The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  Mr. Glantz shrugged. “So maybe they had a fight. Ich veis?”

  Fought over what? “You sure?” I said. “Before, not after she—”

  “Yes, yes, before! Like I told you. In May seventy-four, right after Independence Day. He called and asked if he could take the room again. So I didn’t ask questions.” Mr. Glantz looked at me directly. “Sure I said yes. Seventeen years, it counts for something.” He got up. “Come. I’ll show you his room.”

  We straggled in, but there was nothing much to look at. A wooden table with one chair by the window; a narrow military bed stretched taut with a blue army blanket, and under the bed, two scuffed leather slippers, neatly aligned. On the wall, the photograph of my grandfather and grandmother from Poland who had gone with Hitler; and, to the side, one more photo: my father with Paltiel Rubin, both in desert fatigues, their hair blowing in the wind.

  No photograph of my mother, or of me or my brother. As if anything that occurred after ’48 had never happened.

  I blew my nose into my handkerchief.

  I looked around me, trying to discern in this bare cell an answer to the mystery of my father’s death, and of his life. But there was nothing. A few books were piled helter-skelter on a low plywood shelf by the window: mainly poems by Nachman Shein, Paltiel Rubin, and Michah Cohen-Kadosh. On the table were The History of the Jews, by Professor Chayim HaM’eiri-Roggell, all five volumes of it; an old Cassuto Bible; a Siddur; and, to my great surprise, my own three blue copybooks of poetry and stories, which I had written during the service, against regulations. A ballpoint pen lay on the top copybook, a clot of ink on its tip.

  I felt my nose heating up inside.

  Amzaleg said, “Did Paltiel also live here? In this room?”

  “Yes, yes, here. They used to write at this table, together.”

  “Together?” I said. This was news to me.

  “Yes, sure, together. They were friends, once.”

  I thought Mr. Glantz would launch into a story about the rocky friendship of my father and Paltiel, how they fought the Arabs in ’48, and each other, and made bedlam in the Tel Aviv bohema, but he seemed to have lost interest. “Look around. Maybe you want to take something now, or later, I don’t care.”

  I leafed through the copybooks, my cheeks burning. Some pages had been corrected, for grammar and punctuation; but here and there were small sharp check marks of approval. I felt my eyes sting.

  “Did anyone come to visit him?” I asked. “After my mother died.”

  “Sometimes.” Mr. Glantz went on about the Yaffo suppliers who arrived once a week for their checks, then stayed for coffee, and actors who came. The friend who had come every Friday to help translate Paltiel’s poetry books into Arabic; and more actors, who came probably to ask for handouts. “Why they didn’t come to the funeral—”

  “Cholera,” Amzaleg said. “All of them.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mr. Glantz went on, “And once or twice on Saturday he came with me to the synagogue—you know the synagogue? On Bugrashov?”

  “Yes. That’s where I had my bar mitzvah.” Then, for no reason at all, I asked, “Did any women come—to visit?” I felt my face redden.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” Mr. Glantz said at last. “Sometimes, once a week, also after Sonya died.”

  I looked at him, waiting.

  “Riva,” Mr. Glantz said. “Riva Yellin.”

  He went into a fit of coughing and I waited until it passed.

  Later, going together down the stairs, neither of us speaking, Amzaleg suddenly said to me over his shoulder, “She has an alibi.”

  “She is old,” I said into his back.

  “Everyone is old.”

  We emerged into the street. For a moment we stood in the intense yellow sunshine, breathing slowly through our mouths, blinking in the glare, ignoring the tailer who leaned on the fence opposite. Then, making an odd squeak with his lips, Amzaleg thumped his fist on my shoulder as if to encourage me before a tough mission, got into his car, and roared off without offering me a lift.

  I stared after him for a long while. Was he really only after my father’s killer? Or was there something else?

  24

  THE AUDITIONS TOOK PLACE Sunday morning, four and a half weeks before the deadline, in an empty warehouse at the back of the Reznik chocolate factory in Ramat Gan. They did not go peacefully. Outside on the sidewalk, two small crowds congregated, face to face. On one side were perhaps twenty youths wearing knitted skullcaps and oversized orange T-shirts sporting a picture of a raised fist, and the word “Kach!”—Thus!—who kept clapping and chanting, “In blood and fire Judea has fallen, in blood and fire Judea shall rise!” They were disciples of Meir Kahane, the mad rabbi from Brooklyn who wanted to expel all Arabs from the land of Israel.

