by Joshua Sobol
And if you knew him, you would have heard in his voice the reserved pride in his son, who is doing exactly what he himself would have liked to do.
And that’s what turned you into a professional killer? she asks.
No, he says. It was the feminine side of my character again.
How come, she wonders, you’ll have to explain that to me.
It was the look in my mother’s eyes, when she came across strangers.
Tell me about it, she asks and curls up in his arms and nestles into his chest.
It’s hard for me to talk about it, he whispers.
Try, she urges.
39
She had this look … he begins after a long silence, but the lump sticks in his throat. He had never spoken these words. He had never spoken of his mother’s eyes, which are looking at him now out of the void, and he feels that if he says one more word he will burst into the tears that have been seething inside him ever since he can remember himself and which he has never allowed himself to weep.
What kind of look did she have? She won’t let go.
He makes a gesture with his hand for her to wait a minute. That in a minute he will open is mouth and speak. He swallows his saliva, but the lump is still stuck there. And suddenly he can’t contain it any longer. He gets up from the carpet and walks naked through the luxurious hotel room, takes a glass from the magnificent bar and pours into it the golden liquid from the green bottle of Laphroaig which he bought at the liquor store crowded with New Year’s Eve revelers, and goes over to the big window where the vast ocean stretches silver in the moonlight painting in phosphorescent green and white the strip of sand along which they ran that afternoon. He takes a hefty gulp of the fierce liquid suffused with the smells of iodine and carbolic acid, and leans his forehead on the freezing windowpane, and she comes and stands behind him, leaning her slender body against his, and he feels her pubic hair on his buttocks, the plums of her breasts tickling his back, her arms enfolding him and her hands stroking his chest and stomach, and the words start coming out of his mouth, carefully feeling their way round the picture he sees before his eyes.
40
It was a shamed look, as if she was ashamed of not being able to prevent what they did to her, ashamed that they took her parents one morning, with other old people, and put them on a truck and drove them to the forest and stripped them naked and stunned her father with blows to the head, like stunning a pig before the slaughter, and afterwards they shot them. And she was ashamed for her husband who stepped empty-handed out of their little photography studio to wipe the display window clean of the eggs people had thrown at it, and a drunken soldier kicked him to his knees, and put a pistol to the nape of his neck and shot him and spat and walked away to join the band of soldiers on the other side of the street, who were standing and drinking schnapps from a bottle passed from hand to hand, and laughing loudly. And she was ashamed of not being able to save her little baby from death by suffocation from diphtheria, and Dr. Gottlieb’s explanations didn’t help, the devoted country doctor who sat one day on their porch overlooking the Judean hills and while sipping steaming tea and fanning himself with his handkerchief tried to persuade her in a gentle voice that in those years, before the discovery of antibiotics, and all the more so in the conditions of life in the forest, there was almost no hope of saving a baby from the Corynebacterium diphtheria bacillus. And the attempts by the good doctor to console her, and even the giving of a name and identity to that bacillus, only increased the disgrace of her failure to perform her role as a mother. And this suppressed shame, which settles inside a person and has nowhere to go, was reflected in her eyes and in all her body language whenever she met strange people for the first time. She would shrink into herself like a wounded body round its wound, as if trying to make herself invisible, her whole being one mute plea not to be noticed, not to be looked at, not to be seen in the disgrace of her survival.
Her iron man couldn’t stand this weakness and didn’t know how to deal with it. Sometimes, when she froze in the middle of plucking a duck, which he brought her from the yard after chopping off its head, or in the middle of gutting a fish, and she would support her waist with the hand holding the knife, and a deep, uncontrollable groan would break out of her depths, the Iron would respond with a kind of dull growl, that seemed to emerge from the blazing belly of a volcano about to erupt, and this mute dialogue between her groan and his growl was enough to make her pull herself together and return to the small acts of daily life, the activities in which she drowned her sorrow and her shame in the days when she cooked for the partisans too, or when she prepared sandwiches from thick slices of black bread smeared with butter and filled with rissoles cut in half lengthways for her iron man, before he took his Tommy gun and set out with a few other men from the village to prepare an ambush on the bank of the wadi for the infiltrators coming from the other side of the border to murder farmers in the fields, like they murdered Yatzker, when he went to move irrigation pipes at night, or Tibor Tomas and his beautiful wife Ilona—who were shot by infiltrators through the window when they were asleep in their beds.
