‘Your heart. Your pride.’ Marilyn snorted. ‘And I’ve told you, Professor Garin, not to wear that pullover indoors. That’s your best pullover, which I hand washed . . .’
After a while he asked shyly, ‘Did she bring me a present?’
Danielle spent an unorthodox Passover dinner at Amos’s house, with Alice, Phil, the silent Tikva, and a crowd of academics who argued all night. There was no ceremony except for a moment at the beginning of the meal when Amos lifted his glass and said, ‘Lord, lead us out of Egypt!’
Danielle and Phil were the only ones who spoke no Hebrew; the others would remember every so often and make some remark in English, but mostly he and she were left to themselves. Phil was alarmed and depressed: he did not know how he could write his Washington Post articles without sounding as if he were delivering a stab in the back. What was published in the Hebrew press (Amos had got him translations) would make your hair curl, but . . . That was in the family. ‘Israel was the most optimistic undertaking of the twentieth century,’ he said gloomily. Danielle tried to cheer him up, without success; Tikva brought them cups of coffee and he brightened momentarily, asking her about Gideon, but she shook her head with a remote, smiling look and passed on.
‘So many of the young women here –’ Phil began. His amiable face wrestled with something he did not want to say. ‘ – are hard. And disappointed.’ He checked himself – ‘I don’t mean to sound sexist’ – if he were giving Danielle offense. ‘I think it’s the army. The cult of militarism.’
She nodded and sighed. Bennie had put it brusquely: ‘Most of them look like sluts.’ She’d hoped that he’d really meant they felt imprisoned by the military system – the No Alternative – against which they were instinctively in revolt. She had the cheap idea that she was pleased Bennie had not met Tikva. Chatting with Phil, her thoughts were on Bennie and she barely noticed Amos’s hostly gestures, that it was mainly he who threw sentences in English for her to catch and turned the conversation to her research, and the accident.
At the door Amos said, ‘I’ll see you in Sydney.’ He was taking his sabbatical leave in Australia. ‘Orstralia.’ He rolled the word around his mouth, testing it like an odd flavor.
‘Will Mira be coming with you?’
Amos shook his head. Mira was going to spend six months at Oxford. ‘If I run into your father –’
‘Yes. I’d be grateful.’
‘You’re so English,’ Amos said, and his head reared away in amusement. ‘Are all Orstralians so polite? Will I need a tuxedo?’
– Smartarse. Wisenheimer. ‘Sure. We dress for dinner.’
‘See you in a white tuxedo,’ he said, rolling his yellow eyes.
Downstairs Alice said, ‘Amos has taken a fancy to you.’
Danielle felt trespassed upon. She longed for her own house, for Emma prancing with excitement, for cooking special lunches for Katherine on the weekends, for the boats turning slow circles in the bay beneath her windows while she wrote letters to Bennie in her head.
It will be autumn and there’ll be Queensland mangoes as big as soccer balls in the greengrocer’s shop, she thought. And porpoises will be torpedoing through the dark blue water. And we’re not at war. And we don’t have nuclear weapons. And nobody wants to wipe us out of history, as an experiment that failed.
A string of negatives, she thought.
‘He’s wasting his time,’ she said to Alice.
Early next morning she braced herself for the Old City. You could walk part of the way along the parapet of the walls, something she had done once already, weeks ago, but it had been late in the day and groups of other sightseers had forced her pace. The Old City was a Chinese box. No sooner had one set of buildings been revealed than another was discovered within. To walk around the Old City’s circumference took a couple of hours and yet there were people who had spent thirty years exploring inside the circle and not seen it all.
She arrived before the day’s onslaught of pilgrims and as she passed through the pedestrian doorway on the left of the Jaffa Gate she put on the purposeful expression necessary in this part of town.
Saeed, who was hanging around waiting for tourists, saw her and decided to get Jazzy. She was making for the parapet; Jazzy could catch up to her there.
Danielle had not been long on the bowmen’s path when from one of the houses in a section behind the Street of the Greek Patriarch a man emerged thirty feet below her, glanced up to right and left, saw she was alone, and exposed himself. He began to masturbate. Her instinct was to hurry away. Then she thought, Damn it! and laughed. The man shot up a furious look and pumped harder.
