The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  As I marched between the two low stone columns that stood at the kibbutz’s entrance, a balding kibbutznik passed by, a towel in hand, his head wet. I asked him where I could find Asa Ben-Shlomo.

  He gave me a quick look, from head to foot. At last he seemed satisfied that I was not an Arab infiltrator. “And who are you?”

  “Tell him Dada wants to talk to him.”

  “You have a full name?”

  “Just tell him.”

  He left me in the dining room and went to fetch Asa. The room was the size of an average Tel Aviv cinema. Kibbutz Sha’ananim had more than three hundred members and they all ate at once, in this whitewashed concrete box with six wire-mesh windows, to guard against grenades, and two metal doors. The two windows behind me opened on a large swimming pool. Screams of laughter and the splashing of water came through. Beyond the pool I could see the pockmarked water tower. In ’48 the Iraqi irregulars came within two hundred meters of the kibbutz. Until 1967, the kibbutzniks still had problems with infiltrators. I myself used to lie in ambushes, not far from here, during paratroopers’ boot camp—

  The door opened and Asa came in.

  He was a small man with very large arms and a wild silvery beard that had streaks of red in it. He looked like an aging rabbi crossed with an orangutan walking upright in patched khaki trousers. He smelled of cow manure and his blue shirt was stained with water. He had probably washed up in a hurry, when he heard I was waiting.

  “Ahalan, Dada,” he said evenly. He didn’t sit down.

  “Ahalan, Asa.”

  There was a short wait.

  “Do you want some coffee? Or something?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He pushed by me and sat at the other side of the table, leaning forward on his thick arms. The family likeness with Yaro was striking. The hooked nose, the thick skin above the eyebrows, the tight manner.

  “I was sorry to hear how he—how your father died.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I couldn’t get away to come to the funeral—two cows were calving, one had twins—” He stopped.

  I said nothing.

  At last he said, “So?”

  “Two kackers attacked me in Tel Aviv, last month. You heard about it?”

  He performed a diagonal nod, then shook his head in sorrow, to indicate disapproval of such idiocy.

  I said tightly, “Then the same people sent a Samson after me, last week.”

  A long silence while he stared at me, keeping his head fixed.

  Finally he said, “So what do you want from me? Go to the police.”

  I said, “This donkey Samson? He had a Batya on his leg.” There was a pause.

  “Shit in yogurt.” Asa kept his eyes on mine, with an effort.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And three weeks ago, someone tried to steal my father’s play. And right afterward, another someone tried to attack me in Tveriah …”

  There was another pause.

  “This I don’t know anything about.”

  I said bluntly, “D’you know why the shoo-shoo is after me?”

  A longer silence, this time. Asa passed his thick fingers in his beard. “Why do you come to me, about this?”

  “Yaro told me you said my name came up, in the Mo’adon.”

  “So maybe I shouldn’t have.”

  I said sourly, “Fuck off, ya Asa. You passed me a message. It was a message from them, that they had talked about me. What do they want from me?”

  He straightened up. “Look, Dada. Why do you want to poke your nose into all this? Go back to Canada. This is not Toronto.”

  I was getting tired of this.

  I spoke slowly. “Asa, if anyone wanted to take me down, they could have done it five times over. So why don’t they? And why like this?”

  He looked at me with eyebrows joined, his mouth clamped; then all at once he grabbed my palm with both of his. His callouses were as hard as pebbles. “Dada, do me a favor. Please. Go back to Canada. Today they are crazy. Crazy! If they think you are a risk, they’ll send you back in a casket.”

  “A risk to what? To whom?”

  “What do I know, to the State, to everything.”

  “But how?”

  It was so idiotic! How could I be a risk?

  Two young women came out of the kitchen and began to arrange plates on the tables for lunch.

  Asa stared at them, unseeing. Without looking at me he said, “You diddling Ruthy again, I hear.”

  I fulminated in silence. What business was it of his?

