When I Lived in Modern Times Page 3

  I was seventeen and leaving school and what I wanted to be was an art student. I wanted to study at the Slade where the Jew Mark Gertler had learned to paint three decades before, and whose work spoke of a life more savage and less placid than the decorative compositions of Duncan Grant or the spare, bleak landscapes of Paul Nash with their tendency toward abstractions. I wanted the art student’s life, to get away from the bourgeois conformity of my schoolfriends. I read Bertrand Russell; not the philosophy, of course, but the pamphlets on free love and marriage.

  But Uncle Joe said that if I wanted to be an artist he could get me a job in an office. I could be a commercial artist, helping in the preparation of advertisements for things like Horlicks or aiding the war effort by designing illustrated pamphlets showing housewives how to stretch the ration or urging them to save string. Gradually, he chipped away at my confidence. Who was I to think I could be anything other than an amateur, a private painter? And if he wasn’t prepared to pay, that was the end of the matter. I took the job. I walked to Holborn every morning and made tea and ran errands and watched the men in their shirtsleeves, with bow ties knotted round their necks and I tried to pick up some techniques from them. But God, they were a dull lot, too old to fight or still waiting for their call-up papers.

  Eventually they gave me a little job to do. An advert for a women’s magazine for “feminine hygiene” in which the facts of biology were rendered so vague that in the end my drawing depicted a woman sitting in an armchair with nothing more than a pained expression on her face. My boss came and took a look. “No good,” he said. “You’ve done laxatives.”

  I only had to endure the office for a few months. Fate had a greater indignity for me. Something about my mother was unraveling. She was coming apart at the seams. She took more and more days off from the salon and sent me in her place. She sat at home, a nervous wreck, crying.

  “Why can’t things be nice?” she asked me, over and over again.

  Sometimes I thought that when she addressed me, it was as one of her sisters. “Gittel,” she said, “make us a nice cup of tea, will you?”

  “Evelyn,” I said. “I’m Evelyn, not Gittel.”

  “Yes. Evelyn. Has someone fed the horse?”

  “Mother, pull yourself together.”

  “Yes, I must. Mum will be back soon.”

  “Stay home,” Joe said. “Look after her.” So I did. And who could blame me for feeling so low in London, going to the salon for a couple of hours every afternoon when she was sleeping, doing perms and sets and nearly knocking myself out on the stench of peroxide in the back room.

  May 1945. The war over. The camps liberated. The voices of the pacifist appeasers not believing what they found there, saying it was war propaganda. Then sitting in a darkened cinema watching the newsreels. Uncle Joe sobbing, his head on my mother’s lap. Sixteen cousins gone. Sixteen.

  Next day he said, “Never mind the six million. What about the eleven million?” And he put a five-pound note in the JNF tin.

  The survivors sat in the displaced persons camps. No one wanted them. Britain said no. America said no. After a while they began to organize. They started up schools and synagogues. They elected their own police force. With the past what it was, they had nothing to do except think about the future.

  IN the summer I came home one day from the shops to find my mother sitting on the step, her face full of cold, heavy sweat, and her eyes crazy. She tried to speak to me but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. “Put the poppy back,” she said, slurring her words like a drunkard. “On the leg. Puss.”

  I held her in my arms and stroked her hair while the doctor was sent for. The Frenchman who ran the pub around the corner where my mother occasionally went for a small brandy with Uncle Joe sat down next to us and took her hand. We formed a kind of pietà sitting there, triangular in composition, as if we were a living Leonardo on that doorstep on Old Compton Street amid the traffic and the tarts and the spivs and the black-market types in their flashy suits and the expressionless men on their way to see strippers in upstairs rooms and the muscle boys in their prime coming back from shooting the breeze with a punch-ball at Mike Solomon’s gymnasium and the dour Hungarian waiters going to work at the Budapest restaurant in Dean Street and the drunk and disheveled old women in broken shoes and moldy hats with dusty feathers and the bohemians in colored shirts opening the doors of the public houses where they would stay until closing time and then vomit in the streets. It was the world I knew and it was about to be overthrown.

  They took my mother away to the Middlesex Hospital where a second stroke, a few hours later, poleaxed her at the age of forty-one. After some weeks they drove her in an ambulance to a nursing home on the south coast where she sat staring at the sea. Nor did my own face or that of Uncle Joe cause the corner of her mouth to move or the tip of a finger to lift. But still, to my surprise he paid for everything. She had the best from him, though he owed her nothing in law. What is that secret intimacy between two people that no one who is not a part of it can ever fathom?

  I felt numb with the pain of her abrupt removal from my life. Everything we could have said to each other it was too late to say. I wanted her forgiveness for the times when I came in late and did not go to her room to kiss her; or when I complained and grumbled about having to work at the salon; or when I resented that I had not been born into more regular circumstances; or when I was ashamed that the girls at school called me the hairdresser’s daughter.

