by Lavie Tidhar
“To . . . ?” Tirosh says, not looking up. The pen hovers between his fingers.
“Nur,” you say. He writes:
To Nur, Best wishes—
And signs his name intelligibly.
“Have you ever,” you say, and hesitate, then plunge on, “have you ever written a story called ‘Unholy Land’?”
“Maybe I would have, once,” he says. “But no, I’m afraid I never did. Maybe you have me confused with somebody else. To . . . ?” and you realise he is already speaking to the next person in the line.
You leave, with Ahmed grumbling by your side. In the morning you catch a taxi to the airport. When you see Tirosh again, in the line for the flight, it is clear he has no idea who you are.
PART FOUR
_______
INTERROGATIONS
16.
By the time I’d found Barashi, the old man was three sheets to the wind, as the English say. Palestina, being land-locked, is hardly a nautical nation, nor are its people great drinkers, as a rule. Barashi was perched at the bar in the Hare & Coconut; his false teeth had slipped out at some point and lay in a disgusting puddle on the floor, and his gums moved incessantly, masticating as he swallowed half his words.
The pub itself was a dingy shithole of the sort favoured by bar stool revolutionaries and spineless conscientious objectors, that is, it was mostly filled at this time of night with students. I was not surprised to see, intermingled amongst them, some faces known to me from the native population. Sedition takes many forms, but I had always believed it was best to give it space, to contain it where it could be watched.
The Hare & Coconut was such a place, but it had outlasted its own usefulness. They knew we were watching and we knew that they knew, and so the closed-circuit system had shortened itself until nothing of significance took place in the pub and the only watcher remaining was the currently drunk specimen of former sergeant Amos Barashi.
I stooped down and picked up his teeth and handed them to him, wordlessly. He grinned at me with that horrid pink gummy mouth and stuck the teeth back in, sloppily. The bartender looked over, saw me and my men, and wisely made himself scarce. I could feel the hostility from the assembled drinkers.
Good kids, mostly, from good families, who had done their army service before entering university, and now regrettably explored radical politics as a means of finding their way. Most of them would grow out of it: graduate, get a job, cut their hair, do their annual service in the army reserves, raise a family.
In time all memories of their little interlude of faux-rebellion would fade, and they would become productive, tax-paying citizens, who would take their families for weekend getaways to little B&Bs on the lake, cheat on their husbands or wives with similarly disaffected middle-aged citizens, in hotels neither too cheap nor too expensive, on the edge of town, and on weekends would take their children to watch the football—Ararat City vs. Kisumu Lions FC, perhaps.
Barashi didn’t care for any of this. He was a washed out drunk, twice divorced, a disgrace to the force. His son was a tax accountant in Johannesburg. His daughter lived in the Nakuru settlements, beyond the Green Line. She never came to see him and he, so far as I knew, never usually left the city. He had a justified fear of the Mau Forest, for he had been offered a glimpse of what lies on the border, and it had scared the living daylights out of him.
Now he stared up at me with bleary eyes and whimpered my name, “Bloom . . . Bloom, old fellow. What are, what are you, you doing here?”
“Where is he?” I said. “Where is Tirosh?”
“Tirosh, Tirosh, he’s—” He hiccupped and the smell that wafted from him was nauseating. “He’s . . . left.”
“What did you talk about?”
“He said he was looking for his, his niece,” Barashi said. His shoulders slumped in resignation and he looked at me in drunken misery. “Bloom, I didn’t . . . you didn’t say to follow him.”
“What did you do?” I said, disgusted. “Did you tell him about the Mau Mau, Barashi? Did you tell him about the ghosts in the forest?”
“I saw them, Bloom,” he said. “They came out of nowhere! One moment the forest was empty and the next, three men and a woman stepped out, dressed in khaki uniforms, carrying guns. I killed them, Bloom. I killed them all!”
“I know, Barashi,” I said. “You told me before.”
