by Etgar Keret
On his mother’s side, Boris came from an educated middle-class family from Kiev, all former members of the Communist Party. The boy had seen many movies, including Mafia movies he bought, stole, or smuggled. Together, in the Fox’s hideout, they watched The Godfather, about the Italian Mafia, four times, and Once Upon a Time in America, about the Jewish Mafia, three times. Inspired by such films, they developed their first business plan. While his father was taking a shower, Saïd explained the details to him.
The Fox did not offer an opinion. He just got out of the shower. That same night, when Saïd returned home, he found all of his things out on the street in black plastic garbage bags. Saïd and Boris’s plan was simple and worked well. Just like the characters in the movies, they spent their time selling protection: preventing robberies they themselves would carry out if payments were not forthcoming. The Palestinian invested all the money he had earned while working for his father, but Boris contributed the bulk of the capital.
Saïd’s uncle by marriage was an Israeli, about forty years old, corpulent, his head completely shaved, and a sergeant major of police headquarters in Bat Yam. Thanks to his assistance, and despite the danger of making incursions into territories belonging to much larger gangs, the business went like clockwork. Saïd and his father did not speak for years, at least that’s what my wife was told by his mother, but every week she would receive from her son a roll of bills that allowed her to live comfortably.
Once their respective organizations had grown so much that it was no longer practical to keep them separate, father and son met again. The Fox had specialized in the prosperous business of methamphetamines and heroin, which had already wreaked havoc on the streets of Beersheba and Dimona. His son had continued to pillage the commercial sector, with the help of Boris and five well-chosen teenagers, as well as the assistance of the always efficient Bat Yam police force.
Their partnership resulted in a well-oiled enterprise. The Fox placed an army at the disposal of his son, and Saïd trained the teenagers to distribute the drugs on the streets. Moreover, and without charging a single shekel, Saïd and Boris brought with them the sergeant major of Bat Yam and his subordinates. From then on it was the police who took charge—in exchange for a reasonable commission for everybody involved—of guaranteeing the entrance of merchandise through the port of Haifa, and to cover up, whenever necessary, murders committed on the streets.
A year later, with business growing by leaps and bounds, the Fox and his son became, with each passing day, much too notorious. The old Mafias, as could be expected, joined together to try to get rid of the burgeoning competition. Before long, one of their soldiers was shot in the head and another soldier avenged him. Shootings from both sides became frequent. During one shootout, Saïd unknowingly killed a capo sitting in the backseat of a car.
* * *
War, like a slow, black, unpredictable snake, slithered through Jaffa’s oldest streets, leaving dozens of bodies in its wake. By the time Irina appeared, five months had passed since the first shot had been fired. Tall and strong, Boris’s youngest sister arrived to take care of their mother, whose health had begun to fail. Saïd saw her first from afar, standing in a doorway, and he felt that those blue eyes were shining with the sun, like in a dream.
He thought about her all day. He also dreamed about her that night, running from a fire, impossible to reach. Very early one morning, a week after he first glimpsed her, he found an excuse to go to the house, accompanied as usual by a Moldavian bodyguard, more than six feet tall and intimidating. When she saw Saïd, Irina gave him a firm handshake and a kiss on each of his cheeks.
He had never been so close to a woman other than his mother. She made coffee, and with a shy smile she talked about Ukraine, winter, the airplane. Saïd fell in love immediately. She started to feel something similar and was increasingly unable to hide it. Boris did not seem to notice. And their father, in addition to taking care of the logistical details of the business, was a man feared for his bad temper, his drunkenness, and his brother-in-law.
Soon the lovers began to meet secretly in downtown Tel Aviv. Their ritual included taking separate routes then meeting on Allenby Street, on Dizengoff Street, under the trees along Rothschild Boulevard, in neighborhoods where they felt like complete foreigners, surrounded by rich, intelligent, young Ashkenazi Jews. They spent whole afternoons holding hands, kissing on park benches, watching small clouds floating by in the sky.
