Danielle was invited to see the forensic laboratory and the mass spectrometer that in its first week had solved two murders. The crime rate? Well, it wasn’t as bad as in Europe, or America, but there was – how could he put it? – an alienated class: people and the children of people who had come to Israel without an idealized cause, who came because they had to, then found life difficult. There was a mafia: drugs, prostitution, the food markets. Tourists came to the Holy Land expecting angels. And then, in East Jerusalem, there were the Arabs.
When the manager left them alone for a few moments he said, ‘Move to a hotel in West Jerusalem. You’ll be safer.’
She was still exhausted. The East Jerusalem doctor had prescribed an antibiotic cream for her infected heels and told her she must walk as little as possible for two days.
She tried to take a siesta when they returned from the police station but as soon as she closed her eyes they flew open again, ready for the intruder with surgeon’s gloves. She saw his face smeared mongoloid under the stocking mask.
When she decided she could not sleep, there was nothing to do but work. Ahmed brought two more hot-water bottles and she settled herself to Eleazar. She wrote:
• Opening shot of Mediterranean beach, gentle swell of sea.
• Contrast to the desert setting of Masada; symbolic suggestion (by seascape) of renewal of life, of variety and metamorphosis.
• To convey agony of Eleazar’s decision about suicide – check New Testament and Gnostic gospels for descriptions of Jesus’ behavior before crucifixion.
• Is Eleazar a Rabbi, like Jesus of Nazareth?
• Problems of martyrdom: joyously embraced by Christians as form of liberation. Zealots similarly?
‘Bugger Bennie,’ she said aloud. He didn’t want anything too complicated. His idea was a 1980s version of Quo Vadis, with the same wicked Romans, and with benighted Jews replacing benighted Christians. ‘And bugger you, skulking in hospital with angina.’
She must have slept, for suddenly she was wide awake in the dark, struggling for the threads of a conversation she had been holding in dream. Her partner had been that shadow met on the roadway last night. But in the dream he had revealed himself fully. He was wearing barbaric princely dress: a lion’s skin over his back, its fanged red-bucket mouth gaping around his head, and perched on one hand a dove with a ruby eye. They were in Africa, or some tropical country; the haze was a cold mist, not heat. He had bare feet and toes like the bowls of wooden spoons yet his hands were long and delicate with velvety black skin. He had turned a wrist for her to see the pink lining of his palm.
What had he said?
‘I change. I cause change.’
She asked, ‘Into what?’
‘Into whatever comes next.’
Then he had done something odd: he dropped to his hands and knees, showing her the back of a wild animal. ‘Piggy-back,’ he’d squealed. It was so frightening she had woken up.
Her watch said it was five-thirty; the evening star had risen, Queen Shabbat departed, and a new day begun all at once. She could now ring her father without breaking the Law. But as she stretched toward it the telephone started to ring.
It was an hour before Danielle had finished talking to Alice, then a man called Phil Abrahams who was trying to contact her father. Next, Wili, who wanted to know when they were to begin work. The desk clerk interrupted them to say he had a call from Australia.
Katherine said, ‘Mummy – there’ve been terrible bushfires – hundreds of houses.’ The line was poor and their voices tangled in panic. From the knotted umbilical of sound words here and there throbbed: ‘Ours is . . . safe . . . I drove up . . . millions destroyed.’
‘What? In Avalon?’
‘No . . . Victoria. Wasn’t it on television? They said it was on TV in Moscow. Don’t you . . .?’
‘Its all different here.’
The tinge of rebuke: ‘I thought you’d be worried.’
‘I would have been. Thank you, darling. Are you’ – I fall back into the role – ‘wearing sunscreen? And a hat, on the beach?’
Katherine had a holiday waitressing job at Bondi, where she shared a flat with four other students. Imagining her shouldering a surfboard across the esplanade, as graceful as a palm tree, Danielle filled with longing and anxiety.
Exasperation: ‘Mother!’
Danielle thought, But I yearn to see you and touch you. ‘Okay. Don’t get in a huff,’ she said.