She yelled down, ‘Monkey! You should be in a zoo!’ She capered back and forth, miming his flailing hand, until, after less than a minute, he stamped inside his backdoor. She was jubilant.
But ten yards on, when the house and the man were safely out of sight, she felt dizzy and glum. You forget the hatred, she was thinking. You forget men want to punish women. And vice versa.
She decided she would walk only as far as the Damascus Gate then return to the apartment, pack, and have a rest. Her legs felt unreliable and something worse had happened: she was intensely sexually aroused. Her crotch was jumping with electricity, and wet. She felt frightened of herself and for herself: everything seemed tenuous and reversible; anything could capsize.
She realized someone was trying to catch her attention and turned, scowling. A young man was jingling his gold bracelet as he waved at her. He repeated his greeting: ‘I say, aren’t you the lady photographer?’ He had a Pommy accent.
She shook her head, frowning harder. She didn’t like the way he had snuck up behind her. He didn’t look English, but there were plenty of Jews and Arabs around who had been brought up in England. He was vaguely familiar.
‘I say,’ he repeated. ‘Didn’t I see you taking some marvelous shots of St. Anne’s the other day?’
‘Not me. Sorry.’
He seemed crestfallen. ‘Well, I don’t know if they were marvelous or not – rude of me to assume. Look, I’ve been given this unbelievable machine –’ He had a Nikon. ‘And I can’t work the ruddy thing. Do you know about cameras?’ He prattled on about his vacation and his mother (for whom he was taking the photographs) while she had a look at the camera for him. The problem was simple: the cover was on the lens.
‘Gosh, aren’t I an idiot! And don’t you know everything!’
He was as effete as Wili. She smiled. He had fallen into step beside her. Mother would scream when he told her he had spent six weeks searching for people to rescue him from La Nikon – there’d been a simply marvelous man, a professional photographer, who’d explained all its working parts a week or so ago – they’d met in a camera shop – and you know, he had, I promise you, the biggest nose . . .
‘Really? What was his name?’
Gosh. He had such a bad memory. William? Wilfred? Winston?
‘Wili,’ Danielle said. ‘That was Wili Djugash. He’s one of the best photographers in the world.’
Go on! She didn’t say. Mother would – ! ‘And you know Win – Wif – ?’ Gosh, he must write down the name. And address, if she knew it. For a lark he would love to send one of his snaps to . . . Win?
‘That might cheer him up,’ Danielle said. ‘He’s in pretty bad shape. He had a car accident.’
‘No!’ He stopped walking; his hand with the gold bracelet flew to his forehead. ‘What happened?’
‘His car crashed. And he’s had an arm amputated.’
Oh, God. But he was alive? He wasn’t going to . . . die? Or anything? No . . . brain damage?
She felt nauseated, as if she’d had a blow in the stomach. In the cosmetic-perfumed muddle inside her shoulder bag she found one of Wili’s cards.
‘Here. Bye. I’m in a hurry.’ She reached the Damascus Gate with his ‘Thanks ever so!’ trailing after her.
Two days later, after hours in airports and airplanes, she arrived in Sydney.
Emma�
�s welcome festival continued for a week. Every movement of Danielle’s was an invitation to skip, leap on and off the chairs, and perform her specialty, the flying kiss, which began at a distance of five feet. Emma’s nature was love; she delighted in the force of love and in impetuous contacts.
When Danielle struggled through her high wooden front gate carrying what she could, with the cab driver acting as porter for her heavy suitcase. Emma rocketed from the kitchen door and knocked her over. A bronchial wail arose from Mrs. Wellsmore, who, with the cabbie, tried to pull Emma back. Their yells and tugs at her collar were futile.
‘Leave her, leave her,’ Danielle said.
She lay flat on the concrete of the driveway, panting as paws smashed into her chest and belly. Sometimes the dog’s physical power appalled her; sometimes on the beach Emma would grab something in her jaws and begin shaking her head in a frenzy, a switch would tip in both of them, and Danielle would see Emma in the pack of dogs in a Staffordshire bullring, tearing the beast to death, as she had been bred to do.
