When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  My mother, when she had cut herself off from her family and rendered invisible those old people in their beards with their nostalgic yearning for the previous century and its certainties, had considered hairdressing to be a very modern job. But as her own mother had, according to ritual observance, shaved her head and worn a wig, it occurred to me that once, in every town of a reasonable size in the Jewish world of eastern Europe, there must have been wig-makers. And those men, or even women, perhaps, had gathered the hair in great bags and then styled it into headpieces which their wearers would never remove, for the whole of their lives. Presumably they must have had to have their own hair regularly shorn, though my mother thought that hers had done the job herself, alone in the bedroom in the afternoons, hacking it off with kitchen scissors.

  “Yeah,” said Johnny. “I remember my grandmother did the same.”

  “Did you know that it was only after the exile that Orthodox women began to crop their hair and wear wigs when they got married, which makes me wonder if, now that we’re on the brink of achieving a national home, the practice can be discontinued? It’s just a Diaspora thing.”

  “Good point,” Johnny said.

  I told him that there had never been a time in human history when people didn’t pay the greatest attention to their hair and its adornment, that it had always been how people marked their rank, trade or sex. For reasons I could not fathom, the religious authorities had, through the ages, imagined that the sight of what was sometimes known as a woman’s “crowning glory” was likely to inflame men’s passions. I did not say that it had once occurred to me that this might be because the hair of the head made a silent reference to another growth of hair about which men were not supposed to think and which, to this day—when bosoms and legs and bottoms have all been accentuated by prevailing fashions—has never been allowed to be exposed. Though my mother combed hers and applied a light oil to make it glossy which I knew because I saw her doing it, just once, when she came from the bath, her legs spread apart as she sat on the closed lid of the WC, her skin pink and wrapped in an emerald green Chinese robe with red-tongued dragons.

  “It’s interesting how a bottle of dye can turn you from one thing into another,” Johnny was saying. “Just that little bottle and you fool them.”

  “I wonder if I sometimes fool myself, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I’m with the British and they treat me as if I’m British I feel British, not a Jew at all. If I have a passport in the name of this Priscilla Jones, who’s to say I’m someone else, apart from myself? I mean if I suffered from some form of amnesia and forgot completely that I was Evelyn Sert who would I be then?”

  These questions puzzled me but they did not interest Johnny. He shrugged. “I know who I am,” he said. “It’s not a problem.”

  Looking at him, I was reminded of those pages in the book that discussed the cubist portraits of Picasso. By showing the human face as a series of disjointed planes and angles, Picasso had demonstrated that who or what a person was depended entirely on your point of view. The new way of looking at things, apparently, reflected the relativity of the Einsteinian science and of the age we lived in which lacked a single, unifying truth or belief but saw life as fragmented and discontinuous. And this, perhaps, was the difference between Johnny and me, for he merely wore a mask which deliberately set out to deceive, behind which he clearly knew who he was, while I seemed to contain several selves and each of these seemed to me as valid as the next.

  But I couldn’t talk to Johnny about any of it. It was impossible to get him interested in ideas and perhaps that was part of his attraction. He simplified everything so that the way in front of us was clear, undivided and without mystery. To live, one needed nothing but common sense and native wit. “There is a natural way of doing things,” he would tell me. “Only follow the natural way and you will never get into trouble. Don’t think too much. Just do it.”

  Drinking lemonade on the balcony, I told Johnny all about Mrs. Paget-Knight and we marveled at the mentality of people who could send their children away from them at the age of six, though I wondered if the communally owned babies of the kibbutz did not grow up with the same air of detachment. If their matter-of-fact attitude to sex was based on some inability to conceive of intimacy with another and if they would ever be capable of falling in love, which is after all a form of possession. I had talked to Johnny before about life on the kibbutz and of free love and of the ideas of Bertrand Russell but he thought that they were rubbish.

  “A man wants a woman for himself and vice versa. Anything else is like borrowing a library book. Look at you, alone in the world. Why should you be a library book? No. You want a home. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come to Eretz Israel. You are home, Evelyn.”

  So with Johnny all the complicated ideas were made easy and living in the present tense was reduced to a few energetic necessities—making love and making war. I leaned across and kissed him and pushed my tongue into his mouth and bit his lip. He unbuckled the belt on his khaki trousers while I undid the buttons on his khaki shirt. I took my own blouse off and he unfastened my brassiere and held the weight of my breasts in his hands. Soon we were down on the floor of the square white box that was my living room, writhing, making the beast with two backs and our lovemaking tousled my platinum blond hair.

  One morning I woke out of a pleasant dream. Johnny and I were walking through an orange grove together. He reached up and picked a fruit for me, straight from the tree and peeled it and put the segments into my mouth. My tongue broke their outer skins and the juice ran down my throat. I looked at my hands and I saw my veins run orange. The sun shone mildly and we walked on, to the sea. The sand was white and abundant. We walked into the waves, fully clothed and stood on tiptoe, submerged beneath the surface and when we got out we were dry at once. It was odd and funny and inconsequential. A good dream and I reached across and touched Johnny awake to tell him about it.

