When I Lived in Modern Times Page 12

  “Joyce, Yeats and Wilde are all Irish.”

  “Isn’t it the same thing?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I’m sure you will find, Miss Sert, that it is.”

  “I think I know the literature of my own country.”

  She waved her hand. “Ireland should be glad to be part of a nation which has produced such culture. They are writing in the English language, after all, instead of their own original barbaric tongue.”

  I told her about my six weeks on the kibbutz. “If ever Palestine will be remembered,” she said, “it will be for the kibbutz, its greatest achievement, the only socialist experiment which had really worked. If the British go, there will be war with the Arabs, you can be quite sure of that, and I will take the child to the kibbutz, and leave him there for the duration.”

  “You won’t stay with him?”

  “No. I will return to Tel Aviv. Don’t look shocked. The English evacuated their children to the countryside, to the farms during the war. It was reported in the papers. The kibbutz ideal doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’m too much of an individualist.”

  “That was my problem,” I told her.

  “Listen,” she said, after we had got to know each other better. “You and I are of a type. We are the kind who break the walls with our bare hands.”

  On curfew nights, we used to sit on her balcony fanning ourselves, while the child crawled around our feet inspecting ants, and she sewed and mended, and we wiped away the sweat. Down the street you could catch a glimpse of the sea in the fluorescence of moonlight.

  “You have come too late,” she advised me. “Oh, you should have been here in the beginning, in 1933, when I arrived, one month exactly after I saw the window of a Jewish shop smashed and I told my mother that I was leaving and would never set foot in Germany again while Hitler was alive and my uncle said that I may be a Jew but I should consider myself a German first. Because of the end he met I wish I had been proved wrong and he right but I was right. Only nineteen and already I knew better than the man who was supposed to be the head of my family, but you see my mind had been trained by political theory.

  “The shock of my arrival! Nothing like Berlin but the atmosphere was absolutely marvelous for a young person, it was brotherly, everyone knew everyone, no one had any money. I had been in Berlin already an ardent feminist and socialist so to come here was like arriving in a great social experiment where we would begin all over again to make a new Berlin, a city for the masses and for the intellectuals, where we would build a modern life for ourselves. It was not just me, all of us who arrived, leaving behind a homeland somewhere else and finding this new, unfamiliar homeland, were making history in our way.”

  So young a city, and already it had a legend.

  “Twice a week you went down to the harbor at Jaffa when the ships came in from Europe and looked to see if there were any acquaintances. We all expected it to be not a big city but at least a little Berlin. My God, it was more like a town in the Wild West that I had seen at the cinema. There was no anchorage and you had to be taken to land in this little boat. I remember I stood high on the railing and a huge Arab in a red tarboosh and strange trousers yelled at me in German, ‘Jump, meine Liebe.’ Then the Jewish Agency took me in a diligence—do you know what that is? No? It’s a funny taxi for six people and one horse and this one stank to high heaven. We arrived at a new immigrants’ home in Allenby Road which was a large hall with iron bedsteads and army blankets and there were a few people sitting at the end with contraptions made of fire and talking in a language I thought was not human. They were my first Yemenites.

  “The conditions were terrible in those days, terrible, but I wrote home to my sister: ‘Believe me, this place has a fabulous potential for becoming a truly socialist state because here there are no class distinctions—how can there be when there are no classes? So the only thing that must happen now is to stop the immigration so things can develop naturally.’ Ha! What an idiot.

  “But you know I couldn’t find a job. I had no training for this country, I didn’t even know the language. German, I knew. English I knew, of course, for the literature, the marvelous literature. But Hebrew was beyond everybody except the religious boys from the yeshivot.” She wrinkled her nose. “Those Ostjuden.”

  “I have heard this expression before, Mrs. Linz,” I said, “and I feel I must inform you that I am of those Ostjuden.”