What about Grandfather?
‘You were right,’ Danielle shouted. ‘He’s an old bastard.’
- But I have not given up. On the contrary.
A woman, not Marilyn, answered his telephone. There were voices in the background as if there were a party in his room. The woman spoke English irritatingly, that is, fluently, but with a mishmash of accents – a leetle French, ze Hongare-ian maybe, a touch of Yank – that made her sound, Danielle thought, as if she owns no language at all, has no respect for any. And she was insufferably ladylike: ‘Really, I am not sure that Professor Garin is well enough to talk with you on the telephone.’ She called Danielle ‘Madame.’ As requested, Madame waited, hearing his room muffled by a hand held over the receiver. Then: ‘He will speak to you now.’
In the pause she began to tremble. What would she say? She needed time, but the voice was in her ear suddenly, intimately: ‘Hello? Dan Garin speaking.’ Such a civilized, British voice. All her vulnerability to authority rushed into her throat and choked her.
‘Urn. How are you?’ Much better, thank you. The heart specialist said . . . something. She was in too great a panic to take in the interminable, grave details. Already they had been talking how long – two hours? – her face felt hot with embarrassment for the banality of her responses: ‘Oh, that’s interesting’ and ‘Oh, dear.’ And then – it was like one of those agonizing conversations when you’re in love and he hasn’t called for a week; finally you can’t bear it: you telephone and say, ‘Hi, did you get my postcard?’
There is a room in hell, she thought, where paralyzed women sit beside telephones waiting for their lovers to ring. ‘Did you get my flowers?’
‘Flowers?’ Oh yes. A kind thought.
- A thought. Yes. They were dead, he took one look and ordered them thrown away.
Was she enjoying Jerusalem? It’s changed a great deal. Some inspiring restorations in the Old City. And more to come. Ha-ha. The room around him was going ha-ha, she found herself ha-haing. Then it came out:
‘Are you going to see me or not?’
Silence.
‘Allow me to take your number once more – Judith, would you pass me a pen, please? – and I shall ring you back. At the moment I am – ah – holding court, as my young friend Matti describes it. So, perhaps it would be more convenient for both of us, and I would be more considerate to my visitors who have come all this way, if later . . .’
For a few seconds after she replaced the receiver she felt elated, but it was only the tail-end effects of adrenaline. They burnt out, reeking from her armpits.
Did he notice they were roses, for love? she wondered. And white, for peace?
Garin was saying: ‘I don’t know why, but she came here on Friday afternoon and pressed upon Dr. Wilensky a bunch of dead flowers and this picture book illustrated with photographs of scantily-clad Australians, who seem to spend their lives swimming. The country appears to be a sort of well-appointed health farm. Would you like the book, Judith?’ He added, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ as Judith passed him a dish on which she had arranged segments of peeled orange.
The room service menu was limited, but Danielle decided to have dinner in her room all the same, in case he rang her back while she was between floors. By nine o’clock the telephone had not rung.
There was one Mogadon left, one she was saving for the twenty-hour flight from Rome to Sydney. She took it and had the first serene sleep in weeks, waking to the chime of Sunday church bells vibrating from the Old City.
The hotel
was deserted. Its pilgrim tour groups, who occupied the cheaper modern wing, had breakfasted and left for divine services by the time she entered the dining room. The English couple who had been robbed on the same night as she had moved out; the Swiss businessman who had exchanged nods with her had gone to Jericho; and the Brazilian family had decided they could not bear the cold and had left that morning for Eilat. She booked a call for five P.M. local time to Bennie’s house in Los Angeles and spent the day in the reading room, working on her notes, grateful to be housebound.
The letter and pamphlets arrived, courier delivered, at three that afternoon.
