I went back in.
“I got to go,” I whispered to Ehud. “Can I take your car?”
“Wait five minutes,” he whispered back. “I’ll have someone go with you.”
“No, no. I got to go.”
There was a pause. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
As I closed the door behind me, I could see Yissachar running to and fro, waving his arms at his two pursuers, shouting in anguish about the choice he must make.
• • •
Yaro was alone in his office. He was seated upon his desk, his legs dangling in the air, eyes staring fixedly at the door.
“What is it?” I said, plopping into the chair before him.
Yaro said, “So you’re doing the play in Yaffo?”
“Yes,” I said. “We couldn’t find a hall anywhere else.”
I waited for him to tell me why he had summoned me, but he just sat on his desk, fat and flat-eyed, like a small version of Gershonovitz.
He spoke into his clasped palms, in which he was rolling a pencil. “You had some trouble there three days ago, I heard.”
I fidgeted. “Yes, yes, the bastards of Kahane tried to burn us down—what is it, Yaro?”
Still he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “So what happened?”
I couldn’t see why he wanted to talk about this now, why this sudden interest. I stared at the droplets of sweat that rolled down the creases in his bald, sunburned scalp. “We chased them away, why do you—”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and the factory crew, and some shabbab from Hebron and Jenin, who came to help when the police—”
“So they are friends of yours suddenly?”
He raised his eyes and stared at me blandly, as we used to look at prisoners during interrogations, to indicate it was not personal. That we just happened to be enemies, that’s all.
I tried to suppress my rage, but failed. “Fuck you, Yaya. Okay? Someone put out the word that we are not kosher, so we couldn’t get even a toilet cubicle in Central Bus Station, to—”
“So you went running to them?”
I got to my feet, vibrating with fury. The shame came, too, in waves, but I suppressed it. “Damn you to hell! What did you want me to do, let these Kahane fuckers burn us down? These other guys came to help us for nothing! For the play! You want me to desert them when—”
“So you help the Arabs, now?”
I stared into his eyes; they had become hard and flat and distant; and all at once, I don’t know how, I knew.
I kicked both knees sideways and let my body fall back, even as his body shot off the desk and his hand came up to grab my throat, the other hand jabbing forward, still gripping the pencil.
Once again the moves came back, as though I had just been thrown into water and half-forgotten swimming skills took over. Without thinking, I made quick cutting motions, right and left, and freed myself from his grip.
He landed on his feet—I saw he was barefoot, his sandals under the desk—and now he came at me again delicately, slowly circling the chair, the little pencil gripped in one fist, the other hand probing forward, occasionally swiping at his eyes.
I circled the chair at his exact speed, in the same direction, keeping the chair between him and me.
“Yaro,” I croaked. “I don’t know what these shoo-shoo liars told you about me, I—I did nothing to—”
I stopped.
It seemed so monstrous, so idiotic.
Just because of the elections? It did not make sense!
There was a flash and my legs were swept out from under me. Yaro had leaned with one hand on the back of the chair and kicked forward, then, when I fell facedown, he threw himself upon me, one hand around my throat, the other trying to turn me over on my back.
I arched my back and kicked upward with my foot, catching him in the groin. He grunted, but kept holding me like some obscene pederast trying to mount me from behind, trying to roll me on my back, the little pencil clutched in his fist.
No, not a pencil. A little yellow neoprene tube—
A silent grenade exploded inside my skull.
I didn’t know what reason they had given to convince him that my death was necessary, or why the shoo-shoo had become convinced in the first place that I must die; but I knew Yaro had been told to do it cleanly, without leaving a trace. A heart attack. I had been working hard, and the tension got to me. I’d come to visit my good friend Yaro at his office, and suddenly it happened.
Twisting backward I knifed my elbows into Yaro’s ribs, first to the right, then the left. His grip loosened for a brief second, and I threw him off.
He bounded off the desk’s edge and came at me once again, immediately, his sparse hair falling crazily over one ear, the bull neck disappearing between the hoisted shoulders, his eyes dripping fat tears.