  “Dammit, ya Dada.” He shook his head. “Isser would have belted you, for this.”

  “He screwed, too, when he was young. Actresses, soldier girls …”

  “Not his friends’ wives.”

  It was funny. The shoo-shoo guys fucked right and left. Everyone. To cheat on their wives was okay. But not their friends.

  I said, “Can you tell me why they talked about me, in the Mo’adon?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He sucked his lips in, hesitating.

  “Is it the play?”

  “Also,” he said.

  “And the murder?”

  “Also.”

  He sounded like Amzaleg.

  “And what else?”

  He shook his head.

  I said sarcastically, “Maybe the Debba? They’re afraid he’ll come back after the play, to save the Arabs?”

  To my immense surprise, he nodded. “Yes, hada hoo.” That’s it.

  I got up in disgust and, without looking back, made my way to the car.

  Ruthy was home, but not Ehud. As I closed the door she came to me, and with a fierce and unexplained anger kissed me, as if punishing me for something. “Don’t go away again without me.”

  Together we went to the kitchen.

  I said, “It was the shoo-shoo that tried to filch the play.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Who did you think? I knew all along.”

  “You did not,” I said. “You said it was the police.”

  “The police, the shoo-shoo, what’s the difference? They are all the same.”

  I could not understand her. I thought she would explode with rage, at least show shock, indignation, something. Not this calm acceptance.

  “They don’t want us to do this,” she said. “Don’t you understand? They never did, from the beginning.”

  I wanted to tell her that they were not all the same, that some were quietly on our side, like Zussman and perhaps Amzaleg, but with no pause she began to tell me about the rehearsals, how well the last songs were suddenly progressing, how the scenery buildup was nearly complete, the leather horse, and the costumes. Outside, the heat had intensified. Fumes and dust seeped in, as a bus roared by. Mad thoughts raced inside my head, round and round.

  I said, “When it’s over, if you want, you can come with me to Canada—”

  Ruthy said, “No, you stay here—”

  I shook my head. Rage, impotent rage, swelled inside me. What did they all want of me?

  Ruthy got up and took off her shirt, then her skirt. “Come, Dada, come, before he returns.”

  Afterward, as I was dressing, she said abruptly that Jenny had called. “So I talked to her. You know what? She’s nice—”

  I said nothing; my heart was dark. I didn’t care about Jenny anymore, or about Ehud.

  Ruthy went on, as she put on her bra, “So I wrote down this poem she is sending you, I should look to see where I put it—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. Because now nothing really did. Nothing except Ruthy, and the play, and the beast that had killed my father.

  42

  EVERY DAY I VOWED anew not to read the newspapers besmirching my father’s name, still alluding to the similarity between the play and Paltiel’s work, yet I could not stop. I seriously considered suing some of the newspapers. But what good would that do?

  “So write an article to Ha‘Olam HaZeh magazi
ne, with any evidence you have that he—wrote it,” said Ben-Shoshan, the factory’s accountant, after I had ranted about another poisonous editorial. “Let everyone read it; at least they’d hear the other side, too.”

  This struck a chord, and that afternoon I began to call around. But within a few hours it became clear I would have no such testimonies—none beside Abdallah’s, that is; and I knew just how much good that would do, an Arab’s word.

  It dawned on me that the only one who actually saw my father write was Mr. Glantz. Yes, it was not the play he saw him write, but rather some poems, alongside Paltiel, but it was better than nothing. So by evening, after Ehud and Ruthy had gone to the last technical rehearsal, I called him.

  “I need a testimony from you,” I said bluntly, “that he wrote it.”

  If he interpreted this to mean that I would not mind if he stretched the truth, it was fine with me.

  There was silence on the line, and I steeled myself for a morality speech about the importance of truth, like my father used to give me. I was not prepared for the animal sob. “There’s a … something I … I didn’t tell you … if you want to come—”

  I grabbed Ruthy’s car keys and ran downstairs.

