the Debba (2010) (16 page)

Ehud said, "And you shouldn't go naked anymore." He tilted the kitchen table until there was a click, and pulled the drawer out. At its back was a metal box with a combination lock, which he fingered open. Inside was an assortment of throwing knives, cobbler's knives like my father's, a standard-issue switchblade, and a Wiesbaden dagger with a rusty blood groove.

"I don't need a tool," I said irritably. What would I do, take someone down in mid Tel Aviv? I'd go straight to jail. "Give it to Ruthy, in case anyone comes after her."

"Who will come after me?" Ruthy called out drowsily from the bedroom.

"No one," Ehud said tightly. "Go to sleep. You, too, Dada."

I tilted my head toward the bedroom and asked Ehud in a low voice if he didn't want to pull out--meaning that this put Ruthy at risk, too.

He rattled his head tersely no and turned in.

His loyalty and Riva's absolution and Amzaleg's revelation that others might be rooting for the play filled me with such idiotic relief that despite the bruises and knowledge of the nightmares awaiting me, I went to sleep with an easy heart--foolishly expecting that the blackness would soon turn into light.

A little after midnight I woke up, my head ringing with both songs and dead horrors. I went into the bathroom for a drink of water. Ruthy was waiting there for me, sitting on the edge of the tub, her face as white as her mother's.

Without saying a word she got up, closed the door, and silently and ferociously kissed me on the mouth. Still without speaking she stepped out of her pajama pants, rose on her toes to sit on the sink, and spread her legs wide. Then, silent still, she pulled down my gym shorts and pulled me to her.

We fucked fast and silently, mouths open, eyes an inch apart, saying nothing, listening to Ehud's snores coming from the bedroom. When it was over we stood wordlessly side by side, washing ourselves at the sink, looking neither at each other nor at the door.

The singing inside me had stopped and my head filled with pure blackness. I never knew it was possible to despise myself so much.

Ehud's snores stopped, then continued. Ruthy slipped out and was gone.

PART III
Al Dajjal

(The False One)

29

E
ARLY NEXT MORNING BEFORE
Ehud and Ruthy awoke, I escaped from the apartment as if I had just finished a dreck job. The paint had dried on the low stone fence but the glass fragments were still strewn about. I ate a spicy-hot falafel at the Bazel
shuk
, then marched up Zhabotinsky Street to the Dizzengoff police station.

I strode in and said in a loud voice, "I'd like to report some thugs who attacked me last night--" but before I finished a door banged open and Amzaleg emerged from the corridor, unshaven and rumpled. His eyes glinted as he invited me into his office. I followed him in, touched my ear and pointed to the ceiling, twirled my finger, and raised my eyes. Amzaleg nodded briefly. Yes, it was possible.

I said in the same loud voice, "How's the coffee at the canteen here?"

"Shit," Amzaleg rumbled. He pulled a flat bottle of arak out of his drawer and stuck it in his back pocket. "Let's go to Berman's."

At Berman's kiosk Amzaleg led the way to the only table at the back, by a pile of Dubek cigarette cartons, Tempo bottles, and shelves crammed with Reznik chocolate bars. Old Mr. Berman beamed at me in recognition, but erased his smile as Amzaleg shook his head, and wordlessly brought up two glasses and withdrew. Amzaleg poured arak. "Inoculation against microbes," he said when he saw me squinting at the stained rims. It was a Unit expression.

We drank. Abruptly Amzaleg asked, "You carrying anything?"

I shook my head. "Naked."

He nodded with reluctant approval. I drank down my arak and he poured me some more. I said, "If I file a complaint, can you arrest them?"

"No," he said tersely. "You want a policeman to guard you for a few days?"

"I only walk in crowds."

Amzaleg said, "They may try harder next time."

"And do what? They won't shoot me. This isn't Russia." I sounded like Ehud.

Amzaleg said, "Not yet." He sounded like Ruthy.

I sipped.

"Listen, Amnon," I said. "What the hell do they have against me? Is it this play?"

Amzaleg shook his head; his eyes refused to meet mine.

I waited. "You still think it's an Arab who did it?"

Again, no response.

"Because after last night ... I kept thinking, maybe it's really a Jew who did it? Because of something--before forty-eight? And that's why Shimmel wants me out of here and doesn't want you to catch him? ... Maybe it was someone that my father knew, that he would open the door for?" It was a confused question that would have gotten me an F in interrogations.

