The Debba

by Avner Mandelman

  “So some said, this is it, he went over … the Seddiqi had finally told him everything, and now that he knows … he has made his choice … the donkey is with them … with them … you understand? …”

  Son of the Debba; descendant of the Prophet. The Jalood.

  “Can you imagine? Every last Arabush here would rise up—you know how many Arabushim we have?” He sounded like Gershonovitz now.

  “Half a million, what do I know?”

  “A million and a half. Three hundred thousand in the Galilean Triangle alone … then in Haifa.” His voice was strangled. “Yaffo, Acco, and Nazteret … another million in the Territories … If they all rise together …”

  “Yes.” Abdallah’s words came back to me.

  Amzaleg’s fist hovered in the air, vibrating as if held captive by two opposing internal forces. “But I said, I argued, ‘He’s not with them.’ I said, ‘He likes poetry, Hebrew theater … he knows Rubin’s poems by heart … he is the son of Isser … his son …”

  I said tightly, “So what if I like poetry. They like poetry, too.”

  Amzaleg shook his grizzled head. “Not like this. They like the poems of what’s her name, this Arabusha from Jenin, about eating Jews’ livers raw, for the glory of Allah. Nothing about mercy, and pity, and love. Nothing like us.”

  I tried to peer into the swarthy face of this Moroccan policeman, an ex-assassin like me, who spoke now of mercy, and love, like Jenny; but he still refused to meet my eyes.

  The small jet took off, leaving behind it a stink of burned petrol. A larger jet taxied up to the line, a 707.

  “… So I said to Shimmel, leave him alone for now, give him time … but Shimmel said, ‘We can’t take the chance,’ he said … ‘The Arabs know what he is … and they are already joining forces, because of him … just like then, in the Castel …’ So we brought it to the PM and the PM took it again to the Mo’adon … and they all said … they said …” Amzaleg’s dark face contorted and his lips disappeared as he pulled them in and bit on them, hard.

  I said, “And that’s when Yaro called me? To ask me to his office?”

  Amzaleg’s face screwed up like a prune, as if holding in something big and unmanageable that threatened to burst out.

  I said, “And Yaro said okay? To this?”

  I could not understand why I was so angry. I would have said okay, too. A direct order like that, with this sort of reasoning. Because what was the Unit for?

  There was a long pause as, little by little, Amzaleg’s face loosened. “At first Yaro said he didn’t believe it … that you went over … so we let him see the video …”

  “What video?”

  “That we had filmed, how you helped the shabbab fight the guys in Yaffo … with perimeter defense, triple backup, gimmel tricks … how we could do nothing … nothing …” His face crunched.

  I said, “And Yaro said okay?”

  Amzaleg nodded quickly, not speaking of the obvious. Because it was clear that Gershonovitz had asked him first, since he was closest to me and had also once served in the Unit, but that he had refused. And that’s why Yaro was called. But even if Amzaleg had refused, still he knew of it and acquiesced.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Like in forty-eight.”

  There was a frozen silence.

  I said, “It was you that Gershonovitz called then, in Yaffo, to go after Paltiel.”

  Amzaleg said nothing.

  “In forty-eight,” I said. “Before the Castel attack.”

  “Yes,” Amzaleg said at last. “Shimmel called me.”

  I waited.

  Amzaleg’s voice was a raspy whisper. “They could never do it themselves, these dainty Ashkenazim in the Haganah. Not in a thousand years. So who could he call?”

  “You … so you …” My own voice shook.

  There was a pause, of a different, nearly religious quality.

  “Yes, I killed him, Paltiel.” Amzaleg sipped some water from the paper cup he was holding in his thick nicotine-stained fingers.

  I could not speak.

