The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  “Hanum,” Abdallah said, “Daoud will stay here tonight.” Then, without any ceremony or further words, he closed and shuttered all the windows, and left.

  While Seddiqi Hanum spread a striped bedsheet on the high bed, I looked about me, trying to suppress a wild panic: the huge bed, the dusty photographs, the chichi chandelier with its scruffy false crystals hanging over the low red table, all seemed to be in direct enmity to something in me that would not rest. Only with an effort could I stop myself from fleeing, running downstairs, and running off.

  Running off from what?

  A glass vase full of cyclamens stood at the top of a tall commode, as if surveying the room. Somehow even the sight of the flowers rattled me.

  I sat down on a narrow divan, as the old woman in black occupied herself with the bed.

  In the wall overlooking the street, two elongated windows that began two feet above the tiled floor extended all the way to the cracked ceiling. Between the windows, and flanking them, hung a great many framed photographs, dozens and dozens of them, all merging in the twilight murk. But as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I began to discern tall mustachioed figures, and fezzes, and seated children. Arabs of all ages, men and women, family pictures, and also an oddly jarring photograph of a youthful trio: Abdallah, Paltiel, and my father on some beach, embracing in a tight little circle, heads thrown back to look into the camera. There is a shadow at their feet, the shadow of a large man, probably the photographer, maybe even Haffiz—and here was a large photograph of Haffiz himself (for I knew his face by now) hanging above a radio cabinet the size of a small refrigerator, and to the left and right of it, tall bookcases with lead-glass fronts, crammed with leather-bound volumes, and piles of magazines tied with blue ribbons. Poetry magazines, probably those Haffiz himself had begun printing for the Waqf, and which Abdallah now continued. Before one of the magazine-crammed cabinets stood a faded red armchair, like a stout sentinel, its cracked leather overlaid with a dainty fleece of white lace.

  I shivered.

  There was a rustle and a whiff of dry roses behind me, as Seddiqi Hanum whisked by in a wave of black folds.

  “And now to sleep,” she said to me in Hebrew. Her mouth, a dark blur in the white gloom of her face, smiled at me queerly. “You can talk with the others later.”

  I nodded and sat down on the bed, on which, I now saw, she had spread striped green-and-white pajamas. Arab pajamas.

  “Seddiqi Khan will take you tomorrow,” she said.

  I wanted to ask where he’d take me, but she had already left, trailed by a faint perfume of roses.

  As I slowly removed my sweaty clothes and put on the scratchy striped pajamas, terror—abject, deathly terror—gripped me.

  It was odd. In all my operations inside enemy territory I had never known a fear as deep as the one I felt now; fear not of death, but of something worse, far worse.

  What was it? What?

  “Yes, you must go from here,” Abdallah said.

  “But why are they after me?” I shouted at him hoarsely, as if he were responsible. “What have I done?”

  “You must go away,” he kept saying. “Away from here.”

  Through a thick haze I heard him say he could get me to the Gaza harbor, from where I could leave on a boat to Egypt, or to Cyprus. “Wherever you want. And from there, you can take an airplane back, to Canada—”

  I said I had no money, nothing—but he silenced me with a wave of his thin hand.

  “You’ll give it back later.”

  Ehud’s image flashed before me. The other man to whom I owed money, and my life. Another friend whom I hurt and betrayed, as I had betrayed before all who had loved me.

  “Best is from Gaza—” Abdallah went on. “Not even they dare enter it now …”

  “Gaza,” I repeated, in a daze.

  “They won’t catch you, don’t worry. People have gone out like this, by sea, all the time—”

  What people?

  Instead of answering, he began to tell me how, in ’48, his cousins and uncles had all escaped this way, when Begin’s forces had pounded Yaffo with their mortars. Only he, Abdallah, and his brother Haffiz had stayed behind. “But first you must go back to Canada,” he finished. “Then we can talk.”

  Talk about what?

  “I can’t go,” I said.

  “You must, or they’ll kill you—”

  “I cannot.” I looked away. “The play—I must—”

  It sounded absurd in my own ears.

  What did I care about the play, now? It was Ehud’s, anyway. He had produced it, financed it, directed it, lost his woman over it—

  Abdallah stared at me for a long moment. “You want to see her,” he said at last. “Her.”

