Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Danielle snapped, ‘Vot do you expect? I’m a Chew.’

  Oh! She was so sorry. She hadn’t meant . . .

  Meant what? Danielle thought. I’m sorry I was rude, but you’re an anti-Semite, and I hate you.

  There was no message for her during breakfast; the corpulent headwaiter, whose mustache was like a whale’s tail, watched over her regretfully, tutting about her poor appetite. His impassive, professional manner was disturbed this morning because in his pocket was the card of the man who had pestered Ahmed the night before. A disagreeable type. His companion had hung around outside the gate. The headwaiter had no intention of upsetting the Australian lady by telling her she had been followed from the Old City but he wanted to warn her to stay away from the souk.

  Danielle listened to his rigmarole about a nephew who would take her shopping there, only to the honest merchants, and would bargain for her. ‘Better you wait for my nephew,’ he said. ‘Today comes Shabbat. Better you not shopping. People going to Temple Mount. Sometimes . . . not nice.’ What was not nice? Trouble. But what was the trouble?

  He wagged his head from side to side. ‘Temple Mount trouble. Sometimes other people wanting to pray there also.’

  She realized he was, with that Oriental delicacy of reference that is at once enchanting and maddening, referring to Jewish extremists wishing to pray on the Islamic enclave of the Mount. Since somewhere beneath its contemporary buildings was the site of the Holy of Holies no pious Jew would go up there in case he sullied sacred ground; those who did, if not merely sightseers, had political motives.

  ‘It will be there next week, like this week, like last four thousand years,’ the headwaiter said. ‘You see Abraham, Isaac, the Prophet Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed next week, just the same.’

  After breakfast she went quickly back to her room. She could hear the telephone ringing as she wrestled with the antique brass lock; the line went dead just as she lifted the receiver. There was no message at the desk for her but, yes, the clerk remembered that someone had called. A lady. Old? No, he thought – young, like her. Danielle calculated: he will spend the morning writing, then have lunch and a nap. If I’ve not had a call by two o’clock, I’ll go there uninvited.

  It was snowing, blowing, raining, and sleeting by turns. There had been a flood in a low-lying area of East Jerusalem during the night and an old Turkish drain had collapsed, leaving a crater in the street. Telephones had been affected; an exchange was partly under water and it was estimated that thirty thousand lines were out of order. When Wili woke that morning he looked at the slate sky and decided to spend the morning working indoors. He took a taxi to the Damascus Gate, then struggled against the wind, holding close to the wall until he reached the Jaffa Gate where he took another taxi to the Hilton and began photographing. A few people stared at him and looked around to see who his subject was. By midday he had a pictorial record of the public areas of the hotel, and nobody had challenged him. The weather had improved a little and he was able to walk from the Hilton to the bus station. By that evening he was again in Gaza – Egypt, as he called it. His darkroom was ready. One of the boys asked if he could be a witness. In the black-red glowing room with its sharp smell of nitrates he shivered with voluptuous excitement watching Wili tip the trays of liquid. Images swam onto the pieces of paper like ghosts taking on flesh as Wili talked to them – ‘Come on, that’s it. Yes. Yes!’ They started to laugh. ‘Adios, Hilton. Adios.’

  Wili worked all night, printing and collating. This was the work he had come to Israel to do: make detailed maps of the public areas of West Jerusalem’s international hotels – because what his friends wanted to do, if an opportunity arose to help them, was to stuff a room with plastic explosives. The tactics were the same as for burglary: they needed familiarity with the hotels in advance but dared not snoop around themselves. ‘We’ll make history,’ Jazzy said. ‘Any big tourist hotel . . . We will be known as the Sons of Saladin!’

  In case the Australian woman moved from the American Colony to a West Jerusalem hotel, where her old friend, Wili, might get access to her room, Jazzy had told him to photograph her also, so that all the boys would be able to recognize her. Jazzy had seen her for himself that morning in the Old City and had engaged her in conversation for a few moments: pleasantries, a word of welcome.

