Avner Mandelman Read online

  The policeman was right. She had a big mouth.

  “Oh,” Ehud said, “I almost forgot. Your girlfriend just called. Jenny.” He removed his glasses and rubbed them on a napkin. “She said you should call her.”

  The roar of the street intensified. The tall Moroccan ambled to the back toward the wall-phone, stepping around someone seated on the floor slurping leftover gefilte fish from a plate. I saw it was Ittamar, the beggar from the police station.

  “All right,” I said. “Anything else she said?”

  “No. Only that you should call when you’re finished with the will and things.” Once more he looked at me, then at Ruthy, blinking slowly, insistently.

  Ruthy said to me, “That’s her name? Jenny?”

  “Yes. She’s Polish.” I didn’t know why I was telling her this. What did she care where Jenny came from? “It’s English for Zhenia.”

  There was another short silence.

  Presently a thin waiter came by and squeezed my shoulder, furtively. Then Chetzkel’s son, a bald strapping fellow who said something about his father and mine. How, once, together with Paltiel Rubin, they had sneaked an Arab or maybe a Yemenite into a Purim party of the old Tel Aviv bohema, for a lark.

  From the other end of the café a high-pitched voice began to lament the rise of Menachem Begin in the polls, and of his right-wing coalition, the Likkud. Other voices rose, vehemently, in opposition.

  “Listen to them,” Ruthy said. “Talk, talk, is all they do.”

  I said nothing. It was no longer any business of mine.

  After a while Ehud said, “What play is this, The Debba? I never heard of it.”

  My order had arrived: lamb ribs steaming under tahini sauce, a plate of foule with roasted eggplant, and a large bowl of lentil soup. I dug in.

  I said, “The lawyer said it was staged once, in 1946, in Haifa.”

  More people came in, smoking and laughing.

  “Anyway, I am not going to stage any play.”

  Leibele had also brought me a Maccabee beer bottle, without my asking, and I now drank it down. The lights across the street had begun to oscillate in little fuzzy circles.

  “No, really,” Ruthy said. “I mean, your father wanted you to do it. How can you say no?”

  “So what if he wanted?”

  I gobbled my lentil soup and sopped the green muck at the bottom with a pita. My stomach felt as if a huge beast had lodged itself between my heart and my groin. I kept eating. It was so good to eat, to plug the hole that felt as if it could never be filled.

  “Really,” Ruthy said. “Maybe it’s a good play? Did you read it already?”

  “No.”

  “Ehud can help, too. He doesn’t do theater anymore but he knows everybody—”

  “I don’t need him to do me any more fucking favors,” I said.

  When Ehud and I joined Unit 508, it had twenty-two active members and fourteen reservists. Officially the unit did not exist, and so it was referred to as Sayeret Almonit—the Anonymous Recon, and its members, as Almonim—the Anonymous Ones. Our job was to do the necessary dreck, “so the rest of the Jews can live cleanly.”

  Doing dreck meant killing key individuals in Arab countries in times of non-war so that war, when it came, would be shorter and less costly for us. In my father’s day, these cross-border killings were done by talented Haganah amateurs called the Mista’aravim—literally, those who act like Arabs; but after the State was born, everything became formalized and even dreck had to be taught in special courses. The one I took lasted six months and was held in the Sayeret’s base near Jerusalem. There were three other trainees besides me: Ehud, like me an ex-paratrooper and a Tel Avivi boy; Yerov’am (Yaro) Ben-Shlomo, a kibbutznik and ex–infantry man; and Tzafi Margolis, an ex–naval commando from Natanya. On our first day, Colonel Shafrir gathered the four of us in the base’s canteen, and gave us a short speech. “Everyone in the army, including yourselves, no matter where you served, is taught how to kill in groups. Each of you has had experience in this. But here you’ll be taught how to kill alone, without help. Anyone who thinks he can’t do it better step forward now, before it’s too late.”

  None of us did. What did he think, that he’d scare us? Killing was killing, whether together with others or alone.

  Wasn’t it?

