I summarized the play for him while he fidgeted with a paper knife.
“About the Abu Jalood tall tale? So?”
“So that’s it. Maybe it’s the elections. Begin finally has a chance to kick Labor out, so they are jittery.” It sounded idiotic in my own ears. “Or maybe they know who killed my father and they don’t want me to find out.” This sounded even more idiotic.
For a long moment Yaro stared at me with his protruding pale eyes. “Look,” he said at last. “I’ll talk to my dad.”
Yaro’s father, Asa’el Ben-Shlomo, had been one of my father’s best friends in ’48. Little Asa, they called him. He had commanded a unit operating Davidkas, the small noisy cannons, and nearly went to jail after refusing to fire on the Altalena, the Etzel ammunition ship that had arrived from Europe in ’48, to supply the Jewish splinter forces in their rebellion. Finally they pulled him off and put in his place someone else who sunk the ship in front of Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv. A few dozen Jews were killed, but the State—so they said—was saved.
Asa retreated with his family into a kibbutz, but after a while came out and joined the shoo-shoo. I am told he had helped catch Eichmann. Some rumors said he and two others tracked down Josef Mengele in Brazil in ’64 or ’65, and killed him by themselves, slowly, against orders. I don’t know if it’s true. There are many other such stories about that generation of maniacs who had built the State. The Rishonim. The First Ones.
Today he is retired, back in the kibbutz. Not even kibbutz secretary. Just manager of the cowshed.
I said, “And I also need some help, something.” Meaning beyond finding out what the hell was going on.
Yaro didn’t say anything, just waited.
I said, “Maybe some Unit guys to watch my ass, until I finish with … the play.”
I didn’t say “his play” but it hung there, between us. At last Yaro repeated, “I’ll talk to my dad. Come see me Thursday. Okay? No, I’ll meet you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“In Café Piltz? About twelve?”
“All right.”
Nobody followed me home, as far as I could see.
36
DURING THE NEXT TWO days Amzaleg dropped in on the auditions in the mornings and sat at the back of the hall, listening and watching intently, his black eyes seemingly blank yet drilling into everyone, ignoring the rhythmic shouts outside.
The first time he came I accompanied him out. On the way to his car he stopped before the factory’s gate and scrutinized the two opposing camps on the sidewalk, taking in both crowds, before driving off. Whether he had come because he wanted to keep an eye on them, or just because the play had struck a chord in him, I could not tell. The second day he stayed half an hour only; and this time, like the ex-Anon that he was, he left without anyone seeing him go.
I still hadn’t told him of the Samson, nor did I tell Ehud; I no longer knew whom I could trust.
The next few days passed in a daze of pain and heat. The khamsin had soared and Tel Aviv lay smoldering under an anvil of boiling air. Also over the last few days the Arab garbagemen had gone on strike, and piles of rotting garbage, on which thousands of blackbirds had descended, had begun to accumulate on street corners. The chocolate factory had to detail two employees to transport the factory’s refuse to the municipal dump in Chiriyeh. Since one of them was also our soundman, every rehearsal had to be delayed until his return.
“Shoot those Arabushim,” snapped Amatzia Besser, our Debba, “then they’ll learn.”
“Then they’ll stink, too,” said Yaron Chamdi, one of our musical directors.
Ehud said nothing. Lately he had turned silent. Perhaps it was the play—he seemed consumed by it, like the plays he used to read obsessively at the Unit after operations. Every night now he pored over the script with a pencil, read and reread Kagan’s notes, and made notes of his own. The last few rehearsals, Kagan had indeed begun to defer to him, often accepting his suggestions and his whispered comments, as if he, Ehud, not I, were fulfilling my father’s wish.
Did Ehud know that Ruthy and I were screwing behind his back? I doubt it. We took care to display only the rawest enmity in front of him. For Ruthy this may have been easy. But for me, this subterfuge proved the sheerest hell, as bad as my black dreams, which had intensified, barely kept in check by the play. It was as if with every passing day, my proximity to Ruthy brought back old-new memories of her and of this murderous place, my father’s land; and so my love for both, which I thought I had managed to shed, now gripped me anew with a hundred talons of heat. It would be hell, I knew, when I must leave the land again, and her.
