Avner Mandelman Read online

  “Don’t worry,” I snapped. “I’ll be back in a week.”

  I had met Jenny Sowa at a reading at the Harbourfront Authors Festival. She was a thin blonde with dark luminous eyes who had just won the Governor General’s prize for a book describing in percussive rhymes the travails of runaway girls in a massage parlor on Yonge Street where she had conducted clandestine research. I had come to hear an old Hebrew poet passing through Toronto read his work in English translation. But that reading was canceled (the man had passed away the night before), and so I stayed to hear whoever was next. It was Jenny. The hall filled with overly-made-up young girls who cheered every stanza, but there were also some sullen men in tight pants, probably the parlor owners. Two marched up to the podium and began to berate her, snarling in her face. One raised his hand as if to slap her and it was then I heard her voice, clear and vibrant as in the reading, saying that they’d better be careful, because her boyfriend was watching.

  “A whore like you—boyfriend?” one man snarled. “Where?”

  To my astonishment she pointed to me. I had no idea why she chose me; or perhaps I had begun to rise already.

  I stood up fully, half in surprise, half not. “Yes,” I said.

  And that’s how we met.

  She was a Polish Canadian shiksa and my aunt Rina was aghast when she heard from a friend about us living together.

  “Once or twice, nu,” she said, rolling her fingers in anguish. “But to live together? Like husband and wife?”

  “So?” I said.

  “Your grandfather would roll in his grave.” She wept. “And a Polack, too!”

  What did being Polish have to do with it? “Let him roll! I love her.”

  I was amazed to hear myself, speaking of love, just like that.

  “You know what the Polacks did to your grandfather?” Uncle Yitzchak asked. “How they helped Hitler? I can give you books, so you can see for yourself. With pictures.”

  “She was born here,” I shouted. “Right here in Canada. In Ottawa.”

  “A Polack is a Polack,” Uncle Yitzchak said. “Let me tell you—”

  But I didn’t let him finish. I told him she was talented, and good, that she loved me, and I loved her, too—most of which was true. I also said that if they wanted to see me again, I didn’t want to hear one word—not a single word—against the woman I loved.

  What else could I say? That love was the last thing I wanted? That in the place I had run away from, love had to be paid for with killings?

  I said a few other things I’ve forgotten by now. Somehow we reconciled; then we had tea, with almond cookies. They rarely mentioned her again.

  Jenny was in the literary activism business. She appeared on cable TV on the community channel, debating Canadian Unity. She led a didactic-poetry workshop at the George Brown Community College. Every now and then she published a book of rhythmic poems that she then read out loud at the University, or at the Harbourfront Festival, before a crowd of fans who seemed to know her from her days of research.

  I don’t know why I went to these things. I myself never wrote anything. That is, every now and then I scribbled something very late at night, but in the morning I tore it into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet: detailed nightmares of takedowns I had done—in some the dead now evaded me; in others they didn’t. I had plenty of these dreams after I left Israel, almost every night. I didn’t want to write them down, but when my defenses were weak, I couldn’t resist. After a while it turned into a real problem, because I often had to scribble for more than two hours to get the thing completely out, so I was always late for work and couldn’t keep a job. Finally Uncle Yitzchak took me in, in his small bakery on College Street. I helped unload the sacks of flour, load the unbaked loaves into the roaring oven, then pull the steaming bread out and range it on the floury shelves. I didn’t mind the heat. This was the best part: afterward I slept like a corpse myself and hardly dreamed at all. But Uncle Yitzchak couldn’t pay me much, so after seven years in Canada I still had no money. I was really lucky I found Jenny. She had a job; she loved me. She tolerated my migraines, she even helped me fight my compulsion.

  The first time she found my scribblings she flew into a crying fit. “This is garbage! Pure garbage! Dead Arabs and killings and nightmares and shit!”

  “I know,” I said weakly. “That’s why I …”

  But before I finished she had begun to tear the pages up. “Don’t waste your health on this crap. Take it from me. I am in the business. I know.”