  He looked at me blankly, his eyes still sticky with sleep. “Does this have a point, this story?”

  “No. It was just a nice dream. What do you dream about?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. I have never had a dream in the whole of my life. I have my dream when I’m awake. The dream of Betar winning the cup.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “It is to me.”

  “What happens when you go to sleep?”

  “Nothing. I’m asleep.”

  “Didn’t you have dreams when you were a child?”

  “No, never. Listen, I exhaust myself during the day. I go to bed, I’m unconscious until I get up. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. This dream you tell me you just had, why should I envy you for that? I’m glad I don’t have to deal with such chaos every night.”

  “But dreams are messages from our subconscious.”

  “I don’t believe in the subconscious. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t believe in it. It’s neurotic, the product of a mind that is confused and conflicted and doesn’t see things as they should be. You give me a problem and I can solve it. I don’t think there is any problem so big that I’m not capable of finding a solution if I apply my brain to it. I don’t worry about it, I don’t have anxiety, I don’t brood. It’s like repairing the Norton. Everything is straightforward if you know how the machine was built. Everything has an internal structure which is visible to the naked eye and logical. In Eretz Israel, so help me God, there will be no head doctors.”

  “God?”

  “A figure of speech. My father uses it a lot.”

  “But you’re speaking as if the most important development in twentieth-century thought never existed.”

  “What development is that?”

  “The ideas of Freud. His understanding of the hu
man mind. Look at its influence. Look at surrealism.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve never heard of Salvador Dalí?”

  “No. He sounds like Freud, another neurotic old-world type. What I know about Freud is this. He lived in Vienna at the turn of the century. The place was a nest of anti-Semites. No wonder people felt crazy. They had no fresh air to breathe. They were claustrophobic, frightened. It was the time of the Dreyfus case. There was hysteria against the Jews. The anti-Semites were the hysterics, not us, but they drove us to the same state as them. Head cases. Crackpots. Women with other women. Men with men. All unnatural. And Freud tells me I want to marry my mother. You haven’t seen my mother. She gave birth to nine children and her bosom is hanging down by her waist. My father can keep her. Now see what you’ve made me say. I insulted my own mother. That’s what Freud brings out in you.”

  I did not know what to reply. I had as my boyfriend a man with no inner life. I could only assume later, when I read more about psychoanalysis, that if he did not dream he must have had some powerful mechanisms of repression, perhaps because he had something even more powerful that he needed to repress. Though looking at him, now, it was impossible to imagine what this might be. Where were the hidden depths? Everything was on the surface. He was an open book.

  Johnny never asked me about my dreams and I don’t know whether I would have told him or not. At night when I got into bed I would compose myself for sleep in the knowledge that I was about to enter my other life where things were as real as when I was awake. In later years, those long years of exile from myself, I came to love sleep and dreams, but now, in Tel Aviv, in 1946, what I dreamed about was my mother: of her well and young, brushing her hair in front of her dressing table, or shopping for vegetables in Berwick Street market, or showing me how to divide the hair of the head into its “ply”—the strands we would wind around rollers or twist about our fingers into pin curls.

  I dreamed of the smells of foreign food from the Italian cafés and of dappled spring skies over Hyde Park, the air smelling of rain, the breeze fresh on my face. I dreamed of buying new sheets and towels at John Lewis on Oxford Street before the war, before the shortages, of my mother and me unfolding each one and holding the ends between us to examine the linen for flaws or stains. I dreamed of the smell of cigars on Uncle Joe’s suits and the eau de cologne he splashed on his skin before he came to see us. I dreamed of jam tarts and my mother’s laughter and of her bending forward to straighten a stocking seam so I could see the lace of her slip. I dreamed of the two of us listening to the wireless for the war news and of myself trying to tell that frightened pair that everything would be all right—that the war would last for six years and that we would win it—but nothing came from my mouth and I stared at them, wishing for some way to give them comfort.

  AFTER a while, Johnny began to ask me more about the women who came to the salon. “The British women I mean.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because the information is useful.”

  “To whom?”

  “To those of us interested in furthering the cause of the Zionist state. Which includes you, Evelyn.”

  “What will you do with the information?”

  “It’s intelligence. Think of yourself as a spy. The more we know about the enemy the better. There were such women during the war.”

  “My God, you’re not expecting me to make love to Mackintosh, like Mata Hari, are you?”

  “Of course not. It’s just harmless information we’re after. Names, addresses. That sort of thing. You could easily copy them from the appointments book, surely?”

