by Michael Oren
Dudu had never found love and soon he, too, would be one of those yellowed portraits. This led him from obsessing about his habits to contemplating mortality. Though already a grandfather, he was a healthful one, energetic, handsome in a rough-hewn way. The ghosts of muscles still visited his body, as did the curls that once adorned his scalp. Women of a certain generation found him attractive, and even the occasional twenty-something. Yet there was no dissembling the ripples around his neck, the descending corners of his eyelids. Like his mother, he, too, would eventually reside at the home.
The idea was to keep the mind preoccupied, he concluded, not to think about death. But that understanding also emanated from his mother. For who had known death more intimately than she did, and who had spent more years forgetting it?
Dudu fretted and Dudu forgot. Throughout, he could point to many accomplishments—the mass of admirers and haters that are the measure of any successful politician, children from a scattering of marriages. But he also had problems, serious problems, and if there was anything Dudu Yarkoni lacked more than love it was the time to address them.
“That’s not good,” he thought to himself—uniquely without sneezing—when he entered his office and found Steinbesser waiting. A bland, dwarfish, middle-aged man in oversized suits that invariably covered his thumbs, the spokesman never showed up suddenly unless something terrible happened. And in Dudu’s life of late, the terrible had become commonplace.
“Sit,” Steinbesser said and held out a chair, even as Dudu grumbled, “What now? What?”
“Brace yourself. Tomorrow’s papers are running the story of a woman who’s accusing you of verbal abuse. They’re calling her ‘Y.’”
“Are they insane? I don’t even know any Y.” Dudu was no longer sitting.
“Y is a rather popular women’s initial,” Steinbesser explained, not helpfully. “Yael, Yemima, Yehudit. I seem to recall a Yocheved.”
“Stop it!” Against a wall, Dudu hurled the miniature pennant—a gift of his childhood scouting troop—that always flew from his desk. “There is no Y and there was no abuse, verbal or otherwise.”
Steinbesser was unimpressed. “Tell that to the media,” he counselled. “Tell that to the journalists who, this week alone, have you being investigated by two separate commissions. Tell that to the editors who headlined your remark about reducing preschool subsidies.”
“I was totally misquoted.”
“Tell that to the mothers.”
Steinbesser poured him a glass of water, a sure sign that the situation was serious. “For starters, we’ll issue a denial.”
“I’ve got the photo-op with the paratroopers today, tonight’s flight to Lithuania. I’ll have to cancel.” Dudu said this to the glass but, like the glass, Steinbesser was not listening.
“I’ll talk to Channels 1 and 2,” he rattled off instead. “With all the dailies, the radio shows.”
But then, abruptly, Dudu’s reaction changed. From panic and despondency, he grew calm, almost dispassionate. This was another quirk: to panic over the trivial—the slightly-off bank statement, the shirt that returned wrinkled from the cleaners—but grapple unflappably with crises. Another kink, another gift from his mother.
“Confirm the photo-op and the flight,” he ordered Steinbesser. “And check tomorrow’s schedule.” He was already stomping out of the door, striding the way he once, long ago as an infantry officer, barreled out of his tent. “Before boarding that plane, I’ve got to stop at the home.”
Now Steinbesser seemed nonplussed. “But where are you going?”
“Where else?” The answer echoed in the hallway. “South.”
* * * * *
From his penthouse office in the middle of the country’s center, Dudu drove to the periphery. In a state so small, one didn’t have to travel days to reach the boondocks, more like hours. Within minutes, the skyscrapers were replaced with tenements and the tenements by shanties. Camels threatened the highway. Soon, there was only desert and scrub and then, anomalously, a klatch of apartment blocks tilting inward as if to gossip.
Dudu found the address, 21 Mounters of the Gallows Street, and parked the car. The entrance to the building was garbage-strewn and picketed by cats. Graffiti advertised excitement on the fourth floor, but Dudu climbed to the fifth. There, after rapping on a mock-oaken door, he found himself in a luxuriously appointed living room and in the presence—debonair, deadly—of Arnon Rothenberg.
