the Debba (2010) (11 page)

PART II
Al Infitar

(The Cleaving)

14

E
VADING THE TAILERS WAS
of course pointless--everyone knew where the shivah would be held--so when my uncle at last drove down the dark hilly street where his house stood, another Toyota, a gray one, was parked across the road, its roof sprouting double antennas. I could see the glow of a cigarette inside.

My uncle said nothing, just parked and then prowled around the house, listening, and--much to my unease--sniffing the night air like a wolf, head thrown back and nose up, nostrils open wide, swaying his head from side to side; at last, without speaking, he motioned for us to enter.

Once inside he made straight for the kitchen cupboard and broke out a new bottle of 777. Margalit brought three glasses and we drank, sitting at the window overlooking the blue-black Kinneret. I wanted to ask my uncle about my father's early days, but the moment did not seem right. Little blue lights bobbed in the middle distance--fishing boats going out for the nightly catch. The smell of the water was in my nostrils, and I could hear jackal howls coming all the way from the Golan Heights.

Next morning I woke with a sandy tongue and my head buzzing with remnants of blackness; but some white snatches of soaring chants were there, too, lacing the dark.

I looked outside the window. The Toyota was still there.

Uncle Mordechai was standing in the kitchen by the Primus stove, frying fish. "Yes, for breakfast, for breakfast. It won't kill you." He sprinkled pepper from the bottom of his fist.

I pointed to the window. "So it's nothing to do with the play?"

My uncle threw me a black brow-knit glare. Obviously the moment was still not right. I waited, then said lamely, "You think anyone else from the funeral will come to the shivah?"

Uncle Mordechai said nothing.

"Maybe we should invite the tailers in, to say Kaddish with us."

"Over my dead body," said my uncle.

But two people did come.

First, as I was digging into my fish, a black patrol car came to a halt in the yard, and soon Inspector Amzaleg entered, not even bothering to knock. "One for me, too?"

"I bought five
mushts,"
my uncle said.

"He loved them so much, the bastard," Amzaleg said.

For a moment I thought Uncle Mordechai would start crying, but he only sneezed.

Amzaleg kicked his shoes off. "Bring the fish here."

As he burrowed in, I said, "These tails outside, they help you investigate?"

Amzaleg gave a curt head shake and dug into the crisp
musht
without looking up. "You want to be an idiot hero with this play, go ahead. But do yourself a big favor and leave the police job to us."

I asked him if he was warning me officially.

"Yes, I am," he snapped, pointing the fork at me.

"Shut up and eat your fish," Uncle Mordechai said.

When breakfast was over, we sat on the cool tiled floor to play poker. We were well into the game when I asked my uncle, as casually as I could, what he could tell me about the play and my father's doings before '48.

"That's not for now," he growled into his cards.

"So when?"

"When the Angel of Death comes for me, maybe."

"But Mordechai--" I began, but he cut me off.

"Ask Shimmel. Maybe he can tell you something."

I felt a slight shock. "You think he'll come?"

"No," my uncle said. "He would be ashamed."

"He should be," Margalit said.

But that afternoon the fat man walked in--like Amzaleg, he did not knock. Through the open door I could see his gray Lark parked behind my uncle's jeep. It, too, had a dipole antenna.

I shook his hand foolishly, torn between my sudden urge to flee and my desire to query him.

"So, young man," he boomed at me, "we are orphans now?"

A tickling had begun inside my nose.

Gershonovitz turned to my uncle. "So the emigrant is back?"

My uncle put down the newspaper and stood up. "So you deigned to come, finally."

Gershonovitz stabbed a thick thumb in my direction. "Hiding in a whale," he said to my uncle, "like his father."

Amnon Amzaleg came in, rubbing his eyes, then Margalit, her mouth clamped shut.

She said,
"Shalom
, Shim'on. So you came."

Gershonovitz deposited his bulk on the smallest chair. "Sure I came, a moral duty, nu." With much groaning he bent down and removed his shoes--rubber-soled French Palladiums, Unit shoes. "And where're the others? Gone?"

"What others? Nobody came," my uncle said belligerently. "Nobody except the policeman, and the fuckers outside. They're yours?"

Gershonovitz inclined his head, acknowledging ownership. There was a moment of hard silence. Then he blew out his lips. "Sit down, sit down," he said to me, as if he were the host, not Uncle Mordechai.

I sat on the chair's edge. I was taller than him by a head at least, but his bulk, his Mongolian face, the flat eyes, filled me with dread; my questions stuck in my throat.

Uncle Mordechai snapped, "I didn't know you still remember the way here."

