Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  “I’m looking for the Tehiyyah Kibbutz,” Rehv said to her.

  The sugar dispenser stopped in midair, two thick hands wrapped around it. “That would be the old Cutler farm,” the woman said in a high, brittle voice. “First right after the Mobil station.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Two miles.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to go. The sugar dispenser resumed its journey.

  Two miles was far enough when the roads weren’t plowed and the snow lay knee-high. Ice wedged inside Rehv’s shoes and up his pant legs, soaking his feet, ankles, and calves. The snow fell silently. Once he left the town he saw no people, no buildings. He heard only the muffled tramp of his feet, and his own excited breathing.

  He reached the top of a small hill and paused to brush the snow from his hair. In the distance he saw a large isolated farmhouse, surrounded on every side by empty rolling fields; he saw a barn, several smaller outbuildings, and three long trailers parked by the side of the house; he saw a wooden flagpole, not very high, flying the Star of David. He saw the headquarters of the Israeli government-in-exile, a government recognized by no one. The capital of Israel.

  He began running to it, slipping and sliding in the snow. He was breathless when he reached the wooden gate. Inside the gate was a car with an official crest on the side. The door opened and a Vermont state trooper got out. He wore sunglasses.

  “Training for the marathon, pal?” he said. He opened his coat to show the gun on his hip, but he didn’t bother drawing it.

  “I’m an Israeli,” Rehv said. “I want to go inside.”

  “Oh yeah?” A snowflake landed on the left lens of his sunglasses and clung there like a white spider. “No one told me about any visitors.” He tried to dislodge the snowflake by twitching his cheek, but it stayed where it was. Perhaps he had a tic.

  “I’m sure they’ll see me,” Rehv said. They stood watching each other over the top of the gate. The white spider melted and dribbled off the trooper’s lens and onto his cheek. It twitched again. After a while he decided he didn’t want to stand outside anymore.

  “You wait here,” he said to Rehv, and walked toward the house.

  “Tell them I was a lieutenant in the army and an assistant professor at the Hebrew University,” Rehv called to him.

  The trooper showed no sign of having heard. He knocked at the door. It opened. Rehv saw a dark-haired woman in a red plaid shirt. The trooper said something to her. She looked over his shoulder at Rehv. He realized what she must see, his wet hair over his forehead, his cheap nylon jacket, his trousers wet to the thigh. The woman nodded. The trooper turned and came back to the gate.

  “Okay,” he said, pulling it open. “But first I need ID.” Rehv handed him the plastic card he had been given at Immigration. The trooper copied from it into his notebook. Rehv turned to go. “Not so fast. I’ve got to search you.” Rehv raised his arms to shoulder level. The trooper took off his leather gloves, stuck them between his teeth, and patted his hands up and down Rehv’s limbs and over his body. “Looking to catch pneumonia, pal?” he asked, his words muffled by the gloves. “You’re turning blue.”

  Rehv walked to the front door. “My name’s Isaac Rehv,” he said to the woman in Hebrew. “I want to see the prime minister, please.”

  “What about?” she replied in English.

  Chinese Gordon, Rehv thought. “It’s confidential,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel right telling anyone else. That’s for him to decide.”

  For a moment she looked at him without saying anything. She had large brown eyes and thick hair of the same shade. It needed washing. Wrinkled indigo depressions were stamped under both eyes, like brands of fatigue or worry. She motioned him inside. “You should get out of those clothes, Mr. Rehv.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Inside the front hall it was cold and dark and quiet. A long corridor stretched away into the shadows. He saw several doors, all closed. He thought of kibbutzim as noisy and busy, but there were no sounds of children playing or work being done. Maybe it was because of the winter.

  Somewhere nearby a man was talking on the telephone: “In that case put me on to his assistant,” he said with irritation in his voice. There was a pause. Then he spoke again, more angrily: “But I’ve been leaving messages for a week.” Another pause, slightly longer. “No, I have not been out when he calls. I’m never out.” Rehv heard plastic strike plastic. On one side a door opened. A man stood in the doorway. His face seemed familiar. Rehv remembered seeing it from time to time in Israeli newspapers.

