Avner Mandelman Page 7

  Two hours later Ehud and I were finally driven in a jeep to the airfield below—I accompanied by a military policeman, Ehud lying silent on a litter among the dead soldiers and sacks of mail in the back. From Bir Gafgafa we were flown in a dusty Hercules north: Ehud to Tel HaShomer Hospital; the eleven dead to the Sdeh Dov morgue; and I to military HQ in Tel Aviv, to stand trial.

  My trial for disobeying a direct order and endangering the troops was held the next day, presided over by the Hawk camp commander himself. (He insisted that I had been under his jurisdiction when I committed my crime.) The prosecutor, an old reserve major who had once served under my father, apologized to me twice during his summary speech, saying he was only doing his duty. The young defense counsel spoke confusedly of the Bible, and the Prophets, and other such shit in yogurt. I did not bother to listen. The presiding colonel then informed me that I had to serve thirty-five days in Kele’ ’Arba‘, Military Prison Number 4, where I was to report that same evening on my own, after doing my duty to the fallen’s kin. (“You tell them, not me.”) Then, as he was signing the jail papers, he added, “And you are lucky your father is who he was, or I would stick you in for five years.”

  When I left the courtroom, the prosecutor offered me a lift, but I refused. Instead, I walked in the noon heat all the way to Mooky Zussman’s home, a dusty two-room apartment on the third floor of an ancient building near the old Tel Aviv harbor. Mooky’s father, thin and yellow in overlarge striped pajamas, offered me a cup of Nescafé with Tnuva milk, and tried to pat my hand shakily with his palm, while his wife wept in the toilet, helping Mooky’s little brother, Oded, take down his pants.

  Yonathan’s parents were luckily abroad (they had emigrated to British Columbia), so it was the Israeli consul in Vancouver who gave them the news.

  The other nine had come from one kibbutz in the Galilee. A jobnik colonel took it upon himself to let their parents know, so I wouldn’t be late for jail.

  Upon my release from Military Prison Number 4, I hitchhiked back to base and had a long talk with Colonel Shafrir, at his request. That is, he talked and I listened, standing at immobile attention in his small heat-choked office while outside the window some rowdy bluebirds cackled in the sycamore tree. I forget what he said, exactly. Nobody could fault me, he said. This was the difference between us and them, he said. He was sure my father was proud of me, he said. (My father never said a word about the entire affair. My mother said nothing either but cried for an entire day, hugging me at length and shaking her head whenever I asked her why she cried.) “Your father was once like that, too,” Shafrir said. “And I, too, was like this,” he went on, “before I learned my lesson. You have now learned yours. We must do some things the Prophets would not approve of, if we want to keep these sons of whores away from Dizzengoff. You hear? So don’t you ever fuck up again! For your own good, Dada, and for ours! All of us! We know them, not from today! You hear?”

  He hit at my shoulder with a balled fist, hard.

  “Yes sir,” I said, staring straight ahead.

  “Fuck this yessir shit! Get out of here before I get mad! Get out! Dismissed!”

  He saluted me and I saluted back, slowly.

  Ehud, with his bum leg, could not return to the Unit, and until the end of his service was posted to a staff job in army HQ in Tel Aviv. I went back to doing dreck, and over the next three and half years, until my release, didn’t fuck up once—even though my nightmares became steadily worse. At first I tried to ignore them, but finally in 1970, after a routine dreck job in Cairo, I didn’t cross back, just lay low in Heliopolis for two weeks, drinking coffee and playing backgammon with street idlers in the City of the Dead. Finally, a week before my five-year service was over, I returned to base, refused to sign for an additional period, hitchhiked back to Tel Aviv, and applied for a visa for Canada. (My father objected terribly; my mother said not a word.) Uncle Yitzchak cosigned it, and the visa arrived quickly.

  A week later, I left.

