Avner Mandelman Read online

A tickling had begun inside my nose.

  Gershonovitz turned to my uncle. “So the emigrant is back?”

  My uncle put down the newspaper and stood up. “So you deigned to come, finally.”

  Gershonovitz stabbed a thick thumb in my direction. “Hiding in a whale,” he said to my uncle, “like his father.”

  Amnon Amzaleg came in, rubbing his eyes, then Margalit, her mouth clamped shut.

  She said, “Shalom, Shim’on. So you came.”

  Gershonovitz deposited his bulk on the smallest chair. “Sure I came, a moral duty, nu.” With much groaning he bent down and removed his shoes—rubber-soled French Palladiums, Unit shoes. “And where’re the others? Gone?”

  “What others? Nobody came,” my uncle said belligerently. “Nobody except the policeman, and the fuckers outside. They’re yours?”

  Gershonovitz inclined his head, acknowledging ownership. There was a moment of hard silence. Then he blew out his lips. “Sit down, sit down,” he said to me, as if he were the host, not Uncle Mordechai.

  I sat on the chair’s edge. I was taller than him by a head at least, but his bulk, his Mongolian face, the flat eyes, filled me with dread; my questions stuck in my throat.

  Uncle Mordechai snapped, “I didn’t know you still remember the way here.”

  “I remember, I remember.” Gershonovitz declined my uncle’s gruff offer of cognac, and drank down three glasses of water with raspberry juice—one after the other, crunching the ice cubes in his teeth—then turned to the policeman. “So, Amnon, you caught him already, this animal?”

  Amzaleg said tersely, “We are talking to a few Arabs.”

  “Talking?”

  “Yes, talking. It’s early. If we get something, then maybe I’ll tell you.”

  Uncle Mordechai said, “If you want, I can ask around the villages. Some still have connections with … the old guys.”

  Amzaleg said, “But we don’t know yet if it’s because of—what happened then.”

  My nose tingled again and I swiped at my eyes. Everyone stopped talking. I tried to speak but could not. Gershonovitz grasped my elbow and gave me a thump on the back, and all of a sudden the tickling in my nose became unbearable.

  He put his arm over my shoulder. “Some cognac, ya Mordoch.”

  My uncle poured.

  “He could drink cognac, this mamzer, a bottle, two, like nothing,” Gershonovitz said. “Like nothing.” To my surprise I saw him wipe his eyes.

  “This mamzer,” said Amzaleg, “was a good guy.”

  “The best,” said my uncle.

  We all drank. I waited for something further, but apparently the eulogy was over. After a while I found my voice and asked Gershonovitz if he knew that someone had tried to steal the play. When he inclined his head I said, “One of yours?”

  He shook his massive head with the same economy.

  I said, “So maybe it’s the same one who killed him, who tried to steal it?”

  Gershonovitz spoke without looking at me. “Don’t be a fool. Take the money and go back to your shiksa; don’t be a bigger idiot than he was.”

  I half rose from my seat, my fingers curled tight. The fat man looked at me calmly.

  “Sit down,” Uncle Mordechai said to me, then turned to Gershonovitz. “Finish your cognac and get out.”

  “Yes,” said Margalit.

  The camaraderie of a moment ago seemed to have vanished in an instant.

  Amzaleg rolled his glass between his palms, staring at the drink.

  As Gershonovitz was lacing his boots I said into his back, “Why are your guys following me?”

  I didn’t expect him to answer, but to my surprise he did. “It’s for your own protection, Dada.”

  Protection? Against whom, or what?

  “Shimmel—” I began hotly, but Uncle Mordechai interrupted me and addressed the fat man. “I think I told you to go.”

  Without fanfare Gershonovitz left, his Lark roaring up the hill past the parked Toyota, its curtained windows like invisible eyes behind dark shades.

  After the fat man left everyone dispersed. All at once the feeling of being constantly watched filled me with anger and I felt an urgent need to get away from all eyes. I picked up a towel, softly climbed out the back window, and slid down the hill.

  I don’t think the men in the Toyota saw me go.