  I knew that, too; but I couldn’t help it. It just kept coming out. Sometimes I wrote ten, twelve pages at night, and then I hid them, in my half-sleep. You would think that in such a tiny apartment there would be no more hiding places; but in the morning, my head splitting, I sometimes wasted a whole hour trying to find that one last page.

  Why I did it I don’t know. It was one of those crazy compulsions, like biting on your nails, or scraping the paint off the wall and eating it. But Jenny was really good about it. Together we hunted—on all fours, sometimes. When we found the last rogue page under the entrance mat, inside the lamp shade, wherever, she would take my head between her hands and tell me not to worry. One day I’d forget all about the horrible place I had come from. “I can’t wait,” she told me.

  I couldn’t either; but now, this.

  While Jenny took her turn in the bathroom I called El Al, put my name on the standby list (all flights were full), dressed (my frayed jeans for the plane and a sweater, in case it got cold: after seven years in Canada I still had not gotten used to the cold weather), threw some underwear and my shaving kit into my old army backpack, and left Jenny crying at the door, her hair framed by milky light.

  I was in luck: a seat was available. I boarded the plane, sank into a place by the window, and promptly fell asleep.

  I have no recollection of the first part of the flight, except for a thick residue of black dreams—the kind I used to have every night until Jenny’s ministrations kept them half at bay; but now they were back in force. I woke up ten hours later, gasping for air, and dimly saw a trio of black-coated Jews praying at the bulkhead, swaying with their eyes closed; then I fell back into a profound slumber. But as my eyes began to close I suddenly had the strangest sensation—I could smell my father’s sweat as if he were sitting beside me, the sour smell of a cobbler, mixed with acetone glue and dyed calf leather. I turned violently in my seat and buried my face in the cushion, and the sensation passed; then, just before I slid back into a black sleep, for no reason at all I remembered I had forgotten to ask Mr. Gelber if the robber had already been caught.

  2

  I HAD TALKED TO my father only once since I left Israel—that was when my brother Avraham was killed in that stupid retribution operation.

  My father telephoned and in a tight, matter-of-fact voice told me what had happened to his other son. I asked (or I think I did) when the funeral would take place.

  “There won’t be a funeral,” my father said. “They didn’t find the body. May the Holy Name avenge his blood.”

  My father’s voice was faint, I remember; but it could have been the bad connection. I think he called me from the phone in Zussman’s kiosk, next door to his store.

  “You all right?” my father asked, after I had mumbled my clumsy condolences. I remember hearing in the background the rumble of buses passing in front of the store, in Herzl Street. It was probably noon in Tel Aviv when he called.

  “Yes,” I said then. “I’m all right.”

  There was a pause.

  “No shiksas?” my father said, half joking, half entreating.

  “No, no,” I lied. “Only bad Jewish girls.”

  “Ah, good, good,” said my father. He then said I should call Aunt Rina and tell her, too. He didn’t mention Uncle Yitzchak. Thirty-five years before, Uncle Yitzchak had been late in sending money to Poland (he claimed he did not have any at the time), and as a result—or perhaps not—Hinda Malka, my father’
s younger sister, had died in the Moloch’s maw. He still had not forgotten.

  “All right,” I said. “I will.”

  My father said, “And, listen, about this thing with the passport—”

  I then hung up, or perhaps the line went dead; at any rate I didn’t hear what my father wanted to say; and this was the last time I spoke to him.

  I knew very well what he wanted to say about the passport.

  Two months before, four years after arriving in Canada (sponsored by Uncle Yitzchak, against the violent objections of my father and my mother’s painful silence), I had become a Canadian citizen. A day after I falsely swore allegiance to the foreign monarch, I went to the Israeli Embassy on Bloor Street and asked to give up my Israeli citizenship.

  The consul, a Mr. Iddo Ronen, was not amused. “David Starkman? The son of Isser?”

  I didn’t answer. What was there to say?

  “The Isser Starkman? From forty-eight?”

  “Yes. So what?”

