I told her not to do me any favors. “You go ahead and get married.”
Ehud said nothing.
Despite the rejections, or perhaps because of them, and because the play seemed to be my only hope against the blackness, my wish to stage it only grew. More than once I considered asking Ehud for help. But after all he had done for me, after saving my life at such a cost to himself, I now repaid him by screwing his future wife under his own roof; the last thing I needed was one more favor from him.
So I took the bus to Herzl Street, and went one by one into stores whose owners had known my father for thirty years, beseeching them, reminding them of my father’s deeds. But like my old friends and classmates, no one had anything to give. It was tax time; after Passover it was always slow; how they wished they could help me. If they had any money to give, they would. Even for this play. Even for this.
It was strange how a play that, strictly speaking, had never been fully performed, still generated so much fear, even in those who had once been my father’s friends, and mine.
Later at night, I called Jenny from the living room phone. She picked up on the first ring, cried with joy and began to recite another poem she had written for me. I closed my eyes and, when she finished, asked her whether I could borrow some money for my father’s play.
There was a short silence. Then she said in a small voice, “Are you sleeping with her?”
“Who?” I said.
“Swear!” Jenny said. “Swear!”
For a brief moment I could not speak; then I rasped, my voice tight with panic. “She’s the fiancée of my best friend. They’re getting married in three weeks! In three weeks!”
There was a long pause.
“I—I’ll try,” Jenny whispered at last. “I can borrow maybe two thousand on my credit card, because the plane ticket already—”
“Whatever you can send, send.” I gave her Ehud’s address, and before she could say anything else or quote to me any more love poems, I said I’d call tomorrow and hung up.
But two thousand wasn’t enough, and it was now clear what I had to do. That evening Ehud and I sat in the kitchen while Ruthy sat by, pretending to read Ha‘Olam HaZeh. For an hour Ehud kept telling me all that had befallen him since I had left. His early ventures with small theater groups; how he no longer did this, “because no one cares anymore about good theater.” How he and Ruthy came to live together; how he now focused on work at his father’s chocolate factory, resisting the lure of the stage.
Finally, I interrupted him and asked roughly if he could lend me some money, maybe also help with the production. “I only have five weeks,” I said. “I must do it by the fifteenth or lose it but no one wants to talk to me. Maybe if you produce it, not me—” I stopped.
“But we have the wedding in three weeks—”
“You can postpone it,” Ruthy said without raising her head from her cinema magazine. “We’re screwing already, no?”
There was a long brittle silence.
“All right,” Ehud whispered at last, his face pale, “if you want.” He looked at me.
I forced myself to look at him, nodded jerkily, then explained that Mr. Gelber had said it would cost 150,000 shekels. “But in five weeks, you’ll get it all back—”
“Nah, it’s eighty thousand maximum.” Ehud explained how one calculated the actual costs: number of actors, props, play length, complexity of material, lighting—
“Ehud—” I said, but could not continue, so much love I suddenly felt for him; like the love I had once felt for my father.
“Nah. Leave it. I’ll hang the ads in Cassit and Kapulski Café tomorrow, for the auditions. Then we’ll go get us a director, and start on Sunday.”
I could see I was in good hands now.
21
YET NONE OF THE directors Ehud called was willing, even those who were out of work and needed the pay. Everyone had different reasons; but it became clear that whatever fear was infecting the merchants and the actors was also causing directors to shy away.
Whether it was the play’s peacenik message or something else, we didn’t have a clue.
Then Ruthy learned from her mother that Re’uven Kagan had directed the play’s ill-fated 1946 performance. So the next morning the three of us drove to see him. We climbed the four floors to his rooftop apartment on HaYarkon Street, not two hundred meters from the beach.
Kagan let us in without a word. Empty arak bottles were piled up in a wooden crate by the door, and a half-empty Stock 777 bottle stood on the floor beside the uncurtained window. There was very little furniture; it was an old rooftop laundry nook converted into a pauper’s living quarters. The three of us avoided staring at the mess, as, one after the other, we implored him to direct the play for us.
