The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “So we did.” He puffed on his cigar and glanced at Cohn to see if he was listening. “We landed in Haifa on a hot day in August. They put us into trucks, about a hundred of us, right at the docks, and drove us into the Negev. By the time we arrived it was almost dark. A little village of huts had been thrown together. Okay, everybody out, they said. Here’s your new home. Happy farming. We looked at the rocks and the sand. We stayed where we were. So they fired a few shots in the air, and someone yelled it was an Arab attack, take shelter. We ran and hid in the huts. The trucks drove away. The next morning we divided the land and began to plow.”

  Cohn appeared unmoved by the story. His eyes were far away, on the Old City. The clouds had hidden West Jerusalem in an obscure gloom, but they had yet to cover the Old City. By an accident of light and shade the centuries were rolled back like cheap rugs, and the walled city seemed more than a tourist attraction. But in a moment the vision was gone, and the golden Dome of the Rock looked once again like gold paint, and the limestone towers, churches, and synagogues like rubble.

  Calvi realized that he had probably recounted the whole episode before, perhaps even in a speech somewhere; a speech written by Moses Cohn. And he realized too that this time he had told the story with no real bitterness. No sense pretending: he had been so grateful to be in Israel he would have happily planted apple trees in granite.

  Cohn had been the radical in those days, a European socialist who believed in the impossibility of comparing cultures. Therefore no one could be superior to another. Just different. Did Cohn regret the political tutoring he had given him? He could see it on his face, feel it in the tension between them. They were like a married couple growing apart: united only by a contract and the accumulation of common property.

  Cohn’s clear blue eyes looked closely at Calvi. “What’s behind Grunberg’s heavy-handed little visit, Simon? Why this pressure?”

  Before Calvi could answer the rear door of the house opened.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Gisela said. “I didn’t realize you had a visitor.”

  For one who had been in the country for less than a year her Hebrew was excellent, but neither man paid much attention to her speech. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. She showed no trace of embarrassment, although she and Cohn had never met. No haute couturier would look twice at her body, but other men would. It was unfashionably heavy, especially in the hips and legs, but still retained remnants of the springy underpinning of nubility. With old-fashioned politeness Cohn looked away.

  “Do you want breakfast?” she said.

  “Breakfast?” Calvi asked Cohn.

  “I really haven’t the time this morning. But thank you.”

  “He can’t stay,” Calvi said to Gisela. In some way her nakedness required him to become an intermediary in the conversation. “But I’d like something, please.” Gisela turned and disappeared in the house.

  “British?” Cohn asked.

  “German. They are rather easy to attract in this country, you know. It must be some form of restitution.” Instantly he regretted the facetiousness of his remark. He felt more for Gisela than that.

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Why should it?” His cigar had gone out and he relit it. “She wasn’t even born during the war.”

  Cohn shook his head, the way faithful married men often do at their bachelor friends. Especially bachelor friends who are pushing sixty. He rolled up his pant legs and remounted his bicycle.

  “I’m going to tell Grunberg all about this,” he called over his shoulder as he rode away. “Now you’ve gone too far.”

  Calvi laughed and turned to the newspapers. Politicians read the news avidly, the way actors read theatrical reviews. Calvi was not aware of the first few snowflakes that drifted through the trees into the garden, melting as they touched the ground. He scarcely noticed Gisela return, dressed in old jeans and a woolen sweater and carrying a breakfast tray. Politics are serious in Israel and the word crisis means what the dictionary says it does. Gisela sat beside him eating her breakfast. After a while she ate his, too. When she felt cold she went inside to do the dishes, or at least to stack them in the sink.

  Because he read each paper from beginning to end it was some time before Simon Calvi reached the classified page of the International Herald Tribune. Among the personals his eye caught a brief notice addressed to Walter D. In his armpits the pores opened suddenly.

  “Walter D. Did you get my present? Marie.”

  He went quickly into the house, into the little study on the ground floor, and locked the door. Taking a French edition of Crime and Punishment from the shelves he sat at the desk and began marking numbers on a sheet of paper.