  Amzaleg began to speak again, conversationally now. “It had just begun, the attack on Yaffo, when I got Shimmel’s note … He said, ‘We need your help, please, Amnon, no one else can do it …’ So I left Begin on the roof of Alliance school, with all his idiot advisers … and I went down to Zerach Brandt Street and waited … and after half an hour I saw Paltiel, walking … Glantz and Zussman and a few other Shay guys came out and called to him … begging him to come back, but he just kept on going … so I hid behind Shifrin’s carpet store and I followed him in … everyone was shooting like in the Wild West … like in a movie … mortar shells flying overhead … but I recited psalms and followed, to see where he was going … that maybe Shimmel had made a mistake … but I saw where he went—three streets away he was already, from Seddiqi’s house … He was almost there … So I called out to him in Yiddish, like I heard in rehearsals of Isser’s plays … ‘Paltiel,’ I said to him, ‘come here a moment, I beg of you …’ So he came over and I let him have it.” Amzaleg turned and looked at me, his eyes black and flat and empty, like Abdallah’s. “With a shubrieh in the guts. Then I made it look like … like it was Arabs …”

  “You … cut—” I could not continue.

  “Yes,” Amzaleg said conversationally, sipping water. “I cut his zayin off, and—and did all the rest.” He coughed and swiped at his lips with his knuckles. “Then after, I dragged him all the way back …”

  The roar of a jet engine intensified as a large Air Canada jumbo jet taxied by, faces peering from the windows.

  Amzaleg was saying, “… was lucky, so lucky; if I were late maybe five minutes—five fucking minutes. Can you imagine what—” He gave his head a swift shake, then took another sip of water and spit it out.

  I leaned on the low concrete rail and stared into the asphalted horizon, waiting for the tremor in my jaw to subside.

  Amzaleg said, “Five minutes. Can you imagine? If the Castel had gone to them … If he had gone on, to keep them together, like Ben-Gurion did for us—” Amzaleg poured the remaining water over the balcony and the wind took it away in a cloud of spray. “And this feigele poet, because he loved this cock-sucking Arab cholera … for his sick love he would have given up all of this … Everything …” Amzaleg shook his head in wonder.

  It was odd to hear this Moroccan policeman using so many Yiddish words; as if living among the Ashkenazim had rubbed off on him, just as living among the Arabs had rubbed off on the Anons; as it had rubbed off on all of us, here.

  I said to him, “Did you read any of Paltiel’s … stuff?” I had wanted to say poems but it didn’t come out.

  “Yes,” Amzaleg said equably, “I read, I read.” And suddenly, without warning, he mashed his large fist into the low concrete wall with a tremendous force. There was a sickening thud as the knuckles hit.

  Amzaleg’s thick nose rode up and down as he gave a loud sniff. “Was a good writer, goddamn him, a beautiful writer, with extra soul.” He stared at me with his black Moroccan eyes, now filmed over with pain and moisture. I handed him my clean handkerchief to wipe his cheeks but he took it and wrapped it around his knuckles instead. They were red and raw and bleeding.

  “Yes,” I said. “Was a good poet, goddamn him.”

  I suddenly realized that Amzaleg, like everyone else (except for the discredited Professor Tzifroni), still thought it was Paltiel who wrote the poems, since Ruthy had made me keep quiet about it. It also dawned on me I would now probably continue to keep quiet, because my father would have liked it that way.

  Another jet took off, trailing smoke that filled my eyes.

  Amzaleg was saying something in a low guttural voice, but the noise of the jet swallowed up his words.

  “What?” I said, leaning into him.

  “‘Thou art my enemy, O friend of mine,’” he said, “‘my rival and my fate, thy giant shadow on my bride looms …’”

  “Yes,” I said. I recalled the
words I had quoted to Mr. Gelber, the first time we met. “Golyatt.” My father’s words. Isser’s. My father’s.

  “Yes,” Amzaleg said. “‘In the midst of darkest night it blooms, thy hate; my love, my shadow, my one and only mate …’” He unwrapped the handkerchief and gave it back to me.

  I finished the stanza for him, “‘For till the end of days, and ever, until my heart, like slate, with stones and slings and arrows—’”

  “Yallah, enough,” Amzaleg said. “Let’s take a piss before you go. I gotta be in Shfar’am by twelve.”

  As we stood side by side, shaking our dicks and bending our knees, the burly policeman said into my shoulder as though answering a question. “Goddammit. You want poetry, or you want a State.” He did not say it as a question.

  “Both,” I said.

