Avner Mandelman Read online

  The light explodes into whiteness, the Debba rises, his blue-black abbaya spread wide; then the light turns to black. A long scream is heard, and the curtain falls.

  At that moment the phone rang.

  “Screw it,” Ruthy said, and went to get it.

  After a moment she came back. “For you,” she said curtly.

  For a frantic moment I thought that Jenny had called; but it was only Yitzchak Kramer, my father’s cousin in Canada. His voice was hardly audible; he, too, could barely hear me over the fuzzy echo on the line. I managed to say I was all right.

  Yes, I had told all the family (who were all? There were now only Uncle Mordechai, Margalit, and me) how sorry they were in Canada. No, they hadn’t caught him yet.

  And no, I said. I was coming back right after the funeral.

  I spoke briefly with Aunt Rina (yes, I said, I was dressing warmly), then hung up and bounded back to the kitchen.

  The curtain rises on the fourth act, where we see Yissachar in torment. He has betrayed his friend the Debba, he sings, for the sake of his people, and now his heart is dead.

  Yissachar’s two friends, standing at his side, respond as one: “There is no place for love nor friends if you desire to aid thy folk; and truth, and honor, yea, must too be slain, so future sons and daughters of man shall live amidst their homeland free.”

  As Yissachar sheathes his sword Sarah approaches, and in a flat voice tells him that she bears a child, not to him, but to her truest love, which he, her man, had just slain and with whose death her own heart had also died.

  Yissachar emits a long cry, draws his sword and flings it to the ground, then flings his Bible after it. He and Sarah sing back and forth two different songs—he about his double shame, she about her lost love. The songs weave into each other, while the two friends, leaning on their spades, sing an accompanying refrain about the homeland now pure and free.

  Yissachar’s song rises by an octave. He lifts his hands in the traditional gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the Blessing of the Priests, and vows to raise the child as his own. “I shall raise him as my seed,” he sings, “and teach him all the ways of man, and beast; and yet no man nor beast shall he become, but changeling: at his will shall he become whatever that his heart desires, and so perchance, shall he one day join men and beasts as one.”

  The curtain falls.

  I assembled the yellowing pages with unsteady hands and inserted them into the envelope. At the back were half a dozen lined sheets speckled with staffs and musical notes. After glancing at them I inserted these, too, in the envelope and got to my feet.

  None of us looked at each other. There was a long silence.

  “I want her role, Sarah,” Ruthy said in a low voice. “I don’t care about anything else.”

  Ehud drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly.

  “I am not doing any play,” I said.

  Ruthy hissed, “So in six weeks this will go to the State with the money and everything—”

  “So it will go.”

  “—and then it’ll never be produced …”

  “So it won’t.”

  Ehud looked at her, then at me.

  “Good night,” I said harshly, and went to bed.

  For a long while I tried to postpone sleep as I desperately filled my mind with images of Toronto, and Jenny, and the snowy cold; but soon the black dreams reclaimed me and I plunged once more into the darkness where I extinguished life so that my forefathers’ ancient fictions could live on.

  But for the first time ever, as I tossed and wept, I glimpsed a white dot in the blackness, like glowing milk. The darkness seemed to part before it, as singing voices emanated from its milky incandescence, and for a brief, magical moment I felt my despair lift. Breathlessly I tried to approach the whiteness, to query it, but then the singing faded and I plunged back into the horror-filled black.

  Jenny called at three-thirty in the morning.

  Her soft voice wept in my ear. “When’re you coming back?”

  At first I didn’t know who she was. “Mah? Mah?” I kept shouting in Hebrew into the receiver. What? What?

  I had again dreamed of the fearful beast; only this time it had the flowing locks and mocking eyes of Paltiel Rubin, not my father.

  “David! It’s me, Zhenia!”

  The beast retreated, laughing shrilly.

  Jenny began to recite a new poem she had written specially for me, the night I had left; a soft cascade of iambic hexameters about forgiveness, and love. I interrupted her in a panic and in one long rush told her about the will and my father’s request, and the deadline. The apartment break-in I left out; somehow it seemed too fantastic to mention. “No way!” I shouted hoarsely. “No way I’m going to stay and do this—this goddamn play.”

