The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  “How often did they change tapes?”

  Zussman darted a quick glance at me. “I … I changed them, at night … They … they gave me a box of cassettes, and … every few hours I …” He began to speak faster. “David, they said Arabs sometimes came there, and talked among themselves … so it was important to listen …”

  “What Arabs?”

  “They said it was secret.”

  “And you believed them?”

  He gave me a frightened stare, as if I had just gone mad. “Sure I did!”

  A month ago I would have believed them, too.

  “How often did they come for the tapes?”

  “Every day.”

  “Who was it, who came?”

  He shook his head.

  “You knew him?”

  Zussman hesitated, looked at my stony face, and finally nodded, diagonally.

  “Who?”

  He swallowed. “Someone. You don’t know him.”

  There was a pause. His wife looked at us from the back, but came no closer than the furthermost table.

  “You still have the last tape? Of the last day?”

  I was surprised to hear how calm my voice was.

  “No, they took it.”

  I turned to go.

  “Swear to me, David!”

  I said nothing, and left. Behind me I could sense his wife scuttling forward to talk to her husband. I did not turn around to look.

  The eight-story building on King Saul Boulevard, two blocks away from Yaro’s office, had just been built when I left Israel. There was a sculpture of a cube out front, and a little fountain.

  They had the third floor all to themselves. A plaque on the wall said, unconvincingly, ZERACH FELDMAN, INSURANCE AGENCIES. I tried to open the door. There was a four-button combination lock on it. It stayed closed. I thumped on the door with both fists, then kicked at it.

  “Fucking shoo-shoo!” I hollered.

  A small TV camera buzzed as it turned in my direction. The Israeli consulate in Toronto had one just like that.

  I could hear muffled voices behind the door.

  I kicked at the door again. “I want to talk to you! If you don’t open, I’ll go holler in the street that you killed my father!”

  The door hissed open, slowly. A small nondescript man stood inside, a row of pens in his nylon shirt pocket. “What do you want? You have an appointment?”

  I pushed the door and barged in. Hard hands grabbed at me. I peeled one finger off and bent it back, then another. The other hand tightened its grip, and I raised my elbow for a down thrust.

  Down in the street a Vespa engine died down, and I heard two crackling whistles. I delayed my elbow, and gave the same whistle back.

  “Leave him, Yossi,” said the nondescript man.

  The hands slipped off me.

  The man called Yossi was huge and hairy with a bristling mustache, and he reeked of sweat. It was the man who had broken into the Ibn Gvirol apartment and stolen my father’s letter. “Who did you bring with you?” he snapped.

  “Go jump on my dick.”

  He took a sliding step toward me.

  “Yossi! Please!”

  “Sit down,” said the small man.

  I said, “You bugged his store, you fuckers. You bugged my father’s store. To listen in on him and Seddiqi talking. So the night he was killed, you heard everything, the killer, too. Who was it? Who killed him?”

  They both looked at me in silence.

  I said, “I can go to Ha‘Olam HaZeh, tell them about it—”

  “It didn’t work that night,” the small man said abruptly. “The tape.”

  “Balls! You know who killed him!”

  He shook his head. “Someone screwed up, maybe when they changed the tape. The tape didn’t work.”

  “Shit in yogurt. You know who it was, and you’re protecting him.”

  I felt him relax, as though I had somehow committed a blunder.

  “I think you should go.”

  I said to the large hirsute man, “Where is my father’s letter that you took? What did he write to me?” I didn’t want it to sound like a plea.

  He looked at me silently, biting his lips. The small man stayed silent also. It was clear no one was going to speak. I kicked at the table, trying to stifle the tickling inside my nose.

  No one said anything as I left.

  Back in the apartment, Ehud and Ruthy were gone. A hundred-shekel note was on the kitchen counter, and the Beetle’s keys. I set to work. It took me half an hour to find the bug, using Ruthy’s transistor radio with a fork for an omni antenna, twiddling the dial from side to side, listening for the faint echo from the hidden resonator.

