To America and Back

by Mordechai Landsberg

“Dear Nathan, let me think.” said Raphaella to her sweetheart, after he had revealed to her his bloodshedding heart, his difficult economic situation, the almost dead end of his efforts.

  “I must relax a little.” Raphaella’s voice was weak, “Let me have a week rest, in order to recover from this hit or shit, and think about a solution. I must have rest. The doc has givrn me some drops of Valerian drug, against my irregular heart beats.. I’ll let you know my answer to your proposal, regarding the Rabbi’s Yeshiva. I’m sure we’ll get together… I am really sick.”

  “No!” shouted Naitty, “ I need an answer now, regarding Israel!”

  He was grabbing her right hand’s fingers, and then smoothed his touch, even like caressing; then he pressured her tightly again.

  “Even if you announce that your nerves net is torn, and that your physical strength and psychological power are lost… ”shouted Naitty, “and your orgastic pleasure becomes zero… I mean, for joining me even to Paradise. I am not ready to get any argument against my proposal regarding Israel. Not the Yeshiva”.

  She was weeping: “I know that you hope to trick something in order to get back here. To civilized America, to the heart and mind of culture. But … I have suffered enough in my life. You know that, Nathan.”

  “I’m adamant, that you will be coming with me to the Holy land, Raphaella. I know your fears; but they’ll vanish. You will be wearing there the ormanented kerchief. I don’t ask you… an immediate shave of your hairs. You will lit Sabbath candles, not like here, that you’ve done it for me, as you said… You know how a Yiddish Maidl(maiden) should behave. With God’s help- all that will change our fate. The greatness of God’s belief had been engraved deeply in my mind, and now even more: Not in vain – the Jews have survived alive- as individuals and as a nation, for three thousand years. D’you imagine? It’s impossible that our fathers and forefathers and their forefathers – had been mistaken thousands of years, and were praying for naught, to empty skies!? Without anything inside it!? They were not stupid, all those Jews. Even though I agree, that some were and are nowaday. But it’s a personal luck, that God has created us in this manner. And that personal luck can… luckily be changed, all at once. Have you understood the deep thoughts, that I have just expressed?”

  She rolled her eyes, for fear and amazement.

  “Let me go… home, Naitty,” she mumbled, “I can’t think now in sanity... regarding our new situation.”

  He held her right hand very tightly, and his strong fingers were like a metal plyer pressuring and biting her flesh. Then he pulled her to his chest and turned her body and hand around, with her buttocks toward him, aching her by the curvy pull. She cried and screamed.

  “I must leave America immediately, and you’ll come with me.” Naitty shouted. His voice was threatening, and his eyes were suddenly searching around. She didn’t guess what.

  “I am not ready,” she spoke harshly, because of pain, “to hear you talk like that, Nathan! You have suddenly changed the tone of talking to me. You have been – till now- so considerate, quite gentle; so good talking, so humane. I had been your angel, so you’re telling me. What’s happened to you? I, who had been hurt so much by men, who used my good heart and my sense of giving and assisting and all the plenty of goodness and pretiness and pitiness that God had planted in me… But I believe in a Universal God, not in the narrow minded Jewish one.”

  “You offend God, saying that!” Naitty roared.

  “ I’ve told that also to Effy. Am I not allowed to have my own belief? I don’t need a Holy Land for God, and especially not Israel, that is so far, and full of misery and problems. I read the newspapers. You and your Effy.. .AYYYYYUYEY! You believe to your half-mongoloid half-outist cousin?”

  “You’ll come with me to that land, where God’s spirit is really felt. There is the best place for worshipping Him!”

  “We’ll see that,” she said, and yelled again from pain, as Naitty has turned her again, now was re-facing her. He put his leg in between her legs, and by a short push caused her to fall on the rough wooden floor of the Gallery.

  “Nathan, I know you need money.” She mumbled while he kneeled beside her. “Let me… take a taxi and bring you two thousand bucks or more. It’ll help you, I’m sure.”

  “No! You don’t take any step without me, from now on.” he said very vehemently, and his leg on her was aching, as adding force to his oral order.

  “I’ll buy today two sailing tickets to Israel. You’ll wait me here, in closed door. Then we’ll go together to your room, you’ll take the money there – and we’ll stay here again, till the sail.”

  “Naitty, I suddenly don’t recognize you. What happened to you?