“Yaro,” I said hoarsely. “Look at me—Yaya—”
But he would not look me in the face. His eyes were on my torso, somewhere under my solar plexus.
I didn’t look at his hands, or at his feet, just kept my eyes on his, looking for the flicker of an eyelid.
On and on we circled.
It was still light outside when I emerged from the building. A white Toyota was parked behind Ehud’s Volvo, and another, a gray one, with a single headlight, on the corner of Yud-Aleph Street. I sprinted across the boiling asphalt into a yard, rolled over the scraggly grass and kept on rolling, until I reached the garbage-can shed in the back, vaulted over the low wall, and rolled again. I kept running, my chest on fire, my brain and belly aflame. Blindly, seeing nothing, going by instinct, I kept going. Once, dimly, through a half-remembered memory, I gave a trilling crackle with my tongue as I ran, more a sob than a call. But there was no response this time. Only the wild hammering of my heart, and muted faraway shouts. I did not even bother to turn around and look. It was clear that whoever was guarding me before had now been withdrawn.
I reached Ibn Gvirol Street via back fences, dashing through bushy undergrowths in empty lots. I felt like a wild jackal, a Debba that had suddenly found itself in enemy territory, trying to find its way back to where it had come from, to the wild open country, to its lair. And as I ran, there was also the Other, now small and terror-stricken and yammering.
Why had Yaro agreed to kill me? Just because I had let Arabs help me defend our performance hall? Just because I was determined to stage my father’s play? I had an insane urge to laugh at the comicality of it, the absurdity.
But if they had convinced Yaro, they could surely convince anyone, and other killers would soon come for me.
It all seemed like a monstrous joke, somehow. The entire shoo-shoo against one Anon, a burned-out drecker lured back to his birthplace to die for his father’s old scribblings.
For that? For that?
53
THERE WAS NO ONE behind house number 142-Aleph, as I crept into the basement’s window through the back, then rushed up the stairs. Ruthy was sitting in the kitchen when I burst in. An open script lay on the table before her. Apparently she had been practicing her lines again.
“Your shiksa called,” she said tonelessly, “from Paris. She got stuck, she will come tomorrow, on Swiss Air—”
I stumbled to the sink and washed my face, then grabbed the 777 bottle from the cupboard above the fridge and took a long pull. I hardly felt it going down my throat.
Ruthy said, “I was right in the middle of the scene, I couldn’t get the flight number—” She stopped, her face twisted; whether because of Jenny’s arrival or because of the scene’s demands, I could not tell.
“‘A child I bear,’” Ruthy intoned, her face contorted, “‘ a child to the Debba, whom God in His wrath hath sent—’” She folded her hands on her belly, and began to weep.
I had no time for this now. For a long incoherent moment I babbled about the shoo-shoo, and my father, and Yaro. “He tried to take me down!” I shouted at her. “Yaro! Yaro Ben-Shlomo! He tried to—”
> But Ruthy was not listening to me either. “Fuck it,” she shouted back. “Do you hear what I’m telling you?” She peeled her T-shirt upward. Her breasts seemed swollen, inflated, the nipples dark and heavy with blood. She sobbed. “Look, Dada … look …”
But I did not want to look at her tits now. That was the last thing I needed. That, and love. I kept on raving about Yaro. “Is Ehud home? I need his help—”
Yes, Ehud. He would help me. He always had. He was my only hope now.
She shook her head. “I … no. Not yet.”
She swayed on the chair, then rose to her feet and sobbed into my chest.
“Six years,” Ruthy went on, “six years I’ve been fucking everybody, just about everybody … and nothing …”
“When is he coming back?” I asked. And then it hit me. “You sure?” I touched her taut belly, now hot and feverish, as though something were boiling inside.
“Yes.” She almost fell. “Dada, hold me—”
It seemed she had not heard a word I said.
