Israel

by Fred Lawrence Feldman

  “But you’ve turned out to be one of my best workers. I’ve got to let you go, but if I need more help you’re the first I’ll call.” He opened his desk drawer to remove a slip of paper. “This is the name and telephone number of the personnel manager at Pickman’s in Herald Square. He’s a friend of mine, and when he mentioned he was interviewing sales clerks, I told him about you. He was so impressed that he suggested you call him for—”

  “Oh, Wilkie, how wonderful of you!” Becky gushed, so excited she broke the manager’s cardinal rule and called him by the nickname he despised.

  Fortunately, he seemed not to notice. His robust, shell-pink blush suffused his jowls, rising to encompass his balding dome. “It’s nothing at all, my dear. I’m glad to do it. The only problem is that Pickman’s is hiring full time only.”

  “I understand. I think I’m going to try for it anyway. There’s no guarantee I’ll get it, after all.”

  “None at all,” Wilkerson smiled. “Then again, I wouldn’t bet against you, Miss Herodetsky.”

  Beaming, Becky said, “Thank you, sir. I’ll always be grateful.”

  “It was nothing. It’s all up to you, really. You can finish out the week if you’d like.”

  The next day she called Pickman’s while her father was upstairs. She made an appointment for a preliminary interview the following week.

  After her job at Malden’s ended, Becky still left the store until the early evening three nights a week and all day Saturday. She saw no point in taking a giant step backward, letting on that she’d been fired, especially if she wanted to work at Pickman’s full time.

  She decided to ignore her father’s opposition, at least for the time being. What point was there in getting into a raging battle over a job she was still a long way from getting? Most likely she’d be crossed off the list of Pickman’s prospective employees after her first interview, considering the way her luck had been running.

  Pickman’s dominated Herald Square. Once in a blue moon Becky’s mother had run to Pickman’s to take advantage of the big sales. Sometimes Becky would get to go along. She remembered how impressed she’d been by the tall, slender salesladies, to a little girl from the Lower East Side as glamorous as princesses.

  And soon I may be one of them, Becky thought. Sales clerk was the first rung of the ladder to buyer.

  She spent her former working hours in the library, poring over texts on fabrics, the garment industry, wholesaling and retailing. She had no idea what questions might be asked, so she prepared for everything she could think of. With Wilkerson’s personal recommendation behind her Becky would never have a better chance at landing a job, but these days competition was stiff, as it was fashionable for the daughters of the wealthy to play at work behind the counters of the better stores. The department stores competed to see which could put the prettiest and most sought-after young ladies on its sales floor and show ramps and in its buyer-trainee programs.

  During those exhausting evenings at the library Becky tried hard not to think about the debutantes who might get her job, only to quit after a month or so. With all those beauties they’ve got to hire at least a couple of girls with brains, she grimly told herself, and then she redoubled her efforts at her books.

  * * *

  On Wednesday afternoon Becky left the personnel department of Pickman’s and wandered in a happy daze among the throngs in Herald Square. She was past the preliminaries. They’d asked her back for a second interview a week from today, on the nineteenth.

  During the next seven days Becky made innummerable false starts on breaking the news to her father. Each time she began to tell him, she lost her nerve and changed the subject. No point to telling him now, she would decide. I don’t have the job yet.

  Becky gambled some of her savings on a Pickman’s dress for her second interview. It cost a staggering twenty-five dollars, but it was well worth it. Pale grey with white collar and cuffs, it was at once businesslike and elegant. A shirtwaist, it would never go out of style, and its closely woven fine linen would wear for years. Besides, she had new white accessories, so the dress was her only expense.

  All Sunday it rained and Becky pored over her notes from the library. She woke at dawn, around four-thirty, and got right to work. She seemed driven to concentrate solely on preparation for her interview Wednesday. She was quite fierce to Abe when he mildly suggested that she stop and get dinner. Finally Danny made sandwiches, but Becky would not stop to eat hers.