  He passed around the prints of Danielle: full-face, profile left; profile right; back-of-head; smiling to herself. ‘Make another set and give them to her. She’ll be impressed.’ He himself was impressed with the progress Wili had made during his dinner with the woman, that he had managed to get a job as her site photographer. It meant that when the producer arrived Wili could go into his hotel room also. And where Wili could enter, Jazzy and Saeed could enter, too. Perhaps he had underestimated Wili’s ability to get on with women; or perhaps it was that losers attracted each other. ‘Doesn’t she look vulnerable?’ he added, and as he tossed his hair off his forehead he caught Saeed’s eye.

  Danielle wondered as she dragged on the Rodeo Drive boots and felt them scald her heels why she believed, to her core, that she could not meet her father in comfortable clothes. ‘I’m dressing up as a mark of respect,’ she answered herself, in too much of a hurry to think what that might mean. She had already arranged to have her hair done. It had taken eight telephone calls to find a salon with an opening since this was Friday and every woman in the city, it seemed, was titivating for the Sabbath.

  The man who shampooed her was a creamy-skinned black. From Iran, he said. He had recently come back from Lebanon and thanked God he was only on reserve duty these days. ‘When I made my first parachute jump I was nineteen. I tell you, I was so excited. But now . . .’ and he reached for the cigarette left burning on the edge of the basin. Israel chain-smoked, she’d noticed: bank tellers took a drag in between thumbing out notes, post office clerks lit up while selling public telephone tokens or sheets of the small, dun-colored postage stamps printed without a cover price because of inflation. She wondered if she could ask him to move the cigarette; the smoke was stinging her eyes.

  He was saying he enjoyed hairdressing better than soldiering, but he didn’t like hairdressing – ‘It’s a job.’ Then he led her to the dressing table where he first checked in the glass the symmetry of his short black beard; she watched him snip off a tiny bunch of unruly hairs. The service was certainly different from that at Avalon, where the customers’ hair was done before the staff’s. But one has to bear in mind, Danielle told herself, that Charles of Coiffeur Charles – strawberry blond one week and lilac the next – will never jump out of anything higher than a double bed. She was in a forgiving mood. The Iranian was saying he couldn’t see his girlfriend as often as he would like because she was still in the army full time.

  ‘It makes her nervous.’

  Nervous?

  Again, that look of helplessness, the unvoiced question: What can I do?

  ‘She doesn’t like some of her duties. She gets upset . . .’

  So, what did he think of the war? He didn’t know.

  ‘But I hate the Peacenowniks. We have to fight. Otherwise . . . Listen, my family was in business in Tehran. We’d been there for centuries. Now the Khomeinis call Jews “spiders.” They want to take over everything, the whole Middle East. You can see them walking around in East Jerusalem already – women with white veils over their heads and long coats. Khomeinis. Already in our capital. My elder brother was going to study to be a doctor. What job does he have? He’s a chauffeur.’ Immigrants usually romanticize the riches they have left behind, she thought, but this boy is telling the truth – the fluency of his English, the elegance of his bearing, his whole demeanor marks him as upper middle class. He inhaled smoke, his free hand still massaging her scalp – as if, she thought, the right and left are disconnected, with an abyss between.

  Seated in front of other mirrors there were women in states of dampness, semiattentive to the work of the hairdressers, some having their fingernails painted by pretty, hard
-looking girls who argued with them about which colors to apply, as the hairdressers were arguing with their clients about styles, their voices gritty with assertiveness. There seemed to be no calm place, no space, no time to halt the struggle.

  A terrific bang! shook the front window. A manicurist jumped, upsetting a bottle of polish. Some of the hairdressers switched off their blowers; someone hurried to the door to look out and returned shrugging. Someone else turned on the radio. Danielle’s attendant took no notice except to concentrate more determinedly on the curling tongs. After a while he said, ‘Maybe the Messiah just came,’ and he grinned, astonished at his own wit.

  Most offices closed at midday and by half past one the streets were emptying. Grilles were pulled down on shopfronts and cafes; Danielle had not had time for lunch. In Zion Square a hawker was selling off cheap daffodils and irises; late shoppers were hurrying home with the last plaited loaves of challa from bakeries. The sky was cold iron, but at least it had stopped sleeting and the wind had abated to gusts. She had to juggle with all her paraphernalia: the shoulder bag, umbrella, book wrapped in red cellophane, album of photographs, bunch of white roses. She laid them out on the backseat of the Mercedes taxi, anxious that nothing should be crushed.

