Camels wandered in from the sand dunes south of Yaffo and ate the thick, prickly leaves, oblivious to the thorns. They lay in the warm sand all afternoon and when the sun set meandered back south. It was a strange sight for the European Jews to have camels on their doorsteps.
For a long time I had no idea what my father did during the sixteen years between his arrival in Palestine and the time he met my mother. Hazy tales of theater ventures reached my ears. Some said my father had gotten the literary bug from Paltiel, whom he had met on the boat to Yaffo; others said it was the other way around. An usher in HaBimah told me my father had once written a play in which Riva Yellin was to have played the key role. It was a drama in four acts. The usher hinted at some tragic liaison between my father and the great actress, or some tragedy in her life in which he had played a part.
Riva Yellin was the queen of the Hebrew stage. When she passed in Dizzengoff Street all fell silent and stared.
She and my father?
Yet, in the shoe store overlooking Rothschild Boulevard, all the actors of HaBimah congregated between rehearsals. Everyone in Tel Aviv went to the theater in those days, doctors and artisans alike. And in the store there was always someone present from the theater: an actor, a director, a stagehand. Many bought shoes on credit; some repaid their debts with tickets.
My mother, Sonya Bukovsky, was at that time working as a seamstress in Yaffo, for some rich Arabs. Her parents were not wealthy and she had to take whatever work she could get. The month before, at the order of her father, she had stopped seeing some unworthy fellow—a Yemenite, or perhaps a Moroccan Jew—and in consolation Grandpa Yoel offered to buy her whatever she wanted, with half her weekly pay. She went to my father’s store to buy high-heeled shoes—her first. She had beautiful long legs, slender and creamy white. My father took a long time fitting her. She was exceedingly choosy.
In the mirror frame stuck a theater program and a pair of tickets. Just the previous day Re’uven Kagan, the famed director, had left two gallery tickets for The Dybbuk in exchange for a pair of black biblical sandals. A renowned critic had lauded the performance highly. The review—autographed by Kagan himself—was pinned to the wall, above the tickets. The program was autographed, too.
When my father wrapped up the box of shoes, he stuck one ticket into the wrapping paper. My mother said he blushed furiously, but held her eye. She smiled and he smiled back. He had two gold teeth, which my mother found charming. After the show they went to Café Cassit to take coffee with the actors. They were married seven months later in Va’ad HaQhilla, the old community center on Allenby Street.
Tel Aviv, I am told, was then a dreamy, fragrant place. Orange groves came up to the very edge of town. In the afternoon tall Arabs emerged from the neighboring village of Sumeil, dragging tiny donkeys laden with huge boxes of fruits and vegetables. The yellow mimosa blossoms filled the air with musky perfume. Cool sea breezes blew. Every evening the bohemians and Haganah fighters on furlough argued late into the night at Café Cassit about theater, poetry, and the future of the Jews. Many took an evening stroll with their wives or friends, and ended at the sand dunes of Machlool, to look at the sunset.
In my mind’s eye I can see them, as in an old, sepia-brown postcard, looking over the sea, trying to peer into the Jews’ future.
Did they ever think it would produce men like me?
19
I DID NOT MOVE out of my parents’ apartment. It would be far easier, I told myself repeatedly, to do the play while living in Ibn Gvirol, closer to the bohemian cafés. It was only because of the play that I stayed put, I told myself, not because of Ruthy. And indeed, this may have even been partly true, because my discovery that the play alleviated my black dreams was like a slow-burning white fire, nearly as strong as my dark attraction to Ruthy, and so for the first time since I escaped Israel, I felt there was hope for peace inside me. Every night before I went to sleep, I read and reread a few scenes, humming the songs so that they would sing to me while I slept, then stashed the pages under my pillow, from where they radiated heat, similar to hers.
But whereas the nights were now easier, the days were harder.
Ever since our afternoon in bed, Ruthy had begun to treat me with hostile formality, as if I had done her some sort of wrong, or injury. Ehud, too, she treated coldly; maybe to even things out.
