When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

Author:Linda Grant [Grant, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101563397
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

I MET him at eight in a café at the junction of Allenby Road and Rehov Ben Yehuda, just before Allenby took a sharp turn down to the beach. Outside, a small chamber orchestra sat on folding chairs on the pavement playing Mozart and Strauss waltzes. It was composed of four men in suits and ties and a woman in an antique black cocktail dress from before the war, cut on the bias. Their faces, bent over their instruments, dripped with sweat. One of the violinists stroked the wood of his instrument between pieces, as if he was afraid it would buckle beneath his fingers in the heat. Johnny was inside, under a noisy electric fan, eating apple strudel.

“Who are they?”

“From Budapest. They were with the symphony orchestra. You know what they used to say ten years ago? Anyone who arrived off the boat without a violin case was presumed to be a pianist. Here, I’ve got something for you.” He passed an envelope to me under the table. “Don’t look now.”

“What is it?”

“A passport.”

“I’ve got a passport.”

“Yes. In your own name. This one is made out to Priscilla Jones. You might need it.”

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“Connections. Get a photograph taken and stick it in. What film do you want to see? I prefer action pictures. Is there anything on like that?”

He didn’t want me to ask too many questions. Okay. In England I might have dismissed him as a spiv but here, in Palestine, under British occupation, as far as I was concerned he was a hero. A Jewish hero and how many do we have of those? How many tough guys have there ever been to look up to? A few fish with sharp teeth swimming in an ocean of vegetable life—old men with beards, bent over their books.

I looked at the films listed in the paper, as the quintet entered, for the third time, the Vienna Woods. It was all just sentimental love stories so we settled for The Picture of Dorian Gray with Hurd Hatfield, Donna Reed and Peter Lawford. I liked Hatfield, he was darkly handsome and I’d seen him in Dragon Seed the year before. We left the café and I put some piastres into the tweed cap on the pavement next to the woman in the cocktail dress. She smiled at me, sweat dripping down her bosom.

In the cinema, Johnny didn’t understand the film at all and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“What was that about?” he asked me as the curtains closed.

“Double identity,” I said. “But really it’s about the unconscious, the idea that we have a self, one part of which we are conscious of and keep control over, and another interior life which is wayward and even dark.”

“Do you believe that stuff?”

“Yoohoo,” an English voice cried out from a couple of rows behind as we got up to leave. It was Mrs. Mackintosh and her husband.

We were jostled by crowds out on to the street and nearly lost them but they appeared again, at my shoulder.

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