the Debba (2010) (30 page)

There was a little pause.

I said at last, "Why--why did he give Paltiel his poetry, my father?" My voice came out all rough, and I coughed, to clear it.

I had no idea why I was asking Leibele, but he answered, without hesitation or evasion. "Isser gave him everything, because no matter--no matter how he tried, this
kacker
Paltiel--after twenty-eight, he couldn't write any more poems for this
Arabush
--everything he wrote was for him--but he just couldn't write anymore
--challas--"
Finished, in Arabic.

There was a long pause as Leibele stared far away, perhaps at the other sidewalk, where a few stooped garbagemen were now collecting rotting bags into a wheelbarrow.

"Twice he tried to kill himself, Paltiel--twice--once in Yaffo, he tried to drown himself in the sewer, the other time--he cut his hands, in the store--each time Isser saved him--"

I tried to speak but no sound came.

"Finally Isser said to him, he said, 'Take my poems, give them to him, they are yours--'"

A gaggle of white pigeons flew past, in formation, their wings clacking. Leibele followed them with his eyes.

A sudden cheer erupted at the back, where some actors were listening to a transistor radio.

Leibele put down his coffee cup, and got up; only now did I notice he was not dressed in his waiter's clothes, but rather in blue Atta pants, and a white nylon shirt. But whether it was his day off, or he had put these clothes on to vote, I could not tell.

"They only tell lies," Leibele said, as though all he had just told was a mere continuation of what he had said before about the newspapers. "Lies, everybody. To themselves, too--only what they want to believe--"

Then he left.

59

W
E STOOD ON THE
empty viewing terrace at Ben Gurion Airport, Amzaleg and I, looking over the tarmac. The warm wind ruffled my hair, just as it did when I had landed, two thousand years ago.

I had left Jenny behind with the actors and crew and Kagan (his chin resplendent in a large bandage), all who had come to bid us good-bye, and gone out with Amzaleg for one last talk.

Amzaleg said, "Shimmel said he's sorry he couldn't come, but he had a meeting."

That morning the radio announced that Shim'on Gershonovitz had turned his political colors and accepted the post of interior minister in Begin's government.

I said now to Amzaleg, "What about you? Will they also kick you out of the police?"

Right after the play Amzaleg was suspended, for having disobeyed Gershonovitz's order to close us down. I still did not understand why Amzaleg had done it.

He shrugged, to show it was possible, then stuck his finger upward in the Arab gesture of
zayin
and spit fully, to emphasize he didn't care. I doubted it. A whole career down the drain like that--giving it all up on a moment's decision. And for what? Besides, it was not only he who would pay. His daughter could now lose her police-family scholarship, leave university, and have to go to work. And as a Moroccan girl, what could she do? Be a hairdresser, or a manicurist? Or live with her mother and Arab stepfather, and so become the only thing worse than a Moroccan?

But children always pay here.

There was a long pause as we both looked at the empty tarmac.

"It wasn't the Arabs," I said. "It was the
shoo-shoo
that did all these things to me."

"Only to scare you off."

"Shit in yogurt. Only scare. The Samson--that was to scare me? That was to put me in the hospital."

He looked away. "I had no say in it."

I should have left it at that but could not. "And later? When Yaro called me?"

Amzaleg said nothing.

I could see a small business jet taxiing on the runway, an Astra, braking every now and then, its nose dipping.

I said, "When he tried to take me down, to stop the play? All because of the elections?"

"Not because of the elections. No, no. By that time we didn't know if--if you were with us or with our foes." He used the biblical word, "haters," in its original construction.

And he had said "we."

I tried to look at his eyes but he kept staring into the distance as he spoke in a halting singsong. "We knew you were his--son, of Seddiqi ... but we were sure you--that you didn't know ... But then you went ahead with this play ... and you didn't want to stop ... All right, we said, he doesn't know, he wants to honor his--father ... but then you began to organize the
shabbab
in Yaffo ... and you helped them fight the Kach demonstrators ..."