"Maybe," Amzaleg said.

He pulled out a pack of Gitanes, the kind Shafrir used to smoke, and lit up. "These
bohema
people," he said into the blue smoke. "Many were with him once in the Wrestling Club, no? Maybe one of them came?"

This caught me by surprise. "And you think one of--them--did it?"

Amzaleg gave a squeak with his lips, this one indicating ignorance.

Berman served us two Turkish coffees with cardamom seeds, in glasses like those from which we had just drunk arak.

I drank the scalding bitter syrup.

"But why?" I persisted. "Why would any one of them do it--kill my father?"

"Jealousy, maybe."

There it was now, on the table, just what some of Paltiel's biographies had said, calling my father Paltiel's boyfriend as well as accusing him of stealing Paltiel's work. I grabbed the table's edge and leaned forward, but Amzaleg held up his hand. "Goddammit, Dada," he said levelly. "So your father wasn't one, but half the others were. Paltiel, Shein, Kagan, Tzipkin--"

I fairly shook. "Amnon, this was thirty years ago, all this shit. Thirty years!"

"I didn't say it was one of them. Maybe it was an Arab. They also had Arabs in the Wrestling Club before thirty-six, before they split, and some of them were also ... you know, like Paltiel and Kagan ..."

I wanted to tell Amzaleg that he and Shimmel could go screw themselves, but breathed deeply and said, "Did you ask any of those old wrestlers about the play?"

"Nah." Amzaleg evaded my eyes. "The play probably's got nothing do with it."

"Well, did you at least talk to Kagan about the play? Or to Riva?"

"I have better things to do than talk to old farts about prehistorical literature." He looked at his watch, suddenly eager to go.

"Suit yourself." I threw a ten-shekel note on the table, nodded to old Mr. Berman, and left.

Clearly it was not just the play, but any talk about the literary prehistory that filled everyone with unease. Why that was, I couldn't tell. But it was equally clear that if I wanted to find the answer to why my father had left me his play and why he had died, I had to seek it myself.

30

T
HE STREETS WERE ALREADY
teeming with morning crowds when I walked up Dizzengoff to Riva Yellin's apartment, my tailers trailing behind.

Riva lived atop a decrepit old building on the corner of Dizzengoff and Bar Kochba. It was ten years since I had been here last. She opened the door a full minute after I had knocked, and glared at me. "Why did you come back from Canada?"

When I began to speak, she cut me off. "Because I don't need you, and she doesn't need you either. Go back to the diaspora. Don't ruin her life."

The previous night's absolution was apparently withdrawn.

I burbled that I had nothing to do with Ruthy, that I came to stay with Ehud, that it was Kagan who had picked Ruthy for the play. "And I didn't know she was living with Ehud--I wanted to leave after the shivah, but my father stipulated that I do this play--"

"I know." Wordlessly she moved aside and let me enter.

Her room was bare, with only four wooden chairs with woven seats, a plywood table with a telephone and an ashtray, a hanging gray blanket to separate the bed from the rest of the room, and a cheap Primus stove for heating food on a rickety table by the small fridge. It reeked of bohemian poverty even worse than Kagan's.

I sat down on one chair and she sat on another. I said I had been to see Mr. Glantz. "Just to get a few things from the room--he said you came to visit my father--"

Riva leaned back. "Oh ho ho, I heard you went with the policeman. But what did you need him for? In Cassit they say now you want to catch the killer yourself, this Arab burglar."

"It was not an Arab burglar. He was a Jew."

Riva's eyes turned opaque. "Yeah?"

"Yes. There had been a burglary at the Atta store a month before, so my father wouldn't have opened the door for just anyone--unless he knew him--" I took a deep breath. "Mr. Glantz said you came to visit my father every week--" I waited.

She stared at me, then gave a theatrical sigh. "Give me the cigarettes from my bag."

I handed her the crumpled packet of Dubeks; she lit one and inhaled. She said, "I had come to pick up my check, if you must know. From Paltiel's estate."

"Every week?"

Her eyes were black pinpoints. "Also I went to talk to your father, at the beginning, to tell him not to be an idiot--to go back to her--"

"To--my mother?"