  Across from them was another, smaller crowd—high school students, both boys and girls in standard uniforms of dark blue pants and pale blue shirts like those Ehud, Ruthy, and I used to wear to Alliance High School, and a few Tel Aviv bohemians in their own standard uniforms of jeans and Peace Now T-shirts, like Ruthy’s. Every now and then the high school crowd tried to drown out the screaming of the orange shirts with soppy kibbutz songs, but this only served to inflame their opponents. The result was an ongoing cacophony. At last we had the chairs moved to a large storage room, windowless and stuffy, but quiet, and there the audition finally began, an hour late.

  Only young actors had come to try out, most clutching copies of the play—how they had gotten them no one knew. But a few arrived without knowing what they would be auditioning for, and two of these, after scanning the first act, got up wordlessly and left. A third, a curly-haired girl with a Star of David medallion on her neck, gave a short ranting speech similar to the one I had gotten from the Israeli consul in Canada. The remaining actors just stared ahead, waiting for her to finish and leave, which she finally did. Immediately afterward, Kagan stood up and asked for quiet. His face was flushed, his bloodshot eyes distant as he spoke. The play for which they were auditioning, he announced in his trained HaBimah voice, was a rediscovered masterpiece written by Isser Starkman, hero of the Castel, recently murdered by evil hands whom justice would one day surely reach.

  The room was silent as Kagan went on to say that the play had been staged only once before, in the days of Genesis, but that performance had been interrupted by other malign hands. And, as all could now see, Kagan continued, similar hands were still trying to stop the play from being performed. Here his voice strengthened dramatically. “Anyone who auditions today must be ready, if chosen, to sacrifice for the play, since the same hands that cut short Isser Starkman’s life would no doubt try to stop his song also.” Kagan scanned the small crowd, his eyes flashing theatrically. “So any soft-hearted louse among you who cannot take it better leave now, for know we must, ere we start on this sacred task!”

  No one got up, no one spoke, no one moved; the crowd seemed transfixed.

  “It is an important play,” Kagan went on, “a key play in pre-Genesis Hebrew literature, conceived in suffering and born in blood. And the son of the slain author and brother to a fallen soldier will help direct it, as his father asked him before he died.”

  Chairs creaked when, as if pulled by a string, everyone turned in their seats and looked at me. There was a low hum as all mumbled gutturally together, like the crowd repeating the Kaddish at my father’s funeral. Blood rushed to my face and I felt my eyes sting. There was a strange softness in my belly.

  Ehud punched at my shoulder with his fist, not hard, and left the fist there.

  Then the moment passed.

  “Yallah,” I said to Kagan. “Siftah.” Opening move.

  Kagan began matter-of-factly, distributing copies of the play to those who did not have them, allowing fifteen minutes of reading. He then let the auditioning actors read whatever part they wanted. To my surprise, he made Ruthy audition like everyone else. I thought Ehud had assigned her Sarah’s
role in advance, as the price for postponing their wedding. But she waited in line as three other Sarahs walked up front and sang their chosen parts. When her turn came, she stood up in her seat, silent and fulminating. She began softly, staring at Kagan, Ehud, and me in turn, and after a while her voice strengthened as she sang of her plight. And all at once her voice acquired massive volume as it soared, hitting the highest notes with violent precision. She remained standing for a moment, then sat down. No one spoke; two other actresses who had sung before for the role got up and left.

  By afternoon Kagan announced his choices without explanation. To no one’s surprise, Ruthy got Sarah’s role. Other choices seemed no surprise either.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Kagan said. “Be careful when you leave. I suggest you exit in twos and threes. Those who did not get chosen, please leave your names and addresses with me, in case of need. For the chosen, take your copies home and memorize your lines. Reflect on the play at length—tomorrow would be a good day to do so. Then have a good sleep—first rehearsal is Friday morning, nine sharp.”