They spent several months watching this life they would never have, as if peering through a shop window. They realized that they needed to be together, even if blood would have to be spilled. Sex was part of it from the very beginning. They had wonderful times in cheap hotels with names like Heaven or Costa Azul or Holidays, across from the wide beaches of Bat Yam, in claustrophobic rooms with white and red Formica, dirty windows looking out on the Mediterranean, and mirrors on the ceilings.
Eight weeks later Saïd secretly introduced his mother and Irina at a special dinner he had prepared for the occasion. My wife’s aunt did not want her only son to marry a Russian, but she liked Irina right away, and the rolls of bills kept arriving every week. Saïd’s mother listened to that beautiful girl and quickly gained her friendship—to Irina, she was like the mother who had left her on her own for so long back in the Ukraine.
After fifteen weeks, Boris began to suspect something. He wondered why his sister seemed so happy while going about her household chores, or whenever she went out shopping. Much later, Saïd’s mother told my wife that he decided to follow her one autumn afternoon. To his surprise, she took the 25 bus and got off on King George Street. In front of a café, she met Saïd. While they were still locked in an embrace, Boris walked directly up to them, his right hand hidden inside his jacket.
Just like in the movies they had watched together, he brought his face right up against his friend’s and whispered that he would not kill him then and there because of all they had lived through together, but that from now on they would be enemies.
One week later, when the news of the romance eventually reached the ears of the Fox, Saïd made an attempt to resolve the problem, but ended up creating an even bigger one. He made contact with Irina while she was shopping at a Russian supermarket. In the canned goods and sauces aisle, wearing sunglasses and a wool beanie, he told her that he wasn’t eating or drinking, that he couldn’t live without her.
He then kissed her on the lips and whispered in her ear that they should go to Taibe to start a new life. Without waiting for her to answer, he gave her instructions. At two in the morning that same night, she would leave her house without anybody finding out, while he distracted the thug posted at the front door. He would wait for her in the street behind her house.
At the appointed hour everything seemed to be going smoothly, when, from the building’s back staircase, a steady hand pulled out a semiautomatic. The burst that followed destroyed one of Saïd’s feet, which was resting on the motorcycle. The Fox’s son, though wounded, managed to flee, with only one foot on the pedal and leaving a twisting trail of blood all the way to the sea. He said goodbye to Irina under the stars, knowing that he might never see her again, then pushed the motorcycle off the cliff, and rolled down the same cliff to the beach.
He limped through the rocks, washing the blood from his wounds in the surf, suffering agonizing pain, and struggling to stay focused on Irina’s sweet breath. He thought he could convince one of his father’s thugs to secretly whisk him to the hospital without anybody else finding out, but that was impossible. In his paranoia, the Fox had bought three black guard dogs, and he himself opened the door when they started barking.
When he saw that bloody foot, Saïd’s father offered perhaps the first kind gesture of his life. On his knees in one of the bathrooms at the back of the house, he washed and bandaged his son’s wounds. After finishing he went to the living room and issued the necessary orders: A stolen lightweight motorcycle would be obtained in Holon. Two kids without police re
cords would carry out the job without knowing where the order came from.
At eleven in the morning, just when the Ukrainian was leaving his house, a burst of gunfire shattered the windows of the first floor and grazed his right arm. Very drunk, he stood staring in disbelief at the boys on the motorcycle. One of his men died at his feet before the arrival of his brother-in-law, the policeman, who was accompanied by sirens and curses shouted over the police radio.
The response was swift. Following a quick search of the area, the two kids were located and taken to the police station. After completing the requisite paperwork, they dragged them to the cliff and tortured them until they coughed up the name of the person who had hired them. Already severely disfigured, they were thrown from a squad car into the streets of Ajami so that the Fox’s soldiers would know what to expect. The man who had transmitted his boss’s order was removed from his house half-naked at gunpoint and taken to a different cliff. They shot him once in each leg, to save time.
