I did not realize how much Tel Aviv had worn me down after three weeks of unemployment and loneliness until one night I sat in a cinema watching Beau Geste. I found the drama most moving, and when Gary Cooper died in a fortress in the desert, I began to weep quietly to myself. I suppose I felt I knew what it was like.
A city where one knows nobody and in which one has no work is, I think, as desolate a place as any on earth. I had no friends in Tel Aviv; I knew almost no Hebrew; and there were very few friends of mine in all Israel. I went to visit one in Jerusalem, and he wasn’t there, so I came back to Tel Aviv. I visited another in a kibbutz in the north, and found that we no longer had anything to say to one another, and that I did not like the kibbutz, so I came back to Tel Aviv again. I had a letter of introduction to someone in the Israeli Foreign Office, and spent a morning wandering around the hutments outside Tel Aviv where the government was at that time housed. I followed one erroneous direction after another, and went from one wooden hut to the next. Eventually I sat under a tree and watched a procession of unemployed Yemenites who were as lost as I was, and were. bemusedly trailing around the encampment in search of the man they had come to make demonstrations against. I hope they found him: I was told by a girl in a khaki skirt that my man had gone to Ottawa for a conference.
Tel Aviv was appallingly ugly, white, and crowded. I lived in a succession of hotel rooms which I shared with a succession of people as itinerant as myself; I never unpacked my clothes, nor did any of the others. Sometimes it seemed to me that half of Tel Aviv was living as I was, and the reflection was not a cheering one. I saw some of the people with whom I shared rooms: we said “Shalom” to each other and fell asleep: the sabra with a vicious cast in his eye; an old German Jew who talked to himself, awake or asleep; an Australian who told me lies about the air force in which he claimed he was a pilot. Others I did not even see. They were no more than the electric light coming on, clothes being thrown on a chair, a cough, a smell of socks. It was as though I were living for weeks in a crowded train compartment, only that when I woke the scenery hadn’t changed at all. I wandered around the streets until my feet ached; I sat on a bench and stared at the feeble sea they have there; I watched the children play in the Gan Meier; I asked myself again and again what exactly I had hoped to do by coming to Israel without a job and with not too much money. I couldn’t even leave the country. Apart from other considerations, there was nowhere for me to go, except home, and that would have been an ignominy greater than I could face. So I applied for a job as an English teacher at a commercial school of some sort, and they kept me hanging around for days, and then gave the job to someone else.
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The night I saw Gary Cooper die in the desert, I went into a billiard saloon on my way back to the room. I wanted someone to talk to me, and a billiard saloon seemed the most likely place where that would happen. It did not of course. A few soldiers were playing snooker, and a group of Moroccan youths were batting away at table tennis with a ferocity that left no room for chitter-chatter with an Anglo-Saxon in a corner. So I went out of the billiard room feeling worse than ever. I flinched from the thought of the room, but at least there I could lie down.
There was a surprise waiting for me in the room: a portrait of a little boy was pinned up with thumbtacks on one of the doors of the wardrobe which no one ever used. The portrait had a green background, and was painted on linen. I tried the door of the wardrobe but it was locked. Apparently someone had taken up residence in the room.
That was something to think about. I lay on my bed and smoked, staring at the portrait. It was a very bad portrait; the boy’s mouth hung open in a smile that I tired of quickly. He had blond hair bristling all around his head into the green background. And his eyes seemed screwed up, though that may only have been a fold in the linen. When I had exhausted the picture’s interest I tried to read, but the one yellow bulb in the room seem to attract rather than disperse the shadows of the evening, and I put the book down again. Charlotte Bronte couldn’t hold my attention anyway. A man came in, said “Shalom,” and went out again, after putting a knapsack under the bed that was to be his. I looked at the knapsack. I knew what it contained: I had seen enough of them under other beds.
Then the door opened and a small man in a brown suit with faint white stripes stood in the doorway. He didn’t rush in as the other had done; he stood and looked around him: this was to be his room. “Shalom,” he said.
“Shalom,” I replied.
Then I noticed how bald he was. It would have been better if he had been absolutely bald, but, as if to show up the baldness of the rest of his skull, he had a roll of fine brown hair on either side of his head. The hair curved back on itself, in each roll. The rest was bald, wrinkled, brown, with faint freckles here and there on his scalp.
He smiled at me and I smiled at him.