“Afterwards,” he said, “I went looking at the bodies. What was left of them. I found a strip of cloth, left whole. An armband, Bloom. A blood-stained armband. A black swastika in a white circle, on a red, red cloth. What were they, Bloom?”
“They were Nazis, Barashi,” I told him.
He looked at me and laughed. “But there are no Nazis,” he said. “There have been no Nazis since the Hitler assassination, and that was in ’48.”
“They were Nazis,” I told him, sadly. “It was just that they were not from around here.”
He looked at me with eyes filled with misery. His face said he did not know what I meant, but his eyes betrayed him. There is a knowledge one cannot erase: the impossible cannot be ignored once seen.
“The old general was angry,” he whispered. “He told me to bury the bodies where no one would find them. And to burn the cloth, to burn any other sign that they were ever there.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I kept it, Bloom. I kept the armband. What are Nazis, anyway, Bloom? We were not involved with the war in Europe. The Nazis never did a thing to us.”
“No,” I said. “No, they didn’t.” I patted him on the shoulder. He was not a bad man, it’s just that he should never have gone into the forest and, once he did, should never have been allowed out again. “Not here. Not in this time and place.”
“I don’t understand, Bloom.”
“Perhaps it’s better that way. About Tirosh. Where did he go?”
“I saw him step into the bookshop, across the road,” he said. “Waxman’s. I fucked his sister once. Waxman’s.” He barked a coarse, delighted laugh. “Ha! She had an ass on her, Bloom. That was some ass.”
I waited him out. He traced lines of moisture in spilled beer on the countertop. “Died of the cancer, last I heard.”
I motioned for the bartender. He was standing at the end of the bar answering questions in a tired, patient voice, like it was an unpleasant but routine task for him. He came over and brought Barashi a drink, wordlessly. He raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. He shrugged. I put a note on the counter and he took it and made it go away. I seldom drink, but I admire a man who can conduct his business in silence.
“Where is Deborah Glass?” I said.
“Sir?”
“Your name is Nir Clore,” I said. “You served in Pelican Unit on the Maasai Mara border area, and later in the Disputed Zones?”
He sneered at me. “They are all Disputed Zones,” he said.
“You were a good soldier,” I said.
“We’re all good soldiers,” he said. “This is what Jews are now. This is what we’ve become. Soldiers.” He said it with contempt.
“So now you serve beer to drunks?” I said. “Is that how you want to make your living?”
“It’s an honest living,” he said. “It’s better than some.”
I let it go. I was used to their disdain.
“You know this Deborah?”
“It’s the same I told your man earlier. She sometimes drinks here.”
“He is not my man.”
“No? Then what is he to you?”
“He is a person of interest,” I said.
“Then God have mercy on his soul,” he said, with fervour.
“I would like to find her,” I said.
He shrugged. “Talk to the trees,” he said. “They might tell you. Or ask the wind. I just work here.”
“We both know that’s not true, though, don’t we,” I said. “You’re a Nandi sympathiser, Clore. You organise little political gatherings in your flat, when you think no one notices. It’s in Golda
Heights, isn’t it? It’s a nice area. On the outskirts of town, a green place, plenty of trees, a nice view of the sunset. You can sometimes see giraffes and rhinos in the distance.”
He didn’t say a word and I liked him for it.
“I couldn’t afford it myself,” I said. “Not on a public servant’s salary. Your parents are rich?”
“That’s none of your business,” he said, tightly.
“No,” I said. “But I was curious so I looked into it. You have a three-bedroom flat in Golda Heights, don’t you, Nir?”
His fingers tightened on the bar, their tips growing white as the blood fled.
“It’s a nice place to raise children,” I said, quietly. He looked up at me then. I had his attention; all of it.
“Plenty of parks, swings to push the kids,” I said. “Good schools.”
“I suppose,” he said. “I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Your girlfriend,” I said. “Rose?”
He pulled back from the bar. His hand edged for a bottle. I watched his hand.
“She’s positively glowing, these days,” I said, quietly. I was ready for him when he raised the bottle. He smashed it on the bar and the sharp tang of alcohol filled the air. Broken glass showered Barashi, who yelped and fell off his stool.