41
No, he leans his forehead against the windowpane, no, he repeats to the ocean waves breaking in front of him, it wasn’t the wish to continue the Iron’s war that turned him into a killer. No no. His father had already done his bit when he took part in the uprising of the body burners, and afterwards, when he raced a jeep on the southern front, and when he was made the security-coordinator of the new border village—which clung to the mountainside in its little houses, two tiny rooms and a kitchenette and bathroom, forty-five square meters in all—and organized the guarding of the fields and orchards. And when the disease that had spread throughout his body was about to defeat him seven years after the doctors had given him three more months to live, and he felt his strength leaving him, and the pain was growing worse and soon it would be unbearable and he would need stronger and stronger doses of morphine, until the drug paralyzed his respiratory system and he died of suffocation in his bed—he rose before dawn and took his big Parabellum, which was his service revolver in the War of Independence and in all the years of his reserve duty as the commander of a reconnaissance unit, and went out to the well-tended yard, where he had planted every tree and bush, and sat on a bench he had made with his own hands under the sapling which had grown into a huge, spreading tree, and set the barrel of the gun to his right temple, and put an end to his iron life with the same iron hand which had raised it from the ruins.
No, he says to her and licks the salt from the stalk of her fragile hand, which is stroking his wet cheeks, it wasn’t him who made me kill the soft, dreamy little girl I used to be—and this is the first time in his life that he has dared to utter these words, ‘the soft, dreamy little girl I used to be’, and now the fountain of tears wells up unimpeded from the hole drilled by his own words in the hard layer of ice which has covered it for so many years; and which her emaciated body, and her caressing hands, and something else, something hidden which he does not yet know how to name, has suddenly melted. Yes, he says, it was my mother, her shamed existence, the disgrace of the innocent victim—this is what threatened to crush me from within, and made me bury the poetess inside me alive, stifle her gentle, hesitant words, and become a man of action.
Come, she says, give me your face, and he turns to face her. She takes his head in her long slender fingers and licks the salt from his cheeks. Her tongue penetrates the corners of his eyes and licks the tear ducts, and this gentle tickling maddens his senses, but he lets her do as she wishes with him, and she lifts her long thin legs and coils them round his waist, and he whispers to her:
You’re as light as the wind, as if you have no body.
You make me weightless, she whispers, let’s go to bed.
And he leans forward, lowers them both to the thick carpet, and they lie there in each other’s arms for a long time, almost without moving, afraid of disturbing the closeness g
rowing ever greater between them.
42
And suddenly her hands grip the sides of the boat, and she leaps up from the sea like a dolphin opposite the coast of Florida, naked and dripping, and her wet skin glitters in the pale light of dawn turning the Eastern sky pink before his eyes. So the boat had not stayed still, but had evidently been turning slowly on its axis all the time she was away, an eternity or only a few minutes. Mona’s body cast in bronze cuts a dark silhouette against the sky. She stands naked with her legs apart, her strong feet steady on the edges of the boat, on either side of the prow, and washes her body with water from a plastic container, another three like it strapped to the stern. And after she has rinsed the salt water from her body she wipes it with a round stick, a habit she brought back with her from her visit to Japan. Ever since she has not touched a towel, and he is surprised to see that she keeps such a wiping-stick on her boat as well, and the thought crosses his mind that this woman has built herself an entire world connected to the sea, where there is no room for him. His gaze climbs from her feet to her calves, her sturdy thighs, the curves of her hips rounding to her narrow waist and rising to her supple back, and his eyes are arrested by her breasts which are still the same as they were when he met her and fell in love with her, the liaison officer in the special unit he joined after he was discharged from the commando, and he looks at her muscular arms, which press the Japanese wiping stick to her neck and lead it with brisk movements to the erect pink nipples of her breasts, wiping away every drop of moisture—and as she performs this wiping action with the precision of a ritual act, she says to him:
Look, I’m not really interested in who and what she is, and if she’s a mulatto or a Chinese woman. But it’s obvious to me what’s happened to you. You started having an affair with someone, and suddenly you got scared, because you felt you were beginning to fall in love with her. And you’re afraid of falling in love. You don’t know what to do with it. So you took to your heels and ran away. Now you’re not there, but you’re not here either. You’re stuck in some no-man’s-land. Floating like an embryo in limbo. Ever since you came back, I can feel that you’re not the same person. You don’t listen. You don’t concentrate on what you’re doing. And you hardly talk. You don’t communicate. If it only concerned your life with me, I wouldn’t like it but I’d put up with it. But the trouble is that it expresses itself in your running the business as well. And it’s happening in these hard times, when hundreds of businesses are being wiped out every day, and our own business is on the verge of bankruptcy. And there’s a rare opportunity to make a pile of money if we win the competition, and exactly at this moment, when you should be leading the company, you’re suddenly not there, and you let your art director fight with the graphic artist and the idea-woman, and pardon me for putting it bluntly, but even though Mackie is your friend from days gone by, you have to face the fact that apart from his well known obstinacy, there isn’t a drop of creativity left in him, and he can sense it, he’s not a fool, but apparently it’s difficult for people to admit failure, and even more difficult for them to acknowledge that their time is past. So instead he fights Golan and Moran, who came up with a brilliant idea if you ask me, and if we go with their idea we have a good chance of winning, and you know exactly what that means financially speaking. It could be the difference between bankruptcy and bringing in millions, for years to come. But I can see that even now, when I’m talking to you, you’re staring at me without hearing a word I’m saying. The words fly past your ears like missiles that missed their target and explode in the air. So I’m telling you to pick up your heels and go to your model or nun or American policewoman, and I’ll take charge of things here and run the business. I’ll direct the project and I’ll make the decisions. And if you come back one day with a clear head, and I’m still here, and the company will still exist, I’ll be happy to let you take charge again, because I have plans of my own too. I’m planning to sell this boat and buy a two-master and take out a skipper’s license for the Atlantic Ocean, and then to extend it to the Pacific as well. So I don’t intend spending my life running the company, but at the moment there’s no other alternative. If you have something to say, say it, she commands him and pulls on her sweater that swallows her magnificent breasts.
