.

Before I left for Palestine I had packed the bottle of Barri cold wave, very carefully wrapped in plenty of brown paper. On the kibbutz it had
been enough to wash my hair once a week with the shampoo I had also brought but any day now I would need to reperm my hair to restore some wave to it. My guess was that if cold wave was difficult to obtain in London it would be even more scarce in Tel Aviv, however modern the city was.

Perhaps hairdressing was a way out of my temporary inability to decide upon an occupation for myself, I thought, and it turned out that having a bottle of this precious commodity in my possession was the key to employment in a city where many people were jobless.

I was not qualified as a hairdresser. I did not have my indentures but Palestine was a practical country, more interested in what one could do than what certificates one had. From Mrs. Kulp’s point of view, I was a young girl straight from London who knew all the up-to-the-minute styles. I could talk nicely to the customers. Did Mrs. Smith want to have her hair done by a middle-aged foreigner with a guttural accent? No. She would want someone she could talk to about the latest fashions, someone who could chat about film stars and the news from home. For they were strangers here. They felt their loneliness. The heat alone dispossessed them.

And Mrs. Kulp understood this exactly. Looking at me, she saw that in the future there would be considerably more sitting down behind her reception desk, marking up her appointments book, reminiscing about old times in the Imperial court of the tsars and holding forth about hairdressing and other forms of personal adornment. She confided that she had a supply from America of Helena Rubinstein cosmetics (another Polish Jew) which she sold to favored clients from behind the counter.

“I will give you a trial,” she said. “Start tomorrow morning and see what you can do. If you are suitable, I will pay you for your time. If not, I will not ask for compensation for any damage you might do to my valued customers.”

“That’s reasonable,” I said.

So in just a day I had found a flat and a job. Mrs. Kulp wasn’t so bad. Warmth strove to find its way out of her into the world, as if through cracks in broken masonry. She was another survivor, like Blum. He said of her one day, in an unguarded moment, “She has built high walls to conceal the hunger of her heart: a good heart, a Jewish heart. She must have learned how to do this during her time in Germany.”

The salon was on Shenkin Street, near the intersection with Allenby Road, the very acme of Palestinian elegance, such as it was. A few postwar Renaults were already cruising its length, driven by youngish men with carefully trimmed mustaches, wearing jazzy ties. It was provincial, but
raffish. The shops displayed an excellent selection of ladies’ costumes and the previous season’s hats; there was no clothes rationing here. The cinemas played to capacity crowds. At night, if there was no curfew, the streets were thronged with people seeking pleasure and prostitutes hurrying down to the seashore to start their evening’s work.

The salon smelled of exactly what all salons smell of, all over the world: peroxide and shampoo. White steam rose from the equipment which sterilizes the combs and brushes and fans spun furiously on the ceilings, trying to bring a breath of air to the hot faces of the hairdressers and the customers. They sat beneath their metal helmets, heads bristling with rollers like porcupines or curls held in place by pins, as scaly as anteaters, reading weeks-old copies of magazines from home.

They wanted an illusion, that they had stepped out of the piercing Middle Eastern sun, away from the land of the belligerent dispossessed into a coolish West End afternoon with tea and cakes at Fortnum and Mason to look forward to, before a bus home to prepare for the cocktail hour.

My first customer was Mrs. Paget-Knight. She wanted “something different.” She had a thin face, pointed nose and a scrawny neck on which you could already detect the plucked chicken skin of advanced middle age. She wore her hair pinned up in a French pleat so her head resembled the blade of a kitchen knife. Here the rules of hairdressing and the basic art-school principles the commercial artists in the office had taught me came together: the composition had to be broadened, length minimized.

I parted her hair on the right, combed it flat to the head for a few inches, then established a double layer of curls on one side and a single layer on the other, creating an asymmetrical look. From the temples, it was swept up into a lower sheath of softer waves. The backs and sides I left to hang almost to her shoulders.

While I worked, she chattered way. She was going to a tea dance in Jerusalem in the afternoon. Her husband worked for the CID. She couldn’t decide on a blue or a pink dress. Did I think that she was too old for pink? Her best friend, Mrs. Simmons, had said so, but was she just being catty? The children were at school, at home in England. She missed them, and worried about them when they wrote in their letters that they had colds or had hurt their knees but her husband said they must be toughened up. They had gone off without their beloved teddy bears. The youngest had cried bitterly and Mr. Paget-Knight had ruffled his curls and told him to be a man.

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Six,” she said.

She was delighted when I held the mirror behind her head so she could see her reflection from the back and sides. I asked her if, next time, she might consider a preparation which would “bring out” the chestnut tones in her hair. She blushed but said she would like to make an appointment. She gave me a good tip.

As she was paying, she looked at me and said, “My dear, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I told her that I had just arrived in the country. I had had a whirlwind romance with a policeman on home leave in London, married him and arrived in Palestine just as he was, inconveniently, posted to Tiberias.

“Oh my dear, I’m so sorry. Perhaps my husband can do something. What’s his name?”

“Jones,” I said. “But please don’t put yourself out on my behalf.”

“You know you
are
familiar. You look a little like a girl who was on the ship with me when I came back in April after leave. She was a religious tourist. I didn’t speak to her but I saw her on deck.”

“How curious,” I said.

“Well, quite incongruous things do look familiar. When we first arrived here, I thought it quite like parts of Hampshire. After a time, the impression wore off. I don’t think it’s a patch on Portugal. Too bare for my taste.”

After the salon said good-bye to its last customer I bent over the sink and dyed my hair platinum blond. I shaved my eyebrows and penciled in a fine arc. I looked in the mirror and now I was Priscilla Jones. Mrs. Kulp was pleased with me. She was prepared to give me a position, starting the next day. Priscilla, Evelyn, they were just names. If I was to pass myself off as a non-Jew, this was all to the good. “The British like their own,” she said. “They’ll tell their friends about you. You will be good for business.”

On my way home I walked past Mrs. Paget-Knight’s house out of curiosity. In the garden, tall blue flowers that I now know to be lupins and small ones called anemones in various stained-glass colors were struggling to hold their own in the fierce heat. The path was scattered with parched rose petals and some kind of life must have gone on behind the pristine starched whiteness of the lace curtains that hung behind her windows. In Jerusalem, Mrs. Paget-Knight was doing the foxtrot and perhaps even the tango. She twirled about to the strains of a Jewish orchestra, her teacup refilled by Jewish waiters and on her side plate, tiny sandwiches cut in the kitchen by Jewish hands.

Then I caught the bus home but when I got there I discovered that my purse had been stolen by a pickpocket, which was surprising as I did not expect to find thievery in utopia or among the members of the new human race.