He did not rise from his armchair or offer Dudu a seat in the empty one opposite him. He merely said, “I see you got my message,” and then, snapping at the rangy henchmen loitering nearby, “coffee.”
“This has got to stop, Arnon. Enough.” A full head taller than his host, and twice his bulk, Dudu nevertheless felt vulnerable addressing him. “What else do you want from me?”
Arnon shrugged. He might have been asked about the temperature outside, which was rarely less than sizzling. “Really?”
“And so the investigations. The misquotes. And now this? Y?”
Another shrug, followed by a self-congratulatory smirk. Manicured fingernails combed through sculpted hair. He was a pretty man, delicately featured. Such refinement, Arnon knew, when combined with ruthlessness, was unnerving.
“We had a deal.”
But Dudu was not unnerved, more like allayed. The moment he’d long dreaded had arrived and yet here he was, still standing.
“You mean, all I have to do is make that call?”
A henchman handed Dudu a demitasse. He was too smart not to accept it and sip. Arnon, meanwhile, waved his cellphone in the air. “Just one.”
Just one, but it would set into motion a series of irreversible events. Not only would Y and the alleged investigations disappear but so also would certain zoning restrictions, various bureaucratic barriers, and customs duties. Someday, maybe, there would be questions asked or maybe not. Such were the vagaries of politics. Dudu dialed.
* * * * *
Later, in his car, steeped in nausea and relief, Dudu again thought about his life. Perhaps along with his mother’s intensity he’d inherited her father’s hauteur, his predilection for dubious affairs. Or maybe he was more like the great-grandfather his mother once told him about, the half-mad Talmud student who lived in a shtetl near the town where she grew up. Who hid from pogroms in basements and wrote hallucinogenic stories in the synagogue where he was supposed to be studying. Twenty minutes passed before Dudu remembered the photo-op. Glancing at his watch, folding his shirtsleeves inward, he sped out of town.
The paratrooper base was also located in the desert, not far from where he, himself, had trained. Only back then, the soldiers sweated in tents, ate C rations, and shat and showered outdoors. Now, though, recruits slept in air-conditioned dorms with bathrooms. Mess halls supplied hot, balanced meals. Back then, the commanders were all males but today many of them were women, like Dalia.
“Don’t you think that’s a little bit smarmy?” Dudu had questioned Steinbesser when he came up with the photo-op idea.
“You mean for a politician to exploit the fact that his daughter is a drill sergeant in the paratroopers? Smarmy?” the spokesman replied. “You bet.”
And yet, passing through the gates, Dudu already cringed at the sight of the reporters and the base commanders turned out to greet him. Stiffly, he nodded through the tour of the high-tech lecture rooms and the virtual target ranges. The lunch they served him could have fed a squad in his day. At last came the time for the shoot. A VIP Humvee whisked him out to a training field where Dalia and her troops were waiting.
“Hey,” he merely said, emerging, and “Hey,” equally awkward, came her response. Beneath her camouflage paint, he could detect her creamy cheeks. The strands that escaped her floppy hat where flaxen, her eyes, Mediterranean blue. It surprised him just how much she looked like one of his ex-wives and how difficult it was remembering which one. Still, seeing her battle-geared, with an assault rifle slung around her neck and a row of nervous troops
behind her, delighted him.
“You could have asked me, you know,” she hissed.
“I know, Dalia. I’m sorry.”
“Shhh.” She motioned with her chin behind her. “I’m Commander Yarkoni to them.”
“Commander, of course…”
“Good. Now let’s get this over with.”
They posed, first Dudu with his daughter, and then the two of them with the entire platoon. He debated which expression to use, the hard-baked ex-colonel’s or the pride-filled father’s? He compromised with a grin, but then struggled to look at the camera. His eyes kept drifting toward her, to them, so youthful and pure. Armed angels. Had he once been like them, he wondered, before the wars, before politics?