“You speak Hebrew?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Yiddish?”
“A little.”
“Where do you come from?”
“South Africa.”
He opened his hands and closed them with a little clap. “We will speak English,” he said, and only then did he come into the room. “We will talk English.”
He went to one of the other beds and sat down on it. He was very short, and his neat polished shoes did not rest fully on the floor; they dangled a little, childishly.
He sat on the bed and looked at me, smiling. Apparently he expected me to entertain him. It did not seem that it would be difficult to do so: he looked like an innocent, a well-wisher, in that room—the guiltless party in a divorce perhaps.
I said: “It’s been very hot today.”
“So hot. Terrible heat.” He nodded agreement enthusiastically.
Then he waited for more.
“It’ll be hot until the rains come,” I suggested.
“So,” he agreed. “Terrible heat until the rains come.” That was settled.
I wondered what I could do next. I offered him a cigarette, and he took one, and we lit our cigarettes from a lighter which he produced deftly, from one pocket of his trousers, and put away again like a conjurer.
We blew smoke. Still he regarded me, smiling, and I began to smile too. My smile widened. I began to laugh, and delightedly bringing both hands to his ears and throwing them into his lap, he laughed too.
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He really was an extraordinary-looking person. Beneath that bald scalp, with all that bone uncovered, his face sagged suddenly with an excess of flesh and loose skin. It sagged downwards, past his eyes, and billowed into round cheeks, a heavy jaw, a thick neck that rose at a shallow angle to meet the round of his chin. The downward droop from the skull was like that of a half-filled sack of meal. The sack was marked with a small nose, a mouth, and indecisive wrinkles here along the cheek, there to the side of the mouth. And then face and neck, the burgeoning man, dwindled away, again quite suddenly, to a spruce little body, a neat little stomach, little legs dangling. He laughed at me, and I laughed at him, and we were glad we were together.
“Where do you come from?” I asked.
“From Hungary. Then there was a war, and I was in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy. Now I am in Eretz Israel.”
“How do you like it here?”
“It is difficult. I am a chef here—” and he pointed with a precise finger at the corner of the room. Then he named a café near the Dizengoff Circle: the direction was the right one. “It is not easy work. My feet are exhausted when I stand all day cooking in the kitchen.”
“What were you before the war?”
“I was in business. What else should I have done?”
I couldn’t answer that one. “Have you been here long?” I asked.
“Three weeks.”
“Three weeks! That’s the same as me.”
The coincidence pleased him. He saluted me. “We are both sabras.”
“Sabras who can’t speak Hebrew.”
“That is nothing. You will learn to speak Hebrew.”
“Do you speak Hebrew at all?”
“A little, yes. I learned in Switzerland and Italy, but it is not easy always to learn a new language. German, French, Italian, English, now Hebrew. Always new languages.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is easy.”
“We are not very good sabras,” the man admitted. “But my son will be a sabra.” He pointed at the picture on the wardrobe, and I looked at the open mouth, the blonde spikes of hair against a green background.
“Where is your son?”
“He is in Switzerland.” He brought his hands to his chest and crossed them there for a moment, one flat palm lying above the other—an archaic, gentle gesture, like one preparing himself for prayer. “He has the T.B.’s,” he explained. “But one day he will be better.”
“I hope so,” I said.
He looked at the picture and shook his head. “He is a clever boy. Already he writes to me in Hebrew, because that is what they are teaching him in the hospital. There is a waiter at the café who tells me what he is saying in German. I write to him in German, and he understands that also.” The boy’s face hung in the room, painted on a sheet of linen. The room in which he hung had five iron bedsteads, a floor of bare pale tiles, the one sickly bulb hanging unshaded from a piece of electric flex.
“Does he look like that?” I asked.
“He is bigger now, but I think he still looks like that. I have not seen him for a year. When I went to Italy I left him in the hospital for the T.B.’s, and then I could not go back to him. Now I wait for him here.”
“When do you expect him to come?”
“They say it will be a long time.”
His face was in repose: I saw that he had rather dark blue eyes.
“You have eaten?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“You will eat some here?”
“Where?”
