Promised Land

by Martin Fletcher

  The faintest shiver went through Arie. So they know that. And what else?

  “And?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “Tell you what? That I knew this man and killed him?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Yes, I did, I remember now.”

  Shemesh went silent. He managed to control his features. He swallowed, before asking. “Do you have a number on your arm?”

  Now Arie was surprised. “Yes, I do.”

  “May I see it?”

  “No.”

  Shemesh fell silent again. Arie said, “This man, Yonathan Schwartz, you say he died ten years ago. It was so long ago, why do you care about him? Or do you care about me, for some reason? You want to write a story claiming that I, Arie Nesher, am a killer? Why? Based on what? An old police report?”

  “One that was hushed up by Mossad. The policeman told me he complained officially at the time. Somebody in Mossad asked for the file, and later the investigation was closed down. That Mossad person was your sister-in-law, but she doesn’t work there anymore. The policeman told me. I have her name and I will find her.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Diana Nesher.”

  “You’ll have a hard time interviewing her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh. You went that far to cover your tracks.”

  The silence hung heavy, and grew heavier. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Arie rose. “Get out.” Close to forty, he was still a powerful man. “I’m going to put that down to the stupidity of youth. If you weren’t a child I’d kick your ass. And to save your time investigating another imagined murder, Diana died in childbirth. Now get the hell out of my office.”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Nesher. That just came out.” He stood. “I didn’t mean it, really. It was stupid of me, I apologize. I’m sorry she died in childbirth, I had no idea. Please, you said something, I really need to know more. You said you knew Yonathan Schwartz, I’d like to ask you about him. Please. Can we sit down again? I’m sorry.”

  Arie was holding the door open, pointing the way out. He hesitated. He’s just a stupid kid but he could do real damage with this report. It was a sexy story. Murder. Cover-up. Mossad. Arie Nesher.

  “Why? Why do you care so much about how that man Yonathan Schwartz died ten years ago?”

  “Hans Schwartz. He changed it to Yoni. You see—he was my father.”

  “Ah. I see.” Arie’s heart thumped. That’s why he won’t give up—he never will. He stepped back into the room and closed the door. “I’m sorry about your father. I mean, what happened to him.” What to say? What to do? What could he give the boy that would shut him up? “Coffee now?”

  “No, thank you. May I sit?”

  Arie poured two glasses of water and gave one to Yoram. He drained his own and poured another. He walked to the wall, adjusted a painting. “Never stays straight, that one. Always annoys me.” Finally he sat down, and pulled his chair closer to Yoram. “Important to keep hydrated,” he said, gesturing with his glass to Yoram’s. Yoram drank.

  “So after your father died, you grew up with your mother?”

  “No. I didn’t know her, she died when I was a year old. In a displaced persons camp in Germany. Tuberculosis.”

  “She was a survivor too?”

  “Yes. My parents met after the war, I was born nine months later in the DP camp. A quick romance.”

  “Yes. There was a lot of that in those days. So your father brought you up, then he died, when you were, what? Nine? What happened to you then?”

  “I don’t have any relatives. Everybody died in the camps. I was in a home, I hated it. I left when I was fourteen, I’ve been alone since then.”

  “Supporting yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the army?”

  “I have diabetes. And asthma.”

  “I see. That’s quite a story. And you’re just nineteen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you really a journalist?”

  “No, sir. Sorry. I’d like to be one day.”

  “How do you support yourself then?”

  “I work in a kiosk. On Gordon Street.”

  Arie picked up Yoram’s pen, his notebook, and looked at him with a thin smile. “So what’s this all about then? Looking for your father’s … so-called killer?”

  Yoram looked as if he would cry. Finally he said, “It didn’t start like that. I found a newspaper cutting that I must have kept from the time, it mentioned my father having an argument with a concentration camp survivor who knew him in Auschwitz. So I went to the police to find him—the other survivor. They could only tell me about Mister Ludlow, and he told me about you…” He looked down. “And all the rest.”

