When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  Mrs. Kulp, once she had established that her son, the trainee manager at the King David, was unharmed, was offended by her own situation. She had not been removed from the building for questioning. “Don’t worry, madam,” a lance corporal had told her. “It’s just the young ones we’re after.”

  Mrs. Kulp went red. “But how old do you think I am?” she asked, thrusting her bosom at him. I could hear by his voice that he was from somewhere in the Black Country. There was a rash of pimples on his forehead and his white, sweating skin had been badly damaged by the sun.

  “Fifty?”

  “How dare you.”

  “Let’s see your papers, then. We’ll find out how old you are.” He walked off, muttering under his breath, “Bloody Jews. Mutton dressed as lamb, the lot of them.”

  A group of us were assembled on the pavement and marched down to the interrogation cage. Of the women, there was myself, Mrs. Linz and a girl actress from the Habimah Theater who swore at the troops in three languages. “What have we done now?” asked a young lieutenant, smiling. The girl said she’d heard that they had set up their HQ at the theater and damaged some of the props for a future production of Hamlet.

  “Chazzers!” she cried.

  “What’s a chazzer? Anything nice?” the lieutenant asked us. No one spoke. “Somehow, I suspect not. I’d look it up in the dictionary but I don’t know what language it is. Best forgotten, perhaps.” He winked at me. “Can anyone else offer any light relief?” He turned to Mrs. Linz. “Know any good jokes?”

  “None that I would care to tell from inside a barbed-wire fence.”

  “Suits me,” the lieutenant said and turned away to light a cigarette. He looked down at his clipboard and ticked off our names. Someone behind me started whistling “God Save the King.” It did not seem to be a patriotic gesture.

  “Put a sock in it,” the lieutenant said. “Or I’ll put one on you.”

  “These are not very cultured expressions,” said Mrs. Linz.

  A squad of soldiers entered our building. I was holding the fake passport Johnny had given me and I was frightened. Frightened that they would find, in the kitchen drawer, the passport of Evelyn Sert who had been granted a visa several months ago to enter the Holy Land as a tourist of sites of Christian interest and who should not be residing in a Jewish block of flats in a Jewish city with nothing of any historical or archaeological significance.

  In the cage, the lieutenant walked off and a sergeant came up to me and looked at the Priscilla Jones passport. He was a sturdy youngster with short legs and a mottled face. “Funny place to find yourself, Mrs. Jones,” he said, looking at the others from the building.

  “I know,” I said, lowering my voice. “Pretty frightful, really. Bloody Jews, but I try to rub along.”

  “Where’s Mr. Jones?”

  “Tiberias.”

  “Why aren’t you with him?”

  “We’re saving to start a family and I have a job here in Tel Aviv which pays quite well and after all Tony is trying to get a transfer.”

  “If you ask me, you’d be happier in Jerusalem. Not so infested if you take my meaning.”

  “Yes, so I’ve been told.”

  “Beautiful place. Very historic. The stones breathe history.”

  “Really?”

  “I’d move there if I were you. The policy regarding Tel Aviv seems to be to leave them to it, the Jews I mean. And they can have it as far as I’m concerned. This place is a dump. The Christians are all pulling out. There won’t be a Gentile copper here before the year’s end.”

  “Then I’ll certainly look into jobs in Jerusalem.”

  He stared at the others in the interrogation cage. Looked at Blum arguing with Mrs. Linz about something and the girl from the theater with her arms crossed and an unhelpful expression on her face.

  “Personally, I don’t know how you can stand them. Talk, talk, talk, the whole time, I don’t know how they can hear themselves think. Silence is golden, is my motto. If I had a long enough leave I’d go back home and hire one of those boats on the Broads for a week. You glide through the water, everything’s still, if you close your eyes you think you’re…Anyway, where was I?”

  “Homesick, I’d say.” And I smiled at him.

  “Too true.” He handed my passport back “All in order. Good luck, miss. I mean madam. Sorry for the inconvenience.” And I was released.

