“Maybe it’s this policeman,” Ruthy said. “This beast.”
Ehud raised his eyes and looked at me, beseechingly, then at Ruthy. But she did not react, just snatched the letter from my hand and tore it to pieces. “I don’t even want to talk about such shit.”
None of us mentioned it again.
48
THE FOLLOWING DAY UNCLE Mordechai called and said he’d be arriving soon in Tel Aviv, and perhaps we could talk. My heart leaped; but that same afternoon Aunt Margalit called and said they had kept him in the Afoula hospital for an operation.
“It’s in the throat,” she said, her voice breaking.
I did not have to ask what was in the throat. With all his cigarettes, and the cognac.
Strangling on my words, I said I would go visit him right away.
Ruthy insisted on coming with me, and Ehud did not even try to dissuade her. Ever since the ghastly poison-letter episode, he was now ceaselessly trying to apologize to her, instead of wanting her apology, or denial.
Perhaps Ruthy did not give any reason because she rarely talked these days, and neither did Ehud or I. It was as if the three of us had slowly been disconnecting from one anther, coming together only in the rehearsals, or to fuck—Ruthy and Ehud in their bedroom at night; she and I by day, blindly dashing from Yaffo to Ibn Gvirol between rehearsals, to claw at each other on the roof, on a torn mattress in the peak of the day’s heat, sweaty and dirty in the sun-broiled dust, like two scrawny Arab dogs. Or if the break was short, we did it in desolate parks or on the beach in Yaffo in semi-secluded spots, while Ehud remained behind, pale and silent, Kagan slumped at his feet. The silent Arab shabbab sat cross-legged all around on their prayer mats or stood along the walls, watching with the Jewish chocolate-factory workers, holding their breaths, absorbing my father’s words and the singing battles between men and beasts.
We arrived in Afoula a little after two o’clock. Visiting hours had already ended, so Ruthy stayed in the car while I went to search for a way in.
Vigilant nurses seemed to be prowling the corridors, like military sentinels. Finally I found a back door, and sneaked into the oncological ward. I found Uncle Mordechai in a small cubicle all by himself, close by the back stairs. His face was half hidden amid the gray pillows, his stubble perhaps five weeks old. It seemed he had not yet shaved since my father’s death.
He was not surprised to see me, nodded when he saw me walk in, and although he could barely speak, he answered my questions readily. “Because he let Paltiel put his name on his own poems,” Uncle Mordechai rasped through his cancerous larynx. “I told Isser, it’s yours! I told him … Why do you give this to him? … Your work, your writing … your name—why? Just to have a free hand with Riva?”
“So that’s why he gave him the poems?”
“Why else? What other reason could there have been?”
I shook my head. It did not sound right. “So that’s why you stopped talking to him? Just because of some fucking poems—”
“Just poems?” Uncle Mordechai’s eyes caught fire, “It was Shimshon, and Ben HaTan, that he gave away to him, and Golyatt—Golyatt!—”
“But he kept half an interest,” I said, stupidly.
Some floor-cleaning machine had started in the corridor, and Uncle Mordechai’s voice was half swallowed in its racket. “—and not only the poems he gave to him, to this son of a whore Rubin, but his honor—his honor—!” The raspy voice grew stronger. “… because he let Abu Jalood go …”
My heart froze. So it was true … Or was it?
Uncle Mordechai whispered on, “… because he did not finish off this beast—this fucking lover-boy of Paltiel …”
I bent toward the splotchy face. “You—so you also think it came back—to kill him?” I could not recognize my own voice. “Because me, I don’t believe this Debba shit—”
“No, it was no Debba that killed him—”
Uncle Mordechai’s voice came out in raspy spurts. I tried to hold his hand, but he withdrew it under his sheet. I croaked, “You—you think they killed him, because they didn’t want him to pass on these messages?”
I did not specify who “they” were; there was no need. When I told him what Abdallah had said, about my father and him acting as messengers, Uncle Mordechai did not seem surprised.
The gray lips barely moved. “I don’t know.”
