When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  After a bit, the penny dropped. I said, “Is this football you’re talking about?”

  “Of course it’s football. I’ve supported Betar since I was old enough to go to matches. They’re my brothers. In fact my brother Yasaf plays for them, in defense. Now, nothing. Nothing to look forward to. We’re out, finished. I can’t believe it.” He shook his head.

  I stared at him. “I don’t understand why this is important. It’s only a game.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Why does football matter to you?”

  “It’s our national sport. I love all sports. I like boxing—Joe Louis, what a contender! I like tennis and golf, everything. If I ever went to London do you know what I’d do? I’d go and see Arsenal play. That’s the other team I support. I read in the paper that they’ll be going back to their stadium this season. It was requisitioned for something during the war, I can’t remember what. Arsenal at home. That would be something.”

  “But why? Why should you care about people who live a thousand miles away?”

  “Because,” he said, “a man must have a cause to follow.”

  “What about the creation of the Zionist state?”

  “That’s different. Football is about dreams. The Zionist homeland is gong to happen. It’s inevitable. The British will go. We can get them out, it’s only a matter of time, but whether Betar or Arsenal will win the cup this season—that’s not a certain outcome and it’s not dependent on my own actions.”

  “I see,” I said, but I didn’t and I never would.

  After a long silence, he looked up. “Well, enough of my miseries. Are you free? Would you like to do something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, sullenly. He had asked me nothing about myself.

  “Listen, let’s hop on the bike and go for a spin.”

  “All right,” I said, but only because despite his disheveled appearance, or perhaps because of it, he seemed very handsome and women are affected by that kind of thing, such superficialities.

  I had noticed, by now, that something was missing. “Where’s your mustache?”

  “Gone, for the moment. It comes and goes.”

  “Why?”

  “According to whether I need it or not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind. You don’t need to.”

  His mood had lightened, a little. We walked down into the street and I got on the bike and we rode through the city, my hair streaming. We drove along the shore past Jaffa through sand dunes and Johnny pointed out the spots where new towns would one day be built on the site of Philistine ones: Ashdod, Ashkelon, their names were. Further on was Gaza and then the border with Egypt but we did not go that far. We turned back and flew through Palestine under starry skies and came home to my flat.

  “Hey, nice place,” he said, looking around. “How did you find it?”

  “I met the landlord in a café.”

  “Good landlord?”

  “Not really.”

  “Someone should sort him out for you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, he has his own troubles.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I have no real worries of my own.”

  “You’re lucky then.”

  He wanted a cold drink and I poured some lemonade. We sat on the balcony and listened to the interminable sounds of gramophones and dance bands rising from the cafés on the seashore, coiling their way up my street. Polkas, foxtrots, waltzes, grinding out through the cheap instruments of secondrate orchestras.

  “Things sound as if they’re getting rowdy at the Scopus Club,” Johnny said. “So, Evelyn, what have you been up to since I last saw you?”

  I told him about Mrs. Kulp and the salon and why I had dyed my hair. I introduced him to my imaginary husband in Tiberias and explained about my false name. I described Susan and our picnics on the beach and her friends, the inspectors from the various police stations.

  “They sound like a right shower,” Johnny said, puffing on a Player’s.

  “You’re used to Englishmen.”

  “True. But we never talked politics. You realize the police are anti-Semitic?”

  “I don’t much like them but it’s nice to feel at home from time to time.”

  “Home?”

  “What did I say?”

  “Home. This is your home, now.”

  “It is. But I suppose if you’ve lived somewhere all your life, it’s bound to rub off. The Germans here, you’d think that Germany would be the last place they think of as home…”

  “But they can’t stop going on about how bloody wonderful Berlin was. Don’t I know it.”

  “Meier on the kibbutz said that people can’t live without the past.”

  “Bollocks. The future, Evelyn. Keep your eyes fixed on the future and you won’t go far wrong. If you’re walking down the street which direction do you look in? Where you’re going, of course. And if you walk backwards? You get run over.”

  “That’s true. But do you never think about the war?”

  “No. Why should I? It’s over. Finished. That part of my life is done.”

  “By the way, what do you do for a living, Johnny?”

  “Me? I’m a tailor.”

  Before he left he kissed me tenderly on the cheek and asked if he could come again to see me the following day. Perhaps we’d go to a film, now the picture houses were open again.

  He’s a very simple man, I thought. He’s like a Bauhaus building, straightforward.

  I MET him at eight in a café at the junction of Allenby Road and Rehov Ben Yehuda, just before Allenby took a sharp turn down to the beach. Outside, a small chamber orchestra sat on folding chairs on the pavement playing Mozart and Strauss waltzes. It was composed of four men in suits and ties and a woman in an antique black cocktail dress from before the war, cut on the bias. Their faces, bent over their instruments, dripped with sweat. One of the violinists stroked the wood of his instrument between pieces, as if he was afraid it would buckle beneath his fingers in the heat. Johnny was inside, under a noisy electric fan, eating apple strudel.

  “Who are they?”