  For a moment I thought he was about to launch into a long and tedious speech—the kind Uncle Yitzchak used to give me. About how countless generations of my ancestors gave up their lives to maintain the flame, which I, the wretch, was so callously throwing away. About my disregard for values. My egotism.

  Instead he pulled out two more forms and asked me to write why I wanted to give up my citizenship. “Then we’ll send it to Jerusalem, and we’ll see. You married?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Your wife Israeli, too?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Well, have her fill out a form, too.”

  I said, “If it’s not approved soon, I’m going to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.” I then said a few more things, some premeditated, some not.

  It was then that Mr. Ronen issued his speech. But I was well adapted by now. I listened to it all the way through. At the end I said, “You finished?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Ronen said. “I will see that this goes through. We don’t want your kind anyway, nemosha.”

  I hadn’t heard this word since my days in the army. It is Hebrew for a louse; the Bible used the word to refer to cowards who shirked their military duty.

  One of the clerks in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem must have notified my father, because two weeks later I received a letter from him—five pages torn from an old school copybook of mine, written densely in his crabbed hand. I could smell on the envelope the acetone cement he used to glue rubber soles with, and his sweat.

  I tore the letter to tiny pieces and didn’t reply. A month later I received a small official form from the Israeli Embassy, notifying me that my request to have my Israeli citizenship revoked had been approved.

  About three weeks later my brother Avraham was killed. It was really stupid. No one had told him to go. The operation was not even approved by the higher-ups at the Unit. Afterward he received a Chief of Staff Citation—posthumously of course. Or rather it was assumed to be posthumous, since no one could find his body. This was a common thing, at the Anonymous Recon. If you didn’t come back from a deep penetration, it was likely no one would ever know what had happened to you.

  Anyway, there was no funeral, and this was the last time I had spoken to my father; and now he, too, was dead.

  3

  I SLEPT THROUGH MUCH of the flight and missed the meals. Once I awoke in a cold sweat—I had dreamed I was being briefed prior to crossing the border for a takedown. This was a dream I used to have every night after I left Israel. It only stopped after I had given up my Israeli citizenship, but now, inexplicably, the dream returned. In it I saw the sergeant major who had taught us silent killing—he was standing on the doorstep of my parents’ apartment on Ibn Gvirol Street, his eyes shining malevolently. In his hand he held a silenced Anschutz, or perhaps a Feinwerkbau single-shot. Behind him cowered a long line of dark subhuman creatures, stuttering and blubbering. These are the ones we must exterminate, said the sergeant major, if we are to cleanse the land. With one hand he handed me a black-bound military Bible, with the other the rifle.

  “Sign here,” he said, pointing to the Bible’s cover, which for some reason carried the photograph of Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff.

  I took pen in hand and looked at the picture, and before my eyes it changed into the picture of my father. He was standing tall and severe in his desert fatigues and heavy shoes, beside a slim elfin figure of a young man, the hair of both blowing in the wind.

  I knew the other one. This was Paltiel Rubin, the “wrestler poet,” whose books stood on a shelf in my apartment.

  Or was he Rubin? This man appeared healthy, his throat without a mark. According to the early biographies (my father never spoke about it), Paltiel Rubin had had his throat slit by Arabs in a Yaffo alley, twenty-nine years ago. His private parts were then sliced off and stuffed in his mouth. This was a very common thing, in the events of ’48.

  The slim image wavered and my dream suddenly turned upside down. An animal figure, perhaps a hyena, perhaps a man, screeched into my face. With supreme effort I fended it off, but the screeching continued. I felt a hand on my shoulder, then on my chest.

  It was the flight attendant. “We are landing,” she said, her hand lingering. With the other she handed me a wet towel. “Are you all right?” Above her head the beeping continued. We were to put on our seat belts.

  “Yes, yes,” I snarled, shrugging her hand away. The plane banked; through the window, just underneath the wing, I could see the white surf of the Tel Aviv beach shining in the dark, and the ghostly buildings beyond, dotting the dark land. It was exactly as I had last seen it, seven years before.