  I said nothing.

  He got up, climbing on his canes. “Don’t open the door to anyone. Anyone. I’ll whistle, like this.” He pursed his wrinkled lips as if for a kiss, and let out a few bars of ’Um Kulsum’s “Ya Habibi.” “Understand?”

  Before I could answer he left, hobbling.

  I woke in the afternoon, his hand shaking me. I jumped to my feet, rolled over the floor, and stood up in a wobbling hikkon stance.

  He did not smile. “I have tickets.”

  With his other hand he handed me an old blue abbaya. It was huge, and smelled of mothballs; probably it had belonged to his dead brother.

  “So no one can recognize you,” he said. “We all look the same to them, in abbayas.” He handed me a keffiyeh also.

  I put both on awkwardly, and stumbled after him downstairs.

  The eleven young Arabs were still sitting around the table, like some mysterious sentinels. Fauzi was not among them. All looked up at me as I came down the stairs, and, as one, all touched their foreheads.

  Abdallah paid them no heed.

  “Cover your face,” he said to me, “and let’s go.”

  55

  DURING THE PREVIOUS TWO days the khamsin indeed had shattered all records. Even at this hour, seven-thirty in the evening, the heat was suffocating—at least forty degrees Celsius. As I followed Abdallah down the cobblestoned lanes of old Yaffo, the buildings around me shimmered in the heat.

  “Over here,” Abdallah said.

  I almost did not recognize the hall: it had been given a coat of green paint, the yard conspicuously cleaned of all refuse and broken furniture. The sycamores’ trunks around it had been painted white and strung with yellow police tape to mark the border beyond which the crowd, standing silent and thick and patient, could not cross. A long line of shuffling men overflowed into Shazli Street, then cut through to Avoda Lane, and looped back to HaMeshorerim, from which it snaked back to the gate of the Waqf hall.

  “Careful!” Abdallah hissed, grabbing my wrist. “Look down. Down.”

  Through a narrow opening that the police had left in the cordon, a policeman was now letting ticket holders through one by one, looking intently into their faces.

  “Here.” Abdallah’s strong fingers pulled at me.

  The thick line of men parted for us, enveloped us, and closed around us.

  I stood still, absorbing the crowd’s emanations.

  All around me were Arabs: plump Israeli villagers from the Gallil, narrow-shouldered sunbaked Bedouins in brown camel-hair galabiehs, suited city-dwellers in scuffed shoes. A long line of silent figures, watchful, dreamlike, patient. The smell of the za‘atar and the yachnoon wrapped me in an embrace, the smell of the land—

  Whose land?

  “Yallah!” A policeman crooked his fingers at me.

  Abdallah shuffled forward on his canes, showing our tickets to the scowling policeman.

  “Yallah! Imshi!” Move! Be quick about it! He gave Abdallah a half kick.

  One aluminum cane slipped, and the thin old man at my side stumbled. I felt my shoulders tense, my knees bending into a crouch.

  “No, no!” Abdallah’s whisper was like a whiplash.

  My shoulders loosened. Head bent under my keffiyeh, I
followed the old Arab through the gate. He leaned on my arm, saying nothing.

  Someone made room for us in the dense line before the door.

  “From Gaza, my nephew,” Abdallah murmured.

  “Salaam,” said someone, his face thoroughly cut up with meticulous shaving. He touched his fingers to his forehead, quickly.

  Other muted salaams came from the dense line. Only men; no women.

  I put the tips of my fingers to my own forehead, keeping my eyes lowered.

  “Yallah! Imshi!”

  More Arabs shuffled in. A young man with a pinched face slid toward me, bringing his lips close to my ear. “Blessed be the sons of the camps, ya ‘Azzati,” O Gazan, “for they shed their blood for us all—”

  I lowered my eyes in becoming modesty.

  There were several murmurs of approval.

  The Gaza refugee camp was apparently still under curfew, following the riots of the week before. It was an insanely brave act now, for a Gazan to come to Yaffo.

  The crowd was growing thicker by the minute, yet still remained oddly silent, like a large snake, watchful, waiting.

  Another line, thinner and noisier, stretched before the other door, to our right: actors from Cassit, and high school students, and a scattering of reporters, chattering in Hebrew.