“Here,” he repeated, and went to the wardrobe. He took the key from his back pocket, again with a flick, a twist, and opened the wardrobe. His clothing was hung up within it: there was another brown suit, and two pairs of highly polished shoes on the floor of the wardrobe. Next to the shoes was a paper packet. He took this out and put it on the table. “I always have food now. It is because of my work.” And he showed me a tin of bully beef, a packet of biscuits, a small bottle of olive oil. He held them to me, one after the other, in one hand, tempting me. “You don’t want?”
“No, thank you.”
He looked at the food thoughtfully, and then produced a packet of sandwiches from his jacket, which he put together with the others in a little display. He regarded the four items for a moment, before quickly wrapping them up again. “Tomorrow morning there will be sandwiches.” He put the parcel on the floor of the wardrobe and locked it.
“We will go now for a walk.”
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So the two of us went for a walk. We walked along the sea front, past all the hideous cafés screaming gramophone music across the Mediterranean, the soldiers, the young girls who looked like soldiers, the young sabra men in white shirts shouting at one another in their throaty Hebrew, as though swearing at each other, but really, as I was to discover when I knew the language a little better, only saying things like “Nice to see you” and “How you doing Aaron.” The sea made no noise, and there was no wind. Upstairs one café they were dancing, and a crowd stood below watching them dance, as I had stood the previous evening. But at least tonight I was with a friend. We walked on. He walked with quick steps, small and on his toes, and stepped aside continually to let others pass. We would be separated, and I would see him dancing his sidestep, smiling at me, trying to join me through the crowd. There was a swanky hotel, with people sitting on a balcony watching the sea; here was a crowded little park, and a gang of girls rushed past in their best dress uniform of white blouse and blue skirt. Cars were grinding about in the empty lot used as an army car park, and soldiers in the soldiers’ club were wailing some kind of song; droves of them stood outside, feverishly begging lifts from cars.
We turned and went back to the hotel. There were too many strangers: no one had greeted us.
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I was ready for bed, and when we got to the room I took my clothes off and crawled between the blankets. I knew I would have to throw the blankets off after a few minutes: it was too hot even to wear pajamas.
But the man with me did nothing as unceremonious as that. Firstly, he went to the bathroom, and I heard the flush of the pan drumming against the wall where my bed stood. Then he gargled his throat: I heard that down the passage. Then I heard him running the water and puffing and blowing. He came into the room carrying his collar and tie in his hand. His eyes were screwed up, and what hair he had stood up from his head in wet bristles, giving him a freak resemblance to the picture of the round-faced, smiling boy pinned to the wardrobe door. He stood in front of the wardrobe and groped to get it open, but he had forgotten that it was locked and that the key was in his pocket. When he remembered he did not know what to do, because he did not want to put his wet hand in his pocket. I got out of bed and gave him a towel from the top of my case. He received it gratefully.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, rubbing himself fiercely. “Ah.” He puffed; his neck wobbled under the scrubbing. “Ah. That is finished.” He returned the towel to me.
Then he proceeded to undress. He took off his shoes and socks, and polished each shoe with its respective sock, put the socks within the shoes, and placed them so that they peeped out, shining, from under the bed. He took off his shirt and folded it under his pillow, for some reason. He took off his trousers and folded them, put his collar and tie on top, and then settled the parcel in the middle of the table. He went to the wardrobe, took his pajamas out, unfolded them and stared at them for some time, holding them full-length away from him; apparently he found them satisfactory, for he whipped off his vest and underpants and jumped into the pajamas. Then he stood in the middle of the room and smiled at me. The pajamas had red and yellow stripes of equal width. They reminded me of something—something seen on a cinema screen—but of what I only remembered later. He said to me: “Is good?”
It was only courtesy to reply: “Is good.”
Then he got into bed.
The problem then became—who was to switch off the light? I was too lazy to get out of bed, and waited for him. But he didn’t seem to mind having the light on. He lay under his blanket with his arms behind his head, staring up.
I asked him: “Do you want the light off?”
“It can stay like this.” Then he asked me: “You are Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“Everybody here is Jewish. It is good.”
“Yes,” I said.
But we neither of us had much conviction. He was working himself up a little about it; I couldn’t blame him; I had tried myself.
