When I Lived in Modern Times Page 11

  One weekend I went to the beach with Mrs. Gibson, or Susan, as she told me to call her, who was my own age. She was the wife of a CID inspector at the police station on Levinsky Street, where he was more concerned with arson and burglary than terrorism. Palestine bored her stiff. She came into the salon for her weekly shampoo and set and studied all the latest women’s magazines sent by her sister in Reigate, struggling to concoct tasty recipes from unfamiliar ingredients, trying new ways of applying eyeshadow and rouge, and running up her own frocks, fashioning the latest styles from Mayfair, on a Singer sewing machine she had shipped out when they arrived the previous year.

  “It’s hard to make friends,” she told me. “I don’t meet people and the English ladies here are missionaries and schoolteachers, terribly drab types. Norman and I are C of E, of course, but Norman says that just because we’re in the Holy Land, we don’t want religion rammed down our throats night and day. What about you, Priscilla?”

  “I haven’t been to church since I was christened,” I said. “My mother didn’t find our vicar very inspiring.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Lewisham.”

  “And your husband?”

  “Lewisham, too.”

  “You must miss him.”

  “Yes. He’s put in for leave.”

  “That will be nice.”

  “I know. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

  On the beach they sat on the sand like a school of fat pink fish. The Sheppards, the Boltons, the Mackintoshes, and Susan and her husband Norman, all policemen and their wives, second-raters who had passed the war directing traffic and catching Jewish con men, breaking up knife fights in Jaffa or issuing driving licenses. They insisted on a formality I had forgotten about since arriving in a country where codes of social conduct had been thrown out to make way for a new system of social relations.

  We lay about in our bathing costumes absorbing the sun and taking turns to swig from bottles of lemonade. The women were quite nice to me. They thought it was a shame that I was so far from home, a young married without my husband. They promised that they would all patronize no one but Mrs. Kulp’s when they had their hair done. “And Priscilla is awfully good!” Susan cried. “I doubt if you’ll find better in all of Palestine. She trained on Regent Street, you know. Terribly grand.”

  Mrs. Bolton looked up and smiled with painted lips, a dark crimson no food or drink seemed to dislodge. She sat quietly reading a book, a detective novel. She was in her mid-thirties, a well-turned figure in a plain blue bathing suit and vermilion-lacquered, square-cut toe and finger nails.

  “Any good?” I asked her, looking at the book over her shoulder.

  “Dorothy Sayers. I’m quite a fan.”

  “Oh yes, I think I read one or two when I was at school. It’s Lord Peter Wimsey, isn’t it, her detective? And that rather clever girl who assists him.” I missed books like these which came without a lecture.

  “Read much?” Mrs. Bolton asked.

  “Quite a bit.”

  And then we began a conversation about novels, which was pleasant to have with your toes curling in the sand and the smell of the beach in your nose, after you had just been through a long war.

  Her husband was telling a joke involving a horse going into a pub. “And the barman says, ‘Why the long face?’” We all collapsed laughing. It was stupid, of course, but sometimes silly things are the funniest. Then everyone chimed in with their own. They were puns, all terrible puns. A man goes into a pub and the peanuts on the bar tell him he’s wearing a spiffing tie. It’s because they’re complimentary, the barman says. Good God! And yet we laughed harder and harder with each one. Susan’s husband began doing dreadful impressions of war leaders. His Mussolini wasn’t bad but other people on the beach began to turn around when he did Hitler. But it was so pleasant to relax. We were talking about the radio and the programs like ITMA which had kept us going throughout the war because one thing all of us knew was that if it’s your darkest hour you hang on to your sense of humor if you possibly can help it.

  I cannot think of many Jews of the then Palestine who would have laughed at the puerile humor of Norman’s off-color jokes, but I did. They were the same jokes my mother and I heard when we went to see Max Miller at the London Palladium. What they were not were Jewish jokes. There wasn’t a mote of darkness in them.

  “Proper wartime humor,” Susan said.

  “You should have seen it here during the war,” Sheppard replied.

  “What was it like?” I asked him.

  “A convalescent camp for Allied troops. Clubs all along the sea front, for officers and NCOs. Cafés. Teeming with soldiers, it was, and most of them British. You felt at home.”

  Norman said, “I’ll never feel at home. This place has always been full of extremists. You only have to go halfway to Jerusalem and the landscape changes. Get into the Judean desert and you’ll see where they got the raw material to stone people with. The whole country is a dump. There’s no music, no night life apart from Third Programme type stuff, all those gloomy cellos.”

  “Too true,” Sheppard added.

  “I must say, it’s not what I expected,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, who had delicate, pale skin and could not understand why someone as blond as me should tan so easily. She sat, fully clothed, under a wide-brimmed hat, embroidering flowers on table napkins stretched over a wooden hoop, and smelling, to me, of lavender water and bread and butter. She had brought packets of seeds with her from England and went about surreptitiously scattering them over portions of waste ground so that Palestine would become a country of lupins and delphiniums and hollyhocks and pansies and marigolds and other familiar flowers of the cottage garden. “My father is a vicar and I grew up on the biblical stories but there’s no oriental atmosphere and it’s full of absolutely unscrupulous people. I find them gruesomely go-ahead. I’ve never been anywhere with so little charm.”