“It was me,” she burbled, “who sent him the letter—I wanted you to tell him it was true—what the letter said—that we—that we—”
I asked her wildly how she knew it was mine. She wept with rage and said that since nothing had happened for six years, she was sure she could not have children. Once I returned, though, she became extra careful with Ehud because if anything did happen, she wanted it to be mine … and hers …
I stopped listening and steered her to the bedroom; there I made her lie down on my parents’ bed, then lay down beside her, under the old HaBimah pictures, under the eyes of Paltiel Rubin, and my mother’s gaze. Nothing else mattered anymore. Nothing.
“You will stay?” Ruthy wept. “You’ll stay with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will.”
Somehow we fell asleep side by side, our legs enwrapped.
• • •
A line of blackened skeletons stretched before me all the way to the horizon. Their sunken eyes were fixed upon something I held in my hand, something vibrant and warm.
“Water! Water!”
I clasped the cup loosely to my chest—no, not a cup: a large white envelope fragrant with lemony musk. The envelope opened; yellow pages, written in my father’s crabbed hand, rustled inside it. The yellow turned red and the envelope turned inside out, and suddenly I was inside it, a dove wriggling in my arms.
The skeletons yammered in my ears, their hands thrust out. From the muzzle of one hand came a long hot tongue of fire, wet and sweet.
The white dove rose, circling and screeching.
To my son, my eldest, my beloved—
I clasped the dove to my belly and its soft screeches were suddenly transformed into ululations. I opened my eyes. Ruthy was straddling me, her hands on my shoulders, and Ehud was standing by the door.
“She called me,” he croaked. “She said I should come quickly—she had something to tell me—something important—”
Ruthy wriggled upon me, crying. “Tell him, Dada, tell him now!”
“Uddy,” I croaked, “I—”
“Tell him!”
“Get out, David,” Ehud said. “I don’t want to see you—”
Ruthy slid off me, slime trickling down her thigh. “Tell him, Dada! Tell him that we—Tell him!”
I got up and groped for my underwear. There was a noise in my ears, like the sound of faraway mortars, crashing in waves. “The play—”
“Goddammit!” Ehud bellowed, in a voice like an animal’s. “We’ll do the fucking play! We’ll do it! Don’t worry!” He grabbed Ruthy’s arm. “Get washed,” he said. “There’s one more rehearsal tonight.”
He didn’t move a muscle as I squeezed past him, and for a second our bodies touched. Then he hit at my shoulder with a balled fist, hard.
“Yallah, haffef,” he said in Arabic. Get out.
Unseeing, I ran down the stairs, and mindlessly came out onto the sidewalk. There were two Toyotas parked in front of the house. As I emerged, the door of one of them opened, and a man got out, his hand at the back of his belt. I sprinted across Ibn Gvirol Street into a yard and cut through some hadass bushes, somersaulted over a garbage-can shed into a patch of dry grass, then streaked across into Bazel Street.
Behind me I could hear muffled calls in military Hebrew, and loping footsteps.
Sprinting in and out of yards, I bounded toward the Bazel market, then dove behind a heap of empty orange crates. There was a pile of rotting fruit behind it, and a mound of jute bags. Like a worm I squirreled my body underneath the rot, and froze.
No movement. No breath. No thought.
The footsteps passed by, then came back.
“Where did the cholera go?”
A car engine was gunned nearby; Ruthy’s Beetle streaked past.
“The sharmuta picked him up! Go go go!”
A white Toyota raced up Bazel Street toward Ibn Gvirol, its radio crackling; then a police scooter, and right after it, a gray Lark, a fat man at the wheel.
Another Toyota passed, and another.
I kept to my spot; after a while there was silence.
Time passed.
• • •
There was a scraping sound somewhere—perhaps a cat dragging a piece of fish—and a clatter of garbage cans and the rumble of a bus; and farther away, the hot hum of the city, the city of my childhood, which had now, without reason or account, suddenly turned against me.
Time began to move again.
I listened for a full minute, for telltale breathing, the scrape of a shoe, the creak of an ankle. There was nothing. Then, without haste or premeditation, I began to move.