Garin had rehearsed its opening words – My dearest Danielle, I write to you now – many times in the past thirty-odd years but personal emotional expression did not come easily to him, and he had a demanding life: students, lectures to prepare, laboratory work, faculty meetings, annual military service, the newsletter. He was not one of those from whose eyes scales had recently fallen, after the miracle of ‘67 and the warning of ‘73, dates when the divine plan had revealed itself to many good young people. It had come to him back in 1949 that his life had been a series of revelatory events: marrying a gentile woman; applying for a post in Palestine because she wanted to travel; the homecoming of his dear Rachela; the destruction of Geoffrey. God wove a seamless garment in which each thread had its purpose and moment. It had been meant that their few thousands would win the War of Independence (so-called) against the Arab millions – who were, incidentally, a fiction commonly agreed upon, a twentieth-century circus invented by British imperial policies.
There were no Arabs, in fact – or very few; but there were a great number of people in this part of the world who believed they were Arabs because they spoke a certain language, which he also spoke. Did that make him an Arab? This absurd – and absurdly believed – political sleight-of-hand was one of the problems he had confronted in the past thirty-odd years. In Israel itself there were few capable of understanding that ‘The Arabs’ were a figment invented by T. E. Lawrence, styled ‘of Arabia.’ Real Arabs, as distinct from the Arab Circus, lived in a medieval desert kingdom that floated on oil and the extortion of money from pilgrims who traveled to it annually to walk round and round in a circle, at the center of which was a large black stone. With them there was no argument. Holding the cities of Mecca and Medina, their concern with Jerusalem, which ranked only third among Islamic sacred sites, was footling. However, since the founding of the Jewish state this nonsensical enemy propaganda had been believed and its pernicious influence was now worldwide. Israel cowered before a shadow Goliath. The imaginary giant waved a toy pistol, the so-called oil weapon, and with this hypnotic instrument had robbed the banks of many unfortunate Third World countries, and more egregiously, those of the soi-disant civilized world: Japan, Western Europe, and America. That is to say, of the nations in decay. He referred to them as the Lands of the Living Dead when he addressed the good young people who were fleeing their birthplaces to Israel. They were states in which drugs, boredom, and lack of meaning had attained such a hold that the females considered themselves lacking in sophistication if they had not been sodomized by the age of sixteen. Regrettably there was, as ever with the Jews, backsliding: in Tel Aviv, a city of Hebrew-speaking Philistines, one could find similar attitudes.
He had composed his address to his daughter so many times – then waited: no letter had come from her telling him that she was ready to ascend. Instead her mother wrote demanding money for the fees at her Anglican school. He could read between the lines: the child was turning into a savage. She had given up her piano lessons; she refused ballet classes. He had written, ‘If you want Danielle to enjoy “the outdoor life,” send her home and I shall arrange for her to live on a kibbutz.’
The kibbutzim were, in those days, decent places where people built the Land. Nowadays they had Olympic-sized swimming pools and were the luxurious domain of milquetoasts and traitors, who proclaimed the joys of ‘Peace Now,’ a slogan none of them was able to define but which seemed to mean abandoning the country and their lives to the merciful disciples of one Yasser Arafat, a murderer who spent his spare time holding press conferences and was too busy to shave.
After a while Bonny had found some source of funds for those famous school fees, although as he had pointed out to her the problem would be easily overcome were Danielle to have her schooling in Israel, where it was virtually free. Then he had stopped writing. The girl did not write either, except for an impertinent note announcing that her final examinations had won her a place in medical school but, lacking funds, she intended instead to write ad copy for a living. A few years later she sent some photographs of a baby with the message: Your granddaughter, Katherine Reilly – her father died in an accident four months before she was born.
That was the moment, of all others, for her to come home; she could have found an Israeli husband in no time if she had one tenth of her mother’s looks. He disliked the term ‘shiksa’ as descriptive of gentile women, who were not all, as it suggested, damaged goods. Bonny, for example, had been made, fashioned, to lead him to Palestine in 1936 – Das Ewig-Weibliche zeiht uns hinan, as it were.
So here, in Jerusalem, was Danielle.
He had been composing his thoughts for her when he had suffered what he believed was a cardiac infarction but which that competent little fellow Wilensky insisted was slight angina.
The letter said:
My dearest Danielle,
I write to you now with joy and misgivings: joy that you have recognized your insoluble connection with Eretz Israel, with Judea and Shomron, and misgivings as to your future course.