Riva nodded diagonally, not denying, not confirming.

"But why did he leave her?"

"It's none of your business."

"She was sick already, when he left her ... Why didn't she tell him?"

Riva let out a dry laugh. "She had her pride, too."

"But did they quarrel? Fight over something?"

Silence.

"He never fought with anybody," I said. "Not even with ... with his murderer--" I waited, but she remained immobile, smoking in furious silence.

I went on. "Ruthy, she thinks it's somehow connected, to the thing from forty-eight, with Paltiel--because they did the same to him. The same beasts--"

At last I got a spark. "So what do you want me to do, Dada? Sit shivah once more?"

"Just help me catch him. When I catch him, I'll leave."

Riva lit another cigarette with the stub of her first.

I said, "I have a girlfriend in Canada."

For a long minute Riva stared at me, and all at once she seemed to have come to some conclusion. "In thirty-one, in Cassit, that's when I met him for the first time, your father. He just came to my table and told me I looked like his sister--"

"Her name was Hinda Malka. She went with Hitler." I felt my chin vibrate.

"I was sitting there," Riva went on, "talking Bialik and Shakespeare with Paltiel, when the lout suddenly left and your father sat down." She smiled bitterly. "I bet your father paid him to leave, so he could have a free hand with me ... A Debba he could fight, this hero, but to talk to me, oh ho ho, for this he needed Paltiel's permission ..." She stared at me with her made-up animal eyes. "But we were hardly ever alone. In one hour, five times he gave money to people. Paupers, actors, two waiters--"

"Yes."

"--and all the time he kept talking about this play he was writing--this shit in yogurt, the dreck about the Arabs, the poor beasts."

"And he wanted you to play in it, in this play?"

"Yeah," Riva said. "Me and him and Paltiel, and maybe Shein--but of course I said no. You know how many wrote plays for me? Bialik, and Tchernichovsky, and Cohen-Kadosh--" The famous names rolled off her tongue. "I didn't have time."

"So that's why you said no?"

She flushed. "You think maybe I was afraid to play in this dreck? That's what you think?" She raised her voice. "Well, I am telling you, I just didn't have time!"

There was a long pause. I asked, "Why did Paltiel give my father a half share in his work?"

Riva's face closed. "I don't know. Ask the lawyer."

"Gelber said it was in return for a favor--"

"He's an idiot. Asking to be paid for favors? Your father?"

I got up shakily to my feet and she grinned up at me. "So that's it? Nothing else you want to know? Maybe if I did it with him?"

I stopped. "Who killed him?"

Her smile did not waver. "Ask the police. They know."

For a moment we stared at each other. Riva's smile became fixed; then it twisted. "Three times, David, three times he asked me to take the role, three times I told him to put the play in the drawer, to forget about it, that it would only bring grief, to everyone, and to him--" Her neck swelled. "And it did ... just like it did to Paltiel ... and to her ..."

My heart thumped. "So you also think that it ... that my father was killed because of the play?"

Riva grabbed at my hand. "Dada, you leave Ruthy alone! You hear? She's just like Paltiel--this
shmendrik
just took anything and anyone he wanted, without thinking about the cost, to others, or to himself ... She got it from him ... and now you are here, with this play ... How can she say no?" Riva's eyes blazed. "It caused so much grief already to so many, I don't want this dreck to bring grief to her also ... and to you, too ... Go back to Canada, leave ..." Riva's knobby fingers clamped on my wrist with feral strength. "Leave!"

I had to twist my arm this way and that, before I could tear it away and escape.

31

F
ROM A MUCH DEFACED
telephone booth at the Dizzengoff Center I called Professor Gershon Tzifroni of Tel Aviv University, who the week before had castigated the play in
Davar
. The Rubin expert whose book about Paltiel was no longer available.

"Oh, yes, Isser's son," he rasped. "What do you want? I have a lecture soon."

I saw no need to pussyfoot around. "So you think my father stole it?"

"I didn't say stole. I only said it was similar to Rubin's work--"

"So? They were friends!" I rattled off some famous cases of mixed artistic parentage. Cohen-Kadosh and Slonim, Bialik and Ravnitzki. "So why the hell couldn't my father and Paltiel Rubin also ..."

Professor Tzifroni hung up in my mid-sentence.