by Yishai Sarid
A trio of battle helicopters passed over the sea heading north, pointing spotlights that turned the water white. I looked at that shaking body, the thicket of dirty hair covering the face, and I tried to figure out how far from here you could get in a rowboat.
“Afterward I made a short film,” the voice kept coming out of the covered face. “More video art than film. I managed to get it into some festival, they wrote my name in the Village Voice. I got a little work on the set of a producer, the first time something good happened to me. I tried to clean up a little, forget all the garbage, forget the crappy Israel, home. I thanked Nukhi, said I was leaving the apartment, thanks a lot for everything. ‘Good luck,’ he told me. ‘All the best. But you owe me one more trip. Just one more.’ I tried to get out of it, but he talked about all the money he had spent on me, and how he had gotten me out of the shit at my hardest time. I couldn’t argue with him. Just once more, he promised me. The same suitcase, now it was really heavy. I swallowed uppers and downers, Ritalin. I got on that flight, scared, my balls were shaking even at JFK. All the way here, I had horrible dreams, sweating like a pig, and as we landed in Israel, a uniformed policeman got on the plane, walked around here and there; we were all delayed until he finished. I got out of the jetway, went to the baggage claim, and couldn’t go on. When the suitcase came, I took it to the bathroom, locked the stall, took all the tags off it, wiped my fingerprints off it, took all my things out of it, stuffed them into bags, threw them into the garbage. The suitcase stayed in the bathroom. I went out to Mother, ‘What, no suitcase?’ ‘No, it got lost, went by mistake to Krakow. Mother, I can’t go sleep in your house, there’s something I’ve got to take care of, I’ll come in a few days.’ That was four months ago. Ever since, I’ve been running away. They had a lot of stuff in there. A very heavy suitcase. Maybe ten kilos.”
Run away, I thought, why do you stay? Run away to the farthest place, start all over there. Forget Ignats and films and all that nonsense. Save your ass.
I sat close to him. Don’t be disgusted by him, he came out of his mother’s flesh. “I can get you immunity from prosecution,” I said. “But you’ll have to testify against him.”
Yotam laughed, stood up, waved his hands in the air. “You’re joking? They’ll whack me.” And once again, his head dropped and sweat dripped from his face. “I’m crippled, got no strength. I can’t deal with them. You’re looking at a dead man.”
“What about the films?”
“One Ignats making bad films is enough,” he giggled, his voice suddenly sounded young and vulnerable. “The world will get along without my films.”
“What will save you?” I asked. It was now dark before us, even the distant tent was folded up and the bonfire next to it had collapsed into embers.
“Give me back my stuff.” He got down on his knees. “And everything will be all right. Give me only one bag to get through the night. Afterward, I’ll make it on my own. Tell Daphna to forget me or to send me money, this talking won’t save me . . . ”
“I threw it all away,” I said. “Nothing’s left.”
I went on sitting with him for a while. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back home. Sigi was organizing for the trip, the whole apartment was full of cartons, the child must be asleep by now. Before I parted from him, I took five hundred shekels out of my pocket and gave it to him. I knew it would make its way to the nearest drug dealer in the Arab village tonight.
I left him on the sand, bound in his own handcuffs. “I’m asking you for only one thing,” I said. “Here’s a phone card. Call your mother, tell her I was with you. Tell her you feel better.”
“For this money, I’m even willing to suck your dick,” he said in the voice of a cartoon character. “No problem, boss. I’ll talk with her, don’t worry. We’re friends, right? Sit together at the sea, talk about life. I sat like this with Nukhi Azariya, too. He really liked listening to what I had to say, between one trip and another. Just watch out for the knives. Don’t let your guard down, friend, watch your back.”
He watched me from below. The lights of the power station picked out the delicate lines of his face. I could have hugged him, I could have kicked him in the face. I turned around and walked away and my shoes sank in the sand.