"I remember, I remember." Gershonovitz declined my uncle's gruff offer of cognac, and drank down three glasses of water with raspberry juice--one after the other, crunching the ice cubes in his teeth--then turned to the policeman. "So, Amnon, you caught him already, this animal?"

Amzaleg said tersely, "We are talking to a few Arabs."

"Talking?"

"Yes, talking. It's early. If we get something, then maybe I'll tell you."

Uncle Mordechai said, "If you want, I can ask around the villages. Some still have connections with ... the old guys."

Amzaleg said, "But we don't know yet if it's because of--what happened then."

My nose tingled again and I swiped at my eyes. Everyone stopped talking. I tried to speak but could not. Gershonovitz grasped my elbow and gave me a thump on the back, and all of a sudden the tickling in my nose became unbearable.

He put his arm over my shoulder. "Some cognac,
ya
Mordoch."

My uncle poured.

"He could drink cognac, this
mamzer
, a bottle, two, like nothing," Gershonovitz said. "Like nothing." To my surprise I saw him wipe his eyes.

"This
mamzer,"
said Amzaleg, "was a good guy."

"The best," said my uncle.

We all drank. I waited for something further, but apparently the eulogy was over. After a while I found my voice and asked Gershonovitz if he knew that someone had tried to steal the play. When he inclined his head I said, "One of yours?"

He shook his massive head with the same economy.

I said, "So maybe it's the same one who killed him, who tried to steal it?"

Gershonovitz spoke without looking at me. "Don't be a fool. Take the money and go back to your shiksa; don't be a bigger idiot than he was."

I half rose from my seat, my fingers curled tight. The fat man looked at me calmly.

"Sit down," Uncle Mordechai said to me, then turned to Gershonovitz. "Finish your cognac and get out."

"Yes," said Margalit.

The camaraderie of a moment ago seemed to have vanished in an instant.

Amzaleg rolled his glass between his palms, staring at the drink.

As Gershonovitz was lacing his boots I said into his back, "Why are your guys following me?"

I didn't expect him to answer, but to my surprise he did. "It's for your own protection, Dada."

Protection? Against whom, or what?

"Shimmel--" I began hotly, but Uncle Mordechai interrupted me and addressed the fat man. "I think I told you to go."

Without fanfare Gershonovitz left, his Lark roaring up the hill past the parked Toyota, its curtained windows like invisible eyes behind dark shades.

After the fat man left everyone dispersed. All at once the feeling of being constantly watched filled me with anger and I felt an urgent need to get away from all eyes. I picked up a towel, softly climbed out the back window, and slid down the hill.

I don't think the men in the Toyota saw me go.

15

I
SWAM FOR HALF
an hour, hoping the clean water would wash away my turmoil. What did Gershonovitz mean when he said that the tailers were there for my own protection? Whom--or what--did he think I needed protection from? My father's killer? The play's burglar? The Debba? As I swam out, I filled my lungs and emptied my mind, and suddenly all I could think about was how Ruthy and I had once swum here at night, long ago, she and I naked side by side, alternately kissing and flipping on our backs to watch the stars, only to join again in near desperation, like one animal with two beating hearts ...

The pain of that memory was so sharp that I plunged my head into the water and, eyes open, dived deep, to the sandy bottom. Silver-gray
buris
swam not two feet away from me, flickering in the milky moonlight, then a school of red
mushts
. I extended my hand to touch them but they flitted by and were gone, like memories.

I swam farther out and looked back at the shore, the pain a distant throb now. The Lux lanterns hanging in front of the Lido beach club swung in the breeze and I could smell their petrol smoke in the wind. It used to be a British officers' club before '48, then became a local nightspot, where my father and mother went dancing during their honeymoon.

Did they both swim here, too, as Ruthy and I had?

My heart thrummed as I desperately tried to conjure up images of Jenny and Toronto, but could not. The land seemed to have seeped into me anew, enmeshing me yet again.

I swam in wide circles, looking first at the Lido, then at the far shore, where a yellow glow was probably the armor camp at the foot of the Golan. Ghostly vapors floated over the water, like smoke rising from a battlefield. The jackals had fallen silent. Everywhere was a vague, large imminence, as if an answer would soon be given to a vast question that had not yet been asked.

At last I swam ashore.

When I got out of the water it was dark and the jackals were still silent. Warm wind, like invisible fingers, mussed my damp hair. I could hear my sandals slapping on the gravelly earth as I ran lightly up the hill. The moon floated above the hedges, yellow and oily and luminous.

A piece of cactus detached itself and stood in my path.