He sensed that the army had not changed that much after all. The same heat, same smell of hot oil on hot metal and the dusty whiff of fatigues. Gunshots popping in the distance. Only he was different. Turning to Dalia, he wanted to tell her that, wanted to apologize for being such a terrible parent and for not quite remembering who her mother was. He wanted to whisper I love you but all that came out was, “Shalom.”
“Shalom,” she repeated and turned to bark at her men.
* * * * *
Baking in the kiln of his car, Dudu turned northeast. The desert gave way to fields and the fields yielded to mountains. The skeletons of armored vehicles destroyed in war littered the shoulders. The State was much like him, he thought. So many different landscapes, so many of them scarred.
Once inside the capital, the people changed as well. The thugs and soldiers replaced by religious men in shtreimels and frocks and wigged women pushing carriages. A shtetl carved from stone. He steered a route too convoluted for navigation systems and exited in a leafy neighborhood of identical four-story buildings. This was where he had grown up, where he played and kissed his first girl and came home from the army on furloughs. And here, not far from her home was the facility in which his mother now stayed and could still make his life unbearable.
The staff was deferential when he entered. They called him sir and complimented his last debate on television. Your mother must be very proud, they said.
“You blew it,” his mother greeted him. “That clown made a clown out of you.”
She sat slouched in her wheelchair, the once-disarming beauty reduced to a stack of wattles, age spots, and spleen.
“How do you feel today, Mom?” He angled her into a corner where the window admitted some sun. Its light accentuated her eyes, the only part of her unaltered. Her penetrating, punishing eyes.
“Better if I didn’t have to watch my only son make a fool of himself in public.”
In fact, she had another son, Itamar, who moved to Phoenix right out of high school and whom she’d rarely heard from since. Dudu never begrudged his departure. Their mother was too vast a burden—the weight of a woman who, as an eleven-year-old, saw her entire family murdered. Who fled into the forest and eventually met up with Koppel and his fighters, becoming the youngest partisan ever. Though more than twice her age, Koppel married her after the war and then widowed her with two babies. She remarried and divorced several times, rapidly. “He couldn’t have reached Koppel’s ankles,” she explained with each breakup. “Koppel could have pissed on him sitting.”
A coarse woman, his mother, custom-fit for politics. A legislator who opted always for the Opposition, who thrived on disdain for power; she remained a loner but a redoubtable one. Logically, he would follow in her path but proceeded to tread it differently, with behind-the-scenes deals and favors for his lackeys, with Arnon Rothenberg.
“I went to visit Dalia today,” he said, changing the subject. “On the base.”
The incisive eyes for once looked lucent. “Ah, Dalia, my favorite. What’s her name’s daughter.”
Dudu gulped. “Yeah, what’s her name’s.”
“Dalia, the goddess of fate. My god,” she added. “Wife of the thunder god, Perkunas.”
Dudu nodded. He didn’t want to let on that he had never heard of any of these gods, of thunder or otherwise, and that Dalia was the Hebrew word for olive branch. He knew better than to argue with his mother who, alone, called him by his real name, David, in memory of her father.
“We took a photograph. Together with her troops.”
The concertina of wrinkles in his mother’s face contracted. “Sounds smarmy,” she said.
Dudu shrugged. He’d long given up trying to win an argument with her. Perhaps he’d never actually tried. “It was good seeing her again, just before my flight.”
“Flight? Where to now? Don’t you know, David, the people want you here. Here. Not drinking schnapps with some Nazi.”
“No schnapps, Mom, no Nazis. I’m signing a trade treaty.”
“Trade treaty my ass. With who? Micronesia?”
Dudu inhaled deeply, dreading her response. The room, he noticed, smelled of bleach. “Lithuania.”
“Worse than the Nazis,” she snorted. Her skin, the color and texture of tissues, crinkled. “Worse than scum. I know.”
“I know you know, Mom. But all that was a very long time ago. The country’s different, the people. They’re some of our best friends.”
“They were our best friends, too. Our neighbors. Our lovers. And they butchered us.”
“How’s the food been?” he asked out of nowhere, despairing. “Any improvement?”
