When I Lived in Modern Times Page 7

  “You need to see a medic,” the corporal suggested.

  “I know.”

  “Try one of the Jewish docs. They’re a clever lot, the Jews. No offense, mate. Miss.” He dropped a couple of fingers on Gadi’s shoulder for a moment, as if to show that he had no objection to touching another race.

  “Is that what you reckon?” said the motorbike man.

  “Oh yes, clever. If you need a patch-up, go to a Yid as your first port of call.”

  “I’ll try that.”

  “Been out here long?”

  “Four years.”

  “Four years too long, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, I lost my lot in ‘41. Joined up with the 8th. Didn’t have a bad war, as it goes. All in one piece, at any rate.”

  “Bet you can’t wait to get home.”

  “Too right. There’s a pub in Bristol, they pull a pint there with a head on it like clouds. You could look at it for hours. Barmaid’s nice, too. If you know what I mean by nice.”

  “Ladies present, mate. Now what are you after?”

  “Petrol.”

  “Help yourself.” He handed him an oil can and pointed to a drum beside the hut.

  The bargaining with Gadi resumed. I stood in the dust and the heat, the smell of dry vegetation in my nostrils. Sand blew across the road. I looked around to see where the hut cast its shade. Gadi’s English began to run into difficulties.

  “Think I can help out with a spot of translation,” the motorbike man said, raising his hand as if he were in school. I noticed dark gold hairs on his forearm, a couple of fingernails rimmed with dirt and a Timex watch with a steel bracelet strap around his wrist.

  “Never bothered picking it up, myself,” said the corporal. “I mean English is the language of the British Empire. They might as well learn our lingo if we’re in charge.” And he smiled brightly, all round. “No offense.”

  As far as I could make out, Gadi and the motorcyclist had begun to discuss the wear on the tire treads. Gadi looked at him.

  “Your Hebrew is excellent. Where did you learn it so well?”

  “In Eretz Israel,” the motorbike man replied.

  “I understand,” Gadi said, but I did not.

  Then he said in English, “Very good. Thank you for your help.”

  “Where to now?” the motorbike man said when money had exchanged hands and the tire and other items had been loaded onto the truck.

  “I return to my kibbutz,” Gadi said. “This lady is going to Tel Aviv.”

  “Want a lift?” He smiled, and his pencil mustache widened. The top teeth were very white and even, but one of the lower ones was crossed against the next.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Yes. It’s okay. Go with him,” Gadi said.

  “Unless you’ve any objection to riding pillion.”

  He was just the sort I had wanted to get away from when I came to Palestine. The banal Englishman who loved his pint of beer and his armful of compliant, female stuff. He was a bore.

  “No, no objection, but I can take the bus.”

  “You speak very good English, miss,” said the corporal. “Where did you learn it?”

  “England,” I said.

  “He’ll look after you,” Gadi insisted, and picking up my suitcase walked with it to the motorbike. The corporal produced a piece of thin rope and my luggage was tied to the back.

  “Hop on.”

  I didn’t like being told what to do.

  “I’ll have you in Tel Aviv in a flash.”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly, and lifted my leg over the back wheel.

  “Tuck your skirt between your knees so you don’t get oil on it.”

  I did what he said.

  “Hold on tight. You can put your arms round my waist if you like.”

  “It will be more comfortable than you think,” Gadi told me.

  “Good-bye, Gadi.”

  “Good-bye, Eve. I liked knowing you.” He came toward me, perhaps to plant another rubbery kiss on my mouth but I waved and then put my hands on my lap.

  We took off suddenly, with a jerk, and I was pushed back by the force of our departure.

  “Best to hang on to me, like I said.”

  I saw his point.

  We took a road that ran along the shore. The sea and the beach were on our right and Mount Carmel on the left. Sand seemed to be everywhere. Between long stretches of orange trees and other greenery, the place became sandy in complexion, like the uniforms. The wind was running through my hair like a dry comb. My skin felt tight. Sand grazed my scalp. I was precarious, terrified and elated. I had never known before the lure of speed, of not caring if you hit a ditch and broke your bones.