  “They are coming!” hissed someone beside me.

  I ducked my head and bent my knees, and the crowd around me surged, protectively.

  Behind us, three police patrol cars and two black vans had come to a stop, their radios crackling. One patrol car now spewed forth a thickset man in a rumpled dark uniform, cradling a walkie-talkie. Amzaleg.

  “Yechrebettam,” someone said in my ear. May their house fall down. “The muchabaratt.” The security services.

  Amzaleg, his eyes like lumps of pitch, stared at the Waqf hall’s roof. I raised my eyes, too. At each of the two roof’s corners stood two figures, heads wrapped in keffiyehs, arms folded. Two black-and-white keffiyehs, for the PLO; one red and white, for the PFLP; one green and white, for the Ichwan, the Muslim Brotherhood.

  “They are together now,” someone said to Abdallah. “No bickering anymore. Together!”

  Several sighs came from all around, then a warning hiss. Steps approached, purposeful, large. Abdallah rapped on my back with his knuckles and I ducked my head under my keffiyeh.

  Amzaleg went by, speaking into his walkie-talkie. For a second his eyes seemed to stare into mine, blind and unseeing.

  “Send me five more, goddammit!” he growled into his radio. “I said five!” Then he disappeared behind the corner.

  A short man and a tall red-haired woman came out of nowhere, he holding her arm, limping, she walking stooped. Ehud and Ruthy. They passed by, and for a brief instant I could smell her lemony musk, like an orange grove in bloom. Then the side door closed behind them.

  Abdallah held on to my arm.

  I said nothing.

  The crowd gave a rustle, like a snake uncoiling. A gray official Lark had stopped on the corner of Yehoyada Street, disgorging a large fat man in blue pants and a white shirt who soon disappeared in the dark.

  Another radio squawked somewhere, and a rough voice in Hebrew said, “Aleph one to aleph two, over.” Then, absurdly, “Where is my cola?”

  More squawks.

  And suddenly the line began to move, quickly, purposefully, the policemen closing in on both sides, to hem its flow. “Yallah, yallah!”

  Abdallah produced his two tickets, and we entered.

  56

  THEY SAT ON CHAIRS, they stood against walls, crammed themselves between the repainted crumbling columns, filled the cavernous hall with a hot, silent, humid presence—to the left the Arabs, to the right the Jews, the two peoples; and not a sound could be heard. Aside from the chirping of some walkie-talkies and the distant drone of cars outside, there hung over the audience an absolute deathly silence.

  I watched them, my heart seizing; and as I sat there, sick with terror and longing, wrapping the keffiyeh around my face, I no longer knew whether it was my father’s play I was longing for, to finally see performed as he had asked me, or whether I was merely waiting for it to end, so I could hold Ruthy just one more time, even though I might then be killed by my pursuers—

  From behind the reddish curtain came muffled whispers. I rose slightly in my seat, devouring the sound. A hand tapped on my knee. “Lower your eyes!”

  Two men in blue Atta jeans were passing in the row before us, looking into faces. A third walked behind, hand at the small of his back. In the first row, turning in his seat, Gershonovitz followed them with his Mongolian eyes.

  The two shoo-shoo men approached slowly, stooping; I felt my body tense up—and at that same moment the lights dimmed and the curtain slowly folded back to reveal Yissachar in mourning, before a large leather lump, his dead horse. Behind him shone Mount Gilbo’a, dark and flat and primordial.

  The two men retreated, muttering, to lean against a wall.

  “O friend and companion,” Yissachar sang on the shallow stage, “on whose back I rode in my ancestors’ fields, who plowed with me the bosom of my motherland—”

  From the audience came a low hum, like a beast raising itself up. Absurdly, a walkie-talkie crackled somewhere, as though it, too, were moved by the song. There was a creak, as the color wheel rotated, and a blue light was turned on; then, from behind a rock, rose Amatzia Besser in a striped blue abbaya, charmed out of his lair by Yissachar’s song.

  The hum in the audience intensified, like some unknown machinery beginning to rev up.