Do you intend on buying the two-master on your own? he asks the sweater which is still covering her face.
That’s what’s bothering you now? Her head emerges from the deep neckline of the red sweater.
A two-master that can cross the Atlantic Ocean is no small matter, he says.
What do you say, she says mockingly, and her hands pull the hem of the sweater over her hips. Don’t worry, I won’t buy it alone. I have partners who’re interested in joining up with me.
Again he realizes the extent to which her life at sea has over the years become an unknown continent to him. He is not surprised that there are partners interested in joining this amazing woman, a winning combination of sex and power, and the thought crosses his mind that she could command a navy missile boat, or at least a coast guard gunboat.
Good, she pulls on her walnut leather pants. My understanding is that we agree. We’re going ashore, we’re calling a meeting, and I’m announcing the changes in the directorship of the company.
43
She drives the Land Rover through the empty streets of the city, still wrapped in sweet early morning slumbers, in a kind of hallucinatory slow motion, as if she is driving a hearse in a dream. Absorbed in her thoughts, planning and scheming—he says to himself as she reaches for the cigarette lighter and pushes it down with a jab of her thumb. Now she raises her hand to a strange new gadget attached to the dashboard. He follows her finger with interest as it lightly touches a glowing yellow button, and the filter of a cigarette pops out of the jaws of the gadget, which turns out to be a cigarette case. She extracts the cigarette with a brisk movement and plants it between her lips. At the same moment the red-hot lighter pops up and her hand, which comes to meet it with perfect synchronization, plucks it from its hole and sets its glowing coil to the tip of the cigarette.
He sends out his hand and touches the yellow button. A new cigarette is ejected from the jaws of the device.
Have you started smoking again? she asks in surprise.
No, he says in an amused tone of voice, I was just curious to see how this mechutl works.
She gives him a disgusted look, and her upper lip curls disdainfully. She hates this Yiddish word ‘mechutl’ which he has attached to her sophisticated high-tech gadget. She sees this shabby word stuck to her Japanese toy as a bit of greasy old dirt congealed on the handle of a skillet bent out of shape with use. Her right hand goes out to the humiliated luxury item, and it seems to him that she is about to stroke it, to cleanse it of the verbal filth adhering to it and restore its trampled honor. But he is mistaken. Her finger simply touches the blue button next to its yellow twin with demonstrative indifference, and the shamefaced cigarette, which has remained stuck ludicrously in the opening, is swallowed back into its container with a dry click.
What an uber-chuchemit pitchefke! he says. Where did you get it?
A present, she snaps.
Who from?
From Golan and Moran.
What for?
My birthday.
Oy, he remembers, when was it?
When you were abroad, she says dryly, and adds: I was actually expecting you to call.
How could I have forgotten? he exclaims and immediately regrets it when she picks up the ball and slams it back at him with the crushing retort:
You were busy with your model.
Policewoman, he corrects her, adhering for some reason to his nonsensical story.
Model, policewoman, I don’t care if she’s a brain surgeon.
Why a brain surgeon of all things?
Why a policewoman if it comes to that, she retorts dryly.
He has no answer to this. Instead of drawing up some pointless remark from the emptine
ss gaping inside him like the great black shaft of an abandoned mine, he puts out his finger and presses the yellow button. The next cigarette appears. He presses the blue button, and the cigarette disappears into the maw of the device.
Leave it alone, she says.
Why, he protests and takes another turn on the gadget, actually it’s a cute little toy.
Leave it alone, she commands and switches on the radio. A singer wails, ‘To give your heart and soul / to give.…’
He switches it off. She switches it on. The singer goes on moaning.
What do you want to listen to this rubbish for? he protests.
It’s the news in a minute, she says.
Until the news could we do without it? he asks, and switches off the radio.
I want to listen to it, she switches it on again.
The singer goes on whining.
It’s horrible, he says.
I like it, she declares.
Since when do you like this saccharine kitsch?
It’s not saccharine kitsch, she says. It has true feeling.
You call this true feeling? He says scornfully and starts imitating the crooner in a tremulous, whining voice: ‘To give your kidneys and your liver / to give / when you have nothing left / to give.…’