Nir Clore raised the bottle, jagged edges pointed at my throat. He went in for the kill, but I’d been waiting. I punched him in the throat and brought my hand down hard, smashing his arm into the counter, breaking his wrist.
The bottle fell from his fingers and rolled to the floor and shattered. I grabbed the back of his head and threw his face on the counter, hard. When he came up the countertop was covered in broken glass and fresh blood. He stood there for a moment, swaying, winded, then he dropped to the floor.
Every man has a breaking point.
My men went behind the counter and propped him up. He wasn’t good for much anymore.
I said, “Clean him up and take him to the cells. Barashi, you come with me.”
I turned on my heels. Behind me I could hear Nir Clore moaning, faintly, and Barashi’s resigned sigh as he pushed himself up from the floor.
“But I liked him, Bloom,” he said, sadly, as he limped outside after me. “He was a nice boy.”
“Nice boys don’t help terrorists,” I said.
Barashi hacked a cough. “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said.
For some reason, the implicit rebuke hurt.
Where I came from we had no insolence such as this, no criminality of any kind!
Ours was a clean, well-ordered place.
17.
My men took the boy, Clore, away. He’d spend a night in the cells. I had already put him out of my mind.
We next interviewed Waxman, a dour old man who refused to admit he knew or saw anything, for all that Tirosh was kidnapped right outside his store. Moreover, he then attempted to sell us a book. I told him what I thought of him and his like in so many words, at which he bristled, and made a comment as to the Jews being called, in vain, “the people of the book.” I ignored him but could not help notice Barashi hastily pocket an old and well-thumbed issue of Zaftig , a magazine that featured large, naked women on its cover.
Sergeant Katz was at the Congress building, where the first round of peace talks had only just begun. Sometimes I suspected that for all his servility to me, he had been secretly sent to observe me on behalf of my superiors. For all my loyalty to Palestina, still some suspected me of being an outsider, though few knew what it really meant. I was efficient, and tolerated; yet I was not liked.
This did not bother me unduly. Personal like or dislike did not matter to me, only my job, and the safety of this little haven of the Jews. A Nachtasyl, some of us called it. A night shelter, a place of refuge for the Jews. It was my duty and my privilege to protect it. With Katz elsewhere, however, I was stuck with Barashi. We stopped at an all-night shack, where I purchased strong, black coffee, and made Barashi drink it until his eyes began to water and at last he stood up and said, “Enough, enough!”
“Go clean yourself up,” I said. “We have a busy night ahead of us.”
“I was happy where I was,” he said. “I was happy watching the bar, and eavesdropping on the students.”
“I know you, Amos Barashi,” I said. “And I know you hear more than you put in your reports. Go. Clean up. The night is young and we have work to do.”
“Aye, aye, Special Investigator Bloom,” he said. I watched him head to the bathrooms, the rolled up magazine poking from the pocket of his jacket. I turned back to the counter and motioned Beiga to pour me another coffee. There’s good coffee grown in Palestina; the climate is ideal, and it was Baron Rothschild’s initiative that financed the first plantations back in the 1920s. It was the English baron of that name, not the French one who invested his efforts futilely in Ottoman Palestine.
This one, Lionel Rothschild, was a keen zoologist. The Rothschild Zoo in Ararat City, as well, of course, as the Rothschild Game Reserve, are named in his honour, as is our local species of giraffe, the five-horned Giraffa camelopardis rothschildi , or the Rothschild giraffe. He once rode a carriage pulled by six zebras to Buckingham Palace, both to prove their suitability for being tamed and to publicize the efforts of the settlers in the newly formed British Judea. He is buried near Lake Nakuru, close to his beloved giraffes.
“Planning a late night?” Beiga said. He was a big man with hairy arms and a pot belly that stretched the material of his chequered shirt. I gave a non-committal nod.