Hani was sitting on Daphna’s seventies sofa, nicely dressed, khaki pants and a checked shirt, very thin, and watching television. From the distance, I could see he was watching Al Jezeera; they had a pretty and mysterious newscaster with great eyes whom I also loved.
I was an uninvited guest, and Daphna was embarrassed. “Come into the living room a moment,” she said, and introduced us quickly. “A student,” she presented me. “He wants to write a book.” For the time being that was enough. I didn’t mean to up the ante immediately.
We sat in the kitchen and made a whole production about the etrog man, who had now arrived at the isle of Naxos, an earthly paradise, and stayed in a village with a temple to Venus surrounded by olive groves just outside it. Sigi and I had been there on our honeymoon; we escaped on a ferry from the flocks of tourists in Santorini, and I didn’t want to leave. “This isn’t a bad story,” said Daphna. “You might do something with it à la Marguerite Yourcenar.” She was tense and I didn’t believe her.
She went to Hani and asked if he needed something. I heard him thank her with delicacy: No, he didn’t have any more pain, maybe only a little, in a while he’ll take the pill and sleep a bit. “In a little while, I’ll come sit with you,” said Daphna.
“Yotam called,” she whispered when she came back to the kitchen; there was a leaky faucet dripping slowly and getting on my nerves. “He said you were at his place. That you helped him a little. He sounded better. That you convinced him to find work. Now you’ve got to arrange it so he can come back to the city.” Her eyes were suddenly enormous, her lips were red and thick; I couldn’t say if she was an old woman or a young girl, it wasn’t important, because she swallowed me up. I ate the cake I loved, we did a little more with descriptions of the view, and suddenly Hani appeared and stood above us. He moved slowly, and up close he looked very bad, thin and yellow as parchment, but his smile was sad and sweet. “Hey!” Daphna blurted a small shout of fear, as if he had caught us plotting. “How did you get up by yourself?”
“I love that cake,” he said. “I smelled it,” and the three of us began laughing all at once. “I can eat what I want, I don’t have a problem with diet.” His Hebrew was slow and precise, like that of a person who learned a foreign language in a cultured way, not with bestial and furtive foreign accents, to survive, but from a longing for education.
Daphna cleared a place for him next to her, I moved my chair a little, she made him strong tea. “It’s warm here as in Gaza,” he said, and she offered to turn on the air conditioner. “No need,” he said. “Inside I’m shivering with cold.”
I knew basic facts about him: that he was born in 1948, that he had one son and one daughter, that his wife had died young of an illness. Mainly I knew the conclusion to his Tel Aviv episode, because then there was a tail on him. I preferred not to remember those things now because the man was heart-breaking and pleasant company and the two of us were sitting on either side of Daphna like long-time residents in a boarding house.
“I hope I didn’t disturb your lesson,” said Hani.
“No, that’s just fine, we’re about to finish,” I said. “I have enough homework.”
I had had time to read his old collection of stories, published in Jordan, and filled with yearnings for the Land and the citrus groves and the wells and the old villages, even though the narrator was born in Gaza and had never seen them with his own eyes. It was a frightening book in its emotional force.
“What are you writing about?” asked Hani, and I really blushed and told him about the etrog man, I tried to garner remnants of truth from within to be convincing.
Hani asked why my man was going to the islands, and I explained that the Temple was destroyed and the Land was desolate and
they needed to bring etrogs for Sukkot.
Daphna reminded him of how they had once sat with a man named Barukh in a Sukkah in Jaffa that had been named in memory of the exodus from Egypt, and Hani said the fellahin would set up huts in the field during the harvest, the whole family would pick crops by day and sleep in the hut at night. Daphna said that appears even in The Song of Solomon, and their conversation was easy and fluent, a chorus of mature voices. He ate a few crumbs of the cake which really was very soft and rich and tasty.
“If Daphna agreed to take you on, you must have talent,” said Hani. “She has no patience for dummies. We’ve been friends for many years now. Most important in writing is not to despair. As in love. It can break your heart in the end, but that’s what a person lives for.”
