When I Lived in Modern Times (10 page)

A
FTER
a while I discovered that there were two countries called Palestine. The Jewish Zion was a raw, strained immigrant society in which the middle classes struggled to keep their heads above water and the poor took life by the throat and throttled it half to death. From far away, the struggle of the Jews against the might of the British Empire had seemed to us in England, Uncle Joe and me, to be no less than David’s battle against the giant Goliath or the resurrected Maccabeans opposing the Romans. Right was
obviously
on our side. But when you got close up you noticed the crooks as well as the heroes.

I hadn’t expected that. People think that suffering ennobles, but they’re wrong. They were Jews who were sullen or violent or depressed or conniving or lazy or untruthful or greedy. They were a catalogue of the seven deadly sins. One night, one of the many when there was a curfew and we sweated indoors deprived of the cafés and the cooling breeze of the seashore, the residents of the Florentin district were rounded up and taken in for questioning. When they were finally released back to their homes they found that they had been burgled. A bookkeeper in a poultry shop was shot in the head by thieves who took his empty wallet. Mysterious fires broke out in factories and shops.

The slums of eastern Europe had been emptied of their gangsters and petty criminals. All the Jewish kings of all the Jewish thieves had built new dominions in Palestine. A young man was found dead, leaning against a sandy wall near the zoo, his hat still on his head, a bullet in his chest. He had no identity papers on him and went to the cemetery as a
galmud
—an unattached—in an unmarked grave. Then the news reported that he had been going around collecting money for the Irgun underground. He was unknown to that organization and when they heard about it, they shot him.

It was not difficult for a girl brought up in Soho to detect vice and beggary when she saw it and it was all around me: in Tel Aviv, the most
modern city on earth, I recognized the little pimps in their imitation silk shirts and loud ties with fake diamond stick pins; I knew the prostitutes whose faces washed and sponged of their nighttime make-up still revealed the kohl caked in the fine lines around their eyes; I saw beggars sitting on the ground, their hands outstretched, one of them wrapped in a
tallis
, making out he was the prophet Elijah. I saw sallow faces and dark ones and stained white robes. In the market I saw a tailor with a tape measure around his neck and pins in his mouth measuring up an Arab for the alteration of a pair of trousers. I heard snatches of song rise for a moment or two from the mouths of the stallholders in languages I could not guess the meaning of, and piles of olives and unfamiliar fruits and bunches of loofahs and bags of sweets and cheap toys and dusters and facecloths and shoes and bunches of bananas and baskets of silvery onions and piles of flat, golden bread. And everyone was pushing and jostling and arguing and screaming at their children and a woman suckled her baby where she stood.

I bought bread and fruit and meat and tea and coffee and sugar, sometimes in Hebrew and sometimes by pointing. A brawl broke out one time between an Arab and a Jew over the price of something and because I did not want to see blood I looked up to the thin strip of blue sky like the seam of a stocking above us.

I saw dusty alleys of crumbling houses and trees with leaves like feathers, bearing red flowers, and some kind of vegetation spilled out over walls with more red flowers of a different kind and I couldn’t put a name to anything I had seen. In and out of these houses came beings I had never imagined existing: the men with beards on their chins but hairless on their lips, the women whose heads were covered entirely with scarves revealing not a single hair and around whose necks hung rows of beads and metal necklaces as if they were breastplates. Their earlobes were weighed down with more baubles and the place that they had come from was called Yemen which I was later to look up in an atlas of the world and find at the tip of Saudi Arabia. I guess that when the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem in the earliest times of the Diaspora some had turned east instead of west and lived nearly two thousand years cut off from the rest of us, people for whom the Bible lands were all there was or ever had been or, for all they knew, ever would be until the end of time.

I felt as if we were all half here and half somewhere else, deprived of our native languages, stumbling over an ugly ancient tongue. We knew that we were to be remade and reborn and we half did and half didn’t want to be. We were caught up in a plan to socially engineer our souls and this was being carried out by men who seemed like the distant gods on Mount
Olympus or Valhalla, the deities such as David Ben-Gurion and the others from the Jewish Agency who were smelting the Jewish future in which we would all be poured, like so many alloys in the melting pot of immigrant life, to emerge as molten, liquid, golden Jewish humanity.