  “From Budapest. They were with the symphony orchestra. You know what they used to say ten years ago? Anyone who arrived off the boat without a violin case was presumed to be a pianist. Here, I’ve got something for you.” He passed an envelope to me under the table. “Don’t look now.”

  “What is it?”

  “A passport.”

  “I’ve got a passport.”

  “Yes. In your own name. This one is made out to Priscilla Jones. You might need it.”

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “Connections. Get a photograph taken and stick it in. What film do you want to see? I prefer action pictures. Is there anything on like that?”

  He didn’t want me to ask too many questions. Okay. In England I might have dismissed him as a spiv but here, in Palestine, under British occupation, as far as I was concerned he was a hero. A Jewish hero and how many do we have of those? How many tough guys have there ever been to look up to? A few fish with sharp teeth swimming in an ocean of vegetable life—old men with beards, bent over their books.

  I looked at the films listed in the paper, as the quintet entered, for the third time, the Vienna Woods. It was all just sentimental love stories so we settled for The Picture of Dorian Gray with Hurd Hatfield, Donna Reed and Peter Lawford. I liked Hatfield, he was darkly handsome and I’d seen him in Dragon Seed the year before. We left the café and I put some piastres into the tweed cap on the pavement next to the woman in the cocktail dress. She smiled at me, sweat dripping down her bosom.

  In the cinema, Johnny didn’t understand the film at all and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “What was that about?” he asked me as the curtains closed.

  “Double identity,” I said. “But really it’s about the unconscious, the idea that we have a self, one part of which we are conscious of and keep con
trol over, and another interior life which is wayward and even dark.”

  “Do you believe that stuff?”

  “Yoohoo,” an English voice cried out from a couple of rows behind as we got up to leave. It was Mrs. Mackintosh and her husband.

  We were jostled by crowds out on to the street and nearly lost them but they appeared again, at my shoulder.

  “Lovely to see you, Priscilla. And you must be Sergeant Jones,” she said to Johnny.

  “That’s me,” he replied, with what I thought was a faint trace of a Welsh accent. Everyone shook hands. Mackintosh’s was dry, like old parchment.

  “So you obtained your leave, at long last,” Mrs. Mackintosh said. “I’m so glad.”

  “Yes, and it couldn’t have come too soon for both of us. I’ve missed the old girl, I can tell you.” He gave my hand a squeeze.

  “Did you enjoy the film?” asked Inspector Mackintosh.

  “Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Double Dutch to me, sir.”

  “Tony was just saying he doesn’t believe in double identity,” I said, trying not to giggle.

  “Not unless we’re talking spies. You must have to deal a lot with aliases and that sort of thing when you’re fighting crime. Up in Tiberias I’m arresting people for riding their camels on the wrong side of the road and the odd kibbutz boy who’s got too handy with a rifle.” I looked at Johnny, he was smiling slightly.

  “Yes. We do. And we’re not helped by the fact the locals speak so many languages,” Mackintosh replied. “You can’t get the nationalities straight at all. Where they come from, I mean. Some of them can switch between Russian and Polish and Yiddish. And German, too, if the poor devils have been unfortunate enough to have been in German hands. They’re the worst, I’m afraid. Absolutely unscrupulous.”

  “You see in their religion they don’t have our idea of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek,” his wife told us. “It’s utterly foreign to them.”

  “English is all I know,” Johnny said. “My grandma spoke Welsh but all that mumbo jumbo’s finished with now. English is the language of the empire.”

  “For as long as it lasts,” Mackintosh said sadly and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Well, nice seeing you again,” I said. “Let’s meet up again soon.”

  “Yes, a beach picnic would be lovely,” Mrs. Mackintosh replied. “And one day you must come to us, for tea. You should see my garden. I’m having quite a success with my roses this year.”

  “He’s a sad type, that Mackintosh,” Johnny said, as we walked off.

  “In what way?”

  “He’s reached the end of the line and he knows it. A lot of them here have no idea—no idea what’s coming. They don’t know what’s going to hit them. They’re going to lose that empire of theirs. India’s going independent. Africa will too, eventually. Britain’s going to be on its own, just a little insignificant speck on the map. And chaps like him, loyal servants and all that, men with a sense of duty, there’ll be no place for them. They’re finished.”

  “But we won the war.”

  “Come off it. The Americans did. And the Russians. The game’s theirs now. They’ll divide the whole shooting match up between them. No. Face it, Britain’s had it. People like us are the future, people who are quick-witted and know how to reinvent ourselves in a flash. You’ll see.” He whistled a Glenn Miller tune as we walked along the street.

  That night we became lovers. Who seduced whom? We seduced each other. He reached his hand up to touch my face and I took it and kissed it. His hand, shaking, lay on my breast and I unfastened the buttons of his shirt. He said, “You’re so very beautiful and so all alone. I want to look after you.” He unhooked my brassiere and my breasts were under his fingers. They were new breasts then. His body was brown and perfect except for a scar on his upper arm where he had been injured by flying debris when the Canadians had bombed their own side by mistake during the Palermo landings. I kissed the scar.

