Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  A middle-aged soldier drinking beer sauntered over to read the address tags on her suitcases. He too was from Sydney, he said. Then, in argot: ‘Is china here’ (he meant Menachem) ‘giving you the tom-tits?’

  ‘She’ll be apples,’ Danielle replied. The code phrase worked.

  He made some announcement in Hebrew that settled the question: there seemed no need to open the second bag. He, the former Australian, was gone when she returned half an hour later.

  Danielle had three times refused Menachem’s invitation to go with him to a place close by. Just for one hour. ‘You will not be disappointed,’ he murmured breathing softly against her ear. He asked her no questions about herself but devoted the time as they pushed and were jostled along Salomon Street to praising his business acumen. He was a toy importer, specializing in helium balloons. ‘I am the balloon king of Israel,’ he said. He was planning to take over Western Europe.

  When he began to nuzzle her neck, Danielle told him in a firm voice that she was in business herself, that she was easily ten years older than he – she had, in fact, an eighteen-year-old daughter – and that she did not go to bed with boys who introduced themselves in the street. Menachem listened with indifference. On her third refusal he stopped walking to look at her again and a brazen smile spread over his lips and eyes.

  ‘I know women,’ he announced. ‘I know when women are in love. You are in love.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied. But Menachem had started to laugh.

  ‘You’re blushing about it!’

  All the way back along Salomon Street he murmured: ‘Your lover is not here, is he? So spend the time with me. I will teach you wonderful things . . .’ She held her chin up and her lips pressed together in a small haughty smile, seeing herself through his eyes – just a foreign woman standing in the street, as irresistibly vulnerable as a rabbit to a man with a gun.

  There were guns everywhere, hanging on shoulder straps, snuggled into armpits, grasped between knees. In the hotel last night an elderly American had accosted her for the pleasure of sharing a revelation: ‘Look at these wonderful kids,’ he said, ‘with their Uzis and Galils. Can you imagine New York if every kid of eighteen had a rifle?’

  When they had reached the schwarma stall again and Danielle had gathered her bags she turned to Menachem and said, ‘I’d just love to. You’re very handsome. But I don’t want to catch herpes,’ and left him.

  Five

  A Russian grandfather gave information about bus schedules from a booth at the rear of the terminal building that some unkind person – like me, Danielle thought – might have said not only housed public lavatories but also stank of them and was generally such an eyesore that one regretted the Egyptians had failed to knock it down with shelling in 1948 and had only made a hole in the pavement outside. Such a poisonous smell came from the area marked ‘mesdames’ that its pollutants could have contained, she felt, radioactivity. She was suffering a vague, general irritation, mostly with herself for her resort to offensiveness to get rid of Menachem: a woman should be able to say no in such a way that the man takes her seriously, she thought. But if one were dealing with a man incapable of hearing the woman, a sort of wise monkey with his paws on his ears . . .

  She cheered up at the idea that in their scene was a neat little allegory for the mechanics of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Arabs had refused to hear what the Jews had said about staying in Israel . . .

  Or maybe, she thought, it’s the other way around, now: maybe we have an attack of selective inattention to protect us from the truth, and maybe the Ayatollah’s Islamic Revolution is serious about its goal of exterminating. . .

  Her eyes moved away from the information booth to a newsstand close by where there were dailies and weeklies in various languages and Hebrew novels with bright pornographic jacket illustrations. A few feet beyond it a religious with a white beard was urging young men who passed by to stop and pray. He had on hand prayer books and phylacteries but – as the Russian explained to Danielle – no water for the ritual wash. Therefore the young men were washing by rubbing their hands on the peeling green paint of the walls. The Russian had a low opinion of religion and considered the old party with the white beard a nuisance. ‘Go back to New York!’ he called several times but was ignored by the Pious One, who was by now absorbed in mumbling. On the cement floor alongside the information stand two disabled beggars had a pitch. They kept up a spirited discussion with the news vendor between shouting demands for money. Their voices sometimes drowned the cries of a man selling tokens for the nearby telephones and another offering cheese pies, cans of Coke, and quoit-shaped rolls from a tray.