I tried not to think of it.
37
THURSDAY MORNING I SKIPPED the rehearsal and went to meet with Yaro.
I got off the bus well in advance and walked down to Gordon Beach. An open space was best for shaking off a tail. So for half an hour I walked up and down the edge of the surf, my sandals slung over my shoulder, idly watching around me.
There was no one.
At five to twelve I put on my sandals and climbed the rickety stairs from the promenade to the glass-fronted café.
Yaro was sitting behind a thick stone column, reading Ha‘Olam HaZeh magazine, oblivious to the view. There was a huge pair of bare tzitzes on the back cover.
“Shame on you, ya maniac,” I said.
He put the magazine down. “You clean?”
I began to say I was, but suddenly I felt a prickling at the back of my neck. “Fuck! There’s someone on our ass!”
I knew I hadn’t been followed, so he must have been.
Yaro said, “I asked two guys from Detachment Bett if they could give us backup.”
My nose stung. “From Bett? Who?”
Detachment Bett was my brother’s old outfit in the Unit. One of their specialities was waiting hours without moving, to provide covering fire if needed. You had to be a bit phlegmatic to enjoy the wait, also a bit weird.
“You don’t know them. Younger guys. Two kibbutzniks, came in after you left. They said they wouldn’t mind. They’ve heard of you.”
I threw a casual glance around the high-ceilinged room. Only old farts sipping their coffees, and a few tourists. Nobody young.
“Are they outside?”
“I don’t even know.”
I said desperately, “Yaro, I wouldn’t ask for backup if it was only the Kahane maniacs—but these shoo-shoo fuckers sent a Samson—”
Yaro said abruptly, “It’s not the shoo-shoo, or Kach. I talked to Dad. He said your name came up in the Mo’adon.”
I felt a trickle of fear course down my spine.
The Mo’adon, the Club, was an informal committee of the current prime minister and all former prime ministers, whoever was still alive, usually not more than three or four. It gathered only infrequently, to decide on the most important matters of state that the prime minister didn’t want to handle alone; for example, major peace overtures, or takedowns abroad.
I wiped my upper lip with a finger. It felt icy.
“You sure?” I said stupidly.
“Last week.”
“But why?”
“My dad said he doesn’t know. Or maybe he does and he didn’t want to tell me.”
“Yaya,” I said desperately, “these shoo-shoo idiots flipped! I am telling you—”
“Yah.”
The warm air suddenly felt cold. There was a long silence.
Yaro said, “Dad also told me you gave up your citizenship.”
I said with an effort, “Yes.” I looked away.
There was a pause.
“Because of—Um Marjam? Of what happened?”
“Also.” I did not meet his eyes.
He nodded slowly. “So what? You are still a Jew.”
My eyes stung again.
Yaro said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Gidi and Ami will stay on your ass, I don’t care what they say about you. These shoo-shoo fuckers—” He paused, his nostrils white. “Don’t you go killing
anybody.”
“Sure. They are Jews, too.”
When we left I looked back. I couldn’t see anybody, neither my regular tails nor the Detachment Bett guys. I should have felt better, but I didn’t. As we were descending the stairs to the promenade, I said wildly, “I swear to you, Yaya, I never did anything against—” I stopped. What was I going to say? Against the State of Israel? Against the Jews? The Bible? Or what?
“Leave it,” Yaro said. “We both came out of the same cunt.”
As I walked home, I saw nothing and nobody. My name had come up in the Mo’adon. I couldn’t quite grasp it.
I had seen the room where they met, in the Mossad complex near Glilot, on the hill beyond Ramat Aviv, where Ehud and I took a refresher course in jail endurance, before we went deep into Syria, to take down a captain in the Syrian mukhabarat. Five days of lying shackled in your own shit, being punched and kicked, with unshaven Moroccans shouting in your face in Arabic, pretending they are Arabs.
When it was all over, they gave us a tour of the premises.
