The Drifters (33 page)

The amount of love represented by these papers was so great that Bruce was silent, recalling his flying visits to Canterbury. He had never been gracious to his grandfather, had never given him the slightest shred of love or encouragement. Canterbury had always been a forced stop between the two real poles of his life and never a vital thing of itself.

‘If I had not come here to see you,’ he asked in a low voice, ‘what would you have done with these papers?’

‘I’d have waited. I was confident that an intelligent boy faced with your choices would ultimately want dispassionate counsel.’

They said no more for a long time, then Bruce asked, ‘In which country is it best to be a Jew?’

‘The worst is France.’

‘Worse than Germany?’

‘Yes. Because France practices the most virulent anti-Semitism but is not aware of it. True Frenchmen—those who love their country—can never forgive the Jews for having forced the Dreyfus issue. Made their public institutions undress in public, as it were.

‘Second worst is Russia. It has always been pitifully confused about its attitude to Jews—love one day, pogroms the next. Every wise Jew should study three events. German Nazism. French Dreyfusism. And particularly the Russian experiment with Birobizhan. Look it up. It’s on the Amur River in Siberia.’

‘Those aren’t the countries I have to choose among.’

‘It’s no fun being a Jew in England. It’s not easy to be one in Israel, with the rabbis running everything and compounding all the errors of Europe. But in the United States, I think it would be most difficult to retain your identity. Because Americans want so desperately to absorb the Jews.’

‘What would you do … if you were me?’

‘I’d use this bankbook to free myself of Melnikoff. He loves you, but love is never protection against exploitation. I’d enroll at Cambridge … get loose from your father’s intellectual influence. I’d study diligently, and when I graduated I’d try some new country like Australia, or maybe Kenya. They’ll need all the intelligence they can find. They’ll also need some Jews to keep them in balance.’ He hesitated, then concluded, ‘But right now, the photographers. Tomorrow, London for your British passport.’

And it was on this passport—this precious dark blue document which for a hundred years had taken the organizers, the producers and the arrangers around the world in security—that Bruce Clifton flew out of London for Israel.

In the fall of 1968, when he was only seventeen years old, Yigal entered the Technion in Haifa, a scientific university which had the capacity to give a first-class education but which was obviously going to fail in his case. The trouble was not the difficulty of instruction, for he found the beginning courses too easy, but his inability to focus on education when other problems were usurping his attention.

He kept comparing Israel with the United States, to the detriment of each, and he began seriously to think that he ought to transfer to Cambridge and become a British subject. What he had seen of the islands he liked; Grandfather Clifton’s quiet approach seemed more congenial the more he thought about it.

From a distance, he found America and Grandfather Melnikoff too boisterous on the one hand and too trivial on the other. He could not imagine the boys and girls of his Grosse Pointe school facing up to invasion the way his friends in Israel had done. (This was an error commonly made when assessing the capacity of American young people; already it had proved disastrous to Adolf Hitler and the Chinese communists. One day it might prove equally so for the calculators in the Kremlin.) And he found the role of the Jew in America, now made more complicated by Negro animosity, distasteful.

On the other hand, life in Israel had a built-in tension that frightened him. He was not a coward, a fact of which he had given ample proof, but he did seek peace in which
to develop ideas which were beginning to evolve. Curiously, they did not involve science directly but were rather those soaring contemplations of justice and equity which harass the best young men of all nations. Yigal Zmora was quite incapacitated by the confusion he had brought upon himself, and by the beginning of 1969 it was apparent to his father, dean of the Technion, that his son had better drop out for the remainder of that academic term.

Doris Zmora agreed. She told her husband, ‘When a boy’s been through what Yigal’s seen, he needs time to recuperate. I can’t tell which is worse, the Six-Day War or Grandfather Melnikoff.’

‘I’m afraid it was Grandfather Clifton who disturbed the tranquillity,’ her husband said. ‘My father has that devilish trick of asking important questions.’

They decided that Yigal should work the rest of the year, but when Grandfather Clifton heard of the plan he interceded: ‘Let the boy stay in Canterbury till school opens again. He should do some reading and some thinking.’