“Right,” Daphna nodded, and looked charming and calm. I felt I was sitting with wise adults, and I was amazed that they were talking with me at all. Until a professional thought darted through my head, bringing things back to where they belonged, and I felt a stabbing pain in my eyes.
Hani said he was going to lie down now; the doctor had suggested he not exert himself, and the medicine made him foggy. He held my hand strongly, said see you again and looked into my eyes. Death was visible in the depths of his eyes. Then he leaned on Daphna on the way to the sofa she had arranged for him in the living room.
We sat in the kitchen a few more minutes. The role playing was over. I promised her in a whisper to try to sweep the area so Yotam could come back to the city, and we arranged to meet two days later.
Afterward, at home, I sat with Sigi and the child at a silent supper. Most of their things were already in cartons, the house had been turned upside-down, but there was no point commenting. The child scattered rice around the plate and asked why I wasn’t coming with them. I answered that it was because of work, but I’d come visit. “Come with us,” Sigi said and I explained to her again that I couldn’t leave in the middle of an assignment. She smiled to herself and dropped the subject, as if I had finally released her. “Go,” I said. “You’re right. Don’t miss out because of me.”
“It’s not me I pity,” she said. “I’ll do just fine, but my heart breaks for the child.”
In the archive I found that they had talked properly with Hani only once, in 1982, a few months before the war. At a certain stage, he had drawn attention, walked around the area a lot, and they decided to call him in for a talk. His information had been typed up and whoever talked with him must have retired long ago. Hani said he was a writer, had been writing since his youth. His stories were published in journals in the West Bank and in the Arab world, he focused on short stories and also wrote poems sometimes. He hadn’t yet written a novel, for that you needed time and a livelihood.
Who was the intelligent interrogator who went so deeply into his kind of creativity? I wondered. Maybe somebody like me, who for some reason was in the deep freeze?
He went on and recounted how he had been invited a few years before to a meeting of Jewish and Palestinian artists at Tel Aviv University (the interrogator wrote “Palestinian,” erased it and wrote “Arab,” and erased it again and went back to “Palestinian”). There he met a lot of artists who invited him to stay with them, and then came invitations to other events. There was a nice evening at “Tsavta,” where he read his poems and afterward he came often to Tel Aviv. Some of the stories he wrote were translated for the literary supplement of Ha-aretz.
Then they asked him specifically about certain names, they wanted him to talk about the political meetings on Jewish-Arab brotherhood he had attended, and he gave all the details. Daphna’s name was also mentioned: Hani said he met her at one of the events and stayed at her house now and then. The interrogator didn’t go more deeply than that; she was one of many other names.
“In Gaza I work as a translator for the UN,” Hani said. “I’ve got a natural talent for languages. I learned Hebrew when I was young, when I worked with Jews on vacation. I joined my older brothers, who did all kinds of jobs, mainly in Ashkelon.” The family was originally from Jaffa. He didn’t remember anything from there because he was only a few months old when the war broke out.
When he was interrogated he was thirty-four years old. His face in the picture is pleasant, smooth, not aggressive. Really a good Arab—except for the ironic smile obvious even in the old photo; we don’t like smiles like that. It’s important to look at a person’s face, it’s the basic alphabet of the interrogator. And the very next page says he was arrested a few days later for interrogation at the installation in Ashkelon on suspicion of connections with the PLO.
“Why did they arrest him?” I muttered. But I immediately told myself that I wouldn’t have acted any different. Something didn’t smell right in his story, he sounded like a mole.
The next interrogation was done while he was in detention, and the intensity rose from the page. The sentences were much shorter and written in a barely legible hand. They asked him about trips, once he was in Italy and twice he went to Jordan. In Jordan, he visited relatives; in Italy, he made a tour with his wife. That was the only time they were abroad, they saw Rome and ate macaroni. Perhaps after such an answer, somebody smacked him. They asked about who he knew in Gaza, mentioned forgotten names of junior PLO activists.
