Mom and I were invited to the Schneider-Taylor residence in Jerusalem for the first time a week before Mom’s wedding to Danny. Danny had stayed with us for six months, and we didn’t even know that his parents lived close by, in the Rehavia neighborhood. By then he had already divorced a French student he had met at university. Early in the morning, when I walked into our kitchen, I would find Danny and Mom sitting there, talking softly about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and Danny would be looking at Mom like a child in love.
As part of his duties as a cadet at the foreign ministry, he had once accompanied a visiting senator from Wyoming on a three-day tour of the country. Danny was anxious about it, and Mom noticed it immediately. On the first night he had called her from Ein-Gev and on the second night, he had called from the home of a well-known author who had hosted the congressman and his companion; a weird lover who passed off as a student. Danny was depressed. Maybe because Victor, the ministry’s driver, was being tyrannical just like he was towards all the new cadets. It was a matter of long-time tradition in the ministry when the administrative staff must teach the newcomers who the true players are that run the show. I think he was influenced by the senator who was behaving childishly in the presence of his companion with whom he was so enthusiastically in love and had loud sex in some strange places, ignoring Danny completely. It was not in the guide book of the cadet’s course, nor in the national interests of the state. Israel was not yet, for all of us, another third world country.
“Something is happening to him,” Mom was thinking aloud that evening as we were eating by ourselves in the small kitchen, and without paying attention she devoured three bunches of grapes. “He is not the same. Not in control, I guess”
“Is it good or bad?” I tried to find out.
“I think he is at a kind of a crossroads and he can’t see his path very clearly.” She didn’t even look at me and quickly went to the refrigerator in a desperate search for more grapes.
On the fourth day, he returned with a bouquet of flowers. The next morning in the kitchen, with no prior notice, he informed Mom that they were getting married. She let out a small yelp and started to cry. Danny looked very determined and said that his mother would be waiting for us on Friday for Shabbat dinner, and we should dress nicely and shouldn’t be worried at all because it would be a lovely evening.
* * *
Chapter 5
I put on the birthday dress that I liked so much, even though winter had already begun and it was a bit chilly. Mom went to the hairdresser’s and stayed there for hours. She was already dyeing her hair by then. A seven-year difference is nothing to scoff at; Danny was twenty-four at the time and Mom was past thirty. Mom was worried. She was especially scared of Gertrude, Danny’s mother.
She had heard about Gertrude from her friends, particularly from Rosette, herself not an easy woman.
“A horrible witch,” said Rosette. “A large-sized spoiled brat, an insufferable Yekke (German Jew).” I didn’t understand all these terms, but I wasn’t afraid at all. Very early in my life, I had understood that it’s the role of the grownups to please me and not the other way around. I was very young when I had learned that my real true father was a hero who was killed in battle. I thought that I would never be afraid of anything because it was my duty to look after Mom. I was even happy about the invitation to visit the home of the Schneider-Taylor family. In the Rehavia district, the homes are large and comfortable. It is obvious that the residents care about their homes and like them a lot.
We walked up two flights of stairs and Mom, who was shaking like a leaf, told me to go ahead and knock on the door. Rosette, who lived one floor below us, knew how to take care of people’s skin and did good manicures and wax jobs. She had done a particularly good job that day. Mom looked young and cute. Rosette had supplied her with a tiny bag of rosemary seeds to ward off the evil eye as well as with some advice on how to flatter Gertrude. I had no problem with knocking on the door. Danny opened right away. He had arrived earlier to visit with his parents and his sister who had come from Boston especially for the occasion. The ceiling was very high. That was the first thing that I noticed. In this kind of house, people can grow tall without having to worry about hitting the ceiling.
In the center of the ceiling hung a chandelier with crystal drops that looked like diamonds and refracted the light into many different colors that shone on glass cabinets of red mahogany. On one shelf there were porcelain dolls and, on another one, embroidered napkins from around the world. A huge bookcase covered an entire wall; books, books, books. I gazed at them, in a trance. “It’s Theo,” Gertrude said, half-laughing and half-apologizing. She had a wide, soft face, and Shirley Temple locks dyed a fake gold.
“It’s hard to believe, but he has read all these books, and even harder to believe that he actually knows all of them by heart. Try him; test him,” she said, almost pushing me. They had not started any formal introduction or small talk yet. I was the easy start for her. “Open any book you want, on any page you choose, give him the book’s title and the first word and he will complete the sentence.”
“Oh, you are exaggerating,” Theo grunted and moved uneasily in his armchair. I fell in love with him right away. He was wearing a square-patterned pair of slippers and his Sunday best, even wearing a tie. But over these clothes he put on a square-patterned flannel robe. I had never seen anyone receive guests in this kind of outfit. “Oh yes, my dear” he was talking to me, intertwining his fingers gently and patiently and had a faint aroma of cologne perfume. “Books are true friends, yes, yes.” He became silent as if pausing in mid-sentence.