  When she went to bed at midnight she was exhausted. She collapsed between the sheets and was asleep at once and for nearly ten hours thereafter.

  On Monday morning she woke feeling vastly relieved, which puzzled her, for her interview still loomed ahead. Then suddenly it dawned on her—Benny was married now. She could not relent even if he asked her and she wanted to. Yesterday she had toiled her way through the ceremony, the reception and in all likelihood the consummation.

  Becky congratulated herself on having forgotten the date and turned her head into the pillow, which she pounded and bit as she wept for her lost lover with the feet of clay. Finally she slept a little more and woke thinking of lipsticks and her new grey linen.

  On Wednesday morning, just hours before her all-important final interview, a letter addressed to Becky arrived at Cherry Street—not a catalog or a library notice, but a letter—the first ever with Becky’s name on it.

  Becky skipped upstairs to read it in private. In the sanctuary of her bedroom she tore open the thick envelope. Wrapped around a sheaf of papers was a note:

  Dearest Becky,

  I made some mistakes. I hope this helps a little to make things right.

  Love,

  Benny

  Trembling, Becky examined the rest of the papers. There was a handwritten explanatory history of this building’s ownership, which ended with Benny’s admonition, “Destroy after reading.” And there was the deed. Becky read everything twice, including the brief note from Benny’s attorney asking her to stop by his office to sign a few documents and remit the sum of one dollar for the building that housed the Cherry Street Market.

  Becky was stunned. Benny’s bombshell of an envelope might just as well have contained evidence that she was adopted or a bastard or a princess or heir to a fortune. She tried to come to terms with the bewildering implications. She was not elated, but more hollow and numb.

  There was no doubt that the deed was genuine, which meant that the property really did belong to her. Benny might well have betrayed her, but now he’d also supplied her with the key to her prison.

  If the deed was genuine, her father had been lying to her all these years. He owned nothing and never had.

  Becky fought back the impulse to rush downstairs and confront her father with the evidence. She had her interview at Pickman’s in just a little while. It would be foolish to upset herself; she would face him after she got back.

  She went to her closet. There hung her courage, and as she dressed she blessed herself for buying it. At last she dashed down the stairs and out of the store without so much as a word to her father. She didn’t trust herself to speak to him. In her purse Becky carried the deed, hoping it would bolster her courage during the interview.

  On the way home from Pickman’s she stopped at the attorney’s office to complete the transaction. It was still early when she was through; she decided to walk downtown. It was a nice warm day and walking would give her some time to think things over.

  All through her interview she’d been afraid she seemed too remote and uninterested, but she’d been unable to help it. Her thoughts were taken up with her letter and the story that went with it.

  And yet here she was, a bonafide property owner, and it now seemed conceivable that she might some day be a department store buyer, for the personnel manager at Pickman’s congratulated her at the end of the interview, admiring her cool poise, and gave her the job.

  As was Becky’s habit, she waited until that night after supper and after Danny had
gone out to discuss matters with her father. She ignored his glower as she explained that she’d be reporting to work bright and early Monday morning and that he would have to manage by himself each morning and with Danny during the afternoons until school let out and summer vacation began in just a few days.

  “And what then?” Abe thundered.

  “Then Danny can be here full time, just as I was.”

  “That’s no good. Danny’s going to enroll in a special summer school to help him pass—”

  “Well, he can’t do that now, Father.” It would not do to get angry, not when she still had her second bombshell of the evening to drop.

  “I see how it is. You’re selfishly taking away your brother’s chances for college even though you know that for years I’ve been saving for his education—”

  “Stop it! Just stop. You know as well as I that all the money in the world couldn’t buy Danny into any college, and even if it could, he’d flunk out. Face it. Danny is no scholar.”

  “So be it. I’ll sell the store,” Abe announced.

  “You can’t sell it,” Becky snapped.