  Mr. Glantz opened the door, his old eyes puffy, and before I could speak he thrust two blue copybooks into my hands. “Please, Davidl … please forgive me—I didn’t want to give them to you before … because I knew you’d take them … and he left them for me …”

  I sat down and opened one copybook. It was filled with Arabic script. The other was in Hebrew.

  “They’re not in the will,” Mr. Glantz wept, “but your father said I could have them …”

  My eyes raced along the crabbed lines. “I’ll bring them back. I promise.” I devoured the words with my eyes. Then as their meaning sank in I looked up, dazed.

  Mr. Glantz wiped his cheeks. “The other one I can’t read, it’s all in Arabic that they translated. You keep it—”

  “Who translated?”

  “Him, Isser, and his Arab friend, the cripple from Yaffo. He used to come sometimes Friday evenings, and they would sit on the terrace … maybe eat a watermelon, then translate this …”

  I picked up the second copybook and opened it at random. The odd graphic pattern of Syrian double meter jumped at me.

  I began to read:

  For in the darkness of the cruelest night,

  Amidst the hatred of a thousand kin,

  ’Tis you, O you, my love,

  My friend, O beast,

  O candle of my youthful blood—

  I closed it quickly as if blinded by sudden sunlight. “This is what they did?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Glantz said. “Translating old poems of Rubin.”

  “Of Rubin.” My knees were weak.

  This was not a poem of Paltiel’s. I knew them all by heart. This was a new poem. A new one. So much like Paltiel’s as to defy comprehension. But new.

  Mr. Glantz blubbered, “Your father said I could have them, after they finished translating … because I took him in again …”

  “Yes.” I was eating up the poems with my eyes, lapping at the lines, hearing their sound, like a voice singing—

  Mr. Glantz babbled on about how Abdallah and my father used to work until midnight sometimes. “So you’ll bring them back when you finish? You promise?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That I can promise you.”

  From a kiosk in Allenby I called Abdallah’s store in Yaffo, but there was no answer. I got into the Beetle and raced to Tel Aviv University in Ramat Aviv.

  As I barged into his office, Professor Tzifroni was standing near the window, leafing through a book.

  “One question,” I said to his back. “Can I ask you one question?”

  He kept reading obstinately, refusing to turn, but I saw his shoulder quiver.

  Using my military voice I quoted the first poem I had just read in my father’s copybook, but stopped in the middle of the last line. “Did you ever hear this one?”

  It was amazing how I already knew it by heart after only one reading. How easy it was to memorize.

  He turned slowly. “Where did you get this?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Do you know it?”

  He shook his head, his eyes on my lips, as if trying to extract from them the remainder of the last line.

  I persisted. “Who wrote it? Can you tell?”

  He licked his lips. “Rubin, for sure! It’s his meter, but with an extra beat.” He shuffled forward and clutched at my hand. “You found some more fragments somewhere? Where?”

  Mr. Glantz had also thought these were Rubin’s poems. But who wouldn’t? The same floating meter, the same incomparable line reversion, the same heart-stopping mystery, the spurious simplicity—

  I pulled one of the copybooks from my knapsack and put it on the cluttered desk. The professor licked his lips again, then opened the copybook with the tips of his fingers and began to read. Once or twice he looked up, his eyebrows knotted.

  “Nu?” I said.

  “Rubin, sure it’s Rubin,” he whispered. “But where did you copy this from? It’s clean, not in fragments.”

  I said, “Look at the last three poems. See this ditty, about Rabin and Peres? And Carter?”

  He read, licked his lips, then looked up.

  “Same meter?” I asked sarcastically. “Prosody? Style?” There was a pause as I took the copybook out of his hand. “You still think they wrote it together? In seventy-six? That Paltiel’s ghost came back, maybe? Like the Debba?”

  The pause lengthened as Professor Tzifroni tried to speak; at last he whispered, “So he wrote them all? Shimshon, Ben HaTan, Zonah Tamah—”

  “Yes,” I said. “My father wrote them all.”

