When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  “Everyone likes ice cream,” I replied.

  “I’ll be in the bar,” he said. “Come and meet me when you’re ready. Wash, freshen up. Take your time.”

  Out of my window I saw the Mediterranean I had sailed across to reach the land of Palestine. I draw up a chair and sat, smoking a cigarette, thinking of the hotels at which we had stayed in Brighton, my mother and I, gray waves from a grayer sea foaming on a murky pebble beach. We always shared a room, the two of us, and did each other’s hair and called out to each other when we walked along the corridor to the bathroom to bring a forgotten towel or soap or shampoo. We kissed each other good night before we went to sleep and she closed her eyes and was in the land of unconsciousness very quickly, perhaps dreaming of Uncle Joe and his hands on her body in the afternoons when I was at school and she took an hour away from the salon to receive him, always soignée and perfumed.

  But I would stay awake a little longer, thinking of pictures I would paint one day and of stories I had read in the newspaper or a comic program on the wireless or a play I had seen at the theater. And so the spool of thought would wind its way into sleep and sometimes I would dream about the lover I would have and always I pictured him as dark and handsome and certainly not an Englishman. Then in the mornings one of us would wake the other and open the curtains to see if the sky was blue or discolored with clouds, or if it rained or was sunny.

  Now, in the Gat Rimon Hotel, I was alone to dream my future and there was no one to share my thoughts with. But I was so happy to have my own bed, with its framed picture above it of a biblical Jerusalem with camels and donkeys, my own washbasin and my own mahogany wardrobe in which I could hang my clothes. I missed my mother terribly at this moment, as the ash from my cigarette gathered into a long, gray frangible column and fell unheeded to the floor. But I had come to the place where there was, mercifully, no past and in which it was the duty and destiny of everyone to make the future, each for himself and for his country. My dear mother had belonged in the twilight, in a place where there is no temporal life at all, between the dead and the living, mute and without memory. Which the Christians at my school called Purgatory. Now she was in the past entirely.

  Meanwhile, down in the lobby, I had a date with a good-looking man with a pencil mustache and an ingrowing toenail. So after a while I went to the bathroom and washed, did some things to my hair, put on a good dress and sprinkled a drop of perfume on my wrists.

  Johnny was standing at the bar with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He appeared to be the life and soul of the party. The room was full of khaki shorts, which stopped at sore, red knees, hats pushed back from the hot foreheads of officers flushed with drink.

  “Sorry, chaps, got to push off,” Johnny said when he saw me. “Cheerio.”

  “I owe you a round, Captain Reynolds,” a fish-eyed man said.

  “Shan’t forget,” Johnny replied, “but as you can see, I’ve got urgent business to attend to.”

  “Yes, I do see.”

  They stood, watching our departure. “How did you convince them you were a captain?” I asked him.

  “Oh,” he said, gesturing vaguely back at the hotel. “They’re easily misled once they’ve had a few drinks. I find it hard to stomach the stuff myself, I don’t seem to have much tolerance for alcohol at all. More than a couple and I’m legless. Four and the next day I’m in bed with a blinding headache. But then again, that’s my advantage over them, holding back gives me the edge. They’re drunk and I’m sober.”

  “So they’re that easy to fool?”

  “Well that’s what I find. They have been so far.”

  “What do you talk to them about?”

  “This and that.”

  Outside we passed a group of off-duty British privates searching, without much success, for somewhere where lads of their rank could get drunk. They were boisterous and confident, pink, sandy-haired men behaving as if they owned the place when they looked, to my eyes at any rate, like aliens on the Mediterranean, belonging in another world altogether.

  “Here mate,” one of them said to Johnny. “Know where we could find a pub?”

  “No chance,” Johnny replied.

  He was a short, sweating private with a broken nose. “Does the young lady know anywhere?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “I just thought she might, what with her being local.”

  “Can’t help you there.” The men walked off.