  “I was surprised too,” said Susan, applying to her skin a dark brown oil which she had had sent over from London. It was supposed to promote the acceleration of a tan which she associated with a group of people she read about in her magazines who would become known, in a few years’ time, as the jet set. “I thought that Arabs would sit on camels eating dates in flowing robes. It’s nothing like that at all.”

  “But there are camels,” said Mrs. Sheppard.

  “Yes,” said Norman. “They don’t half smell.”

  “I don’t think any of that is the point,” said Mackintosh, smiling under a blond mustache, thick and clipped like a pale privet hedge. “What we like or don’t is a matter of indifference. We’re here to play our imperial role. That was what was instilled in me when I was at school, at any rate. We have a responsibility toward the colored races.”

  “Are the Jews colored?” I asked.

  “They’re certainly gaudy enough,” his wife said. “Some of the woman on Allenby, they remind me of the overdressed types you see in London, on the Strand.”

  “Oh, Jews and Arabs, what’s the difference between them?” asked Bolton, who had earlier told the joke about the horse. He was in the middle of a tricky investigation which had been going on for months involving a protection racket along Herzl Street and had been commended the previous year for cracking a complex fraud case involving the transfer of funds between various banks. The perpetrators had been convicted and sentenced but he suspected that the Haganah was at the bottom of it. The trouble was, he told us, no one would talk. He kept visiting them in prison, but they just smile at him and asked him if he would care to join them in a game of draughts. He told us about an Irgun terrorist under sentence of death. “Someone brought him a bottle of brandy and after three weeks he’d finished it. According to the Jews, that made him an unreliable alcoholic.”

  Everyone screamed with laughter. “The Jews,” they cried, “the Jews!” Who could understand them?

  “Don’t mistake me,” Bolton replied. “Jews, Arabs, in the end, they’re all wo
gs. I don’t care about either lot. I’m just here with a box of rules and my job is to get people to obey them. I don’t make the rules. I don’t care about them one way or another. I’m not a passionate man. I don’t take sides. I’ve never seen a side worth taking.”

  Wogs. The word he used.

  Yet the policemen and their wives asked polite questions and listened to the answers, without interruption. I understood how to behave with them. If they offered you a sandwich, I knew that it was customary to refuse the first time and then accept only when pressed, while amongst the Jews of Palestine, if you said no, you went hungry. It was relaxing never to have to wonder as I did when I was amongst my own kind, “What is going on? Why do they do things this way? Why do I, who am one of these people, not know how to be a Jew in a Jewish land?” With the English policemen and their wives I could be an Englishwoman. It was a disguise, of course, but wasn’t it true that everything the English did was performed according to a code and what people said and what they thought were often two different things?

  So there, on the beach, with the sandwiches, I was very comfortable. And yet, they sat next to me, these pleasant individuals swigging lemonade, and they were the enemy of everything I believed in.

  “I grant you the Jews have been through hell but they never ask us what we’ve been through,” Susan said, turning to me. “You know yourself, Priscilla, what the Blitz was like. But they don’t care. It’s all them, them, them.”

  “The Jewish problem,” Mackintosh said, “is that they don’t understand what is fundamental to our make-up: fair play. They see it as a weakness to be exploited. They have a ruthlessness we don’t possess, not anymore, at any rate. You know what I long for? The Golden Age. Queen Elizabeth’s time. We were bankrupt, we’d been invaded over and over again but we made something of ourselves. We were the lords of the world, back then. Now we’re just doing out duty. But it’s got to be done.”

  “The problem with the Jews,” said Mrs. Sheppard, “is that they have a talent for rubbing people up the wrong way.”

  “I quite like some of the Arabs,” said Norman. “They have lovely manners.”

  “At least they’re not socialists,” added Sheppard. “If there’s one thing that really puts me off about Palestine it’s that there are too many Russian Bolshevists. The place is swarming with them.”

  “What’s the difference between here and back home?” asked Norman. “The government’s nationalizing everything in sight. We’ll be under the red flag before the year’s out.”

  “Too true.”

  “Do you remember before the war,” Susan asked, “when you could get that lovely seed cake at Lyon’s Corner House?”

  “Yes!” I cried, for indeed, I did remember it, could taste it in my mouth, the sponge melting on your tongue with real butter, the sharp, dusty sensation of seeds. And we began to talk about Alvar Lidell on the wireless, the sound of the big bands and cups of Ovaltine before bedtime, which reminded me of being tucked in by my mother who had closed the curtains against the sodium orange of the streetlights outside. I thought of a snowy late afternoon on Primrose Hill, the setting sun pink on the frozen ground, my hands in mittens and the velvet collar of my coat turned up while my mother struggled in galoshes along the steep, icy path.

  “To get back to the Arabs,” Mackintosh said, “their difficulty has always been lack of leadership and organization and this is where the Jews beat them hollow. At the end of the day, though, the land belongs to them and the Jews are interlopers, however it might serve our own national interests to have a European presence here. Our job is to keep each bunch from each other’s throats. That’s policy. But if you have to choose between them personally, I know which lot I prefer, the Arabs every time.”

