The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  After lunch in Café Cassit, I sat drinking beer after beer. Presently Leibele came up and said someone was waiting for me outside.

  As I emerged into the sunshine I saw Abdallah Seddiqi seated on an empty Tnuva milk crate at the edge of the sidewalk. Ten paces away, behind the wheel of a black Peugeot, sat his nephew, smoking.

  When Abdallah saw me he rose creakily onto his thin legs, climbing up on one cane, then another. He said he had just been to the apartment in Ibn Gvirol but the lady said I had gone, probably to Cassit. “So I came to here,” he said, in that odd Arabicized Hebrew of his. “I thought maybe I should tell you something.” He gave me a gray stare.

  I suggested we go inside, but he shook his head and pointed to the car. “There.”

  The nephew banged the car door open and Abdallah shuffled in. He patted the seat beside him. “Sit here, near me.”

  The air in the car was thick with the odor of sweat and acetone glue, so much like my father’s, but also tangy with the smell of half-raw skins. Abdallah looked at me sideways, making a humming sound in his throat.

  “No,” the nephew said in Arabic. “He’s with them.”

  Abdallah told him to be quiet. “He’s not with anybody.”

  “He’s with them, I am telling you. You are making a black mistake, ya Seddiqi—”

  “Enough!” Abdallah turned to me, “I used to sell him leather, and also sandals, and sometimes glue—” He paused. “So Saturday afternoon, I came to see him, in the store.”

  “That Saturday?” My heart gave a jerk.

  “A black mistake,” said the nephew.

  “Quiet, ya Fa’uz. Yes, Saturday, to talk about the shipment, also about—other things.” He leaned forward. “Fauzi, turn on the radio.”

  Without speaking, Fauzi obeyed. To my surprise it was tuned to Galey Tzahal, the popular army music station. Voices of two women came on the air, singing of Jerusalem of Gold, Ne’omi Shemer’s song from 1967, the unofficial paratroopers’ hymn.

  “Leave it, good.”

  There was a lengthy pause. I felt Abdallah carefully choosing his words; I couldn’t even begin to guess what he had wanted of me.

  “In thirty-six,” he said, “we were partners in the store. You know of this?” He tapped with his aluminum cane on the floor, lightly.

  “Yes. Before the First Events—”

  “The Rebellion,” Fauzi said over his shoulder. “The first Arab Rebellion.”

  A guitar began to strum harshly on the radio, accompanied by a flute.

  Abdallah said, “Ya Fa’uz, don’t stick your nose in. Let old men talk.” He tapped his cane. “I had to sell him back my share in thirty-six. You know of this?”

  I hoisted my shoulder and gave a diagonal nod.

  “He didn’t want me to, Isrool, but they forced him.” Abdallah turned and looked at me. To my discomfort he put his hand on my knee. The hand was astonishingly hot, as if he were feverish.

  I said lamely, “Glantz, his landlord—I saw the poems you were working on—” A muscle-bound waiter stuck his head in the window and spoke to Abdallah. “Where do you think you—” He saw me and stopped.

  “We’re talking,” I said in English. “What’s your problem?”

  The waiter—one I hadn’t seen before—disappeared.

  Abdallah said, as if there had been no interruption, “As a favor. I helped him with some words.”

  “Words of a thief,” said Fauzi. “Stole our land, then our stories—” He made a soft sound in his throat.

  I felt myself redden. Abdallah’s hand on my knee twitched. “We were friends once, so we met again, when he asked me to do this translation, of the poems.” Another twitch of the hand. “Also we talked—discussed—like in thirty-three—”

  “Discussed what, in thirty-three?” I felt myself suffocating in the heat, and the stink, and this talk of the prehistory.

  “We had a committee, in thirty-three, Isrool and Baldiel, and I and my brother Haffiz, and the Nashashibis, from Jerusalem—” He stared at me hard, to see if I had grasped his meaning.

  I shook my head. The Nashashibi family had once ruled Jerusalem, during the early days of the British Mandate, and were the main political opponents of the Grand Mufti, the Nazi sympathizer. Half the land around Jerusalem used to belong to them.

  “We met, to see if we could make a compromise, between you and us—you see?”