  Next day was Memorial Day, the day before Independence Day. It was also the start of a heat wave that lasted all the way to our performance. Early in the morning, before the heat started, while Ehud and Ruthy were still sleeping, Amzaleg rang the doorbell as I was rereading the play for the hundredth time. When I opened the door he asked without preamble if I wanted to go play poker.

  “Now?”

  “First we go for Yizkor.” The memorial prayer for the dead. “You want to come?” He squeaked his lips at me.

  “All right,” I said.

  It was clear that neither the Yizkor nor poker was the real purpose of his visit.

  We drove by the Moroccan synagogue at the HaTiqva quarter so Amzaleg could pick up his prayer shawl. The synagogue was a decrepit structure shaded by old eucalyptus trees. Through the open door I could see the cantor, a young man about my age but already balding, swaying before the holy arc, trilling the notes. I looked away.

  Presently Amzaleg returned carrying a velvet bag. “For my son, also for two of my brothers,” he said, staring ahead. “He was killed in the Golan Heights in seventy-three, they in Jerusalem in sixty-seven. May the Holy Name avenge their blood.” He ground the gears, then gunned the engine.

  Avenge upon whom? Or what?

  Nachalat Yitzchak cemetery was more crowded than it had been two weeks before. Thousands of people had come, and it seemed that everyone was weeping. There was something nearly monstrous in so much grief all at once. Women of various ages were lying prostrate on graves, hugging tombstones. Men stood in small and large clumps, talking in low voices. A few stood beside graves, idly flicking pebbles onto them.

  “Here.” Amzaleg lassoed my shoulders with a blue-and-white Moroccan prayer shawl. “Was my son’s. You want?”

  “Okay,” I said at last.

  I sat down on a narrow bench, fingering the shawl. Amzaleg had gone to stand before twin headstones fashioned from crude basalt. He held his small brown Siddur, mumbling intently, then moved over to a third grave. A young woman with a nose like Amzaleg’s was weeping silently over it, her brown cheeks bright with tears. As Amzaleg came near her she rose, wiped her eyes, and walked out of the cemetery.

  I averted my eyes. Amzaleg’s family was no business of mine.

  For a while I watched the mourners, trying unsuccessfully to deaden my heart, and finally walked over to my father’s fresh grave, and put a pebble on it, too. Words I had nearly forgotten rose in me, and through gritted teeth I said them. How many friends have I said these words for? How many enemies?

  An antidote to God’s Mein Kampf, Ehud had said.

  A low siren sounded, slowly gaining strength as it rose in volume and in pitch. It rose and climbed until it reached a sort of hum that resonated with everything—the transparent air, the thin dusty sycamores, the black-clad women, the throng of soldiers in aleph uniforms. Then it died down. Bursts of weeping came from all sides.

  “He’s coming,” said Amzaleg. “Peres.”

  Shim’on Peres, Labor’s new leader following Rabin’s resignation, walked by, stooped and gray. Behind him walked four tall gorillas in suits, one nearly as tall as me. All nodded at Amzaleg, their eyes flicking over me.

  When the prayer ended Amzaleg drove me back to the HaTiqva quarter. No car followed us as far as I could see.

  “Now we play poker,” Amzaleg growled savagely, “in their memory.”

  Amzaleg’s apartment in the HaTiqva quarter was the smallest I had ever seen—three cubicles of rooms, a shoe box of a kitchen, and a tiny low-ceilinged toilet. I had thought Amzaleg and I would eat and play cards and talk, but to my angry surprise, when we arrived I saw Shim’on Gershonovitz sitting in the kitchen, splitting peanut shells in his thick fingers.

  “What’s he doing here?” I snapped. “Is it poker, or official business?”

  I thought Amzaleg himself had wanted to talk to me, not this man who was responsible for my tailers, and probably also responsible for putting the fear into everyone about my father’s play.

  Amzaleg’s face darkened. “Sit down.”

  I sat slowly, tamping down my anger with difficulty.