  The ride was too short. Then the steps to the apartment building, just another stone-faced block, the same four stories, the same shape as its neighbors in Jabotinsky Street, with the same few steps to climb to the tiny front garden.

  His apartment was on the second floor, one of two on the landing, its varnished front door identical to the one opposite, with a peephole and a ceramic name-tile giving the name in Hebrew and Roman script. She pressed the buzzer and as she waited heard a telephone inside begin to ring, then stop. No one came to the door. Danielle buzzed again. A flicker made her aware that she was being examined through the peephole. Well, take a look, she thought. Stepping close to the door she saw, miles away, Marilyn’s distrustful dark eye.

  ‘I tried to ring you at the hotel,’ Marilyn said. Her face was pale and she seemed angry, or frightened, or both. ‘Professor Garin had a mild heart attack at seven o’clock this morning, while he was in the bathroom.’

  Danielle had a queer sense of holding an intelligent conversation in her sleep. Marilyn made no gesture to invite her inside, rather she seemed to be blocking the doorway. When the telephone began ringing again, she said, ‘Excuse me’ and Danielle stepped into the hall, narrow and ill lit, with overcoats hanging from pegs. There was an old-widower atmosphere: she saw spindly wooden furniture in the room ahead, laden bookshelves, knickknacks on small tables, but everything was lifeless and the colors were unpleasant – burnt-orange cushions and dark red chairs – and carelessly chosen. An open newspaper sprawled on a settee; a philodendron in an earthenware pot was turning yellow and dropping its leaves. There were some frightful oil paintings – a dancing Hasid; someone’s attempt to copy van Gogh’s sunflowers; a Galilee scene.

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ she sighed. Where were the Oriental rugs, and the carved chairs from Damascus? Surely Arab furniture was not forbidden, too?

  Marilyn was speaking in English to the caller. Danielle heard, ‘Yeah. He’s asleep now and his condition is stable. Praise the Lord.’

  Leather-bound volumes of the Talmud stood to attention in tall black ranks on the shelves of his study, which was otherwise as spartan and insensitive as the rest of the apartment. The only thing worth a second glance was a large painting that was not exactly good but had something to it, something that twanged at the mind and set it vibrating. It showed the Temple Mount, viewed from the west. In the lower foreground dark figures as small as ants prayed at the Wall; above the Wall were the Mount itself, the el-Aqsa Mosque, and the Dome of the Rock shrine, its cupola shining dully. But the lion! Lying on the mount, with tail twitched around the el-Aqsa, paw resting on the Dome, was a huge lion. The top-heavy head had turned to stare out of the painting, past your shoulder, back into history. The lion was resting, but its eyes remembered that it was a king and at any moment it would splatter the cupola like egg yolk. Its tail could flick the el-Aqsa to rubble. Behind the lion the sky was twilit – which had a different meaning here: not the end, but the approach of a new day.

  Marilyn said, ‘Professor Garin says that in other countries people study the past to understand the past. In Israel, we study the past to build the future. Isn’t it an inspiring picture?’

  Danielle said, ‘Hmm,’ but Marilyn required only slight encouragement: would Danielle like coffee and cookies? or lunch? – it was dairy, she always made dairy for Professor Garin’s lunch, but he wouldn’t be eating it today, so they could share it. She spoke in short bursts, leading the way out of the study, swinging her thin arms – ‘Why don’t you sit there?’ – as if she owned the place. The man she had been speaking to on the telephone, Matti, was so interesting – he lived near Hebron.

  ‘On the West Bank?’

  ‘In Judea. Some people are narrow-minded about the Christian contribution to Zion, but Matti grew up in Nebraska and understands the Christian mission in the Holy Land. He has supported our oil well from the beginning.’ . . . Danielle had heard about the oil well, hadn’t she? Gracious!

  There was a history of miraculous events, leading to an exploration for oil in Israel on the coast north of Netanya. Already five million dollars had been spent; drilling was down to eighteen thousand feet. ‘You know what it says in Deuteronomy 33?’

  ‘Not offhand.’

  Marilyn was tolerant. ‘Well, the Lord was speaking about Asher, whose tribe was allotted the land where we are drilling. And the Lord said, Let him dip his foot in oil. Danielle, when we find it, the shekel will be worth gold.’