  I said, “What kind of compromise? Peace?”

  I felt my face redden, saying such a foolish word.

  “Not peace, just a compromise. So we can sell to each other, buy from each other, live together—”

  “Live together.” Fauzi’s voice was thick. “Live? He who lies with the Viper—”

  “Quiet, ya Fa’uz. Quiet.” Again, Abdallah turned to me, “We came to an agreement, slow down Jewish immigration in some areas, purchases of land, a joint representation before the British authorities, a joint bank—” His voice droned on, like some radio announcer, clear and precise now, the Arabicized lilt gone.

  I listened, dazed with beer and heat. At last he stopped. I said, “In thirty-three? All this?”

  “Yes. Unofficial, it all was. Just some private people talking. Only merchants.” He coughed, a caw of bitter laughter. “Just some Arab and Jewish merchants.”

  “But,” I said, “in thirty-three he was already in the Haganah.”

  Abdallah gave another terse nod. “Yes, I knew. And my brother Haffiz, he was in … the Istiqlal. Isrool knew, too. So what? Talking—so what if we talked?” Then, without warning, he spat. “But nothing came of it. The hotheads on both sides—” He stopped.

  I said, “And that’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  I couldn’t see what was so secret about some committee of merchants forty-four years ago, trying to arrive at a half-assed private peace, so they could continue to sell shoes and do business with each other, and make money.

  Abdallah went on, “Then, four years ago, in seventy-three, after the Yom Kippur War, he asked me if we could continue to talk.” The hot bony palm massaged my knee tenderly, absently. “So I said, ‘All right.’”

  “Talk about what?” I tried removing my knee, but he had grabbed it with alarmingly powerful fingers.

  “Some things … that people wanted to pass along … after seventy-three … first we talked about the things … before we let them know …” His eyes were unfocused, his words disjointed, as if some inner censor was wary of revealing too much.

  “Let who know?” I suddenly began to pay attention. A gust of breeze came through the open window, carrying in it the smell of rotting garbage.

  “Whoever asked us to pass it along. What we thought of it.”

  The understanding inside me was like a sudden radiance. “You acted as go-between? The two of you? That’s what you came to tell me?”

  A nod, slow and deliberate. “Hada hoo.” That’s it.

  “Ach,” said Fauzi, in pain and disgust, but whether at the stupidity of Abdallah and my father, or at Abdallah’s foolishness for revealing it to me now, was left unclear.

  “But—but why you? Why him?”

  “Because he was no longer in—in any of this—” Abdallah paused. “And I—because I was never in any way—” A longer pause, now. “Our word was good.”

  “Merchants’ words,” Fauzi said in disgust.

  “Merchants have honor,” Abdallah said. “When we give our word, it’s given.”

  Ten paces away, two new waiters conferred with each other.

  Abdallah said, “In this place, many people want to tell something to the other side. It goes through embassies, through Americans; once the message gets over there, no one can say he believes it. Why? It came from the Jews. A message arrives here, same thing. No one wants to believe. Why? Because it’s from Arabs.”

  “Because it’s from Arabs,” said Fauzi. “We are worms, only now the worms are growing teeth.”

  “But who?” I said, not looking at Fauzi. “Who wants to send m
essages?”

  “Everyone,” said Abdallah. “Fatah, someone in Egypt, maybe in Lebanon, Iraq—” At the Arab names, the very air in the car seemed to congeal into a different substance, heavy with danger and expectation.

  I said, “You passed messages back and forth?”

  “Yes. I to our people, Isrool to yours. But first we would talk, to decide if they were true—no, not true—but—” He searched for the word.

  “Sincere,” I said. I felt myself reddening again. Talking with an Arab about sincerity.

  “Hada hoo. We gave our word, together with the message. That we believe it’s sincere, what the message says.”

  “And if they lied to you?”

  “Then next time we don’t take messages, from those who lied.”

  I said, “You mean, you and—my father—you two they would believe, but not each other?”

  He nodded with placidity. “Yes, yes. Hada hoo.” He had extracted a chain of yellow worry beads out of his pocket, and was now rolling them between his fingers.

  It was so absurd and yet so very like the Middle East that I knew it must be true. Those who would lie without remorse to a whole people would not lie to a man whose word of honor they respected.

