Winter in Jerusalem

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  They had stopped chattering.

  The pulse seems to drop, she was thinking, the heart to beat more slowly; there is an invisible presence at work in this dense, lifeless place, something the body registers at a level too subtle for thought. A lid closes; you breathe differently in the deep.

  Bennie wanted to shout. He wanted to yell and throw stones; his feet wanted to kick into the hump of minerals in front of the one on which he was sitting. He prodded it with his toe; tried again. None of it crumbled; it was seared hard.

  ‘I still fast on Yom Kippur. Sometimes. Well, I never smoke. I didn’t have a cigar last Yom Kippur.

  ‘I wanted to go to yeshiva. I grew my hair long so I could twist the sides into peot. My father said I looked like a girl. In the photograph of my grandfather he wore peot to his shoulders.

  ‘At the beginning of the day of Simchas Torah I danced all night with the older men; I took the crowned bride in my arms – they allowed me to hold her! And I danced till I was giddy, singing, “My joy is the Torah!”’

  – I wish I had done that.

  ‘“How I love thy law; it is my meditation all the day. How sweet are thy words – sweeter than honey to my mouth.” You see? I can still remember –’

  ‘Want a cigar?’ Bennie added. ‘Here – I got some little ones, panatellas. Girls usually like ‘em.’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘So have an experience, Danielle. You’re too conservative. I’m going to have a joint later, on Masada. I’ll see it better if I’m stoned. You like hash?’

  ‘About twenty years ago I did.’

  The cigar tasted disgusting. Bennie was watching her, eager – no, she realized, anxious – that she should continue.

  ‘You make me feel like a . . .’

  A what? There was acute curiosity in his face.

  – An old woman, And hymen intacta. I’m disintegrating, she thought. You seem to know my weakest points. You’ve been bullying me from the moment you arrived and I’m cooperating: because until this film is finished I’m your prisoner. ‘A nudnik.’

  ‘A nudnik! She speaks Yiddish already. You’re holding it wrong. Here, like this.’ He adjusted the smoldering turd between her fingers.

  You have gentle hands, she was thinking. Even when you’ve been in a temper, if you’ve touched me your hands have felt tender, as if they remembered something that the rest of you has forgotten . . . This place is as sterile as my life now that Katherine has left home. How is it possible, after eighteen years of standing on my own, that I feel like a shattered vessel . . . ?

  ‘You’re doing real good,’ Bennie said. I’ll give you a Monte Cristo tonight.’

  . . . now I’m one step away from the top? I feel dead. I was in a fever when I first arrived, when I was sure he would welcome me. Now I feel as I used to when I was eight years old, and could write, and he wouldn’t answer my letters. I’d look twenty times in the mailbox. It was like staring into an empty tunnel. One day I thought: I’m never going to feel like this when I’m grown up. That was how I got through Patrick’s death: howled for three days, then got on with life. You can survive, if you’re armored. Bonny was never armored enough – she just sounded as if she was. I was her comforter, her protector, from when I was a child. Then I was Katherine’s protector. I wish someone would be mine. Patrick was, for a while. But since then . . . James!

  She laughed. ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘about my last boy-friend. He had me called out of a script conference one day so he could complain there was no toothpaste in the house.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I told him to make arrangements to live in a house where there was toothpaste. Before I got home from work that evening.’

  That figures, Bennie thought.

  ‘Speaking of work . . .’

  He helped her to her feet. ‘Let’s ask Akram to take us to S’dom. We ought to have a look at the terrain from ground level before we go up.’ Siting the Roman camp, he said, was going to give him his first nervous breakdown. However, while they had been sitting there, he had figured out a way for driving the battering ram. ‘We’ll have a tank engine inside the tower thing. I can buy one locally.’

  She returned his sardonic grin.

  As they recrossed the desert road Danielle looked at her watch, saw it was nine-thirty, and frowned. ‘We’ve kept Akram waiting for half an hour.’