  “I can’t even get through to the assistant to the assistant undersecretary,” he said to the woman. His tone was very bitter. Rehv thought he heard a certain pleasure in it too, the pleasure of self-hatred being fed. The woman opened her mouth to say something and then closed it. “I can’t even get past the goddamned secretary,” the man said, his voice rising with every syllable. He banged the palm of his hand hard against the door-jamb. Rehv felt a light vibration in the walls.

  “Don’t,” the woman said gently, and with some fear.

  He rounded on her. “Don’t. Sure. Don’t.” He was gritting his teeth so hard Rehv thought they would crack.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  The man noticed him for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Isaac Rehv. I hope I haven’t come at a bad time. I want to see the prime minister.”

  “It’s a splendid time,” the man said sarcastically. “What makes you think we have bad times around here?”

  “Mr. Rehv was a professor at the Hebrew University,” the woman said quickly.

  “Mazel tov.” The man and the woman exchanged a look. Something in it made him inhale deeply and try to assert some control over himself. He turned to Rhev. “What do you want to see him about?”

  “I’m sorry,” Rehv said quietly, afraid he might knock the man’s temper loose again. “I don’t want to tell anyone but him. After, if he permits, I’ll be happy to tell you.”

  The man smiled a cold smile. Rehv did not understand its meaning at all. “I’m not sure you see the situation,” the man said. “I am his chief assistant. The deputy prime minister. The cabinet. The Knesset. Everything goes through me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rehv said.

  “Then I’m sorry.”

  Rehv felt confusion begin to undermine his resolve. He looked at the woman for some kind of help. She was looking at the floor. He turned again to the man: “But what about the government-in-exile? There must be some sort of procedure.”

  “I am the government-in-exile,” the man said. Something in the way he said it made Rehv remember who he was: a right-wing politician who had pushed for the annexation of the Golan Heights.

  “In that case,” Rehv said, “the prime minister will certainly let you know whatever I tell him.”

  The man laughed. “Do you really think so?” He turned to the woman and spoke to her in a voice that was suddenly crisp and unemotional, as if he had tired of sport and was impatient to return to business: “Very well. Let him see the prime minister.”

  “How is he feeling?” the woman asked worriedly.

  “Tip-top. The prime minister is always feeling tip-top.” The man withdrew into the room he had come from and closed the door.

  The woman sighed. “I hope this is important,” she said to Rehv as she led him down the long corridor.

  “It could be very important.” She sighed once more, as though nothing could ever be important again.

  At the end of the corridor she paused before a closed door, and knocked softly.

  “Come in,” a man answered immediately in Hebrew. Rehv had heard that voice many times.

  “Don’t keep him too long,” the woman said to Rehv. “He tires very easily.” She opened the door.

  Rehv walked into a room lined with books. A small fire burned in the grate. There was a faded couch along one wall and a worn easy chair by the fire. The old general was sitting in it with a wo
ol blanket drawn over his knees. He seemed to be asleep: His chest rose and fell in slow even rhythm; his face, fleshy in the days when he was planting Jewish settlements on the West Bank, was now thin. And very old. There was no one else in the room.

  Rehv walked quietly to the couch and sat down. He waited as patiently as he could, his idea struggling to burst up through his throat. In the grate a log cracked loudly, shooting a fan of sparks up the chimney. With a little start the old general awoke, and stared directly at Rehv.

  “Don’t talk to me about the British,” he said in Hebrew. “I’m finished with the British. The British are a tricky people. Look at the Balfour Report: ‘a home in Palestine for the Jewish people.’ Only tricky people know how to make such trouble with prepositions.” He glared at Rehv.

  “I haven’t come to talk about the British, General,” Rehv said. “I’ve had some thoughts about what our course of action might be.”