I have lived for more than three decades as a father without a child and much as I appreciate your filial feelings, I must tell you that I am not given to the vice of curiosity. I do not pant to see you from the spur of inquisitiveness. I wish to meet a daughter whose heart is sound, whose mind is unclouded by the folly of the age, one who, in short, understands the great undertaking of the Jewish people in their obedience to the guidance of God, Who, having scourged them with His great weeding-out, the so-called Holocaust in Europe, has re-established His beloved and precious remnant in Eretz Israel.
Before we meet, therefore, I ask you to consider deeply: Have you Returned? Is your presence in Jerusalem the first step toward a permanent settlement in the Land? Do you know the truth of the saying that your ancestor, Abraham (of course, I am ready to recognize you as a Jew, despite your mother), was the first Zionist? We but follow his mighty footprints which mark out, forever, Our Land.
I ask myself also: does Danielle know that, as with those who found their way here from Egypt after cleansing in the desert, we too must purify the Land of its Philistine inhabitants? We must make It a temple. In fact we must rebuild His Temple. We must cleanse the Mount of its blasphemies. It is a Divine canon and, indeed, the deepest wish of every Jew. Those who have remained in exile, in America, in Europe, all over the globe, annually pray ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ Here we say, ‘Next Year in Jerusalem Rebuilt!’ And it is, my dear, The Temple that shall be rebuilt. My question is: do you join in this great undertaking? If so, I welcome you with open arms and rejoicing. If not, my answer to your question is: No. You and I shall not see each other again. The dry bones, the dead, come to life in Eretz Israel; outside this land is the domain of the living dead.
Please do not be hasty. As a child you were eager and filled with curiosity. Do not now allow those qualities to rule you and, from curiosity about me, profess sentiments you do not hold firm.
In conclusion I quote to you the lines of our great national poet, Bialik:
We are the brave!
Last of the enslaved!
First to be free!
He signed it ‘Dan Garin.’
‘No “Love, Father,” or any of that nonsense,’ she muttered.
She read it through again. Oh, yes – the life of glory for him and all of them. ‘Every Jew.’ How glibly he asserted. How easy to
insinuate that after the Holocaust ‘every Jew’ felt an inner rage for heroism – and of one type only: Violence. What did he fancy would happen when the Temple Mount was ‘cleansed’?
There are twelve million Jews in the world, she calculated, and four hundred, maybe seven hundred, million Moslems. The destruction of their third most holy shrine would pass without a shiver among them, no doubt? A couple of speeches in the United Nations, some tooth-gnashing from the Ayatollah Khomeini, the rulers of Pakistan in pique ordering a few hands cut off, but then they would all settle down. That’s how you picture it, don’t you, Father dear? So simple and reasonable. After all, the Temple was there before the el-Aqsa or the Dome of the Rock, and Jews and Arabs are members of the same family, united in their devotion to the Cosmic Father. They would all shrug and say ‘It is Allah’s will’ and return to what they like doing best: raping their grand-daughters and trading. One could observe how spontaneously Christians, Jews, and Moslems shared their hearts with each other by looking at the television set and seeing them do it in Lebanon. ‘For bloody example,’ she said aloud, and realized she had fled from her father – off into the safety of theorizing.
The two pamphlets he had enclosed contained many biblical quotations: one proved that the Menorah, stolen by the Romans when they sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D., was now in the cellars of the Vatican, and the Pope should be told to give it back; the other was about Marilyn’s oil well, that miraculous hole in the ground into which five million dollars had been poured and which, soon after reaching 20,000 feet, would pour it all back to the surface transmuted into gold.
Why not? Why not!
She realized she should not shout in the reading room of the American Colony Hotel.
Even I know you don’t strike oil at that depth, she was thinking. Why not just strike gold? Spare oneself the technicalities of putting it into barrels and refining it into gasoline and kerosene and leftovers that have to be made into plastic bags . . . This was the solution! This had vision, and verve.
Winter in Jerusalem Page 11
