by Batya Gur
Michael looked outside and thought of the greenish-gray that dominated the movie Blade Runner, the endless drizzle that had depressed him more and more as the violence and alienation of the world created on the screen became increasingly apparent to him.
“But what are you going to do about jet lag? You have to be alert for your interviews. From what I’ve read in the papers, you haven’t made a hell of a lot of progress up to now.”
“It’s a difficult case,” said Michael without taking offense.
“But you’re the star, hey? You’re the current darling over there. You’d better watch out though; stars fall fast with them. Don’t take me as an example—nobody can touch me.”
“Perhaps you can tell me something about this lawyer. What do you know about him?”
“Sure I can tell you a few things about him; I’ve got connections here. I thought you wanted to wait until we got to the airport—you’ve got time until your flight.” Shatz stole a glance at Michael and began talking in a monotone: “Well, what’s there to tell? Max Lowenthal, sixty-one years old, Jewish, born in Russia, but his parents came to America when he was a baby. Graduated from Harvard Law School but nevertheless lives in some hole called Chapel Hill, a university town in North Carolina. He teaches in the law school there, and he’s also very active in the ACLU. You know what that is?” Michael confessed that he had no idea.
“It’s an organization—the initials stand for American Civil Liberties Union. He’s a civil rights freak, a real weirdo. He could be a rich, successful lawyer anywhere else, but he sits there in the South instead. Though he’s loaded, believe me.” Shatz noticed the incomprehension on Michael’s face at the English word and explained: “Stuffed with money. He’s got a big house in Chapel Hill and a summer house on an island, and what hasn’t he got. And every year he goes skiing in Switzerland. He donates a lot of money to the UJA too. We’ve got a file on him here: he’s always been active in all kinds of causes, traveled to Russia a lot and sat in the back of the buses in the South when they were reserved for blacks—you know the type. We’ve got them in Israel too,” and Shatz sniffed contemptuously.
“And what’s his connection with the Russian?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but he had a lot of connections in Russia, this Lowenthal; he even wrote a book about the Russian Jews, and he smuggled all kinds of manuscripts out of there. He’ll tell you himself. The Russian’s name is . . .” Shatz rummaged in his memory and finally took a piece of paper out of the inner pocket of his safari jacket and glanced at it as he drove: “. . . Boris Zinger. He was in the same camp with some other Russian, a poet, the guy whatsis, the young one from the university, Dudai, was interested in. Lowenthal got him out after thirty years in some jail or camp in Russia; I’ve got it all written down,” he said in the aggressive tone of one who suspects that his reliability as a source of information is being called into doubt. “Just a minute, I have to concentrate on the turnoff to La Guardia now,” and they were both silent until Shatz parked in a huge lot. Then he hurried on ahead of Michael into the airport, examined the flight times, and said with satisfaction, wiping his face with a used tissue he took out of his pocket: “You’ve got over half an hour. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
When they finally sat down on two stools at the bar, after covering vast distances inside the terminal, Michael insisted on ordering a coffee with his beer, and as he drank the tasteless liquid he looked at Shatz sipping his scotch and wondered whether he had ordered the drink to impress him or if he was really in the habit of drinking hard liquor in the morning. Shatz cleared his throat and said: “He’s a wreck, that Zinger, a real wreck. He’s got some problem with his heart, and Lowenthal was very uptight about him meeting you. It was only after I explained the situation, after I told him about your case, that he agreed, but on condition that it was in small doses and that he decided on the timetable. I arranged for him to meet you there. It’s a hell of a long way from the airport to that town. Listen, since we’re talking about it, what’s your story with that cassette? Is it true you had evidence and you wiped it out?”
“No; where did you get hold of that rumor?” asked Michael, trying, he didn’t know why, to disguise the hostility in his voice.
“I don’t know, I heard it somewhere. I heard there were a lot of fuck-ups in the case. That you had a whole cassette and only one sentence was left. So why didn’t they erase the whole thing? That’s what surprises me about it: if someone erased it, why didn’t they erase the whole thing?”
