Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘Can I smell it?’ Wili asked; he had already re-covered his scalp.

  The pharmacist’s sigh said that if smelling would make Wili happy, he should smell; if he wanted to set a match to it, he could do so. He, the pharmacist, was familiar with humanity and would not object: folly defeated him.

  Wili passed the bottle to Danielle who jerked back from the punch of Friar’s Balsam.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ Wili said.

  She realized he had, with that great nose of his, almost no sense of smell. This struck her as doubly unfair, for Wili’s nose made him not merely ugly but also ridiculous, as if he had been fitted out by a joke shop, born a clown and fated to the circus – that thrilling glimpse of the netherworld where everything is upside down, in rebellion, on the verge of death, the human fly, men transformed to birds without wings leaping between trapeze swings, animals hurtling through hoops of fire, the clowns themselves with faces as white, sad, astonished, and mute as Lazarus. All afternoon ideas for Eleazar had been jumping in and out of her mind. Suddenly she was sure that Eleazar too had suffered a tragicomic disfigurement of mind or body, that his extremes had some painful source as intimate, so to speak, as the nose on his face: if she were patient she knew that she could hit upon a film metaphor to convey what it was that had made him the Zealot. It would not be an insight to appeal to the audience of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds whom Bennie aimed to please.

  It was already dark by the time they reached the hotel, a five-minute walk from the Old City. They agreed to meet for dinner at seven.

  Back in her room Danielle took a few deep breaths before dialing the number Alice had given her. Marilyn answered the phone, in Hebrew.

  - How dare she speak Hebrew? It’s my language, not hers, she thought, and heard her voice mimicking her mother’s haughty, languid tone. If Professor Garin were out, when was he expected to return? Oh, not this evening? At six-thirty in the morning? ‘I ll be asleep.’

  Marilyn made a noise that was cheerful and disapproving; it said ‘early to bed, early to rise . . .’ and that people who were self-controlled found it easy to make telephone calls at that time of morning.

  ‘Professor Garin is always up at five and at his desk writing by five-fifteen,’ Marilyn said. She asked what message Danielle would like to leave and whether Green had an ‘e’ on the end.

  Danielle said he could spell it. ‘It was his name for almost forty years.’

  Marilyn said ‘amazing!’ in the shocked, tolerant voice of a maiden aunt listening to a tall story.

  Danielle blew on one sweating palm, then the other, when she had put down the telephone.

  There was a knock on the door: Ahmed carried a silver tray on which lay her hair dryer and a message from reception.

  ‘Fixed,’ he said. The hair dryer was not fixed. She had asked him to remove the plug and replace it with one that would fit a socket in her room. Some took around two-pronged plugs, some rectangular-pronged; others three-pronged, rectangular, and round. Ahmed had explained their diversity with this remark:

  ‘Here is the Middle East.’

  ‘All you’ve done is take the plug off,’ she said.

  Ahmed agreed that was so; before she could stop him, he had poked the exposed wires into his mouth, rolled them around on his tongue and, wetted, shoved them into a socket. Danielle stood back aghast as he pressed the On button – there were no switches to the sockets – and held the whirring machine up to his hair. The voltage was two hundred and ten.

  ‘You’ll be electrocuted!’

  Ahmed was enjoying the hot currents of air on his face. ‘Don’t afraid,’ he said. His smile had all the tenderness and contempt of the Oriental male for the female. After an argument he went off to get a plug.

  The message was a telegram from Bennie. It said GO FOR IT GIRL ARRIVING SOON LOVE B K.

  Arriving soon? He – was due to arrive in another four days, precisely. Danielle took from her suitcase the international-time indicator that told her it was about nine-thirty in the morning in Los Angeles, a good time to call. Instead she stood in the center of the room as if in a vacuum, her will sucked away.

  Wili Djugash had chosen the restaurant on Sultan Suleiman Street because he had eaten there before and felt confident about the hygiene of the place. He put his traveling utensils – a folding knife, fork, and spoon – into his pocket before he set out for the American Colony at a quarter to seven, feeling that lightness of heart that comes from trivial successes. He thought he had evaded telling Danielle where he was staying; in fact, she had not asked.