“Go ahead, ask him,” Gertrude continued to prod me, blinking excitedly.
I chose not to ask and test him. His hair was completely white and he had warm, kind eyes. He was a charming, soft-spoken man. Women followed him. He knew how to amuse them, but I would only learn about that a lot later.
Gertrude turned out to really be a witch. She berated me for making noises when I ate and she looked at Mom with an evil stare. Danny was the only one she was nice to.
“So, Danny,” she said to him kindly, “Are you still in touch with Janet?”
Her evilness was clear. He had divorced Janet two months earlier because of Mom, but he had lost interest in her a long time before that.
“Yes,” he replied. “She calls me from time to time. We remain friends, as you know.”
“Zicher,” (sure) said the bitch. “I’m glad you are no more than friends, its better this way. You were just too good for her,” Gertrude was again staring at Mother with a wicked look.
I didn’t like this Gertrude one bit. And for that reason, she decided to pick on me. “Sit up straight, girl,” she scolded me. “You are a pretty girl, it’s a shame you will grow up with a crooked back.”
‘No, not the pretty girl stuff,’ I thought to myself. ‘Don’t even try sucking up to me, it won’t work.’
But try she did. After dinner, she took my hand and told me, “Come, liebschen, come, I want to show you something pretty.” I followed her with pursed lips, cursing her in my heart, and trying my best not to burst out crying because I had decided long before that I would not do that.
‘Evil woman, stupid woman, talks a lot, and I wish she’d rot.’ I repeated in my heart a rhyme that I had invented and found great comfort in. She led me to a side room and opened the door, and I was astounded. The room was full of dolls. She started explaining about each one, caressing them at the same time. There was a Gretel doll and a Hansel doll, and lots of other boy dolls and girl dolls. She explained very seriously, which stories they came from and what they did. Then she grabbed two dolls and started singing in German to them. Her eyes were extremely sad, and tears welled up in them. Even though I felt sorry for her, I could not love her. After a few minutes, she got over it, shook it off and said, “Oh well, let’s get back to the others.”
On the way home in the car, Danny was driving very slowly but still managed to almo
st scrape two parked cars. “So, how was it?” he asked and shot Mom a quick and apprehensive look.
Mom replied, “It was very, very nice.” She tried to look out of the windshield at the sky, maybe looking to see whether the moon was out.
“What about you, Shira, did you have an interesting time with my mother?” I had the habit of not lying, and felt like telling him ‘Not at all, that she was a strange and even scary woman’. But instead, I said, “Yes, it was actually very interesting.” As soon as we got home, I ran to my room and closed the door. Mom tried to come in and talk to me but I told her to leave me alone for now.
Danny was close to the end of his internship. He still had to pass a final test and go before a committee.
“The road to being a diplomat goes through many committees of old and wise men,” he explained to me, and it was clear that he didn’t really believe it. They were a bunch of sadistic old ministry directors. He and two other cadets who used to visit our house and study together all agreed about this. There was Uzi, who had been with my stepfather in the army, and Karni Meridor, the legend of the cadet course. As the daughter of an entitled family who had been part of the Jewish underground before the establishment of the State, Karni knew that she would never live the life of a regular mortal. She had an important father, an even more once important grandfather and family friends who all expected great things of her. But she took it all very easily. She was charming, long-limbed, almost gawky, with a kind and clear face, wide lips and penetrating eyes. She was a burst of energy with a sharp tongue. Only later did I understand how she came to be a legend among her peers, a type of eternal adolescent, provocative, desired and unattainable. At first, all I liked was her grungy look and the fact that, although she tried to constantly irritate everyone, they all kept loving her.
The three of them sat down to memorize the names of capital cities, rivers, and Israel’s policy positions on different issues. The country was perceived as strong and brave, a small state surrounded by enemies; a fighting nation with justice on its side. They would play roles: one would be the ambassador to the UN and another would be the PLO representative, attacking him. Then they would reverse roles. They would argue all over again, each, in turn, winning the debate which would never really end.
After they rolled with laughter, they rested, exhausted, and whined about the committees. I heard Karni venting her fury, saying, “a bunch of ancient department directors is sitting there asking questions about rivers in Russia and about wars in Latin America, and about stuff that they themselves have no idea about. But what can be more fun than to take a twenty-three-year-old guy, make him squirm and sweat and grill him with questions, and feel that even though you are sixty and can’t even get a hard-on, you can still make a young man suck up to you and flatter you and ingratiate himself? He would do anything for you to keep him alive, get him through this, and allow him to join your exclusive club.”