  The general looked annoyed. “Thoughts. We don’t need thoughts. We need tanks. If we had more tanks we could be on the canal in three days. Tanks are the answer. Nasser is helpless against tanks. Why doesn’t anyone understand that? It’s so simple.”

  Rehv looked out the window at the falling snow.

  “Why?” the general repeated. He had not been putting a rhetorical question.

  “I don’t know, General.”

  “Of course you don’t. Throw another log on the fire. I’m cold.”

  Rehv went to the wood basket by the fireplace, selected a split birch log and dropped it into the grate. “Is one enough?” There was no answer. Rehv looked at the general. His eyes were closed.

  Softly Rehv approached him. The old man’s chest rose and fell slowly; the thin face was at rest. Rehv pulled the blanket a little higher and left the room.

  There was no one in the corridor, no one in the hall. Outside, the snow still fell heavily, covering the trooper’s car in thick white pile. The trooper sat on the front seat with his head thrown back and his mouth open. Rehv could not be sure if his eyes were shut because of the sunglasses. Anyone could easily rush the farm and wipe out the government of Israel. Who would want to?

  Rehv walked back along the road.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Why are people so afraid of violence these days?” the little gray-haired woman on the television was asking. The camera tightened on her face, projecting into homes from coast to coast her cunning brown eyes: a Jewish grandmother on the make. “It’s become a fad. Whenever you tell someone about a new movie, it’s the first question they ask: ‘Is it violent? I don’t go to violent movies.’ Why is this happening?”

  The director cut to the interviewer, a middle-aged man dressed, made-up, and lit to look like a Princeton senior. Kick her in the shins, Rehv thought. Then she’ll know. But instead the interviewer smiled and said very drily, “I have a feeling you’re going to tell us.” This was just what the laugh track wanted to hear. It also seemed to please the interviewer, who managed to keep himself from laughing aloud, although he permitted his eyes to twinkle mischievously, and the sly woman, who opened her mouth and emitted sounds to show she knew something amusing had just taken place. But Rehv could see from her eyes that she was impatient for the fun to be over so she could squeeze in a few more cutting phrases before the closing theme. She was a violent woman.

  “I want to watch something else,” Joshua Katz-Finkle said. Rehv hadn’t heard him come into the room. He was standing at the door with his hair in his eyes and two trails of mucus running from his nostrils.

  “Have you finished your homework?”

  “Yes,” Joshua said defiantly. He was a very poor liar, even for a seven-year-old.

  “All right.”

  The boy came into the room, took the remote-control box from the arm of the couch, and lay prone on the rug in front of the television. He watched everything the television had to offer at once, never staying with one channel for more than fifteen or twenty seconds.

  Rehv removed his shoes and socks. They were still damp. He wriggled his toes and arched his feet. He never thought they were really his, those feet: long and narrow and weak, like the feet of an El Greco saint. They didn’t match the rest of him.

  “P.U.,” Joshua said. He was looking at Rehv’s feet with disgust, his nose drawn slightly down as if the nostrils were trying to close themselves.

  “Don’t be rude,” Rehv said.

  “You’re the one who’s being rude. Stinking up the place like that. It’s disgusting.”

  “Watch TV.”

  The boy jabbed rapidly at the remote-control box, threatening to watch with a vengeance. On the screen images appeared and vanished as fast as they could be identified: a smiling housewife, a man wearing a diaper, a box of detergent looming over a crowd of people, Marlon Brando trying to mount a horse.

  Rehv stood up and went to the window. It was a very large window, shaped like a half-moon, and overlooked the northern half of SoHo and Greenwich Village. The apartment was at the top of one of the tallest cast-iron buildings in SoHo—an official historical landmark, Quentin Katz had told him the first time he had come to baby-sit. It was owned by Sheila Finkle’s father and his brothers. A small sign by the front door said: “Another Finkle Property.”