Kagan kept saying no. He was done with serious theater; no one cared anymore. The public only wanted slapstick and dreck comedies. Good plays he was not even going to touch. “Especially this one. Last time, even with Paltiel and Isser and all the other Jewish wrestlers from the club—no, no.” He lifted the arak bottle to his mouth and drank.
Finally Ruthy rose to her feet. “We’re wasting our time, let’s go find someone else—there must be some theater directors with balls …”
“Just a minute.” I turned to Kagan. “Why didn’t they finish the show in Haifa?”
“The Events,” he said in a distant rasp. “Also, there was … this rumor—”
“What rumor?”
“Oh, nothing.” Kagan flushed. “That this—that the Debba would appear after the show—the real Debba, the Mahdi—this fakakte Arab savior—”
Ruthy said to Kagan with exaggerated disdain, “So that’s why you say no? What are you, a superstitious Bedouin?”
Kagan’s flush deepened, “I am not saying this was the reason for the bedlam … They probably rioted because of—of what happens in the play … Also, the week before, this was April forty-six, a bus with nurses from Rambam Hospital was ambushed. And this kind of play, shown right after such a massacre—” He stopped.
We were all silent, digesting this. Finally Ruthy asked, “Who played the parts?”
“They did,” Kagan said. “Isser, Paltiel, Nachman. Who did you think?”
Ruthy said, “And her? Sarah? Who played her—my mother?”
Kagan laughed bitterly. “Riva? No, no. She played it. Sonya.”
The little hairs on my neck rose. It was the first I had heard of my mother’s involvement in the play.
I felt the familiar hole in my stomach. “And the Debba? Who played it?”
Kagan said to me, “Why do you need all this cholera? Go back to Canada, see movies, sit in a café, eat ice cream, enjoy life. Don’t dig up all this past dreck.”
He and Gershonovitz, and Gelber.
Ruthy said, “I didn’t know Sonya could sing.”
Kagan said into the wall, “Many other things you don’t know, sweetie.”
Ruthy said tightly, “I know about—about Mother, and, and him, Paltiel.”
It was commonly known that, as a favor, Paltiel Rubin had married Riva in a sham ceremony, after she had told him she was pregnant. A week later Paltiel and Riva were divorced by the full rabbinical court of Tel Aviv. The rabbis were not pleased. Five months later Paltiel was dead.
“Yes, yes.” Kagan waved his hand, as if this wasn’t what he had meant. “She could sing, Sonya, she could dance, she could act—” He shook his head in marvel and sorrow.
Ehud put his arm around Ruthy’s shoulders.
“Kagan—” I said desperately. “Please …”
Suddenly his nostrils flared and his bloodshot eyes moistened. “His friend, this Yemenite actor, what’s his name. Ovadiah. He played the Debba.” Then Kagan shouted in Yiddish, “Nareshkeit!” Foolishness. “I told him, Isser, why do you need this? You already wrote this crazy play? All right! It’s written! You want to stage it? Fine! It’s your money. Waste it. But why in Haifa? There are no better places in all of Palestine?—but he i
nsisted. Why? I don’t know why. Maybe he wanted some bedlam, for the advertising—maybe it was he who had started the rumor. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. Ask Tzadok.”
I said, “Ovadiah Tzadok? The Yemenite actor?”
“Yeah. Him.”
Ruthy said, “He’s still alive? He had acted once with my mother in forty-two—”
“I don’t know.” He turned away.
“Kagan—” My voice seemed stuck.
“No,” he said, looking at me fully for the first time. “I don’t want to go back into the shit.” His voice was pleading.
I said thickly, “I don’t want to, either, but he asked me to do it, in the will …”
“Well, he didn’t ask me.”
“So I am asking you,” I said in a strangled voice. “For his sake …”
I don’t know how I could ask anything in my father’s name, after the way I had rejected both him and all he stood for.
Kagan’s face turned pale. He looked at each one of us, one by one. No one spoke. Finally he stood up, pinching his nostrils as if trying to hold back anger, or tears. “All right. I’ll help you.” His eyes twitched with moisture. “All right! But you do the research about the background, not me. You dig into this past dreck, not me. That’s the condition!”
