Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Time and again she had remarked on the emotional greenness of these bright young women whose careers reached heights her own generation had not dreamed of. In Danielle she saw an authentic example of the late-twentieth-century Western woman, reared in prosperity at a forced pace. The process left them glossy as their tomatoes, which were colored scarlet from gassing, but undeveloped within. It was a sort of vulgarity, and a sign of the times.

  ‘You’ve got your work cut out, dearest. Marilyn is Professor Garin’s daily help.’ She handed over a slip of paper with a telephone number and an address. ‘His wife, it must have been his third, died recently and Marilyn, from the way she spoke, is his keeper. He’s told her he has no children. It’s as well for you to know what you’re up against.’

  She saw self-righteousness in Danielle’s expression and thought: Fear. But if you succumb to it you’ll spend another twenty years in assuring yourself you did not.

  ‘Do you know why you want to see him?’ she asked.

  ‘Sentimentality.’

  But Alice, even through the distortion caused by her hearing aid, heard the facile note in Danielle’s voice, and thought, I’ll not indulge her.

  ‘In my experience,’ she replied, ‘Sentimentality is a cloak for lies we tell ourselves. You can do better than that.’

  Silence. And noises from another room of Marilyn moving furniture. Danielle was thinking: Something happened to me after I won the award at Cannes for The Lovers . . .

  - Not one thing, but many. The most banal was that I wondered, ‘Is this all there is? Do I now just go on writing bigger and better – or worse – movies till I drop?’

  ‘I had a mild attack of existential angst,’ she said, ‘Nothing, however, to distress for long your average bear . . .’ She listened to herself trying to be amusing. But some slight gesture from Alice conveyed that the old woman was really attending to her, that nothing she said would be dismissed as trivial and that her nervous defenses were unnecessary.

  ‘You know, Alice, I thought of that film – The Lovers – as a clever, feminist look at sadism. And masochism, of course.’

  Alice had seen it; the story was simple, an old favorite in fact: supposedly set in the nineteenth century it was about a poor farmgirl who becomes the mistress of a rich, tyrannical landowner, trapped into it by love for her starving parents, brothers, and sisters. At length, having befriended a terrible bull owned by the lover, she rebels and escapes, riding off on the animal’s back.

  ‘But the idea for it came from television news pictures of a matador being gored. I kept wondering, “Why do they fight bulls?” Suddenly I started seeing pictures of bulls everywhere – every time I opened a magazine or a newspaper.’

  - Like the girl, who had an obsession about the farm bull. She saw it everywhere, watching her, tracking her when she went to the fields, waiting to trample her down.

  ‘Then, at Cannes, an elderly judge came up to me and asked, “Why does she escape on the bull? Why not on a bicycle?” I wasn’t sure. He went on about mythology and the interpretations the other judges had made when assessing the film. Then he said, “Mademoiselle, pour moi.” For him, the bull was the energy of life. The Life Force. And the girl was the Soul. I told him, “Listen – The Lovers is about victimization, and overcoming it.” And he replied, “Ma petite, you are lucky because you have written something good in your sleep.” ’

  They heard Jerusalem surging outside, Marilyn scraping chair legs across the floor, the momentary hiss of the thermostat on Alice’s electric heater.

  ‘. . . absurd,’ Danielle was saying. ‘It sounds absurd. I began to think I was the girl.’

  ‘And who or what is the bull, my dear?’

  - Some part of me, also. Or him. My father. Men. Patrick. Even James. ‘I don’t know. But I imagined it, so it’s mine, somehow.’ Alice was nodding, but Danielle had shocked herself, feeling as if, all of a sudden, she had molted.

  ‘Zeus appeared as a bull. Or a swan – or anything else that took his fancy. Yahweh, too, for that matter . . .’ Alice’s reedy voice was far away. ‘I was translating some Virgil this morning . . .’

  Danielle waited, straining to seem attentive. At length she asked, ‘Did you tell Marilyn that professor Green-Garin does, in fact, have a daughter?’

  Alice sighed. She had, she said, and Marilyn had remarked: ‘Your friend has made a mistake. He has only me, Miss Sadler.’ Then she had given Alice the picture of Jesus and asked her to join in prayer with her, after she’d mopped the kitchen floor.