  How aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I was your sex slave for at least seven or eight months. What has gone wrong in your head? A financial situation can improve, and you’re full of capability in that. Please hear me, Nathan! Are you on hard drugs?”

  She was looking straight into his eyes, and saw some mad-bad omen there; but she was still hoping to make him sane again.

  He was now kneeling beside her. In his palm was a Rafia wire, that he had found near some of his sacks around. He was encircling that wire around her legs, and she was dumb, being shocked. Then he rounded her ankles by another wire.

  Raphaella did not move. Her heart was melting from fear and her mind was obscure. Naitty had taken two additional wires, and by them he tied her two hands, close to her palms. That hurt her and caused pains again. She had tried to rise up, but he pushe her back, his lips filled with foam, and his fingers trembling but forceful. Raphaella spat him twice by his face. While he was still kneeling, he slapped her cheeks four times and then grabbed her hips. He was rising with her, while his strong hands tightened her body to his belly and chest and strong feet. Raphaella was feeling that he was going to do something he’d regret about; and she was regretting, she had not thought about that beforehand.

  She tried to mumble ‘well well, I’ll do every … thing’ – but his red eyes, burning with a dark hatred and asking revenge, had a message that this time he won’t listen any more. He moved her on the air to right and left, in parallel to the floor, as hesitating what to do. Then he advanced her head to his, to look at her face and terrified beautiful eyes. He was still embracing her body – and was folding her – by his strong arms, tightly around his hips. He raised her again, and was carrying his trembling swooning sweetheart toward the narrow steps, leading from the Gallery to the store’s first floor.

  He suddenly threw his sweetheart from the Gallery down, without a second thought. There were twelve stairs under him, covered with a red carpet. A roar of her skull crush was heard as a thunder. Naitty was looking down and shouting in English toward the far body:

  “You bitch, you deserve it! You, Devil’s dicsciple!” Then he said in Hebrew, with his American accent: “Hashem (God) has done that to you. and he’s done that to me. too! I am… to nowhere. No… I’ll not jump. I am a delegate, I’m a messenger! A voice is coming with a message from Heaven: ‘And a Redeemer will come to Zion, to the repentents of Jacob’s people’. You, woman, had refused to repent, and end your sins. Revenge! God is revenging his enemies! Revenge!”

  Naitty’s felt jolted. He had already bolted down the steps, continuing to mumble his previous calls, that he had been learning in Heider (religious classroom) years ago, in a Jewish Ashkenzi accent. Firstly, he put Raphaella’s legs into two empty sacks of wheet flour. For a second he discerned her bleeding head, that had been put aside stranegly, and he avoided looking at it any more. Her blood was filling around a small pool of the red liquid, and Naitty tried to wrap the whole head with a small empty white sack of Matzeh flour. It had soon become red, and he moved the corpse a little and was putting the whole head into another sack. Then he rushed back to a corner, and brought two bigger empty sacks and strong ropes. He pushed her feet into one of them, and to another one he pushed Raphaella’s whole upper body, including her wrapped head by the
smaller sacks.

  He noticed that her belly and hips had not been hidden well: Her thick leather belt, ornamented with small golden starlets and anchors, was seen in the middle. ‘Oh, that’s not important,’ he mumbled. He was feeling the icy sweat stinging his back and chest and legs, and the swift pounding blood pressure in his temples. He tightened the sacks to the corpse by circling ropes around and connecting them. Then he opened the store’s entry door, and peeped out. He saw the yellow light of the street’s electric lamps, and some green light coming from an illuminated electric ad of a pharmacy.

  All the buildings around, blocks and offices and stores, were silent, as dumb and deaf. The time was ten p.m. and he decided he shouldn’t wait. He knew that there had been a swimming pool in the neighborhood. It would be closed by Juta cloths, he said to himself. They avoid waving winds to come in.

  Naitty decided to walk towards that place.

  “If I succeed to drag Raphaella, be her memory blessed,” he just thought, “to that place, I’ll be safe. I can throw her to the water. Hopefully th pool is still filled with water. I’ve never enterd it, now I must… I should not call a taxi for that. Any stupid driver would know what is such a load. O’key, I must fix some long planks along the corpse, and drag it myself to the pool. So, go forward! If somebody discerns me, he’ll think I’m a poor construction worker, forced by his employer to work late… Well, my brain is still promptly active, by God’s command. For better or for worse.”