  He sucked in air, tried to compose himself. “I wanted to find someone who knew my father in Auschwitz. Who could tell me about him there. Did you know him in Auschwitz? Can you tell me about him? What he was like? Where he came from? Because I know so little about him, and I never had anybody else.”

  His eyes filled with tears. “Where do I come from? I don’t know who I am.”

  Arie was touched. He laid a hand on the boy’s arm, patted it. He felt a sudden kinship, as if their stories, their lives, were intertwined, and in a way they were. Everything the boy wanted to know was what he had spent so long trying to forget. Yet what if someone could tell him what happened to his own father? And mother. And sisters. Wouldn’t he do anything to find out? Did he owe it to them all to tell this lost boy what he knew?

  There was another long silence as Arie filled the glasses again until the jug was drained. “I did meet your father,” he said at last, offering the boy a glass. “I didn’t know him well. I can tell you a little about him, but this is not the place to talk of such things.”

  Yoram wiped his eyes again. He shivered. “It would mean so much to me.”

  “To me too,” Arie said. “But not here. Why don’t you come to my home, we can talk there. Tomorrow? Take the 90 bus, it stops a ten-minute walk from the house. Come for dinner. Seven o’clock.”

  * * *

  In the Bar de la Nuit in Saint-Sulpice, a very strange kind of history was made that day.

  Everything was wrong about Nile’s movement. Instead of picking up his attaché case to take out a document, he leaned down and stretched his arm into the case. Instead of looking down to choose the right papers, he looked up at Peter. He kept that posture a shade too long.

  Peter’s neck hair stood, his balls shrank, he shot a look at his backup. The man took two quick steps forward, the woman aimed her gun, still hidden in the purse. A roar came from the television at a missed goal, one of the old men slapped the counter.

  There was a blur of motion. Still seated, Nile whipped a gun into Peter’s face.

  Peter saw nothing but the small round hole of his death, every movement a single jerky frame in a film. He saw Nile’s finger tighten on the trigger, he threw himself to the side, his hand shot out to grab the gun, but too late.

  Nile squeezed the trigger a foot from Peter’s face. It clicked like a clucking tongue. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed. In that instant the Mossad agent, already aiming at Nile’s chest, pulled her trigger. Another click. Nothing happened. It was impossible, but her gun jammed too. Before the other agent could reach Nile, Peter had grabbed his gun hand, twisted it up and round and pulled the gun from his grasp. Now the pistol was in Peter’s hand.

  Nile’s mouth fell open but he was quick to react. He pushed past the agent and ran from the café. Outside, two covering agents, not knowing what happened but seeing Nile’s panic, ran after him.

  Inside, Peter fell back into his chair, his heart hammering like that of a sprinter. The woman was dazed, she looked up and down, from her purse to Peter, from Peter to her purse. What just happened? The male agent rushed to the door but there was
nothing to do but get Peter to a safe place.

  The bartender was still looking down into the sink as she scrubbed the beer glasses; the men at the bar, with their backs to Peter, were transfixed by the game.

  It was so quick it was as if nothing had happened.

  But it went down in Mossad history as the Day the Guns Jammed.

  For Peter, it was the day he got his life back.

  * * *

  The near assassination of a Mossad department chief was an epic failure that led to weeks of deconstruction. Why had Nile turned? How was the veteran Peter Nesher fooled into a trap? Why didn’t the security rings work? And of course, the big one, who to blame?

  But on the flight home, Peter, facing what he knew would be a brutal debriefing, and shaken by his near death, had only one thought on his mind: If he had been killed, who would look after the children? Diana wasn’t yet two, Ezra and Noah were eleven. Rachel was a lifesaver, but they needed a mother. And he needed a wife.