  A needle twirled in Danielle’s chest. ‘So she’s his daughter! That unwashed hippie! He even has a granddaughter. What about all the photographs of Katherine I sent him?’

  Without warning her, Danielle’s body began to sob. Alice came to sit beside her and rubbed her back. She spoke quietly, saying things Danielle could not hear at first for they reached her like signals in a fog. At length she was able to listen. Alice was saying: ‘Remember you’re not powerless. Remember you’re a widow who brought up a child single-handed, got her launched into university to study engineering, and made a career for yourself at the same time. And here you are, not yet forty, setting out on a great adventure. A discovery.’

  Danielle inhaled as if air were liquid, to be gulped.

  ‘What discovery?’ Her voice bridled.

  Alice chirruped, ‘To know yourself. What else is there, my dear?’

  Marilyn had the rugs rolled up, had piled the small chairs on top of the dining table in the salon, as Jerusalem called its living rooms, and was already mopping the stone-tiled floor. She turned to smile, looking up over the mop handle. Danielle thought, You and your broomstick. They made the singsong ‘Shalom’ at each other. Ironic, Danielle thought, how in this battleground of a country people never tire of saying ‘Peace.’ You say it in greeting and parting, even answering the telephone. Peace. Peace. As if in Jerusalem there could ever be peace. Even Alice had the habit: ‘Shalom, love,’ she said at the door.

  A man about seventy was on the stairway, resting to catch his breath. He carried a bunch of violets and although he was sagging from exhaustion his face brightened as Danielle galloped down the steps toward him. He made a gesture with his free hand, trying to tip his astrakhan hat. Half-dead, he retained that charm of a man who loves women. They were in each other’s presence for only a second but it was so agreeable that when Danielle reached the foyer and opened her umbrella against the snow she felt as if something had been restored to her.

  ‘For the American Colony?’ the cab driver asked.

  ‘No. I want to go to the Old City. Jaffa Gate.’

  Thirteen

  Her taxi moved fitfully through the narrow hilly streets of this central European West Jerusalem. It was a town of apartment buildings faced with cream-colored stone, with pine trees and dark-leafed winter jasmine in the front gardens. There were laundromats, banks, bakery windows luscious with chocolate tortes and poppyseed cakes, and cars parked on asphalt pavements richly manured by dogs. Danielle muttered to herself: I am a Hottentot. I’ve never heard of David, Solomon, Jezebel, Herod, Salome, Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, Caiaphas, Titus, Bar Kochbah, Mohammed, Goddefroi de Bouillon, Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion. The Lion’s Gate, the Golden Gate, el-Burak, the Hill of Evil Counsel, the Mount of Anointing, the Mount of Olives, the Temple Mount. The Via Dolorosa, Suleiman the Magnificent, the el-Aqsa, the Dome of the Rock, the Valley of the Cheese-makers. The Tenth Legion. The Wall. These are unknown to me . . . I am just looking.

  What stately names! Uttered under the breath they expand to blossoming centuries.

  It stopped snowing. They passed a street still half-destroyed from the war of ‘67; ahead the purple-gray sky rested a few yards above the Old City walls like a dark wing – but to her, all at once, it was the great protecting wing of the Shekinah. She walked through the Jaffa Gate, past the sandbags and men with submachine guns, and was instantly lost and at home.

  Once she found herself drinking a thimble of coffe
e perfumed with cardamom while in the background a bunch of young men played Space Invaders and older ones smoked hookahs, but mainly she wandered without direction, passing window shutters and doorways painted blue to ward off the Evil Eye. The very air jittered with a violence of mind and sensual distraction that made every yard she walked and every minute that ticked away seem like provinces and months spent in some normal place. The past leaned upon the present. Invisible boundaries, as commanding as barbed wire, appeared at street corners: here ends the Greek Orthodox quarter; here begins the Moslem quarter; Danger – Jews unwelcome past this point. Foreign women take care to be modestly dressed . . . Something had stung her neck: a group of ragamuffins was surrounding her at a prudent distance, their leader, about ten years old, with his hands on his hips.