The Fox, at home smoking his narghile under the shade of a chestnut tree, learned that the Ukrainian was not dead and prepared for the consequences. His most trusted men spent the entire morning moving everything of importance from the house to his cousin’s place, which the Ukrainians had never seen and where he would have at his disposal a small jetty and a fishing boat in case he needed to escape.
When the squad cars arrived at his house the next morning, blocking the street and waking the cursing neighbors, their blue and red lights flashing through the open windows, not even the Fox’s smell had been left behind. The sergeant major, trying to set a good example for his men, entered with his gun drawn. The dogs—drugged, starved, frightened by the lights—greeted him. The young policemen shot them dead before they could even yelp.
* * *
Traffic through Haifa, as could be expected, came to a standstill. The stevedores, the longshoremen, the customs agents, and the truck drivers awaited further orders. Fearing an enemy ambush, nobody showed up or even called. They heard contradictory rumors, and the last truck had not been met in Bat Yam. Wearing civilian clothes and in a foul mood, the sergeant major paid one last visit to try to set things right.
He paid what was owed, called a meeting of the employees, and announced that operations had been suspended. He ordered them to register incoming merchandise as grain and to leave it in containers in the port. One month later, when all known Arab capos seemed to have vanished and the Ukrainians had started buying new weapons in Jordan, Saïd arrived in Bat Yam in his 4x4. He unloaded a motorbike from the back and parked it in front of the Ukrainian’s front gate.
Dressed as a pizza deliveryman, he climbed the stairs with the two guards from the entryway, then shot them dead on the first landing. Knowing that Boris was not there, he kicked in the door. He pulled out Irina, still in her pajamas. Outside, a couple of his guys were shooting it out with the remaining guards. Just like in the movies, the two lovebirds ran down the stairs past the flying bullets. They jumped over a hedge, ran to the 4x4 parked two blocks away, and took off at full speed.
They abandoned the vehicle a few yards from the bus stop. Saïd wrapped Irina in a Muslim veil, embraced her in the cold night air, and together they caught a bus to Tel Aviv. From there they went to the Jewish city of Ashdod, where they thought nobody would be able to find them. Saïd called his mother a few days later, and broke down in tears when he told her the whole story.
Two weeks later, the Fox’s son arranged to have one of his soldiers secretly pass him a gun and a roll of bills during a Nativity procession through Jaffa. Unshaven, he waited behind a group of drunk Christians. Two children who brought up the rear of the group of drummers said later that they saw a white hand holding a gun emerge from among the heads of the crowd.
The murderer shot Saïd through his temple. He fell facedown on the pavement, like a sack of potatoes, and was shot twice more in his back. Women screamed and people ran in panic. The police picked up the body and canceled the procession. The telephone in my living room rang ten minutes later. Saïd’s mother told my wife that her son had been murdered by the Ukrainians.
We went to the wake. The first day, the women cried for the dead man, who was wrapped in a white sheet and laid out on the dining room table, ready to ascend to heaven. When his body was buried, his people rented a tent that covered an entire block. At least a thousand men, from Ramla, from Umm al-Fahm, from Acre, filled the tent, and there they remained for three days, in complete silence or listening to their sheiks, and smoked.
Throughout the long wait, the Fox kept his eyes trained blankly on the house across the street while receiving reports from his soldiers. Then, his face set, he whispered in the ear of the youngest among them. He had hated Boris from the start. The death sentence was handed down without further delay. He demanded the payment of old debts of honor and offered rewards. While the men, I among them, were lining up to shake his hand, the Fox’s soldiers were already fanning out to search the stores and workshops of Bat Yam.
* * *
The sergeant major had to wait three days before beginning his manhunt. The worst way to insult an Arab’s honor would be to interrupt his son’s funeral. Even though the Fox had entered the cemetery on foot and was surrounded by soldiers and neighbors, even though he was sitting, in plain sight, in the middle of the street, there was not a policeman in the world with balls big enough to arrest him in Jaffa in the middle of that war.
