The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  Amzaleg pulled at my hand, softly. “Come, ya Daoud.”

  Without much effort I disengaged his fingers.

  Abdallah went on, “He said to me, ‘Promise me you will lay down your arms forever, and I will not kill you …’ His knife was at my throat—the long knife …” And suddenly Abdallah began to speak in flowery Arabic, in a singsong voice. “‘No,’ I said. ‘Kill me now, for in a double shame I shall not live—’ You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  “So I said to him, ‘It is not a favor that you wish to do unto me, to give me life. You have vanquished me, O enemy mine, do me the honor and slay me.’ You understand? This favor I could not take.”

  I wanted to say he had done so many favors in his life, that he didn’t know where to stop; but I could not speak.

  I nodded.

  Abdallah said, in the same odd singsong, “My child he took, and my woman, and my land, and now my honor—how much more? How much? ‘Kill me, ya mal‘oon,’ I said, ‘and be done with me. Be done.’ But he would not. ‘No,’ he said, ‘for kill thee I cannot. Swear to me that you shall lay your arms down, and I shall let thee go.’ And as I looked up at the shining blade, the accursed ‘Uzra‘in,” the devil, “whispered in my ear, and made me say, ‘If you will swear, so shall I.’”

  There was a long silence. Outside in the corridor someone shrieked, at length.

  “And he said, ‘I shall give thee my word, ya noble Debba—’” Abdallah emitted a rough rattle, perhaps laughter, perhaps a cough. “‘Thy arms for mine—’”

  “Yallah,” Amzaleg said, weakly.

  “He hugged me … Bullets flying, men dying, we hugged—”

  Amzaleg cleared his throat, like a distant grenade.

  “—then he said, ‘Give me thy dagger, and thy rifle, and thy mustache—” The face was so contorted now it looked nearly inhuman. “My mustache!”

  Amzaleg gave an angry sniff, and smacked one palm against another.

  “Goddammit,” he said.

  Abdallah hissed, “But the last laugh is on him. No David art thou, but Muhammad. That’s the name I gave thee before he gave thee his. Not David ben Israel, but Muhammad bin Abdallah—”

  A pale black-dyed redhead edged into the narrow room, followed by a short muscular man, his hand bandaged: Ruthy and Ehud. For a brief second they looked like strangers.

  “I cut my hand,” Ehud announced, “taking down those limelights—” He stood a moment by Ruthy’s side, his eyes like stones, then went over to the bed. Ruthy went to sit on the windowsill, laced her hands over her belly, and looked at me from a long way off.

  I looked away.

  “I wanted to thank you for the hall,” Ehud said to Abdallah in a tight voice, “also I saw you, with the cane, when this fucking shoo-shoo was going to stab David—”

  He looked at Ruthy, his chin raised with pride at having congratulated an Arab. “It was very brave of him,” he said to her.

  I looked at him but he avoided my eyes.

  Ruthy gave a chirp of laughter; it turned into a sob. She slid off the sill and put her arm around Ehud’s shoulder, looking into my eyes all the while.

  Amzaleg cleared his throat. There was a moment of silence.

  Ruthy said to Abdallah, “Did you like the show?”

  He said to the ceiling, “It was a good show. You were better than her.” He didn’t say whether he had meant my mother or Riva, and I didn’t stay to ask. Amzaleg pulled me out; I no longer felt anything, or saw much. As I wiped at my face, my cheeks, smearing my blue abbaya with greasepaint, I heard Ehud and Ruthy walking behind, shuffling, as do two people whose gaits are different and who try to fit their strides to each other. I did not look back.

  • • •

  Outside, in the hospital yard, in the predawn half-light, some remnants of the terror came back. I twirled around, once, my hands raised, watching for an attacker, but there was no one. The yard was deserted.

  My heart slowly settling, I followed the policeman to his car.

  At first, when I saw it, I thought he had gotten himself a new patrol car, but then I saw the car had merely received a new and crude coat of black paint; the Arabic cuss words were barely visible underneath. Tiny drops of dew lay on the window.