  The course had three parts. The first two months, in between lessons in Arab dialects and Arab proverbs, we drove twice a week to the morgue at Tel Aviv’s Hadassah Hospital, where the chief pathologist, Dr. Pinchas Munger, taught us about the human body and how it could be killed. (We called him “Dr. Mengele,” which pissed him off greatly—he, too, had been to Auschwitz, where he was a bunkmate of Ehud’s father.) The rest of the time we practiced using small arms, sharpshooting, hand-to-hand combat, and silent killing under the tutelage of a wiry Yemenite sergeant major who had once been a ritual slaughterer. (We practiced on dogs—their eyes are the closest to human eyes.) Toward the end we also got a week’s instruction in nerve agents and toxins, by a section head from the chemical warfare center in Ness-Tziona. Today this is a major part of every takedown course. But back in 1966 we were the first ones to get it.

  The following two months, having dispensed with the raw technicalities of dreck, we studied what Colonel Shafrir called self-support skills: more sessions with the judo and karate nuts from the Wingate Institute; lots of practice with two Tel Aviv pickpockets and an active burglar from Yaffo (the latter lessons we had together with a dozen Mossad trainees); fieldcraft, both urban (mainly tailing) and rural (mainly tracking); and finally, to our great surprise, we received acting lessons from Re’uven Kagan, the HaBimah director and famed disciple of Stanislavsky who taught us how to “get into a role” so as to dispense with the need for disguises.

  And of course there were the obligatory weekly Bible lessons, taught by Colonel Shafrir himself. “So you never forget what you do all the dreck for.” He thumped on the black-bound volume. “God’s own Mein Kampf!”

  We laughed uneasily, dutifully.

  We all hated the Bible lessons. But none of us shirked them.

  The last two months were live exercises. Some we did in teams, but most we did alone. We burglarized police stations across the border (I did Qalqilia, Ehud did Amman) to retrieve an item (mine was a razor blade) placed there the day before by Colonel Shafrir; we simulated takedowns of government clerks in Damascus and Cairo with Shafrir taking confirming pictures alongside; and finally, in the last week, each of us had to take down a live enemy target (for which the PM had to issue a special “black” permit), with confirmation done a day later by an Intel patrol.

  We were all a bit apprehensive about this part, like pilots before their first solo flight. But after all the practice we’d had, it was almost a letdown. (Mine was a major in the Jordanian police in East Jerusalem, a nobody, whom I did with a pencil-knife in a café’s washroom not three streets away from the Wailing Wall. He was short and thin and hardly struggled at all—it was easy. But I had probably eaten something bad at the café, because I later threw up for half an hour.)

  My father must have been informed of my progress, because the morning after my final test, when I arrived home to sleep, he pulled a bottle of Stock 777 out of the cupboard and poured me a glass; then he poured himself one, too.

  “Lechayim,” he said as he tossed back the cognac. To life.

  I echoed him sheepishly, and drank up.

  I waited for him to say something else, perhaps to congratulate me; but he just poured himself another glass of cognac, none for me.

  “Go,” he said at last, “go see Ruthy. You need to.”

  When I returned to the barracks in the morning, I saw Ehud sitting cross-legged on his bed, his face white, reading a book in English—a collection of plays.

  His cheeks were etched with deep scratches, one cheek nearly raw.

  I asked him stupidly how it had gone.

  Ehud grunted and turned the page with shaking fingers.

  �
��What you reading?” I asked, more stupidly.

  “Antidote to Shafrir’s fucking Mein Kampf,” Ehud snarled. “Now can you leave me alone?”

  The following week we graduated. It was a short ceremony, and an odd one. Unlike any other army graduation, no parents or girlfriends were allowed. We gathered, the four of us, in the canteen at the Sayeret’s base, wearing long khaki pants and white shirts. Colonel Shafrir opened a 777 bottle, then brought out a photo album and showed us faded pictures of members of his family who had gone with Hitler. “You also have such albums?”

  We nodded uncomfortably, avoiding looking at one another. What the hell was that about? Of course we had. Everyone did.

  Shafrir thumped on the album with both hands. “From now on, let the goyim have such albums! No more for us!” He pinned our ranks on. “Now go do clean dreck!”

  We laughed hysterically. Then we all got quite drunk.

  It was about midnight when Ruthy, Ehud, and I left Café Cassit.

  I had wanted to leave earlier, but the ceaseless stream of old actors, ancient pre-State fighters, and strangers kept passing by the table, shaking me by the shoulder and squeezing my hand surreptitiously, before scurrying away.

  I hazily remember Leibele recounting to me in a trembling whisper how he had served my father a cup of Turkish coffee twenty-nine years ago, the morning after my father had slain Abu Jalood. “Black,” Leibele mumbled into my ear, as if revealing a first-rate secret. “With hel.” Cardamom seeds.