At the end of the funeral, the Fox went down on his knees, grabbed a fistful of dirt in both hands, and raised it above his head. Those who could see him, including myself, cried: for him, for Saïd, for the children of Ajami, for Jaffa’s fate, for that afternoon of cold wind that seemed like it would never end.
We walked home with lumps in our throats, imagining the coming battle. The crowd of somber men took the Fox to the tent, and three days later to his next-to-last refuge in Ajami. Along the way, more joined them, many more, filling the streets, watched by policemen who clutched their radios in panic. When the cops were finally able to enter the house, they found nothing but dog shit.
The Fox had had time to escape out the back patio, sneaking through a network of gardens and alleyways and rooftops, to a house on Yefet Street, five hundred yards away, where he would hide for two months, his boys supplying him with provisions. Yet no matter how much his soldiers searched through Bat Yam, seized meeting places and distribution centers, ambushed groups of Ukrainians, the fact remained that the shootouts and resulting deaths changed nothing. Boris could not be found.
Long before all that had started, four hours after the death of his only friend and his sister’s kidnapper, Boris had left Israel on a plane bound for Turkey. From Istanbul, he had entered Ukraine. His sister was found two weeks later in Ashdod. In despair at Saïd’s absence, and without any money left for food, she had called her mother-in-law. Saïd’s mother did not tell her what had happened, and, believing it was a way to help her, she called one of the Ukrainian bodyguards.
The following day Saïd’s mother received a huge bouquet of white roses, a roll of bills that would allow her to live for a year, and a picture of a child on the ground, bleeding, without a shoe, with a caption that read, in broken Hebrew, Your son’s murderer. Irina was taken by two large men to Bat Yam in a truck belonging to the organization. When she arrived, she found out that Saïd was dead. She wanted to return to Ukraine, but her father didn’t allow this.
From then on her mother kept her secluded in an apartment and under guard twenty-four hours a day. My wife’s aunt told us the entire story when we met her in the street a few days later. She didn’t seem like herself: she was trembling and appeared uncertain about how or why she was still alive, as if expecting Saïd to descend from heaven and kiss her, tell her that she, too, could now rest.
We didn’t want to know anything else about the whole business. All we knew was that the Fox carried on as usual in Jaffa, that the Ukrainians had expanded toward Holon and Rishon LeZion, and that
they steered clear of the Arab’s territory in order to avoid another useless war. Months later, emerging Arab gangs tried to take control. During those early days, the Fox was gunned down by two men who found him praying on his patio in Ajami.
Boris never returned. With Saïd’s father dead and the territories reassigned, another year went by before the scandal of the Bat Yam police force blew up in the press. One sergeant, feeling cornered, decided to rat out all the others. The photo of the leader immediately showed up in the newspapers. The sergeant major was found guilty of cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, covering up robberies, and ordering the murder of three informants, among them Saïd Katani.
* * *
Four years had passed when I ran into Saïd’s sister while buying fish in the port. The only thing we had in common was his bullet-ridden corpse, and she mentioned it right away. Boris had returned. He had stayed for a short while. He had visited Irina, now living in Holon, married with two children. He had seen the grave of his only friend, his only enemy, abandoned in front of the sea.
Then, without visiting his mother or his father, he left Israel forever.
This story was translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver.
SWIRL
BY SILJE BEKENG
Rothschild Boulevard
There are many Shin Bet stories circulating in Tel Aviv’s expat community. They are among our favorite conversation topics, somewhere between West Bank travel advice and anecdotes on encounters with the ultraorthodox.
Shin Bet stories—like the one about the British first secretary who came home to his Sheinkin apartment to find all the drawers in the kitchen opened. Nothing had been touched, nothing was missing. It was just the open drawers. A subtle, frosty hello.
Or like the one about the pale wife of the Swedish consul out in Herzliya, who discovered the sheets in the master bedroom had been changed one day while she was out. They were white in the morning and blue in the afternoon. And it wasn’t the maid’s day.