The racket outside died down. Now a nurse’s steps could be heard in the corridor, her flat heels thudding on the linoleum. I waited until the sound faded. “Abdallah, he said it’s not the Arabs who did it … you believe this?”
The unshaven chin nodded, jerkily.
“So who? Who was it?”
Dust, blinding dust, was swirling in the air, in my ears, in my eyes.
“You know who killed him?”
He said nothing, his shallow breath coming in spurts.
“Tell me!”
He shook his head.
“Tell me! Goddammit! Tell!”
And then, as if on cue from some director, a nurse barged in and chased me out.
49
FROM THE BEGINNING WE knew that The Debba would be a contentious play. Yet none of us had any idea just how contentious it could be.
To the day of the performance, articles castigating the entire show appeared daily in the Hebrew papers, filled with so much venom that at times it seemed as if they had been written about something else, not about a mere piece of theater. No doubt some of the acrimony flowed from the fast-approaching elections. The Shovval Institute in Jerusalem had concluded one more opinion poll showing Labor and Likkud still running neck and neck, and yet another poll, by the left-leaning HaAretz, showed Likkud actually leading. For the first time since Israel’s founding, the opposition party, Likkud, had a chance of taking over. Anything and everything was therefore construed to be political. Even a little thing like an old play. Even this.
The Arab newspapers, too, had at first turned against our play. El Fajr in Jerusalem led the chorus in condemning “those who shamelessly steal the people’s legends for their own nefarious aims,” as Fauzi had intimated; and Al Bisr el Firaji followed suit and said in all plainness that those whose land had been usurped would not sit idly by as their culture, too, was being kidnapped. “Rise and reclaim your legends, O Arabs!” one editorial thundered. “Grab back your patrimony, O sons of Salach-ad-Din.”
But all this was before the night of the attack on the Waqf hall. The day after, it was as if a roadblock had fallen, and a long caravan of chortling and ululating Arab scribes had been unleashed, waving their pens. No Arab newspaper could praise the play highly enough—a play that, all reviewers agreed, had been written by an Arab, perhaps by Abu Jalood himself, then taken up by a compassionate Jew—some mentioning Paltiel Rubin, others my father—because, as an Arab play, it could of course not be performed.
Nightly they came to Yaffo to watch our rehearsals, from far and away—emaciated old fellaheen from the Gallil, and city Arabs from Nazareth and Nablus, and villagers from the Shomron—to stare at the Waqf hall from across Avoda Lane, and murmur among themselves. A few came up, shyly, absurdly kissing the wall, or the door. We couldn’t get rid of them. Day after day they kept coming, in the early morning, to watch the actors, or, from time to time, they paid the boy from Café Machfooz to bring the actors a tray with coffees, and baklawa sweets. These watchers did not seem to eat or drink anything themselves, or even go away for a piss. Most just squatted in the dust across the road, their hands hanging between their knees, as though waiting for something or someone to appear. Even for prayers they stayed in place, rubbing their palms with sand, as permitted, instead of going off for ablutions.
After a while we just left them alone. Unlike the Kach thugs (of whom we saw no trace anymore), it was clear they intended us no harm.
By that time the stipulation in my father’s will had also become known, which gave birth to an absurd and dramatic story of how Judge Menuchin (in one version he was accompani
ed by the minister of the interior) called on me at the apartment and beseeched me to stop the production.
“Do not make matters more difficult before the elections!” he was supposed to have said. He even offered me money (so went the story); but I held firm and resolute, vowing to fulfill my father’s last wish.
Yet another story, which found its way to Ha‘Olam HaZeh, was that my father himself had tried to resurrect his play, and was as a result killed by the evil forces of the security services. The play’s only copy was then nearly stolen from my apartment, and were it not for my alertness—which I had learned at my father’s knee—the play, and its message, would’ve been lost forever.
The police of course did nothing (according to the article). Not only did they not try to find the culprits, they were probably in cahoots with them.