  Walter D. was meaningless. It was just to get his attention. He began with did. D was twenty, page twenty, fourth word, first letter. I was forty-five, ninth word. D again. It was an elementary code. All you needed was the right edition of the right book.

  6

  Simon Calvi stood near the Damascus Gate wishing he weren’t. It wasn’t the cold, he had been cold before, many times. It wasn’t the night, night didn’t bother him either. Perhaps it was age. He had never been old before. He knew he wasn’t going to like it.

  He looked up at the crenellated wall that topped the gate. The half moon was doing a terrific lighting job on the old stones, cutting centuries off their age. No Hollywood director with all his fancy filters could have done better work for his fading star. In the pale light Calvi could almost see a real fort, with Crusaders lurking behind the wall getting ready to shoot their arrows through the slits. In the daytime it would be a Crusader’s dream come true from up there: the square packed with peddlers, beggars, tourists, housewives, and donkeys, like the cast and crew of The Ten Commandments on a break. Now Calvi had the place to himself, except for an emaciated old Arab sleeping behind his felafel stand.

  Calvi sank deeper into his fleece-lined duffel coat. A muezzin, in a dyspeptic voice that told listeners it was just a job, and not a very good one, began singing the last call to prayer. The scratchy notes heralded the arrival of two soldiers who came through the gate quite suddenly, Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Groggily the old Arab got to his feet and stood behind the pile of dirty orange crates that served as his stand, his eyes on nothing. From a distance of thirty or forty feet the soldiers gave Calvi a careful look. Indifferently he turned his back on them and slowly walked over to the felafel stand. He felt the soldiers’ eyes on his back while he asked the old man in Arabic if he had anything left to sell. The old man had white cataract smears on both eyes. He reached into a crate and pulled out a little lump wrapped in shreds of greasy newspaper. Calvi dropped a coin into the man’s hand and forced himself to bite off a piece and chew it. He heard the soldiers start walking away, their heavy boots making hard sounds on the unyielding stone.

  When he turned around, they were gone. Around to the Jaffa Gate and back inside the walls, he reckoned. They probably patrolled the Old City quarter by quarter. He tossed the remains of the felafel away and resumed his position near the gate. It was hard to feel inconspicuous when your face was in the morning paper.

  Calvi heard the old man mutter something and saw him walk stiffly into the square to retrieve the felafel. He returned to his stand, wrapped it in another tatter of newspaper and tucked it out of sight. Calvi leaned against the wall and thought about the trouble between the Arabs and the Jews.

  From the Nablus Road came the rough sound of a car motor that needed tuning. Calvi looked north and saw the approaching headlights. Slowly a dusty, dark-colored Volkswagen entered the square and swept around the perimeter until its beams fastened on Calvi by the wall. Then the lights were shut off and the motor cut. It was very quiet. The old man slept on the stones.

  Calvi waited for a minute before he walked across the square to the car. He opened the passenger door and sat inside. Immediately the car began a startling high-pitched buzzing. The driver turned to Calvi and said, “Seat belt.”
He said it in English but the barely detectable lilt came from Germany, perhaps Austria. Calvi, a polyglot, knew accents.

  Calvi fumbled with the mechanism but could not manage it. He had never fastened a seat belt in his life, except in airplanes, and this seemed far more complex.

  “God in heaven,” said the driver with some impatience as he switched on the interior light. Calvi thought it a mild oath when he saw the face it came out of. A face enormously broad, with a thick sweeping bony crescent of brow, two slabs of cheeks and a nose like a redoubt between them. The blond hair was thinning, the blue eyes were somewhat wide and in the mouth the teeth that weren’t missing didn’t match.

  The blond man leaned across Calvi’s body and reached for the seat belt. Calvi had never seen a thicker wrist, and the nylon fabric of his cheap jacket stretched tautly across his back. Not until the blond man had finished with the seat belt and sat straight did Calvi notice how close to the floor pedals the seat was pushed. The blond man could not have been more than a few inches over five feet. Standing, Calvi imagined, he would look like a being adapted to a much more massive planet than earth. Here he was in the wrong place. The thought was restorative.

  “You’re late,” Calvi said.

