Where to Find Me

by Alba Arikha

  I listen to Mordechai. His words resonate more than any words of wisdom I have ever heard.

  And it is in that small room, below the wailing infant, that I begin to write. At first it is a diary – a garbled one at that. Later, long after the events depicted had unfolded, I rewrote it in the form of this fragmented memoir. While many events have been indelibly imprinted on my mind, I find that others have dimmed, like a fading fresco. Yet, through the process of rewriting and remembering, some details have reappeared, hints of hues rising, opening that small door into the repository of my memory.

  *

  I go to restaurants alone in the Jerusalem evenings. I don’t want to have dinner with Mordechai and Sonia every night. Besides, she isn’t a very good cook. So I find a lively restaurant on Jaffa Street, in the centre of Jerusalem. I bring a book with me and pretend to read. I don’t mind. I’m used to being on my own. I enjoy watching people, listening to all the languages spoken around me. Sometimes young men come to the table and strike up a conversation with me. I suppose I must not be very forthcoming, because they always end up walking away.

  I start to make friends at the Hebrew school. One of them is a Hungarian woman my age, Ada. We make it a habit to meet at Café Atara, where many writers congregate. One evening, after we have just sat down for dinner, a man called Ezra Radok comes to our table and asks if he can join us. Ada has met him before and is secretly in love with him. His looks are striking, with searing blue eyes and dark hair. He is a poet from Prague. She doesn’t know much about him aside from the fact that many women are in love with him and that he is said to be related to Kafka.

  It will be a few months before I dare tell Ada the truth. That I too have fallen in love with Ezra Radok. That he isn’t related to Kafka, although his parents had known him. That, although he has written a book of poetry, he has decided to give it up in favour of prose, and that he has become a significant part of my life. Just how significant, I don’t know. How can I presage the future? I can barely understand the present. I don’t watch out for its crevasses. I don’t even know they’re there. Why would I? I want to live again. Love again.

  Hope again.

  *

  I returned to Israel thirty-eight years later, when my husband Henry gave a concert with the Israel Philarmonic Orchestra. He had played with them once before, under the baton of Zubin Mehta. It had been an important event, and I had missed it. I couldn’t bring myself to return, because of my memories of Ezra. He had blood on his hands, and I had been an unwitting accomplice to his crime. Not because I had been involved in any way, but because I had never thought the man I loved would be capable of murder.

  But this time Henry convinced me to go, and I finally relented. “You can’t let the past take over your present,” he said. “You were innocent then and you’re innocent now.”

  “I know, but I can’t forget,” I said.

  “I understand,” he answered. “But it was a long time ago. And Ezra is dead. It would mean the world to me if you came.”

  The blinding white of the Jerusalem light was the same. So were the stones and the smell of pine. The streets were as I had remembered them, as was the Old City. The Arab man with the blue eyes was still selling fruit by Damascus Gate. I greeted him like an old friend, but he didn’t remember me.

  The small house with the peeling paint I had lived in with Mordechai and Sonia had been replaced by an ugly office building. The house Ezra had lived in was still there, even more beautiful than I remembered. It belonged to a family now. A German shepherd ran towards the gate and began to bark furiously. A woman appeared at his side – slim, stylish. “Sheket,” she admonished him. “Be quiet.”

  Did she know who had once lived under her roof?

  On the way back to the hotel, I passed Café Atara, then Fink’s restaurant, where Ezra and I had spent many an evening. Years later, I found out that the barman who served drinks to the British officers plotting against the Irgun was one of its members. I remember the waiter. He had light hair and a dimpled smile. He was a friend of Ezra’s.

  “In this country, everyone is plotting against each other,” Mordechai had once told me. “You cannot trust anyone.”

  I should have listened to Mordechai only.

  No one else.

  Henry and I stayed at the King David hotel. It seemed taller and more majestic than I remembered. Its pink sandstone gleamed in the sunlight. A man was playing the piano in the near-empty restaurant, which overlooked the Old City walls. The atmosphere was staid and quiet. Everything shone. The leather chairs, the marble floor, the turquoise and gold-corniced ceiling.

  But I knew what had happened beneath the shine. What lay beyond the rebuilt rubble of war and memory. I wondered, as I walked past the numerous bellboys and hotel staff, whether they knew it too. How many of them had witnessed what I had? Were they able to live with it, or had they chosen to forget?

  Until now, I have kept the truth to myself, entrusting it only to this blue spiral notebook. An amalgamation of history and memory – not suppressed, but compressed, just as Mordechai saw it.

  For twenty years it has crepitated, like embers, in the third drawer of my old walnut desk. I’ve occasionally taken it out to look at its cover, but never dared reread its contents – nor shall I do so now. I would like my past to be revisited, but not by me. I do not need to be reminded of what happened. I know what I wrote. I know what happened. And I am ill now. Trouble with the heart, the bones, the spirit. I am eighty-two years old and tired. Sometimes so tired that I can barely make it out of bed. My doctor says it’s the heart pills. But he also thinks that I am depressed. Has thought so for years. He has suggested I seek help, or take medication. “I know a good psychotherapist,” he told me, more than once.

