The Collaborator

by Diane Armstrong

  The lawsuit fell out of the sky like a block of cement hurtling from a building site onto his unsuspecting head. One minute he was sitting inside his room in Neve Tzedek, in a street of crumbling, grimy flat-roofed buildings in one of the oldest parts of Tel Aviv, his pen flying furiously over sheets of paper as he composed his pamphlets, and the next that letter arrived. An unusual event for a start, because who would bother writing to him? Who would even want to?

  This was an official letter, with the government letterhead embossed on the envelope. His fingers shook as he picked it up, and he stared at it for a long time without opening it, turning it this way and that, as if the contents might reveal themselves through the envelope. Perhaps, after all this time, someone from his family had survived after all, and they were writing to let him know.

  People did turn up. Just the other day, he read that a man from some Polish city had surprised his relatives by turning up in Tel Aviv years after everyone thought he was dead. He had escaped the Nazis, joined General Anders’s Polish army, been imprisoned with the Polish soldiers in Russia, and then, in one of those unaccountable turnarounds that history constantly produced, he had been released, because overnight Poland stopped being Russia’s enemy and became its ally when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

  The man had spent the rest of the war in Tashkent and Iran, and then returned to Poland in search of his family, but not one of them had survived the murderous efficiency of the Germans. They had perished in the camps or been betrayed to the Gestapo by Christian neighbours whose malice outweighed their mercy; on his return they made it clear they weren’t overjoyed to see survivors coming back to claim their homes and property. Grief-stricken and depressed, he was unexpectedly traced by two cousins in Israel, who had long given him up for dead. Isaiah had carefully cut out the article and reread it several times, trembling with vicarious pleasure every time he came to the part where the cousins were reunited.

  So miraculous reunions did happen. There wasn’t a day when he didn’t think about his mother and his sister Malka and their terrible deaths, all because that mamser Nagy had refused to save them. His blood boiled whenever he thought about that collaborator, especially now that he’d become a maeven in the Department of Rationing and Supply. He was glad he’d written that pamphlet to expose him even if no-one had so far been willing to act on it, or even acknowledge its significance. Exposing the traitor was the least he could do to avenge their deaths.

  He recalls looking at the letter again, and, like a student on tenterhooks anticipating but dreading the results of an examination, he placed the envelope on the table, filled his saucepan with water, and set it on his primus stove to delay the moment of discovery. Only after he had sat down at his small formica table, poured himself a glass of black tea and started sucking a cube of sugar, did he reach for a knife and carefully slit open the flap of the envelope.

  He unfolded the letter and started reading. In his anxiety, he scanned it so fast that at first the words appeared jumbled, and he couldn’t make sense of them. It came from the Ministry of Justice, a department he often referred to in his pamphlets as the Ministry of Injustice. Was that why they were writing to him? Were they offended by his lack of respect? They certainly didn’t deserve any. They prosecuted, or rather, persecuted, the small people, but allowed politicians and businessmen to get away with fraudulent deals, rotten tricks and dishonest schemes.

  He forced himself to read the letter slowly, his nicotine-stained finger moving along each line, word by word, and when he had finished, he leaped to his feet and started pacing the small room, muttering to himself. Then he read it again from start to finish, to make sure he understood it. It appeared that the government of Israel was suing him.

  Not on their own behalf, but on behalf of Miklós Nagy, of all people. He was shaking so violently that he spilled some of his tea but he hardly noticed his scalded hand. He didn’t expect gratitude for exposing the man as a Nazi collaborator, but the government should have understood the significance of his accusations and acted on them. They should at least have looked into the actions of the man they had taken at his word and hailed as a hero.

  His breath came in short gasps and he dropped into his chair, too dizzy to stand. He wanted to crush the letter and tear it into a thousand fragments. The bastards. Instead of investigating the matter, they were charging him with defamation and ordering him to appear in court.