He looked into my eyes like Leibele had done, in the cemetery; as if trying to convey a meaning, or a message.
I managed to speak. “All right.”
When we came down we saw that someone had broken the window of Ehud’s Volvo. I stammered that I was sorry and would understand if he wanted to pull out, but he cut me off.
“You just do exactly what Kagan asked you,” he said.
He didn’t say “your father asked you,” and I loved him for that.
As we drove away, Ruthy was quiet in the backseat. But Ehud leaned over and pulled out an old Unit knife from the glove compartment, its serrated blade blue-black and dull with use. I said I didn’t want it, but he said he wasn’t offering. “You get your own.” He put it in his pocket.
I said I didn’t need a knife.
“Yes, you do,” Ruthy said. “Or they’ll do to you what they did to him.” She paused, “Or it will.”
“You be quiet,” Ehud snapped.
She obeyed, with unexpected shock; he had never spoken to her like this before.
“Did you hear this?” she said to me. “One might think we were married already.”
22
THE NEWS THAT THE DEBBA was about to be staged again raised waves of alarm in various circles, and the vandalism of Ehud’s Volvo was just the beginning.
A day after an article about the play had appeared in Ha‘Olam HaZeh magazine, the daily newspaper Ma’ariv ran an editorial fulminating at the “unseemly wallowing in guilt, so typical of Labor circles, which brought us to the brink at Yom Kippur in ’73.” Davar ran an editorial in reply (“… it has never been the policy of the Labor Party …”) and the phone began to ring right after breakfast, the callers no longer just youthful Kahane disciples. “In this fateful hour,” one caller intoned in flowery Old Hebrew style, “in these wind-tossed days, when the people’s ship of state has nearly sundered—”
“Eat shit,” I said, and hung up.
There were half a dozen more calls, mostly from old men, some incoherent in their rage; but the last one was different. A voice of a young man asked diffidently if he could speak to “the son of Isser from the Castel.”
My stomach lurched as I said it was I.
“D-don’t give up!” the young voice stammered. “D-don’t let anyone stop you! I r-read the play and … and … it’s your duty to do this for—” I interrupted him and asked angrily how he had gotten a copy. “There—there are lots of copies now,” he stuttered. “I—please don’t give up—” There was some muttering in the background and the line went dead.
“Well, send us money,” I said into the dead receiver.
A little before noon, Yaro Ben-Shlomo, from the Unit, called.
“I read someplace you are staying.”
Just like that. Seven years I haven’t talked to him, and no hello, no nothing. Typical kibbutznik.
I said it was only for a few weeks, until I finished. “Then I go back.”
There was a short silence. “Anyway, so you be careful—”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know—anyway, if you need anything, you know—”
Like what? Was he, too, going to offer me a gun, or a knife? “I don’t need anything, but if you can lend us some money—”
But he had already hung up.
There was one more phone call. Abdallah Seddiqi, my father’s Arab ex-partner. In the background I could hear a donkey bray. He probably was calling from his basement store in Yaffo. More condolences, but in Hebrew this time.
“Yes, yes.” I interrupted his flowery speech. “My heart aches too at the loss—”
“Anytime you want, any help you need. Or if you need leather—”
What would I need leather for?
When Abdallah finally hung up I called Mr. Glantz, my father’s landlord, and said I’d like to come talk to him, ask him a few questions.
If no one else would talk, maybe my father’s old landlord would.
He said, “So when do you want to come? Come today, so long as I am still alive.”
There was a buzzing sound on the line, and a faint murmur, and then the line went silent.
“I’m coming,” I said to the dead receiver.
It took me a long time to lace my sandals with fingers gone numb.
23
“WILL YOU HAVE SOME tea?” said Mr. Glantz.
He was at least eighty years old, but as spry and agile as a monkey, drawn from the same mysterious stock of men of Genesis that seemed to age without losing their timeless vitality: like Gershonovitz, Amzaleg, or even my uncle Mordechai.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Me nothing,” Amzaleg said.