  All of a sudden a horrible hunger gnawed at me. It was as if a huge gap had opened in my belly, a deep gaping hole. It was more than twelve hours since I had last eaten.

  I begged the stewardess to bring me something to eat. A piece of bread, anything.

  “There’s no bread on the plane,” she said stiffly, eyeing a bearded Jew two seats to my left. “This is a kosher flight.” She handed me two pieces of matza.

  The bearded man glanced up; when the stewardess had left, he handed me a hard-boiled egg. As I thanked him awkwardly he handed me another egg and a chicken leg.

  “I always bring my own,” he said, exposing bad teeth in a one-sided grin.

  I mumbled my thanks. I hadn’t eaten kosher chicken in a long time.

  I was still sucking on the bone when, half an hour later, I descended the stairs into the night and onto the bus that took the passengers to the terminal of Ben Gurion Airport.

  I was prepared. In a flash the nocturnal smells converged on me like starved furies. Orange blossoms; the salty smell of the sea; the dust; the hot tarmac. I steeled myself and walked on. The hot wind ruffled my hair.

  A sleepy policewoman slouched inside the passport control booth. She flipped through my Canadian passport, her eyes pausing over the section noting I had been born in Tel Aviv. I had made the mistake of speaking to her in Hebrew.

  “And your Israeli passport?” she said, curling her fingers quickly back and forth, impatiently.

  “I don’t have one. I gave up my citizenship.”

  “You have proof?”

  I pulled out of my knapsack a folded sheet of paper. She glanced at it and threw it on the counter.

  “Okay,” she said, eyeing me with contempt and envy.

  Outside, the sky shone with millions of stars. The skinny eucalyptus trees swayed in a slight breeze. I was happy to see how little nostalgia they awoke in me.

  An ancient Mercedes cab, its four doors dented, took me to Ibn Gvirol Street. The driver, a muscular man with a close-cropped head, assiduously avoided looking at me. I paid him (to my surprise he did not count the money) and got off at the corner of Eliyahu Street. Darkness enveloped everything, thick and fragrant like breath. The green glow of the streetlamps seeped through the tzaftzafa trees; white bedsheets, flapping slowly like ghosts, hung on clotheslines. A gray cat slunk into a yard. N
othing seemed to have changed since I left. I climbed the stairs of house number 142-Aleph.

  Ehud Reznik opened the door and looked at me as if I were a ghost.

  “David! I thought you are in Canada!”

  “Yes,” I said, unloading my backpack. “Can I stay here tonight? My father died yesterday and I came for the funeral.”

  Ehud stepped aside. “Sure, sure. You can sleep on the sofa in the living room. You want to eat something?”

  The living room table was piled with dirty plates and innumerable dirty glasses. I had done my homework on this table.

  “We just finished,” Ehud said, “but we left the dishes for tomorrow.”

  From the bedroom came a mumbled query.

  “It’s all right,” said Ehud, embarrassed. “It’s a … it’s David.”

  The mattress squeaked and the bedroom door was flung open.

  “Go back to sleep, Ruthy,” Ehud said. “You can talk to him in the morning. It’s one o’clock already.”

  Ruthy made no sound; no sound at all.

  I sat down on the sofa, under framed photos of HaBimah theater actors, all autographed. On the walls hung more pictures, some new, and also an old one, with my mother playing Queen Esther in an old Purim play. An old photo of Paltiel Rubin hung in the corner. It was generally accepted that he was Ruthy’s father. He was married to her mother, the dramatic actress Riva Yellin, briefly in 1947—very briefly, for one week.

  “I didn’t know you two are married,” I said.

  Ruthy said, “So you came back?” She wore large men’s pajamas, blue with white stripes, the buttons undone. Her stiff un-brushed red hair obscured her face. I was amazed to see how dead my heart was. This was good. It was all over long ago.

  I said, “Maybe I can go to a hotel …”

  “Don’t be a donkey,” said Ruthy. “You stay right here.”

  I nodded. “Maybe I can have something to eat? Anything?”