  In answer the blond man started the motor and turned the car south, toward Mount Zion. He drove like a good citizen, obeying all the lights and signals and staying under the speed limit. Calvi patted his pockets until he found the one that held his cigars, and lit one, dropping the match on the floor. He drew smoke into his mouth and forced it out through his nose. The sting in his sinuses brought tears to his eyes. Despite the cold the blond man lowered his window two or three inches.

  Outside the city, on the road to Beersheba, the blond man began to drive faster. At first there was a little traffic, but after the Bethlehem turn-off none. In the Judean hills the blond man pressed further on the accelerator, and Calvi knew that no Volkswagen could go so fast.

  “What sort of motor have you got in this thing?” he asked.

  “Porsche.” The blond man spoke the word as if it were the name of his baby daughter.

  Calvi twisted around to see the back seat. There was no back seat; in its stead a thin metal casing had been hastily banged into place to hide the hypertrophied engine. He listened to the sounds of the spinning steel. It wasn’t out of tune at all, not in the sense he had thought at first.

  Calvi stared out the window as they climbed through the olive groves of Judea. The dusty leaves were silver foil in the moonlight. Calvi tried to play back in his mind the arrival of the Volkswagen at the Damascus Gate, and in this review he saw what his eyes had seen the first time, but his mind had missed: the very wide, very deep-tread tires of the car. He wondered now where they were going.

  Ahead Calvi thought he could make out the round dark shapes of the bare hills of Gush Etzion. Two kibbutzim were sheltered in those hills, populated in part by descendants of the two hundred and forty Jews who had been killed on the same site in the ’48 war. Fourteen, Calvi remembered, had blown themselves up in their armored car rather than be taken by the Arab Legion. In the end even the trees had been uprooted by the Arabs. It made the present inhabitants determined.

  With a quick movement the blond man switched off the headlights, and slowed the car by half. He put his face almost against the windshield, squinting ahead. In the distance Calvi thought he saw a light, but he could no longer trust his eyes for that sort of thing. The blond man braked the car to a creep, and began peering into the vineyards that bordered the side of the elevated road bed. Then, with a suddenness that caught Calvi by surprise he jerked the wheel, and sent the car flying off the road. They landed with a sickening jolt that cracked the top of Calvi’s head against the roof. He felt thankful for the seat belt.

  The blond man drove the car in a quick circle, snapping the vine stocks beneath. He parked at the foot of the embankment which supported the road, and switched off the engine. The vines would not afford much cover at this time of year, Calvi thought. He’s counting on the superior elevation of the road. But Calvi was certain the top of the car would show.

  Calvi rubbed the top of his head, and realized that his mouth had a death grip on the cigar. As he puffed it back to life he felt the muscles of the blond man stiffen. Calvi too saw it—a point, no, two points of light in the south.

  The blond man turned to Calvi to show him that he had his finger over his lips. Then he did something that Calvi did not like at all: with his short broad fingers he took the cigar from Calvi’s mouth and put it in the ashtray. Calvi started to protest.

  “Silence,” the blond man hissed.

  They waited. Calvi tried to think of a credible explanation for why he was sitting in a vineyard in the middle of the night with a man whose name he didn’t know. He couldn’t. They watched the headlights bob up and down and sometimes slip out of sight as they moved through the hills. In about two minutes they were very close, although it seemed much longer to Calvi. He heard the throb of the engine, and mixed into that sound a metallic rattle of the kind a jeep frame might make. The yellow beams illuminated the vineyard behind them, and Calvi saw how bare it looked. For a very long moment the light flowed into the Volkswagen showing Calvi the beads of sweat on the blond man’s upper lip. From six feet away the din hit their ears, the pounding pistons and the high-pitched wail of eroding rubber and asphalt. Then the Doppler effect bent the noise like a blue note and it was gone, leaving a wake of noxious fumes.

  “Dear God,” said the blond man softly. But he made no move to start the car. A dark green gecko ran along the windshield, stopped, dipped up and down a few times like a push-up fanatic, and rested motionless, its reptilian feet clinging to the glass.