To my surprise he had been waiting for me when I approached house number 71 on Lillienblum Street, seated in his scratched patrol car, reading Ha‘Olam HaZeh.
The ubiquitous Toyota was parked across the road, its driver and Amzaleg studiously ignoring each other.
I didn’t ask whether he had been listening in on my phone calls or whether he had been ordered to meet me by those who did. Besides, I was surprised at how glad I was to see him. Why that was, I couldn’t tell.
It was cool in Glantz’s kitchen. The heat engulfing Tel Aviv had somehow not yet penetrated this ancient enclave of crumbling houses where a few members of the second wave of immigrants still lived. As Mr. Glantz fussed around in his kitchen, Amzaleg and I sat on two wobbly chairs, saying nothing. At last he sat down at the table.
“Drink, drink.” He pushed a tea glass toward me.
He himself drank his tea from a shallow bowl, blowing into it as he drank. Over the rim he said to Amzaleg. “So? Twice in one week? What else you want to know?” He turned toward me. “So many questions he asked me already, he should know me better now than my wife, may she rest in peace.” He sipped noisily at his bowl of tea. “Better than his own wife, maybe.” He gave a cackle. “And you?” he said to me.
Amzaleg’s face turned dark ocher.
I said I wanted to take some of the things that my father had left. “Maybe also ask you a few questions—”
Mr. Glantz pointed a belligerent thumb at Amzaleg. “I told the police already everything, that I went to look for Isser in the middle of the seder, when he hadn’t—”
“No. I—I wanted to ask you about the time he lived here before, with Paltiel.”
Mr. Glantz’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
I explained about the play, what my father and now Kagan had asked of me. “So I’m trying to learn about the prehistory, to make the show look good—” I paused, searching for words. “The atmosphere.”
“Of this, I know nothing.” Mr. Glantz threw a swift glance at Amzaleg, who now kept s
ilent.
I said, “But did he write it here, this play?”
“Ich veis?” he said in Yiddish. What do I know? “He was writing all the time.”
“When? Now? Or then?”
“Oh, then, and also now, all the time.”
I stole a glance at Amzaleg, but his dark face remained impassive, as if now he, like my tailers, were a mere spectator at an enfolding show.
“At this table,” Mr. Glantz went on, “and in his room, all the time he was writing. Poems, letters, stories.”
I said, “Did Paltiel write his poems here?”
Mr. Glantz shrugged. “What do I know? He wrote here, there, everywhere.”
There was another pause, a longer one.
Amzaleg asked, “Before he got married, he also lived here, the deceased?”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Glantz said. “He and Paltiel, seventeen years. Straight off the boat they came, with the horse-drawn cart that used to run between Yaffo and Tel Aviv. Also Nachman Shein, later, after the Zirahtron Theater threw him out because of the Purim party, when he brought the Arab in. So I put a mattress on the floor.”
“What Arab?”
“Someone they found and dressed up like an old Arabusha, and he came and read everyone his fortune. Maybe he was the feigele of Shein, or Paltiel, I don’t know.”
Amzaleg and I waited, not looking at each other.
Mr. Glantz said, “The first time they came, your father and Paltiel, both of them were still wet from the sea, dripping on the stairs—they had both fallen into the sea, coming off the boat,” he cackled. “Lucky for them, this Arabush boatman knew how to swim.”
“Yes.” I had heard this story before. “So how long did he live here, my father?”
“I told you, seventeen—”
“Not then. Now.”
“Now? Three years almost, from just before she died.” Mr. Glantz darted at me a quick opaque look. “May she rest in peace.”
“He came here before she died, or after?”
“Before, three weeks before.”
Amzaleg shifted in his seat.
It didn’t make sense. My parents had always seemed such a pair of lovebirds. My father bringing my mother cyclamens (whose smell she loved) and asters for no reason; she massaging his sore shoulders after work, and mending his socks. Yet he had left her just before she was about to go into surgery, with my brother only a month dead. It didn’t make sense.
The Debba Page 12