Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘I’m a businessman. I have hunches. That Ari smelt bad. He and Wili Whatsit smelt like a pair of cats. I’m not having them in the car with us.’

  Bennie had handed back the blue Mercedes to the rental agency and hired another, a private taxi driven by an Arab, to take him and Danielle next morning to the Dead Sea. Wili and his assistant were to travel there by whatever means they liked: ’That’s your problem, fellas.’

  Wili, little finger crooked as he sipped the Plaza room-service coffee, had said, ’I see. I see.’ His eyes had darted fierce accusation at Danielle. Bennie had also said, ‘You get paid when I see the pictures. I don’t pay cameramen whose flashes don’t work, or who forget to take off the lens cover.’

  When they’d left Danielle had said, ‘You didn’t have to be so rude.’

  Bennie was tossing peanuts in the air and catching them like a seal.

  ‘Why not?’

  She thought, Because the temptation to prey, and to be preyed upon . . . He tossed her a nut, which she caught by hand. ‘You’re the only woman I know who can catch nuts,’ Bennie said.

  He had ruined the city for her. He would never admit it directly, but he hated Jerusalem. He complained of the cold, of the unshaven men, of the litter in the streets. He disliked the wallpaper in his suite; he disliked the food; he disliked the foyer decorations – which were no better at the Hilton, he said. The only decent-looking hotel was the King David, but he wasn’t going to move there because it was full of octogenarian billionaires being danced around by official schnorrers: ‘We’ve paid for every goddamned olive tree in this country ten times over. What do they spend the money on?’ She muttered, ‘Tanks,’ but he wasn’t listening. His list of discontents was endless: ‘Look at that!’ An old man in a black homburg and an ancient pinstripe three-piece suit was trudging, resting on his wife’s arm, trudging again up the hill toward them.

  ‘But look at the story in him,’ Danielle said. ‘He was upper class, he lost everything . . .’

  ‘He should be in a home,’ Bennie said.

  This city was a palace to me, she thought. You’re transforming it into a slum. All my energy is wasting in a struggle to keep on course against the gale of your . . .

  ‘Haven’t they got plastic surgeons in this country?’ Bennie was asking. ‘Everyone has eye warts and moles on their faces. And look at their lousy tee –’ He stopped suddenly, with an ‘ooops!’ grin, a quick glance at Danielle’s teeth. ‘You know what I’m being charged to telephone L.A.?’ he continued. ‘And it took me forty-five minutes to get through yesterday.’

  Danielle said steadily, ‘You give me a pain in the arse.’

  He shrugged. ‘And I think your idea for the end of the movie is lousy. What’s the point of having the whole thing told in flashback by the woman who didn’t commit suicide and who escaped with a grandmother and a couple of kids? Having her – who the hell is she, anyway? – recounting the full catastrophe to a Jewish traitor, who joined the Romans?’

  ‘That is accepted as historically accurate.’ As if it were a piece of metal twisted back and forth by Bennie, she felt her temper snap. ‘I’ve spent hours talking to people from the archeology and history departments at Mount Scopus. If you want a boys’ adventure story –’ Her voice was rising and she started away from him at a run, rushing to escape the anger. There was a restaurant, the Savion, just ahead, on the opposite side of the road. Somehow she got through the traffic.

  It was dark inside. She ordered coffee and a crescent-shaped cake; when the waitress moved away Danielle felt that the man sitting across the room from her, reading a newspaper, was observing her. The Jerusalem Post hid him, except his hands, but in the poor light she could not make out if they were those she had seen before, resting on the counterpane. Three discreetly dressed Rehavia matrons were the only other patrons. Danielle thought of getting up, marching over to him and saying, ‘Excuse me, aren’t you . . . ?’ She felt shocked, and pleased, to realize that since Bennie’s arrival she had barely thought of her father. Bennie had forced the pace – even when he had vanished for two days the knowledge that he was at large in the city had shifted her attention to the short-term, the pragmatic, the acquisitive.

  Her food and drink arrived and she was able to stop shivering with anger. At least Bennie makes me concentrate on what I am now, she thought: a go-getter, like him.