  There was a pause. Fauzi twirled the radio dial, then raised the volume. A commercial for Reznik chocolate came on the air. Something to do with sweet delight.

  I said, “So that’s why he was killed, you think?” I was surprised how normal my voice was. How ordinary.

  The commercial ended with a jingle, and flowed into an old song by the Nachal army band, about preferring guns to socks.

  Fauzi hissed, “They couldn’t let it go on, all these generals. I told him, the Seddiqi. You think anyone here wants to talk? To Arabs?”

  I felt my face darken. “And you, you want to talk?”

  “Quiet,” said Abdallah.

  But I was in full flight now. “In forty-eight,” I snarled, “you could’ve made peace, then in fifty-six, we asked you again, and in sixty-seven, after every fucking war we asked you, but you—” I stopped. Who was “we”? I wasn’t even a citizen here anymore. Both he and Abdallah were. Arabs, but citizens.

  Fauzi raised his hand, the fingers spread, and slapped it against his neck. “Talk? Lying on the ground with your foot on our throat and we’ll talk? And honor? Where’s honor?”

  “Fauzi, start the car,” said Abdallah.

  I turned to him. “What did you talk to him about, when you saw him—last?”

  “Like the week before it … There was—something someone wanted to ask, of the Egyptians.”

  “Ask what?”

  A shrug. I saw he was considering something, as before, as if wondering if he should go on.

  Fauzi let up on the clutch; there was a scratchy sound and the car lurched ahead.

  I said, “And he, my father, he gave you this message? To pass along?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “Something, from someone old, he’s no longer in the government. A kibbutznik. Maybe someone in the government gave him the question, and asked him to ask it.”

  I waited, but obviously he wasn’t going to tell me who it was.

  “Who was it for?” I asked at last.

  Abdallah tapped his cane. “For Sadat.”

  The fingers left my knee, or maybe I had jerked my knee away. And all at once Abdallah began to talk. I listened in stunned silence as he spoke of messages, and suggestions of meetings, mutual visits, a grand gesture.

  Fauzi said over his shoulder, “And leave us Palestinians rotting in the ditch.”

  Abdallah stopped talking and folded his hands on his chest, and once more had become just a dried up old Arab with a narrow unshaven face and a blue-black bow tie knotted crookedly at the throat of his abbaya.

  No one spoke for a while. The almond trees of Har Nevo Street flashed pinkly by the window.

  “A little honor, that’s all we ask for,” Fauzi said. “Someone to give us a little honor. Then we’ll talk.”

  The Peugeot stopped before house number 142-Aleph on Ibn Gvirol.

  I had a sudden urge to invite them both up; then sanity prevailed.

  I said, “So you think—because of this—” I recalled Gershonovitz’s warnings, and Asa’s, the clumsy attacks, the attempts to stop our play by any means, the buzz on my phone, the merchants’ fear.

  “Vipers, all of them,” whispered Fauzi. His eyes, fine and black with long curling lashes like a boy’s, bore into mine. “Vipers defending their precious eggs, biting everyone who tries to—”

  “And Fatah?” I interrupted him. The PLO. “What about them? Or the Ichwan?” The Muslim Brotherhood. “And all your other fucking murderers, who didn’t want to be left in the ditch? Maybe they—”

  “Don’t worry! We won’t be left in the ditch! If we are, we’ll take all the world with us. Women, children, everybody.”

  We glared at each other with hate as naked and pleasurable as love.

  There was a moment of vibrant silence.

  “No,” Abdallah said after a while. “It wasn’t an Arab.”

  “But how do you know?” I couldn’t believe it, asking him such a question, and expecting an answer.

  “I believe them,” he said. Then, absurdly like Amzaleg, he added, “Some of them, I believe.”

  Fauzi said through his teeth, “It wasn’t us. I can tell you.”

  I stared at them, one after the other. It was clear that they were waiting for me to ask a question, or to open the car door and leave. Their message was over.

  I stared hard at Abdallah, to make sure he understood I was asking him, not his nephew. “But why are you telling me—”

  “We were partners, once.” He rapped his cane on the seat, like a teacher making a point. “Partners, in everything.”