  ‘And that, darling,’ the Russian said, pointing to a notice board, ‘is photographs of missing persons. And beside them . . .’ An army couple were kissing each other in a trance of tenderness, the boy clasping a rifle to his girl’s back. ‘After the battlefield, the bedroom. Nu, it’s the rule of Nature.’ The Russian beamed, all sunshine, wrinkles, and a gold front tooth.

  Another rule here, Danielle thought, is: the greatest possible variety in the smallest possible space.

  The interior of the building was the size of a living room in a suburban house, badly ventilated and poorly lit. The seventy-seven – or whatever – countries from which Jews had come to Israel each seemed to have a representative inside it – along with characters like me, she thought, and that black American dressed up as King Solomon, selling incense and patchouli oil in the doorway, who just told me he is a real Hebrew and that he has three wives.

  ‘Ah aim th’ Lawd,’ he said, plucking with long fine fingers at the folds of his yellow robe. He was born in Dallas, he said.

  She was about to make for the exit to the bus bays when a flash of white light startled her. A photographer was crouched on one knee, apparently focusing on the newsstand’s parade of naked women, some of them masturbating, some trussed with black leather thongs. She turned back to the grandfather.

  ‘He’s taking a funny sort of picture,’ she said. ‘Nude women in the foreground and boys praying in the background.’

  The Russian leaned over his counter to see what she meant, grasped it, and shrugged. ‘Darling – this is a free country. What can I do?’ His open hands rose in the air as if controlled by a will so much greater than his own that objections were futile.

  She shrugged back.

  She had spoken out of an impulse to amuse the sweet old man, not really knowing if what she claimed were true or not. But she continued to watch the photographer as he darted about on bent legs and saw that he did have a stubby, wide-angle lens on his camera. He was as quick as a spider. He had just caught an expression of animal stupidity on the face of a soldier who had stopped to pray, a boy whose face in the next moment looked human again. The camera seized frame after frame of the same scene.

  Then his roll of film was finished. He straightened up and strolled outside, taking the exit opposite the one that led past the plutonium lavatories.

  Danielle saw him again a few minutes later. As she took her place with her luggage in the bus line, there, a couple of yards away, was the photographer, snapping a group of nuns gathered around a food vendor. Something about him puzzled her, something tormenting, like a word on the tip of the tongue. He was swarthy, with a huge curved nose like a fin, too big for a big man, and he was short and slight. That nose was troubling him, for he kept sniffing, ruching up the skin on its slopes into ridges. He was warmly dressed, with a natty dark cap, a tartan scarf, and a black leather jacket. It was only ten o’clock but the day, after a promising start, was growing cold again. His face quivered with sudden agony: a sneeze exploded.

  - It’s Wili Djugash!

  She wondered how long he had been out of jail, and what had become of London’s Most Brilliant Photographer. Also, of the silver Jaguar, and the van emblazoned ‘Wili’s Doggie Carriage’ that had carted around the five Afghan hounds to his outdoor assignments.

  She continued to watch
him, remembering her own taste of the exuberance of the 1960s in London – of being twenty years old, having a husband who knew the real story about everything, having a job as a copywriter in Hamish & Bruce. She’d met Wili through Hamish & Bruce; he’d walked into her office one day, said, ‘You’re the new popsie? I’m Djugash – it’s Huguenot French – come to lunch.’ He spoke English like an elocution mistress. That evening Patrick had roared, ‘Huguenot French? Wili’s father was a seaman from Odessa who fell overboard on top of his mother one night. Huguenot French! He’s an East End bastard.’ Then, a few months later, she remembered, Patrick had announced, ‘There’s a rumor your friend Wili has got his prick in the Cusack till. Old man Cusack and his son are gunning for him.’ She had not learned the full details, for she had to return to Sydney and Australian press reporting of the Photographer-Teenage Heiress Scandal was scant. It ended with Wili sentenced to seven years in jail. A picture of him beside a Black Maria carried a caption saying, ‘Wili Djugash, the society photographer who eloped with 15-year-old Hon. Tamsin Cusack, has been convicted of burglary and assault. He says he will go on a hunger strike in prison.’