I remembered the small room with the round table, and the six pink plastic chairs. Yellow flowers in a glass vase, and a platter with American oatmeal cookies for Golda. Her pad still had doodles on it: crooked flowers, a trio of small Stars of David, and two Arabic names crossed out with round angry swirls of ink.
I felt my teeth chatter.
38
I SPENT THE AFTERNOON on the beach, staring at the far horizon, gearing up for what I must do. Finally, as the sun set, I rose to my feet and made my way back to Ibn Gvirol. I could not see anyone, yet I spent an hour dashing into and out of yards until I was sure there was no one behind, and so it was after eight o’clock at night when I arrived at the back of the apartment house on Ibn Gvirol, hopped over the rear fence, and crawled through the low window into the basement bomb shelter, then climbed up the stairs.
Neither Ehud nor Ruthy were home when I came in. Still at the rehearsals, probably. I did not turn on the light. As I went through the kitchen, my stomach growled—I had not eaten since lunchtime, but I did not stop to eat. Making straight for the kitchen balcony, I headed to my mother’s old Singer sewing machine and pulled out from underneath the first shoe box, then the other, and took them into the bathroom.
Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, with only the thin moonlight coming in through the narrow window, I stretched the black Nomex across my knee, and, as I had done a dozen times before, I sewed the tear in one legging, then looked for others. When I found none, I stripped naked, sprinkled talcum powder between my legs and under my armpits, over my chest, and at the small of my back, and pulled on the light-absorbing black coveralls. The leggings reached to the ends of my toes, the headpiece covered my head from eyebrows to chin with only a hole for the face, like a balaclava. It fitted so well, as if I had taken it off only yesterday.
I bent over a few times, then sideways, listening for crackles and creaks. Nothing.
Fishing around in the box, I began to fill the coveralls’ myriad pockets with the peculiar collection of jimmies, lock picks, and rubber fingertips that I had once been issued hundreds of years ago, in my own prehistory. As I turned around, I felt a hard tube rolling under my heel, and picked it up. For a long while I stared at a yellow neoprene pencil that had tumbled out. I pulled off its plastic cover and squeezed the clasp, and the stiff tungsten filament sprang out, nearly invisible in its thinness. When pressed against a man’s chest and sprung, it made death look just like a heart attack. For a long moment I looked at the hellishly thin blade, and at the other tools, remembering the times I had used them, and what they had done to others, and to me. Then I pressed the blade back into its yellow sheath against the mirror, threw it inside the shoe box, and finished filling my pockets.
Unscrewing Ruthy’s electric shaver, I pulled out its two batteries, clicked them into my waistband, and, shielding the thumb-lights with a towel, flashed both on and off a couple of times. Both worked fine. I softly pulled the window shut, to cut off the thin moonlight, and checked myself in the mirror.
My body had disappeared; only my face and hands were still visible, hovering ghostlike in space. The Nomex did not even look black: it was more an absence of color, a sort of dark nothingness, a negation of presence, like my black dreams. I recalled all the other times I had watched myself vanish, in the past; when I called upon the Other in me to appear, to do the necessary dreck for the Jews …
Pushing the thoughts out of my mind, I jumped up and down a few times, listening for rattles. I padded a few pockets with puffs of Ruthy’s cotton wool, one by one, until I could hear nothing.
Then I peeled the headpiece back, down to the collar. In the hall, in the semi-darkness, I pulled on my jeans, and one of Ehud’s dark blue shirts, with the long sleeves. Finally I fished a tube of black polish from the shoe box and stuck it in my back pocket, laced on my old Pataugas canvas boots, and left.
When I returned, again entering through the bomb shelter’s window before running up the unlit stairs, it was three-thirty in the morning. Ehud was seated at the kitchen table, filling a glass from a bottle of 777 and going over the script with one of my pencils. He watched me as I took off my jeans, and his dark blue shirt, saying nothing.
“How were the rehearsals?” I called to him.
“Good.”
But as I began to remove my Nomex coveralls he put down his 777 glass, and the pencil. “Anything?” he said in a neutral voice.