  “Then,” she said, “we shall have to advance you to a higher level in life but it should not be too difficult. You are quite cultured already.” I tried to interrupt her with an expression of outrage, but she pressed on.

  “Anyway, I arrived in May 1933 and the first job you could call a job was in 1937. Four years. Four years of hard labor, supporting myself by hook or by crook. I was a waitress, I was a maid, factory worker. And on Fridays I put on the one good thing I had to wear and went into Mina’s where dinner cost the horrendous price of three piastres but there were four courses and at least I was in a pioneer city full of young workers, all in our teens and twenties. The streets belonged to us.

  “At first my boyfriends were German. It was inevitable. They were the only people I could communicate with in my own language but I grew to dislike them intensely. They hated the light and they were always taking the bus to Jerusalem at every opportunity they could get to hide in its shadowy alleys and cool their blood amongst its cold and ancient stones. Some years it even snows in Jerusalem but it never snows in Tel Aviv. Have you been in Jerusalem?”

  “No. Not yet.” I had thought about it since arriving in Palestine. I thought of its golden dome and its fabulous past, the royal city of King David, and the extraordinary sights in a place so old and romantic. I pined too to see the desert, the River Jordan and the Judean hills and the extraordinary phenomenon of the salty wastes of the Dead Sea.

  “Horrible town, Jerusalem,” Mrs. Linz said. “Absolutely mired in the past. The German colony—not our Germans but the Christians who came here in the last century and were absolutely pro-Nazi and were expelled by the British—their neighborhood is planted with northern pine trees. Why? A monument to homesickness, of course. It is impossible to introduce anything modern for there is a law that every building must be constructed from Jerusalem stone, every one, without exception. So of course anyone interested in building with modern materials must come here. Anyway, Jerusalem is a British city, it is the headquarters of government and everything to do with government will always be stifling and conventional though do not mistake me for an anarchist.

  “So one day, when I had learned a little Hebrew, I found myself a Yemenite boyfriend and he loved going to Jaffa to the cafés of the Arabs where he felt at home. He was very homesick for the Arab way of life and the European manner in which we were building Palestine was quite strange to him. Anyway, he took me with him. The music, the decorations, it was all so very alien to me. I was interested, but unlike him, I didn’t want to get involved. We went to see a film at the Alhambra cinema, very posh it was. I sat for three hours and watched The White Rose, a very famous Egyptian film in which nothing happens except a man sings in—to my ears—a very terrible fashion. I thought, why can’t they have modern houses and modern furniture? Tel Aviv was the absolute avant-garde of modernism. All our architects came from the Bauhaus, as you must know. We were building a European city and the Arabs were stuck in the Orient. But still, it was fascinating—the big palm trees, the smell of spices and flowers, beautiful, though not my sense of beauty. And in the middle of it all the Winter Gardens, a café which was a mixture of the Orient and Germany which my Yemenite boyfriend thought was very confusing. We were both Jews but what did we have in common? Only that we were Jews and what, I want to know, does that mean?

  “I remember this street when there were only ten houses, and the water only came twice a week. You couldn’t wash the dishes or take a shower. People used to come on excursions with picnics to see the new houses being built because it was so exc
iting to see Tel Aviv develop along the shoreline and everyone marveled at how our European architects worked so hard to bring Europe to the barbaric East. We didn’t wait for the Zionist executive to draw up a plan. We just started. We couldn’t wait. People came, they had nowhere to live, they built houses for themselves. We’re the city of formerly homeless people. Oh, life was very hard then but it was marvelous for a young girl like me who wished to practice free love. Whatever you do, Evelyn, do not make my mistake and marry. I don’t know why people think that happiness lies in sharing a bathroom.