  But the notion of seeking psychological help is an ungraspable one. I have never been an admirer of Mr Freud or Mr Jung. I have done what I needed to do, and I did it on my own. I have delved deep inside my psyche and reignited those dormant embers. Those fragmented memories. I have given words to the images and images to the words. I do not need my Pandora’s box to be opened. On the contrary, I need it to be firmly closed. And only my son can do that. The hole of Maurice’s absence has never been filled. I have waited every day for him to reappear in my life, but it hasn’t happened. Perhaps he never wanted us to meet. Or perhaps he didn’t know how or where to find me. I will never know, and I have given up trying. It is now up to someone else to do the work for me. For someone else to inform my son that for him I have recorded history as I experienced it. For him, I have attempted to retrace my steps, follow the arc of my destiny from that summer morning in Paris, right before everything I had taken for granted vanished before my eyes – a door slamming into darkness.

  7

  Ezra and I are eating schnitzel at Fink’s restaurant. It is 12th April 1946 and I am in love. My first true love. There he is, sitting in front of me, eating, dipping a piece of pitta bread in some olive oil. He hasn’t eaten since that morning, he tells me, and he is ravenous.

  Although he holds a part-time job in a British government office, where he processes the applications of Jews seeking asylum in Palestine, Ezra is always broke, because the pay is very low – “as low as the number of Jews they let in,” he tells me. The food is good here in Palestine, and there’s much more of it than in France. We eat hummus and fresh courgettes, bread and eggs, spicy cracked olives and Hungarian pastries. I make a habit of paying for the two of us when we go out, because I’m happy I can look after him that way. I’ve saved money from my year modelling, although Ezra doesn’t like to hear about it, because it makes him jealous to know that men other than him saw me naked. I laugh, and he laughs back. He moves his hands animatedly when he does so, and barely breathes between bites. “I’m hungry all the time,” he says.

  We meet up in cafés or restaurant after work. I no longer teach David English, but French four times
a week now, in a school near the King David Hotel. I enjoy it. The headteacher has asked me to commit to another year, and I have agreed.

  Ezra doesn’t really enjoy his job. He complains that he has no time to write his novel, and when I mention that I would love to read it he becomes agitated. “Stop asking me.” The book in question is a love story set in 1920s Prague, and everyone seems to know about it. I have a feeling he hasn’t written much of it yet, but doesn’t want to admit it, although one drunken night he does reveal that the whole story has been written in his mind – that’s why people know it, because he’s given it away before writing it. It is just a matter of giving life to the characters. “It shouldn’t be too difficult, “ he says, although I wonder. I should know. I have tried to write my novel, but have given up on the idea. I don’t think I have it in me. And there is only room for one writer in this relationship.

  Ezra’s first collection of poems was very well received, and he was fêted as a wunderkind, a Rilke in the making – and suddenly “the whole town wanted a piece of Ezra” is what I’ve been told. This was before we met. Now things are different, because we’re always together, at least in the evening, so if they still want a piece of him they keep it to themselves. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that there is something magnetic about Ezra, and the result is that we are seldom alone, except in restaurants.

  We have been to Fink’s several times before. It is, I am told, an institution. A place for intellectuals, artists and politicians. There are also plenty of British soldiers who flirt with the Jewish girls. The barman, Yuri, is a friend of Ezra’s. He’s Russian and is very good-looking. There are pictures of famous painters on its walls, and in the evening the bar is so full it is intimidating. Hoards of people shout and drink too much. Parisians may indulge in the same activities, but they do it with more reserve. Here, in Palestine, everyone is loud, and reserve is a byword for complacency. No one ever seems to sleep, and Ezra is no exception. He drags me everywhere and introduces me as his girlfriend. My relationship with him is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with Jean or Charles-Henri – and I like it. I feel proud being Ezra’s girlfriend. A few times he takes me to have drinks at the King David Hotel, said to be the best in the Middle East, and even though Ezra and I cannot afford to become regulars, I realize exactly why people love it, because when I’m there I never want to leave. The waiters are all Sudanese, and so many languages are spoken that it’s easy to forget which country one is actually in. Men are dressed in suits, and women smell like flowers and wear high-heeled shoes and summer dresses and flirt with men who might or might not be strangers. Ezra tells me that the southern wing of the hotel is rented by the British to accommodate the Chief Secretariat of the Mandate Administration, and it is where they conduct their business, entertain and take their tea. The notion of “taking tea” is not as foreign to me as it is to Ezra. He hasn’t read the English classics I pored over at the Sorbonne. England is not, admittedly, a country he wishes to know more about, because he doesn’t have much sympathy for the British, whose presence he resents – although he doesn’t discuss it in public, because he doesn’t want to lose his job. But aside from the British, Ezra seems to know everyone else, from writers to politicians to Bedouins and the Arab fruit sellers in the Old City, like the blue-eyed man by the Damascus Gate, who gives him oranges and dates for free because Ezra once saved his small boy from getting run over by a passing donkey cart. It happened quickly. Everything here happens quickly. Jerusalem is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The energy is kinetic. I often wonder if it might spontaneously combust one day. Or perhaps it irradiates from its ancient soil. I am swept up by it all, and for the first time since 1943 I am happy. I can feel it swell inside me like a torrent of water rising through cracked, sore earth.