I touched thumb to index finger, then went in to wash.
From the bedroom came a muffled call. “Is’t Dada?”
Ehud said something in response. I couldn’t make out what it was, and when I came out of the bathroom again, he had already turned in and closed the bedroom door behind him.
Next morning, after breakfast, I took the bus to the Dizzengoff police station.
Amzaleg was in the midst of a loud phone conversation when I entered his office.
“Yes! Yes!” he hollered. “Talk to all of them! I said to all of them! Everyone in the Wrestling Club! I want to know where—” He listened for a while. “Yes! The old members, too!” Then he saw me, shouted a booming “No!” into the receiver, and flung it into its cradle.
I sat down.
He snarled, “Someone burgled the Wrestling Club last night. Also Gelber’s office.”
“Who? Where?” I let my mouth sag. “What did they take?”
Amzaleg lumbered to his feet and closed the door. Then, so swiftly that I couldn’t see him coming at me, he grabbed the front of my shirt with his beefy hand and twisted it, bringing my face down close to his.
I could smell the Gitanes nicotine on his breath, and the whiff of raw arak.
“Dada,” he whispered, “if I catch you in any of these stunts in Tel Aviv—”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t.” I raised my eyebrows and pointed to the ceiling, then made spiral motion near my ear.
“It’s okay now,” he said, his eyes bloodshot.
Still staring into his reddened eyes, I pulled out of my pocket the folded letter I had taken from Mr. Gelber’s desk the night before, when I had broken into his office.
“Gershonovitz wrote to him a week ago. It said there was a check enclosed …” I stopped, overcome with wrath.
Amzaleg threw the letter on the table. “We knew he was being paid. But he has an alibi.”
I stared at him in surprise. “You knew?”
“Sure I knew! You think I was made by a finger? What do you think I am doing here all day? Scratching my dick?”
“So what else did you know?” I threw the other note on his desk, the one I had found in Judge Menuchin’s drawer, with Gershonovitz’s initials.
Amzaleg scanned it briefly, then looked up. “He has an alibi, too.”
“Menuchin?” I blew out my lips. “He’s seventy-eight years old and fat. My father would have eaten him without salt—”
“No. Shimmel.” He stared at me stonily.
I stared back at him. “Gershonovitz? You checked him out?”
Amzaleg got up, opened the door, and looked into the corridor. The thin policeman who had sat at the front desk walked by, carrying a Tempo bottle.
Amzaleg called after him, “Nissim, go bring me a pack of Gitanes from Berman, without filter.” The steps faded.
Amzaleg returned to his desk, sat down, and picked up a thick Globus pen and began to bend it, this way and that.
I said, “So who else did you check out?”
There was a loud crack as the pen snapped in two, one sliver flying into the wall like a bullet, like mine had done in Gelber’s office, a hundred years back. “Everyone he knew, I checked. Everyone!”
I nodded at him slowly, and he slowly nodded back. For a full minute we stared at each other, no longer suspicious but not yet friends; something in-between.
We remained silent for a while; we heard steps approaching. Presently the door opened and the skinny policeman came in with the cigarettes.
“Go see in the back,” Amzaleg said. “Ask them if they need a hand with the whores.”
The policeman edged himself out, his eyes darting from Amzaleg’s face to mine.
When the door closed, Amzaleg said in a low voice, “I checked them all out, everyone, what they did that night, where they were. Everybody.” He looked into my eyes. The raspiness in his voice had disappeared, and it had now become soft, mellow. For some reason it gave me gooseflesh. “Nobody tells me how to do my work, you understand?” Suddenly he stood up and roared. “Nobody! But nobody!”
He sat down again. “Only Zussman, and his wife, and Riva’s daughter. They don’t have anything, no alibi.”
I said, “Women could never do such—”
“Women can do anything,” he said, “if they love or hate enough.”
I didn’t know where this came from. He was probably talking about his ex.
I waited, and presently he went on. “Also the old Arabs, the suppliers. Seddiqi, Mansour, Ayish—”
“Them?” I said, recalling the canes. “They are half dead already.”
The Debba Page 18