  As he lay back in his seat, legs stretched out, arms folded, drowsy, his thoughts tumbled over each other. He had been given a second chance at life. He needed to share it with someone. Diana would have wanted that. But who? Arie was always introducing him to women and he’d gone out with some. He’d liked Vardit, they had been together a month, but she was honest: she didn’t want to inherit three children. So that was that. Michal? She liked him. But she kept trying to communicate with the spirits, with Diana. It was freakish. Then there was …

  Peter was asleep and woke suddenly with her name on his lips. Did he say it aloud?

  Tamara. Oh, Tamara. He had dreamt of her. Her damp hair, her sweet lips. While he was married to Diana he had pushed that part of Tamara from his mind. She played many parts: sister-in-law, friend, his wife’s best friend, the cook, the mother, the human rights lawyer. But that part of her he most wanted, their one moment together, he pushed from his mind. They had been so young and it had been so brief, but oh, what would he give to make love to her again. In a way, he had lived a lie. Had she? Now that he had been reprieved, was this a second chance?

  But what was he thinking? His brother’s wife?

  Tamara’s marriage to Arie had long been a sham, they had separate bedrooms. He always had at least one woman on the side, and Tamara knew it. They stayed together for the children. How old were they now? Fourteen. In four years their twins would be soldiers, they would leave home.

  He had to face himself, he had to talk to Tamara. Did she feel the same? Was he imagining it all, were these just the crazy thoughts of a vulnerable lonely man?

  The gun’s muzzle again, a round blackness, in his face. Click. Click. Two guns jammed. At the same time. God must be rocking with laughter.

  The stewardess was shaking his shoulder. “Buckle up, sir. We land in Tel Aviv in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  Before he could turn the key in the door, Rachel opened it. Behind her, the boys were playing on the floor with a friend, some kind of board game, colored pieces were piled in front of each player. Monopoly? They hardly looked up.

  “How was the trip?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh, fine,” Peter answered. “Just another day at the office.”

  * * *

  The next night, dinner was a strained affair. Arie never explained properly to Tamara why he had invited this strange young man, but she was polite, even as the twins couldn’t leave the table fast enough. And as Hadassah, the maid, cleared the plates, Arie said to Tamara that he and Yoram would go to the study to talk.

  Was he offering him a job? Why would he bring him home? Tamara didn’t wonder too long. “I have some files to work through,” she said. “I’ll be on the back terrace, it’s a beautiful evening.”

  Arie led Yoram into his study. It had a high ceiling and a wall covered with landscapes by Israeli artists. A floor-to-ceiling glass wall looked out onto the back garden. “Not bad,” Yoram said. “This room is twice as big as my home.” He walked slowly along the shelves of antiquities: oil lamps, glass bowls, cracked and repaired, clay vases, what looked like a painted cat’s head, long and pointed. “Roman artifacts, very undervalued,” Arie said. “You can buy these things for a song although they’re thousands of years old. They’ll be worth a fortune one day. But the best thing is the view, look. Oh, it’s dark!”

  The window looked past the terrace to the sea, which was a dark mass sparkling from the stars’ reflection. “That’s the only thing those bastards couldn’t take from us,” Arie said, “the sky. Sit down.”

  Outside, the air was still. As Tamara read by the electric light, the overhead fan kept the mosquitoes away; its whirr reduced the low tones she heard through the open study window to a muddy murmur, so at odds with the evening calm.

  “… and the face of the Russian soldier who looked at us through the wire,” Arie was saying. “He vomited. I had no idea until then how disgusting I must have been. At that moment, just when I knew I’d live, that I had survived, I saw myself through his eyes. Diseased. Disgusting. At least I was standing. There were hundreds who didn’t have the strength, pulling themselves along the icy ground, like worms.”

  Yoram broke in. “And my father? He was there? Please tell me about him.”