  He took the hill at a trot, picturing himself setting forth, over kebabs and grilled chicken, ‘My Prison Experience’ and ‘My Liberation.’ Of course, she would have read something in the newspapers; the whole world knew they had jailed him. He imagined a candle on the table and its glow in her eyes. Maybe she would weep.

  The streets were inky; some had sidewalks, some did not, it was necessary to press against the walls of houses as cars went by. Halted for a moment Wili realized he had stepped in donkey dung.

  He felt sick!

  Should he run back and change his shoes? Should he dash down to the Damascus Gate and look for a shoe-shine man? At this hour they would have gone home.

  Fortunately he was wearing gloves. With a gloved hand he could remove the shoe and find a faucet somewhere – maybe at the American Colony.

  Danielle said, ‘Give it to me, for God’s sake. I’m not squeamish.’ After a few minutes she returned to the foyer with a clean, wet shoe.

  ‘What a great lady you are.’ He had been impressed by her friendly relations with the staff: a young man called Ahmed had gone off with her and the shoe. Wili had heard them joking together, something about this being the Middle East. He took it as a good omen that she was staying in the American Colony rather than in one of the multistory West Jerusalem hotels. As Jazzy was always reminding him, one could never believe what people said about their political sympathies; however, a Zionist would not choose the American Colony.

  ‘Good hotel?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Heaven.’

  ‘So you like the Palestinians?’

  ‘What a peculiar idea.’ She meant: one likes some and not others, but Wili translated it as ‘How could you doubt that I would?’ and gave her arm a squeeze.

  He was going to enjoy showing her his photographs of Helga, ‘the lady I told you about. So like you, Princess. So like you.’

  Afterward Danielle often remembered the dumb hilarity gripping her from groin to neck as she looked at Helga-so-like-her: nineteen years old, hair plaited into eight hundred dreadlocks, clenched fist for the camera, ancestors from the Ivory Coast.

  ‘She’s very pretty.’

  - Wonder if she dresses well? You can’t tell with nudes.

  ‘Afro-German,’ Wili agreed. If he had not looked so solemn as he added, ‘You and Helga are the same sort of woman,’ Danielle might not have released that shriek of laughter.

  Then, because she had insulted him; because she had to defend herself for having made a despicable, racist remark – her noise had become ‘a remark’ – she thought it was funny to be compared to a black lady, did she? she thought black people were funny? he supposed – if only all this had not taken place within moments of sitting down to table she might not have gone too far in her desire to mollify him, and ended by inviting him to take the site stills when she and Bennie began their location tour.

  Her original intention had been to have dinner with him, get back her fifty dollars, and never see him again.

  For his part Wili could barely believe his luck. Their luck. ‘Fine by me,’ he’d said.

  Fourteen

  Listening to Wili’s story she thought, The quality that makes people interesting is different in each one, but bores are all the same.

  She was ashamed of her lack of compassion. However wildly he exaggerated, Wili had been victimized. He had been beaten up (by persons unknown, one in the uniform of a Gu
ards officer – the Hon. Tamsin’s brother was in the Guards); he’d been sued for libeling the family; he’d been bankrupted by litigation. In Parliament an MP had demanded he be ‘sent back to Bombay along with all the other wogs.’ But compassion, she realized, is a willful emotion that wells up and slinks away according to a tide of its own. Her attention to Wili would spurt, then subside as her mind wandered to her own collection of family myths. She tried to see them afresh, clearly: the tear made by Geoffrey’s death, the grief . . . Did my father, she was wondering, beat up Bonny from frustration – because the real villains were out of reach? Bonny had told her, again and again, ‘He made me the scapegoat!’ But Danielle knew her mother had been a flirt, even in those days, that she’d hypnotized the Arab doctor who came to visit them in West Jerusalem . . . Then there was cousin Rachela, the illegal immigrant they were hiding. She remembered: I went into Bonny’s room one day and found her brushing her hair into sparks. She said, ‘Your cousin finds my appearance frightening, Frightening! That’s what she told your father.’ The golden filaments crackled. ‘What’s the use? He’s in love with her!’ Bright fragments exploded; Bonny’s image disappeared and in its place: the wooden backing of a looking glass. ‘A whore for the SS – that’s how our dear Rachela survived the Holocaust. And how are we to survive?’