  I tried to concentrate on my food, but he kept muttering into my ear. “His hand, steady, like that.” He demonstrated discreetly, extending coffee-stained fingers.

  Someone, a nondescript ancient with a leathery neck, whispered into my other ear, “His friend, the poet, they got in forty-eight. Now him.”

  Someone else said something about the police.

  “Police, shmolice. He’ll take care of it now. Like Isser taught him.” The ancient slid a knobby forefinger across his goiter and patted my shoulder delicately, like a woman.

  My stomach heaved.

  “Nobody knows if it’s an Arab,” Ehud said.

  “’Esma mini,” the ancient said in Arabic. Listen to me. “He came back, and no mistake.”

  “They remember,” Leibele said to me. “They never forget.”

  We drove home in silence. The light switch at the bottom of the staircase didn’t work, and so we climbed the steps in the darkness, silent still.

  “Look, the door’s open,” Ruthy said. “You forgot—”

  A black shadow burst out of the apartment and hurtled toward the stairs.

  I received a fleeting impression of dark pupilless eyes, and a tight mouth under a bristling sparse mustache; a rancid smell came in my nose: old sweat and pungent spices; an almost animal smell. Then a huge hairy paw came from somewhere and crashed into my ear, and I found myself on the topmost stair, legs spread wide. With my arms flailing helplessly, I began to roll.

  Ruthy screamed.

  “Dada!”

  I saw Ehud kick with the edge of his left foot over my head, twice.

  The shadow stumbled, half racing, half tumbling down the stairs, clasping something under its armpit. Without thinking I clutched its arm and tried to drag it down. It kept going, immensely strong.

  A white envelope fell out, fluttering, into the stairwell. I snatched at it. The smaller envelope slipped out and glided all the way down, like a white square butterfly.

  At that moment Ehud sprawled over me, legs akimbo, and we both rolled down, from stair to stair. I grabbed at the rail and felt it scraping at my wrist as it evaded my grasp.

  “Dada! Uddy!”

  Ehud held on to my belt, like a paratrooper whose own parachute had failed to open. Desperately I tried to hook my thumb on the railing and reach for the large envelope with the other four fingers.

  Thirty feet below, the shadow paused. Its eyes flashed briefly as it looked up, staring right at me. Just then my thumb caught one of the spindles and was nearly wrenched out.

  When I looked down again the shadow was gone.

  Ruthy screamed, “Did you see? A fucking burglar!”

  Hissing and cursing, she disentangled us. “How’s your leg, Uddy?”

  “I’m okay,” Ehud said, grim-faced with shame at his infirmity.

  Doors began to open. Mr. Tzukerman, wearing red pajamas and carrying a black shoe by its tip, stared wildly at us, his pink mouth working. “Nazis!” he shouted. “Murderers!”

  Mr. Farbel looked up from the first floor. “Anybody need help?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What did he take?” Ruthy said.

  “Nothing,” I said, clasping the large envelope to my body.

  But a moment later, when I went down to look, the little envelope with my father’s letter to me was gone.

  Back at the apartment I sat at the kitchen table and gulped down some tepid tea that Ruthy had made with hot water straight from the tap.

  “Call the police!” Ruthy hissed at me. “What’re you waiting for?”

  When I didn’t get up, she marched to the phone and dialed.

  I heard Amzaleg’s voice rasping tinnily.

  “No,” Ruthy said, “they took nothing, but—”

  Amzaleg’s voice squawked further.

  Ruthy snapped, “What do you mean, what do I want? Maybe it’s connected to the murder?”

  The receiver squawked.

  “Connected how?” Ruthy hollered. “Connected how? Maybe they don’t want him to do this play? He has only six weeks—”

  Squawk.

  Ruthy cursed Amzaleg in Arabic and hung up. “Lazy Moroccan beasts. He said if they didn’t take anything else to call him in the morning. They probably open only at ten.” She sat beside me. “Why do you think the burglar wanted it, this play?”

  I shook my head. The jet lag, and now this odd burglary, somehow combined to reproduce in me the same queer black sensation I used to get before a takedown, when the past merged into the future and both dimmed into nothingness until only the present remained, hard and monstrous and clear.

  Ehud muttered, “Maybe he grabbed the first thing he saw, when we came—”

  “From under the sofa?” Ruthy said.

  There was a long silence.