  “Yes. I could.” He smiled at me. The stink of palm oil was gone. I had bought him a new American hair cream which smelled pleasantly of lighter and more masculine perfumes. He ran a nail brush across the tips of his fingers before he came to me. He wanted now to shower before we went to bed, afraid that the sweat on his body would offend me but I told him not to, I wanted to smell him when we made love. I didn’t want him to be a ghost, without odor.

  “Come here, darling,” he said to me, stretching out his hand. “Never forget that I was a soldier and you know what soldiers do, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “We occupy territory.”

  So I copied out the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all our clients and gave them to Johnny.

  Mrs. Linz stood watching me as I washed one of his shirts in the laundry room on the roof.

  “So now you reduce yourself to a laundress,” she said.

  “I’m just washing.”

  “Washing for a man.”

  “Oh, why not? Really!”

  “Can’t he wash his own, your terrorist boyfriend?”

  “Don’t be silly, Johnny isn’t a terrorist, he’s a tailor. He may have connections but they’re with the Haganah who are hardly terrorists.”

  “Is that what he tells you?” She stretched a short arm behind her back and scratched. A fly settled on her face and she slapped it away. The child was examining strands of fiber through his magnifying glass.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Try to use your head,” she advised me, folding up sheets. “Think. Not enough thinking goes on in the world.”

  So I thought. It’s true, I said to myself, he has never told me who is getting this information I pass on. I resolved that the very next time I saw him, when he promised he would have my shirt for me, I would ask him who his associates were.

  “Anyway, there’s an easy way to tell,” Mrs. Linz was saying, smoothing the child’s little shirts and socks.

  “And what would that be?”

  “Does he like football?”

  “Yes, very much as it happens.”

  “And which team does he support?”

  “Tel Aviv Betar.”

  “Well, then obviously he is Irgun.”

  “And why is that?” Really I was exasperated with Mrs. Linz who was always right and who always knew best.

  “Because if he supports Betar he was in the Betar youth movement, that lot of crypto-fascists Jabotinsky started. He will have spent his boyhood marching around with guns shouting death to the Arabs, death to the British, dreaming of a Zionist state that covers the whole Middle East and furthermore he…”

  That was all I heard. I ran down the steps to my own apartment. But I did not have time to ask Johnny if he was a terrorist because before I saw him again the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing nearly a hundred people, many of them Jews. Everyone knew they were hiding out somewhere in the white city. All hell broke loose.

  Now Tel Aviv was cut off from the rest of the world and we, its residents, were cut off from each other. An absolute curfew prevailed. The official communiqués said that anyone seen on the streets would be shot on sight. The phones were dead. Everything was silent and in the stillness of the air, from my balcony, I could hear the roar of the sea on the beach as it might have sounded long ago, before the men and women gathered on the dunes to possess the sand and build on it and to dream their town into existence out of nothing.

  Someone from the building pushed a note through my letterbox in Hebrew.

  “What does this say?” I asked Mrs. Linz, for I could hardly read the language.

  “Oh that, we’ve all got one. It’s a biblical quotation,” she said.

  “Read it to me.”

  “It says, Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee, hide thyself, as if it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. Very comforting, I’m sure.”

  Blum looked at his. “It’s taken from the prophet Isaiah,” he told us.

  “I had no idea you were religious, Blum,” Mrs. Linz said.

  “I am not. But I read Isaiah from time to time. He is full of gloom and despair and baleful warnings to the Jewish people. He suits our age. I prefer him to Tolstoy.”

  “Barbarian,” said Mrs. Linz. “Read Thomas Mann
and Musil. Dare to be modern, Blum.”

  The troops came in their red berets, those anemones, and set up barbed-wire pens on each street corner. Every able-bodied man between fifteen and fifty was rounded up to be searched and every woman or girl between fifteen and thirty-five also. We gathered at the front door of the building. I saw an ill-assorted group from the apartment opposite being marched along in a line—men in shorts and shirts, Yekkes in pressed suits, women in housecoats, a lady in a dressing gown carrying a parasol to protect her skin from the sun. I saw the stragglers prodded with clubs and a man who dropped his hat did not stop to pick it up.

  “This is familiar,” Blum said.

  Two girls in summer frocks with chiffon scarves covering their hair were held for a long time and eventually forced at gunpoint into a truck and driven away in handcuffs. An energetic, pushy press photographer from an American newspaper tried to take their picture but they covered their faces. “Shit,” he said, turning to a soldier. “You mean to tell me those girls are gun-girls? Bombers?” He shook his head. “Pretty, too.”

  Then the soldiers came to us. A woman on the ground floor complained to an officer that she had not been able to take her terrier for his walk. “To do what is natural for all of us, sir,” she explained, delicately.

  The officer was sympathetic. “I have a Yorkshire terrier myself, as it happens. Lovely breed. Well, a call of nature is a call of nature. Can’t let the animals suffer. No, not at all.” He called over a private and gave him instructions.

  “Simchah is to be walked twice a day,” she told me. “How civilized the British are.”