Pursuit (38 page)

But it had to be a joke, a practical joke someone was playing on him! It couldn't possibly be true! For three years he had done everything possible to get to Switzerland and for three years everyone and everything had conspired to impede him in every way. And now that he was finally here, actually in Geneva and only miles from Zurich, he was three days late! It simply could not be true. It was a joke set up by Brodsky—no, Wolf!—in fact, he had conspired with the old man upstairs to make those horrible snoring noises, to drive him down to the lobby and the newspaper that had been planted there; one could get them printed at those specialty shops as a joke on friends. And Wolf had probably suspected for a long time he had money in Switzerland, why else had he tried so hard to get there? It was a joke.…

But it wasn't a joke, and he knew it. He sat, his head in his hands, wanting to cry but too drained of emotion for even this release. Still, in thinking about it, if Ginzberg's snores had not driven him down to the lobby and the newspaper, he might well have walked into his bank in Zurich the next day and found himself in more trouble than he could handle. He ought to thank the old man for snoring on that basis, but at the moment thankfulness was the farthest thing from his mind.

What to do?

What to do
?

Return to Palestine—Israel—at the end of the purchasing mission? No. No. No! That would be the ultimate admission of failure, the final confession that his three years of suffering had truly been wasted. He would stay in Europe, possibly even try to immigrate to the United States; at least in comparison with Israel these were relatively civilized places. His passport had given him no trouble getting into Switzerland, so it must be a good forgery. For one brief moment the thought occurred that he had given Dr. Schlossberg a large check on that Zurich bank; he wondered if the doctor had ever cashed it. Schlossberg had never been caught, and the check had been for a substantial amount. Possibly if he ever ran into the doctor again he might ask for some of it back.

But that thought was also ridiculous, and he knew it. Ah, the mistakes he had made; the many, many mistakes he had made! But at least with the money gone for all time there was no longer any area in which he could make further mistakes, if there was any consolation in that. In time he supposed he would settle somewhere, get some sort of a job, and find another Deborah. He would try to forget the Deborah in Israel, and try to forget the money in the Zurich bank waiting there to rot, and try to forget that if it hadn't been for an old miserable Jew who would not travel on a Friday night he would be a rich man at the moment.

But merely trying to forget—or even forgetting, if it were possible—was no answer to the principal question:
What to do
?

What, indeed, to do …

He was still pondering that question without result when Ginzberg came down in the morning, disgustingly refreshed, and led him off to a cheap breakfast before taking him to their appointment, admonishing him all the way that they had very important work to do and he shouldn't sit up all night but should get his rest, it wasn't good for a person.

They spent the next four months traveling from city to city, from arms warehouse to arms warehouse, from fields covered with used battle equipment to other fields equally crowded; for the man in Geneva was only an agent who ran his business by telephone from his luxurious apartment on the Place Bourg-de-Four in Geneva and had never actually seen a weapon in his life. Grossman would inspect the used weaponry, advise Ginzberg as to its utility and relative value, and then listen as Ginzberg tried and usually succeeded in making their limited credits go further. Shipments had to be arranged, proper packaging determined to prevent additional deterioration, freight rates considered, ships' schedules taken into account, and always the desperate word from Israel and the Haganah to hurry, hurry, hurry! And always the problems of money, credits, payments! The work became an end in itself for Benjamin Grossman, a means to take his mind from his bitter disappointment, of drugging himself to the fact of his failure, to the knowledge that his sacrifices had been for nothing and that with his one great dream shattered there were no other dreams, great or small, on his horizon.

One day they went to a warehouse in Vienna, in the inner city, the First District, west of the Danube. Here used rifles, used handguns, used machine guns of many nations and many calibers had been collected and tossed in great piles with no attempt to separate them or properly identify or store them, as if the owner recognized their uselessness. Most were rusting, almost all had parts visibly missing. Ginzberg, who by now considered himself something of an expert on weaponry—even as Grossman was beginning to consider himself something of an expert on bargaining—made a sour face and turned away.