  He went outside, locked the store and was stepping forward, trying not to be heard. Forty or fifty steps from the store, there was a Bulldozer parking in an almost empty square. Around it were scattered sacks of cement and some brown bricks. Then he saw a pile of planks, each one as long as a man’s height, at least. Naitty was smiling to himself, taking under each of his two elbows three or four planks. He started to walk with them, and was feeling an enormous force driving him back to the store. He thought that he could insert them into the ropes fastened around the sacks, and in that way the corpse would be well hidden.

  When he got back into the store, he lit the electric light again, and looked over the sacks on the floor. He kneeled toward the corpse and listened if he could hear something coming out of its chest. The soft touch of his beloved one’s breast, made him mad. He began to shout: ‘Oy Vey,’ and rose up. But soon he was patiently tying the planks to the corpse, one by one. ‘Thank God’ – He mumbled, “that she had kept a thin, sexy figure. Very well. It won’t be a heavy load. God’ll help. I’ll just begin dragging.”

  He opened the door again and looked outside. Nobody was there, as before, and he was taking out all his load to the curvy sidewalk near the store. He recalled that he had not locked the door. He put the load down and rushed to the store and locked it.

  ‘Enough’ he said to himself, ‘I won’t stop dragging until I arrive to the pool and finalize my task.’

  Salty foam was filling Naitty’s mouth, while he was walking on his way, with the planks hiding the load underneath. His breath had become heavier from the carrying effort, and from the fear of being discovered. ‘God, help me to pass this path safely, as you had helped Jacob to pass Yabok passage, and afterward he fought against a bad man and succeeded.’ He slowed down, to search for a plain straight path, that the dragging noise won’t be heard. He was feeling again the dirty sweat creeping on his skin, mixed with some lime dust or cement powder bubling on the air. He calmed himself: “Only more two hundred meters… still … I hope the place would be open, or I’ll find some breach. For me – it’s nothing. In Korea I’ve found a sack of rice in a locked courtyard. I had the pliers then, and soon succeeded to have an easy cut of the fence’s iron net. Oh, what an idiot am I? I haven’t taken the pliers with me, though I had known I should need it. I see a small shed there. I’ll store the corpse under it.”

  He rushed back with a pounding heart. After having found what he had wanted, he came back breathing heavily. He was afraid that somebody would find the corpse, but it was lying there in the same manner that he had left it. He touched again Raphaella’s belt, which was a ‘siezing point’ for carrying her, pressed by the planks – along the way toward the swimming pool. He moand, and could not avoid a short weep, then strengthened himself. He found himself with his load beside the fence. He cut it from top to bottom, and was staring already at the pool. Dark water had been filling only half of its height. As Naitty saw that, he said ‘well’, and dragged his victim to hide behind a huge cactus planted nearby. After disconnecting the planks from the ropes, he threw the wrapping sacks as far as he could. Then he was undressing his sweethert’s body, soon embracing and kissing Raphaella’s breast, but not looking at the horrible sight of her head and skull that were still wrapped. He dragged the naked corpse twenty steps, looking into the darkness around him, till he arrived to the water. ‘Blood is not bleeding from the corpse any more, well.’ So he told himself, with a thought that the devil had caused him this queer dance with the bare corpse…

  Naithan took out the sacks from the corpse head, and threw the young woman bare body to the water. She had long sateen hair, her skull was blown up, her perfumes were still smelling from her dead body. He had a strange feeling that the prettiest of all girls that he had seen in his life, is again asking him, her sweetheart, to penetrate to her caves and conquer her holes… A Flopflopflok noise was heard from the water. The man Naitty looked around in great fear. There had been no one around, and he walked back through the breach he had created just a fw minutes before.

  I’ll tell Effy, he said to himself, that we will take a flight. He‘ll cancel the sail, if he had ordered a ship for us. ‘El Al’ is a good flying Company. It’s ticket much more expensive than a ship’s, but I must hurry to the Savior’s land.. No, that is a Christian idiom. The Saving Country, that will rescue me from the troubles… My name is Nathan, which in Hebrew means: ‘has given’, God has given me the rescue. And Freulich in Yiddish is ‘joy’… A joy of God’s believers. Symbolic names.

  CHAPTER 35