Emma was saying, ‘I love beyond endurance. My being overflows!’
The taxi driver went away wagging his head and Mrs. Wellsmore, the drawstring of her lips jerked tight, returned to the house to make a pot of tea.
That night Emma slept under the blankets instead of at the foot of the bed. Every couple of hours she crawled up to the pillows to cover Danielle’s face with caresses and to explore her armpits, the flavor of her palms, the webs between her fingers.
Like Bennie and me, Danielle thought. ‘But you’re better than Bennie.’
Early morning and after dark when they drove to the surf and went running along the beach Emma pleaded with Danielle to try harder to keep up. ‘Beloved, Beloved,’ she cried. ‘Like this – like this!’ She never tired of trying to teach Danielle how to run.
It took Danielle some days to discover the source of the smell in the house.
At first she thought Mrs. Wellsmore had neglected to air the clothes. Then she discovered the huge burned spot on the underside of her mattress. Emma came in to stare at it, too, then looked up at Danielle, smiling to her back teeth: it was she who had dragged Mrs. Wellsmore, drunk, and having a last cigarette for the night, from Danielle’s bed.
‘Yairs. I did spill a spot of tea on it,’ Mrs. Wellsmore said.
DIARY 1984
I found home-people half-asleep after Israel and I didn’t feel like talking to them about what had happened to me there. I knew nobody who I thought would understand even as much of it as I did. I felt lost.
When I first returned home I spent hours in an armchair, pretending I was recovering from jet lag, but in fact admiring what I owned – perhaps like the Jews who first settled and farmed in Palestine and rejoiced in the feel of their earth on their hands, their cows giving Jewish milk, their cotton fields growing Jewish cotton, their hens laying Jewish eggs. I was in my house; its solidity reassured me. I thought of it as the sturdy vessel containing my life again, safely, after all that shaking around. My house. I’d worked for it; I’d built it up. I knew Mrs. Wellsmore felt as kindly toward me as the Palestinians did towards the Israelis – but what could I do about that? She’d sold the husk of it to me.
I was wearied by the excitement I had left behind and by the heaviness of love. I thought constantly of Bennie Kidron as I sat by wide front windows.
I’d been extravagant when I rebuilt Mrs. Wellsmore’s cottage and had knocked out the north wall to replace it with glass. In front of me was the wooden-decked balcony with balsam and geraniums in pots. Beyond were the tops of the trees in my garden, a steep slope that, at an invisible equator, changes to native forest, virgin except for the track that leads through it to the front door of Mrs. Wellsmore’s own fibro-cement shack. It was once a dinghy shed; high tides bring shoals of transparent fish to her back-door mat. I, in her former house, look clear over her roof and the canopies of eucalyptus to the bay. I have a T-shirt printed with a drawing that could have been made from my balcony. Under the picture it says: FROM MY FRONT WINDOW I CAN SEE LION ISLAND. It’s the sort of thing the Avalon boutiques sell mainly to the inner-city people who rent houses here for the summer. One feels cut off from Sydney; the city is almost as far away as Jerusalem is from Tel Aviv.
Thoughts of distance distressed me.
Bennie was a planet away.
He telephoned me from New York the morning after I arrived home. I was about to leave for Emma’s early run, but it was evening for him and he was going to dinner with his grandmother – that outrageous old woman who enjoys piano bars and the attentions of an elderly senator. Then they were going to a new Coppola movie. He said he wished I was there.
We pretended. At least, I did. My own nature was largely a mystery to me then: many of my actions seemed alien events over which I had no control; I would think out the explanations afterward. If you are a mystery to yourself you cannot change. I was half-blind, in those days, not only to my own faults but also to Bennie’s. It had not occurred to me that there are people, of whom he is one, who arrange their affairs in a way that invites disaster – and that I was another.