  Behind her a merchant was offering for sale a statue of the Madonna, its face inlaid with mother-of-pearl. ‘See the beauty,’ he called to Danielle.

  Men dressed in the style favored by Christ went by; the Yasser Arafat three-day beard was popular – on both Arabs and Jews – and an old party got up as an amateur-dramatics Turk stomped along banging the stones with a stout pole, followed by some Assyrian kings with square beards and diamond crosses hung around their necks. ‘That’s the Pope,’ someone said. But it was only the Greek Pope.

  The environment recalled too much of the past and confused it with the present, making her feel slightly mad. She looked into the face of every older man she passed: he was not in them. When she turned to rebuke the person behind who had shoved her, Danielle met with a donkey’s muzzle. The donkey tapped his delicate forefoot peevishly; his back was laden with kerosene tins and behind him eight men inside a Mercedes Benz waved fists out the window. The donkey said, ‘What do they expect me to do? Fly?’ Since no one could move, the owner began beating him on the rump, and yelling. A sign said Via Dolorosa.

  It had taken her about a minute to realize – or remember – that the merest glance sideways at the wares of the souk would bring out like wasps from a disturbed hive men saying, ‘Yes, please? What is it you want?’ in voices at once obsequious, threatening, and suggestive, as if anything at all could be made available and they could recognize a corrupt soul.

  Pretending to help her try on a sheepskin jerkin a boy had fluttered his hands over her breasts and as she pulled back he had grabbed a handful of her hair as if by accident. ‘Welcome,’ he said. An older man watched from a rush-bottomed stool in the corner of the shop. Outside someone had followed her ten yards muttering ‘fuck-fuck-fuck-suck-my-cock’ until she’d had the nerve to swing around and hiss, ‘Suck it yourself!’ He had scrambled back, eyes rolling white, like a dog unjustly kicked. Extremes touched each other: in the streets, misogyny; in antique shop windows, clay figurines of the Mother Goddess, who became the Abomination.

  She stopped to look at an Abominable Female (price, $200, guaranteed a genuine Caananite artifact), wondering if her father now recited the daily prayer: Thank you, Lord, for not creating me a woman. What monsters that insult has spawned, she thought.

  She was aware of other dissonances. Although the Old City belonged so intimately to the people, there was an insistent suggestion of conflict between their vitality and the funereal stillness of its stone. The walled town was time-defying, like a pyramid. Enclosed by masonry of such mighty age flesh seemed tender, weak, and poignantly impermanent, at the farthest remove from eternal life. It was as if the builders had constructed a daily reminder for themselves that bodies are only meat and bones. She shivered all over at the idea that underneath lay collected a lake of the human blood shed century after century in these lanes: a sharp blow to the paving could make it gush again.

  Suddenly she found she had escaped the crowds of the souk and was alone in a Crusader church. It was free of decoration inside and out, except for a cross on the wall of the apse. The altar table had a white cloth and two lighted candles, their pale, straight forms like the translucent bodies of saints. There were rows of pews and nothing more – thousands of tons of masonry leapt upward as if weightless. She was shaken by contact with genius, its fire drawn down, somehow, into the hands of stone-cutters who believed the earth was flat. Her footsteps on the flagging made a soft thunder.

  It was bitterly cold inside the church, which was filled with a dim gray light except where, entering at a round window, a silvery ramp of sunshine maybe sixty feet long ran down to the altar. There was a saying, she recalled: Jerusalem’s sunshine is the outermost garment of God.

  She was about to leave when a group of pilgrims came in following a guide. From forty feet away she could hear his whispers about the acoustics of St. Anne’s; he suggested they sing. Danielle was half-way to the door. ‘Please stay, Miss,’ the guide called and his mouth could have been cupped against her ear. The pilgrims’ voices rose – and then, something happened. Angels came to sing. Her body was permeated by their vibrations and she felt she had expanded so far the boundaries of her skin disappeared, and she’d turned into waves and dots and riffles of light.

  She went outside when they began the second hymn. She was weeping, but not distressed. She felt, rather, a mixture of joy and compassion for all beings. It was a calming sensation and she leaned against the wall of the church, smiling. The world on its permanent errand went here and there in front of her.