  “Pardon me,” Abe said sarcastically, “so why can’t I sell?”

  “Because you don’t own it, and damn you for lying to me all my life.” Becky slapped the deed down on the table between them.

  Abe reached out to touch the paper, then jerked back his hand as if it could bite. “What is it?” he asked weakly.

  “That paper and some others Benny Talkin sent me explain everything. What it didn’t explain I could guess. Now I understand why Benny came to see you, although never when I was around. Stefano de Fazio has been your landlord, hasn’t he, Father? All the years of my life, when you held this damned building over my head to make me do what you wanted, you were just a little man working for a ganef. Right? You looked down on Benny and his father, but all the time you’d been paying out blood money from Stefano to Benny. How many others come to you for their murder money?”

  Ashen-faced, Abe sat with his shoulders hunched, his eyes downcast. “There are plenty who come,” he said hoarsely. “Whether Stefano was paying them for murder, I don’t know. I was merely a messenger, a go-between. Nobody sees fit to tell me anything. Oh, goddamn Benny Talkin for sending that to you.”

  “Did Mother know?”

  “Everything, always. She was my strength. Oh, Becky, don’t hate me,” he pleaded. “I had to lie to you. I wanted you to think I was special—”

  “Why couldn’t being a good father have been enough?”

  “Ahh—” His keening tore at her. He sagged toward the tabletop to lay his head in his hands. “You know how many times I was a big hero? Never. So often in my dreams I was important, a somebody. So often I was applauded, admired. But only in my dreams. In real life, never.”

  “That’s not true, Father,” Becky said. “Remember when you gave the money to Stefano to save the union?”

  “Look what it brought me.”

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  “All it made me was Stefano’s dog.”

  “Not anymore. He no longer owns the building.”

  “Who, then?” Abe asked fearfully.

  “I do.” Becky tapped the deed. “Somehow Benny got ownership, and he’s given it to me.”

  Abe shook his head. “Gave it to you? Why?”

  “Never mind why. From now on the rents you collect will really belong to us. With the rents, the profits from the store and my salary at Pickman’s, there’ll be more than enough to pay a helper come fall.”

  “Please, Becky, don’t leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving. I’ll still live here, after all.” She smiled, attempting to reassure him.

  “Now you’ll live here, but for how long? Don’t go, Becky.” He tried his best to smile. “You’re the owner now, yes? We can make changes in the store—improvements.”

  “Father, I’m sorry I yelled at you. I don’t care about the past. I love you. But I don’t want to work in a grocery for the rest of my life.”

  “Everything changes too fast,” Abe complained. “Everything before I’m ready. Haim’s leaving, your mother’s death—everything.”

  “Father, I’ve got a chance to be something I’ve always wanted to be. Can’t you be happy for me?”

  “Everything changes too fast . . .” He wasn’t listening. Becky took the deed and went into her bedroom. The last thing she did before going to bed was carefully unfold the note Benny had sent.

  He had made a handsome gesture, and she was on the verge of forgiving him after all when she recalled that the deed to a house was a traditional way of paying off a discarded mistress. She clung to that thought as her last line of defense against him.

  PART III

  DREAMS RENEWED

  Chapter 36

  Jerusalem, 1941

  Herschel Kol huddled in the corner of his dark cell, listening to footsteps echoing along the dank corridor of the solitary confinement block. The sounds registered on his brain, but he paid them no mind. Surviving a spell in solitary called for ignoring the unpleasant externals and focusing on one’s center.

  The footsteps grew louder and then stopped. Herschel briefly imagined that somebody was standing on the other side of the windowless steel door.

  A hallucination, Herschel decided. It had to be.

  A fellow locked up by himself in the dark was easy prey to hallucinations unless he disciplined his mind. Say he let his thoughts wander, got to thinking about the roaches, spiders and the like. He couldn’t see them, of course, any more than he could see his own hand in front of his face, but he knew they were there, and if he concentrated, he could hear the tiny clicks of their legs as they scrabbled across the concrete—toward him.