A doctor of Arab literature at the Hebrew University put a special expert opinion on Hani’s writings in the file, which I found in a shabby plastic bag. He wrote that even though his stories and poems don’t preach violence, and the lyrical style is restrained, they throbbed with a sense of injustice and a strong desire to return to the lands that had been taken; that was the leitmotif of his creation, and so may have been a disruptive influence on Arab readers and a demoralizing effect on the Israeli public.
After three days, he was released with no accusation at all, but he was forbidden to re-enter Israel.
They went easy on him, I thought; with such connections he could have easily been arrested for several months. All those associations were exceptional, it smelled bad. The man didn’t take care of those bohemians’ cars, nor did he serve hummus chips and salad. They forbade him to return to Israel and thus solved the problem. It can plausibly be assumed that they tried to recruit him—that’s what they always do—and he didn’t agree. That was his punishment.
At the end of the dossier were a few letters from his friends, addressed to politicians, to let him in. They wrote that he was a moderate, a bridge to peace. All of them were filed with brief remarks of refusal written by professionals.
In the afternoon, I took the child to the sea. As we entered the water, the sun was still blinding and strong. His little body floated in a purple inner tube. I taught him to rise above the smooth waves, and after every wave, he shouted with excitement. Hundreds of times. Water sprayed in his eyes, and he heroically refrained from whining. I showed him how I put my whole head into the water and dived without fear.
The water turned purple at sunset, and only when it got dark did he agree to come out. We ate the watermelon Sigi had prepared. The child was shaking under the towel. Go with them, I said to myself, leave the cellars. Not yet, I thought, that won’t solve anything. I saw myself sitting on a bench on a foreign street, wrapped in a coat, shaking with cold, under foreign trees dropping their leaves, killing time, growing old. “It was a lot of fun in the sea, Papa,” said the child. I took off his bathing suit and dressed him in shorts and a shirt. “Papa, I got tired,” he said and I picked him up, along with all the beach things. By the time I put him in his safety seat in the car, he was asleep, covered with salt.
Haim was stuck in his orthopedic chair, behind the long Formica table, his eyes red with the great effort of following the information on the screen. “When’s the meeting with the son?” he asked. “Is that organized? Is there a date yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “There’s a problem on the way.” I told him about the issue with Yotam.
“Splendid family, a scion of great rabbis, philosophers, physicians, ho
w did such a degenerate boy come from that,” said Haim angrily.
“Drop it now, Haim, come on,” I said impatiently. I knew where the conversation was going, his usual tirade about the loss of values. “I want to get moving on this.”
I wanted his advice about how to deal with the drug dealer Nukhi Azariya. Haim suggested I talk with the police, let them take care of it, why should I mess around with that. “The police won’t do anything,” I said. “I’ve already talked with them. They know him, they’re following him, playing a double game with him. He’s also a source of intelligence for them. Five minutes with the intelligence gatherer of the elite central police unit and I understood how deep they’re into him. He buys safe documents from them and they can’t touch him. How long have you been following him? I asked them. Three or four years. Meanwhile, he’s gotten very rich and can hire a battery of lawyers who get him out of any trouble. He’s very careful, doesn’t get his own hands dirty, only his name hovers overhead.”
“What does he want from the boy?” asked Haim.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s the value of the drugs the kid stole from him, or lost for him, depending what you believe.”
I asked Haim for permission to arrest Nukhi Azariya, to scare him so he wouldn’t touch the boy again.
“The opposite,” said Haim and his finger pressed the keyboard. He never missed anything that appeared on his computer screen, from the synopsis of Al-Jezeera editorials to the most sensitive reports from agents. “Do exactly the opposite. You won’t manage to scare him. He knows you can’t keep him in detention more than twenty-four hours. The Jews have basic laws that guarantee respect for human lives, they were born free to sell drugs. After two hours, you’ll have to bring in his defense lawyer. The moment he’s released, he’ll go looking for your boy to cut off his balls for denouncing him. Don’t scare him. Recruit him,” said Haim. “Make him a patriot.”