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Then he sat up in bed and cried out to me: “One, my wife. Two, my daughter Elise. Three, my daughter Riva.” He was counting them off on his fingers. His gestures were as neat as ever: the forefinger came down to meet the precisely protruded fingers of the other hand, one after the other. “Four, my father. Five, my mother.” The fingers of that hand were exhausted. He counted back on the other. “Six, my brother. Seven, my sister. Tot,” he shouted in German at me. “Tot. Tot. The little boy is the only one left. My brother’s children. My sister’s children. Tot.” He asked me: “You know what that is— tot?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I was in Buchenwald. You have heard of Buchenwald?”
“Yes.”
“That was where they killed my wife and the girls. I don’t know where they killed the others.”
He sat up in bed in his striped pajamas, with the two rolls of hair curving back on themselves again as they dried, and the sad sack of a face beneath, his body in a Buddhist posture, his hands in his lap. He said: “They can’t do that to us again,” and it was strange to hear in his voice how weak the bulwarks of that faith were against not the past disasters, but the present loneliness, Tel Aviv and the hotel room, his job. He told me about his job. He hated it, and he did not know what to do, as he was afraid to let it go. He did not want to go into the country: he was too old to become a farmer. He did not have enough money to set up a business of his own. Now he was getting seventy lira a month. He asked me whether that was good.
I did not know. I thought it was quite good. I wasn’t sure.
He told me that he wanted his son to learn a trade while he was in Switzerland, after he had recovered. Here, he could see, a carpenter, a bricklayer, was a king. “I will write to him,” he said. “He must learn to be a carpenter in Switzerland.”
When he decided to sleep he simply dived under his blanket. So in the end I had to get up and switch off the light.
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I was wakened about two o’clock in the morning by the loudest and most obscene snoring I have ever heard in my life. It rose and fell like the crashing of waves; it was a roar, a yell, a bellow, the sound of the beast itself. I lay and suffered; I could not sleep with that noise in the room. I blocked my ears with my fingers, but it was impossible to lie in that position for long. I ducked my head under the cushion, but it hardly helped at all. All the day’s loneliness and futility returned with the hour and the sound, and I felt desperately sorry for myself, helpless, unable to sleep. I whispered, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” willing the man to silence with every snore he gave, but it did not help. I lifted myself from the bed to see who it was. It was not my friend; it was the other man who had come in and out so quickly, and had now returned to shatter the night. The room seemed to rock with the sound of the snores. I said loudly into the darkness: “Shut up,” and all the stranger did was snort, and then begin to snore again. I wanted to kill him.
I was not the only one. The little man across the room leaped out of bed. He pranced across the room in his pajamas, and leaned over the bed of the snorer, solicitously, it seemed. He brought his lips to the ear of the snorer, like someone about to whisper secrets, or a lover. He remained like that for a moment, while the snorer’s body heaved and fell. Then he gathered himself together and flung all his strength into a most terrible yell right in the snorer’s ear. “Bleib still! Du schnarchst wie ein Schwein!”
I was momentarily struck with terror by the loudness of it, the high yelling timbre of the voice in a dark room in the middle of the night. But when I felt my heart beginning to beat again, I gave a low cheer. And the little man came across to me, delightedly shook my hand, and scampered back to bed.
There had been a gasp from the snorer, and then silence so intense I was afraid that he had fainted. I got out of bed and went and leaned over the man’s bed. In the darkness I saw only the shine of a terrified pair of eyes staring up at me. The man did not move—either he could not, or he thought it wiser not to. He stared at me in silence, eyes wide open.
From the other bed I heard my friend sigh as he fell back into sleep, a sound of contented, half-conscious surrender. The rigid creature beneath me did not move. I went back to bed and slept, undisturbed by any snores.
When I woke the next morning both of the others had already left the room. I decided suddenly that I would go from Tel Aviv, that day. I would go back to Jerusalem, and see if I could do anything there—I could at least speak to someone in the Agency who might be able to advise me. But before I left, the hotel proprietor had a long talk with me: what had happened in my room the previous night? One of the people from the room had come downstairs and told him that the other people in the room had tried to murder him in the middle of the night. I denied any knowledge of it. I said the man was mad. Then the hotel proprietor said that something must have happened. He had asked the second man in the room if anything had happened, and this man had said no, nothing had happened to talk about. “We killed a pig, that’s all that happened,” the proprietor quoted. What did the man mean: “We killed a pig”? I said I did not know. But I thought of the gesture my friend must have made in telling his story to the proprietor, the flick of his wrist, and all his fingers flaring outwards, the neat gesture of an innocent, a practical joker, a father, a widower.
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