  ‘You can represent yourself if you like, but we advise you to appoint a lawyer,’ the officious young woman in the Ministry of Justice informed him a few days later when his rage had subsided sufficiently to contact someone about the lawsuit. She was one of those modern Israeli girls, very sure of herself with her flint-edged voice and condescending manner. Nothing like the Hungarian girls back home with their flirtatious charm and seductive voices. Sabras they called these native Israelis, after the cactus fruit that grew in the desert. Prickly on the outside, sweet inside. The first description he concurred with, the second was debateable. Their arrogance infuriated him. They made it clear they considered themselves superior to Holocaust survivors like him. They saw themselves as victors because they’d fought for their country, whereas they regarded people like him as merely having been victims, obedient sheep who had allowed themselves to be herded into camps like dumb animals. He could feel his blood pressure mounting again just thinking about this insult to the memory of the dead.

  ‘I’d like to see how heroic they’d be if they were unarmed and surrounded by guards with machine guns.’ He didn’t realise he was muttering to himself until he looked up and saw that the woman in the office was drumming her stubby fingers on the desk, waiting for his response with an impatience she didn’t bother to conceal.

  He had almost forgotten her question. ‘A lawyer?’ he repeated in a dazed voice.

  ‘Tov,’ she said briskly. ‘Fine.’ As he watched her making a note in the file, he realised too late that she had taken his absent-minded repetition as assent.

  She slid the file into a pigeon-hole above her desk, sat forward, raised her thinly pencilled eyebrows and spread her hands to signify that there was nothing more to say and he was wasting her time.

  Until then, it hadn’t occurred to him to engage a lawyer. He had assumed he would represent himself. After all, he was telling the truth so he had nothing to hide and nothing to fear, as the charge was bound to be dismissed. In the course of venting his spleen in his pamphlets, he had found out that if it’s a fact, it isn’t libel. And what he had written about Nagy was the sacred truth. Besides, everyone knew that solicitors were ganevs, scoundrels who twisted facts, bandied long words, and bled their clients dry. And even if he wanted a lawyer to represent him, he couldn’t afford to pay one.

  All this is churning through his mind as he knocks on the door of Amos Alon’s office. By now he has worked himself up to such a pitch of anxiety that he is gabbling incoherently about the injustice of his predicament even before he sits down. Now that he has cranked himself up, he can’t stop. Hardly pausing to take a breath, he fills the poky office with indignation that bounces off the walls and threatens to dislodge the flakes of loose paint and crumbling plaster from the ceiling. The wooden chair digs into his thin buttocks, and its slats make his back ache, but he is in full flight and hardly notices the discomfort.

  ‘It’s outrageous!’ he shouts. ‘What is this country coming to when an honest man, a poor man like me, who fights corruption with the only weapon I possess, my pen, is being sued for telling the truth? I’ve devoted my life to pointing out wrongs and exposing evil-doers, and what do I get in return? Litigation. By the government, no less. Is that fair? Is it right?’

  Like a car engine that runs out of fuel, he finally comes to a dead stop and looks at Amos for the first time. He is startled to see that the lawyer is probably younger than him, with the straight back and muscular build of a man of action, not one who spends his days in courtrooms and offices, bent over law books. A coiled spring, Isaiah think
s as he looks at the bald head shaped like a bullet. He can feel energy emanating from him. The deep scar that runs from the corner of his right eye to the edge of his square jaw suggests a past incongruous with a sedentary profession.

  Amos leans back in his chair, tilting it so it rests on its two back legs, and fixes his gaze on Isaiah, not interrupting his diatribe. The word that comes into Isaiah’s mind when he looks at Amos is steel. Unbending, unyielding and uncompromising.

  Having ground to a halt, Isaiah suddenly feels panic-stricken. There is no expression on the lawyer’s face, and he has no idea how Amos has reacted to his story. Perhaps like everyone else he regards him as a crank, and will refuse to compromise his good name by representing him. On the other hand, looking around the office, which was in dire need of a coat of paint and an energetic plasterer, it doesn’t look as if Amos is overburdened with work. Either way, he probably couldn’t afford to reduce his fee even if he wanted to take on his case, and Isaiah regrets his own chutzpah. How did he have the cheek to bother the lawyer with his problem? And even if Alon did agree to take on his case, he couldn’t afford his fee. He is mortified at his own audacity, and embarrassed by his penury. He fidgets in his chair, looks at the floor, and curses his own stupidity in coming.

