When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  “Would you like me to assist you?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Certainly, though there will, of course, be an accommodation.”

  “You mean a fee?”

  “Yes. A finder’s fee.”

  “Which will be how much?”

  “Twenty pounds.”

  “Absurd.”

  “Ten.”

  “Two.”

  “Five.”

  “It still seems exorbitant.”

  “Look behind you. What do you see? Many apartments. Which of these needs a tenant? Do you know? No, you don’t. I know. The men are come back from the war. They get wives. They get children. They have to have a place to live. You think you are the only person to need an apartment? No, you are not. Everyone does. And I can find you one.”

  “Do you have a wife?”

  “No. No wife. I had one, and children.”

  “Were they…?”

  “No. We divorced in 1936. She went to America with her sister and brother-in-law and my son and daughter. Why has the conversation taken this turn? Why do you ask such impertinent questions, miss?”

  “Never mind. Please excuse me. What kind of an apartment is available? Where is it?”

  “On Mapu Street, off Ha Yarkon, just behind us. Very nice. Only ten years old. All the modern conveniences.”

  “When can I view it?”

  “Tomorrow morning, if you like.”

  “What will the rent be?”

  “The rents are fixed by the District Committee. They are unalterable. However, you may wish to offer the owner a consideration of some kind. To be paid weekly. And a deposit.”

  “Why, if the rents are fixed?”

  “You ask too many questions. I find you unduly inquisitive which is not attractive in a young girl. If you wish, I will meet you here tomorrow, at ten o’clock and we will visit the prospective apartment. Do you agree?”

  “Yes. I agree.”

  I walked along beneath the dry rustle of palm leaves and the night air smelled of a dozen things I didn’t know. I passed uncurtained windows where people sat, their dark heads bent over books. I looked up and saw windows like ribbons above the stairwells, emitting strips of tangerine light. Buildings stood on stilts, slim columns of concrete, and the gardens crept under them. Jewish cats yowled under a Jewish moon.

  YOU are late,” Herr Blum said, when I arrived at the café the next morning.

  I looked at my watch. “Only five minutes.”

  “Seven.”

  “Not all watches are the same,” I replied, angrily. “They run slow or stop. It’s not as if we have Big Ben to set them to.”

  “The country must learn to set its watches accurately and in synchronicity with each other. Otherwise we are…”

  “We are?”

  “Lost. Don’t fiddle with yourself, miss.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “Your hands are too active, keep them still.” I was undoing a black button at the collar of my polka-dot dress because my neck was moist.

  We walked a short distance and turned one block inland. The whiteness of the façades was so dazzling I would find that it would hurt my eyes to look upon my own front door in the middle of the day. Blum pushed open the door and we walked up three flights of stairs and he put the key to a lock.

  “Now you are home,” he said, gesturing with his hand and smiling at me, that smile with no humor or warmth.

  I had four rooms and every one was completely square and painted white and there were no cornices to soften the edges of things. There were no curtains at the windows, but gray metal venetian blinds. The place was sparsely furnished: a couple of wooden tables of different sizes and folding chairs. It was furniture ignorant of the existence of upholstery or the concept of comfort and ease and lounging about. On these chairs you would sit bolt upright, and pay attention to what was around you. They were chairs to command engagement with life.

  There was a small kitchen and I was surprised to see that the cupboards seemed to be attached to the wall and to each other, all of a piece. A long counter running across them connected the sink and the cooker and there was a refrigerator. It was achingly up-to-the-minute, the last word in modern design.

  “This is called a fitted kitchen,” Blum said. “I read an article about it in the paper. It was thought up by German woman who emigrated to the Soviet Union and our architects who came from Germany imported the idea to Palestine. Whatever next, eh?”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, running my hand across the Bakelite handles of the cupboards. I had a vision of myself cooking meals in this kitchen, perhaps even holding dinner parties. But I could not cook, just boiled eggs and cheese on toast.