  “You have charmed me, O son of man,” Amatzia sang in a hard voice, “against my will you have turned me from all I know—”

  In the first row, Gershonovitz, his face twisted, was staring at the stage as if seeing other people there, and other events unfolding. Amzaleg at his side, in a white shirt also, looked like a grown-up boy on a night out with his father. And then, as my eyes slowly got accustomed to the gloom, I saw behind them the shining pate of Mr. Gelber, and at his side, to my dull astonishment, Colonel Shafrir, and the bulk of Asa Ben-Shlomo—and by the wall, Ittamar the beggar, today in a clean, embroidered Russian rubashka, his hair combed …

  “—against my will,” sang Amatzia, “I shall help you cut the furrows of my cradle, this land—”

  And the entire bohema was there, too, seated near the wall: Riva Yellin, Tzipkin, old Benvenisti, erect and tense in a white shirt—

  Everyone had come to hear my father’s words spoken, and sung. Everyone. They had fought the play, they had battled it at every turn, but they had all come.

  Another walkie-talkie crackled; and then there was a collective hiss, an indrawn breath, as Ruthy emerged from behind the cardboard Gilbo’a, her hair dyed black, and stood staring with fulminating wonder into the Debba’s eyes.

  “Why have you this shiny pelt that asks to be caressed—”

  One more crackle, and then a scream; and another.

  Two frenzied boys in orange shirts had scrambled up the stairs and were now running to and fro on stage, their arms windmilling.

  The Debba sang on, “O beautiful daughter of man, whose skin is thin yet hard as steel, whose eyes are soft as morning light—”

  More shouts.

  Ruthy cowered behind the rock, her hands laced on her stomach.

  “Sit down, ya ’ibni! Sit!” Abdallah hissed at me.

  On the stage, one boy swung a chair, and the Debba stumbled; then it rose to its feet, swung both arms, the fists locked. The boy went tumbling, yelping weakly.

  Voices rose in the hall, angry and insistent.

  Kagan, his hair wild, was on his feet, wobbling. “Jews!” he cried in Yiddish. “Jews! I beg of you! Do not—”

  Then he was down. Three more orange shirts had careened past him down the aisle, holding long sticks. More screams in the crowd. “Cholerot of Kahane!”

  “Sit down!” Abdallah tugged at my abbaya. “Sit!”

  I tore away from him. A
mass of bodies writhed around me; orange shirts, and a few abbayas. There was an unearthly howling in my ears.

  Who was yowling like that?

  On stage, Ehud was grappling with a large man in an orange T-shirt, stumbling this way and that. As I watched, Ehud suddenly snapped his fingers above the man’s head, then, in an eyeblink, twisted sideways and hurled him into the first row. But almost instantly, he was pulled down by two others who had scrambled onto the stage, shouting to each other in military Hebrew.

  “—and get the scenery! The scenery! Break it to pieces!”

  “—no, no, go after the actors!”

  I rose to my feet, the yowling rising again in my ears. A chair broke to my right, on someone’s head. Another voice screamed. The audience seethed, boiled. Abdallah was pulling at my abbaya. “Let’s go, ya ’ibni! Let’s go from here!”

  The yowling rose again.

  “Ta‘al ho-o-on!’

  Who was howling?

  “There he is!”

  An orange shirt swam into view, and a hand holding a knife—there was a flash of silvery metal—I half twisted—not enough, not enough!—but then an embroidered Russian shirt and a halo of hair stumbled on the arm, deflecting it, and the knife slipped down my ribs, not deep; and then an aluminum cane swung down from the other side, in a long arc. The knife changed direction, flashed in and out.

  Abdallah stumbled, a narrow red efflorescence blossoming upon his shirt.

  “Ya Daoud! Ya ’ibni—”

  He fell.

  “You piece of Arab cholera.” Teeth were bared before me. “And you too, ya Arab-loving—”

  I tried to dive after him, but the crowd swept me away, in a doughy mass of flailing legs and yammering voices, all swimming for the exit. Someone grabbed my neck. I kicked back at a groin, twisted, kicked at another. Howling, I swam against the human tide, toward the stage. It, too, now was a thick stew of bodies, writhing, coalescing. I hopped on the shallow elevation, cupped one hand to my mouth, tore the keffiyeh from my head, and waved it in the air.

  “Ta‘al ho-on!”

  There was a moment of slowness, as though a wave had passed through the writhing, twisting bodies. Two of the men I had seen leaning against the wall started in my direction. “Here he is!”