But his mother would not be derailed. “You’re not like your father. You’re not even like my father. You’re more like his. Fooling everybody into thinking he was some kind of scholar when all he did all night was write nonsense—fairy-tales and bullshit—that he hid behind the ark. They found them after he was killed by a Cossack. Crazy stuff. The rabbi had them burnt.”
With an effort, Dudu could have understood her meaning but he was too tired to press. He needed to get back to the office, to confirm with Steinbesser the total disappearance of Y from tomorrow’s newspapers, to pack his bag, and to head for the airport.
“That’s it, Mom, I’ve got to go.”
“Go. Go. Have a schnapps with your Lithuanian Nazis. Raise a toast to me.”
He tapped the back of her hand, all gristle and veins. “You be well, mother.”
Turning to the door, feeling it coming on, he might have sprinted and released it outside. Fit as he was, though, Dudu could not pull it off. Right there in his mother’s room, loudly and wretchedly, he sneezed.
From the corner by the window, with the contemptuous care he knew from earliest childhood, came the pronouncement, “That can’t be good.”
Lithuania’s Trade Minister could not have been happier. He shook Dudu’s hand and posed with him over the freshly inked treaty. A gaggle of photographers, Steinbesser among them, eternalized the event. That image, and not that of Y with her face blacked out, would grace the next day’s news. Dudu had survived, politically at least, and at a price, but wasn’t that always the case with life? One got by with what’s at hand, whether guns or wits or influence.
Adjourning to the minister’s office, clinking glasses in a toast, Dudu began to unwind. There was no Opposition here, no needling activists, and certainly no mother to harangue him. He only had to remember to call the capital Vilnius rather than Vilna, the city’s name in Yiddish.
“To Vilnius!” Dudu exclaimed and downed another vodka.
The beefy minister, red-faced and sweaty, gleamed. “To friendship!”
To friendship indeed. Dudu had rarely met such cordial people, brimming with warmth. Hard to imagine them turning on his people and massacring them. He actually mentioned this—blame it on the alcohol—and was surprised by the minister’s response.
“You are from here?”
“Well, not me, personally,” Dudu blushed. “My parents.”
“Yarkoni?”
“It’s the Hebrew version of Gryn, my mother’s maiden name. She went back to it after her first husband—my father—died.”
“And where was she from?”
Dudu wasn�
��t sure if the minister was interrogating him or not, probing for holes in his story, or simply being inquisitive. Either way, he was embarrassed to say he didn’t know.
“Anik something. I think….”
“Anik?” the minister refilled Dudu’s glass. “Anykciai?”
“That’s it! That’s it!” At least he thought that was it.
“But you must go, then,” the minister laughed. “It’s our best resort, with skiing and spas. Just over an hour from here. My driver will take you.”
Dudu wasn’t certain—the press could claim he was using public money for pleasure—and told as much to Steinbesser.
“Crap,” was the spokesman’s retort. “The public loves root-searching. And seeing where your family was shot.”
So they travelled, Dudu, Steinbesser, and a septuagenarian driver whose only English words were “go” and “stop.” The topography, flat and undistinguished, was broken only by ramshackle villages. The ghosts of shtetls hovered between them. Eighty minutes out, just as the minister estimated, two silver spires came into view and then some rooftops. “Anyksciai.”
The town, too, was nondescript. Shops, restaurants, vaguely European with a hint of Slav. No spas, no ski slopes, only drab, squat houses, many with privies out back and steeple-covered wells. Not until they reached the town square did Dudu stop to ponder what connection, if any, he had to this place. He recalled his mother mentioning that her father, a lawyer, had his office on the square, and that the synagogue she and her mother attended was not that far away. And indeed, at the end of a nearby street named Sinagoga, was a yellow-plastered building that had once held worshippers but now only bread, freshly baked on the premises.
Yet still he felt nothing, no sense of connection or the remotest nostalgia. A former soldier, the father of soldiers, an elected official wielding power, he was Dudu Yarkoni, not David Gryn. He did not share this with Steinbesser, though, even as he posed in front of the synagogue-cum-bakery. He settled for his grin again and then told the driver “go.”