  Amzaleg let go a huge fart, loud as one of Ittamar’s fist trumpets. “Today you can have both.” He zipped up, violently. “Yallah, go, or you’ll miss your plane.”

  For a moment we stood outside in awkward silence, looking at the bustling terminal, the faded colors, the fluttering flags, anything but each other. I wanted to say I was sorry he had to be suspended, for my father’s play to go on; that I understood his shame and anguish at losing his wife to someone he could not even hate; and that I forgave him for lying to me, and for acquiescing in the plan to kill me, because in this place people must kill not only their enemies, for the sake of old evil fictions, but also their kin; and if they didn’t forgive each other, soon they would have no friends left. But there was no need to say anything, because whatever had gone before was now over. I was not one of theirs anymore, nor the others’, since their fictions were no longer mine, and so there was no need for me to kill anymore, or to participate in killings. But their burdens were still mine to carry, and the burden my father had put on me, the one I could not escape, nor did I want to.

  Presently a disembodied voice called for passengers to embark. Amzaleg extended his large hand and I took it awkwardly, minding the bruised knuckles. To my consternation he rose on tiptoe and laid both palms on my head, with the fingers spread in the gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the blessing of the priests. “God will bless you and guard you,” he mumbled in guttural cantors’ singsong; then he punched my shoulder with his bruised fist, gently (later I found blood stains on my shirt), and walked away in that lumbering gait of his, almost like an Arab.

  Only later, on the plane, did I find in my pocket my father’s letter, which he had slipped in when I wasn’t looking.

  Jenny was sitting where I had left her, at the coffee counter, among the throng of crew and actors and the few high school students who had come to see me go, yet apart from them, reading the Polish magazine Mirror, her fair hair (grown longer) reflecting the light. There was a picture of Gershonovitz on the front page, and some fat headlines.

  The departure lounge around us was full. There was a large crowd of religious Jews, men in black, and women in brown and gray, shepherding dozens of twittering offspring; young ex-soldiers sitting on backpacks; and a large family of Arabs in colorful village clothes with half a dozen silent children. Arab and Jewish children eyed one another curiously while their parents pulled them back.

  To the side stood Fauzi, his eyes hooded. On his arm was tied a black sharit alhidad. I got up and stood beside him, and for a while neither of us spoke.

  “Goddammit,” I said at last. “Was a good man, the Seddiqi—”

  Fauzi said, “Another message arrived, just now, ya Sa‘eedi.”

  He did not say who had delivered it, and I did not ask.

  “They want you to take it to them, ya Sa‘eed,” he said in a voice like sandpaper.

  I felt no surprise. Somehow it seemed logical. The only surprise was how fast the message had come.

  “I’ll be back in three weeks,” I said.

  Behind, the actors whooped it up, reading the latest reviews of the show.

  I stared at the small group at the coffee counter, and the crowds behind. Neither Ehud nor Ruthy had arrived to see me off.

  Fauzi said, “You think this ’ibn sharmuta Begin will listen?”

  He had said ’ibn sharmuta, son of a whore, the way Leibele spoke about my mother; or Amzaleg about my father, calling him a bastard; a sign of grudging respect.

  “He’d better,” I said. “Or—” I stopped. Or what? Or I would come out? As what?

  There was one last pause.

  “Salaam,” Fauzi said; then, his face flaming, he repeated the word in Hebrew. Then he bent and kissed my shoulder, quickly, turned on his heels, and ran off.

  I took one last look at the actors and crew, the faded corridor littered with old election posters, the children tentatively and shyly making faces at one another as the parents hissed at them to stop; then I went to join Jenny.

  Her eyes were red and her face pinched, after all the crying she had done last night, following our talk. That is, she talked and I listened. I still could not see how she could possibly forgive me. How much forgiveness can one person have? How much?

  But she seemed better now; I, too.

  “They have magazines in Polish,” she said to me in a low voice when I picked up her small bag, to carry alongside mine. “Look.”

  I tried to turn my face away—I knew there would be a picture of all the show’s actors inside; Ruthy’s, too—but Jenny would not let me. She grabbed my chin and turned my face gently to hers, looked into my eyes, then kissed me hard on the mouth and didn’t let go until Ben-Shoshan gave a long wolf whistle.