The second Palestine was the one I lived in during the daytime, at the salon and sometimes on my day off and that was something else altogether, British Palestine, the rule of the Mandate. As much as I felt that I belonged heart and soul to Zion, it was the British whose taste and idioms, language and dress, cooking and habits I knew and understood. The British were the only people who did not seem like foreigners to me, although they were the colonial, the oppressive power. They were the enemy and the paradox of my life was that the ways of the enemy were partly mine too. This state of affairs perplexed and troubled me when, with my platinum hair and penciled eyebrows, the soldiers on the street now never thought that I was anything but one of them.

One weekend I went to the beach with Mrs. Gibson, or Susan, as she told me to call her, who was my own age. She was the wife of a CID inspector at the police station on Levinsky Street, where he was more concerned with arson and burglary than terrorism. Palestine bored her stiff. She came into the salon for her weekly shampoo and set and studied all the latest women’s magazines sent by her sister in Reigate, struggling to concoct tasty recipes from unfamiliar ingredients, trying new ways of applying eyeshadow and rouge, and running up her own frocks, fashioning the latest styles from Mayfair, on a Singer sewing machine she had shipped out when they arrived the previous year.

“It’s hard to make friends,” she told me. “I don’t meet people and the English ladies here are missionaries and schoolteachers, terribly drab types. Norman and I are C of E, of course, but Norman says that just because we’re in the Holy Land, we don’t want religion rammed down our throats night and day. What about you, Priscilla?”

“I haven’t been to church since I was christened,” I said. “My mother didn’t find our vicar very inspiring.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Lewisham.”

“And your husband?”

“Lewisham, too.”

“You must miss him.”

“Yes. He’s put in for leave.”

“That will be nice.”

“I know. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

On the beach they sat on the sand like a school of fat pink fish. The Sheppards, the Boltons, the Mackintoshes, and Susan and her husband Norman, all policemen and their wives, second-raters who had passed the war directing traffic and catching Jewish con men, breaking up knife fights in Jaffa or issuing driving licenses. They insisted on a formality I had forgotten about since arriving in a country where codes of social conduct had been thrown out to make way for a new system of social relations.

We lay about in our bathing costumes absorbing the sun and taking turns to swig from bottles of lemonade. The women were quite nice to me. They thought it was a shame that I was so far from home, a young married without my husband. They promised that they would all patronize no one but Mrs. Kulp’s when they had their hair done. “And Priscilla is awfully good!” Susan cried. “I doubt if you’ll find better in all of Palestine. She trained on Regent Street, you know. Terribly grand.”

Mrs. Bolton looked up and smiled with painted lips, a dark crimson no food or drink seemed to dislodge. She sat quietly reading a book, a detective novel. She was in her mid-thirties, a well-turned figure in a plain blue bathing suit and vermilion-lacquered, square-cut toe and finger nails.

“Any good?” I asked her, looking at the book over her shoulder.

“Dorothy Sayers. I’m quite a fan.”

“Oh yes, I think I read one or two when I was at school. It’s Lord Peter Wimsey, isn’t it, her detective? And that rather clever girl who assists him.” I missed books like these which came without a lecture.

“Read much?” Mrs. Bolton asked.

“Quite a bit.”

And then we began a conversation about novels, which was pleasant to have with your toes curling in the sand and the smell of the beach in your nose, after you had just been through a long war.

Her husband was telling a joke involving a horse going into a pub. “And the barman says, ‘Why the long face?’” We all collapsed laughing. It was stupid, of course, but sometimes silly things are the funniest. Then everyone chimed in with their own. They were puns, all terrible puns. A man goes into a pub and the peanuts on the bar tell him he’s wearing a spiffing tie. It’s because they’re
complimentary
, the barman says. Good God! And yet we laughed harder and harder with each one. Susan’s husband began doing dreadful impressions of war leaders. His Mussolini wasn’t bad but other people on the beach began to turn around when he did Hitler. But it was so pleasant to relax. We were talking about the radio and the programs like
ITMA
which had kept us going throughout the war
because one thing all of us knew was that if it’s your darkest hour you hang on to your sense of humor if you possibly can help it.