Two days after I had returned from Tveriah the phone rang at eight in the morning.
“It’s for you,” Ruthy said stiffly.
I took it without looking at her. At first I thought it would be again one of the crazy adherents of Rabbi Kahane, the messianic madman from Brookyn, warning me not to stage my father’s play or they “would do to me what was done to him.” They had been calling at all hours, their thin voices hysterical. I was ready to slam the receiver down, but it was Amzaleg. “You wanted to come see the store.”
“Yes,” I said, thrown off balance. “Now?”
“Yes. I’ll meet you there in—” Before he could finish, the line went dead.
I hung up. “I’m going to the store to meet the policeman.”
Ehud said, “Maybe the police found some clues?”
Ruthy said, “Or maybe they found nothing, and they want to investigate David.” She laughed at her own joke.
Ehud looked at her, pained. Ruthy’s hostility toward me was taking its toll on him. The night before, he had asked me in a low voice to be nice to Ruthy. “I know that you went out for a long time and everything, and maybe you had a fight, what do I know, but that’s—that’s in the prehistory, I—please be nice to her—” He looked at me beseechingly. Then, for no apparent reason, he started to tell me how astounded he was when Ruthy called him right after I had left for Canada and asked him to take her to a play he was then producing. “Of course I said yes,” he whispered, his face flaming. “All these years I—”
But I did not let him finish. “I’m not saying anything to her. What do you want from my life?”
I felt like the worst kind of rascal. Like the stories they used to tell about how Paltiel Rubin stayed at the homes of his infatuated admirers and screwed their wives, then borrowed money from the cuckolds for his drinking and debauch.
“No, really,” Ehud said.
Finally, my face flaming, I promised him to be nice to Ruthy. Maybe even take her to Café Cassit, when he, Ehud, was busy.
I couldn’t look him in the eye.
But Ruthy was right. Amzaleg did want to ask me questions. When I reached the store, I saw him sitting in his scratched black patrol car, parked on the sidewalk.
“Come inside,” he said. “It’s hot.” He opened the store’s door with a key, the one I knew, tied with a brown leather strap, and I followed him in.
The store’s floor was littered with elections posters that someone had slid under the door. “Time for a Change!” said one. Begin smiled at me toothily.
Amzaleg kicked at it sideways. “We didn’t clean anything, just the—the body.”
I sat down on the black wooden bench where I had sat innumerable times, watching my father seated at his low stool hammering on shoe heels and gluing soles.
Amzaleg sat on the table where my father’s cash register used to stand. Above him hung a picture of my father, age twenty-five, lean and wiry and dangerous in a tight black wrestling leotard, one set of knuckles on the floor, the other on his lean hip.
I stared at it, bracing myself for a speech telling me to forget about the play and leave, but instead he looked at me with puffy eyes and said, “Maybe you could help me?”
I was taken off guard. Help? I thought he wanted me to keep out of it.
“Help how?” I said, not offering, just to know.
“Tell me about your father and your mother, and, you know, the family.”
From outside came the cries of a truck driver, cursing, and honks.
I said, “I thought you knew him.”
“Nobody knew him.”
I said, “I—I don’t know very
much about him either—” It dawned on me that this was true.
“Just anything, how he was then, and later. What you remember about him, and your mother, and your family—” Amzaleg looked at me intensely.
I said lamely, “But—I haven’t been here for seven years—ask his friends from the army, and from afterward—”
“Who? There’s nobody to ask. No one knows anything about what he did the last twenty-nine years.” He looked at me, his eyebrows joined. “So what do you want me to do?”
I said, “Maybe Uncle Mordechai—”
“Thirty years Mordoch didn’t speak to him. What would he know? He only saw him maybe once, twice, in a bar mitzvah, or a wedding.”
I said, “But—why didn’t Mordechai speak to him?”
Somehow no one ever discussed this in our family. It was just one of those things; my father and his brother were not on talking terms.
Amzaleg said, “I don’t know why. So I am asking you, anything you can tell me—” He looked at me, not pleading, just waiting.