  Arie stiffened. What had touched him about this earnest child? Their related suffering? Did the boy’s pain touch his own, that he had never been able to confront? Was Yoram’s father just the trigger, the conduit? Arie spoke in a monotone, as if distancing himself from his own thoughts. He told of the boarded-up freight train that crossed Europe for days, transporting him and his parents and sisters, crammed inside a stinking cattle car with their neighbors, with no food or water or toilets, no air, no room to sit, boiling during the day, freezing at night, coughing and spitting. The floor sodden with urine and excrement. The bright, clean world sliding by through a crack in the wood. A quarter of them died before they even reached Auschwitz.

  There was something riveting, relentless, about his tone that made Tamara strain to understand her husband’s words through the window. She laid her papers aside. She caught only occasional words, like “Auschwitz” and “train,” until she realized she should turn off the fan. When the whirring stopped and she moved closer to stand with her back to the open window, she could hear every word. She was transfixed. She had never heard Arie talk like this. Never. Not only what he said but how he said it. It was as if he could hardly believe his own words.

  Who was this boy? Why was Arie telling him all this? And then she heard Arie say, “Your father and I had the same job for months. It was supposed to be an easy job.” Arie paused, considering Yoram. “You really want to hear this?” A grimace passed for a smile.

  “Yes, I do,” Yoram said. This was what he had come for. He had not dared to interrupt, but he had to know about his father.

  Tamara’s heart sped as she listened; the twinkling stars, the gentle silence outside, made this stolen moment all the more horrifying, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  “The guards packed the Jews into the gas chambers so tightly that when it was over and the doors were opened, the corpses stayed upright, like naked clay figures. Holding hands. Hugging. Their faces were the worst. Distended, mouths open. Dead but standing. Standing on babies. There was no room to fall down.

  “We had to handle the bodies. The Nazis took everything of value. They smashed the teeth to take the gold fillings. Our job, your father and me … our job was to search body cavities for valuables.”

  Tamara dug her fist into her mouth to stop from crying out.

  “Do you know what I mean?” Arie said.

  Yoram nodded, and then shook his head. “No.”

  “We had to stick our fingers into the mouths, noses, the rectums, the vaginas of the bodies. Feeling for diamonds, money. There were piles of corpses and we had to work through every one. We dragged them, stacked them, burned them. We didn’t smell the stink anymore. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the insult, the constant Nazi insult,
to the corpses, to ourselves, to the Jews. I swore that if I lived through it, nobody would insult me ever again. All we wanted was to stay alive ourselves for as long as possible. Your father. And me.

  “I did that for about half a year. I met up with your father again months later, when I had a special position due to sports. I’ll be honest with you, your father didn’t like me then, nobody did, but I did anything I could to survive. Anything. I’m not proud. But I live with myself.” His voice trailed off so Tamara could barely make it out. “I do my best.”

  Tamara shuddered and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. What pitiful agony was held in those words: I do my best. He has suffered so much for so long. He was only a child when he’d entered hell, not much older than their own children, Carmel and Daniel. She leaned against the wall; she felt she may faint.

  “Your father must have been the same,” Tamara heard Arie say after a while. “We hated ourselves. We hated the world that didn’t help. We even hated our rescuers for seeing us in our filth. And ever since then, we held it all inside. Because if we said what happened, everybody else would hate us too. There could be no forgiveness. Your father and I, we were not close, nobody was, but we understood each other. Everything can be taken from you, everything and everybody. We were fighting for our lives. We could die at any moment, everybody was the enemy.”

  And they still are, Tamara thought. You’re still fighting to survive, terrified to lose it all, everyone is still your enemy. Everyone? She trembled. Is that what I am to you? Even partially? Only now she truly grasped the man she married fourteen years ago.

  TAMARA and PETER

  TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  August 1964

  Tamara wept that night, her pillow became damp. Was she just another kind of guard who had taken away Arie’s freedom? Did he hate her for it?

  Should she go to his bed? Twice she threw back the cover to go to him, twice she pulled it back again. She had loved him, once. Could she again? This tortured soul, barely hanging on, her husband, the father of her children, he needed her, even if he didn’t know it.