I cannot think of many Jews of the then Palestine who would have laughed at the puerile humor of Norman’s off-color jokes, but I did. They were the same jokes my mother and I heard when we went to see Max Miller at the London Palladium. What they were not were Jewish jokes. There wasn’t a mote of darkness in them.

“Proper wartime humor,” Susan said.

“You should have seen it
here
during the war,” Sheppard replied.

“What was it like?” I asked him.

“A convalescent camp for Allied troops. Clubs all along the sea front, for officers and NCOs. Cafés. Teeming with soldiers, it was, and most of them British. You felt at home.”

Norman said, “I’ll never feel at home. This place has always been full of extremists. You only have to go halfway to Jerusalem and the landscape changes. Get into the Judean desert and you’ll see where they got the raw material to stone people with. The whole country is a dump. There’s no music, no night life apart from Third Programme type stuff, all those gloomy cellos.”

“Too true,” Sheppard added.

“I must say, it’s not what I expected,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, who had delicate, pale skin and could not understand why someone as blond as me should tan so easily. She sat, fully clothed, under a wide-brimmed hat, embroidering flowers on table napkins stretched over a wooden hoop, and smelling, to me, of lavender water and bread and butter. She had brought packets of seeds with her from England and went about surreptitiously scattering them over portions of waste ground so that Palestine would become a country of lupins and delphiniums and hollyhocks and pansies and marigolds and other familiar flowers of the cottage garden. “My father is a vicar and I grew up on the biblical stories but there’s no oriental atmosphere and it’s full of absolutely unscrupulous people. I find them gruesomely go-ahead. I’ve never been anywhere with so little charm.”

“I was surprised too,” said Susan, applying to her skin a dark brown oil which she had had sent over from London. It was supposed to promote the acceleration of a tan which she associated with a group of people she read about in her magazines who would become known, in a few years’ time, as the jet set. “I thought that Arabs would sit on camels eating dates in flowing robes. It’s nothing like that at all.”

“But there
are
camels,” said Mrs. Sheppard.

“Yes,” said Norman. “They don’t half smell.”

“I don’t think any of that is the point,” said Mackintosh, smiling under a blond mustache, thick and clipped like a pale privet hedge. “What we like or don’t is a matter of indifference. We’re here to play our imperial role. That was what was instilled in me when I was at school, at any rate. We have a responsibility toward the colored races.”

“Are the Jews colored?” I asked.

“They’re certainly gaudy enough,” his wife said. “Some of the woman on Allenby, they remind me of the overdressed types you see in London, on the Strand.”

“Oh, Jews and Arabs, what’s the difference between them?” asked Bolton, who had earlier told the joke about the horse. He was in the middle of a tricky investigation which had been going on for months involving a protection racket along Herzl Street and had been commended the previous year for cracking a complex fraud case involving the transfer of funds between various banks. The perpetrators had been convicted and sentenced but he suspected that the Haganah was at the bottom of it. The trouble was, he told us, no one would talk. He kept visiting them in prison, but they just smile at him and asked him if he would care to join them in a game of draughts. He told us about an Irgun terrorist under sentence of death. “Someone brought him a bottle of brandy and after three weeks he’d finished it. According to the Jews, that made him an unreliable alcoholic.”

Everyone screamed with laughter. “The Jews,” they cried, “the Jews!” Who could understand them?

“Don’t mistake me,” Bolton replied. “Jews, Arabs, in the end, they’re all wogs. I don’t care about either lot. I’m just here with a box of rules and my job is to get people to obey them. I don’t make the rules. I don’t care about them one way or another. I’m not a passionate man. I don’t take sides. I’ve never seen a side worth taking.”

Wogs. The word he used.

Yet the policemen and their wives asked polite questions and listened to the answers, without interruption. I understood how to behave with them. If they offered you a sandwich, I knew that it was customary to refuse the first time and then accept only when pressed, while amongst the Jews of Palestine, if you said no, you went hungry. It was relaxing never to have to wonder as I did when I was amongst my own kind, “What is going on? Why do they do things this way? Why do I, who am one of these people, not know how to be a Jew in a Jewish land?” With the English policemen and their wives I could be an Englishwoman. It was a disguise, of course, but wasn’t it true that everything the English did was
performed according to a code and what people said and what they thought were often two different things?