  After forty minutes or so we turned of toward Netanya. We drove toward the seashore and stopped outside a café. On the street, the air smelled of hot palm trees and their leaves rustled dryly above me. He went inside and he indicated a display of Viennese pastries. “Have a cup of tea. Have a cake. I’ve got to deliver something, won’t be a mo.” He walked off, empty-handed.

  I ordered coffee and a tart with an almond on it, in basic Hebrew but was understood by a small, middle-aged man impeccably got up in waiter’s attire, with a starched napkin over his arm. Outside, a street or two away, I could hear the waves boil onto the shore.

  The coffee came with cream. I held a sip in my mouth. It felt heavy on my tongue after the watery stuff diluted with chicory that we drank on the kibbutz.

  The motorbike man returned and sat down opposite me.

  “I’ll have the same,” he said, pointing to what I had. “But double helpings of cream.”

  I didn’t know his name. We hadn’t been introduced.

  “My name is Evelyn Sert,” I told him.

  “And mine is Levi Aharoni. But since your Hebrew isn’t so good, and we’re going to be talking in English, you can call me Johnny.”

  “But you’re a British soldier.”

  “Not anymore. Demobbed last month.”

  I stared at him, but I could not assemble out of the components in front of me the face of a Jew. “You’re a British soldier.”

  “As you keep saying, I was. A Tommy. I am also Levi Aharoni, born in Jerusalem, 6 February 1923. Joined the British Army to fight fascism, 12 November 1940. In fact I’d have joined anyone’s army, anyone who would have had me to kick the arses of those scum. Listen, I’ll tell you what it was like back then.” He leaned forward across the table. Palm oil was in my nose. “Palestine was full of scraps of armies from every nation that the Germans conquered. The Free French were here, the Free Poles, the Greeks, they were all hanging around in the Negev and Monty put the 8th together out of all those leftovers. This pastry’s nice. Fancy another?” I shook my head. I was too astounded to eat. “Think I will.” He called the waiter. “More coffee?” he asked, gesturing at my empty cup.

  “All right.”

  “Where was I? Oh, yes. I’d just joined up. I got attached to a British unit. I was at El Alamein in ‘42. Then over to wipe the Germans out in Tunisia in ‘43. Finally wound up on the Palermo landings in ‘44. I was fluent in English when I joined because my dad was a civilian clerk with the Mandate in Jerusalem and wore a tarboosh every day like all the native workers, as they so charmingly called him, until he retired and we moved to Tel Aviv because my mother likes to be by the sea. If I tell you that his father worked for the Turks, you’ll see what a family of civil servants we are. We’ve been here forever. We weren’t part of any Zionist aliyah. I don’t know how we got here—maybe we never even left back in biblical times, though I think in fact we came from Spain via Sarajevo a couple of hundred years ago.

  “Anyway, I spent five years with British soldiers—every waking moment. I ate with them, I slept in the bunks next to them, I showered with them. We played football, we drank beer, we talked about girls—excuse me, miss, but this is what soldiers do, all over the world, in every army—I did everything the British did and even when I had the chance I di
dn’t join the Jewish Brigade. I liked my situation. I watched them all the time, the British, every minute. I can do any accent you like. You want Scottish? I can do it. Aberdeen? Glasgow? Edinburgh? I’ve got them all. Maybe I’m a natural mimic, I don’t know. But I can do Bristol, Scouse, Geordie. Where you from?”

  “London.”

  “But you know what? I’ve never set foot in the place. Never been to England. Seen pictures of course—Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace. But if you put me off the boat in Southampton, I’d be sunk. Wouldn’t have a clue. Don’t know how to find a railway station, or what a ticket costs or what it looks like. Don’t know the lines on the underground or what bus goes where.”