  After a while she became aware that a pair of eyes were fixed on her.

  ‘Wili.’

  ‘Prin-cess!’ His approach was an exercise in stagecraft: arms flung wide; two steps forward; say ‘Princess’; halt; smile; another two steps. Hug.

  His skin shone from cold cream and he seemed to have spilt on himself the contents of a bottle of Kouros. It was a scent she loathed.

  He was sucking a throat lozenge.

  He’s been watching me, she realized, he can see I’ve been crying, but he’s such an egomaniac that all he’ll be interested in will be my praise for his cleverness in finding me.

  ‘Well, how did you do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone told me.’ Lips pursed smugly. He had an aluminum suitcase on the ground beside him, open. The insides were a nest of foam-rubber hollows for extra lenses and film spools. He shut it with a snap. ‘I don’t let them x-ray this.’ He wrinkled his nose and made the eh-eh-eh snigger. Danielle felt too peaceful to be irritated. She allowed him to take her arm and lead her off.

  ‘How did I find you? Well, you had a coffee in the Moses Cafe. You talked to a friend of mine in the antique shop just over there . . .’ Wili looked meaningfully into her face. ‘You see, darling, I know lots of people here.’

  Her vague response displeased him and he changed the subject: he was taking snaps for what would be The Book on the holy places and the religious in Israel. And he was working with ‘a very talented, a very beautiful lady. Who lives in Germany.’

  ‘We may marry,’ he said.

  Danielle made a polite face.

  ‘Helga and I share a great many views,’ he added. His sharp eyes were full of questions and secrets. Danielle thought, If I were not in such a soft mood . . .

  As they walked Wili greeted several passersby, in Arabic. From their courteous responses it was impossible for her to guess whether they knew him or not. The Arabs in Jerusalem wore masks of calm behind which flitted restlessness, agitation, or despair.

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they great human beings?’ he said every time a man returned his attention. He took Danielle’s silence for agreement and squeezed her arm. Then he made an irrelevant remark, as seemingly trite as his others, but with an energy that jarred; afterward it echoed to Danielle and disturbed her. He said, ‘What’s lost on the battlefield is made up for in the bedroom.’

  She said, ‘Wili – that’s the PLO line. The Arabs used to say that in 1948. It hasn’t worked yet.’

  ‘Not yet’ – with a spike through ’yet’ ‘Whose side are you on, politically?’

  ‘Neither. They’re both right. I think history is a series of experiments, most of t
hem ending in catastrophe. How can one take it personally?’ She was still feeling vague.

  Wili stopped abruptly, jerking her to a halt. ‘Princess, that is a very, very perceptive statement.’ He added, ‘From your point of view.’

  Danielle wanted to leave the Old City through the Lion’s Gate and walk around the outside of the walls, but Wili said it was getting too late, that more snow might fall, and that he knew a quick way to reach Herod’s Gate which would take them straight on to Sultan Suleiman Street.

  ‘And I want to show you something. For your political education.’

  They were in the Moslem Quarter, a quiet residential area where children with eyes as bright as licorice balls laughed and ran around in the laneways and delicious aromas drifted from windows cut in the stone walls. There was also the smell of drains. Wili said, ‘Look!’

  Above their heads a long pole projected from a second-story window. From it hung a white rectangle of cloth with a horizontal blue stripe near the top, another near the bottom and in the center a blue Star of David.

  - The Israeli flag! In a Moslem area!

  ‘Nice people, your Gush Emunim,’ Wili said and set off jauntily again. They stopped inside the Old City once more only, at a pharmacy near Herod’s Gate where he inquired about nettle tonic for his scalp. Apparently his Arabic was rudimentary, for the pharmacist replied in English. Wili gesticulated, trying to make his hands a dictionary. Then he took off his peaked cap and the problem was revealed: all his luxuriant black hair, which Danielle remembered him wearing to his shoulders, like the Beatles, had vanished. Now there was only a dark gauze through which his yellowish scalp shone. The pharmacist nodded solemnly, reached under the counter and withdrew a small dark-brown bottle, which he blew on to remove the dust.