something I had never had and of whose absence I had never been aware; for even before I took up residence in my squalid cave in the marketplace—in my parents’ home, in the boarding school, in all the places where I had ended up, there was nowhere that was really clean, and it was only when I stepped into the quiet whiteness of the Brandeis residence that I could look back and be revolted, and only then did I begin to yearn for this new wonder.
The comfortable cleanliness, which was deep but not sterile, the vaulted white ceilings, the solid, welcoming wooden furniture—everything invited me to lean back, to close my eyes, and sail to a land where nothing bad had ever happened. And I closed my eyes and sailed to that Neverland, because after she had turned my tattoo into an ornament, Oded’s mother went on calmly stroking me without hurrying to the stove. She traced the lines of the predator’s face with her finger, touched the bared fangs, and in parting also gave its nose a friendly little poke. And with this gentle poke I fell asleep and I went on sleeping for a long time, until Aaron Gotthilf came back to ambush me and invade my dreams. For with the passing of time I had succeeded in banishing him from my dreams as well as my waking thoughts.
My lack of a mother and the absence of any other significant relations in my life were the main dowry I brought to my marriage with the Brandeis family. This was not a dowry to be admired out loud, but over the years we all came to appreciate its worth.
Free of parents, I relieved my father- and mother-in-law of the need to share the title “grandparents” with a pair of strangers, and gave them the gift of taking for granted the fact that their son and grandsons spent almost every holiday and Saturday with them. A picture in which they sit around the table with my pre-historic family is not one that I want to imagine. My father squirming and bragging and never still for a minute, the lock of hair stuck to his forehead growing greasy with effort. My mother raising her fair, plucked eyebrows, thin as a hair, in an exaggerated expression of amazement, and raising a hand to her operatically plunging neckline to feel her heart. Disgusting. I don’t want to think about the disgust. For a long time I succeeded in not thinking about it, and I succeeded so well that I was close to believing that we are the masters of our thoughts.
- 3 -
Disgust is a cunning infiltrator; it’s hard to keep its stealthy invasions at bay, and sometimes you have to recruit guards to protect you from them. The guardian of my soul against disgust was the idiotic Alice, the heroine of my newspaper column.
Alice appeared in my life when my sons were already in high school and empty pits of leisure began to yawn around me. The sentry of my soul appeared at the right time, a moment before my husband began to wonder where the artistic personality he had married, in his opinion, had disappeared to. Like a lot of other good things, the writing came to me as a result of a conversation with Menachem. Chemi collects books about journeys to Jerusalem. I sat on the comfortable window seat while he showed me an old-new addition to his collection to admire, and as I paged through it and examined the engravings I mused aloud that “you don’t need to be a pilgrim to see this city through the eyes of a traveler,” and in order to gild the lily of this pronouncement I added, “When you think about the history of Jerusalem, in a certain sense we’re all only visitors here.”
My family likes hearing remarks of this kind from me. Even though I haven’t written a word for years, those dear to me continue to boast of me as a poet—including the sons I kept from reading my poems—and in their opinion, these are the kinds of sayings an artist is supposed to produce.
Chemi beamed at me, said that this was a very original view, and before taking the book from me to return it to the shelf, he set me a challenge: “Come on, Elinor, let’s see you write something about Jerusalem, something short, from the point of view of a visitor. How long will it take you? Will a week be enough? Two?”
Menachem Brandeis knows how to direct others toward wanting what he wants. His son says that I have no idea how he used to tyrannize his employees and articled clerks. And how could I have any idea? In the family circle, not only have I never heard him raise his voice, I don’t even recall him sounding stern.
Two days after the conversation with Chemi, Alice was already there. And when she appeared, I had no idea that she would be with me for years to come.
My Alice—she has no surname—was born and grew up in the fictional town of Coldstone in Alaska, and came to Jerusalem with one overriding obsession: to learn how to paint desert light. Why Alaska? And why desert light? Just because. Because that’s what came into my head. With a pair of pigtails she came to me from a little town in Alaska to acquaint herself with a different light, and fell under the spell of a different city.
The first two chapters of her adventures—Alice enrolls in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Alice looks for an apartment in the picturesque quarter of Nahlaoth—were written in less than a week. A drawing teacher I met by lucky chance at exactly this time provided me with anecdotes about Bezalel; Nahlaoth I know very well. I had a basis in reality, and on it I began to elaborate the fantasy.
Over the years I composed hundreds of Alice episodes, but the characteristics of the heroine and the characteristics of the story remained as they were in the first two pieces that were written at the request-demand of Chemi: naïve and clueless, ignorant of our great stern beliefs, ignorant of the history and customs of the place, Alice from the realms of ice roams our streets, mostly our alleys, breathless with excitement, biting the tips of her braids, opening her eyes wide at the colorful sights she sees. Colorfulness is the key, and everyone who runs into Alice tends to see himself as colorful character.
“Are these real people? People you know?” Menachem asked when he finished reading my one thousand six hundred words.
“Partly. Not exactly. Partly yes. The Iraqi from the grocery store is quite real, as is the connection of the Armenian, Dakaan, to the Natural History Museum: the building was originally called the Villa Dakaan. Never mind. Most of it I made up. I was just having fun.” I went to the table to take my pages, but Menachem put his hand over them. “The fact that you’re talented goes without saying, but apart from being well-written, in my opinion you’ve hit on a gimmick here. Let me see what we can do with it.”
I didn’t protest. I was in Paradise. I was in the middle of the years of the Garden of Eden, and Alice was the kind of character you’d expect to meet among the trees. I enjoyed the company of this innocent, and from the moment she appeared I was in no hurry to get rid of her. My family was agog with silent excitement—Mom’s writing, my wife’s gone back to writing, quiet everybody. Even the boys didn’t think that their mother was embarrassing them—and without an explicit invitation on my part, Alice began to accompany me almost everywhere I went, and like a Cocker Spaniel puppy she would urge me to take her out for a walk.
Menachem spoke to whomever he spoke to, sent off the material, and that same week I met the person who was then the culture editor of The Jerusalemite and explained the “gimmick” to him. As if I had intended a gimmick from the outset: Alice as a kind of reporter. She goes to real places in the city and interviews people, but her reports on them are only half true, and both of us are free to add fictional characters and fictional elements as the fancy strikes us.
Like Chemi, the editor too used words like “fresh” and “authentic.” But at the same time he wondered about the possibility of libel suits. I promised him that there was nothing to worry about and that no such situation would come up. It wouldn’t come up because the enthralled Alice saw nothing but good, and there was no way that anyone would be offended by her descriptions. In fact the opposite would probably happen: Alice would make the people she met see themselves as colorful characters and rejoice in the colorfulness of the world.
What I said without giving it much thought turned out to be true. In all her explorations of the city, innocently delighting in Jerusalem