  The bathroom didn’t have a bathtub, but a cubicle with a shower. In the bedroom, which was the same size as the sitting room, was a marital bed, and instead of a wardrobe a line of cupboards formed a continuous wall.

  “A lot of space for one person,” Blum said.

  More space than I had ever known.

  “And the wireless, which is a luxury, is included in the price. No telephone. There’s a long waiting list. If you wish to send a message or receive one, you must inquire at the newspaper kiosk. They will accommodate you.” I nodded. “So now we go to see the landlord.”

  We walked back down the stairs, which seemed more unkempt and dirty than the apartment. The windows were smeared, dust gathered in the corners of the steps and the banisters were stained.

  Blum opened the door of a ground-floor apartment and with one pace I left Palestine. A clock was ticking in its walnut case. Dark wood cast a pall of gloom on the white walls. Carved wooden chairs with high backs and maroon velvet upholstery were arranged like soldiers in lines around a table whose legs imitated the feet of lions. On the table was a brass bowl which held two bananas and an orange. Along one wall was a row of walnut glass-fronted bookcases and the spines of the volumes, in German and English, matched the uniform brownness of everything else. A chandelier strung with necklaces of crystal beads and drops hung from the ceiling, almost reaching the table as if it were made for taller rooms than this. Flies droned and even though it was still morning I felt hot and sleepy while beyond the window the sky stuck to its blueness and the sound of a loud gramophone drifted up from the seashore.

  “Where is the landlord?” I asked Blum.

  “I am the landlord. I am he. Blum.”

  “But you’ve tricked me.”

  “No. I am owner and middleman all in one.”

  “Don’t think you can fool me,” I cried, stepping toward him, a sandaled toe near his foot, fit to stamp. “I’m not paying you the finder’s fee. And what about the consideration? Why do I have to pay that?”

  “Fräulein, as the saying goes among my circle. I did not come here from conviction, I came here from Germany. Understand?” I nodded. “Good. Now understand also that I am not a socialist but a capitalist. The only way we were able to acquire Palestine was to buy it from the Arabs, meter by meter, stone by dusty stone with the money we raised from Jewish capitalists all over the world. I arrived in 1936 with my furniture and a sum of money. Not large, not substantial, but enough to ensure my future. I could not find work in my profession. I saw that there was a great influx of refugees all with somewhere needed to live and that I could exist comfortably on their rents. I paid for this building to be constructed. I even said yes to the architect when he wanted to put in that unfortunate kitchen. Just one, I said to him. As an experiment, to indulge an artist. But socialism is everywhere. It cannot be eradicated. The District Committee has brought in a law that protects the tenants by telling me what rent I can charge them. I cannot live on what they pay so I must labor with my hands fixing dolls, and I must tell you that no one in my family for four generations has fallen to a manual trade.

  “I am not dexterous. I am clumsy. I am not neat and my eyesight is not the best. Dolls bore me as do puppets and other marionettes which are sometimes sent to me to fix. I
don’t like their dead, glassy eyes. I am full of neuroses. Birds’ legs, for example, frighten me. And their beaks. All in all I am entirely unsuited to my work and I do not prosper in it. That is the answer to your question. Every pound you pay me on top of the absurdly inadequate rent is a few less dolls for me to repair. Yes, we will forget about the finder’s fee but you can have this apartment only if you pay to me directly my additional consideration.”

  “That’s immoral.”

  “Everything is immoral.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “No, perhaps not.” He smiled, with small pointed yellow teeth behind yellow lips. “But you can dream, if you wish. I have stopped. Each man must look to himself. And you, young lady, give the appearance of a degree of financial comfort. I don’t ask how you acquired this. I don’t ask what you are doing here. I don’t ask anything about you at all. I ask only that you pay me a sum which you can conceivably afford. Besides, you will not be here long, you will be married before the year is out and I will have to find a new tenant. Perhaps you already have a fiancé?”

  “No.”

  “Then we will try to find you one.”