  Finally I found it, a standard makshivan. It had been glued to the back of the kitchen table, most probably at the time of the burglary, and was shaped like a beetle (the odd sense of humor of some shoo-shoo technician), the size of my fingernail, its thin antenna pasted to the table’s underside with gray gaffer tape. Standard military issue.

  I flushed the makshivan down the toilet and went to search for the other—they were usually left in pairs. I found it on top of the bathroom door, a standard echo chamber made to transmit voices not more than two hundred yards away, most likely to the Toyota parked on the street. At the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, one had been buried in the American eagle behind the ambassador’s desk, for many years.

  Barely able to contain my rage, I crushed it under my heel and threw its husk in the garbage pail.

  If that’s the way they wanted to play, it was fine with me.

  44

  NEXT MORNING EHUD AND I picked up Kagan and drove to the Waqf hall in Yaffo. But my seething dissipated when we arrived.

  The old community center of the Muslim Religious Council stood not two hundred yards from the Yaffo beach, wavy lines of heat snaking above it in the khamsin. In the yard stood Abdallah, waiting for us.

  “This?” Kagan yelped. “This chirbe?” This wreck.

  “It’s big,” Abdallah said with equanimity, “and I can rent it to you. I am the treasurer of the Waqf.”

  We stood breathing the boiling air, staring at the hall.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Ehud.

  Ehud shrugged curtly. What was there to say? The devastation seemed complete and irremediable.

  “But we own it,” Abdallah said, a new note creeping into his voice, “the Waqf does, and I can rent it to you.”

  Ehud muttered, “We—we can’t pay for this. We don’t have much money left.”

  “So I will lend it to you, and get you some laborers to do what’s necessary.” He fixed me with his coal-gray eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll make a profit.”

  When none of us answered he hobbled on his canes toward an opening in the hall’s side, and entered, Ehud and I following, then Kagan.

  It was a cavernous room crisscrossed with dusty light. Thirty years before it might have been a thing of beauty, with blue-white tiles set at eye level all around, but by now most of the tiles had fallen off, revealing the crumbling sandstone underneath.

  Kagan said, “But—there’s no stage, no seats, nothing—”

  “We’ll bring,” Abdallah said fiercely. “Everything. We’ll borrow from other halls. In Qalqilia, Jenin, Ramleh—” He rattled off a few more names from the West Bank. “Then we’ll take it all back, so it’ll cost only rental fees.” He gave me a half grin. “Billig,” he said in guttural Yiddish. Cheap.

  We went outside. “Here.” Abdallah handed me a typewritten page. “I prepared the agreement.”

  I handed it to Ehud. He scanned it and looked up. “Five percent of the box office receipts? No cash up front?”

  Abdallah looked at Ehud, then at me. “You want it?”

  “Three percent,” Ehud said. He seemed to have perked up a little.

  “No, no,” Abdallah said, his body filling up, too.

  Finally they settled on four. Abdallah spit on the ground, for luck, and Ehud followed suit. I did th
e same, and we all mashed the spittle with the tips of our shoes and sandals. Then Ehud signed his name at the bottom of the page, and finally I did, too.

  “You as witness,” Abdallah said to Kagan.

  Kagan signed, slowly.

  “Now in Arabic, too,” Abdallah said. “Everyone.”

  Leaving Abdallah behind, we went out, circled the building, and stood staring at the sea. The water glinted in the khamsin like a freshly polished mess tin, the horizon a shimmer of yellow.

  Ehud said, “We don’t have to kiss him or anything. We do the play, we pay him, then we’re gone; we don’t have to talk to him afterward.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s for the money that he does it, what d’you think.”

  Kagan remained silent.

  We turned to go. But on our way to the Volvo, three young Arabs barred our path, their faces wrapped, two with red-and-white keffiyehs, the third’s green and white. For a wild moment I thought there was going to be a brawl, but then the green-and-white keffiyeh was thrown back, and the young Arab touched fingers to his forehead. “As-salaam alaikum,” he said gruffly.

  “Alaikum as-salaam,” I replied as evenly as I could.