I remember very little of how I got to Yaffo.
As I crept under fences, slinking from one shadow to another, I could hear the laughter of passersby, glimpse the flash of white faces, the open mouths, the eyes of men and women: my people, my enemies.
Streets and lanes came and went. Avenues flashed by. Keren Kayemet Boulevard, where my brother and I used to play ball. Then Ben Yehuda Street, where I had once stood on one of my father’s shoulders, to watch the tanks go by during the Independence Day parade, my brother standing on the other shoulder, my mother five paces away, looking not at the parade but at us.
Down another fence, and another, across HaYarkon Street, past the Israeli Aero Club, and Cinema Dan, where I had once seen with Ruthy two mushy movies in a row, both of us swearing eternal love—
Down the gravelly steps to Gordon Beach, where we used to lie at night, the two of us, in the pale dark starlight, and fumble with each other, talking laughingly of poems, and of us—
I sank to the sand and listened once more.
Nothing.
After an indeterminate while I got up, and, taking care to keep to the very edge of the surf so as not to leave footprints, I began to run toward the distant stained darkness that was Yaffo.
54
AS THE FIRST SHACKS came in view I turned left and staggered up the embankment.
A hanging lantern swayed above a coffeehouse, in an invisible breeze, overlooking the dark beach. It threw greenish shadows on the jumble of fishing nets heaped between two boats that lay overturned upon the sand. Blurry faces of young men glistened from the circle of light. They were sitting around a little table, playing a card game of some sort.
Without pausing to think, I asked one of the men in Arabic for Seddiqi’s house. My voice sounded strange in my ears; high pitched, like an animal yelp.
None looked up. “It’s not far,” one said.
“More are coming,” said the first. “From everywhere.”
Who? Who were coming?
Mindlessly I went on, stumbling on empty sardine cans, scraps of fishing nets, tangled nylon cords. Up, up the hilly mound, its smell a mixture of rotting fish and an undefinable raw tang of putrid open earth and ancient debris.
On and on I trudged, weeping in helpless rage. The stench, the debris underfoot, the imagined footsteps, all
combined into a nightmarish sensation that mixed in my mind with Yaro, and Ehud, and Ruthy, the entire surreal sequence of events of the last day, now capped by Jenny’s pending arrival. She, and Toronto, now seemed a million miles away.
Onward and onward. Before my pursuers caught up with me. Onward!
Then somehow I was not alone anymore. A doorway had opened in a two-story house, and a yellow light sprang to life. A tall man floated into view, his shadow detaching itself from the doorframe.
Weeping and cussing, I dropped into a semi-crouch, sending my hands snaking before me in hikkon.
Beware! Beware!
The man stumbled out, the light framing his abbaya in a yellow fuzz.
“Enter,” he said. “My house is your house.” His hand, bony and warm, grabbed my arm, the fingers wiry and strong. “Enter.”
Helplessly, I let myself be dragged through the light.
The floor was composed of a great many mosaic tiles the size of my thumbnail.
“I … I—help—” I croaked.
Abdallah stood to the side. “Come in.”
Light. Intense yellow light, and eyes. Pairs of black eyes staring at me, under the blaze of the fluorescent tube overhead.
As I straightened, I saw eleven young Arabs seated around a heavy dark table, mute and erect, all staring at me.
“Hada hoo,” said one. This is he.
Incomprehensibly, the others around the table nodded slowly, making a collective sound of assent.
I nodded tremblingly in their direction, and then we were climbing up the stairs, Abdallah and I, he pulling himself up by the handrail, dragging his aluminum canes behind, I holding on to his coat, like a baby.
Midway on the stairs I stopped, yammering confusedly about danger, about pursuers, that I must take care, hide; but he pulled me roughly after him, with a force I could not foresee. “First, to sleep, ya ’ibni. Then we shall see.”
We passed through a small vestibule, then through another, and finally came into a large bedroom. An old woman came in after us, dressed in village black, the same woman who had served me coffee, a hundred years before.
The Debba Page 25