  Is there anything sweeter in the world than to lie with your head on the chest of your lover, smoking cigarettes after you have made love and for the first time understood why people do this, all over the world? And there is no greater aphrodisiac: sex with someone you love, which annihilates all the potions of powdered horn and root which by sympathetic magic are supposed to imitate the phallic shapes they resemble. Was I in love with him already? Perhaps. I loved the way that he could deceive the British and play with them but inside he knew exactly who he was.

  I loved also the way he accepted people at their own estimation of themselves, whatever that may be and didn’t try to guess their motives. “Life is too short to analyze the psyche,” he would say. “All I need to do is to know myself, and him I know very well indeed. I have no curiosity about other people. They will tell you soon enough what you want to know. You know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy without examining their subconscious. The signs are all there, on the surface.”

  I didn’t agree, but as he pointed out, he had got by long enough on this simple philosophy and unlike others perhaps better and wiser than himself had survived five years of war and another year resisting the colonial presence of the British. Who was I to tell him that he was wrong? Perhaps we do not need to know each other after all. Perhaps our compulsion to tell each other our stories is no more than talkativeness and we would be better left in our silences, each with our own essential mystery. Though God knows how you’re going to sell that one to the Jews.

  WHAT did I really want to know about Johnny? Well, he stayed in my apartment two or three nights a week and sometimes I wondered what he did with the rest of his time, but not all that hard. All I was really interested in was whether or not there was another girlfriend somewhere. That he worked in a back room in the Florentin district making suits I knew because he told me. He would get on the Norton every morning after spending the night with me and disappear off down the street, blowing sand around his wheels. He never wore a suit, but then not many Palestinians did. It was a casual country. Who did he make them for?

  “People.”

  “What people?”

  “The British. They come out here with tweed and worsted and they have to have something lightweight for the climate.”

  “Who else?”

  “Evelyn, this is boring. My work doesn’t interest me. It’s what I do to earn money. My father got me into it before the war when he realized I was never going to make a civil servant. He found jobs for all of us.”

  “How many are there of you?”

  “Nine.”

  “Nine? That’s a huge family.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Where do you come in? Are you one of the youngest or one of the oldest?”

  “Second youngest. I have a younger sister. But I was always the baby because there was a big gap between me and the next one up.”

  “What’s it like to grow up with so many relatives?”

  “Like being a member of an army. I have eleven uncles and aunts by blood and more cousins than I can count. For my brothers’ and sisters’ birthdays I make them a shirt. I put darts in the chest if it’s a sister. That’s it. I use whatever color material comes to hand.”

  “Will you make me a shirt?”

  “Yes, if you want. But it will be like a kibbutz shirt, not fashionable.”

  “I’d like it if it was made by you.”

  “Give me a week.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll need your measurements.”

  “I don’t know what they are anymore. I’m bigger since I came to Palestine. Not fat, more muscle, I think.”

  He looked at me and sized me up. “Like a girl should be, sturdy. I don’t like these thin little English girls with no chests and skinny little arms. They don’t know how to eat. I want something I can grab hold of in bed.”

  And all this time I carried on cutting and setting hair at the salon and listening to the shallow chatter of my customers. I tried to explain to Johnny that I could on
ly retain an interest in hairdressing by regarding it as an extension of what I had picked up in the office where I started to learn commercial art: as the arrangement of forms and masses within a given canvas. Or was it a kind of sculpting of a portion of the human form with hair as the plastic material? Dyeing became for me a means of working with color. Instead of mixing oils on a palette, I would painstakingly form an amalgamation of different chemicals which in the bottle would look like no more than a muddy brown but, if the manufacturers had got the formula right, would produce the desired effect—blond, brunette, auburn. With paint, what you saw on your palette and dipped your brush into would be much the same color on the surface to which you applied it. Not so with hair dye, for hair is a living substance (emerging from the part of ourselves which is closest to the brain) so the principles of hairdressing were those of uncertainty and experimentation based, if one had it, on a sound chemical knowledge of the structure of the hair and what affected its disposition—to be straight or curly, pale or dark, thick or thin.

  As well as being a minor art form, hairdressing was a far more dangerous and exact science than painting. I was regularly daubing the heads of my ladies with chemicals like hydrogen peroxide which has a tendency to decompose and suddenly explode if not stored under the correct conditions. In fact, if you thought about it in a certain way, the storeroom of a hairdressing salon more closely resembles in its potential for the damage it can inflict a small, backroom bomb factory.

  “Good,” Johnny said. “If I need to make a bomb in a hurry I know where to come. To Mrs. Kulp’s ladies’ hairdressing salon on Shenkin Street. Now I’ve heard everything.”

  I tried to convince him that there was something serious in hairdressing. During my schoolgirl visits to the National Gallery, as well as decoding the symbols contained in a lily lying on the floor and representing trampled purity, or a skull reminding us of our mortality, I would look at the changing hairstyles in the pictures. But the understanding of what the profession really was came to me not in a museum, nor in the Regent Street salon itself, but during the journey to Palestine when I sat on the deck turning the pages of the book that Uncle Joe had given me, in which I learned for the first time to think like a modernist, to look for the fault lines between the present and the past, the place where ruptures took place.