  He was certainly slimmer.

  There was a double coincidence in seeing him again, here, for the one person Danielle knew in Israel, her beloved Alice Sadler, had been Wili’s teacher too, but in England, at a progressive school founded soon after the war. She wondered if he had seen Alice already.

  Danielle watched him patting at his jacket pockets for a fresh handkerchief: he was always the first in London to catch the new strains of influenza. Around Hamish & Bruce any unidentified illness was known as ‘The Wilies.’

  The nuns were eating cheese pies made with flaky pastry. They had strained, yearning eyes that reached out as if they wanted something specific, but were not sure how to recognize it. Even as they ate, they kept watching for it. One noticed the camera and began brushing her mouth and chin with flustered movements, while Wili turned his machine vertically and snapped once more, a smile on his small, rather feminine lips. The traffic noise drowned out other sounds, but Danielle could hear in memory a snigger, a little eh-eh-eh in the back of the throat Wili made when he was pleased with a shot.

  Just then the bus that was already full of passengers pulled out and, like clockwork, another pulled up at the front of the bay and everyone corralled between the iron railings of the line began pushing and shoving. A trio of the Pious, two older men and a beardless youth, were immediately in front of Danielle. Behind her were two tired-looking soldiers with kitbags. The soldiers had only enough energy to keep themselves upright, but the Hasidim had spent the past ten minutes in constant minor activity, the men talking animatedly to each other and consulting a religious text, the boy nervously curling his earlocks around his index finger, fluttering his hands to the brim of his handsome black hat, and then, as the new bus pulled up, using his pointing finger again to help him count, over and over, the number of passengers in front of him. As they approached the head of the line the boy peered backward, anxiety impressed into a face too young for it. He was as pale and tall as a sprout germinated in darkness. His clear, worried eyes looked not past Danielle but through her, by some process of mental discipline that allowed him not to see that which was forbidden. The hair stood on her scalp: this time she felt certain there was somebody watching her from back there, some shadow, original and dark. She swung around wildly, ready to say ‘Father!’ but there was only a line of men and women paying her no attention and the two soldiers, who grinned.

  ‘You speak English?’ one asked. She nodded. ‘You won’t get on this bus,’ he said. ‘Sweetie-pie has it all figured out: if you board, he’ll have to sit next to you.’

  He jerked his thumb at the adolescent Hasid. ‘God doesn’t let them sit next to women.’

  His companion muttered. ‘Bloody shirkers. I say, fuck the religious.’

  When they reached the head of the line the Hasidim had an excited exchange with the bus driver, who appeared to be cursing them, but nevertheless he beckoned to a man standing alone behind Danielle and the two soldiers and ordered him to enter the bus as its final passenger.

  ‘See?’ the soldier said. ‘And what do they do for this country?’

  Danielle felt hostile and uneasy: she had been the victim of an injustice, but it was such an ironic one. Those religious men, supposedly concerned with the immaterial and the spiritual, had just revealed that their true obsession was with the body and its physical purity. So she knew she should not be upset: they were frightened of women, in general; that was their problem, in general.

  Her hostility passed and its place filled with a niggling anxiety. She had thought of herself as cast from a single piece, but in recent months she had begun to doubt – and worse, different parts no longer seemed to fit together. Which was bewildering. Wasn’t she thirty-eight years old, the winner of an award at Cannes, and with the screenplay of Eleazar, getting the chance to win an Oscar? For some reason she could not diagnose, she knew that even if she had more luck, more success, the comfort it would bring would leave her feeling incomplete. And so she was going back to Jerusalem, to heal something.

  The Hasidim were now on the bus.

  ‘What should they be doing for the country?’ she asked.

  The soldier patted his rifle; his companion nodded in agreement.