"Who is it?" I called, my neck hair bristling.

"Wallad el Mawt!"
the shadow whispered in Arabic. Son of death. It was the '48 Arab pejorative for the Jews. Cowards, good for death and nothing else.

The hair on my forearms crawled.
"Man hadda?"
I called out in colloquial Arabic. Who is it?

The figure advanced upon me, its
abbaya
flapping like big black wings.

For a brief second I stood frozen, then all at once old training took over and my legs and arms moved in well-practiced patterns long forgotten. Yelling hoarse battle obscenities I kicked at the figure before me, clawed at his throat, poked at his eyes with stiff fingers. But my legs kicked at air, my fingers grabbed at nothing. And when I searched behind the cactus hedge, there was no one there, only the bristling palms scraping against the wall, and the soft whistling of the wind.

16

W
HEN
I
CAME BACK,
the house was dark, and so were the windows of the Toyota in front. Uncle Mordechai emerged from the toilet, trailing newspaper. "How was the Kinneret?"

"G-good."

Uncle Mordechai peered into my face. "What happened?"

"N-nothing."

He grabbed my hand and held it up.
"Nothing?!"

My palm was vibrating as if air jets were blowing through the fingertips. "I ... don't know, I ... it was--someone." Haltingly I told him about the figure I had just seen. "I don't know, maybe ... maybe he wasn't there, and I just thought he was--"

A shadow darkened the terrace door. Amnon Amzaleg, in gray military underwear, stood rubbing his gray scalp.

Uncle Mordechai did not take his eyes off me. "The donkey just saw
him
again. Near the old sheikh's grave--"

Amzaleg wheeled around and, one hand at the small of his back, hopped over on the terrace wall and was gone. In a moment I heard his raspy voice outside, then the slam of a car door, and feet running down the hill. Then there was nothing.

Uncle Mordechai bent over and tugged at the drawer under the fridge, and pulled out an ancient long-barreled Parabellum. "Here, take this." He tried to foist it into my hand. "No, take, take, it's good for thirty paces, maybe forty." The gun must have been fifty years old.

I pushed his hand away. Seven years I had managed to live without weapons; I was not about to start carrying one again.

We were both silent.

Uncle Mordechai said, "Me, I don't believe in the tall tales."

"No, no. Who does?"

Uncle Mordechai and I stared at each other for a moment. Then, just as he had left, Amzaleg was back, soaring silently over the terrace wall. "Nothing. Them neither." In his right hand he held a scuffed Beretta, its safety off. "You want?" he said, when he saw me looking.

I shook my head. Two days here, and again everyone was offering me guns.

As I went to bed I heard Amzaleg and Uncle Mordechai conferring in low voices in the kitchen. Once there was a knock on the door. My uncle went to open it and I heard a low murmur--it was one of the yeshiva boys--though I couldn't catch the words.

"No," my uncle's voice rasped. "You stay out. What do you want?"

The murmur continued.

"Well, I have a tool also," my uncle snapped, using the old '48 slang for a gun. "And he can take care of himself, too. Now get out!"

The door slammed.

Next morning, my head still fuzzy, I sought out Amzaleg to talk about the phantasm. But he had gone to Tel Aviv to meet his daughter, who now lived with her remarried mother in an Arab village near Haifa. Uncle Mordechai came back from some medical checkup in Afula and closed himself off with the newspaper. Margalit did not want to talk about last night either.

By noon I'd had enough of the silence, and the foggy memory of the night before, and decided to return to Tel Aviv. I called Ehud to let him know I'd be moving to a hotel. I did not want to stay near Ruthy; I needed a clear head to do the play.

But it was Ruthy who answered. "No. He's in the factory, I don't know. How is Tveriah?"

"Hot. I burned my back." All thoughts of the night apparition evaporated the moment I heard her voice. "Is ... is it hot in Tel Aviv?"

"Very. When are you coming back?"

"In two days," I lied. "Maybe three."

Perhaps I could sneak in when she was not home, to pick up my shaving kit.

I could hear her shallow breathing.

I said, "I ... I told the lawyer that I'll do the play ..."

Ruthy said nothing. I could hear the Peace Station yammering in the background.

"Anyway," I said, "at least I'll stay for the wedding."

Ruthy said, "Can I read it again?" Then she added, "Come back quickly."

"Maybe," I said. "If you behave."

There was another silence.

Uncle Mordechai shouted at me from the kitchen, "Duvid! You finished with the phone? It's two shekels every minute!"

"No," Ruthy said. "Come back soon."

"Maybe," I snapped, and hung up.