And there were other such tales, more fanciful still, many to do with the hoped-for (in Arab newspapers) or dreaded (in Jewish newspapers) arrival of the real Debba at the play’s end, to rescue the Arabs from their oppressors, as it had nearly managed to do in ’46, before the show was interrupted.
The beneficial result was that tickets for the show had sold quickly, and were now fetching more than triple their original price on the black market of Lillienblum Street.
But there were other results, not all beneficial. The worst, for me, was that hardly anyone would talk to me, when I asked questions about my father or the past. Somehow a story had taken hold that the shoo-shoo was indeed involved in my father’s death, and nothing was more certain to cause people to clam up.
The morning Ha‘Olam HaZeh magazine appeared with the first of such stories, Amzaleg called me in cold anger. “What did you tell them this garbage for?”
It was the first I had heard from him in a week.
I explained I had said nothing. “I didn’t even talk to them. They just invented everything—”
“No, tell me!” Amzaleg fumed. “You think I don’t want to catch him? You think I don’t? If you think this, come out and say it!”
As a matter of fact this is precisely what I had begun to think, but in the face of such vehement protestations, I told him I knew he was trying his best. But even this he must have taken as an insult, because he began to shout into the phone that Gershonovitz could go screw himself. “Your father was my friend also. What do you think? Ask Mordoch. He was my friend in the army, and before—”
“Sure,” I said, taken aback by this eruption.
“—what do you think, that I don’t want to catch this beast?”
Before I could ask him why he, too, now called my father’s killer a beast, he hung up.
50
AS THE HOT FETOR swept Tel Aviv, with the Palestinian garbagemen on strike for the fifteenth day, the rumor about the Debba’s second coming now included the conviction that it was he who had killed my father, as an advance warning of what he would do to all the Jews.
No one knew how this idiotic rumor developed, but somehow it stuck, and, for reasons no one could identify, it nearly emptied the streets. Or perhaps the empty streets were due to nothing more sinister than the khamsin, which would soon break all records. Or maybe it was due to fears that a new Arab terror group would take advantage of the crowds and demonstrations, before the elections, and stage some spectacular bombings in Tel Aviv.
Leibele, at Café Cassit, had another theory for the street’s desolation. “It’s their conscience bothering them,” he said to me, pointing at a small group of actors who sat subdued in the corner, all engrossed in books, not a newspaper in sight. “For what they are about to do, vote for this beast Begin, so they don’t show their faces.”
“No, it’s for what they’ve done to the Arabs,” Ruthy snarled. (She now accompanied me to Cassit openly, no longer caring about the evil tongues.) “And now they’re afraid this Debba will do the same to them, they’d even vote for this beast Begin so he’d do the necessary dreck, to defend them …”
“What do you want from him?” I hissed at her, when Leibele ducked his head and scurried to the kitchen. “He didn’t do anything to you.” For some reason, her treatment of Leibele pricked me more than any of her other antics.
“So what? I can say what I think, no? It’s still a free country, here.”
At the sound of her raised voice, the actors got up one by one and left, as if they, too, wanted nothing to do with her. As though it were she, not the Debba, who was about to inflict on them some sort of punishment, the one they were afraid of.
Often I felt this way myself.
51
THE PENULTIMATE REHEARSAL WAS progressing as if it were the last run before a military operation. Actors stepped into their precise marks on the floor cloth, on the dot of Ehud’s hand claps, stared into each other’s eyes, and sang with anguish all the more frightening because it was anticipated. Aside from the sound on the stage, and Ehud’s sharp claps, the hall was silent. All construction had long been finished, but none of the Arab helpers had gone back to wherever they had come from. Half of them had stayed in the hall, at night sleeping on mats that they had brought with them from their villages; the other half went to stay at Abdallah’s house. But now they all sat, silent and watchful, listening for the twentieth time to the songs they must have known by heart. Amzaleg had been absent; but in the middle of the Debba’s final speech, he entered through the stage door, his police cap in hand. He sat down slowly on a bench by the wall, apart from the Arab crowd, and waited for the scene to end. Then, without speaking, he tapped me on the knee and I rose and followed him to the Waqf yard.