  There was a long silence.

  Jenny said in a choked voice, “How long do you have if—if you want to—”

  “Six weeks—but—” I rasped, “there is no way in hell—”

  “But your father, he asked you to do that? For him?”

  Jenny’s father used to beat her, even rape her (that’s what she said), in that little village near Ottawa where she was born. That’s why she ran away from home at fifteen, like those other girls on Yonge Street. Yet when he was diagnosed with cancer six years later, she went to stay with him in the hospital for nearly a month, until his last moment. I couldn’t understand it.

  “I don’t know if it’s for him,” I said. “Maybe it’s for his friend.” It was too complicated to explain over the phone.

  Behind my back I could hear someone moving around in the bathroom, opening the water tap and closing it, then the medicine cabinet.

  “Well, if it’s for your father,” Jenny whispered, “then it’s something else, if it’s for him—it’s not like you are waking up at night with nightmares, and writing shit and—and—” She began to weep.

  I felt a piercing panic, like I had every other time she cried over me, or for me.

  “I … I’ll call you after the funeral,” I said, and hung up.

  Ruthy emerged from the toilet, and without looking at me went back into the bedroom.

  11

  MY FATHER’S FUNERAL STARTED half an hour late. People kept streaming in through the stone gateposts, in great silent clumps. Oldsters who could barely stand, and ancient theater actors, and here and there a closed-faced Labor Party hack. Men of Genesis, the founders. No one looked at me as they passed, as if they all shared some uneasy secret. But among them, here and there, I saw younger men, negligent and immobile, never staring at me directly, yet keeping me in their sight wherever I moved. As they turned their close-cropped heads, I could see the skin-colored Motorola earphone-plugs. Each man kept one hand free and one hand in his pocket, probably with the thumb on the radio clicker. There must have been at least eight of them, all in clicker contact.

  I gawped at them. Were they here because of me? Or did they expect something to happen? I had made up my mind to go and ask when I felt a hand clap me on the back. “So, Duvid,” said my uncle Mordechai. “You can’t deign to go unshaven for a week? Even for your father?” He seemed shrunken, smaller than his wife, Margalit, at his side, whose long braid, I saw, had turned white; probably after ’46, after their son’s death. “It is not important,” she whispered. “Only what’s in the heart.”

  “Heart, shmeart,” muttered my uncle. “In the shivah you don’t shave.”

  More old people kept coming. Ehud said at my side, “I never knew he had so many friends.”

  “Fine friends,” Uncle Mordechai said. “So where were they when he was alive?”

  I glanced at him askance. Look who was talking: the man who had not talked to his brother for close to thirty years.

  Not that I had much right to criticize.

  I pointed out the surveillance teams to Ehud. “You have any idea why—”

  “Well, what do you think, with your passport and everything.”

  I felt my face go red. A trai
ned lone killer who had disobeyed orders and shown fatal pity, had been punished for it, and emigrated, and here he was back and not even a citizen anymore, and so not subject to any orders … What were they supposed to do? I would have had me followed also …

  But why so many?

  Then I felt the pain in my wrenched thumb, and recalled that someone did try to steal the play. I turned to Ehud and started to ask him if he thought there was a connection, but Uncle Mordechai shushed me as a rustle went through the crowd. Three girl soldiers in starched khaki had laid a circular wreath of white roses at the graveside. Pinned to the stems was a silk ribbon of white and blue, crossed with the tiny golden swords. A Gibbor Yisrael decoration. Hero of the People of Israel: the highest honor the Jewish state can accord its warriors. Less than two dozen have been accorded, three posthumously.

  I stared at it. Ehud stared, too.

  “Yeah,” said Uncle Mordechai. “I knew this.”

  “We all knew,” said Margalit.

  I hadn’t. Nor, apparently, had Ehud.