  I was beaten. Here I had an apartment; beyond these doors I did not. I told him I would return to the hotel to collect my things and cash my banker’s draft. He extended his hand to me to shake on the deal. He shook hands very firmly. His nails dug into my palms.

  I walked back to the hotel, shuddering slightly when I thought of my own doll, Mathilda, falling into his hands. When I outgrew toys I gave her to Gabriella’s little sister who had never had anything so nice and sat her on a shelf and worshipped her from afar, taking her down every three months to change her outfit, according to the seasons.

  In the afternoon I returned to the apartment and was handed my keys in exchange for a folded pile of pounds. I climbed the stairs and let myself into my new home and sat on a folding chair and looked around me, enraptured by my wooden chairs and my streamlined kitchen.

  Later, as the room grew hotter, I moved to the balcony. Along the street, on the corner, an Arab in a quaint tarboosh had set up a stall selling watermelons, big and red and juicy and cool they looked to me, tantalizingly cool. How odd that a fruit which was red—the color of heat and danger—should be sweet and watery and cold. I was disinclined to make my hot, weary way down the stairs to the street to buy my watermelon. I watched the Arab on the heat of the pavement with his guaranteed coolers and I wanted what he had and I didn’t. I supposed he was watching us, the people who built on sand, and thinking that if he waited long enough, patiently, the sand would return to engulf us.

  THAT night there was a curfew. Soldiers and police drove through the streets shouting orders through megaphones. I was hungry again, I was always hungry, in Palestine. I couldn’t arrange any meals for myself, there was too much disorder. Things were out of control. I sat on the balcony giving myself a headache, smoking too many cigarettes. Across the street and along it, people were doing exactly the same thing: sitting on their balconies in the nighttime heat.

  I was trying to think of what to do with my life, how to find work, and I considered my options. I could go to work for the Jewish Agency in some secretarial capacity but I had no secretarial skills. And I spoke only a kind of kibbutz Hebrew, enough to get by on, not to read documents and draft responses to them.

  I could become a fighter in one of the Jewish undergrounds but I didn’t know how to make contact with such a thing or what I would do if I joined up. I supposed that Johnny did something of this sort for Ben-Gurion’s Haganah—going about with a bucket and paste after nightfall sticking up posters demanding free immigration and that the British should evacuate NOW, or organizing demonstrations or forming one of the bands of men and women who met the illegal immigrants on the beach and smuggled them past enemy lines. But in the absence of Johnny I was just an enthusiastic supporter, not an activist.

  I could work for the British and spy on them because people kept telling me I would make a good spy but I had entered the country as a Christian tourist of the Holy Land and I did not know how to explain why I wanted to stay on. I was worried that they would start investigating me for security clearances and discover I had made lies like tissue paper that you could poke a finger through and that my time on the kibbutz would be uncovered.

  My school would be contacted for references and they would say, “Ah, the Jewish girl, Evelyn Sert…” remembering my lack of enthusiasm for lacrosse on foggy mornings beneath leafless trees, rubbing my hands together for warmth, and my attempt to blow smoke rings with my frozen breath. My insolence and my contemptuous whispers when I thought my spinster teachers were stupid, those harmless Englishwomen wittering about gentle Jesus meek and mild and the milk of loving kindness while across the Channel all hell was breaking loose. Cretins. Appeasers, all of them. So not as harmless as they first appeared with their sagging, shapelessly happy faces.

  The ashtray was full and my skirt was gray. My skin was crawling in the heat. My lungs felt lined with damp moss. Someone knocked on my door and I walked over to open it. My ankles were swollen. My heart was panting from the short exertion. On the other side was a delegation, a welcoming committee, holding coffee and tea, sugar and bags of oranges and tomatoes, slabs of white cheese and a cake decorated with macaroons. The tomatoes looked very red against the white walls and the oranges, very orange and I noticed that my brain was glad to receive some color in my monochrome modern home.

