Read Online When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant - Free Book Online Page A

circumventing it to suit their own ends. The sense that rules were to be gotten around by some means or other was instinctive with them. They shirked their work duties, slept in, refused to share anything and were constantly arguing for a largeramount of pocket money to buy chocolate with, of which they were inordinately fond. Thefts began to occur. Small piles of hoarded items like shoes began to be found under their beds.
    They spat when they heard what my nationality was. They had picked up some English from their captors. They were young men, graduates of a very different school of life from the one that I had attended.
    “The British are anti-Semites,” they said.
    “That’s not true,” I told them, “not all, anyway.”
    “The Labour Party is anti-Semitic.”
    “No, it’s not. They’re socialists.”
    “Like the
National
Socialists.”
    Inside they were ash, burned out from within. They were receptacles for hatred and there was nothing I could say to them. Their families lay beneath the earth of Auschwitz or were incinerated into nothing. Or they drifted on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, fishes eating their flesh with tiny teeth or buried beneath a shoal of sand and shells. Meier said they reminded him of a whole tribe of Jonahs. They had been swallowed by the whale and survived its dark belly and miraculously they had been washed up on dry land. Still they stank of that vast, obscene darkness filled with half-digested flesh in which it was not natural for anything to live.
    One day they all disappeared, transferred on a night when there was no moon to another kibbutz and I thought I should not see any of them again.

A fter a while fragments of sentences started to appear in my mind in Hebrew. The names of the plants and the animals and the different kibbutz buildings were Hebrew now. I had forgotten their different equivalents and many of them I had never known at all. When I spoke in Hebrew I was not Evelyn Sert but Eve from the kibbutz and Evelyn lived inside me, my private self.
    It was Evelyn who remembered, in English, an archipelago of wet brown leaves on the pavement on Tottenham Court Road one autumn morning, emerging from the lift at Goodge Street tube station, looking across the street at the windows of Heal’s and at the backs of couples staring at sofas and cupboards. Or the Christmas lights decorating the façade of Selfridges before the war. Or the flames of the bonfire they lit on Primrose Hill on Guy Fawkes Day when we burned in effigy the Catholic traitor, the terrorist of his times. Or the smell of beeswax polish on the wooden floor of the assembly hall of my school. Or the small waves dashing their heads off on the gray shingle on the beach at Brighton on summer weekends, when my mother and I walked along the pier to see a music-hall turn. Or the smell of tram oil along Kingsway.
    And all these memories were in the English language and what I saw when I opened my eyes was in Hebrew, so how could I know what I was any more, when I felt just as much a composite character as I had at school where the blond girls with blond eyelashes felt like members of another race?
    Something was starting in the country. When we gathered around the radio, on the news we heard that the Irgun underground had attacked the police station at Ramat Gan, escaping with British weapons but leaving behind one of their own wounded, whose name was Dov Gruner. The Lehi penetrated an encampment of the 6th Airborne Division in Tel Aviv and killed seven paratroopers in the car park. The day after, British troops went on the rampage in Netanya and Be’er Tuvya. A nighttime curfewwas imposed on the cafés and restaurants of Tel Aviv. All this happened in the course of one week.
    They talked about the political situation all the time, but it did not really affect our lives. We lived in a self-enclosed world with its own internal order. Some evenings, out of a need to escape, I would walk a little way along the road