  More people kept coming. I recognized Riva Yellin, Ruthy’s mother, in her signature black Arab galabieh, and Re’uven Kagan, the theater director who had taught the Stanislavsky Method in my takedown course; then three emaciated old actors who had gained fame in my father’s Purim plays; then a crowd of HaBimah actors; then five old Cameri directors; and Professor Gershon Tzifroni, the failed poet who, so they say, had written a biography of Paltiel Rubin that had to be withdrawn because of its scurrilous inaccuracies, and who now taught at Tel Aviv University. One by one they all nodded at me, their eyes furtive.

  Ehud said, “It’s like a reunion, almost.”

  A reunion of what?

  The crowd grew thicker by the minute. The average age seemed about seventy, but sprinkled among them were the young tailers who kept eyeing me, oblivious to anyone else. I saw they all wore their shirts loose over their pants, regulation form, for easy draw of a gun holstered at the small of the back.

  Uncle Mordechai said through the corner of his mouth, “Amnon Amzaleg tells me a ganef tried to steal your underwear last night. What’d you keep in it? Your money?”

  “No,” I said. “He tried to steal the play.”

  Uncle Mordechai’s cheek twitched. “Did he—get it?”

  “No. But the letter to me he got.”

  Margalit smiled at me tenderly and said I must know what was in the letter anyway. I didn’t respond.

  Uncle Mordechai muttered under his breath. Two jeeps had stopped on the chalk-marked gravel, and a knot of sunburned old men alighted. Several nodded at Uncle Mordechai, who didn’t nod back. “Sons of whores, all of them,” he said.

  “Shush,” said Margalit.

  A whisper ruffled the dense crowd, like soft wind over reeds. The military Rabbi pulled the prayer shawl over his head.

  Ehud said. “You have a prayer book?”

  I shook my head. My nose, my throat, my eyes were heating up.

  “Here.” Uncle Mordechai put a frayed volume into my hand.

  “’El male’ rachamim—” God full of pity. The military rabbi began to chant.

  Two dense lines of men, holding on to the handles of a large litter with a white bundle on it, shuffled forward step by small step. The farthest man on the left, I saw to my surprise, was Leibele, the waiter from Café Cassit; and at the front, side by side, shuffled Inspector Amnon Amzaleg, and Shim’on Gershonovitz himself, the director general of the Interior Ministry, his immense body and flat face unmistakable.

  “Hi, I’m here,” Ruthy said breathlessly into the back of my neck.

  Uncle Mordechai pointed my finger at a line of prayer in the Siddur.

  “—HaGibborim, ve-HaNehedarim—” The heroes, and the magnificent, sang the rabbi.

  Slowly, the twelve pallbearers laid the litter on the ground, clumsily trampling the wreaths. All around them, from within the dense throng, the tailers kept staring to my right and to my left, never directly at me.

  Overhead a flock of pigeons flew by, swooping over the crowd in a semicircle like an absurd honor guard, their wings clacking. For a brief moment all eyes followed them. Then the wind picked up and the birds were gone. Behind me the flag gave a series of sharp cracks, like a slow-firing machine gun. Two tailers snapped their hands toward the small of their backs, then retrieved them sheepishly. A few oldsters saluted in the old style, their elbows out. Their images wavered. My eyes seemed filmed over and my throat on fire. I coughed at length.

  “Enough!” rasped Uncle Mordechai. “It’s the Kaddish, now.”

  I felt the pages being turned. Other hands guided mine down the page.

  “Here,” said Inspector Amzaleg. “Start here. ‘Yidgadel ve-Yitkadesh—’”

  I mumbled the ancient words. Through a haze I saw the litter with its bundle being lowered into the pit, so much like the one I had seen last night, in my nightmare.

  To my eldest, my beloved …

  “Here are your sunglasses,” Ruthy whispered. “I brought them.”

  My father used to sing the Chad Gadya at the Passover Seder, his voice warm and strong and vibrant. I tried to recall it but could not. For some reason it filled me with panic. I put my old Ray-Bans on and wiped my cheeks underneath.