  I went to visit every Sunday. She looked at me, uncomprehendingly. Her hair was turning gray and it was fine, and only combed, not permed, or set, or styled. I held her hand and watched our shadows on the lawn. My mother had turned her face against ugliness, she had fled from the slums to a life that was pretty. She had found a protector. But even he could not save her from reality. It was obvious to me that life was not fair and made victims of people who should never have been oppressed in the spirit and the body, and that the only way to live was to summon one’s strength to fight back against whoever it was who was trying to dominate you, not retreat into a world of make-believe.

  I left her with a charcoal drawing I had made of the two of us together, in our old home, the flat in Soho. I put it on her lap but she didn’t look at it. I walked away and then turned and waved. Her head was lolling. She seemed to have fallen asleep.

  “She’s exhausted after the excitement of your visit,” a nurse said.

  By the winter she was a wisp of ectoplasm swirling around in a chair. I kissed her papery skin and held her hand. She smelled of old food and urine. On Christmas Eve she died. Uncle Joe was away. He had taken the first family to a Jewish hotel in Bournemouth. I had to get the synagogue to find the ten Jewish men we needed for the minyan without which the interment could not proceed. Ten strangers. They stood there respectfully, like so many suitors. She went into the ground. They filed past and wished me long life. But what kind of a life was it to be?

  “Now what?” said Uncle Joe. “You want me to find you another place in an office?”

  “I’d like to go to art school.”

  “How can you make a living out of art? Where’s the money in it?”

  “I don’t care about money.”

  He choked on his cigar. I thought the smoke would come out of his ears.

  “Listen, Evelyn, who I have known since you were a tiny baby in your mother’s arms, may her good soul rest in peace. No one can live for five minutes without money. They think they can but then they find out different. Have you got a sweetheart yet?”

  “No. No sweetheart.”

  “You’re fancy-free?”

  “Yes.”

  “No ties?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you go to Palestine?”

  “I don’t know, I never thought about it.”

  “How does the idea strike you?”

  Palestine. I had never been further than Sussex.

  He gave me books to read and pam
phlets.

  A week later he came to the flat.

  “You read the books?”

  “Yes, I’ve read them. All. Every word.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Palestine belongs to us,” I cried. “What do we have to do with this place, England? It’s nothing. Only the birth of our own country can avenge the death of the six million. That’s the resurrection.”

  “Excellent. I knew you’d see it in the right way. Now we have to find a way to get you in, but trust me, I have some connections.”

  We went together to the Jewish Agency. They were incredulous. What could I offer? they demanded. Nothing, it turned out. They explained, patiently, that the British were only giving out fifteen hundred entry permits and that hundreds of thousands of DPs were ahead of me in the queue. Were I of potential use to them, they could, of course, obtain one of these permits for me, but I was no use at all, as far as they could see.

  The rich are not used to taking no for an answer. “Is there any other way?” Uncle Joe asked, taking his checkbook from an inside pocket of his jacket and unscrewing the cap of his gold-plated Parker fountain pen.

  They replied that they would think about it.

  A week or two later, he telephoned them. Had they had any ideas? Yes. They suggested that I present myself to the Mandate authorities at the Foreign and Colonial Office and explain that I wished to enter Palestine as a tourist, a pious young Christian wanting to visit the Holy Land. I could take a perfectly legal passage on a perfectly legal ship and cruise pleasantly through the Mediterranean to Haifa. It was something that other people did all the time.

  “How about this?” said Uncle Joe. “I will sell the salon. Your mother worked there for twenty years and you’re entitled to something. Suppose I buy a ticket and give you a banker’s draft to cover your first three months?”

  “It’s very generous.”

  “The future belongs to the young people, Evelyn. I’m too old to go but you…”

  Did he really see me as the future hope of Jewish humanity? Or was he just getting rid of me? Still I don’t know.

  First, I had to obtain a passport and endure the icy politeness of the officials when, looking at my birth certificate, they observed the space where my father’s name should have been. Then I dressed in a hot brown scratchy tweed skirt and a modest cream blouse with a peter-pan collar for my interview at the Foreign Office. I borrowed a gold cross from Gabriella who was working in one of the newly reopened Italian restaurants and hung it round my neck. She had great sympathy with my cause. A lot of people did in those days. She gave me a rosary of brown wooden beads too which I put in my handbag. I went with no lipstick or rouge and my hair, which reached to my shoulders, was screwed into a bun with tight fingers.

  I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue where the cleaners were busy on the steps of the theaters, to Piccadilly Circus. Past Lilly-whites, where there was an artful arrangement of cricketing paraphernalia in the window, then down Lower Regent Street, into Trafalgar Square and across the Mall. Walked along Horse Guards Parade, where on my right the swans and mallards and Canada geese made their way across the lake in St. James’s Park, and I saw one rise from the water and take wing above the bare black twigs, and turning saw it fly over Buckingham Palace with the flag ripping against the wind to tell us that our King and Queen and princesses were at home. A car passed and a somber profile that I recognized from the newsreels looked straight ahead. The might of the British Empire was burnished in the frail sunshine of this morning in February 1946, when London had never looked lovelier. The grandeur and majesty of England bore down on me.