  Memories of the past days returned: she had treated the academics who had given her their time and knowledge like computers, prodding them back to the point if they became discursive. ‘I see you are single-minded,’ one had rebuked her gently when she had let him know, with a little tap of her foot, that the excavations at Herodian were all very well – yes, Herod deserved to be counted among the great engineer-architect kings – but it was his design of Masada that interested her. And if he could shut up about Herodian . . . ‘Well, Miss Green, here is the model of Herod’s palace on the north face of Masada.’ Reconstruction was difficult because the Zealots – nu, they were primitives in their own time, fundamentalists. They had no respect for palaces. What they wanted from Masada was its position, its apparent invulnerability. They didn’t give a hoot for its Roman baths; they camped in the dining halls. You could say they were hippies: very pious, warrior hippies.

  He said, ‘If you want to understand the Zealots talk to the hard-core of the Gush Emunim. Talk to Rabbi Levinger.’

  And Kahane? she’d asked.

  ‘Don’t say that name!’ He had slapped his hands over his ears.

  Could the Zealots have been influenced by the followers of Jesus? she’d wondered. ‘Could they have expected to be saved by a Second Coming? It was a fashionable idea then.’

  ‘Nu – fashionable then, fashionable now.’

  The man opposite, without lowering his newspaper, turned a page. Danielle drained her cup. One-two-three. She was able to walk steadily toward him.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The newspaper came down. It was just a face. Sixty-five years old? Seventy? The mouth, the chin – she could not tell; you always look at the eyes: she’d looked at an eye-mask. The hands? The ears? They were similar.

  ‘Would you tell me the time, please?’ Her voice was husky.

  He held out his arm for her to read from his watch.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He nodded.

  Bennie was seated on the Savion’s terrace, chewing a leaf and spitting bits of it onto the marble paving. He stood up and put his arm around her shoulder. The whiff of his kid jacket and his own body smell, something like apples and sweat, made her breathe deeply as if she were sighing. Bennie grinned. ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I realized: Danielle is getting her period.’

  She thought: What’s the use of arguing?

  ‘Are you constipated?’ he added, solicitously.

  ‘Bennie!’

  ‘No – listen: I wanna look after you.’

  He was charming with Alice, held her hands between his, kissed her three times when taking leave. Alice’s telephone had been out of order, again, and they had called in for a few minutes only so Danielle could let Alice know her new address and that she would be out of town for a week.

  ‘You mind that road,’ Alice said. ‘There have been a lot of deaths on it.’

  Bennie did not seem to notice the gas stench, or Alice’s furniture. When they got downstairs he said, ‘She’s wonderful. I want to buy her a present. What can I buy her?’

  ‘Dinner?’

  ‘Maybe she’d like a trip.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re a tight-fisted bitch. You’ve got a quarter million bucks and you won’t buy your grandmother –’

  ‘She’s not my grandmother. Nor have I got a quarter of a million dollars: I’ve got eighty thousand dollars’ worth of debts.’

  Bennie was rambling on, half to himself: ‘She’d love New York. She could stay with my bubeh. That’s it. Alice should spend Passover in Manhattan. Danielle
, will you write that down for me? Tickets for Alice. Just make a note.’

  They were walking back up the steepest part of Gaza Road. There was a cool gray sunset, the color, in music, of an oboe’s voice. She stopped, took out her notebook and wrote the first line of a limerick:

  A young man from Israel called Bennie

  ‘You’d make a good secretary,’ he said.

  She nodded: ‘penny’ would end the second line; for the final rhyme, ‘one too many.’ Perhaps he’ll have a heart attack, she thought, and gave him a smile. He was complaining, now, about Passover in Jerusalem.

  ‘“This isn’t kosher. That isn’t kosher.” Have you noticed the way the women whine? “You can’t buy whiskey – it isn’t kosher-for-Pesah.” There’s none of that crap in Tel Aviv.’

  Danielle said quietly, ‘The Judas trees will be in bloom by the time we get back to Jerusalem. They have purple flowers. For blood.’

  ‘Blood makes me faint.’ He meant it to sound offensive – that women being monthly bleeders . . .

  She felt manic. ‘You’ll enjoy directing the suicide scene,’ she replied. ‘You know, it happened at this time of year, in the spring. Passover. Easter. The blood of the lamb. The pagan spring festivals, with blood libations for the crops and the Mother Goddess. Yum-yum-yum.’