  Bennie deliberately slowed his pace. ‘Akram is getting one hundred and twenty a day, in green, and he can order anything he likes at the hotel on my account.’ At this moment he would be eating Black Forest cake and ogling the dames on the beach. ‘Akram’s laughing,’ Bennie said.

  Their emergency meeting that evening lasted almost to midnight. Jazzy was enraged. He and Saeed had gone to the room at seven-fifteen, before there were maids in the corridor. There was no DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The door was open but the lock had not been fixed by Wili in the way Jazzy had taught him – the door was just open, and the room was empty. No tools! Nothing. No sign of Kidron’s clothes, no sign of Kidron except for cigar butts, a wine bottle, and an unmade bed. There were a woman’s hairpins in the bathroom: did Wili suppose they could remove the paneling with hairpins?

  What was Kidron playing at? Why had he suddenly changed rooms? Who was the woman he’d had there last night?

  Do you know what it feels like, Wili, to be walking around with plastic strapped under your shirt? It feels like running across glass holding egg white in your hands.

  What was making Kidron suspicious? He trusts the Green woman; he trusts you, Wili. Doesn’t he?

  As they were leaving, a waitress carrying a breakfast tray along the corridor had seen them. If the job had been done it would not have mattered: he and Saeed would be in Egypt when it was set to go bang! that night. What exactly had the woman from Los Angeles said? ‘Tell him I’ll bust his balls?’!

  How do you know she was telephoning from Los Angeles? Because she said so! Wili, the call came through the switchboard: she could have been ringing from inside Israel. Wili, they have taken your camera box. If they open it and see what’s inside . . .

  Jazzy said, ‘You came sobbing to me in London when you got out of jail because an Englishman had slapped your face five years before. Who fixed the brakes on his car? Who took the risk? Me and Saeed – you should kiss his feet. We risked our lives for your honor.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to kill him,’ Wili whispered. ‘I asked you to give him a fright.’

  ‘We did. For your honor we gave him a big fright. I’d like to give that Kidron a big fright for what he’s done to us.’ Jazzy was thinking: the boys are becoming nervous. We’ve missed another opportunity. It was an error to believe Wili would be useful. I’ll have to destroy the photographs he’s taken. I’ll have to rethink . . . ‘I’m going for a walk,’ Jazzy said. ‘All of you stay here.’

  He returned with a bag of the cakes called bird’s nests; they frothed another finyan of coffee. Wili held Jazzy’s hands. He did not dare to confess what the princess had said before they left the hotel that morning: that Kidron knew Saeed was a Palestinian. Because if Jazzy heard that, he would –

  ‘You’ll never know how grateful to you I am,’ Wili said. ‘For this . . . this . . .’

  Weep now, Jazzy thought, for after tomorrow you will not weep again.

  ‘I like a man who can cry,’ he said. ‘It’s a sign of a good heart.’

  The landscape of sculptures soared against a sky of cyan-blue. The convulsed shapes changed from moment to moment, as did the colors: pink, like Bennie’s kid jacket; white; every beige; lion-skin – the lion dozing in sunshine, lying in shade, or dull brown by moonlight. They gazed up at walls that contained them like ants fallen into a bowl.

  ‘Mrs. Lot,’ Akram said.

  The dirty white pillar, standing separate from and taller than others, was hundreds of feet high. Its peak tipped slightly forward – a head bent to utter a piece of advice.

  As they walked to the c
ar Danielle began to turn for a last look. Bennie seized her and clapped his hands over her eyes. ‘Just in case!’

  They had been playing all morning, touching, feeding each other pieces of orange, laughing inordinately at one another’s bad jokes. Without effort, some sort of camaraderie had been established. For a while, Danielle thought.

  Sodom was a grassy knoll. What else? It must have been an oasis, like Jericho, once.

  Bennie dashed up it ahead of her and ran about shouting, bending down, standing, waving. He had a fistful of wildflowers. When they drove back into the desert and again passed the out-crop named Lot’s Wife the red poppies in their laps asked for silence in honor of a massacre.

  They arrived at the base of Masada in the early afternoon. As the Mercedes’ engine gave a final purr Bennie turned to Danielle and let his jaw drop.