  He married Rachela later, but she died from tuberculosis, already too far gone with the disease when they carried her ashore and smuggled her into the house. Bonny used to say, ‘When I married your father in 1935 he didn’t know Yom Kippur from Pancake Day. The war . . . the war . . .’

  Wili was saying, ‘I knew you would understand.’ She blinked away tears, and he reached out to grasp her hand.

  Then he straightened up, cleared his throat, said, ‘Well, well . . .’ and, in the tone of a man who has put the past behind him, told the waiter to bring more wine.

  They were seated on the mezzanine floor of the restaurant alongside one other group, a party of Americans in high spirits. They pointed out to each other the ‘ethnic’ gravy stains on the tablecloths and laughed loudly at a wall papered floor to ceiling to resemble a Swiss Alp. Downstairs there was a concrete floor and a glass counter displaying cooked dishes. There the tables were occupied by silent men playing a game that looked like backgammon. From time to time they darted angry glances at the noise upstairs.

  From the Americans’ conversation it was impossible to tell if they were nominal Christians or nominal Jews: they shouted ‘l’chayim’ as they clinked glasses and said ‘be‘te’avon’ as they fell to their food, but they could have learned these expressions from a guidebook. A young man began telling his experiences as a volunteer kibbutz worker:

  ‘I’ll never look at a sheep again. For those animals I slaved like a black.’

  Wili turned his head away from them and muttered the best-known curse in Arabic.

  ‘And they were exported to Saudi Arabia!’ said the kibbutz volunteer.

  The conversation moved on to the exigencies of economics. A woman said, ‘Keep your voice down, George.’ Someone else said, ‘They can’t understand English.’ George swung his head defiantly and said, ‘So Israel’s major export is weaponry. I’ll tell you something, Bob. The survival of this country depends, ultimately, upon the Bomb.’

  There were cries of protest from the women; the men munched gloomily. George said, ‘Israel’s survival is a microcosm of the problems of world survival in the face of the nuclear terror. What saves this country from being overrun is they know in Damascus that Israel has nuclear weapons.’

  The waiter said, ‘Kebabs.’

  ‘And will use them if necessary.’

  The waiter said, ‘Parsley salad.’

  The kibbutz volunteer roared, ‘But when the Syrians get their own bomb they can wipe out most of the population with one strike on Tel Aviv.’ He added in triumphant gloom, ‘And Israel can never have a second-strike capacity.’

  The waiter said, ‘Fools.’

  Heads turned, as a shoal, in his direction. He was referring to an extra plate of beans.

  When he had gone George hissed, ‘Morty, technological progress will . . .’ but Danielle and Wili could not hear what it would do.

  Wili pinched the bridge of his nose, and frowned. ‘Business, Princess,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll do the location shots for you. I’ll be very honest: Wili needs the money, these days. But tell me – this film.’ He was still holding his nose on. ‘Is it, like their nonsense about having nuclear weapons, going to be another Jewish propaganda exercise?’

  She thought of replying, ‘Your political views bore me. And so does this cacophony of moral claims and counterclaims.’ Instead she said, ‘That’s a snide question.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t realize you were so sensitive.’

  She glared at him, willing him to drop his gaze, but his eyes held steady and after a few seconds it was she who looked at her wristwatch.

  Wili polished his traveling cutlery with his table napkin and put it back in his pocket. Downstairs at the door he announced, ‘I’ve got to piss.’ His mood had changed abruptly and he was debonair again.

  ‘Try going through that door with a top hat over it,’ Danielle said.

  He tutted. ‘Never in public lavatories.’

  Off Nablus Road he found a convenient laneway from which he returned smiling. Danielle asked how, if never in public lavatories, he managed on airplanes.

  ‘I order a tall glass of water. I take it into the lavatory, throw out the water, and pee in the glass.’

  ‘Oh, terrific.’