  So if a fellow knew what was good for him, he didn’t think about the blasted bugs that might or might not be there. He calmly refused to acknowledge the itching along his spine, resisted the impulse to scratch, because giving in to that itch would spawn a dozen more, and before long he would be tearing at his skin in the dark, convinced that he was being eaten alive.

  The footsteps, Herschel reminded himself. Had they stopped before his door? Not likely. It seemed too soon for release, although these days he did not have the best grasp of time. Was this his fifth or sixth spell in solitary? It was bad not to be able to remember.

  What day was it? What month? Let’s see, the usual stretch in solitary was seventy-two hours, but after a man’s third offense the sentence was often extended to a week. When had he gone in? Before. When would he be released? After.

  Goddamn it, Herschel thought—or had he actually said it out loud? He couldn’t tell. Was he awake or asleep? He pinched himself. Pain—he was awake. He knew his name, and that this couldn’t last forever. Consciousness, identity, the knowledge of time’s passage—these three formed the tripod on which Herschel Kol’s sanity rested.

  The door slot slid open. Herschel winced and shielded his eyes. The slot slammed shut and the door to his cell was wrenched open. Somebody half-dragged, half-carried him from his cell, back into the world.

  “What day? What month?” Herschel begged.

  “April twenty-fifth, a Thursday. You’ve been in five days,” someone with a British accent replied. “You’d be in for another two but for your luck. Come on, liven your pace. We’ve got to get you cleaned up, mate. Someone very important is here to see you.”

  Herschel was allowed to shower and shave. They gave him clean clothes, not the usual prison garb, but trousers, a shirt and sandals, reasonably well-fitting. They gave him a meal he could only pick at because he had been on starvation rations so long. Then a doctor came and gave him an injection that made him itch worse than the imaginary bugs but feel very alert and strong.

  Finally he was escorted to the office of the chief magistrate of the prison. It was a spartan room with stone walls painted yellow, a metal desk and file cabinets and several straight-backed chairs with missing rungs.

  The chief magistrate was
absent. In his place, seated behind his desk, was a British colonel in his sixties with grey hair and a matching iron-hued slash of mustache. Standing respectfully to one side was a youngish captain with a number of file folders clasped under his arm. The captain was pale and gaunt, clean-shaven and bespectacled. Despite his uniform he looked far more like a bank clerk than a military man.

  “Mr. Kol, how nice to see you.” The colonel beamed, actually standing and extending his hand.

  Herschel hesitated, mindful of the guards around him. Moving without permission usually earned an inmate a painful taste of a guard’s baton.

  The colonel evidently understood Herschel’s hesitation. “You men wait outside,” he ordered. The guards saluted, turned and marched out of the office.

  “Now then, Mr. Kol, why don’t we shake hands like gentlemen, eh?” the colonel remarked pleasantly. Herschel, nodding dazedly, did as he was told. When the colonel invited him to sit down, Herschel sat. “Would you care for a drink?” He indicated a bottle of whiskey and one glass on the desk.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “A cigarette, then?” The colonel took a silver case out of his pocket and offered it.

  “I’ve given up smoking. Please, who are you and what do you want from me?”

  “Yes, of course.” He snapped the cigarette case closed and returned it to his pocket. “I am Colonel Ian Richards of General Sir Archibald Wavell’s staff. Do you know who that is?”

  “No.”

  Colonel Richards glanced at the captain. “How long has he been in?”

  The captain scrutinized the contents of a cardboard folder. “Twenty-one months, sir.”

  Richards nodded, his smile reappearing as he turned back to Herschel. “General Wavell is Prime Minister Churchill’s chief of staff in the Middle East, and the general himself has sent me from Cairo to see you, Mr. Kol. To ask for your help. Things have been happening while you were our guest here.”