  There was quite a crowd of them and they greeted me in a variety of languages. At the head of the visitation was a large, handsome, artificially blond woman near the age of fifty, with a head dressed in a mass of Edwardian curls, who entered my apartment in a stately manner reminiscent of Queen Mary on official business amongst the lower orders.

  “I am Mrs. Kulp, of course,” she said.

  “How do you do.”

  “Delighted.” She extended two fingers.

  “Thank you for the food, I’m very glad of it.”

  “You’re welcome. You have the apartment with the unfortunate kitchen, I see.”

  “I admire it. I like modern things.”

  She smiled a smile as artificial as the color of her hair and coming toward me planted a kiss on my cheek with breath that smelled not of Parma violets as I expected but boiled eggs, a sulfurous odor. Her skin was dosed with a perfume I knew very well, Guerlain’s Shalimar.

  “Shall I make coffee for you?”

  “A pleasure.” She waved the others away with her arm, speaking in two or three different tongues. “The others you will meet in time. I am the president of the residents’ committee.”

  “How well organized.”

  “Our landlord is a swindler. A skinflint. We have to be on our guard.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you will join?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “There is a fee, a small one, of course.”

  “What do you do with the money?”

  “We put it aside to pay a lawyer to take Blum to court to make him maintain the building.”

  “Do you think you’ll win?”

  She waved her hand. “Oh, Blum will be defeated in time. No one can live long with so many enemies.”

  I made the coffee and cut slices of cake and we sat on the balcony exchanging polite inquiries about each other, trying not to move, not to exert ourselves and produce a blush of sweat on our skin, a gust of bad odor.

  “How did you enter Palestine?” she asked me. I told her. “Then you are a clever girl,” she replied, and put another forkful of cake into her mouth.

  “Now my story may also be of interest to you.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” I said, politely, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Everyone in Palestine had a tale of some kind and they were prepared to tell it to you at the drop of a hat. In a country with its face turned toward the future, our stories sat on our shoulders like a second head, facing the way we had come from. We
were the tribe of Janus, if there is such a thing.

  She was a Russian whose mother had been an assistant to one of the hairdressers at the court of the Romanovs and this well-placed lady had known personally (as her daughter would very frequently tell me) the Polish Jew Max Factor back in the days when he was make-up artist to the Imperial court, before he left for America and invented the cosmetics for the motion-picture industry. Mrs. Kulp was a refugee not so much from anti-Semitism as Bolshevism.

  Setting off in 1925 on her own from the newly named Leningrad when she was around the same age as I was now, she had arrived in Hamburg and married the owner of a medium-sized department store which she revolutionized by opening a beauty salon inside it. By the thirties, her husband, more astute than she and predicting that he would shortly be spending more on the replacement of smashed windows than on stock, sold up and moved the family to Palestine where he immediately contracted tuberculosis from drinking infected milk. The disease spread through his lungs, forming cavities, and ate its way into the bronchi where, advancing through the system, it began to erode his blood vessels, causing him to spit crimson matter into his handkerchief. With rest, good food and nursing care he might have built up a resistance against the bacillus and eventually sealed it off.

  “But, my husband, Mr. Kulp, did not rest. Not at all. He was determined to re-create what he had had before—a grand panjandrum, he called it, selling everything from socks to divan beds, on Allenby Street. The ice box in this very apartment was almost certainly purchased from my husband’s store.” As she told it, Kulp flogged himself to death trying to import luxury goods to sell to a market of British Mandate officials and the rising Tel Aviv bourgeoisie. His lungs became a mass of cheesy material. The bacilli spread to his kidneys and killed him, six years after he first set foot on Jewish soil.

  Mrs. Kulp was left alone to fend for herself. Widowed, with a son who worked now as a trainee manager at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, she set out to build a second life for herself as the owner of a hairdressing salon in the center of the city. She had an admirer among the crowd of hopeless German émigrés, who she suspected was only interested in her for her money, and she was probably right for if she had feminine charms, they were invisible to me.