I swallowed hard. “But—I want you to tell me something first.”
Amzaleg did not appear surprised. “What?”
“Why did he leave the army?”
Amzaleg got down from the table. “I don’t know. People talked.”
I waited, my heart beating hard. “Like what, ‘talked’? Who?” I had wanted to say, “Because he said ‘noble enemy,’ in the Castel?” but refrained.
There was a timid knock on the door.
Amzaleg said, “Evil tongues, what do I know? Jews like to talk, behind the back. They said he didn’t kill him, maybe. That he let him go, Abu Jalood.”
The room spun. I sat slowly down on the bench. “In forty-eight?”
“Yes. Complete shits, some people are.” He seemed genuinely angry.
“Why?” I asked stupidly.
The knock on the door was repeated. Amzaleg opened it. It was Zussman, from the Tnuva kiosk near my father’s store. “Ahalan, Amnon,” he said. “Your car is blocking the way, the truck driver told my wife he is going to charge for the time he is—”
“All right, all right.” He muttered an army curse and turned to me. “I’ll be right back.”
When he returned he said, “A good man, this Zussman, but his wife eats him alive.”
“You also know him from the army?”
“Yes.” Amzaleg didn’t elaborate. “Some people—” He shook his head.
There was a pause.
I said, “But why? Why would he let the—him go?”
“I don’t know why! Your father used to wrestle with Arabs, before the Wrestling Association kicked them all out. He had lots of business with Arabs. Some people said he didn’t have the guts to use a knife up close. Or that he took money from Abu Jalood to let him go. If you ask me, people were jealous. At age forty-one, still commanding the unit he founded—” Again, he shook his head.
“So that’s why they—” I swallowed. “Why they kicked him out of the army?”
Amzaleg leaned over and looked into my eyes. His were bloodshot. “They didn’t kick him out. He could have been chief of staff one day. Moshe Dayan did much worse, a few times, and nobody said boo. Ask Gershonovitz.” Amzaleg closed his eyes for a moment. “But he left. He just left.”
“Maybe he was tired.” I could understand that. When I had finished my five years of service I was so tired I wanted nothing but sleep. For two whole months I tried, often drinking a bottle of Stock 777 every night to ward off the black nightmares, uselessly, until my visa to Canada arrived.
“Maybe,” Amzaleg said cryptically. He looked around him. “You want something from here?”
I got up and wandered around. My father was only six days dead but already the store was dusty and smelly, as if no one had ever worked there. I said over my shoulder, “So you are getting close? Do you think you’ll catch him?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll catch him.” And then he sat down on the bench, as if he’d just made a decision. “All right. To you I can talk.” And while I kicked through the scraps of leather, old shoes, rusty knives, discarded lasts, empty glue cans, the three decades of debris of a Tel Aviv cobbler, he talked at length about some lab tests, and conversations over Turkish coffee with Arab informants in Yaffo. “I am sure it’s Arabs. Gershonovitz says it’s probably someone crazy from here, maybe on drugs, who got it into his head that he is … you know, this Debba … But me—” He gave his head a quick shake. “It’s a new terrorist organization, I told him—”
I listened, stupefied, as he told in bewildering detail of some burglary in the Atta store adjacent to my father’s, the month before (“So he wouldn’t have opened the door to someone he didn’t know—no, no!”), and how none of the other merchants nearby had seen anyone come or leave. “So it wasn’t a customer. Not on the Shabbat.”
I listened numbly as Amzaleg kept spewing out details about who went home at what hour, who could have seen the shoe store’s door from his own store or kiosk, and who couldn’t. The angles of view, the blind spots. He pulled out a creased notebook and showed me a page of dashed lines scribbled in blue ballpoint ink, the kind we used to draw before a sniper job. “It’s some young Arab shabbab.” Amzaleg stabbed his finger at the page, as if it contained proof. “The old ones, two of them, gave me their word that it’s not PLO. I don’t know. I believe them.”
“Word of an Arab,” I said.