  ‘Know what?’

  She nodded: Wili.

  ‘Listen – if he’s still here I’ll say – um, quick, Danielle: you write the stories. You have to be a better liar than I am. What happened?’

  ‘We changed the schedule.’

  ‘That’s it? We changed the schedule?’

  ‘And you fell on the camera bag, while holding a screwdriver.’

  ‘No! That’s a lie! It attacked me. I fought it off with a screwdriver. Like that bloody hotel door in Rome. Did I tell you about that? My bathroom door in the Rome Hilton up and belts me across the eyebrow. You saw: I had three stitches.’

  ‘I saw sticking plaster.’

  ‘I needed stitches.’

  ‘I need lunch.’

  Wili was sitting in the cafeteria at the base of the mountain. Bennie saw him before he caught sight of them and whispered, ‘There’s a saying in Hebrew . . . oh, oh, he’s seen us.’ She watched his lazy stroll across the room, hands in the pockets of his loose raw-silk trousers. Then he was stroking Wili’s back, calming him down. Wili’s limbs jerked; he began to smile, then laugh, pleating the top of his nose.

  Bennie was grinning when he returned to the cafeteria line. ‘All fixed. Juggy thought his other bunch of cameras had been stolen from the Plaza. He was so relieved when I explained they’re stored in the porter’s lodge that I told him the truth about busting his number-one bag. Happy ending.’

  They shuffled along the line holding their orange plastic trays. Bennie said, ‘You watch what Akram takes to eat, and take the same.’ She wanted to know why. ‘Do like I tell you: take the same salads as Akram.’

  When the four of them were seated at a Formica table Danielle asked Akram why she had to eat a yogurt salad with her humous. His tiny hippopotamus ears moved up and down in a fit of hilarity all their own.

  ‘Farts!’ he bellowed. ‘Stops farts.’

  Bennie almost tipped over his chair. ‘Akram – I’m going to put you in the movie. Listen, Danielle: you write a comedy scene for Akram. You want to be a Jew, or a Roman?’

  ‘Who won?’ Akram said.

  ‘Who won! Danielle – don’t write his lines. Just leave a blank page marked AKRAM.’

  They all felt slightly manic. Wili had eaten lunch and was raving about a new cure for carsickness, and the car he had hired – a tin Lizzy, but it had got him here all right, although he had to admit he had not arrived until ten A.M. and had hunted all over the mountaintop for them. He was fiddling with his traveling knife-fork-and-spoon set. Bennie said, ‘Give me! I’ve gotta have,’ and snatched it from Wili’s hands to eat with himself. Wili insisted on getting the coffee: they must be exhausted if they had been working since before dawn. And he would just make a phone call – about his other camera bag.

  He came rushing back to the table: terribly sorry – but the fact was the man he was talking to at the Plaza did not understand English very well and, since the bag was stored in Bennie’s name . . . Would Bennie mind explaining that a young man would come to collect the bag from the porter’s lodge?

  When Bennie sauntered off, Wili leaned forward and said vehemently, ‘Princess, that Bennie Kidron is a real gentleman.’ She nodded gravely; Akram said, ‘Very gentleman.’ He was thinking about the lady he had driven home for Mr. Bennie two nights ago and of having noticed, this morning, that Mr. Bennie was feeding this other lady, his secretary, pieces of orange by hand, slipping them into her mouth. She had hit him across the face, in Jericho. Maher had seen her do it and they had all watched to see what would happen next. But Mr. Bennie had been most dignified and today he was courting the secretary in an ambiguous and playful fashion. He had picked red flowers for her, then thrown them into her lap as if he meant nothing.