  ‘Danielle! Stop teasing me.’ Between the fingers clutching his head a dark tendril of hair escaped.

  They stopped walking and looked at each other. Danielle thought, Why are we clawing at each other like children? What are we trying to rip away? ‘Isn’t it a lovely evening?’ she said.

  A group of Rehavia shops had reopened for late trading; their neon and yellow electric lights seemed to suck up what was left of the day, hastening a duplicitous twilight. Danielle could not be sure whom she had seen – then: ‘Hello Marilyn.’

  So La Pucelle has dressed up today as a Russian peasant girl, Danielle thought. Marilyn was wearing a brightly printed skirt, thick maroon stockings, and a little wicker basket. Her hair was clean.

  ‘Why, Danielle.’ Smiling, pleased, she was very pretty. She looked ready to drop a curtsey to Bennie. ‘Yes, I’ve heard about Bennie.’ Graceful switch of the peasant basket to left arm so she could shake Bennie’s hand. ‘I’m Richard Trembole’s sister.’

  When she was out of earshot Bennie exploded. ‘It isn’t true! Sugar Tits turned religious.’

  ‘Sugar Tits?’

  ‘You bet. Raphael told me.’ Bennie hmmned. ‘They say she found her brother’s body. Dead a week. Poor kid.’

  Danielle realized the poor kid was Marilyn.

  A few minutes later they were back at the Plaza. Bennie asked, ‘You want to eat with me?’ saying, You don’t want to, do you? Danielle did not. He said he could not bear one more meal in a hotel, but he had a great idea: he would call on Danielle’s father – Marilyn would let him in. ‘You know me, girl – I could sell the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time I’m through, your father will be pleading, “Bennie, bring me my daughter.” What’s the address again?’

  ‘Have fun,’ she said as she was leaving. She had intended to sound careless but her throat strangled the words and they came out grim. She tried to recoup: ‘Don’t forget: the car will be here at six-thirty. If you’re still asleep . . . ’

  ‘Who – me?’

  Marilyn won’t go to bed with him, Danielle told herself as she groped the doorway for its light switch: Sugar Tits has changed. When I first saw her I sensed she’d been a hippie tart. A year from now she’ll be rock-and-rolling with Baghwan in Oregon – but right now, Marilyn is a nun.

  She flinched from the abrupt glare of a naked bulb. The African mask was smiling at her, its cowrie eyes puckered around their slits.

  At half past eight that night she chewed a Mogadon Phil had given her, took her telephone off the hook, checked the front door lock, shut the bedroom door, set her alarm for 5:15, and lay down on the painter’s hard bed waiting to fall into a sleep from which, she hoped, she would remember nothing.

  Twenty-two

  Her first thought, when the alarm rang, was of Marilyn and Bennie. She felt a doomed curiosity about them as if all night her thoughts had played on nothing else and that question in her waking mind arose as a shadow from the underworld of sleep. It had a peculiar feeling of incompleteness, as if she had lost an aspect of herself.

  But by six-twenty-five when she strode across King George Street to the hotel and saw in the dim light that Bennie was already waiting for her, hands in his pockets, lounging against the big white car, saying something that made the chauffeur bounce with laughter – when she saw that everything was in order, her spirits zipped.

  ‘They were out,’ Bennie said; she returned his hug with gratitude.

  ‘Now we’ve gotta wait. Wili’s assistant let him down – didn’t turn up this morning. Wili’s up in my room having a piss and resorting his gear.’ Bennie had felt sorry for Wili; he had invited him to travel with them in the Mercedes. ‘Meet Akram.’

  As they shook hands a Morse code flashed between Danielle and Akram: the gap between his front teeth was even wider than hers. He was short and plump and his round brown face had tiny handles for ears, like a hippopotamus’s.

  ‘Best driver in Israel,’ Bennie said. Akram had another squeezing fit of laughter. A horseshoe was welded to the front grille of his car; at the back there was a brass eye with a blue iris, and a baby’s white bootie dangled from the rear-view mirror.

  ‘For lucky.’ The bootie was that of his youngest.

  ‘Akram’s been explaining to me how it is with the rich guys in Gaza,’ Bennie said. ‘Four wives, hundreds of girl friends –’

  ‘Very gentleman,’ Akram said. ‘In Jericho also –’

  Danielle thought, Trust Bennie to find a sex maniac as our driver. I’m going to have to listen to their bedroom adventures . . .