  15

  I SWAM FOR HALF an hour, hoping the clean water would wash away my turmoil. What did Gershonovitz mean when he said that the tailers were there for my own protection? Whom—or what—did he think I needed protection from? My father’s killer? The play’s burglar? The Debba? As I swam out, I filled my lungs and emptied my mind, and suddenly all I could think about was how Ruthy and I had once swum here at night, long ago, she and I naked side by side, alternately kissing and flipping on our backs to watch the stars, only to join again in near desperation, like one animal with two beating hearts …

  The pain of that memory was so sharp that I plunged my head into the water and, eyes open, dived deep, to the sandy bottom. Silver-gray buris swam not two feet away from me, flickering in the milky moonlight, then a school of red mushts. I extended my hand to touch them but they flitted by and were gone, like memories.

  I swam farther out and looked back at the shore, the pain a distant throb now. The Lux lanterns hanging in front of the Lido beach club swung in the breeze and I could smell their petrol smoke in the wind. It used to be a British officers’ club before ’48, then became a local nightspot, where my father and mother went dancing during their honeymoon.

  Did they both swim here, too, as Ruthy and I had?

  My heart thrummed as I desperately tried to conjure up images of Jenny and Toronto, but could not. The land seemed to have seeped into me anew, enmeshing me yet again.

  I swam in wide circles, looking first at the Lido, then at the far shore, where a yellow glow was probably the armor camp at the foot of the Golan. Ghostly vapors floated over the water, like smoke rising from a battlefield. The jackals had fallen silent. Everywhere was a vague, large imminence, as if an answer would soon be given to a vast question that had not yet been asked.

  At last I swam ashore.

  When I got out of the water it was dark and the jackals were still silent. Warm wind, like invisible fingers, mussed my damp hair. I could hear my sandals slapping on the gravelly earth as I ran lightly up the hill. The moon floated above the hedges, yellow and oily and luminous.

  A piece of cactus detached itself and stood in my path.

  “Who is it?” I called, my neck hair bristling.

  “Wallad el Mawt!” the shadow whispered in Arabic. Son of death. It was the ’48 Arab pejorative for the Jews. Cowards, good for death and nothing else.

  The hair on my forearms crawled. “Man hadda?” I called out in colloquial Arabic. Who is it?

  The figure advanced upon me, its abbaya flapping like big black wings.

  For a brief second I stood frozen, then all at once old training took over and my legs and arms moved in well-practiced patterns long forgotten. Yelling hoarse battle obscenities I kicked at the figure before me, clawed at his throat, poked at his eyes with stiff fingers. But my legs kicked at air, my fingers grabbed at nothing. And when I searched behind the cactus hedge, there was no one there, only the bristling palms scraping against the wall, and the soft whistling of the wind.

  16

  WHEN I CAME BACK, the house was dark, and so were the windows of the Toyota in front. Uncle Mordechai emerged from the toilet, trailing newspaper. “How was the Kinneret?”

  “G-good.”

  Uncle Mordechai peered into my face. “What happened?”

  “N-nothing.”

  He grabbed my hand and held it up. “Nothing?!”

  My palm was vibrating as if air jets were blowing through the fingertips. “I … don’t know, I … it was—someone.” Haltingly I told him about the figure I had just seen. “I don’t know, maybe … maybe he wasn’t there, and I just thought he was—” />
  A shadow darkened the terrace door. Amnon Amzaleg, in gray military underwear, stood rubbing his gray scalp.

  Uncle Mordechai did not take his eyes off me. “The donkey just saw him again. Near the old sheikh’s grave—”

  Amzaleg wheeled around and, one hand at the small of his back, hopped over on the terrace wall and was gone. In a moment I heard his raspy voice outside, then the slam of a car door, and feet running down the hill. Then there was nothing.

  Uncle Mordechai bent over and tugged at the drawer under the fridge, and pulled out an ancient long-barreled Parabellum. “Here, take this.” He tried to foist it into my hand. “No, take, take, it’s good for thirty paces, maybe forty.” The gun must have been fifty years old.

  I pushed his hand away. Seven years I had managed to live without weapons; I was not about to start carrying one again.