  It was Fauzi, Abdallah’s nephew. The green, the Holy Color, meant he was a supporter of the Ichwan, the Muslim Brotherhood. The red meant the other two were PFLP supporters. Here, in plain daylight, declaring their support for murder and terror. My stomach began to sizzle.

  “The Seddiqi said we should help,” Fauzi whispered. “It’s only because of him.”

  “All right,” I said, keeping a lid on my temper.

  “And he said also that you’ll tell us what to do.” I could hear the rage. “How to fix the place, and how to set it up—”

  “Not me.” I pointed at Ehud. “He will.”

  Ehud rasped, “Whatever I can.” I could see it was costing him blood also.

  The two other Arabs shifted in place, their eyes narrow with confused emotion.

  Fauzi went on, “And after it’s fixed, he said we should also guard it—” His eyes were hot and black, daring me.

  I swallowed my bile. “I’ll give you a hand there.”

  “Shukran,” Fauzi hissed. Thank you. Yet the sarcasm didn’t quite come off; and without further word, he and his two followers walked away.

  Next day I awoke full of feverish excitement, and, alone in the apartment, hummed Yissachar’s opening aria while I shaved. Then, shaven and cut and without breakfast, I took bus number 1 to Yaffo, and disembarked in front of the Waqf hall.

  I could hardly recognize it.

  Whereas the day before, the hall seemed like a large decrepit sheikh’s grave, it was now more like a wrecking yard filled with noisy carpentry crews.

  Cars sporting the green license plates of the West Bank were parked in the yard. Behind them, a group of fierce-looking boys were sprawled on a pile of lumber, hammering down nails with violent enthusiasm. Four other young men in burnooses passed, carting debris, then five others, lugging benches. A transistor radio yawled a song of Farid Al Atrash and all sang along with it. The scene had a wild comic air to it, but with a dark undertone, like an undefined act taking slow shape.

  I looked behind. Two Toyotas were standing at the curb, their drivers smoking. In a rage I began to stride in their direction when Ehud limped out of the hall. “It’ll never be ready in time!” He chortled. “Look at this! Not even a stage!”

  “So we’ll build a tent,” I shouted, the shoo-shoo cars forgotten. “We’ll build a Bedouin tent! Arabushim we already have.”

  Indeed, that we had. The yard was bursting with them, with gaggles of admiring Arab urchins looking on.

  “Come inside!” Ehud hollered, and before I had a chance to reply he pulled me into the dusty light inside the hall, and, his cheeks shiny with happiness, kicked hard at a leg of someone lying under a wooden frame. The leg withdrew and our accountant appeared, his nose stained.

  “Hi, Dada,” he exulted. “We stole the lumber from a construction site in Lodd, me and Fauzi. Didn’t cost a penny!”

  Ehud began to holler again over and above the racket. Behind us, oblivious to the noise, a young Arab had knelt on a prayer mat and, with eyes closed, began to sing out the Fatiha, the opening verse of the daily prayer, his voice merging into the hammer blows:

  ’Alhamdu lillahi rab ’alalamin, malik yawm al-din,

  iaka na‘abudu wa’iaka nasta’in—

  God be praised, ruler of all the worlds, King of Judgment Day, Thee we worship, and thy help we seek—

  My stomach churned; I recalled the times I lived among them, in Egypt or Amman, pretending to be one of them—hearing their own god’s Mein Kampf sung over and over again, while keeping the Other in me in check, waiting to do the necessary … then I recalled the time on Um Marjam hill when I kept the Other in check, even as I heard the same detestable prayer, and so caused the death of friends …

  I looked away.

  A few Arab boys had begun to drag chairs in, standing them in rows against the wall, and I felt a dull astonishment at how fast the place had begun to resemble a real hall, with a stage, and benches, and a frame for a curtain—even rails for lighting were now being strung up at the ceiling’s corner by a young chocolate-factory worker on a rickety ladder, with a young Arab shouting directions from below. Here and there some high school boys could be seen, dragging lumber, chairs, or rope bundles.

  “Salaam ‘alaikum, ya Daoud!” At the door, leaning on his canes, stood Abdallah, a cigarette in his curved mouth.