  “What did he mean, me being local?”

  “I suppose he mistook me for one of them and you for one of us. Which you are, of course.”

  “He didn’t realize I was English?”

  “Suppose not.” The corporal selling knocked-off gear on the Jaffa Road had thought the same thing. “It’s an easy mistake to make. Just look at yourself.”

  We drove along the shore, farther south, to where the city nearly ended and a dazzling circular building rose up from the sand to the wide sky so that sitting down at a table it seemed as if we were at sea, sailing west to Cyprus, water around us on three sides, and at our backs the white boxy buildings of Tel Aviv. A row of baby’s prams was lined up in front and the young mothers sat in the afternoon heat drinking coffee and glasses of milk and eating cake while their children slept or cried. Everyone was having babies as quick as they could squeeze them out; plump little cushions with noses instead of buttons.

  “I could just eat you up,” a mother said, holding her infant close to her face.

  “So many babies!” I said.

  “The men are coming back from the Jewish Brigade and you can guess what they want to do. There’s the results, right in front of you. And there’s some more results of the war’s end, over there. Look at them.” He pointed to a middle-aged group sitting on the sand in jackets with ties knotted under their chins, perspiring in the heat.

  “Who are they?”

  “Old men, chaps in their forties who fled to Palestine straight from Europe before the war started and joined up at once. They’ve got nothing. No wives, nowhere to live, no jobs in their profession. They can barely speak our language. Didn’t get any opportunity during the war. They weren’t here, they were all over, but not usually here.”

  They stared out at the deep blue sea, their backs to the land that had saved them.

  “They’re aimless. They have nothing to do. They live in hostels. Used to be bankers and professors. Now, they’re nobodies. With no routine, who the hell are they? They don’t know. It’s worst of all for the Germans. Instead of a heart, they have a clock.”

  He ordered a dish of ice cream for each of us. Apart from the depressing band on the beach, nothing could have been pleasanter than to sit with my new friend, watching the surf shimmying up the beach like a flapper’s dress. I was turning my head back and forth along the wideness of the horizon stretching from north to south, pointing down to Egypt, pointing up to Lebanon.

  “What a wonderful place,” I said.

  “You like it?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Really? This is my city, Evelyn, and it’s the city of all the Jewish people. We’ve been waiting a long time for Tel Aviv, many centuries. When I was a child we had a population of fifty thousand people. It was just a big village but a strange one, a village with two theaters, an opera house and a very large library. We were still covering up the sand and already we had a museum. And you know what is the best thing of all, what makes us the opposite of Yerushalayim?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing is sacred. Cigarette?” He passed the packet to me, smiling. They weren’t the local kibbutz gaspers but English ones, Player’s.

  “Yes, please. I haven’t had one of those in ages.” He leaned over and lit it with a chromium lighter.

  “We’ve got everything here,” he said, proudly. “People say we’re provincial but what’s missing? The zoo has just taken delivery of two giraffes from the Sudan.” I laughed, but I saw he was serious. “Did you enjoy the ice cream?”

&nb
sp; “Yes. Very much.”

  I smiled at him, narrowing my eyes and looking under my lashes, a sexy look I’d picked up from the movies. He had a kind of healthy, glossy animal quality to him, in an open-necked shirt, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles and an animation about him, like a jumping jack. I looked at the black, oily hair, the eyes, like mine the color of plain chocolate, the mouth with its tiny flaw when he smiled and showed the crossed lower tooth. I liked a man with a mustache, in those days, very much so, in fact. And I found I liked his simple masculinity. He was a very natural man, easy with his body and in his clothes, the type who looks normal when naked, not vulnerable and ashamed.

  I wondered who he might be if I had access to him in his own language, if the idioms of the soldiers he had knocked about with for the past few years were gone and I could hear him speak in his original—his own—tongue.