  We were both silent.

  Uncle Mordechai said, “Me, I don’t believe in the tall tales.”

  “No, no. Who does?”

  Uncle Mordechai and I stared at each other for a moment. Then, just as he had left, Amzaleg was back, soaring silently over the terrace wall. “Nothing. Them neither.” In his right hand he held a scuffed Beretta, its safety off. “You want?” he said, when he saw me looking.

  I shook my head. Two days here, and again everyone was offering me guns.

  As I went to bed I heard Amzaleg and Uncle Mordechai conferring in low voices in the kitchen. Once there was a knock on the door. My uncle went to open it and I heard a low murmur—it was one of the yeshiva boys—though I couldn’t catch the words.

  “No,” my uncle’s voice rasped. “You stay out. What do you want?”

  The murmur continued.

  “Well, I have a tool also,” my uncle snapped, using the old ’48 slang for a gun. “And he can take care of himself, too. Now get out!”

  The door slammed.

  Next morning, my head still fuzzy, I sought out Amzaleg to talk about the phantasm. But he had gone to Tel Aviv to meet his daughter, who now lived with her remarried mother in an Arab village near Haifa. Uncle Mordechai came back from some medical checkup in Afula and closed himself off with the newspaper. Margalit did not want to talk about last night either.

  By noon I’d had enough of the silence, and the foggy memory of the night before, and decided to return to Tel Aviv. I called Ehud to let him know I’d be moving to a hotel. I did not want to stay near Ruthy; I needed a clear head to do the play.

  But it was Ruthy who answered. “No. He’s in the factory, I don’t know. How is Tveriah?”

  “Hot. I burned my back.” All thoughts of the night apparition evaporated the moment I heard her voice. “Is … is it hot in Tel Aviv?”

  “Very. When are you coming back?”

  “In two days,” I lied. “Maybe three.”

  Perhaps I could sneak in when she was not home, to pick up my shaving kit.

  I could hear her shallow breathing.

  I said, “I … I told the lawyer that I’ll do the play …”

  Ruthy said nothing. I could hear the Peace Station yammering in the background.

  “Anyway,” I said, “at least I’ll stay for the wedding.”

  Ruthy said, “Can I read it again?” Then she added, “Come back quickly.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If you behave.”

  There was another silence.

  Uncle Mordechai shouted at me from the kitchen, “Duvid! You finished with the phone? It’s two shekels every minute!”

  “No,” Ruthy said. “Come back soon.”

  “Maybe,” I snapped, and hung up.

  17

  AN HOUR LATER I took the bus back to Tel Aviv. All through the trip I buried myself in the play, reading and rereading its soaring lines until they filled me completely, leaving no room for anything but the hard resolve of the graveside.

  When the bus arrived in Tel Aviv three hours later, I already knew the entire play by heart. It was amazing how easy it was to memorize.

  Fortunately Ruthy was not at home. I quickly gathered my things, but before leaving called Jenny in Canada one more time, silently begging her to pick up. The phone rang for a long time without an answer. I hung up, got myself a beer, and sipped it slowly, my knapsack on my shoulder. My legs seemed to have turned to wood. After a while I heard a key at the door and Ruthy entered. Before she could speak I snapped that I’d decided to move out, maybe to a hostel on HaYarkon Street, something cheap.

  To my surprise she didn’t object, just offered to make me an omelet before I left. “In the hotel you’ll have nothing,” she said.

  My heart drummed as I found myself nodding, then drank my beer through a constricted throat while she busied herself at the stove.

  We sat at the table in the hot kitchen, eating egg in a pita—strictly not kosher for Passover—not looking at each other.

  “You didn’t come to your mother’s funeral,” Ruthy said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Because you—didn’t want to come back?”

  “No, no.” What else could I say? That I had learned of my mother’s death only after her funeral? That until last week I hadn’t even known my father had left her?

  I tried not to look at Ruthy. “We didn’t exchange letters. Maybe a New Year’s card once a year.”

  I had learned from Margalit that my father had not been to my mother’s funeral either. They were living separately by then, and she had told the registrar in Assuta Hospital, where she had gone for her cancer operation, that she was a widow.