  The heat had broken during the night and the air was surprisingly cool. It was going to be a fine day.

  We didn’t speak in the car; suddenly, halfway to Yaffo, Amzaleg said, “Goddammit, this Begin. If he gets in, I don’t know what will happen.”

  I said, “Carter will bend his arm, something will happen, maybe peace, what do I know.”

  There was no escape for me, Abdallah had said. The land will call me back, and my people.

  Which people?

  “Yeah,” said Amzaleg. He threw me a brief look through the corner of his eye, as if admitting that he, too, didn’t know why we were talking about Begin and Carter.

  I said, “Gershonovitz was your commander, once?”

  “Yes,” said Amzaleg, driving at great speed along the Herbert Samuel Promenade. The sun had risen and I glimpsed pigeons strutting above Café Piltz, just behind the Israeli Aero Club; then we whizzed past.

  “When I was in the Shay in Tveriah, he was the regional commander of the entire Galilee, and when he moved to Tel Aviv, he asked me to come help,” Amzaleg said to the windshield. “Then after forty-eight he moved to the shoo-shoo; I joined the police.” His mouth twisted. At the time, the Internal Security Service didn’t take in Eastern Jews.

  I said, “So they knew all along who did it, from the tape.”

  Amzaleg didn’t reply. What was there to say?

  But I didn’t let up. “They protected his killer. They didn’t want this to come out—”

  “They protected you,” Amzaleg said to the windshield. “Only you had to barge ahead like a donkey—”

  “It was for him,” I said, meaning Isser.

  “For him?” Amzaleg said, bitterly. “Do you think he’d have liked all this to come out?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  When Amzaleg said nothing, I said, “So were you working for Gershonovitz?”

  “For him, not for him, what do I know? We’re all here in the same shit, working for the rabbinate … Look, look.” Amzaleg pointed with a nicotine-stained finger at a line in front of Cinema Yaron. “See? They can’t wait to vote, these corpses, to tell the fuckers what they think of them.”

  At first I couldn’t understand. “Oh, it’s today,” I said. “Today are the elections.” It had completely slipped my memory.

  “Sure, today. Where have you been?”

  I said, “So whom will you vote for?” I immediately regretted my words. It’s the one thing one does not ask a policeman.

  Amzaleg sucked on his teeth. The car accelerated, then sped on, past Manshiya, past the crumbling hovels of Adjemi. The tires screeched.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Isser, letting him go like this, in forty-eight.”

  How virtuous can you get?

  I felt dead inside, but tears, large and oily and thick, kept rolling down my cheeks, as they had when I first heard of my father’s murder, a thousand years ago, in Toronto.

  “Enough with all this,” Amzaleg said gruffly. “Let’s go eat.” Without applying the brakes he threw the car into a screeching turn down a narrow alley behind the clock tower, the car nearly overturning. “Don’t worry,” he said, “in the army I once drove a tank.” He guffawed at his own joke, without mirth.

  We sat in the small dark back room of the same Arab café where I had once sat with Abdallah, and drank scalding coffee from cups of thick rough glass. It tasted just like the coffee Abdallah had served me, four weeks before, in the prehistory.

  I wanted to ask Amzaleg what he was going to do now about Abdallah, and Gershonovitz; whether he was going to pursue this. But my tongue seemed to have dried up.

  I said to him, “Did you like the show?”

  I could still see Ruthy bef
ore me, her eyes made up garishly, her palms over her belly, swaying slightly in the yellow light; and Ehud’s contorted mouth, and the knife in his hand; and behind them the hundreds of eyes, staring, looking on with nameless dread, their mouths open, Jews and Arabs alike, waiting for the Word.

  “I saw only half,” he said. And then he added, absurdly, “If they’ll let him out of Hadassah today, even in a wheelchair, I’ll take him to vote.”

  I stared at Amzaleg; he was drinking his coffee, his small finger sticking out. For the first time I noticed that its nail was longer than the others, like that of old Moroccan Jews. I had never noticed it before. Perhaps he had just started growing it.