  “Now things are not nice. Not very nice at all. Do you know the ideas of Judah Magnes? He is for a bi-national state but the bloody Irgun and the Lehi are doing their best to spread hatred, abominable hatred. I have utter contempt for those people. A question, for you. If you knew of anyone who is a terrorist would you inform the British? I’m very divided. On the one hand, terrorism is anathema so you must do it. When it comes to killing people you have to stop and think first and that Etzel shower are anything but thinkers. On the other, how can you give up a Jew to those policemen who on the day of embarking for Palestine were indoctrinated by Mosley? Or to one of our civil servants who form part of the adoring public of Mr. T. E. Lawrence and believe anything connected with Arabs is absolutely fabulous and who are secretly disappointed when the people here who are so much superior to them in intellect are in fact the Jews? For you know we established from the very beginning a very high standard of intellectual life. I myself arrived here with a gramophone and records.

  “Undoubtedly the terrorists will get what they want and when the British go we will see the frantic joy of the population and then we will be in constant fear of being attacked. There will be a terrible war and we may be defeated and if we are not, on the day that Palestine becomes an independent Jewish state, I will weep. I will have the national identity of a country I do not think should exist. But what is the alternative? Take the man who sells watermelons on the corner of our street. You have noticed him?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “You have bought his watermelon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Delicious cool things. He brings them every day from one of the Arab villages a few miles away. No more than three or four miles. He brings them on a camel. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “He leaves the camel in Jaffa and he transfers the watermelons on a cart. Now the problem for us is this: we, the residents of Tel Aviv, are spearheading the twentieth century. We are the cream of pre-war Berlin society, we are what remains of the Wiemar Republic, in exile. We have here in our Jewish city some of the best-educated men and women in the world. We have scientists and historians and musicians and lawyers and doctors, everything. The Arab on the street is simply an illiterate man who knows how to sell watermelons. Can an industrious, well-organized minority who are the receptacle of all the most advanced ideas of the modern age be governed and dominated by a majority so patently inferior to us in energy and education and administrative experience? Can we be governed by feudalism and blind devotion to religion and tribes and sects and blood feuds? No. Impossible. Such an arrangement could never work. Our misfortune is that we must rule them because we are modern.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “we can send Gropius to see if he can redesign their tents.” We both laughed.

  “But no,” she continued. “It is not comic. It’s a tragedy.”

  “Where is the rest of your family?” I asked her.

  “Gassed,” she told me. “My mother and my redheaded uncle and my redheaded cousins.”

  “Why didn’t they come here?”

  “They did come, for a visit in 1937, but they abhorred the socialism and the disorder. They preferred England and it is true the English are civilized, come what may. They went back to Berlin to arrange their affairs and they never got out.”

  Mrs. Linz was employed as a stenographer in a large office. Sometimes we took the bus to work together and sometimes we went afterward for a coffee at the Noga café where the intellectuals met and there was dancing at weekends. I saw all the art I could find in Palestine. It was curious stuff, the painters influenced by a Paris training and they depicted the white city in murky colors with stark leafless trees, as if it were an overcast November day in the Bois de Boulogne.

  But there was an abstract painter who sometimes came to the Noga and spoke of the vibrancy of the sky and the air in motion, of the local light and the essence of the expanse. It was the soul of matter, form and content that he was trying to express, he said. “The atmosphere is the substance,” he told me. “The posture is sometimes the soul.” And I nodded and sipped my coffee, not understanding.

  In the evenings, the child would crawl around in the garden getting his clothes dirty. He was a solitary presence in our building where everyone had come from somewhere else. The palm trees and orange trees and bougainvillea and the torrid, steamy summer heat and the British shouting at us through megaphones were what was real for him. He reminded me of myself at that age. He was a child without grandparents or other relations and the little society on Mapu, full of immigrants and strangers, was all the world he knew.