  Ruthy said, “She’s not buried in Nachalat Yitzchak cemetery.”

  “No. In the Trumpeldor Street cemetery, near her parents.”

  Grandpa Yoel and Grandma Leah had been killed in a terrorist attack on a bus near Natanya. A month later my brother Avraham embarked on his unauthorized retribution operation on the Palestine Liberation Front headquarters in Damascus.

  “I should go see her grave, too,” I said. “Put a stone on it, something.” At the thought of my mother, and her unanswered letters, my heart seized, but I tamped the pain down.

  “She knew Polish and Russian and Hebrew and Yiddish—I can hardly speak English.”

  I said, “She had learned some Arabic, too, when she worked in Yaffo, in sewing.”

  I could not see why we were talking about my mother all of a sudden.

  “I can’t even speak French, four years I took it, in Alliance, because of Mother.” She nibbled on a tomato. “You want a radio? The news is on, soon.”

  “No. What do I care what happens here?”

  I knew I should go but my legs were still wooden, as if I were again battling a phantasm.

  Ruthy hugged her knees and looked at me as I mopped the plate. “You still hungry?”

  “N-no, I’m finished.”

  “So come,” she said. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  Like a sleepwalker, I followed her into my parents’ bedroom.

  “Ehud is away till tonight,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. “He went to talk to the bank again, something about the factory’s line of credit, I don’t know.”

  I sat down on the bed, my teeth clamped so they wouldn’t chatter. The world had contracted into a blue cube and I was in it, fish swimming in my head.

  “David,” Ruthy said. “David, David.”

  She had taken off her shorts and panties and now sat beside me. With the knuckle of one forefinger she knocked on the front of my pants. “Debba, debba, tze’ hachootza,” she chortled into my ear. Hyena, hyena, come out.

  My heart in turmoil, I lay back and let her pull off my pants and the underwear, her nails drawing lines across my hips. She crouched above me on all fours.

  “Oy yoy.” She touched my shoulder with a finger. “You really burned it.”

  “What happened to your hand?” I croaked. She had a long, ugly scratch on her left forearm. I touched her skin.

  “I had an accident today, in Sheinkin Street. An ass in a Toyota. Now it’ll take f
orever with my insurance because he ran off and didn’t want to give me his.”

  “And this?” There was a scar on her left breast, an old one. I didn’t remember it.

  “Someone, I don’t know.” Her small freckled breasts swayed with her breathing. “You can’t tell them no, if they’re going to die tomorrow.”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone. Soldiers, what do I know? It’s only a little thing. It makes them happy.” Then, without warning, she plunged her teeth into my shoulder. “What do you care? You ran away to the diaspora for two thousand years. What did you want me to do, stay deserted and fallow forever and ever?”

  “I don’t care.” There was moment of wild confusion as we wrestled, our teeth knocking against each other; and then I was upon her, and inside her, making animal noises.

  Ruthy let out a sharp scream, the one I knew. I shoved my forearm into her mouth, giving my arm a half twist. Her voice came out muffled. “Is it better than with your Polish shiksa?”

  I had wanted to say no, then yes, then, What does it matter, because why should a man have only one woman, only one country, only one people? But just then I plunged into the familiar abyss, the unknown, forgotten land, and I and the tan animal under me writhed together, and then it was over.

  “The police will soon come,” she said with satisfaction. “Screaming like this.”

  I rolled over and curled up. My spine felt hollow.

  Ruthy jumped off the bed. “I’m first.”

  I could not talk. The enormity of what I had just done to Ehud, and to Jenny, began to sink in.

  She called out from the bathroom, “So you have what, forty-two days, to do it?”

  “Forty-one,” I croaked. For one frightening moment her voice sounded just like my mother’s.

  Ruthy said, “So you’ll come to the wedding?” She appeared in the doorway, toweling between her legs.

  “Maybe,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”

  “Three hundred people,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

  18

  WHEN MY FATHER MET my mother for the first time he was thirty-three years old. He had never been married. She was twenty-two, with shoulder-length brown hair and long legs.