  The kitchen was so tight no one could move without poking a knee or an elbow into someone else. A black frying pan stood on the gas range, emitting a strong smell of fried onions. There were no curtains nor a woman’s touch anywhere; it was evidently a single man’s dwelling. But on the high shelf, besides several photos of a boy and a girl, some together with a younger Amzaleg, others alone—probably his son and daughter (there was a diagonal black patch on one of the boy’s photos)—I saw a line of poetry books in Hebrew, Arabic, and French, with paper tabs sticking out. Farahidi’s book of sixteen Arab meters; Nuwas’s love poems; Mallarmé’s sonnets; Bialik and Tchernichovsky; Alterman; and also Paltiel Rubin’s first edition of Flowers of Blood.

  I raised my eyebrows, trying to catch Amzaleg’s eye, but he evaded mine. He tugged at the fridge’s door and pulled out a large bottle of Tempo and, from the back, a pack of well-thumbed cards. “My ex used to say, it’s either them or me.”

  “Them,” said Gershonovitz.

  Amzaleg swigged at length and passed the bottle to Gershonovitz, then cut the cards. “Siftach,” he rumbled.

  The fat man drank and passed me the bottle (I curtly declined), as his eyes flashed with false bonhomie. “The Toronto embassy katsa tells me your shiksa has big tits.”

  Rage blossomed in me. “You had me followed in Toronto, too!”

  “Only now and then, to make sure.”

  “Sure of what? That I didn’t kill anyone?” But I really shouldn’t have been surprised—an ex Anon, no longer a citizen, and with the speech I gave to the consul … “And here? Tailing me day and night like an Arabush …”

  “It’s for your own protection, Dada, we told you.” He slapped two cards. “Raise you ten.”

  “Protection!” I pushed a ten-shekel bill. “Against whom? More burglars? Amzaleg still didn’t catch the—first, then the one who tried to steal the play, then this Arabush in Tveriah—” I made a farting sound with my lips.

  Amzaleg growled and picked a card, and Gershonovitz picked another equably.

  I said, “Or maybe you think it’s a Debba that did all this?” I repeated the sound.

  “Well, you can laugh,” Gershonovitz said. “But how did the … killer get into the store? With the door locked?”

  I slapped down my cards. “So maybe my father opened the door himself, when someone he knew knocked, or someone asked for money?” I collected the bills.

  Amzaleg dealt fresh cards and kept darkly silent.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Gershonovitz said. “But how could the killer lock the door after … what he did? There was only one key, and it was in Isser’s pocket.”

  It was true. My father never made a duplicate key to the store’s door. I had never asked why. All at once the image of my father sitting at his workbench, c
utting a thick leather sole, a long knife in his hand, came to me, and I felt my eyes sting. Silently Amzaleg handed me the Tempo bottle. I took a swig and gagged. It was pure arak. Amzaleg retrieved the bottle and said in a low voice, “Well, we found he did have a visitor in the store that night.”

  I breathed shallowly. “Who?”

  Amzaleg said, “Someone. We don’t know who. Zussman came back later to get something from the kiosk, and he heard someone talking with him—”

  Gershonovitz interrupted angrily, “This baldie, his wife, she sent him to the kiosk to bring more Tempo bottles in the middle of the seder … Can you imagine? We’re lucky he married her only later, or in forty-eight he would have done nothing. She would have kept him home in the kitchen all through the war.”

  Did he mean Zussman worked for him in forty-eight? It seemed needless to ask.

  Amzaleg said, “Well, Sonya didn’t keep him from doing things.”

  Gershonovitz said, “Yeah, but she was doing things, too.”

  There was a silence, as if they expected me to ask a question. I asked it. “Did my mother work for you, too, before the Events?” My heart was thumping hard. It was now clear that this was why they had brought me here, to tell me this.

  “No, no.” Gershonovitz picked a card and pushed a bill forward. “She just—helped. She was only sixteen, not a full member; she was—doing other things for us—”

  “For the Shay?” The Haganah’s intelligence service.

  More cards exchanged places; money piled up; I did not understand how I could continue to play.

  “Yes, even though she was young, in thirty-three,” Gershonovitz said. “Very young, when she began working in Yaffo, in … sewing.”

  There was a long pause. Amzaleg said into it, “But we don’t think that this is connected to what happened then, in the prehistory.”