  “Andrew has read Mr. Lawrence’s book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” his wife told us.

  “Yes. It’s fine, very fine. I wish I’d been here in 1917 instead of at prep school when Lawrence marched behind General Allenby and we captured Jerusalem. That would have been a sight.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, they needn’t have bothered,” Bolton said, looking around for more beer.

  “But don’t you see the Arab virtues?” cried Mackintosh. “Their physical courage is beyond doubt, their pride in their traditions, their exquisite courtesy and their hospitality—my God! Just last January gone I had to go up to Jaffa during Ramadan when they aren’t allowed to touch a morsel before sunset. Yet they invite you in and they order tea for you and the most elaborate display of cakes, and even though they aren’t allowed to let a drop pass their lips they insist that you shouldn’t go without. And they have a sense of honor which I’m afraid the Jews just don’t share.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, “they’re so touchy. That they denied our Lord is a fact, it’s in the Bible, but if you remind them of it, why they fly off the handle.”

  “Load of codswallop,” Bolton said, “about the Arabs, I mean. I don’t know where Lawrence got his ideas from, but it wasn’t this lot. You find them picturesque? I don’t. Their fawning makes my flesh crawl. All I can say about them it that they share a great dislike of any kind of work. They’re lazy and unenterprising and if they do lose ground to the Jews it will be because of their own lack of effort. You can’t accuse the Jews of that even if they’re pretty unappealing in every other way, those fat-hipped women in particular.”

  Susan was bored and wanted to bathe. All of us except Bolton got up and walked toward the water, our feet sinking in the sand. We laughed and threw balls at each other while Mackintosh struck out toward the horizon and Bolton sat on the beach drinking beer, watching us and smiling, and watching the other people on the beach too, for he was a policeman through and through and felt that he was on duty all the time.

  MRS. Kulp was becoming less interested in hairdressing and more obsessed by her battle with our landlord. She walked around the exterior of the building and looked for cracks in the concrete. She showed me places where the brilliant surface had begun to discolor and turn brown as if some toxin was eating away at it from the inside. She brushed away encrusted salt. There was no doubt that our brand-new home was in the early stages of deterioration. It was like a young child struck down with a terrible illness and Blum was doing nothing to arrest its decline. His life was spent either mending dolls or sitting in cafés eating cake.

  Mrs. Kulp kept threatening to move to an even newer apartment, one of the kind built on columns so that the dust and heat from the street flowed under the house instead of rising up to its windows. Sometimes she spoke of leaving Tel Aviv altogether and transferring her business to Jerusalem where everything was made of stone and things remained cool indoors instead of the concrete city which all the day sucked the heat through its thin white walls until at night you could not breathe and everyone was driven out into the cafés.

  “So why don’t you?” I said, exasperated by her complaints. Because, because…she had a clientele, she had an admirer and because she yearned for the respectability of a stable, rooted life. It embarrassed her to be a wandering Jew.

  Up on the roof, where we did the washing and strung out our clothes to dry, I met Mrs. Linz, a sturdy, dark, curly-haired woman with short legs and powerful calves who was in her thirties and always knew best. She didn’t pay much attention to how she looked, habitually wearing khaki shorts and a khaki shirt with old black plimsolls in summer, but I found her grumpily helpful.

  “Not like that, like this,” she said. “Not this place on the washing line, here is a better place. You bought from that store? You are mad. Go to this one, it’s cheaper and better quality. I will write down the address. You want to know this? Why ask me? How should I know? My former husband, he knows. I will ask him on your behalf.”

  She lived in the apartment immediately below my own, had lived there since the day Blum first opened its doors, then with her husband and now on her own with her child, a boy of ten who trapped flies and pinned them down by their wings and tried to look a
t their eyes through a magnifying glass.

  “The child is curious,” she said. “The eye of a fly is what interests him and I will not interfere. He will be a scientist like his father.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not far. He waits for a visa to go to America. The child wishes to go to America too and he can if he chooses, but I will not go.”

  “Why not?”

  “All Americans are conformists.”

  “I see.”

  “Like the Germans, who are so very, very boring.”

  “Though not in recent years.”

  “That is because of obedience. But they will be punished now.”

  “Yes, at Nuremberg.”

  “No. The trials are not punishment but revenge. They will see the fate that is in store for them when they find that they are no longer capable of producing great music and literature. I don’t speak of art because I have no interest in painting. It makes me sick.”

  Mrs. Linz’s apartment was decorated in the same style as those of all the intellectual or socialist immigrants of the previous decade: the tiled floors sluiced down with water every day, the walls entirely lined with books, the decorative copper bowls, the ugly German furniture and in her case, pinned to one wall, arms akimbo, a curious dress which had been collected from an Arab village by one of the volunteer assistants of Mrs. Violet Barber at the folk museum in Jerusalem.

  Like all the Yekkes, she devoured literature. “I have always been a student of your great novelists and poets, Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson of course, but also the moderns, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde.”