When I Lived in Modern Times Read Online Free PDF Page B

forty-five years ago. What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? Ifelt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be exactly the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was
me
that understood, the spy in their midst.
    There was no difficulty at all in obtaining permission to go to Palestine. The situation was not stable, they warned me, but with proper care and by closely following the advice of the officials I met there I should experience no danger.
    I was told, enthusiastically, of the sights I wound find: one of the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Nativity and other Christian and Muslim landmarks that did not interest me. Neither archeology nor ancient history moved me in the slightest. All the madonnas of the Renaissance were, for me, studies in perspective and pigment and skin tone.
    “You’ll want to visit Galilee,” they advised.
    “Where Christ walked on the water,” I replied. “How wonderful to think that I’ll see it with my own eyes.” But as I regarded things, I was pretty close to walking on water myself.
    Uncle Joe gave me a book of modern art as a going-away present. I looked forward to spending the voyage reading about Picasso, and Matisse, Miró and Chagall.

I TOOK the boat train to Marseilles. Farther along the coast, across the Chaîne de l’Estaque at Port-de-Bouc, others were also casting anchor. They were setting out on a more perilous voyage than mine. They had nowhere to go but forward, no choice but to make an illegal journey or stay where they were and rot.
    I sat on deck and thought how the whole story was about coming home. As I sailed the Mediterranean Sea, all over the world people were in mass transit. We were moving like tides across the continents and the seas, troopships full of men stamping their boots in impatience, hats flying into the air at the sight of land. The roads and railways were engorged with human, sweating, shivering, stinking, parched or pissing flesh, traveling not for adventure or for pleasure or to take a rest cure or acquire a tan or out of boredom or to find romance or to cure a broken heart—but because they had a hunger for the good earth of home under their feet.
    Then there were those, like me, who understood on some primitive level that the state of flux was the one we were in. The political map was changing. A lot of people were about to acquire brand-new nationalities, if not entirely new identities. And I was one of them, on both counts.
    My fellow passengers on board ship were mostly returning officers of the Palestine Police and Mandate civil servants with their wives and families. There were a few biblical tourists, as I was pretending to be. They swallowed whole my impersonation of them.
    Every morning a small group of Christians held a prayer service and I joined them, for appearance’ sake. I told them that I had undergone a revelation the previous year, when I felt that God had touched my hand. I withdrew my rosary piously. A woman looked at it.
    “Are you going over to Rome?” she asked, nervously.
    “No. Why?”
    “I see you have those beads the RCs use.”
    But how was I to distinguish between the different sects of Christianity? They were all just mindless Gentiles to me. I threw the rosary overboard, where it floated on the dirty foam for a few minutes before being swept under.
    How much longer could I have kept up with this invented personality? Not that long. The person I pretended to be was beginning to get on my nerves. But it didn’t matter because I was nearly home.
    When I saw the Promised Land I nearly cried out: “This is it! Now history starts!” But that would have betrayed me and I was trying as hard as I could to be circumspect, to play simple card games in the second-class lounge, to flirt with the young police sergeants and the Mandate pen-pushers, to make small talk and never