  Jenny smiled amiably at him and stuck her finger up in the Arab gesture she must have picked up from Amzaleg. Then she locked her fingers tightly into mine and together, hand in hand, we went out through the lighted gate.

  Epilogue

  IN 1980, A YEAR after the peace agreement with Egypt was signed in Camp David by Begin and Sadat, I came back for the Negev Theater’s performance of The Debba, in Be’er Sheva. It was the fourth production of the play, not taking into account a number of high school stagings. A local actress played Sarah, and Moshe Geffen, the biggest Israeli rock star, played Yissachar. The Debba was played by Fauzi Seddiqi—he was the one who had written to me to Canada, to invite me to the performance. And although he is rather small, only one meter seventy, not at all what the role demands, he did rather well, I thought. In fact, he made the role his own. (The audience, which at first booed him, turned progressively quiet, until at the end he even got fairly loud applause, which I thought surprising. This, after all, was Be’er Sheva, where most residents are Eastern Jews who vote for Begin’s right-wing Likkud and hate Arabs.) Yochanan and ‘Ittay were played by two local boys. They got the biggest applause, winking and smiling at the public shamelessly. Ehud Reznik (who last year, following the bankruptcy of the chocolate factory, turned to directing and theater production full time), later told me he’d had the play translated into Arabic, and it had a very long run in refugee camps, touring several. (I had assigned to Ehud a half interest in the play, and full decision rights in all matters of production.) The Arab director asked for permission to change the ending, a request that Ehud refused. But the director by-passed the refusal and had the Debba, his abbaya flapping, rise silently from behind his rock as Yissachar sings his final aria. He was within his directorial prerogative, Ehud said, so there was nothing he could do.

  An English translation has just been finished (I myself had helped Professor Gershon Tzifroni of Tel Aviv University do it), and one into French is in the offing. Half the revenues from all foreign productions are to go to the Re’uven Kagan Memorial Fund, which helps young actors with occasional loans and study stipends.

  Kagan, who died last year of throat cancer, just like Uncle Mordechai, had been buried in the old Trumpeldor cemetery, just behind Paltiel Rubin’s grave. It came out that Kagan had bought the plot years before. He would of course not have been able to afford it today. Not only apartments have gone up in price, following the peace agreement with Egypt; graveyar
d plots did, too.

  Abdallah Seddiqi had been buried near the village of Tibrin, on the shoulder of a narrow hill overlooking Lake Kinneret. Uncle Mordechai was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the other side of the hill, near his son Arnon. It is convenient for me, I suppose, to be able to visit all the graves at the same time, when I come to visit.

  Ruthy tried being a housewife for a while, raising her daughter (now almost three), but eventually returned to acting, in the Cameri Theater. She had not come to the performance in Be’er Sheva, and Jenny was disappointed. Lately they had begun to correspond. I have no idea what they say to each other.

  Not long ago Jenny said she would not mind coming to live with me in Jerusalem for a time, while my own play, The Moloch, is being produced there by Lo Harbeh theater.

  I said I would think about it.

  Acknowledgments

  Many helped me get this book published, either by teaching me how to write; by providing succor over the twice-chai years it has taken me to write this book; by helping me edit it—or by helping me edit me. The following are just a few:

  Victoria Gould Pryor, Alice Rosengard, Sheryl Jaffe, Josephine Carson, Howard Junker, Jim N. Frey, Molly Giles, Ephraim Mandelman, Ayala Mandelman, Alona Pickovsky, Judah Rosenwald, members of my platoon in the Sinai, Chris Pryor, Ronnee Fried, Kathleen Schneider, Greg Michalson, Anna Lui, Judith Gurewich, Lorna Owen, Katie Henderson, my parents, Joe Garber, Marjorie Farkas, those whom I’ve omitted by necessity (you know who you are), and all others who have read the manuscript over the years and made useful comments. I could not have done it without you. My heartfelt thanks to you all: on my behalf, and (dare I hope?) on behalf of the readers.

  AM

  Vancouver—Toronto—Los Altos Hills—Toronto

  1973–2009

  Copyright © 2010 Avner Mandelman

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

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