  I opened the door and got out. Cans overflowing with garbage were piled at the curb, and brown burlap bags stuffed with old newspapers. Across the street, a gray Toyota with a single headlight was parked, its windows curtained.

  “Never cheated in anything,” Abdallah said. “His word was always good.”

  Fauzi clicked the door lock. Without looking at me he said, “Allah yerachmo.” God will pity him. Then, as if to compensate for a gaffe, he spit, but dryly. “Chalas,” he said. Finished. “The Seddiqi will call you.”

  And all of a sudden it wasn’t clear just who was in charge, Abdallah or he.

  I began to climb the stairs, seeing nothing, when I heard Abdallah calling after me. “Ya Daoud!”

  I turned, squinting. His head was a blur within the Peugeot’s window.

  He said, “You still need a hall, for this play?”

  I tried to speak, and failed. At last I nodded.

  Abdallah went on, “Maybe I can help you. You want?”

  I nodded again. The sun’s brilliance was so blinding I felt my eyes sting. “Na’am,” I said in Arabic. “Na’am.” Yes, yes.

  I did not know why I spoke Arabic to him all of a sudden.

  He nodded to me in return; and then the Peugeot pulled away, with the Toyota close behind it, disdainfully close, not even trying to hide its intent.

  Neither Ehud nor Ruthy had yet come back when I woke up at seven in the evening, my head aching as though I had been handling gelignite. Stumbling out of bed, I made for the kitchen terrace, pulled out my Nomex coveralls from under my mother’s old sewing machine and, with my head hammering with mad thoughts and traces of the beer fumes, went into the bathroom.

  I had been an idiot. It had been staring me in the face, this thing, and I had refused to look. Again I checked the waistband batteries, the thumb lights, the jimmies and the picks, then pulled on Ehud’s dark blue shirt and my own jeans, cursing myself for being an unthinking fool, for not finishing the job last time. Deaf and dumb I had become in Canada. Deaf and blind and dumb. But no more.

  When I returned to the apartment it was five-thirty in the morning. Neither Ruthy nor Ehud woke up as
I washed and changed. I sat on the terrace, my feet dangling outside, smoking one of Ruthy’s bitter Dubek cigarettes and looking over the city. Above the old Bazel shuk, glued to a tall wooden platform that someone had erected during the night, was a huge poster of Peres, leader of the Labor Party—it stared at me with puffed eyes over the expanse of white roofs, with a black-lettered slogan underneath.

  “Vote for experience!”

  Closer and farther down, in the street below, from along the entire length of the stone fences of houses to the left and to the right, a carpet of Begin placards, already there for a week, stared at me in a sea of thick glasses.

  “Vote for change!”

  I sat on the terrace, smoking and waiting for the sun to come up, then left at seven o’clock, without breakfast.

  As I approached his kiosk, Zussman was loading Eshel crates into the back. At this early hour Herzl Street was still deserted. I followed him silently into the kiosk’s interior, and stood by without saying a word, just watching him, as the color slowly drained from his cheeks.

  He did not even ask me what I wanted.

  “Nu?” I said, pointing to the wall.

  His face fell to pieces.

  “Swear to me, David, that you’ll not tell. They’ll take off my zayin if—if they knew I—that I told you—”

  “That they were listening in on my father?”

  His cheeks turned doughy. “D … David,” he stammered, “swear to me! I—I beg of you—!”

  I waited until his panting subsided.

  “Why did they put a microphone in his store?”

  “They d … didn’t tell me—”

  “Did they have a court order?”

  He shook his head.

  “So why did you let them?”

  He whispered something.

  “What?” I said.

  “As a favor.” His voice was nearly inaudible.

  “To whom?”

  He shook his head, saying nothing.

  Probably to someone from his days in the Intelligence Service, in the prehistory.

  I looked down at the gray plastic box in my hand. I had found it the night before, when I broke into the Tnuva kiosk. The diminutive Japanese tape deck had been hidden under a crate of Dubek cigarettes, the mike cord attached to the wall with gray military adhesive tape before disappearing into a tiny hole. Probably voice activated, like the ones we used to leave behind sometimes, in deep penetrations into Damascus or Cairo, to be retrieved later by Intel Recon patrolmen.