Before he had even opened his mouth, I knew.
“Mordoch,” I said, feeling my stomach go all rubbery.
Amzaleg gave a short, military nod. “Yeah.”
I could feel the oily sweat breaking on my chin. “Was it quick?”
“Two hours ago. They did an X-ray and decided to operate. But when they opened him up, they saw they couldn’t take it out. It was too big, the tumor—”
From within the hall I heard Ruthy wail, bemoaning her choice.
Uncle Mordechai with his stories, and his fried fish, and his cognac.
Amzaleg pulled out his cigarette pack, stared at it, then shoved it back in his pocket.
I said I’d better call Margalit.
“No. She’ll call you later. She’s resting now. The doctor gave her an injection—” Amzaleg gave a long cough, then said, “But I talked to him.”
I wiped my eyes shamelessly. “To Mordoch? When?”
From within the hall came the metronomic yells of ‘Ittay and Yochanan, the two Friends, beseeching Yissachar to consider his obligation to his people, and Ehud’s metronomic hand claps.
“Just before they wheeled him in.” Amzaleg squatted down on the floor like a Bedouin, staring at the wall. “He told me about this guy—in the first show—”
I squatted down slowly besides him, one Bedouin next to another. “About the Arab actor? In forty-six?”
“Yes.”
Amzaleg coughed again, and suddenly grabbed my right arm above the elbow. “Ya donkey!” he snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I hardened my bicep and with my left hand peeled off his fingers, one by one.
He said, “You’re still thinking I am with them? No, tell me!”
I shrugged, then shook my head. “No.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
I wanted to say, “Because he’s mine, whoever killed him,” but no voice came. I tried to hoist a shoulder, but it didn’t quite succeed either. I clamped my lips.
Amzaleg thumped on the hard gravel. “He was my friend, too,” he roared. And then he began to weep, shamelessly and openly, the tears trickling slowly down the corrugated cheeks, like candle wax. It was the second time I had seen him show grief, after that time in Tveriah at my father’s shivah.
Finally he said, sniffling, “Goddammit, this Mordoch.”
I made my voice rough, as proper. “Was a good guy, the bastard.”
And then we both got to our feet, looking away from each other, until, slowly, our eyes met. I said, “It was Haffiz Seddiqi, this actor, in forty-six. Not a Yemenite. I saw Haffiz’s picture in Abdallah’s basement, alongside the other actors’ and actresses’.”
Amzaleg gave a small angry sniffle.
“It was an Arab,” I said, “that played the Debba.”
Amzaleg nodded, a curt military bob of the head.
There was no need to say anything else. It was all so clear. It was Abu Jalood himself who had played the Debba’s role in my father’s play in forty-six. Two years before my father had “slain” him in the Castel. It was Haffiz Seddiqi who had been Abu Jalood. Fauzi’s father. The bon vivant, the Arab man-about-town, the squire of countless actresses and café flies, in Tel Aviv as well as Yaffo. The theater lover by day, and the gangleader by night. The Debba.
Did he have matters with my mother, too? Did she sleep with him to get information, to help her people? In the service of the Haganah’s intelligence service, the Shay?
I said, “Did you talk to Abdallah Seddiqi already? Did you ask him if it was his brother who played it?”
From within the hall came the rustle of the three attackers, rushing up to the Debba’s lair.
Amzaleg’s eyes had turned opaque again. A policeman’s eyes. “He said yes.”
52
LATE NEXT MORNING, A day before our performance, we had the final dress rehearsal—it took about an hour. Toward the end, as Ruthy was hitting the very highest notes, our accountant sidled up to me and told me I had a phone call.
I took it behind the stage door. It was Yaro.
“David, got to see you. Something came up.” His voice was dispassionate, businesslike.
“Right now?”
For a week I’d been trying to call him, without success, and now this.
“Yes. Can you come here?”
I knew better than to say his name or ask what he wanted, over the phone.
The Debba Page 24