  His voice began to slip into a kind of neutral gear. It was English, I suppose, but it had lost any sense of place or class. If I’d met him at home I’d have been at a loss to know where he was from. I think I would have known he was a foreigner, without being able to tell how I sensed this. He was an Englishman in translation.

  “Why did you say I should call you Johnny?”

  “That’s what they always called me. Johnny the Jew. Jewboy at first, but they forgot about that in the end. I was one of them.” He laughed.

  “Would you like to see England one day?”

  “Yes. But only on a passport issued by the Zionist state. Okay. Now you know everything about me, let’s hear about you.”

  In the whole of the world there has only ever been one person with whom I have been completely honest, whom I never felt the need to lie to, to pretend. Always I have edited my life, leaving out whole sections, or changing or embroidering details. Who doesn’t? Tell someone your life story and what you have is exactly that, a story. We cannot help this. You’re not loading a video tape which will play back the past. You’re not taking a section of it out of a filing cabinet. And remember, the Jews have been telling people our story for three thousand years. We’ve had practice. We know what it’s like when the listener’s eyes glaze over or narrow with doubt and you skip forward or miss out a portion when it’s getting too convoluted. Do you think the Wedding Guest didn’t fall asleep through parts of that story the Ancient Mariner told about the ship and the albatross? If you’d heard it from him, might it have been a different poem altogether? Shorter, probably, with romance and a happy ending. He was, after all, on his way to a wedding.

  Let’s face it, we’re all compulsive liars in our way. And though Johnny would repeatedly lie to me in the months ahead, I was as honest as any of us knows how to be, with him. I told him the truth about my birth, about Uncle Joe, school, the office.

  Johnny rested his chin on his hand and he was looking into my face, scanning it, his eyes moving from place to place: mouth, eyes, ear, chin, forehead, cheeks, nose. He shook his head now and then in sorrow or outrage, at some fresh detail.

  “What a story.” He was stirring the dregs of his coffee, gazing at me as if I were something more than I was, as if I were one of the drowned men, a survivor from Europe though I was nothing like that and my tale seemed to me quite unremarkable. But he leaned across the table and took my hand and held it in his for a moment. I looked at the hand as it held mine. It was a man’s hand. The palm was dry. Under the smell of palm oil another scent was coming through, of gasoline and cheap soap, and it mingled together into the scent of something that no cosmetics company has ever captured in a bottle, what we used to call back then, sex appeal.

  “You’re a brave one coming here on your own,” he said. “You must be a strong girl. Very strong. So what are your plans for Tel Aviv?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d find a room and a job of some kind.”

  “Finding a room will be tight. There’s a big shortage of housing. What work are you after?”

  “Again, I don’t know. Anything where I could be of use.”

  “So you want to help out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make a contribution?”

  “Yes.”

  Our eyes met. Sometimes a flash of complicity is established between two people, and you don’t know why. Connections get made below the level of what you can understand. I understand it now. Looking at Johnny was like looking at myself in the mirror. Each of us existed as a reflecting surface.

  We drove through orange groves until we reached the white city, and it was white, then. One day I saw a photograph of a small crowd of men and women in old-fashioned dress standing in the middle of a dune, their footprints pocking the sand. Emptiness stretched all around them—nothing, as far as the eye could see, unless you turned to the south and there was Jaffa, where Andromeda was chained to the rock and Jonah set sail for Tarsus on the ill-fated journey that would see him swallowed by the whale.

  The ancient city was overcrowded and the group of pioneers standing optimistically in the sand in 1909 were holding a founding ceremony for their new town which they would call Tel Aviv after a German utopian novel of the previous century. On the left, a woman stood apart holding a child in her arms. Perhaps it was crying and interrupting the momentous commemoration. I don’t know what they were doing inside the circle. Laying a stone? Or perhaps just saying that they were founding a city was enough to make it happen. The bizarre thing was, it had. It was thirty-seven years ago, the picture. Ten years later, the women’s skirts would be at their knees. The little baby, crying on the seashore for milk or comfort or because it was afraid of the sound of the waves or of the empty place it had been brought to, wasn’t even old enough to be my mother or father now it had grown up. Plenty of people were older than the city.