This appealed to Yigal, and he flew to Britain, much against Grandfather Melnikoff’s advice, and dug into that great sequence of books from which young people have been gaining their insights in this century: Gibbon, Spengler, Marx, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Max Weber, Keynes, Charles Beard. His most fruitful experience, however, was his running conversation with his grandfather, for Lawyer Clifton had a sweet simplicity of manner that allowed him to become eighteen years old again, and he discussed Bruce’s reading at precisely the level which the boy could understand.

It was a great winter, with formal parties at which Bruce met the few young Jews of the Canterbury area, and he might have continued with this life if one day he had not seen, in the display window of a travel agency, the same poster advertising Torremolinos that had created such havoc in the mind of a Norwegian girl in Tromsø some months earlier. He was walking home from the library, thinking of nothing in particular, when he saw this near-naked girl standing beside a windmill on a Mediterranean beach, and she seemed so real that he could have touched her, and all of a sudden he realized that what had gone wrong was neither Israel nor the Technion but the simple fact that he was eighteen years old, and though he had ventured to the Red City and had helped stand off
six enemy tanks, he had never been really involved with a girl.

‘I want to spend my vacation in southern Spain,’ he announced that night at supper. His grandparents considered this for a moment, then nodded.

‘It’s time you occupied yourself with something frivolous,’ Grandfather Clifton said, ‘and I hear that the south of Spain is very nice,’ and the next day when he went to inquire about plane tickets and reduced rates at hotels, he saw the Torremolinos poster and recalled how he had felt at eighteen. He said nothing, paid for the tickets, and handed them to his grandson. When the boy was gone, Lawyer Clifton did not share his suspicions with his wife, but two days later, when she was returning home from shopping, she, too, saw the girl by the windmill, and that night she said, ‘I should think the call of Torremolinos must have been very powerful. Probably better than meddling around in Canterbury.’

British airlines offered a series of preposterously favorable excursions to Torremolinos. You could fly from London to Málaga, get free lodging at a good hotel for two weeks, receive a set of meal tickets entitling you to food at the best restaurants, then catch a plane back to London—all for something like $71. On Brace’s plane a group of sixteen girls had taken passage, and two were named Pamela. (On such trips it was not uncommon for five or six girls to be named Pam, for this name had been popular after the war.) These two were differentiated by their friends as Mini-Pam, sporting the briefest red miniskirt the police would allow, and Fat-Pam, clearly on the pudgy side, but with an amiable disposition that kept her attractive.

They were hardly over the English Channel when Mini-Pam plumped herself down beside Bruce and started telling him about her plans for Torremolinos. ‘They’re putting us up in this swell place called Berkeley Square. My girl friend stayed there last year and she said the management let you get away with anything so long as you didn’t annoy the guests. I’m going to find myself a lover and snuggle down for thirteen days of glorious love-making.’

Bruce was only vaguely aware of what she was saying, for he was obsessed by her slim, bare legs, nestled close to his and visible to the thigh. He became painfully conscious of his hands and could find no place to put them, for they were attracted like steel filings to the magnet of her legs, but he was afraid to touch them. His mouth went dry, and when she turned to ask him a question, her bright young eyes staring at him and her breasts pushing against his arm, he could only gulp.

Not getting an answer to her question, she rambled on: ‘There’ll be French boys and German and a lot of real horny American soldiers. If a girl plays her cards right, she can find a date in Torremolinos, no matter what the others say.’ Bruce started to ask her what the others had said, but the words formed clumsily in his mouth, so after taking a deep breath he placed his hand high above her knee. She shivered, closed her eyes, and whispered, ‘That feels good. Let’s move to the back seat. No! You stay here for a minute. I’ll go back for a drink. After a while you follow me.’

When he reached the rear seat he found that she had covered herself with a blanket, as if about to take a nap, and when he sat beside her she took his hand and placed it at the top of her leg, covering everything with the blanket. ‘Isn’t that good?’ she asked.

When she saw he was able to say nothing, she giggled. ‘I picked up this trick from a naughty joke.’ And she told him about the big Texan who was flying on Japan Air Lines and went to the washroom. After he returned, the stewardess handed him a letter.