  There’s a photograph of Ehud and me on Um Marjam hill at night, against the full moon, our hair blowing in the wind. He stands with his legs spread wide. I tower over him by a head, my hand grabbing onto his shoulder, as if he’s planted in the soil and I must hold on to him so as not to be blown away. Behind us is a shadow—the Thompson tent where the Armor Recon guys are sleeping, unseen but still alive. A darker shadow at its side may be a jackal, or perhaps a wild dog, one of those the Egyptians had left behind. And high above it all, round and jagged, floats the moon, like a peephole in the sky out of which some invisible jailer is watching over the birthplace of the evil scribblings that begat all the blood.

  Some time later during the night I awoke from a black dream, my hair on end.

  It was a dream I had never had before: I was standing in the moonlit yard of Har Nevo school and my father was calling to me from within a shallow hole in the ground, his tongue lolling through his blood-filled mouth, as he struggled to make his voice heard. I tried to get down on my knees to hear him, but my Nomex coveralls were so tight, it was as if my body had turned to wood. And when at long last I managed to kneel on the gravel, my father had vanished and I inexplicably saw before me the black snout of some beast leering at me, its mouth dripping blood and froth.

  I awoke with a snarl. For a terrifying moment I imagined that the black beast had touched its snout to my face before retreating to watch me from afar.

  I stared wildly about me.

  Ruthy, in a white T-shirt and panties, was sitting on the edge of the sofa bed, her freckled arms hugging her chest, her nose a silver dot in the moonlight.

  She said, “Did you read it already? I can’t sleep.”

  For a moment I did not know what she was talking about.

  “The play,” she said.

  I hissed at her to go back to bed, before Ehud woke up.

  She said with derision, “Don’t worry. One time, he’s gone the whole night.”

  “Well, I have to sleep. The funeral—”

  “So you’ll sleep on the plane. Come on. Don’t be a louse.”

  As we sat down at the kitchen table, Ruthy said in a tight little voice, “You want water with raspberry juice, something?”

  “No,” I said.

  With the tips of her fingernails she extracted from the envelope several yellowing pages written densely, and held one up before my eyes.

  “Is it … his handwriting?”

  I extended my hand to take the page from her, but she held back. “Is it his?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s my father’s writing.”

  Maybe she had expected to see Paltiel Rubin’s scrawl, but the handwriting was unmistakably my father’s: the same angular aleph, the curling lammed, the down-thrusting gimmel. The pages had probably been torn from a copybook similar to the ones I later used in Har Nevo school—similar to the one in which I am writing now.

  A bulky shape in blue-white pajamas appeared in the kitchen door. Ehud.

  He looked at Ruthy, rubbing his eyes, then at me. “What you guys doing?”

  “Reading the play,” Ruthy said. “Come, Uddy, sit here. Move a little, Dada. Let him see, too.”

  Ehud sat slowly down. “How you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  I kept my head low and aligned the pages with my fingertips; I felt a slight tingle, as if I had just touched a live electrical wire, or toggled a pencil-knife’s safety off.

  I turned the first page.

  The Debba, it said. No name of author, no date.

  Without further ado we began to read.

  It was a play in four acts, taking place in the thirties or forties, but written in flowery, turn-of-the-century prose. The first act presents Yissachar HaShomer, the Sentinel. Yissachar is a farmer by day and a sentinel by night, when he must guard the fields against the marauding animals of Eretz Yisrael, who consider the land theirs.

  The play begins with Yissachar plowing his field, Bible in hand, against the backdrop of Mount Gilbo’a.
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  When Yissachar’s horse dies in harness, he sings to it a song of mourning (“O friend and companion, on whose back I rode in my ancestors’ fields, who plowed with me the bosom of my motherland”).

  Behind a rock lurks the Debba, an enigmatic Arab hyena that can walk like a man. The Debba has been charmed out of its lair by Yissachar’s song, and by his voice.

  When Yissachar has finished singing, the Debba uncurls and turns into a giant of a man, offering to pull Yissachar’s plow in place of the horse.

  “You have charmed me, O son of man,” says the stranger in the striped blue-black abbaya, “against my will you have turned me from all I know; against my will I shall help you cut the furrows of my cradle, this land.”