  “Well,” he said tersely, “he’s a citizen.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We ate fried eggs and fresh white bread (the waiter apologized that there was no pita bread that day—the bakery had been sold last week to a new owner, a Jew), with sliced tomatoes on the side, red as open knife-wounds, soft and sweet like the ones Ruthy had served me after I arrived …

  A giant hand squeezed my heart. I never knew it was possible to suffer like that—not only with yearning for Ruthy, but also with deep shame at what I had done to Ehud, who once again had rescued me by pushing himself into the line of fire, so I could be free…

  Free to do what?

  “It’s just like a Tnuva kiosk, now,” said Amzaleg. “Give them time, they’ll be just like us.”

  I started to say that, after doing enough dreck, in time we’ll be just like them, but refrained, minding Amzaleg’s feelings.

  When we finished, I didn’t know whether to return to the apartment. I wanted to see Ruthy so badly I nearly cried, but I knew it would do me no good to go back now. So I asked Amzaleg to drop me at Café Cassit on his way to the Dizzengoff station.

  I knew I was being foolish, showing myself so openly, but I no longer cared.

  “Now?” Amzaleg asked. “It’s only eight in the morning.”

  But Café Cassit was open, and volunteers from the voting station at the back sat and drank coffee, with strudel slices. Leibele came by as I sat down.

  “Your girlfriend was here,” he said, “looking for you.”

  A wild dark flash seared through me. “Who?”

  “The blonde one, the Canadian,” he said, adding shyly. “Very good-looking.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing whether I was thanking him for the information, or for the compliment about Jenny. And suddenly and idiotically I wanted very badly to find her, so she could console me for what I had lost, as she always had, to forgive all the evil I had done, as she always did …

  I turned away, not wishing him to see me like this.

  He loitered by delicately, averting his gaze, shuffling his sandals. “It was a very, very good show,” he said at last. “I liked how you—how you—your role.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Better than him, even, in forty-six, the Arab,” said Leibele, and sat down beside me. He started talking, quietly and easily. “I didn’t know how they could do it,” he said. “Everyone knew he wasn’t a Yemenite. It all started as a joke, when he—your father—when he brought him to the Purim party—”

  “Yes,” I said. Leibele put a coffee cup before me. I told myself I should not drink so much coffee, then drained half the cup.

  “This friend of his, this Arabush,” said Leibele. His face was composed, peaceful. “Isser thought it was a great joke, to bring him dressed as an Arab, and everyone thought he was someone from Petach Tiqva, or Kerem HaTeymanim. A Yemenite in disguise. But she—” He stopped.

  “I know,” I said. “My mother.”

  “Yes,” said Leibele. “Sonya. This sharmuta Sonya.” This whore. But he said it with affection, as though according a compliment.

  I said nothing.

  “We all loved her,” he said. “What she did for us, we all loved her.”

  I nodded.

  “Everyone loved her,” Leibele said. “Everyone.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she only loved him. The Arab.”

  “You knew?”

  “Everyone knew.”

  “No one ever told me.”

  “No.”

  There was a short silence.

  Leibele looked at the empty street. “What will you do now? You going back to Canada?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then I added, “But I’ll be back in June, to finish something, that my father asked me—”

  I could not see how I could even think of it, now; how I was hoping to get out of here, let alone come back.

  Leibele nodded slowly and got to his feet. “They only write lies, the newspapers,” he said, “only lies—”

  There was a little pause.

  I said at last, “Why—why did he give Paltiel his poetry, my father?” My voice came out all rough, and I coughed, to clear it.

  I had no idea why I was asking Leibele, but he answered, without hesitation or evasion. “Isser gave him everything, because no matter—no matter how he tried, this kacker Paltiel—after twenty-eight, he couldn’t write any more poems for this Arabush—everything he wrote was for him—but he just couldn’t write anymore—challas—” Finished, in Arabic.

  There was a long pause as Leibele stared far away, perhaps at the other sidewalk, where a few stooped garbagemen were now collecting rotting bags into a wheelbarrow.

  “Twice he tried to kill himself, Paltiel—twice—once in Yaffo, he tried to drown himself in the sewer, the other time—he cut his hands, in the store—each time Isser saved him—”

  I tried to speak but no sound came.