  *

  There is a friend of Ezra’s called Lotta, a musicologist from Berlin. The front door of her house is always open, and every Friday night people pour in and out like a swarm of hungry bees. Lotta is in her early thirties – a sophisticated, attractive woman with long black hair and dark skin. Her husband, a clarinettist, has recently left her for another woman, who is now pregnant with his child. For a while Lotta’s house was closed to family and friends, but now she’s reopened it. “I don’t have a baby, but at least I got a house out of the bastard,” she declared.

  One can just walk into Lotta’s living room and someone will be playing the piano or reciting poetry. There are conversations in German, Hebrew and English – sometimes Russian or French. People often sleep over at Lotta’s, because there are no cheap hotels in Jerusalem, and there is no way of contacting her in advance because very few people have telephones. “Her house is like a literary salon,” someone once says about Lotta. “But not everyone can be a member.”

  I often wonder whether I would be a member if it weren’t for Ezra. I’d like to be friends with Lotta. I find her impressive. She writes, she sings, she speaks several languages, she is everything I am not. But there is something aloof about her, or perhaps it has to do with me. I try to speak to her several times, but she seems distracted, as if she’d rather be talking to someone else. Ezra once mentioned that she was “sort of in love” with him, and I wonder what he means by “sort of”. But I know better than to ask. I also know that, if I could, I would make Lotta like me more. Show her my steelier side.

  But something about her defeats me.

  *

  Ezra is fluent in French, so this is the language we speak together. He has a faint accent, which he calls “the lost Empire accent”. “Where I come from no longer exists,” he says. “Unlike your Paris.”

  “Paris may still exist, but it’s no longer mine, and it’s been bruised.”

  “It will recover,” Ezra says. “France always recovers.”

  “Yes, it does,” I concede. “Its vanity is too deeply anchored in the national psyche.”

  “Were your parents vain?” he asks me, a question which takes me by surprise. If anything, my parents were the opposite of vain. They were modest, hard-working, humble. “They didn’t know what vanity was. Although my mother was coquettish,” I tell him.

  “Was she pretty like you?” Ezra continues. “She must have been.”

  “I think she was beautiful,” I answer. I describe my mother and her elegance, how she loved clothes and how loud her laugh was for such a delicate woman. Then I find that remembering her laugh makes me want to cry, so I tell Ezra that I’d rather hear about him now, his childhood in Prague, his mother and father. His face tenses up a bit when I mention him. “I never really felt I knew my father,” he says.

  Ezra was brought up in an affluent family in Prague, in an apartment housed in a former palace overlooking Wenceslas Square. There were so many rooms in that apartment that he could ride on a bicycle through them. There were two servants and a French nanny, Simone, whom he adored. He spoke German to his parents and French to Simone, who had sole charge of little Ezra, because his mother, a famous beauty and socialite, was too busy to take care of him. He never resented her absence – so he says – because he loved his mother and she loved him back, and when she was there for him she was “entirely there”. She was very bright; “a well-read woman with a voracious appetite for life” is how Ezra describes her, as if he were talking about a female version of himself. “Our house was always filled with people, especially in the spring and summer. My parents had many parties. There was a playwright, Jaroslav Hapvil, I think she had an affair with him. I’m sure my father thought so too, though I wouldn’t know, because he was a difficult man to talk to – very reserved, a rich textile manufacturer, a cold man, just like the rooms in our apartment in the winter. When guests would come to visit, the stove had to be lit two days beforehand to ensure they would be comfortable. That’s why most of our parties took place in the warmer seasons. I met Kafka’s parents because they came to a few or our parties, and they knew my mother – everyone did.
They all loved her – even Kafka’s father loved her, although he was not a nice man. Like us, they spoke German at home, and Franz wrote in German and the Czechs didn’t like that: they wanted him to write in Czech. But then that didn’t matter, because he died in 1924, and we all thought that grief would make Franz’s father softer – but it never did. He was also a manufacturer, a clothing retailer, like my father, but he wasn’t elegant like him. He was overbearing and loud. My mother used to say that it was because he had grown up the son of a ritual slaughterer from Southern Bohemia. A religious Jew. “He’s got the sensitivity of a slaughterer,” she would say about Hermann Kafka. She never really had much patience for Hermann or religion. Although we were Jewish, it was seldom discussed. Until 1938, when there was a big Wehrmacht parade on Wenceslas Square and our lives changed overnight.”

  I never hear the rest of the story, because Ezra stops it right before the gates open into Auschwitz, where he was deported. “I don’t want to open those gates again,” he says. All he does tell me is that he contracted typhus, then tuberculosis, and the fact that he survived made him stronger.

  He doesn’t hear the rest of my story either, as mine stops after my mother has walked away in her blue polka-dot dress, the smell of perfume trailing behind her. I do not describe the heaving hole of her absence, how I circumvent it every day. In general, Ezra and I do not feel the need to put our pain into words. We continue eating our schnitzel and potatoes, followed by strudel with a hint of cinnamon, and leave our pain wordless.