  The snow had stopped falling. The sky had cleared. He could see a few stars that were strong enough to penetrate the umbrella of pink light over the city. One of them was Betelgeuse, much redder than usual. Bayt al-jawza’, of course. It was Arabic. He watched it glowing red in the pink sky, and thought for some reason of the Star of David on its little pole. It made the screaming start, far away.

  He turned to the boy. He was propped up on his elbows watching a man wrestle a calf to the ground. “Come here for a minute, Josh. I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Come. You’ll like it.”

  The boy slowly rose and backed to the window, his eyes locked on the screen. Rehv turned him around and pointed to the sky. “Do you know what star that is?”

  “What do you mean, what star?”

  “The name of it. Don’t they teach you the stars in school?”

  “Sure. The Big Dipper.”

  “What else?”

  “The Little Dipper.”

  “Any others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s another one, then. Do you see that star? The red one?”

  “It’s white.”

  “Look carefully.”

  “It’s white.”

  The screaming came a little closer. He bent over the boy. “It’s called Betelgeuse. That’s an Arab word. It forms the shoulder of Orion, the hunter.”

  “I don’t see any hunter.”

  “That’s because the sky’s too light.”

  “What do you mean, light? It’s nighttime.” The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve, looked at it, and wiped the sleeve on the leg of his jeans. He glanced curiously at Rehv, wondering if there would be a reprimand.

  Rehv pointed again to the sky. “What’s the name of the star?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  “I don’t want to,” the boy said. “I’m tired of looking out the window. I want to watch TV.”

  “Try,” Rehv said again. Something in his voice seemed to frighten the boy. He took a step back, and his lower lip quivered very slightly, as though a tiny electric current had run through it.

  “Beetle something.”

  “Good, Josh.” He tried to speak in a quiet even tone. “Betelgeuse. Say it.”

  “Beetle juice.” Another current ran through the thin lip.

  “Close enough. Do you know any other Arab words?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do. Zero is an Arab word. Except in Arabic it’s sifr. Sifr. Say it.”

  “No. I’m going to watch TV.” The boy turned. Rehv grabbed his arm.

  “Sifr. Say it.”

  The current ran stronger now, and didn’t stop. Neither did the scre
aming. “See fur.”

  “Sifr. Try again.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Sifr.”

  “Hey. What’s going on?” Rehv and the boy turned. The boy’s parents were standing in the doorway, wearing their coats. “What’s going on?” Katz said again. Rehv took his hand from Josh’s arm. The boy began to cry. Sheila ran across the room and lifted him in her arms.

  “What’s he done to you, my precious boy?” He was crying too hard to tell her.

  “I didn’t mean Josh any harm,” Rehv said. The screaming withdrew into the distance. His voice seemed to be someone else’s, high and strained. He had to fight to make it his own.

  Sheila looked at him with hatred. “His name is Joshua,” she said. “If we had wanted people to call him Josh we would have named him Josh, wouldn’t we?”

  Rehv had no answer. He looked down, and saw his bare, pale feet, with black hairs curling on the toes. He tried to remember how hard he had been gripping the boy’s arm.

  “He wouldn’t let me watch TV,” the boy wailed between two sobs.

  Katz came toward him, his broad forehead wrinkled in puzzlement from eyebrows to bald spot. “Why not, Isaac? You know he’s allowed to watch TV after his homework’s done. Was his homework done?”

  “Yes.”

  “He hurt my arm.”

  “He did?” Shiela pulled up the boy’s sleeve.

  “The other one.”

  She pulled up the other one. They all looked at it. On the biceps was a faint flush of pink, no bigger than a penny.

  “Jesus Christ,” Katz said. “You’d better have some explanation for this, Isaac.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. The boy stopped crying, sniffed, and pointed a finger at him: “He tried to make me say bad words.”

  “What kind of bad words, honey?” Sheila Finkle asked in a tone that had two distinct strata: sweetness above and menace below.

  “Not English.” His cheeks and upper lip glistened with mucus and tears.