  Ruthy said, “You think it’s the same one that—that killed him?”

  “’Ana ’aref,” I said in Arabic. What do I know?

  Ruthy whispered, “Maybe, like my mother said, it did come back, you know, like the stories from forty-eight—”

  “Shit in yogurt!”

  “Leave him alone,” Ehud said to Ruthy, then turned to me. “Put it someplace safe. Tomorrow I’ll make you photocopies.”

  Toward the end of May ’46, two weeks before the Six-Day War started, Ehud and I crossed over into the Sinai for a couple of dreck jobs: I to take down the operations officer of the Bir Gafgafa airfield, and Ehud the chief of radar maintenance on Um Marjam hill, five miles to the north. We had gone together, dressed as Bedouins, via the Gaza Strip, then hitchhiked south on an Egyptian fuel truck, paying the driver with hashish. But because we walked the last few dozen kilometers across sand dunes, we were late by two days, and on the morning of June 5, within five kilometers of our target, we heard the roar of planes and saw Mirage jets with Stars of David on their wings streaking overhead and diving onto the radar station on the hilltop.

  Ehud kicked at the sand. “These fuckers! They couldn’t hold off until we finished?”

  As if anyone in the Israeli Air Force even knew we existed.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait; finally, a day and a half later, we saw the advance jeeps of the Armor Recon with their back-mounted recoilless guns driving down the Bir Gafgafa road. Ehud and I slid down the sand dune, in our Bedouin galabiehs, our palms raised with the fingers spread in the traditional gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the Blessing of the Priests, singing HaTiqva at the top of our voices, to make sure we wouldn’t be shot.

  In t
he first jeep, to our surprise, we saw Mooky Zussman and Yonathan Avramson, also Alliance High School boys. They didn’t ask any silly questions about our Bedouin clothes, just fed us combat rations and gave us a lift to Um Marjam hill, where the Egyptian radars had just been toasted and where, until the airfield became operational again, the Sinai sector command would be stationed.

  It was a windswept gravelly hill with one shallow incline and one steep shoulder, on whose peak a Hawk anti-aircraft missile battery was already operating. A platoon of Golani infantry reservists was to arrive any day for sentinel duty, but for now the Armor Recon unit was it. And to fend off boredom, while waiting for our ride north on a Hercules, Ehud and I joined them.

  By that time, the Egyptian army was broken—thirty thousand Egyptian soldiers perished in the sand, and the remainder, mainly poor fellaheen who had been drafted against their will, threw off their shoes and tried to give themselves up, begging for water. But our sentinels, by direct order of the Hawk-base commander, chased them away: stragglers still carried arms and were considered treacherous.

  On the third day, a few hours before Ehud and I were to drive down to the airfield to fly north, seven haggard skeletons appeared in the morning mist at the foot of the hill, and for several hours their thin voices wafted up, their pleas for water interrupted only for prayers, which they called out in a Masri accent, just like that of the muezzin at Hassan Ali mosque in Cairo, where I had once holed up after a dreck job. The beseeching voices wafted at us in the canteen, in the latrine, in the tent—just about everywhere. Once, Mooky Zussman shot long Uzi bursts from the cliff’s edge over the stragglers’ heads to chase them away, but their thirst was stronger than their fear and none left. Finally, unable to stand the unending pleas, I overruled both Ehud and Mooky and called down to the stragglers in Masri to come up to the water tanker.

  I was helping a thin Egyptian boy-soldier hold my mess tin to what had remained of his mouth when the last skeleton in the line pulled from under his rags a Carl Gustav, and, cussing in high-pitched Arabic, shot Mooky Zussman in the stomach from a distance of five feet. The stuttering CaG swung on in a wide arc. More soldiers fell. When the barrel began to swing in my direction I nearly welcomed it, tensing my stomach to receive the bullet, but just then a sweaty khaki lump bounded off my hip into the line of fire—Ehud Reznik—and, spitting and hissing, caught the bullet in his right thigh. At that exact moment the top of the shooting skeleton’s head blossomed. From where he sat slumped in a pool of pinkish water, Mooky Zussman had shot him once, under the chin, just before he died. And as the other skeletons fell to their knees, raising their hands in wailing supplication, Ehud slowly hobbled from one to the next, and with precision emptied one Uzi magazine after another into their upturned faces. The camp commander, his face lathered, came running out of his tent, heard what happened, and punched me in the mouth. I didn’t even try to resist.