  While he pulls at the plow he tells Yissachar stories of the birds and the beasts, and Yissachar tells him of his ancestors, and of his new wife, Sarah. They then sing a song of friendship and the Debba reveals to Yissachar the secret of his lair.

  “Come to me, son of man,” he sings to him, “tonight, so I can teach you how to speak with all the beasts, sing with the birds.”

  Once again, the two sing a song of friendship, and Yissachar promises to visit the Debba, whose secret dwelling he now knows.

  When the sun sets, the Debba prepares to slink off into its lair, just as Yissachar’s beautiful young bride enters, carrying a basket with food for her husband at his plow.

  She laments with him the death of the horse (“O gentle beast that carried me to my wedding canopy, that helped my groom sow bread in the earth’s womb”) and ends with a prayer to God to open her own womb, for she is barren.

  “Don’t turn the pages so fast,” said Ruthy.

  While Yissachar eats his pita and olives, looking at the mountains painted on the backdrop, there is a brief encounter between the Debba and Sarah.

  She asks, “Why have you this shiny pelt that asks to be caressed?”

  And he replies, “O beautiful daughter of man, whose skin is thin yet hard as steel, whose eyes are soft as morning light yet burning as the sun who gives it, why ask you that which no Beast can forbear?”

  He then curls into his animal form and runs off, while Sarah slowly backs off, to stand by Yissachar.

  The curtain falls.

  “Wait,” said Ruthy. “I am going to take a pee. Don’t turn the pages.”

  Ehud and I reread the last page, not looking at each other, until she returned.

  In the second act, two other farmer-settlers, arriving for a day’s work in the field, discuss with Yissachar the predations of wild animals, who slaughter the chickens and eat the crops. After dividing the night watch among them, they debate what to do about the Beasts.

  “Let us cleanse the land of putrid beastly stench,” says ’Ittay, brandishing a scythe. “Let sons of man make pure these gentle hills—”

  Ruthy made an inarticulate sound deep in her throat.

  “—the cradle of our ancestors, of all impure and foreign breed.”

  The other farmer, Yochanan, assents. “Only in toil,” he thunders, “shall man’s son conquer, only in sweat shall he mark his claim; only those who sowed the land have gained the right to reap.”

  But Yissachar is doubtful. It is clear he is torn between his love for his people, and his sympathy for the Beasts whose land he cannot help but usurp. “Why do you press me thus to kill?” he asks ’Ittay. “For is the sin not great enough, to chase those whom the land hath borne? To cleanse the lairs of gentle folk, whose only crime was happenstance, to be here born while we meanwhile were gone?”

  “So wilt thou leave thy land to beast, to fowl, to insect, and to thorns?” asks ’Ittay. “Lovest thou thy people more, pray tell, or lovest thou something else still more?”

  The three then sing a complicated song in which prayers from the Siddur and whole sentences from the Pentateuch are interweaved.

  “Look! Look at this,” Ruthy yelped in delight. “This line here. Where it takes the Avinu Malkeinu prayer and turns it around and connects it with the Kaddish, and then here, look—”

  “Yes, yes,” Ehud said, infected by her mood. “And also here, where—”

  “Quiet,” I hissed. “Let me read.” My stomach had begun to growl. I turned the page.

  The two friends grapple with Yissachar and shout into his face, “Tell now, tell now, soft-hearted louse, whom you love most, for know we must, ere night, when you stand guard on home and field.”

  Yissachar breaks free and runs to and fro, in torment, waving his Bible. “The Beasts I love,” he sings, “for they are blameless, but God’s command hath put my heart in chains; and now upon me love has no more power, since God has called me to do battle, in His name.”

  At last, as his wife Sarah steals across the backdrop dressed in black, Yissachar cries out, “O listen, friends and kin and folk, and know ye that I loved thee best. I loved the truth, and justice, yea; but thee, my folk, and God, cursed God, I loved still more, more still.”

  Ruthy’s breath came out in a whoosh. “What language! It sounds just like Paltiel Rubin, in Golyatt, when the holy sheikh—” she stopped and looked at me sidelong, chewing her lower lip.