“Yes,” the policeman said evenly. “Word of an Arab.” After a little while he added, “Not everybody, but if I know them, then maybe.” He leaned back and looked up at me.
“You talked to his old partner, what’s his name, from Yaffo? Abdallah?”
“Yes. Him I believe.”
A few more wrestling photographs hung over the old Rotter machine at the back, where my father used to sew soles. There was a small photograph of him alone; a larger one of my father with Paltiel, side by side; Paltiel and my father amid a dozen bright-eyed swains with flowing forelocks and thick mustaches, all in black leotards, arms folded. The Yaffo Wrestling Club, probably, from before 1936, before the club had split into a Jewish club and an Arab one. Before the First Events, when the real killing started, when everything fell apart. When history began.
Amzaleg said suddenly, “Next week, I’ll have some time, we could go to his room, that he rented, on Lillienblum. This old man he rented the place from, he says he knows nothing. Maybe to you he’ll talk, I don’t know.”
“Glantz,” I said. “That’s where he used to live before also, when he landed in Palestine. With Paltiel.”
“See? I didn’t know this.” Amzaleg gave one more kick to the heap of leather scraps.
I took down two dusty albums from the shelf above my father’s stool, with old theater programs. “Can I take these? Maybe also a few knives.” I picked up three knives, in their leather sheathes, thinking of the play.
“Take whatever you want.”
On the way out he locked up, then pulled yellow police tape out of his pocket and stuck it on the door.
Across the street two new men now loitered—younger ones, in jeans and faded tie-dyed T-shirts: fake beatniks.
I pointed to them with my chin. “These yours?”
He spit on the pavement, noisily, and to my surprise stuck his own middle finger at my tailers in the obscene Arab gesture of zayin; and before I could say anything, he got into his patrol car and drove away.
As I turned to go I felt a tug at my sleeve. Zussman, from the Tnuva kiosk, his sparse hair plastered wetly to his skull. He handed me a tall glass. “Raspberry gazoz,” he said loudly, both his voice and hand shaking, “for the heat.” Then, looking furtively behind him, he pulled a few crumpled bills out of his pocket and shoved them into mine. “For the play,” he whispered. “Don’t let them stop it!” He seized my hand and held on to it, as Leibele, the waiter from Cassit, had at the funeral.
I stared at him over the glass’s rim, then asked in a low voice whether he had a minute to ta
lk.
“Not now,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. “Maybe next week.”
His balding wife glared at me from behind the soda fountain. “Out of here, murderer nemosha.”
I couldn’t blame her, really. What I couldn’t understand was how her husband was willing to talk to me, let alone help.
20
EXCEPT FOR A FEW people, no one wanted anything to do with me: the old as if they knew something I didn’t, the young as if they had been warned by the old. Every day I called old friends and high school classmates, asking for a loan to help produce the play. All claimed empty pockets. The occasional envelope did appear in Ehud’s mailbox with a few bills inside, but none carried a name, and these paltry gifts were far outnumbered by letters cursing me, my father, and the play, all unsigned, each nastier than the last.
I tried to disregard the poison letters—as I had disregarded the speech by the Israeli consul in Toronto—yet they weighed on me. So even though Ruthy was hostile, it was a relief to see her and Ehud in the late afternoons, as she returned from one more fitting at the seamstress, and he returned from the chocolate factory. Then the three of us would go to Café Cassit to eat, and simply yak. My constant followers—usually two, but often only one—would sit three or four tables away and stare at me, as if marking me for everyone else to see. I didn’t point them out to Ruthy, and to Ehud of course I didn’t need to.
Much later in the evening, I would go alone around Tel Aviv, from one bohemian café to another, trying to interest actors in doing the play, handing out photocopies of the main speeches and the songs. Occasionally some younger actor ignored the frowning hints of his elders and the grim stares of the constant tailers and read a few pages over his mud coffee; but when I said actors would have to work for “points,” all demurred.
“No one wants to do it,” I said to Ehud later at night, “without money up front. I thought actors took chances if they thought it was good.”
“I would do this for free,” Ruthy said.
The Debba Page 11