  ‘Just a matter of personal hygiene.’ He sounded flattered.

  She walked back to the hotel thinking, I have made a terrible mistake; his obsession with cleanliness is a projection of some filthiness in himself.

  In her room she felt so jittery she telephoned Australia, first Katherine, then Mrs. Wellsmore. For no good reason she burst into tears after speaking to Emma, who whined quizzically, then barked into the telephone. Mrs. Wellsmore said Emma had been naughty: she had killed a possum two nights ago and the neighbors had threatened to report her to the department.

  ‘What department?’

  ‘How should I know, dear? I never owned a dog. Never could afford one.’

  Danielle told her it was snowing: Mrs. Wellsmore hated cold weather.

  ‘Snowing? I’ve never had the opportunity to see snow myself, dear. Never had your sort of money.’ She ended by promising she would ring Danielle’s Sydney lawyer if anything should come of the neighbors’ threat.

  Ahmed brought a pot of cocoa. Outside her room the indoor garden area behind him was brightly lit, yellow light bouncing off its big brass table and white walls, and Ahmed, framed against it, had an aura of gold. He lowered his eyes when he saw her smudged mascara and poured the cocoa with his head bent so far his chin hit his chest.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Very problems. Very tense, Jerusalem.’

  The gingerly way he opened and closed the double doors, wringing silence from the ancient fittings, the way he turned his dirty black shoes into the pads of a cat – these things told her that he had something he wanted to say. She scribbled herself a note: Ask Ahmed.

  At some stage that night she had a nightmare: a brown monochrome painting she had seen, a Daumier of Don Quixote on his horse, came to life. In the painting the mad knight was trotting along a leafy country lane but in dream he was moving through the covered souks of Jerusalem. Now and then he flicked his visor open and each time he did he revealed a different person: a man she had seen in the souk; Wili; someone who might have been her father; a man who resembled Bennie Kidron but was maybe an actor. The rider carried a crusader’s shield. Suddenly he was no longer in the Old City but galloping along the Gaza Road. His horse went so fast its caparison streamed and changed to the red-and-white sides of an Egged bus. Then the horse itself changed into a bus, hurtling like a firebird. The crusader was running beside it. He threw his shield on the ground and it exploded
in a ball of fire. Bodies flew in the air. A voice shouted. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and she woke.

  Ahmed also woke for the prayer, which he made in his room. During contemplation his mind wandered, however, and he remembered the man who had come into the hotel that evening and asked questions about the lady in room one. ‘I talked to her today in the Old City,’ he said, ‘and I am conquered.’ He gave Ahmed ten dollars and asked him to give to the lady his card. Ahmed had been busy with the pilgrims from Tennessee and now he could not remember where he’d put the card.

  A recorded male voice speaking Hebrew answered Professor Garin’s telephone. There was a beep. Danielle left her name and number and asked for her call to be returned. Her heart had been flying ever since her alarm clock had rung. She lay back in bed, trying to be calm, but her mind seemed to bump against the walls of her skull like a trapped insect. After a while she got up and distracted herself with bathing and dressing. One of her heels seemed worse this morning: a blush of inflammation had crept around her ankle.

  She left the door to the bathroom open, ready to leap out, but by seven-thirty there had been no ring.

  She rushed downstairs, in case he should call at that moment, running to the reception desk to tell the staff that she would take any calls that came through. The desk was surrounded by English pilgrims, older women in sensible shoes and a few surviving husbands, who stood together being jovial about the girls’ plans for today. Danielle heard one say, ‘If Gwen insists we visit the Holy Sepulcher again . . .’ Their pastor wore a tur-tleneck sweater and a Harris tweed jacket. He was saying, ‘Ladies, ladies, if I may suggest,’ but their attention was on the desk manager. His brown eyes drowned in sweet, patient melancholy, his hotelier’s unintrusive gaze seeing all, forgiving all. At last Danielle got through to him. One of the women said, ‘Everyone pushes in this country. Manners are something which don’t exist.’ Danielle tried to apologize to her but she was not to be mollified. ‘It’s no good doing it, then being sorry afterward,’ the woman replied.