  “Finally Isser said to him, he said, ‘Take my poems, give them to him, they are yours—’”

  A gaggle of white pigeons flew past, in formation, their wings clacking. Leibele followed them with his eyes.

  A sudden cheer erupted at the back, where some actors were listening to a transistor radio.

  Leibele put down his coffee cup, and got up; only now did I notice he was not dressed in his waiter’s clothes, but rather in blue Atta pants, and a white nylon shirt. But whether it was his day off, or he had put these clothes on to vote, I could not tell.

  “They only tell lies,” Leibele said, as though all he had just told was a mere continuation of what he had said before about the newspapers. “Lies, everybody. To themselves, too—only what they want to believe—”

  Then he left.

  59

  WE STOOD ON THE empty viewing terrace at Ben Gurion Airport, Amzaleg and I, looking over the tarmac. The warm wind ruffled my hair, just as it did when I had landed, two thousand years ago.

  I had left Jenny behind with the actors and crew and Kagan (his chin resplendent in a large bandage), all who had come to bid us good-bye, and gone out with Amzaleg for one last talk.

  Amzaleg said, “Shimmel said he’s sorry he couldn’t come, but he had a meeting.”

  That morning the radio announced that Shim’on Gershonovitz had turned his political colors and accepted the post of interior minister in Begin’s government.

  I said now to Amzaleg, “What about you? Will they also kick you out of the police?”

  Right after the play Amzaleg was suspended, for having disobeyed Gershonovitz’s order to close us down. I still did not understand why Amzaleg had done it.

  He shrugged, to show it was possible, then stuck his finger upward in the Arab gesture of zayin and spit fully, to emphasize he didn’t care. I doubted it. A whole career down the drain like that—giving it all up on a moment’s decision. And for what? Besides, it was not only he who would pay. His daughter could now lose her police-family scholarship, leave university, and have to go to work. And as a Moroccan girl, what could she do? Be a hairdresser, or a manicurist? Or live with her mother and Arab stepfather, and so become the only thing worse than a Moroccan?

  But children always pay here.

  There was a long pause as we both looked at the empty tarmac.

  “I
t wasn’t the Arabs,” I said. “It was the shoo-shoo that did all these things to me.”

  “Only to scare you off.”

  “Shit in yogurt. Only scare. The Samson—that was to scare me? That was to put me in the hospital.”

  He looked away. “I had no say in it.”

  I should have left it at that but could not. “And later? When Yaro called me?”

  Amzaleg said nothing.

  I could see a small business jet taxiing on the runway, an Astra, braking every now and then, its nose dipping.

  I said, “When he tried to take me down, to stop the play? All because of the elections?”

  “Not because of the elections. No, no. By that time we didn’t know if—if you were with us or with our foes.” He used the biblical word, “haters,” in its original construction.

  And he had said “we.”

  I tried to look at his eyes but he kept staring into the distance as he spoke in a halting singsong. “We knew you were his—son, of Seddiqi … but we were sure you—that you didn’t know … But then you went ahead with this play … and you didn’t want to stop … All right, we said, he doesn’t know, he wants to honor his—father … but then you began to organize the shabbab in Yaffo … and you helped them fight the Kach demonstrators …”

  “Goddamn Hitlerjugend,” I said, “that’s what they are.”

  “And you taught them perimeter defense, night procedures … gimmel tricks … and then when Seddiqi told you about these messages—”

  “You never liked what they did, did you?” I said. “That someone was trying to make peace behind your back. You had to listen in, to make sure nothing happened.”

  Amzaleg went on as if I had not spoken, “So Shimmel told Yaro to send the two Betniks away … so we could grab you, stash you someplace safe for the duration … but you went to live in that damn Waqf mosque.” He turned to me, his bloodshot eyes beseeching me. “What’d you want us to think?”

  I said, “Because Ehud kicked me out, that’s why. I thought you knew. You had listened to every fart I made.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  That’s right; they couldn’t. I had pulled the bugs out of the apartment.