  Wili had to travel up in the funicular, because of the weight of his gear – ‘and the ticker, Princess. A few problems with my ticker.’ No – he wasn’t going to keel over, and he didn’t need the chauffeur (he said the word disdainfully, let it drop from his lips as fingers drop something soiled). He would carry everything himself – damn that Greek or whatever-he-was – but he could not risk the Serpent Path. She and Bennie ought to be careful, too: it was steeper than it looked from ground level and there had been some nasty accidents. One of the Vogue models had broken her ankle, needed plastic surgery on her face, and was useless for photographic work after that. They’d had to fly in another girl from London: she had no suntan and the makeup they put on her rubbed off on the clothes. And then it rained. An unbelievable downpour, worse than the tropics. Everything washed away. The camel bolted. Oh, yes – I know Masada, Princess. Did she have a walking stick? And gloves? Parts of that track had to be taken on all fours.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Wili, there are handrails. I can see them from here.’

  All the same. Where had Bennie gone?

  ‘He’s smoking a joint.’

  I shouldn’t have said that. Wili is more than a sycophant; he’s almost spying on Bennie, she thought.

  ‘I could get him some coke in Tel Aviv.’

  ‘Tell him.’

  Wili tipped a finger to the brim of the panama hat he was wearing today. ‘See you up there in an hour,’ he said.

  The path was steep, a walk-and-scramble of forty minutes for somebody fit. Bennie was not. When he moaned for the third time, ‘We’ve been climbing for five hours. I’m dying,’ she began to note the minutes between each of his collapses: they averaged seven. She jerked him to his feet again, but when they reached the first really sharp incline he fell down and cringed with both arms over his head.

  A group of young Israelis in khaki shorts and climbing boots was behind them. They halted and stared at Bennie, jabbering to each other and Danielle in Hebrew. They seemed to be offering to carry him, and could have, by the look of them: through rough shirts their bodies glowed. Bennie kept silent while Danielle repeated, ‘No. Please don’t worry.’ One of the girls spoke a little English: ‘He is what?’ she asked. ‘He’s American,’ Danielle said. They had another conversation about that, then, unwillingly, moved off. When they were well away Bennie peeped from between his knees and giggled. She gave him a sharp prod in the rump with her sandshoe.

  ‘Stand up! And behave yourself.’

  He stood up, raised his arms to the sky, arched his neck backward, and took a bite of the sun. Then he started off at a run, calling over his shoulder, ‘Beatcha!’

  On the worst section, directly below the summit, Bennie jumped on the handrail and went sliding back down it yelling, ‘Wo-wo!’ Alongside the rails there was a drop of about three hundred feet, but his arms held horizontal somehow balanced his slide and at the end of the rail he landed on his feet.

  ‘You see me fly?’ he yelled up at her. ‘Its fantastic! Danielle – try it.’

  She trudged on.

  At the top of the path she entered the territory of birds, glossy black projectiles that threw loops of air around her ears then darted into crevices in the mountainside.

  It was a pleasure to see Wili again when, emerging through what was left of the casemate wall, she met his black eyes, round as buttons from watching Bennie. ‘I think we should wait until h
e’s safely through,’ Wili said, but Danielle was by now too angry and tired to care. In a tone that allowed no argument she replied, ‘You and I are working.’

  She wanted to see Herod’s Palace first. Then the excavated granary. Third, the Roman camp on the western side of the mountain. Fourth, the synagogue. Fifth, the reservoir.

  It was another hour before her temper had abated enough for her to be able to see anything properly. Then it seemed too late: ruined, the first razor-edge of delirium blunted. Her senses felt as sodden as cardboard and she thought, This is what Bennie did to me in Jerusalem.

  Wili was starting to fuss about the light and the need to catch the last funicular ride down. But he had done well, and to work again with an old-fashioned professional had relieved some of her anxiety. Neither of them had seen Bennie for almost two hours. She told Wili to give up trying for more detailed shots of the synagogue and do what he could – given the lighting problems – with the casemate wall.

  ‘I have to be alone for a while,’ she said. They agreed to meet in the upper palace in twenty minutes and go down together in the funicular. Bennie, no doubt, would want to walk down the Serpent Path in the dark: she had seen a notice stating that to do so was illegal.

  Sunset was on its way and her shadow as she marched off toward the bow of the galleon-shaped mountaintop stretched out like a numerical progression, thin and limitless.