  He is stammering his apologies for wasting the lawyer’s time and has started backing out of the office when, to his astonishment, Amos tells him to sit down. He speaks in a tone used to giving orders, a military commander rather than a lawyer.

  He expects to hear Amos say that he is too busy to represent him, that this isn’t the kind of case he usually takes on, or that it isn’t his area of expertise, but he doesn’t say any of those things. When Isaiah starts apologising that he can’t afford to pay, Amos dismisses his comment about fees with a deprecatory wave of his large hand, indicating that this is irrelevant and has no bearing on the situation.

  What he does say is, ‘I will take on your case, Mr Fleischmann.’

  Isaiah can hardly believe what he has just heard. He asks him to repeat it, and when he does, he knows he will never forget the lawyer’s next words.

  ‘I will represent you, Mr Fleishmann, and you don’t have to worry about the fee. I will do it pro bono. But I want you to give me a free hand in the way I conduct the case.’

  Isaiah walks out of Amos Alon’s office in a daze. He knows he has found his hammer.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tel Aviv, 1953

  Amos Alon strolls along the sand in bare feet as he always does at daybreak. It’s the time of day he likes the most, the hour before the city wakes. Tel Aviv is a city of loud sounds and bright colours, and he enjoys this interlude of peace when the sun tints the sky in streaks of peach, rose and apricot, and the streets are still empty and quiet. He walks close to the shore’s edge, breathing in the clean, salty air and listening to the lapping of the waves as his feet sink into the sand, leaving deep imprints that are quickly filled by the inrushing tide. These early walks feed his spirit and refresh his mind, and he often finds that by the time he is ready to lace up his shoes and head back to the office, the stroll has worked its magic and provided the solution to a problem that has been exercising his mind.

  On this particular morning, he is thinking about his new client. It’s a strange case, and the more he thinks about it, the stranger it seems. He reflects on his own split-second decision to accept the brief, something none of his colleagues would have done in this situation, but his ability to trust his instincts and make swift decisions was honed during the War of Independence. As he recalls the war, his hand traces the ridge of the deep scar on his cheek, a souvenir of one of the skirmishes he led against the British while their Mandate was still in force.

  His thoughts turn to the case he has taken on. If Isaiah Fleischmann has defamed Miklós Nagy, how come it’s the government, and not Nagy himself, that has sued the pamphleteer? And this man Nagy. Amos doesn’t know much about him apart from the article he read recently in Ha’aretz. According to the report, Nagy saved over a thousand Jews in Hungary during the war, and the government is grooming him for a ministry in the next elections.

  Now that’s something to conjure with: a government figure who was a wartime hero now being accused of collaborating with the Nazis, the most serious crime in Israel and the only one that incurs the death penalty. It sounds far-fetched, but Amos knows that in life the most unimaginable scenarios often turn out to be true. Besides, he believes he’s a good judge of men. Isaiah might be a pompous crank with a bee in his bonnet, but he strikes him as sincere.

  The more he thinks about this case, the more tantalising it becomes. He has a bloodhound’s sense for the hidden secrets that men in power seek to conceal, and he doesn’t trust the men running the country, especially the one with the bushy white hair who leads the government. To say he doesn’t trust Ben-Gurion is an understatement: he loathes him and would do everything in his power to expose his duplicity. And now in this unlikely case, with its even more unlikely defendant, he glimpses a sliver of light shining through the apparently solid wall of government impregnability through which he might finally wreak revenge.

  It’s been a long-simmering hatred and, standing on the promenade, looking out to sea with seagulls wheeling and screeching overhead, the waves foaming the shore with lace-like patterns and the taste of the sea in his mouth, it all comes back to him as if it happened yesterday: the betrayal and the crime. And that memory ruins the serenity of his dawn stroll.