  Bennie was saying, ‘You know Jericho was the town where merchants used to take their blonds in winter?’ It seemed the playground atmosphere had been affected since ’67, when the city moved from Jordan. ‘Where the hell is that photographer?’

  Just then Wili came running toward them, balancing his tripod on one shoulder, his aluminum camera bag in his other hand. As his nose hit the cold morning air he stopped and sneezed.

  ‘You had a call from Los Angeles – here.’

  Bennie read the slip of paper and swore in a language Danielle did not understand. ‘Give me two minutes,’ he said.

  He strolled back to them, hands in pockets again, grinning.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  In the interim Wili had fussed: loading his gear in the trunk – ‘Careful! And don’t squash the lunch boxes,’ – was Danielle feeling well? Princess, you’re looking marvelous – isn’t this exciting? Oh, he’d manage without that berk of an assistant.

  ‘Bennie thought he was a Palestinian,’ Danielle said.

  Wili looked grave. ‘I was relieved when he changed his mind about the job.’ He added that he was impressed with Kidron; very.

  When Bennie said, ‘I’m shutting this,’ and closed the glass partition between Akram and Wili in the front seats and him and Danielle in the back, Wili said, ‘Of course. You two have important business,’ and he turned to help shut the glass. Bennie rolled his eyes. In their sealed compartment he said to Danielle, ‘What the hell did you tell him about me? He’s been crawling up my ass since six o’clock this morning.’

  She made an impatient noise. ‘He’s a parasite. Forget it. His work is excellent.’

  Bennie said ‘It better be.’ Then, ‘Aw – c’mon, we’re going to enjoy,’ and he rubbed an unpowered punch against her jaw.

  He and Danielle had allowed six hours by car for finding locations for the Roman army’s march from Jerusalem. The city in flames would be a studio job; men crucified outside its walls would also be filmed indoors. Danielle said, ‘You must get Research to check the shape of the crosses – I think they were like Xs or capital Ts. The Christian ones are inaccurate.’ Be
nnie said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  She had nothing much to do. The army’s route was a production problem, one of finding several lengths of road with a bend at one end and long enough to fit the six hundred extras who would be filmed again and again on the different sections, marching first in one direction, then its opposite, to give the illusion of an iron-scaled serpent hunting the ragged Zealots. They had chosen an area called the Ephraim Hills, between Jerusalem and Lod, and drove back and forth, back and forth. Bennie tapped on the glass for Akram to stop; he and Wili would jump out; Bennie said, ‘Take this – take that.’

  Danielle moved to the front seat and she and Akram drove off to measure the distance, which she marked on the site sheets and collated with their road maps. Akram had a cache of oranges and chocolate bars and a thermos flask of coffee and pressed her to eat and drink at every stop. Bennie was not allowing time for any of them to have a proper lunch. At three o’clock he slapped one palm against the other and announced, ‘That’s it. We’ve got it.’ He pulled Danielle from the car, pointed to Wili to take the front seat again, slammed his door and instantly appeared to sleep. The two others looked around at Danielle, asking, ‘What now?’

  ‘Go to the Dead Sea, I guess.’

  Bennie, with his eyes closed, said: ‘Stop in Jerusalem first. I gotta check something at the hotel.’

  Wili thought he would faint.

  What if Saeed and Jazzy were still in Kidron’s suite, removing the bathroom paneling with the tools in the second camera bag?

  Jazzy had been furious when Wili and Saeed had reported how badly their first meeting with Kidron had taken shape. Saeed was in tears; Jazzy had roared, ‘Why was he suspicious of you?’ and Saeed had rocked, helpless, whispering, ‘He’s more clever than we thought.’ Jazzy, drawing close to Saeed, had smelled the sweet rottenness of his breath – bad teeth, maybe, but also the stink of fear. It aroused in him an avid sensuality. ‘Leave us,’ he said to Wili.

  When Jazzy came through the curtain he said, ‘Saeed and I will work inside the hotel. You are certain we have three days?’ Wili had replied, ‘He told me: Bring gear for three days; maybe we’ll be away five.’ Jazzy said, ‘That had better be true, for Kidron’s sake.’