It was clear that he was waiting for an explanation, and against his will—afterward Michael blamed the weather and the panic aroused in him by the big city; even though he wasn’t actually in it, he could feel its frenzy in all his nerve ends—against his will, he said: “It wasn’t exactly evidence, but something that could have provided a new lead. It’s a cassette that someone erased in broad daylight, somewhere where he apparently wasn’t supposed to be. So he was in a hurry, or somebody disturbed him in the middle. It was inside a car and—”
“He erased it inside a car?” said Shatz sharply. “How? the tape decks in cars are only for listening; you can’t record with them, or erase either.”
Michael smiled. “If you saw the car you’d understand. An Alfa Romeo GTV—it’s got a stereo system big enough for a dance hall. It can do everything.”
“Is that so,” said Shatz slowly, taking it in. “Who’s got a car like that in Israel?”
“Shaul Tirosh had one,” said Michael despite his dislike of Shatz’s gossipy inquisitiveness.
“I heard that the gentleman in question left tracks leading him right to those gas cylinders,” said Shatz with a sly expression on his face. He narrowed his eyes and chewed an ice cube.
“Tell me,” said Michael angrily, “how did you hear everything so quickly? Who told you those things?”
“Much more easily than you think. I’ve got a brother; you know him.”
“Me? Your brother? Where do I know your brother from?”
“Think about it for a minute. We don’t look alike, me and my brother, but we’re brothers anyway.” Shatz laughed, and Michael felt the blood rising to his face. “Meir Shatz the historian is your brother?” he asked incredulously.
“It’s a fact, whether you like it or not,” said Shatz, roaring with laughter. “And we’re close too; he brought me up. We were orphaned at an early age, and he was like a father to me. Are you shocked?” he asked with open enjoyment. And then he added: “That’s why you’ve got standing with me, because of what my brother told me about you. You don’t have to be so shocked. He’s the intellectual of the family, but I have my role too. I take care of the practical side. You think he would own an apartment today without me?”
“None of that explains how you came by all that information so quickly,” said Michael.
“My brother’s got a friend—you know him too: Klein, Ariyeh Klein—and he told him a few things. I talk to my brother on the phone almost every other day. With my job, I’m telling you, I’ve got God by the balls.” He ordered another scotch.
“Still,” continued Shatz, “When you think about it, there are a couple of things that don’t add up. A guy fills diving tanks with CO, and he doesn’t take the trouble to cover up his tracks, he trips himself up like that? Orders the gas in Klein’s name? Scribbles some signature? What’s it all about?”
“Yes”—Michael sighed—“it doesn’t make too much sense. What other options did he have, though? He could have broken into a lab, but that would have been even riskier.”
Shatz looked at his glass and rattled the ice cubes. When he spoke, his voice was more serious and deliberate, as if he had lost the wish to impress. “I think it was something else,” he said slowly.
“Like what?” asked Michael, glancing at his watch.
“I think,” said Shatz, “that he was sick and tired, that he wanted to be exposed. I think Tirosh was a burnt-out case.”
Michael said nothing. He t
hought of Graham Greene’s novel about the leper colony, and about the last chapter of Agnon’s Shira. He thought of corruption and decay and of Manfred Herbst following the nurse Shira, whose name meant poetry, into the leper hospital, forevermore. And he looked at Shatz with new respect and thought that again he had made a mistake in judgment. After a long silence, he asked: “You mean he wanted to get caught?”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but that’s the general direction, more or less. I wouldn’t mention it at the SIT meeting if I was you, though,” he warned.
“Actually, what you say is very interesting. But it doesn’t fit in too well with his personality. What made you think of it?” asked Michael curiously.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Shatz, leaning forward. Michael looked at the sweaty hands holding the empty glass, at the manicured nails. “The will made me think of it. It’s quite a strange will, isn’t it? As if the guy was putting things in order before making his exit, right?” Shatz didn’t wait for a reply and, almost in the same breath, went on to say: “I want to ask you something else. Dudai—have you got the exact time when he arrived in Eilat?”