“Pfui!”

Grossman caught his arm. “Wait—”

“For what?” Ginzberg spat, but carefully, to miss his trousers. “This is
dreck
. What I intend to tell that
momser
in Geneva, you can believe! A whole day wasted, not to talk of the fare!”

“Not those guns. Over there.” Grossman led the way to some used machine tools lined up against one wall, covered with cosmoline and Pliofilm from old rifle packing. He lifted the film away and studied them. There were lathes, milling machines, planers, drill presses, crank presses, and the other tools needed for any machine shop. Ginzberg watched the inspection, looking at the used equipment suspiciously.

“So what's this? We came here to buy guns, not this
dreck
.”

“With these tools you can make your own guns.”

“Make? Who's got time to make? There's a war on, you heard? Anyway, we already got factories to make guns, but you notice they send us out to buy more. You think they don't know what they're doing?”

“The war is going to go on for a long time,” Grossman said patiently, and felt a twinge as he recalled these were almost the last words he had heard from Deborah. “You can't spend the rest of your life combing Europe for guns; we've seen almost every warehouse there is. Whatever is usable at a decent price is gone. What's left is either too expensive or like that junk there.”

Ginzberg tipped back his black hat and studied Grossman. “So?”

“So sooner or later you'll have to either raise enough money to buy new guns, good guns, or manufacture more of your own armaments.”

“And what do we make them out of?” Ginzberg asked sarcastically. “Kasha?”

“You make them out of rusty junk like that.” Grossman pointed to the piles of rusting weapons. “I rebuilt worse guns with less equipment in a cave at Ein Tsofar. You can probably buy this junk for next to nothing, just to give them floor space, and you can probably pick up the machine tools for not much more. In a short time you can be turning out your own guns.

“Grossman, you're
meshugah
. Look! Triggers missing, firing pins missing …”

“So you cannibalize, or make new parts from castings or stampings. Everything necessary is here; it's no great job with proper tools. How do you think those guns were made in the first place?”

There was a few moments' silence as Ginzberg's tiny eyes surveyed Grossman from behind deep-set pouches. He pushed his black homburg even further back on his head, exposing pink skin, and shook his head slowly.

“Grossman, you surprise me. What are you so interested for? You keep saying ‘
You
make them' instead of ‘We make them.' Max Brodsky told me you probably wouldn't be going back to Israel after you finish working with me. I'll tell you the God's truth, I'm surprised you're still here. So what are you so interested in we make guns we don't make guns? You going back, or what?”

For a moment Grossman felt anger sweep him. What business was it of anyone what his plans were? He forced the anger back, staring at the old man coldly.

“No, if you want the truth, I'm not going back. It's just that I thought buying the machine tools would be a smart move.”

“A smart move …” Ginzberg looked around the warehouse, speaking as if to himself. “Well, maybe if we had somebody to put together this factory you're talking about, then maybe you could have an argument …”

“You have engineers.”

“… someone who knows what to do with all this junk and also knows something about guns …”

Grossman smiled in understanding. “If you mean me, the answer is no.”

Ginzberg shrugged elaborately.

“A pity.” He looked up at the taller man with true curiosity, changing his tactics. “Tell me something, Ben. What do you have against Israel? You had it so good in Germany before?”

“I merely said, I'm not going back.”

“So you were at a kibbutz, Ein Tsofar, I heard about that. So some people like it in the desert and some don't. Myself, I get hives from the heat, I itch you wouldn't believe! But Israel's a big place—” He held up one hand abruptly. “So it's no United States of America, but it's no
shtetl
, either. If it's big enough for all the Jews we hope come, it's got to be big enough for Benjamin Grossman. Anyway, you wouldn't put a factory like you're talking about in the desert in the first place—”

Grossman had to smile. “I said, no.”