  The bus moved off, giving Danielle a clear view of Wili, but she avoided looking at him directly; within seconds she would be able to board and escape him altogether. However, something seemed to have happened to him in the few minutes he had been out of sight and she found herself glancing in his direction. He had hung his camera around his neck and was hitting himself on the thighs, the chest, the rump, and talking aloud. Then she realized: He’s been robbed!

  Danielle hesitated, stepped over her suitcases and ran up to him. He did not recognize her. She had to repeat, ‘Danielle Green – oh, Reilly – I was married to Patrick Reilly of the Sunday Times. From the Bruce agency. Remember?’

  He jerked as if she had slapped him. Then he threw his arms around her saying, ‘Princess!’ (And how well she remembered that salutation of his, and how it irritated her. She suspected that within it was a sneer – ‘Jewish Australian Princess.’)

  Danielle riffled through the currency she had in her shoulder bag and pulled out a wad of hundred-shekel notes.

  ‘Here’s fifty dollars’ worth,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.’

  People were shouting at her to get on the bus or to move her suitcases or to do something – to stop wasting their time – but Wili, sudden tears in his eyes, had caught her by the elbows and was refusing to let go.

  ‘Hey, Wili,’ she said, ‘Alice Sadler is living in Jerusalem.’ His attention caught, she managed to twist free. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘That old fart.’ He seemed to be grasping only parts of what she said.

  She called ‘American Colony’ over her shoulder as she mounted the steps to the bus and knew he had heard this time because he nodded vigorously.

  Six

  February was only a few days old but already the people of Jerusalem were forcasting that this would be the coldest winter in forty years.

  When she got out of bed that morning Alice Sadler discovered that the solar-heating tank on the roof of her apartment building had again proved itself ineffectual and she had no hot water at all. It would take two hours for the electrically heated boiler to produce some, but Alice could not afford to switch it on. Inflation was already running at 120 percent and everything cost a fortune. She looked out at the sky, of which she had a good view from her top-floor apartment. It was the color of metal, right across to Jordan.

  ‘Israel needs all the rain she can get,’ Alice said to cheer herself up. Then she added, ‘Jerusalem the Golden with milk and honey blest, my foot!’

  In her kitchen, which had the same stone-tiled floors as the rest of her shabby rooms and smelled of gas, she was too cold to
boil the kettle for a cup of tea. Boiling the kettle took a good five minutes because the water had the hard nature of the city and despite scrubbing out every couple of weeks and soaking with half a lemon, it left on the inside of the kettle an unbudgeable deposit of limestone, a lining of that same rock the local Arabs called ‘Jew’s head’ because it was so tough. She went back to bed and there, guiltily, let her hand slide to the switch of her electric blanket. Alice allowed herself few weaknesses; the electric blanket was a gift from her friend David, and normally she used it for only half an hour at night, the time before sleeping that she devoted to a memory exercise with cards. Although her passport said she was born in 1898 Alice suspected that in a few weeks she would turn eighty-six, not eighty-five. The records had been lost in a synagogue fire and her mother, beautiful and frivolous, was vague about dates. Alice excused her as a creature trapped by the mannerisms of her era. To exercise her own wits Alice translated some Virgil each morning while she ate her granola.

  She listened to the BBC foreign news broadcast, but without taking much in because she had slept poorly after the excitement of speaking to Danielle in Tel Aviv. Finally she read a few pages of a new feminist book called All Women Are Goddesses. She’d liked the title, although it was glib. The authors argued (and she agreed with them) that Eve, far from being the cause of the Fall of Man, had led Adam from his bucolic stupor into a subtler realm of thought. They were just getting themselves muddled in their argument when Alice glanced at her bedside clock, saw it was past nine, and realized that she had to get out of bed and hurry.

  Outside the city was already rowdy. There were the sparrows to feed – only four fluffed into gray dandelions had had the patience to wait on her balcony – and downstairs Arik, who lived in the communal garbage container left parked in the street, was stiff-legged with temper because his breakfast was late.