The Tea Hut, as the place was informally called, seldom served tea, but it did serve a loose alliance of nightbirds: truckers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs, police and security personnel, and late stragglers from the city’s nightclubs and bars. It sat on the edge of the city, on the Tchernichovsky Bypass, near the old tea packing district, a warren of old warehouses that now served as the city’s main nightlife area for the young. At this hour it was not yet busy.
A Ugandan trucker sat in one corner, nursing a Coke; at a table two police officers, a man and a woman, were silently smoking clove cigarettes; along the window counter three employees of Lansky Limousines were talking animatedly with many hand gestures, and I listened to them talk.
The Tea Hut was a good place to listen to conversations. Within its walls there was a truce even I dared not disturb.
“And they don’t bloody tip,” one of the drivers said. They were three in a row, two wearing yarmulkes, one without. “They don’t tip and they insist on speaking English to you, or worse, they only talk through the interpreter.”
“We trained half of these guys and the other half went to university here,” another driver said, the yarmulke sitting awkwardly on what little was left of his hair. “Now they suddenly don’t speak Judean.”
“It’s pride, isn’t it,” the third one said. “It’s face. It’s all about face with them.”
“Face,” the first one said, and made a rude gesture. “They should be coming as beggars, cap in hand, asking for our grace. Not making demands. Not like they want to see the Nandi and that lot in their own country. Look at the Kenyans. They could have taken the refugees in. Or the Tanzanians. They’re not our problem. It’s just that no one else wants them so we’re stuck with them.”
“And the British sticking their nose in like they still own the place,” the third one said. He was getting quite worked up—they were talking about the latest round of peace talks, of course. “Send them to Uganda, to Amin and his gang. He’s funding half the terrorist organisations beyond the line, anyway.”
“Amin just wants to make trouble for us, he doesn’t want them coming over. And who trained him in the first place? We did. Got his paratrooper wings with the PDF. Ungrateful shit.”
“That’s why we need the wall,” the second one said. “You seen that bomb on the bus the other day? We need to stop them where they are. No more coming and going, no more sneaking over the line.”
“What are we going t
o do for workers, though?” the third one said. “You know they’re the cheapest, and they work hard. Palestinians don’t want to do the dirty work anymore. This isn’t the settlement time.”
“Are we short of foreign workers?” the first one said. “We’ll bring them over from—” he waved a hand, “Egypt or Angola. Asia, even. Got to be lots of people looking for work in Asia. Cheaper, too. Good work ethics.”
“Still,” the third one said, dubiously. “Got to be careful they don’t stay.”
“This is a Jewish country, for Jewish people,” the first one said.
“Still.”
“I just wish they’d tip better,” the second one said.
Presently Barashi came back from the men’s room, the magazine out of sight. His walk was steadier. He slid onto a stool and Beiga served him coffee without saying a word. Barashi downed it in one. He turned to me.
“Well, boychik?” he said.
“Call me that again, and I’ll show you what hell really looks like,” I told him. He just grinned at me, the old goat.
“Come on,” I said. I left some money on the counter and rose to my feet. “We have a long night ahead.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Barashi said.
Beiga looked after us mournfully as we left the Tea Hut. He was married to a Ugandan woman, from beyond the line; an illegal. He knew what we were about, but he wouldn’t say anything, not to me.
We got back in the car.
“I hope you remember how to use a truncheon, Barashi,” I told him as he strapped himself in. “Tonight, we raid Golgotha.”
He blanched at that, but he said nothing; and a new determined expression settled on his face. I put the car in gear and roared into the night, heading beyond the Green Line: heading to the camps.
18.
For a long time Tirosh did not know where he was.
He awakened in the dark. Pain sent sparks of light behind his eyes: the only thing he could see. After a time he realised he was tied to a chair, and there was a sack of black cloth over his head. The cloth smelled of laundry detergent. It was not unpleasant. His hands and legs had been tied securely but comfortably. The ropes did not cut into his circulation unless he tried to move, and so he sat still, awash in the scent of the laundry, and tried to picture himself elsewhere.