  The soldiers stepped forward and hoisted their Galil rifles. There was a moment of awkward silence. Then the sound rolled.

  “Fire!”

  There was another loud crack. My father died nearly thirty years after his most memorable act; the army still remembered him, but his son could not.

  I tried once more to resurrect my father’s voice, but all around me was a rushing, deepening dark; I swayed and felt hands grab me, and then suddenly his voice came, hot-white and clear and soaring, raging at the death of men and beasts by the order of an evil book …

  More hands held me. I shook them off and stood up straight, listening; and as the words I had read last night sang in me, like Jenny’s hexameters, I felt my heart broaden and deepen, as the chanting words congealed into something else, akin to operational resolve.

  “—Blessed be the True Judge,” the military rabbi chanted.

  One by one the theater people came by to shake my hand, looking away from me; then the merchants. None of the old party hacks did; they had all melted away after the Kaddish. Gershonovitz was nowhere to be seen either. Ruthy and Ehud also had left. Of the tailers only three remained, leaning on the stone cemetery wall, indolently smoking, staring into space.

  How can I say no?

  Leibele shook my hand at length, “You watch yourself, now, David …”

  Uncle Mordechai clucked his tongue at him but Leibele held on to my hand, stared into my eyes, nodded, then shuffled away. Through the corner of my eye I saw the tailers tense up. One stubbed his cigarette and inserted his hand in his pocket, and I saw his fingers move as he clicked away. I turned to see what had caused it. From behind the grave site three old Arabs in white abbayas shuffled forward. I recognized Mansour, the sandal wholesaler, and Seddiqi, my father’s ex-partner, who now sold leather. Stooped and dried up and ancient, he was leaning on a pair of aluminum canes. His ‘akkal had a green filament in it, indicating he was a sharif, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

  The third I did not recognize. Probably the winter-boot man.

  “Any help thou needst,” Mansour droned in flowery Arabic. “Mine house is thy house, mine food thy food, mine water thy water—”

  “Na’am, na’am,” I muttered. Yes, yes.

  My stomach heaved. I hadn’t spoken to an Arab in seven years.

  The three tailers stared at the Arabs, then at me directly, their eyes hard. Another tailer appeared in the cemetery’s gate; probably the team leader.

  Seddiqi touched four fingers to his narrow forehead, mumbling something about noble souls going to sit in the bosom of Allah forever. Between his thumb and forefinger I saw the brown crescent tattoo, signifying he had been to Mecca, a hajj.

  The third Arab stood t
o the side, saying nothing, blinking.

  I couldn’t wait for them to leave. Arabs at my father’s funeral. I couldn’t blame the tailers, really.

  Presently Uncle Mordechai took Margalit by the hand and walked to his jeep, with me following.

  “I used to know him, Seddiqi, when he was still your father’s partner,” Uncle Mordechai said as we were driving to Mr. Gelber’s office, now tailed by a white Toyota, “before he had to sell his share to your father, in thirty-six.”

  In 1936 the Arabs of Palestine, incensed at Jewish immigration, revolted, slaughtering Jews and British alike. Most ties between Arabs and Jews were then cut. The rebellion ended in 1939, after the British hanged a few Arab leaders and exiled others.

  My uncle squinted into the windshield. “Seddiqi’s father used to own a brickyard, the cinema in the Adjemi neighborhood—his brother published a poetry magazine—”

  I clicked my tongue to show I didn’t care about these ancient Arab histories—I wanted to ask about my father’s army past—but my uncle paid no attention. “His brother died in forty-eight, near Jerusalem.” He massaged his unshaven jaw. “But the Arabs are quiet now,” he added, apropos of an unstated memory. “They are getting old.”

  “We are all getting old,” Margalit said, “Only the young ones here can’t grow old.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, but as we turned into Rothschild Boulevard my uncle growled, “But everyone came today, the bastards.”

  “Sure,” said Margalit. “They all remember. How can they forget?”

  I didn’t have to ask what it was.

  12

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS AGO MY father had performed one feat that everyone remembered.