  It took considerably longer for Blum, Mrs. Linz and the actress to return and when they did, Blum was grumbling, Mrs. Linz was smiling contemptuously and the actress was loudly threatening to offer her services to the Lehi.

  Stories were circulating now from other detainees in the cage. Someone said he’d heard about a man who had been caught out on the street during the curfew. Asked if he was a Jew and replying that he was, he had been bludgeoned with a truncheon.

  Blum said it was a shame that the British sent out to rule Palestine were not “of the very best type.”

  The actress said there was a single type. “Colonialists, with a colonial mentality.”

  The argument rumbled on for a few more hours. We were running out of food and getting hungry. The army only allowed us out for a short period each day to go shopping and often you could not reach the front of the queue in time. To solve the problem the troops started to drive around in trucks with bread and water, demanding payment but they were mobbed in minutes and the soldiers too frightened to collect the money.

  Mrs. Kulp wanted to open the salon during the two hours when the curfew was lifted. “Women will still be women,” she said, “whether or not we live under martial law.”

  “This isn’t martial law, is it?” I asked her.

  “It soon will be,” the actress shouted.

  “Are you frightened?” Mrs. Linz asked me.

  “No,” I said. But I was.

  “This is nothing,” she said, “during the Arab riots…”

  “The Arab riots? You call that something to worry about?” said Blum. “I remember in Berlin when the SS…”

  I remembered the air raids in London, when we were buried alive in the tube station, listening to the ground shaking above us, the theaters and shops shuddering on their foundations and wondering if we would survive the night. These memories were not held in common with the inhabitants of the apartment building on Mapu but with the soldiers who had moved past our street and were setting up their barbed-wire interrogation cages on Frishman.

  ON the fourth of August the siege was lifted and the dead city came to life once more. The news vendors’ kiosks were mobbed, people flocked to the zoo to see the baby monkeys, Finkel was playing Hamlet at the theater, the watermelon man was back on the corner and the ice-cream parlors were open again, where I went at once to sit on a high revolving stool, lick at a strawberry sundae and wonder what flavor pistachio might be. Mrs. Kulp’s salon reopened and the ladies of Tel Aviv had their hair shampooed and set, permed and restyled because whatever else is true you will never in a million years overcome a woman’s concern about her appearance.

  Johnny stayed away for at least a week after the siege was over. “You okay?” he asked as he swung through my door, grabbing my face and thrusting his tongue into my mouth. “Hey, let me look at you. What a doll. What’s this, a new dress?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here and there, darling, here and there.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said, as I sat on his knee with my arms around his neck on one of my uncomfortable chairs. “This information I’m giving you. Who is getting it?”

  “Those who serve the interests of Eretz Israel, of course.” He stroked my hair.

  “And who are they, exactly?”

  “Oh. It’s that kind of conversation.” He lifted me off his lap and reached into his packet for a cigarette. He lit two and gave one to me. I sat down opposite him. The evening sun cast long shadows on the tiled floor. “Does it matter?” he asked me.

  “I don’t want to be a dupe. Or a dope
.”

  “Don’t you think that the less you know, the safer you are?”

  “But I’m implicated.”

  “Not much.”

  “But what if that passport you got me hadn’t passed muster, or they’d found the other one, what would I have said then?”

  He shrugged. “There are always risks.”

  “Yes, but what am I risking this for? What am I involved in? Don’t I have the right to know that much?”

  A pianist had just moved in next door. He was practicing the “Goldberg” Variations. The notes slithered about the building sounding as if they might have been composed yesterday instead of three hundred years ago.

  “Doesn’t that guy ever shut up?” Johnny said. “What is that stuff?”

  “Bach. He’s putting on a concert next month.”

  “Count me out if he offers you tickets. I like something more lively. You heard Frank Sinatra?”

  “Yes. Let’s get back to the subject.”