  From very near Calvi was surprised by the faint susurrus of slow rolling tires on the road, followed by the almost undetectable purr of a lovingly treated engine. No headlights this time, no rattle. It went by like a ghost. The blond man checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch and waited exactly two minutes before he started the car. He was very good.

  Before they reached Beersheba the blond man turned the car off the road, and barely slackening speed, using only the light of the moon, he began to maneuver across the rock and sand of the Negev. At first the way was very bumpy. Rocks, some big and unyielding, struck at the axles. Wiry bushes clung to the bumpers. Occasionally the fat tires lost traction in drifts of soft sand, but the blond man always slid through. Finally he found the hard-packed bed of a wadi winding south, and he followed it. In the distance Calvi could see the dark shape of a massive plateau rising straight off the desert floor. He had been a soldier, he had learned the soldier’s art of falling instantly to sleep when there was nothing to be done. He slept.

  When he awoke the moon had gone down. He could see little except the profile of the blond man, sickly green in the light from the instrument panel. Again they were on very uneven ground and the lines of strain on the blond man’s forehead were etched in a deeper green. As his eyes adjusted, Calvi saw that they were beginning the climb up the massif. Around him loomed hulking twisted rocks; robbed of their yellows and pinks and browns by the night, they took on the shadowy shapes of the prehistoric monsters that once walked the earth. He guessed that they had entered the land that had made the Hebrews so fed up with Moses on the trek to the Promised Land. Cohn had told him Isaiah’s description when they had toured the area once in the fifties. Cohn liked to take him on little educational trips and his hobby, which he admitted was somewhat nostalgic, was the geography of the Bible. Isaiah had called the place “a land of trouble and anguish, from whence came the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent.” Calvi saw no sign of the fauna but he didn’t quarrel with the first part.

  The climb was very slow. Several times rocks as tall as trees forced them to backtrack. During one stretch they crept along the edge of a deep gorge. Calvi could feel the cold wind rising in a steady current from the dark and arid plain below. One of the rear tires slipped off t
he sand, and it spun wildly over the abyss before the blond man could fight the car back to safety.

  Calvi guessed that they had climbed only a few hundred feet when the blond man stopped the car and peered at the solid rock wall that rose to his left. He took a flashlight from under his seat and got out of the car. Calvi saw that he was even shorter than he had guessed. With his hand over the lens like a visor, the blond man shone the light for two or three seconds at a time at different sections of the rock. Calvi saw nothing but a shadow that might indicate an indentation further up. The blond man returned to the car and drove on.

  When they reached the shadow in the wall the blond man stopped the car and turned off the ignition. He motioned for Calvi to get out. Calvi unfastened the seat belt—in this respect it resembled those on airplanes—climbed out and closed the door quietly.

  There was no sound except the faint brushing of the wind in the whorls of his ears. The cold dry air sharpened his senses. He walked softly to the indentation in the rock face. Only when he stood right before it could he see that it was not an indentation but a narrow natural passage through the thick stone wall. At the end of the utterly black corridor he could see the deep grays of open space. He walked through.

  He supposed that he had entered a small boxed canyon. On all sides he felt the vertical presence of the cliffs. He had taken two steps inside when he sensed a man behind him. He whirled, and faced a robed Bedouin, as tall as he, but not as broad. In one motion Calvi crouched and turned sideways, watching for a knife. But the Bedouin reached out his hand, and gently touched Calvi on the upper arm. Calvi relaxed slightly, and the Bedouin ran his hand softly over his arm, under it, down the side, the leg, the inside of the leg, the other side. How careless, Calvi thought. If guns were a worry the blond man should have searched him long before.

  He took a cigar from his coat pocket. To hell with these people. He struck a match, and in the glow of the light saw the rifle held loosely in one hand, the bandoliers that formed an X across the man’s chest, and the keffiyeh pulled across the lower half of the face against the wind. But above the keffiyeh, the face, although dark, looked soft, very soft for a Bedouin. And between the keffiyeh and the round neck of the robe Calvi saw the starched beige collars of a uniform. Why are they taking such chances, Calvi asked himself. Angrily the man leaned forward and blew out the match.