We pretended for a few weeks that distance did not separate. He telephoned me every couple of days. In between I suffered frantic bouts of jealousy. At first we talked for an hour at a time, but we found less to say, and the interlocked threads snapped one by one. I was embarrassed by the irrelevance to him of the things I had to report – that I’d discovered Mrs. Wellsmore had almost burnt the house down, that Emma had a tick (he didn’t know what a tick was) – yet I felt resentful that they didn’t interest him. He returned to his seesaw of complaints about Marguerita Schultz and his boasts of how he was outwitting her, the Internal Revenue, his bankers, the whole financial world. Once he was drunk: it was four in the morning in Los Angeles, he said, and in a few hours he was going to appear in court. He’d been up all night with Sam ‘and the boys I hired in New York – best attorneys in the world.’ The witch was closing in; he and Sam believed Raphael died leaving only one will and that the alleged second one produced by Marguerita was a fake. But the courts had accepted it as genuine, invalidating the first, which had left Raphael’s share of the company to Bennie.
It was ten o’clock in the evening in Sydney; I was working on the screenplay and my mind was sharp. But the interruption had shattered an image that was taking shape. Bennie said, ‘What am I going to do? The bitch wants to tear me in half.’
He had not told me before about the second will. He had not told me that there was a real danger he could lose control of the company, that Marguerita Schultz might be able to stop production of Eleazar, that the whole project could be washed away like a sandcastle. My contract was with him; I could be out of a job. I suggested he volunteer for military service in Lebanon.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and hung up.
I had set a tough routine: from six to nine playing with Emma and so forth; nine o’clock to one-thirty writing; lunch and a sleep until three-thirty; writing until seven; another run with the dog, then dinner; nine till midnight, work. I took Saturday mornings off to do the shopping while Mrs. Wellsmore cleaned the house. By midday she was sometimes drunk. ‘Touch of the flu, dear,’ she’d say when she lurched against the furniture. She found excuses for hanging around me on her cleaning day, suggesting extra work. (This was to earn another five dollars, which went, that evening, for gin.) One day she said she had to clean the silver – I didn’t have much, only what Bonny had salvaged when we fled Jerusalem – and I saw her fling a tablespoon out the kitchen window. I found it in the azalea bed and brought it back to her.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a lizard.’
I never knew what strange bestiary was in her head. The day, a few weeks after my return to Sydney, when I arrived at the house with bands on my teeth and a black knot of surgical string in the center of my gums – the orthodontist had had to cut a little ridge of bone between my incisors – Mrs. Wellsmore screamed. I was groggy from th
e anesthetic, but I rushed to her, thinking she was going to faint. She staggered away from me, saying, ‘Come no closer!’ When she calmed down, she explained that she thought I had a spider in my mouth and that I’d been out in the garden eating their webs.
‘I’ll do your shopping, dear,’ she said. ‘You can’t go down to the village looking like that, like the grille on a 1955 Holden.’
The moment when I had decided to get my smile fixed, my looks had ceased to worry me. It was extraordinary to realize that I had been trapped into one misery by attempting to evade another – Bonny’s warning to me (when I was about eight years old) that I would never be loved if I were too handsome. I had been planning to tell Bennie about my teeth next time he called, but he did not telephone again for a month and by then I had realized that it was not his business, but my own.
I had returned outwardly and, in time, inwardly to a celibate life. Katherine was secretly delighted although she pretended to be permissive about me. She whined a bit: ‘Aw, Mum – you should have a boy friend.’ These days she put gel in her hair, making it look like a lavatory brush, and arrived home for weekends of windsurfing in mauve or purple faille dresses with silver beads around the necklines. They cost two dollars each from St. Vincent de Paul and apparently she wears them to lectures with fishnet stockings and canvas shoes made in China. They are her disguise: she’s as steady as a bank clerk.
She discovered my new kid jacket on her first visit. I made her promise to lend it back to me on short notice: perhaps even then I had an intuition that Bennie would turn up without warning.
When he telephoned after the month’s silence he was more like his pre-Israel self. I had almost finished the first draft. We were businesslike and kept to technicalities. He was obviously talking from a list of headings, and taking notes of my remarks. He’d signed contracts with an art director and a composer. Toward the end I asked, ‘What’s happening with the evil Mrs. Schultz?’
Winter in Jerusalem Page 26