  I mumbled back a shy salaam. I did not know what to say, how to praise the speed with which he had brought all these ragtag shabbab together.

  But he was not waiting for praise. “A policeman came, before. He asked for our building permit, so I told him we don’t need one. The hall belongs to us.”

  I stuttered, “I can call the lawyer, to—”

  “No lawyer! The hall belongs to the Waqf! To us! We don’t need any permit from anybody!” He thumped on the ground with his cane, for emphasis. “To us!”

  “Yes,” I said. “All right—”

  As I went out, Fauzi came up to me and pointed with his chin. “See them? They have been here from the morning.” He spit into his fist.

  Beyond the fence stood five boys in orange shirts, and two burly men, all carrying Kach placards. The Toyotas were right behind them.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have seen them. Just keep your eyes open.”

  Fauzi said there were several shabbab staying in Abdallah’s house. “I can go get them now, take these fuckers on, break their bones before they try anything—”

  “Forget it. Do nothing unless they try to barge in. Understand?”

  He glowered at me.

  I said, “You touch anyone now, you’ll be arrested. You want to be arrested?”

  “Them, the police don’t arrest.” He pointed to three burly men across the road.

  “Because they are outside the fence.” I pointed out five other men whom he had missed, three lounging in the shadows of an awning at the corner of Shazli Street, two at the back of a grimy house on Avoda Lane. “Keep a watch on them from here. And at night, stay hidden. And wear dark clothes. Understand?”

  He said nothing, just kicked the gravel and left.

  That afternoon I dropped by again, and, before leaving, organized a simple perimeter defense of the hall, in two layers. I placed Fauzi and five young Arabs from Qalqilia on the corners of Avoda Lane, two Arabs from Hebron on Shazli Street, and Ben-Shoshan and a young Druze on the corner of HaMeshorerim Street and Sefer Shir Avenue. A handful of high school boys (I could see no girls), pale with fear and excitement, were told to remain inside and keep watch through the windows. “If you see anything, whistle. Anyone coming from Shazli Street, whistle once. From Avoda, twice—”

  It was a long, detailed instruction, and I made everyone repeat it until I was satisfied they had gotten it all. Then I gave Fauzi the pair of night-vision goggles that I had brought wit
h me from Ibn Gvirol, and explained to him how to use them. “Everything will look green, but you’ll see clearly, everything. Only don’t look directly at bright lamps, or you’ll burn the electronic retina.”

  He scrutinized the goggles in his hand, and tried them on. They were a bit loose, so I tightened the strap for him.

  As he took them off he gave a clicking of the tongue, as though calling to an invisible horse, and nodded at me equably. For a moment I thought he was going to thank me, but he just nodded again, and walked off.

  That same afternoon we had the first rehearsal in the Waqf hall, among the myriad benches, chairs, half-erected curtain frames, and heaps of partly sawn lumber. It went without a flaw. Afterward, as Ehud stayed behind to give the actors notes, I sat with Abdallah in Café Machfooz, in an odd one-sided companionship—he silent, I burbling desperately about how well it all went, telling him about Canada, and Jenny, and my scribblings, avoiding even thinking about Ruthy. Next morning was another rehearsal, just as flawless, and immediately after, yet another. Or perhaps it was the next afternoon. I no longer remember. The last days before our performance have become an only partly remembered memory—I was not entirely well. I had lost five kilograms since my arrival, I hardly slept anymore, and I now smoked a pack of harsh Lodd cigarettes and drank three or four beers a day. Often, between rehearsals, I took notes and drew tables and diagrams, like the ones I had seen Amzaleg do, to try and fathom how and why my father was killed; but I could no longer concentrate on it. All I could think of was the play, and Ruthy. Every night at two in the morning she would be waiting for me in the bathroom, silent and feverish and tense, already seated on the sink, her legs spread. And later, as I lay awake trying to think of nothing, groping for sleep, she and the play and my father’s other writings and the hopeless investigation would merge in my feverish brain into one opaque mystery whose purpose or ending I could not yet fully see, or comprehend.