  We drove on. I had seen nothing like this before—how could I have done, as a citizen of an old country? It was an entire town without a past. All the side roads ran in straight lines, down to the sea, with three or four wide, tree-lined boulevards marching across them, from Jaffa in the south to where the city petered out in the north and became an Arab village.

  At first, the houses seemed uncertain, vacillating between the old homelands and the new one. I saw a red-tiled roof. I saw green shutters. I saw the domes of the Orient. I saw a frieze of tile camels form a caravan, stepping above gables.

  Then I saw apartment buildings of two or three or occasionally four stories, all white, dazzling white, and against them the red flowers of oleander bushes. Flat-roofed white boxes, I saw, though sometimes their corners curved voluptuously like a woman’s hips and two buildings facing each other like this, on a corner, reminded me (and, it turned out, everyone else) of a pair of ship’s prows sailing out into the dry waters of the street. They were houses like machines, built of concrete and glass, not houses at all, they were ideas. I saw walls erected not for privacy but as barriers against the blinding light; windows small and recessed, each with a balcony and each shaded by the shadow cast by the balcony above it; stairwells lit by portholes, reminding me that we were by the sea. Sometimes, if I turned my gaze up to the rooftop, I saw a kind of pergola of whitewashed, crisscross beams that served the purpose of casting a latticed shade and these pergolas were the single allowance made for a flight of fancy.

  Though all of this was rushing past me at high speed and it was only later that the detail resolved itself into something I could examine and identify, I recognized at once that what I was looking at was something I had only seen in photographs—the inspiration of the pre-war German avant-garde which Hitler had destroyed and driven into exile to far-flung shores, like this one. The Bauhaus! The cleansing of the eye—the spirit in motion—that group which was a gun firing itself into the future—the properly trained modern mind which took the chaos of the city and its noisy, simultaneous events and imposed a strict order upon it.

  If the idea behind the white city had been imported from Dessau, a cold, gray, snowy German place, in the hands of the Jewish émigrés who brought it here it seemed to live and breathe the climate and the atmosphere of the Mediterranean. There were not dozens of Bauhaus buildings, there were thousands. And if I didn’t see a single masterpiece, it
was because the entire fabric of the place was the International Style. They were not showcases but experiments in modern living like the cooperative housing on Ben Yehuda Street that I found out about later, where the workers had made a kibbutz in the city with kindergarten, communal kitchens, a cooperative shop—a whole parallel socialist economy.

  I was in the newest place in the world, a town created for the new century by its political and artistic ideologues: the socialists and Zionists, the atheists and feminists who believed with a passion that it was the bon ton to be in the forefront of social progress and in a place where everything was new and everything was possible, including a kind of rebirth of the human spirit.

  We were driving along a road lined with smart shops. Shoes and dresses and refrigerators flashed past. We reached the seashore. More white Bauhaus boxes and across from them the sand where deck chairs were lined up on the beach and men and women strolled and children played. When Johnny turned off the engine there was no breeze and I felt a merciless sun on my head.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “Where?” I looked up and there was a bigger white concrete box in front of me.

  “The Gat Rimon Hotel. They’ll find you a room.”

  “I hadn’t thought of staying in a hotel.”

  “Where did you think you’d stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Since I had come to Palestine one thing had happened after another and my well-being seemed to be taken care of. But I had my banker’s draft safe and I considered the attractions of good towels and a comfortable bed and white sheets and someone to clean up after me and these bourgeois luxuries seemed extremely attractive after the spartan rigors of kibbutz life.

  We walked into the lobby. From the bar I could hear British voices. “They come here to drink,” Johnny said. “They’ve nothing better to do.”

  After I signed my name in the visitors’ book, and demanded a good room, one with a sea view, Johnny asked me if I wanted to go out in a while for ice cream.

  “Do you like ice cream?” he asked me.