“Really,” protested Michael, “what do you take us for? I’ve got a signed statement that he arrived in Eilat at four o’clock. He left the department faculty meeting at half past eleven. In his own car. The director of the diving club spoke to him at quarter past four. Even if he flew—and we checked that he didn’t—I don’t think he would have had the time to deal with Tirosh and get there by four.”
“Pity,” said Shatz. “I had a theory.”
Michael looked at him and thought again of the man’s image in the police force, of the impression he himself had had of him until the last few minutes. He felt guilty and ashamed of having snubbed him from the first minute. Now he wanted to take it back, to somehow express his approval, but Shatz looked into the mirror opposite them and said in his old voice: “Well, buddy, your flight’s leaving soon. We’d better get moving.” He glanced at the check and left some bills on the table with a practiced, confident gesture, then led Michael to the departure gate for his flight. “I hope you’re not shocked when you hear the way they speak down South. I don’t know what your English is like, pal, but it’s hard even for me to understand them, and I’ve been here for three years.” He laughed. “Call me from there if you like, if you need anything. Maybe you’ll change your mind and we’ll go out and have a bit of fun together on your way back.”
19
There were three of them. Jews, of course. We’re talking about 1950. One of them had emigrated with his parents to Palestine, to Eretz Israel, in the mid-thirties, when he was still a small boy. His mother became very homesick for Russia, and when she saw that there was no hope of realizing the ideals she had dreamed of, she took her son and returned to the Soviet Union. We’re talking now about the period just after World War Two but before the establishment of the state of Israel. Anyway, she chose to return to Russia. The victorious Red Army attracted her, Stalin attracted her; God knows, today we’re a little wiser, so it’s hard for us to understand what attracted her.” Laughter. “By then her young son was sixteen years old. There were a handful of similar cases, of Jews who emigrated back to Russia from Palestine, each of them a story of its own. Almost all of them regretted it. So this woman took her son back with her to the Soviet Union, and they lived for a couple of years in Moscow. And when Anatoly Ferber was eighteen, he decided to cross the border with two friends his age and go back to Israel. It wasn’t the most legal thing in the world, as you know.” A deep breath. “There were the three of them. Ferber, whom you’re so interested in—he’s probably the hero of your story—had of course grown up in Tel Aviv, had a Hebrew education—his longing to go back is easily explained. But it doesn’t explain his influence on Boris. Our friend Boris is the hero of my story: thirty years in Soviet jails and under house arrest and it’s a wonder he came out of alive, not to mention the state of his heart, his diabetes, kidneys, and God knows what else.
“Boris was the second. They reached Batumi, a Russian port on the shore of the Black Sea, seven kilometers from Turkey. And there they were caught. Boris claims that they were caught because the third member of the group informed on them. A guy called Duchin. At night, when Boris was burning with fever, when he was staying here, so many years later, with me, he would always talk about Duchin. But he didn’t even try to track him down when they let him out of jail. Go and understand human beings.
“They were together for seven years, your Anatoly and my Boris: three years in the Lubyanka in Moscow, two years in the Perm prison in Mordovia, and then in Magadan, in northeast Siberia, a labor camp, what they call in Russian katorga. They were there for two years. There people have to toe the line and work like dogs. I can’t begin to describe the suffering to you, because it’s indescribable. Maybe you’ve read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. That book actually describes Magadan, but maybe these details aren’t important to you at the moment. In any case, it was there in Magadan that Anatoly Ferber died. What did he die of? Pneumonia. Believe me, dying of pneumonia was no problem, with the hunger and the work and the miserable excuse for medical treatment they had there. Antibiotics already existed in the world. But not there. That’s one of the things I’ve been fighting for all these years, not only to let them go but also to let them live. It wouldn’t be correct to say that Anatoly Ferber was a real dissident. All he wanted was to return to Israel. But in the labor camp he apparently became a dissident, because they sentenced them to five years at the beginning and then to another five—it was during those years that Ferber died—under Article 58-10: Anti-Soviet Agitation, a very common charge. Anyone can decide what constitutes anti-Soviet agitation. That’s the story. Later on my Boris was transferred to the Butyrki prison in Moscow, and he was there for another five years, and after that he was in the Lubyanka again. And another four years in Lefortovo prison, also in Moscow. From then on, he lived in a town near Moscow, under house arrest because he had become a hero and mentor of the younger dissidents. It was only recently that I finally succeeded in getting him out of the country. Don’t ask me how, but I brought him here, to my house, and he’s been under medical supervison ever since. He wants to go to Israel, of course, but in his condition I doubt if he’ll make it. His English is very poor, but we speak Yiddish and a bit of Russian, and with the young fellow who was here three weeks ago, the one you said died in a diving accident, he spoke all night in Hebrew.”