  “God, this place is bloody hot. Got any lemonade? You know, in the house where I grew up in Jerusalem, we had a fan on the ceiling. It was a very old house, from the time of the Turks. I don’t know why those Yekkes who came from Berlin or wherever didn’t think to put something like that in when they built these places. Madness. Everything up to date and modern but they don’t spare a thought for the climate. The Arabs, they know how to build houses for the heat. Maybe one day I’ll take you to one of the villages, you’ll like it, they’re very colorful people. You could…”

  “I’m losing patience, Johnny,” I said, and stamped my foot.

  He looked at it, my foot in a red leather sandal. I loved red shoes in those days, and matching red handbags. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But understand that whatever I tell you will mean more danger, not less. You know what you’re asking? I’ve tried to protect you, to keep you marginal. I didn’t want you to be too involved. Listen, I could have had a very different kind of girlfriend, a type I’ve known all my life, we would have absolutely no secrets from each other. We would be fighting at each other’s side. One day, when the real war comes, we would be on the roof together, we would both have guns in our hands and we would be firing them. But that’s not what I want, I chose you because you are a very, very pretty girl, because you are all alone here, because you have guts and…”

  “Because I’m your way in to the British.”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the first thing I thought. It only occurred to me after I saw you with the blond hair and the new name talking to that policeman.” It was the night we became lovers.

  “You used me!”

  “Darling, isn’t it better to be used than to be of no use to anyone?”

  I could make no answer to this. I wanted to be loved purely, for who I was alone. But I didn’t know if such love existed. I still don’t. So I said nothing.

  “Who are you? You owe me that.”

  “Well, my name is not exactly Levi Aharoni as it is not exactly Johnny but a name means nothing. A name is just something on a document. It tells you nothing. To you I’m Johnny and that’s as it should be. You don’t need to know my real name as long as you know me. What else?”

  “You support Tel Aviv Betar. Does that mean you were in the Betar youth group?”

  “Yes, naturally. I was a very tough kid.”

  “And does that mean you are in the Irgun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the Stern Gang?”

  “ We call it the Lehi, but no, I’m not in the Stern Gang. Between us and Lehi there’s a big difference. The Irgun and the Haganah are not allowed to be armed except during an operation. The Lehi have orders to be armed twenty-four hours a day and to shoot soldiers and kill them whenever they have an opportunity. Their idea is that the mothers in England will be shocked and say, ‘Bring our boys home.’ It’s a good plan on one level, but I’m not going to kill someone on sight, just because of where they were born. It would be barbaric. If they hang my comrade Dov Gruner, then I might change my mind, but for the moment, no.”

  “Did you blow up the King David Hotel?”

  “Not me, personally.”

  “Did you kidnap the British officers?”

  “Yes.”

  “The names and addresses I’ve been giving you, are they for future kidnaps?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t think you are putting me in danger?”

  He shrugged again. “To only a small degree. Listen, there are people clamoring to help us, to get themselves killed if necessary, all kinds, students, craftsmen. They all want to go on operations and they give me a headache saying, ‘If you don’t take me I’ll go join the Lehi.’ I have to find a way of giving a piece of cake to everybody. We have people inside the police, we have girls who disguise themselves as prostitutes. Did I ask you to do that? No. There’s a girl from Rehovot, she meets British officers, she takes them to her room, then our guys are waiting outside. What I ask you to do is harmless by comparison. And remember, Evelyn, it was not me who gave you an alter ego. You had that already, two in fact. You’d made your own cover.”

  “And you assumed that I would support the aims of the Irgun, the violence, the bombs. I’m telling you, I don’t.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “I don’t support terrorism.”

  “Terrorist? I’m not a terrorist, I’m a freedom fighter. Were the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto terrorists?”

  “They were up against evil.”

  “So am I.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, the British aren’t evil. You’ve lived amongst them, you know that.”