Bruce chuckled, and within a few minutes Pam was practically undressed and had begun to unfasten most of Bruce’s buttons, too, and as the plane droned eastward they came as close to having sexual intercourse as a couple could in those awkward seats. Then she found a way to pull out the dividing partition, and with an admirable
contortion, so manipulated her body that sex was not only possible but well-nigh inescapable.

Fat-Pam, watching approvingly from the front of the plane, alerted the others as to what Mini-Pam was up to, and the fifteen English girls took furtive peeks at what their companion was accomplishing. ‘He’s cute,’ one of the girls whispered. ‘I wouldn’t mind being back there with him.’

‘There they go!’ another cried, and a dozen girls watched with varying degrees of envy as Bruce stiffened, then fell back inertly against his headrest. Soon thereafter Mini-Pam walked the few steps to the washroom, and when she returned to the cabin she caught Fat-Pam’s eye and smiled. Making the sign of victory, she sank back into her seat beside her companion and wakened him. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Bruce.’

‘That’s a keen name, Bruce. When we get to Torremolinos and find a proper bed …’ She ran her fingers in an arpeggio from his throat to his knees, then suggested, ‘You ought to button up, Bruce. But this is only the beginning.’

When they reached Torremolinos she insisted that he join her group at the Berkeley Square, and before his bags were unpacked she was in his room, undressed and in bed. ‘Do you think me too bold?’ she asked with the covers primly drawn against her throat. ‘It’s just that we haven’t much time, have we?’

They enjoyed four tempestuous days together, but they might just as well have been in Brighton for all that Spain mattered. Then, in a maneuver that Bruce could not understand, for it was incredible that she should have found time to meet another man while so totally engaged with him, she moved out of the Berkeley Square and into the flat of a German businessman.

Bruce, left unexpectedly alone, rather relished the opportunity for digesting what had happened so far. While Mini-Pam was still with him they had taken their meals with various members of the English group, and he was appalled at the bleakness of their lives. They had read nothing, contemplated nothing, seen nothing. In Spain for the better part of a week, they had not gone to Málaga or to the inland towns, preferring to hang around their English hotel and two or three English bars. They were overly eager to meet men, and most did, but out of the whole lot
no girl met anyone with whom she might logically expect to develop a continuing interest.

‘It’s a vacation!’ Mini-Pam had cried, flicking at him with her napkin. ‘Who wants to talk or read books or bother with deep ideas on vacation?’

Then one morning she was back at the Berkeley Square, as beautiful and as provocative as ever. She had surprising news. ‘I’m off to Palma on the afternoon plane. A very nice English gentleman I met in a bar.’ She didn’t think she would be going back to England, and one of the girls was to break the news to her Mum. She came to Bruce’s room and stood in the sunlight, her exquisite bare legs set off by the brief red miniskirt. ‘Will you remember me?’ she asked. ‘When you’re a professor or a member of Parliament or something big? That first time on the plane? God, almost broke my back.’ She whirled, caught him by the hands and pulled him onto the bed. ‘You’ll remember this … always,’ she whispered, and within the space of a few farewell minutes she lavished upon him an explosive love that no man could forget.

‘Goodbye,’ she called from the door. ‘You were precious, and one day I’ll see your picture on the telly.’

For two nights his room was empty, but on the third Fat-Pam sat on the end of his bed and said, ‘You’re deep. You’re a real gentleman, Bruce. I watched you and Mini-Pam, and you treated her with respect.’ She sat there a long time, talking of her life in London and its tragically circumscribed potential. ‘I’ll never amount to much,’ she said. ‘I’m cut out to be a housewife, that’s about all. But I’ll be a good mother. My children will grow up without a lot of crazy ideas, because I know what love is. It’s giving yourself to the other person—your husband, or your children, or your minister when he’s trying to do a good thing. My view of life is quite different from Mini-Pam’s. I would never use people. Of course, maybe I have to be that way because I’m not beautiful like her, and when a girl isn’t beautiful, there’s only so much she can get away with.’