When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  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?”

  WHAT 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.
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  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.

  AFTER a while I discovered that there were two countries called Palestine. The Jewish Zion was a raw, strained immigrant society in which the middle classes struggled to keep their heads above water and the poor took life by the throat and throttled it half to death. From far away, the struggle of the Jews against the might of the British Empire had seemed to us in England, Uncle Joe and me, to be no less than David’s battle against the giant Goliath or the resurrected Maccabeans opposing the Romans. Right was obviously on our side. But when you got close up you noticed the crooks as well as the heroes.

  I hadn’t expected that. People think that suffering ennobles, but they’re wrong. They were Jews who were sullen or violent or depressed or conniving or lazy or untruthful or greedy. They were a catalogue of the seven deadly sins. One night, one of the many when there was a curfew and we sweated indoors deprived of the cafés and the cooling breeze of the seashore, the residents of the Florentin district were rounded up and taken in for questioning. When they were finally released back to their homes they found that they had been burgled. A bookkeeper in a poultry shop was shot in the head by thieves who took his empty wallet. Mysterious fires broke out in factories and shops.

  The slums of eastern Europe had been emptied of their gangsters and petty criminals. All the Jewish kings of all the Jewish thieves had built new dominions in Palestine. A young man was found dead, leaning against a sandy wall near the zoo, his hat still on his head, a bullet in his chest. He had no identity papers on him and went to the cemetery as a galmud—an unattached—in an unmarked grave. Then the news reported that he had been going around collecting money for the Irgun underground. He was unknown to that organization and when they heard about it, they shot him.

  It was not difficult for a girl brought up in Soho to detect vice and beggary when she saw it and it was all around me: in Tel Aviv, the most modern city on earth, I recognized the little pimps in their imitation silk shirts and loud ties with fake diamond stick pins; I knew the prostitutes whose faces washed and sponged of their nighttime make-up still revealed the kohl caked in the fine lines around their eyes; I saw beggars sitting on the ground, their hands outstretched, one of them wrapped in a tallis, making out he was the prophet Elijah. I saw sallow faces and dark ones and stained white robes. In the market I saw a tailor with a tape measure around his neck and pins in his mouth measuring up an Arab for the alteration of a pair of trousers. I heard snatches of song rise for a moment or two from the mouths of the stallholders in languages I could not guess the meaning of, and piles of olives and unfamiliar fruits and bunches of loofahs and bags of sweets and cheap toys and dusters and facecloths and shoes and bunches of bananas and baskets of silvery onions and piles of flat, golden bread. And everyone was pushing and jostling and arguing and screaming at their children and a woman suckled her baby where she stood.

  I bought bread and fruit and meat and tea and coffee and sugar, sometimes in Hebrew and sometimes by pointing. A brawl broke out one time between an Arab and a Jew over the price of something and because I did not want to see blood I looked up to the thin strip of blue sky like the seam of a stocking above us.

  I saw dusty alleys of crumbling houses and trees with leaves like feat
hers, bearing red flowers, and some kind of vegetation spilled out over walls with more red flowers of a different kind and I couldn’t put a name to anything I had seen. In and out of these houses came beings I had never imagined existing: the men with beards on their chins but hairless on their lips, the women whose heads were covered entirely with scarves revealing not a single hair and around whose necks hung rows of beads and metal necklaces as if they were breastplates. Their earlobes were weighed down with more baubles and the place that they had come from was called Yemen which I was later to look up in an atlas of the world and find at the tip of Saudi Arabia. I guess that when the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem in the earliest times of the Diaspora some had turned east instead of west and lived nearly two thousand years cut off from the rest of us, people for whom the Bible lands were all there was or ever had been or, for all they knew, ever would be until the end of time.

  I felt as if we were all half here and half somewhere else, deprived of our native languages, stumbling over an ugly ancient tongue. We knew that we were to be remade and reborn and we half did and half didn’t want to be. We were caught up in a plan to socially engineer our souls and this was being carried out by men who seemed like the distant gods on Mount Olympus or Valhalla, the deities such as David Ben-Gurion and the others from the Jewish Agency who were smelting the Jewish future in which we would all be poured, like so many alloys in the melting pot of immigrant life, to emerge as molten, liquid, golden Jewish humanity.

  The second Palestine was the one I lived in during the daytime, at the salon and sometimes on my day off and that was something else altogether, British Palestine, the rule of the Mandate. As much as I felt that I belonged heart and soul to Zion, it was the British whose taste and idioms, language and dress, cooking and habits I knew and understood. The British were the only people who did not seem like foreigners to me, although they were the colonial, the oppressive power. They were the enemy and the paradox of my life was that the ways of the enemy were partly mine too. This state of affairs perplexed and troubled me when, with my platinum hair and penciled eyebrows, the soldiers on the street now never thought that I was anything but one of them.