  “No,” I said in a tight voice. “It’s different.”

  Ehud rubbed his nose, saying nothing.

  We read on.

  With Sarah still gliding at the back, the three sons of man plan their attack on the lair of the Beasts, whose whereabouts Yissachar (after a speech filled with anguish) has now revealed. At dawn, they whisper together, they shall cleanse the land. Yissachar then launches into a declamatory song, ending with, “My soul forgone, son of man am I no more, but truly brother to the beast, whom slay tonight I must.”

  As Yissachar sharpens a sword, the light dims; and as the moon rises over Mount Gilbo’a, Sarah is seen waiting by the rock. The Debba suddenly looms before her, and for a long moment he and Sarah stand close together, looking into each other’s eyes without touching, without speaking, in the light of the moon.

  Sarah speaks first. “Who art thou, man or beast, that hath into my eyes so plunged, and of my soul so rudely taken?” She tries to step back, but cannot.

  The Debba then speaks in a voice full of thunder and anguish. “Nay, ’tis thou,” it says, “who has my heart envelop’d, in web of silk, and whispers, and deceit. You know that I forever hence must love thee, thee daughter of man, thee shameless, thee Lilith.”

  “Hey!” said Ehud. “That’s the Abu Jalood tall tale—”

  “Quiet,” I said, my eyes on the scribbled sheet. “Let me read now.”

  I couldn’t lift my eyes from the page. The lines throbbed, the words pulsated, the entire page sang.

  We went on reading.

  The second act ends with Sarah and the Debba falling slowly into each other’s arms, and as the moon disappears over Mount Gilbo’a they sink behind the rock, wrapped in the Debba’s Arab cloak.

  “Yechrebetto!” said Ruthy in awe, lapsing into the common Arab curse. May his house fall down! “Now I see why they had the bedlam in Haifa.”

  I said nothing. My head throbbed. My jaws ached from clenching. I could see the scene before me, in Haifa of thirty years ago, enfolding on the stage; then the furor of the crowd, the boiling wrath—

  “Come on!” Ruthy raked my arm with her nails. “I want to read!”

  Ehud rubbed his temples and said nothing.

  I turned the page.

  The third act begins with a whispered dramatic dialogue among the three friends, who are crawling toward the Debba’s lair at dawn, led by Yissachar, his sword drawn.

  “To cleanse we must, for kin and folk, the bosom of this ancient land,” hisses Yissachar. “And if we beasts thereby become, so be it, yea—”

  “Amen,” “Amen,” his two friends whisper in return.

  As they approach the beast’s lair (“a mound upstage”) the lights dim further, and a spotlight frames Sarah, who is standing at the rock, singing in pain.

  “Two secrets in my heart do dwell,�
�� she sings, “and choose I must, for in my choice lies death, for one or other, in my hand their fate. Shall I reveal unto the beast the secret of my man, and doom the one that God hath given me to wed, and with him, yea, my folk? Or shall I stay forever still and slay my love, the earthen-born, and doom my heart to hell?”

  Ruthy got up and drank some water straight from the tap. “You want something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Me neither,” said Ehud.

  We read on.

  The light framing Sarah dims now, and the spotlight illuminates Yissachar and his two friends, who are now almost upon the Debba’s lair. “My heart lies still, still lies the heart,” Yissachar sings, “for beast I am forevermore. Forsooth when morning comes I shall to beast and fowl speak as kin, for soul of man have I no more.”

  Once more the light changes, and Sarah is lit. Her belly is shown to bulge—she is pregnant.

  “Already?” said Ruthy. “It takes longer than that.”

  “It’s a play,” I said.

  Sarah then sings at length, thanking God and cursing him at the same time, for opening her womb and for sending her the Debba. It is a song in the style of a Piyut, a Sephardic laudatory prayer, in the complex meter of two Shva’im and a stressed syllable. Her song weaves into that of Yissachar and his two friends, and as the light begins to rise, signifying the dawn, Sarah’s song culminates in a shout of anguish and anger that mingles with that of the attackers, who now rush the Debba’s lair.