“And all I said was it's a pity,” the old man said and looked at Grossman's set and smiling face. He looked around the warehouse a bit sadly and raised his shoulders. “That's all I said. You heard? Well-let's go, then …”

“Then let's go,” Grossman said agreeably, and led the way to the large overhead door. Did the old man really think he cared the least bit whether the Jews set up another arms factory or not? He was merely trying to be helpful, trying to fulfill an obligation to a girl named Deborah, not to anyone else. Or did the old man think the thrill, or the patriotism, of working day and night setting up a factory for no pay, or for very little, in a place he hated would bring him back to Israel? What a dream! It was enough to make him smile, but at least he had to admit it was the first smile he had had for a long time.

It was, in the end, a woman who made the difference.

Ginzberg and Grossman had finished their supper in silence, the old man spooning his soup into his mouth with a combination air of aggrieved hurt and a loud
slurping
sound, as if his disappointment in the younger man could not be put into words, and with Grossman efficiently silent. At the end, Ginzberg had wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the back of his hand with his napkin, and then gone upstairs to their room to try and get a trunk call through to Tel Aviv. For a moment Benjamin Grossman wanted to ask him to speak to Brodsky, to find out if Deborah was still at Ein Tsofar, or how she was, but he knew the old man would only interpret that as a weakening of his resolution about not returning, and at the moment Benjamin Grossman was in no mood for more of the old Jew's sententious homilies about home and country. Further, it was pointless to think about Deborah. Deborah was something of the past. He decided that a long walk was what he needed to get Shmuel Ginzberg, Israel, Deborah Assavar, and everything else out of his mind.

It was a rather chilly September evening with dark clouds beginning to roll down from the hills to the north of the city, and with the threat of showers in the heavy air. He had walked for miles, for hours, without conscious thought of his surroundings, tramping the streets of the old city in the direction of the river without being aware of it. His mind jumped restlessly from one kaleidoscopic picture to another. Vienna—he could remember as if it were yesterday, the day of Anschluss. He had been riding in a car in the convoy that had brought the Fuehrer through the streets of the city, and he wondered now at the intense joy he had felt on the occasion. Ten years gone by.… It seemed like centuries. They were still rebuilding the damage done by the idiocy of war.…

Stop! Cut …

No thoughts of war, or of his own idiocy since those days at Maidanek. Think of other things. Remember that boulder-covered slope running down from Ein Tsofar to the sea. Remember the shower of sparks as the first mortar shell struck. The exhilaration, ah yes! The feeling of power! But so soon gone … Think of that slope in earlier days. That hated cell. Remember the sunrise coming over the Jordanian mountains beyond the flat, silvered surface of the water. You had to give the desert credit for spectacular sunsets and sunrises, if for nothing else. But stop thinking of that hated place.

Remember little Morris Wolf snoring away in the common tier at Belsen? Certainly a pitiful exhibit in comparison with the noises generated by Shmuel Ginzberg. Shmuel … Once he would have sneered at a name like that. But once he would have sneered at a name like Benjamin Grossman. Now it sounded so natural he could hardly remember any other. Jew names, remember them: Ben-Levi, Pincus, Yakov Mendel, Lev Mendel, who saved his life, Brodsky … Remember the first time you met Brodsky? That horrible feeling in the boxcar when he learned they would not be sent to—what camp had he planned on going to from Buchenwald? He could not even remember. But he remembered that night in the boxcar, nearly dying in that stink and heat and the others all crowding over, pressing, pressing. And that other boxcar, from Germany to Italy. Brodsky forgetting to tell him about the ignition key, the idiot! And the American sergeant looking in at the window of the truck. And Brodsky beside him at the battle of Ein Tsofar. That had been exciting. His father would have been proud of him.

No! Stop!

Where had his father come into this, for God's sake? Go back to Brodsky. The first time he came to Ein Tsofar after leaving him there, the time he came with Deborah. A year ago, more or less. Seems like much longer. Deborah. The first time they had made love, the softness of her, the tenderness of her. The
feel
of her! And Deborah the last time he had seen her. In bed, asleep when he got up so quietly and left Ein Tsofar for the last time. Hair all damp with perspiration, matted on her forehead. The womanly smell of her that morning—