  I was trying to make myself feel as I appeared to be: a modest Christian girl hurrying through Whitehall, perhaps to polish the candlesticks on the altar at Westminster Abbey or to commune with the tombs of English poets, four hundred years dead. Or whatever it was people did in churches. The rosary beads lay in the darkness of my handbag, clicking against each other. A man passed me in pinstripe trousers and a morning coat and wing collar and he lifted his bowler hat and said a courteous good morning. I smiled back. Across the city, the East End and the docks were flattened, in ruins, but here nothing had changed.

  Inside my head the kings and queens of England were stacked like pancakes in chronological order going back to the Wars of the Roses but no one I was related to had ever set foot on English soil until forty-five years ago. What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? I felt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be exactly the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was me that understood, the spy in their midst.

  There was no difficulty at all in obtaining permission to go to Palestine. The situation was not stable, they warned me, but with proper care and by closely following the advice of the officials I met there I should experience no danger.

  I was told, enthusiastically, of the sights I wound find: one of the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Nativity and other Christian and Muslim landmarks that did not interest me. Neither archeology nor ancient history moved me in the slightest. All the madonnas of the Renaissance were, for me, studies in perspective and pigment and skin tone.

  “You’ll want to visit Galilee,” they advised.

  “Where Christ walked on the water,” I replied. “How wonderful to think that I’ll see it with my own eyes.” But as I regarded things, I was pretty close to walking on water myself.

  Uncle Joe gave me a book of modern art as a going-away present. I looked forward to spending the voyage reading about Picasso, and Matisse, Miró and Chagall.

  I TOOK the boat train to Marseilles. Farther along the coast, across the Chaîne de l’Estaque at Port-de-Bouc, others were also casting anchor. They were setting out on a more perilous voyage than mine. They had nowhere to go but forward, no choice but to make an illegal journey or stay where they were and rot.

  I sat on deck and thought how the whole story was about coming home. As I sailed the Mediterranean Sea, all over the world people were in mass transit. We were moving like tides across the continents and the seas, troopships full of men stamping their boots in impatience, hats flying into the air at the sight of land. The roads and railways were engorged with human, sweating, shivering, stinking, parched or pissing flesh, traveling not for adventure or for pleasure or to take a rest cure or acquire a tan or out of boredom or to find romance or to cure a broken heart—but because they had a hunger for the good earth of home under their feet.

  Then there were those, like me, who understood on some primitive level that the state of flux was the one we were in. The political map was changing. A lot of people were about to acquire brand-new nationalities, if not entirely new identities. And I was one of them, on both counts.

  My fellow passengers on board ship were mostly returning officers of the Palestine Police and Mandate civil servants with their wives and families. There were a few biblical tourists, as I was pretending to be. They swallowed whole my impersonation of them.

  Every morning a small group of Christians held a prayer service and I joined them, for appearance’ sake. I told them that I had undergone a revelation the previous year, when I felt that God had touched my hand. I withdrew my rosary piously. A woman looked at it.

  “Are you going over to Rome?” she asked, nervously.

  “No. Why?”

  “I see you have those beads the RCs use.”

  But how was I to distinguish between the different sects of Christianity? They were all just mindless Gentiles to me. I threw the rosary overboard, where it floated on the dirty foam for a few minutes before being swept under.

  How much longer could I have kept up with this invented personality? Not that long. The person I pretended to be was beginning to get on my nerves. But it didn’t matter because I was nearly home.

  When I saw the Promised Land I nearly cried out: “This is it! Now history starts!” But that wou
ld have betrayed me and I was trying as hard as I could to be circumspect, to play simple card games in the second-class lounge, to flirt with the young police sergeants and the Mandate pen-pushers, to make small talk and never to say a single thing that was intelligent, let alone controversial. It was no effort at all for someone who had stood, day after day, winding the hair of middle-class women on to curlers, speaking of film stars and shortages and the infinite virtues of Mr. Churchill, their hero.

  I took my first step on Jewish soil, then another. The port was swarming with red-faced Englishmen, burned by the sun, going about their business. A sergeant looked at my passport and entry permit.

  “Sert. Evelyn Sert. It’s an odd name.”

  “My father was from the Outer Hebrides,” I said.

  “Oh. That explains it.”

  An invention, but I had only done what my mother had done and her parents before her, when they left the lands the Jews had inhabited for centuries and set sail for a new world and a new life. And all the dissembling had just that very moment ended with me because I had come to the place where no Jew need ever invent himself again or pretend to be someone he wasn’t. I had read in the books Uncle Joe had given me that the elemental nature of the Jews, stripped of the accents of a foreign language and its customs, was going to reveal itself for the first time since the Exile. We would cease to be composite characters.