  “As individuals, no, many of them are not. In fact some have collaborated, they bring us arms if we pay them. How do we always know when there’s going to be a search? Because our intelligence is very strong. One of them said he wouldn’t take any money for information but he wanted my watch, he wanted a souvenir from a terrorist. It was my bar mitzvah watch. I told him to go to hell.

  “But they’re anti-Semites, you know. They don’t think they are but their distaste for Tel Aviv tells you everything. Find me a goy who loves Tel Aviv. Yerushalayim, easy. That’s the Holy Land, but here, there’s nothing distracting them from Jewish-ness. We’ve got no sites of antiquity to offer them, no beautiful landscapes, no places of pilgrimage. Nothing but Jews. Jewish everyday life. They can manage the Jews when we’re something special, Yehudi Menuhin, perhaps. The world is big enough for a few special Jews. It’s the ordinariness of the Jews they can’t stand. The millions of ordinary Jews with nothing particular to contribute, the Jews from Yemen, from the Polish ghettos, the Jewish riff-raff going about their business being Jews. The Jew-haters think Tel Aviv is just a city with too many Jews making a mess in their precious desert. They don’t want anything here but picturesque Arabs in their robes to take photographs of so they can go home and stick them in an album and say to their good chums, ‘Look what I saw when I went abroad.’ “

  “Yes, but there are other means to…”

  “No. There aren’t.”

  “Ben-Gurion thinks so. So did my Uncle Joe.”

  “Yeah? I wonder what your Uncle Joe really thought. Where do you think we get our money? We have a man who goes to London every few months, goes round all the rich guys. You want me to check with him whether he has your Uncle Joe on his list? As for Ben-Gurion, he’s another fool. Listen, until the King David we had a pact with the Haganah and now the pact is finished because Ben-Gurion doesn’t want to be associated with us. He doesn’t want his hands to be seen to be dirty. So technically, you can tell yourself with good conscience that you were supplying information to the Haganah but through the intermediary of the Irgun.

  “As for myself, the Haganah say we mustn’t fight the British by force, only by demonstrations and bringing in illegal immigrants. Bring in illegals? Who did that? Us. Before the war we brought twenty-two thousand Jews to Eretz Israel. That’s twenty-two thousand Jews we saved from Hitler, we saved, not t
hem. And those who we tragically could not save? Evelyn, ask yourself, how can we be sure it won’t happen again? By having an army. And how will we have an army? By having our own country. And how do we get our own country? By having an underground army to drive out the people who are preventing us from having our country. This is simple. This is logic. There’s nothing complicated about it. What I am doing now, I will be doing after the state is created.”

  “You’re a tailor.”

  “For the time being, but soon I’ll be in the army again, our army, this time. Maybe I’ll even be a general, who knows? I’ll be respectable. But until then I pick up my gun with or without permission and I fight.”

  “So when you’re not seeing me, you’re killing people.”

  “No, wrong. You see because I’m good at impersonating the British, what I do is assume the disguise of different ranks. Then when, say, we want to find some rifles, I go to the gate at the barracks at Sarafand while the troops are in the mess hall and I tell whichever soldier is on duty that I have come to relieve him. There is an urgent message, he must go and find his sergeant. I take his place, I let my friends into the weapons store. And people say afterward, ‘Oh, I walked past and there was a private on duty. He gave me a light for my cigarette. He had a Yorkshire accent.’ Then they go looking for this Yorkshire private and they can’t find him. Next time I’m a lance corporal from Manchester, or a captain from Norwich. Sometimes I do altogether different things, but those we’ll pass over.”

  “Like kidnapping the officers?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why did you release them?”

  “We didn’t have anywhere safe to keep them.”

  “What about the bombing in Jerusalem. Most of the people who died were Jews.”

  “Yes. It’s a tragedy. But it’s war.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Yes. What do you want to do now?”

  “You mean do I want to get on the bike and go to the Galina café to eat ice cream?”

  “No, no. I’m not that callous. I mean do you want to chuck me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you need to think about it.”