  “You fucking donkey,” Ruthy screeched, her eyes white with wrath. “If you write this in the newspaper, I will do not do it. You hear me?” Her voice rose into a shriek. “I won’t do it.”

  I stuttered that I’d only write about the play. “Not the poems, not the sonnets—just so that the newspapers won’t drag my father’s name in the sewer—”

  “Well, I don’t give a zayin!” Ruthy shrieked. “I am not going to stand there and sing, when everyone—nobody is going to say that my father stole—that he didn’t—” She broke down.

  I shouted at her, “But did you read what the papers are saying about my father—”

  “So they are saying!”

  She and I glared at each other; her father against mine.

  Ehud whispered, “So maybe you’ll write it only later—” He was pale, looking neither at me nor at Ruthy.

  “When later?” I said. “A day after the show, who would care?”

  “Well I am telling you,” Ruthy hollered. “I am not going to act in it if—if David’s going to say that he—that Paltiel stole—”

  “But you have to,” Ehud whispered, the pallor of his face darkening. “It’s too late to get someone else—it’s in one week. You have to do it!”

  “Have to? I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to!”

  After a while Ehud said to me, “So maybe you—just postpone this article—what do I know—” He stared at me with eyes suddenly wet. “He also would have …”

  I could not speak. “All right,” I whispered at last.

  To fufill my father’s wish, it seems, I must let his name be dragged in the mud.

  I stumbled blindly down the stairs.

  43

  DOWN IN THE STREET, buses roared by, billowing black smoke. All I could think of was my father relinquishing his work.

  For what? Was it for money?

  That my father gave money to actors, I knew. He had always given. But his work?

  My father, who had never done a crooked thing in his life; my father, who noted down every shekel he had received, and paid tax on every penny. My father, who had refused to be reimbursed for his bus fare to his weekly meeting at the Wrestling Club, where he volunteered as a board member. My father, t
he honest Jew, who had never cheated, who had done only favors; except for his sons.

  And for his wife?

  I stood awhile in the hot sizzling sun, then, without premeditation, took bus number 63 to Pinsker Street, got off on the corner of Trumpeldor, and went to visit my mother’s grave.

  The old Trumpeldor cemetery had an aura of dereliction, as if it was a Muslim one about to be bulldozed. The trails were overgrown with injill, Arab weed, and scraggly dandelions and hubeiza poked between the stones. I made my way to the end row, looking around. It was seven years since I had been here last.

  Grandpa Yoel and Grandma Leah were buried at the westerly end, and my mother just behind them, under plain mounds overlaid with rough slabs of rock. The khamsin had made the stones too hot to touch, so I sprinkled some sand on my mother’s gravestone, and sat down gingerly on it.

  All around me were graves, graves, with Stars of David on their faces, and square Hebrew letters half smothered with sand. Most were of rough sandstone and dark basalt, and just plain gray marble. Here was Nachman Shein’s headstone, engraved with a large musical note, there Paltiel Rubin’s, a pencil, or perhaps a quill, incised at its base. To the side, half fallen, were the headstones of Sirkis, and Gurevitch, and Shaposhnikov, the early dramatists, and three gravestones whose lettering had long ago been obliterated by the salty wind. Flies flitted everywhere, also a few sparrows.

  Why was my mother not buried by my father’s side? They, who were so loving in life; who often, after the Shabbat meal, sang together old songs from ’48, and before, or recited Hebrew poetry in tandem, each quoting alternate stanzas, then alternate lines, then alternate words, faster and faster, until one stumbled and had to wash the dishes while suffering pinches …

  What made them part?

  The sun was warm on my neck but my heart felt cold.

  I sat for an indeterminate while, looking around me, trying to imagine the old hatreds and the loves, the passions and the sorrows, all gone now; all but the one that had remained, the one hate that had come back to kill my father.