Michael sat in his hotel room, translating into Hebrew the words of the lawyer coming out of the tape recorder. Now he stopped writing and listened to his own voice describing the circumstances of Iddo Dudai’s murder. The American lawyer, Max Lowenthal, uttered exclamations of shock and horror. The word “devastating” occurred several times, and Michael opened his English-Hebrew dictionary to look it up.
He sat at a desk in a large, comfortable room painted white and brown in the Carolina Inn, a colonial-style building close to the campus and the hospital in the university town of Chapel Hill. They had brought him there after Max Lowenthal and the ill Boris Zinger had signed preliminary statements in the presence of two policemen, produced for the occasion by Lowenthal. Once Michael had stressed the importance of Boris’s statement as evidence, the lawyer had no need of any further explanations—although he did express some doubt as to the admissibility of this evidence in court, since the local policemen could not understand a word that was said. They might be capable of understanding the words of his own statement, Lowenthal had said, laughing, but he doubted very much if they would be able to comprehend Zinger’s biblical Hebrew. The tape came to an end, and Michael Ohayon peered out of the big window, which overlooked the street. The town was utterly tranquil. In New York, Shatz had complained, you heard the noise and the traffic all night long, even on the twelfth floor, but here all that was audible was the chirping of the crickets. The air-conditioning was o
n in the room. Michael opened the window and breathed in the heavy, moist air saturated with the sweet smell of magnolia blossoms. The whole place looked like an immense forest, giving way here and there to occasional buildings and narrow streets. He couldn’t fall asleep. When he returned home, he decided, he would see a doctor about his insomnia. Then he sat down and listened yet again to the tapes he had recorded during the day. At the hospital, Lowenthal had repeated his warning before allowing him to go into Zinger’s room, exhorting him not to ask about conditions in the prisons where he had been incarcerated, to be as gentle and tactful as possible. The Jewish community in the nearby city of Charlotte was paying the bill for Boris’s hospitalization, explained Lowenthal, which made the private room and all the necessary treatments possible. The man was completely broken inside. He was only fifty-five, Lowenthal said with a sigh, but he looked like a ruin, though better than he did when he first arrived.
His condition was so sensitive, said Lowenthal, that any excitement put him at risk. In fact, it was after the conversation with Iddo Dudai that he had been rushed to the hospital. During that interview he had been obliged to return in his imagination to all the terrible events that even he, Lowenthal, had not dared to ask him about.
Michael turned the cassette over and went on listening to Lowenthal’s lively voice. He remembered the long, narrow face, with its small lips. A pampered mouth, he thought when he first saw him, until the American naïveté that had made all that wide-ranging work possible filled him with awe. Lowenthal told him about his activities without either boastfulness or modesty, speaking matter-of-factly, like someone explaining how he had come upon some information. After all, he had written a book on the subject, he asserted. Soviet Jewry was the issue closest to his heart, he said passionately, bursting with youthful energy. Back home, thought Michael, such intensity existed only among the right-wing religious fanatics of Gush Emunim and the handful of Trotskyists in the group they called Avant-garde.