  His thoughts turn to Eli, and the pain is as sharp and bitter as it was the day it happened, five years and one long lifetime ago. It was Eli who had joined the Irgun first and, as usual, Amos had been quick to follow in his older brother’s footsteps. Eli was a firebrand searching for a cause, and this time the cause was just, and he couldn’t wait to join. They would be part of the underground army, the Irgun, that would drive the British out of Palestine and set up an independent state of Israel.

  Like their leader Menachem Begin, they believed that the provisional government had no vision and no courage. As long as those gutless men of the Jewish Agency were in power, they would go on negotiating and kowtowing to the British, and nothing would ever change. Two thousand years was too long to wait for the restoration of your homeland, but their land would never be free because their leaders were too pusillanimous to risk antagonising their British masters.

  According to Eli, who knew much more about politics than Amos did, the British White Paper had swindled the Jews out of their homeland. What neither of them could forgive was that the British had made a pact with the Arabs to prevent Jewish survivors from migrating to Palestine, and they turned away ships bringing Jews who had managed to escape Nazi death camps. Prevented from landing, they perished at sea or were slaughtered when they returned to Nazi-occupied countries.

  You can’t blame the British, Eli used to say in his cynical way. After all, fifty million Arabs with oil wells were a better deal than a few Jews with nothing to offer but orange groves, patriotism, and an irritating sense of historical entitlement. But, he often added, our provisional government should have done more to expel the British and establish an independent Jewish state, instead of treating us as a Jewish outpost of Westminster.

  Although he and Eli didn’t join the Stern Gang, the extreme paramilitary group who sabotaged British military installations and blew up their military depots, they admired their audacious raids which succeeded against all odds. They were outraged that instead of siding with the young Jews fighting for independence and freedom, the provisional government denounced them as terrorists, and, like the loyal lackeys they were, they helped the British to capture, imprison and hang the ringleaders. The way Eli saw it, their leaders were actually collaborating with their oppressors.

  When the British finally left Palestine, and the United Nations declared the independent state of Israel, Amos and his brother were overjoyed. They had been part of the group whose daring actions had helped to push the British out and that resul
ted in their nation’s independence. To add to their triumph, Winston Churchill validated their struggle by acknowledging that it was really thanks to the actions of Irgun that the British were kicked out of Palestine. They had fought and won. After thousands of years, they had brought a Jewish nation into existence once more. They were on the right side of history, allied to the winning cause. No feeling in the world could equal that. He could still hear Eli’s triumphant voice and feel the pressure of his fingers on his shoulder as he said, ‘We did it, little brother!’

  His brother’s words still ringing in his ears, Amos gazes at the far horizon. Spotlit in the morning sun, a cargo ship is sailing along the Mediterranean coast towards Jaffa, and for a moment he imagines it’s the vessel he watched that June day in 1948, the one his brother was on, bringing weapons and ammunition from France to help fight the War of Independence after the British left and to relieve the Irgun men in the siege of Jerusalem.

  *

  The Altalena was carrying around 900 young Jews from Europe, mostly Holocaust survivors, eager to defend the new nation from its neighbours — Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Syria and Egypt — whose armies had attacked it the day after the United Nations voted it into existence. At that point, the fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance, and Irgun had arranged the purchase of the ship and obtained the weapons and ammunition to equip its men, who were facing annihilation.

  Before he sailed for Marseille to help load the Altalena, Eli had scoffed at Amos’s praise for the French who had agreed to supply the ship. ‘Don’t imagine for a minute they did it because they love the Jews,’ he said. ‘It’s politics. France is furious that Britain usurped their colonial power in Syria and Lebanon, and sided with the Arabs against them, so they decided to help us as a slap in the face for Britain. See, where there’s power there’s always a hidden motive, something concealed or not revealed, an evasion, prevarication, or a downright lie. And behind everything, you’ll find the ugly face of politics lurking in the shadows.’ And Amos had listened, his eyes wide with admiration. How smart Eli was.