  The heat was receding. The mothers were standing up and shaking crumbs from their dresses and wiping ice cream from their fingers and straightening the thin sheets that covered their babies. They walked off, a line of them in colored cotton dresses, pink and powder blue and primrose yellow and green like my own, a box of sugared dragées on slim calves and ankles, making toward Ha Yarkon Street which ran along the shore. We got up and followed them. We skirted a barking dog by the café’s kitchen but it didn’t frighten me because I wasn’t alone. The sun was a red coin in the sky over the sea. The chimney of the power station at the end of the beach caught its light for a moment. The white walls of the houses gave out their own radiance.

  JOHNNY took me back and wished me good luck and from this I gathered that he didn’t want to make a date to see me again. I was surprised. I thought he liked me. We shook hands. I wanted to ask him everything: how I would find an apartment and a job and how I would make friends and what I could do to contribute to the establishment of the Zionist state. I wished I had asked him these things instead of imagining him undressed.

  “Do you often drink here at the bar?” I asked him.

  “Not unless I need to,” he said.

  “Will I see you again?”

  “It’s a small place, everyone bumps into everyone else eventually.” And I watched him drive off along the street in the deteriorating light.

  I unpacked my suitcase and hung my clothes on hangers. I rested on the bed for what I thought would be a few minutes, fell into a doze and then into a sound sleep. When I woke, it was ten o’clock, it was stifling hot and I was very hungry for I had had nothing but cake and ice cream since the early morning kibbutz breakfast. I groaned and perspired and scratched a heat rash on my skin. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was red and shiny with sweat. My hair was a mess. A couple of flies banged into the walls.

  The hotel’s dining room was closed. They had nothing to offer me. In the bar British officers were still drinking and the fish-eyed man was dead drunk. I resolved to go out and see what food I could find for myself. On the street I could her the sound of gramophones playing scratchy polkas near the seashore and people sat outside cafés turning their damp faces to catch the breeze. Crowds were surging along the pavements, an unceasing flow of humanity. The holy language that Moses spoke was a neon advertisement flashing above their heads, a film poster, a newspaper headline, a signpost to an amusement park or the beach.

  Cake seemed to be the principal sustenance of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Netanya. The cafés sold many kinds: gateaux with cream, like the Belgians made in Soho; tortes from Vienna made with glazes of apricot jam; cheesecakes from Poland and Russia; and tiny syrupy, flaky things, decorated with small green nuts. All these you could have at any time of the day or night in Tel Aviv and it was said that if the Messiah was ever to return to the Holy Land he would have to go to the cafés to deliver his message to the people.

  I sat down next to a table full of Germans. The waiter seemed to think that they occupied too much space, morose and discontented as they were, demanding glasses of water and complaining about the quality of the one cup of coffee which they managed to make last most of the evening, refusing to have the cup cleared away in case they were required to purchase something else. I knew this type from Soho, where they were, to some extent, indulged by kind hearts. In Tel Aviv, however, they were not considered exotic or even strangers. They were the crowd.

  They were arguing amongst themselves. Or rather what had begun, as far as I could make out, as an intellectual discussion in which the names of Attlee, Ben-Gurion, Kafka, Macbeth and Carl Jung were mentioned, seemed to have degenerated into a squabble, perhaps over money, for one of them threw his wallet onto the table and held it upside down to demonstrate its utter emptiness. He was a short, thin balding man in a blue worsted suit. His tie was stained and a smell of stale sweat came off him.

  I was trying to inquire in my limited Hebrew whether there was anything savory to eat but the waiter spoke English and so we reverted to that. No, he said. I could have cheesecake. It was nourishing. I ordered a slice.

  The man with the empty wallet leaned over and asked where I was from.

  “I’ve just come from Galilee.”

  “No, no. The country. Where were you born, madam?”

  “London.”

  His face lit up. He turned to the other men and spoke to them in German. Some smiled, some scowled. “May I join you for a moment?” I could see no polite means of refusing. “I welcome the opportunity to talk to a civilized individual. My friends bore me. Their company is incessant.”