In these discussions, Danny was always quick to defend the ministry, having been born and raised in the diplomatic life and having spent his life in Germany, France, and Norway.
“It is the only place where you can still find people who are interested in world affairs past their thirtieth year,” I heard him say on more than one occasion. “After forty, they are still interested in literature and culture, and in short—they stay classy.”
Karni Meridor, despite her family background, hated the government’s policies.
“Tell me, how you can explain a policy of repression, a policy of occupation, and a policy of exploitation?” she gestured at Danny with her long arms.
He gently touched his forelock and as usual, spoke softly and gutturally, “You know the answer very well. There is only one State of Israel and it must continue to exist. I am sure that when they finally agree to talk to us, as our leaders have always promised, on that day they will find us ready to talk.”
“Tell me,” she interrupted him. “Will you always believe everything they tell you to say? How far will you go to lie for your country?”
Danny looked at her with a blank face and said, “I will say whatever I need to say with no qualms. At the end of the day, we are dealing with marketing. That’s the name of the game, and you better be good at it. You are selling an image, and the reality behind that image is only important at the superficial level. On the day-to-day level, that reality is a moving target.”
“Daniel Taylor!” Karni spoke with a sharp tone, “you have no roots and no basis. You are a synthetic product of the packaging plant that is called diplomacy.”
Her words were very direct, but Danny took no offense. He was patient with her and longed to defeat her. For him, she was, at that time, a good partner to practice persuasion and advocacy in the marketing game he was yet to master.
“There is a hard nucleus of existential and ideological truth beneath all of this, and that is what I believe in.”
“What fundamental truth?” Karni asked with a mixture of disdain and anger.
“With time, when I know the answer, I’ll tell you where reality ends and marketing begins and where marketing ends and actual reality starts.”
“No,” she said after a short while, not so aggravated anymore. “I don’t know if you’ll ever find that fine line.”
During all this, I’d be sitting in the large armchair that Marcel had left behind, and pretend to be watching television. I’d explain to Mom that I had already finished my homework. She knew that it wasn’t so, but this was the kind of tolerance that was allowed. I didn’t have any trouble with school, so she didn’t make a big fuss of it. I’d got along with Mom real well for as long as I could remember. I was in the third grade when she attended her last parent-teacher evening. When the school’s deputy principal sent her a note a year later inviting her to school because I was disruptive in class and had discipline issues, she wrote him a letter, which I drafted:
Dear Deputy Principal,
My daughter Shira is an intelligent girl who understands everything that she is told. If you have a problem with her, please explain it to her directly because as her mother, I have enough obligations towards her and I try to fulfill them to the best of my ability. I kindly request that you fulfill your own obligations. Please talk to the girl. I trust her.
Respectfully,
Pnina Attias
Attias was Marcel’s last name. That letter got me through the whole of elementary school. By the end of fourth grade, she received notes telling her that I was very talented and should be tested for the gifted class. I prepared another reply for her:
I was glad to hear that my daughter is gifted. In all honesty, I was not surprised. Nevertheless, and perhaps because of this, she will be better off in a regular class. I believe that her peer group is more important than some elite group.
It was the same with letters informing her of my occasional absence from school. She would sign all the reply notes that the school secretary attached without saying a word.
That was the time when I started to like traveling. I would go to the American Cultural Center on Keren Hayesod Street where I started reading newspapers in English. I tried to understand the topics that interested my new father, Danny, who was in the business of marketing foreign policy. With Marcel, I never had to make an effort. He was glad to be my father because he longed for Mom’s love. With Danny it was different. Mom worshiped him and I had to learn how to live peacefully with both of them. I looked for conversation topics and I tried to understand where he was heading. If they were planning on dragging me across the world because of the foreign ministry, maybe I, too, would grow up to be a synthetic person with no convictions and no opinions. The thought scared me.
Hillary, the old handicapped librarian at the US library, would bring me books and newspapers that were appropriate for my age. The hours I spent there were always pleasant. Through the magazines, I went on long journeys and dreamy voyages. At school, they got used to my mother not getting excited about their complaints. After a wh
ile, Hillary revealed the video library to me and for the first time I fell in love with television and production. Every time I visited, I picked a movie to watch. They had forty-two movies deemed by the U.S. government as representing American culture: Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and so many others. At first, I watched each movie once. Then I started watching the most special ones dozens of times. I knew the main characters’ dialogues by heart and I would lip-synch with them word by word; with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. I would arrive at eight-thirty in the morning and wait for half an hour until they opened the library. With the push of a button, I was in Atlanta or in the Spanish Pyrenees.