  ONE lunchtime a few British officers were abducted by the Irgun from their club at the Yarkon Hotel. The streets were flooded with security forces, sweating troops tearing up the pavements and barricading them with sandbags. On my way to the salon, I passed Bren gun nests at Mogen David Square and there were constant cordon and search operations. The kidnappings accelerated. The city was out of bounds to all ranks, and the soldiers in their red berets whom we mockingly called the anemones were armed and went around in pairs like nervous couples. The railway tracks were blown up, trains were dynamited. One drama followed another. There was no relaxation. The policemen’s wives whose hair I shampooed and set complained that they hardly saw their husbands anymore, they were busy till all hours rounding people up and interrogating them.

  In the apartment building, everyone grew hot and quarrelsome as the curfew dragged on. Mrs. Linz missed her concerts. Mrs. Kulp missed the cinema. Blum missed sitting with his cronies, eating cake. I missed having the life of a normal young person, free to go to parties and other entertainments where I could meet young men.

  But our country continued its march of progress. They laid the cornerstone for a new scientific institute in Rehovot. The scientists were planning to plant castor trees in the Negev because they grew anywhere and from their fruit you could extract products which could be turned into nylon. And if you had nylon you could make anything, from women’s stockings to mosquito nets. They were going to try out machines that would turn salt water into fresh and invent devices which would make electricity for blocks of flats by exploiting the difference in temperature between the basement and the attic. They were going to grow grapefruit and oranges as big as footballs and pipless giant tangerines. They were going to build an electronic brain.

  “If the child stays in Palestine he will definitely work there one day,” said Mrs. Linz who had taken him to watch the inauguration of the institute. “This is our future, you know, pioneer industries, plastics, everything up to date.”

  “Like magic.”

  “Yes, magic but on an industrial scale.”

  The child was learning to take his own pulse with his mother’s wristwatch. We looked at him, admiringly. “The new Jew,” I said.

  A couple of weeks after their abduction, at the beginning of July, the three captains kidnapped from the officers’ club were dumped in the middle of the street, groggy with chloroform. Each had been given a pound note to cover the wear and tear to his uniform.

  One afternoon, I passed Johnny sitting in a café on Ben Yehuda Street, looking terrible. It was the first time I had seen him since he dropped me off at the hotel and wished me luck. He barely looked up when I approached his table.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, of course. Even with the blond hair. It suits you. Very glamorous.”
He mashed the remains of his cake with his fork. “How are you getting on?”

  “Very well. I have an apartment and a job. I thought I’d have run into you before now.” I was wearing a blue dress and white high heels and I had no need to worry if my seams were straight for my legs were brown and I didn’t need stockings.

  “Yes. Well, I’ve been a bit busy.”

  “With what?”

  “Oh, this and that.” He pushed the plate away.

  “Were you arrested at all?”

  “Me? No. I’ve got some fake British papers.”

  “How did you get them?”

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” He grimaced at his coffee. His hair was not sleeked back with palm oil and his shirt was soiled and creased.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “What’s up? Don’t you know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. How could you?” He stared miserably out of the window. “I still can’t believe it. It’s just…” He began to speak in Hebrew, a long, low, angry mutter. He lit a cigarette without offering me one. I took one from my own packet, on the table. He looked at it. “Sorry,” he said, dully. “I have no manners today.”

  “Something has happened. Can you tell me?”

  “If the words don’t turn to ash in my mouth.”

  I considered that he might be in fear of being arrested for black-market offenses. I looked around to see if there were any policemen in the café and saw one.

  “There’s a cop here,” I said, whispering. “Should you go?”

  He looked up. “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might be in trouble with the police.”

  “Well, I’m not, though there has been a catastrophe. An absolute disaster.”

  I was trying to think of what might have happened. “Has an immigrant ship sunk? Someone you know been killed?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. That would…Well, never mind.

  It’s this: my team, Tel Aviv Betar, has been eliminated in the first round of the tournament. And at home, too. And we, we are supposed to be the cup specialists. We won in ‘40 and ‘42. Now we’re out for the count and to Ness Ziona. If Yalovsky gets back from the Jewish Brigade in time, my God, they’re going to win the whole thing. It’s a tragedy.”