  But what if the Lord meant olive oil? Danielle wondered. ‘Amazing,’ she murmured.

  Marilyn pumped her head, with a strange, inwardly-fixed expression. Danielle had seen that look often in the past few days – the Hasidim had it, their eyes did not rest upon the outer world either.

  ‘Marilyn. . . my father?’

  She surfaced. ‘Do you want to leave a message for Professor Garin?’

  ‘No. I want to see him.’

  There was a spark of amusement, quickly smothered.

  ‘Professor Garin’s only child, a boy, was killed during the War of Independence.’ Marilyn’s tone was sugary but crisp, as if she’d almost exhausted her capacity to indulge her visitor.

  Never argue with the servants, Danielle thought.

  ‘Well, all the same, I have brought him some presents from relations in Australia. And I must deliver them in person. Which hospital is he in?’

  She could feel Marilyn’s eye watching through the peephole after the front door was closed.

  Danielle finally found a taxi on the Gaza Road, having walked blindly in that direction, stamping up the hill of Jabotinsky Street, across Albert Einstein Square, down the slope of Molcho, then along Radak Street, with its pretty Turkish villas, one of which had a brass sign announcing in English that the occupant specialized in ‘Women’s Diseases.’ People were waiting in a bus shelter, cringing back from the rain, looking at their watches, then up the road. A man dashed out and managed to nab the taxi she thought was stopping for her. When a second one came by five minutes later she ran onto the roadway in front of it, waving her umbrella. The red cellophane around the book she had brought for him had a thin coat of mud on it when she picked it up from where it had fallen.

  ‘No. It’s too far. I have to be at the depot in half an hour.’ He wanted to shut the door again.

  ‘Please. My father has had a heart attack.’

  He drove at high speed. ‘You make me illegal. I lose my license if I’m on the road after Shabbat.’

  ‘But for taking someone to hospital?’

  He made a disgusted noise in his throat. ‘How do I know what you want in the hospital? Maybe you’re a nurse going late to work.’ They skidded at the lights. ‘You make me lose my license.’ He said, ‘Shabbat Shalom’ and was gone, without looki
ng at his tip.

  The ground floor of the hospital was deserted except for a couple of people who shook their heads when she spoke to them in English. It was a tall, modern building with glass partitions and corridors leading off in all directions; the signs were in Hebrew and English but they pointed to destinations she did not want: x-rays, pathology, eye clinic. There was nobody at the information desk and its typewriters had covers on them as if they were caged birds put to sleep for the night. After wandering about she came across a European-looking man standing in front of a bank of elevators. He spoke English. ‘Try the seventh floor,’ he said. They waited together. ‘It doesn’t want to come,’ he said. ‘What time is it?’

  He thought that maybe the hospital had already switched over to the automatic Sabbath elevators, although it seemed too early. Then a lift opened for them, but although he pressed Up it went down. ‘It doesn’t like me,’ he said and got out in the basement. Danielle stayed in the carriage, which rocked gently and bumped its door open and shut when she pressed its buttons. It was sighing but stubborn. Without warning it decided to ascend. She was back on the ground floor. A woman in a white uniform called, ‘Use the Sabbath elevator’ and pointed off to the left. A long walk later she found herself at the end of a narrow corridor in front of a door which, when she opened it, revealed firefighting equipment. She passed more people on the way back, but they did not speak English. Then she saw a steel door, and, opening that, found a stairway.

  The rose petals flopped on the open blooms and buds lurched like ashamed white faces; the red cellophane was torn. But she had, at last, found his ward and someone willing to spend a few seconds speaking to her, a woman from Sydney, oddly enough.

  ‘The form says clearly, look here – oh, you can’t read it, give it back to me – here, “No children.” He has no relations. It says here. Mrs. Green, I trained at Royal North Shore, and if we had people barging in to see patients, we told them to go and they went. Now – look at that Mrs. Rubenstein, she’s still crying over there. I had to get a male nurse to drag her out this morning. Her husband is very ill, but he’s not going to die . . . Gveret Rubenstein! Oh, if she doesn’t shut up in a minute . . . Look at that! It’s temper. She’s not hysterical. Gveret Rubenstein,’ She’ll break that chair. No. I’m sorry. You can’t see Professor Garin.’