  He wanted to know about the London theater and named particular actors and actresses whom he admired, mainly from before the war.

  “I never was in London,” he said, “but the culture is beyond dispute. They say that Tel Aviv is like a symphony. If it is we’re still tuning up. I am surrounded by Ostjuden.“

  “Who?”

  “Jews from the East. Poland. Russia. That sort of place. Very primitive people really, peasants or just a generation removed. Rural middlemen, or else slum dwellers in the cities.” He held out his hands in a gesture I couldn’t read because it wasn’t English.

  “My mother’s family came from Latvia,” I told him coldly. “So I am Ostjuden.”

  “Really?” He looked me up and down. “Then I’m surprised. You seem quite cultured.”

  “What was your profession in Germany?”

  “I was a lawyer.”

  “Do you practice law here?”

  “No.” He sat up straight with his hands clasped in front of him on the table. His fingers had a number of nicks or small cuts on them. “The law I knew about—Weimar law—no longer exists.”

  “What do you do?”

  He smiled, but it did not soften his face, it merely broke it up into irregular sections. “I mend fractured hearts, the shattered hearts of children.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Of a sort. But not human flesh and blood. I stand in a back room in a street off the Allenby Road and repair dolls and when my work is done the little girls who come to pick up their toy, their friend, dry their tears for their doll is better. I do not smile quite as readily for they pay me a pittance.”

  And this was the fate of the educated Germans who came to Palestine. They thought they had found a road to freedom but it was a cul-de-sac. He told me about the other men at the table. “Bloomingfeld, here, a banker in Vienna but in his spare time he practiced a little conjuring for the entertainment of his children. Now he is Bloomingfeld, the King of the Magicians. He is a headline act in the music halls of Haifa. Gutsman has done the best of all of us. In Hamburg he imported furniture from France. Here he is a French polisher and in considerable demand.” And so he went round the table cataloguing the little indignities of his friends, and if I learned anything during my time in Palestine it was that it is one thing to survive, quite another to survive intact, and this was the second lesson I was to receive in a class which had begun that evening on the kibbutz when I met the nearly drowned men and was surprised not to find them
pleasant or polite or compassionate.

  The man from the doll’s hospital was named Herr Blum. He wanted to meet me for coffee the next day and talk to me of literature and art and music, but I fobbled him off with an excuse. I was sorry that they should have come undone, but they were creatures of the past and I was facing forward to the future. Also, I was worried that he might start touching me for money, and I had none to spare for him.

  The Jews of Palestine called Blum and his friends Yekkes, which was the word for jacket because however hot it was they never stripped to their shirtsleeves. They formed a somber formal presence in the country and were badly out of place in the clear, unforgiving Mediterranean light but later I understood that the word was also a pun, an acronym of Yehudi Kashe Havanah —a Jew who has difficulty understanding. And indeed the Yekkes never did understand the country it was their fate to find their refuge in for if, by their names and by the racial calculations of the Nuremberg Laws, they were Jews, in their hearts and their minds they were Germans.

  I noticed some gaudily dressed women lurking about and because I had grown up in Soho I knew exactly who and what they were and assumed that they were Arab girls because in the endeavor to build the new Jew from the ground up in our new home we would not, of course, be needing Jewish prostitutes.

  “Why does everyone sit outdoors in cafés?” I asked.

  “Because it is too hot to remain inside, of course. We sit by the sea trying to catch the breeze.”

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  “What is not what you expected?”

  “Palestine.”

  “Nothing is what anyone expects. Especially Palestine. That’s life. Or life as I have found it. Where do you stay?”

  “The Gat Rimon Hotel.”

  He leaned forward and there was a yellow glint in his eyes. “You have the money to pay for it?”

  “I have some money, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in an apartment?”

  “Of course, but I don’t have one and don’t know how to find one.”