"Goddamn
Hitlerjugend,"
I said, "that's what they are."

"And you taught them perimeter defense, night procedures ...
gimmel
tricks ... and then when Seddiqi told you about these messages--"

"You never liked what they did, did you?" I said. "That someone was trying to make peace behind your back. You had to listen in, to make sure nothing happened."

Amzaleg went on as if I had not spoken, "So Shimmel told Yaro to send the two Betniks away ... so we could grab you, stash you someplace safe for the duration ... but you went to live in that damn Waqf mosque." He turned to me, his bloodshot eyes beseeching me. "What'd you want us to think?"

I said, "Because Ehud kicked me out, that's why. I thought you knew. You had listened to every fart I made."

"But we didn't."

That's right; they couldn't. I had pulled the bugs out of the apartment.

"So some said, this is it, he went over ... the Seddiqi had finally told him everything, and now that he knows ... he has made his choice ... the donkey is with them ...
with them
... you understand? ..."

Son of the Debba; descendant of the Prophet. The Jalood.

"Can you imagine? Every last
Arabush
here would rise up--you know how many
Arabushim
we have?" He sounded like Gershonovitz now.

"Half a million, what do I know?"

"A million and a half. Three hundred thousand in the Galilean Triangle alone ... then in Haifa." His voice was strangled. "Yaffo, Acco, and Nazteret ... another million in the Territories ... If they all rise together ..."

"Yes." Abdallah's words came back to me.

Amzaleg's fist hovered in the air, vibrating as if held captive by two opposing internal forces. "But I said, I argued, 'He's not with them.' I said, 'He likes poetry, Hebrew theater ... he knows Rubin's poems by heart ... he is the son of Isser ...
his
son ..."

I said tightly, "So what if I like poetry. They like poetry, too."

Amzaleg shook his grizzled head. "Not like this. They like the poems of what's her name, this
Arabusha
from Jenin, about eating Jews' livers raw, for the glory of Allah. Nothing about mercy, and pity, and love. Nothing like us."

I tried to peer into the swarthy face of this Moroccan policeman, an ex-assassin like me, who spoke now of mercy, and love, like Jenny; but he still refused to meet my eyes.

The small jet took off, leaving behind it a stink of burned petrol. A larger jet taxied up to the line, a 707.

"... So I said to Shimmel, leave him alone for now, give him time ... but Shimmel said, 'We can't take the chance,' he said ... 'The Arabs know what he is ... and they are already joining forces, because of
him
... just like then, in the Castel ...' So we brought it to the PM and the PM took it again to the Mo'adon ... and they all said ... they said ..." Amzaleg's dark face contorted and his lips disappeared as he pulled them in and bit on them, hard.

I said, "And that's when Yaro called me? To ask me to his office?"

Amzaleg's face screwed up like a prune, as if holding in something big and unmanageable that threatened to burst out.

I said, "And Yaro said okay? To this?"

I could not understand why I was so angry. I would have said okay, too. A direct order like that, with this sort of reasoning. Because what was the Unit for?

There was a long pause as, little by little, Amzaleg's face loosened. "At first Yaro said he didn't believe it ... that you went over ... so we let him see the video ..."

"What video?"

"That we had filmed, how you helped the
shabbab
fight the guys in Yaffo ... with perimeter defense, triple backup,
gimmel
tricks ... how we could do nothing ... nothing ..." His face crunched.

I said, "And Yaro said okay?"

Amzaleg nodded quickly, not speaking of the obvious. Because it was clear that Gershonovitz had asked him first, since he was closest to me and had also once served in the Unit, but that he had refused. And that's why Yaro was called. But even if Amzaleg had refused, still he knew of it and acquiesced.

I took a deep breath and said, "Like in forty-eight."

There was a frozen silence.

I said, "It was you that Gershonovitz called then, in Yaffo, to go after Paltiel."

Amzaleg said nothing.

"In forty-eight," I said. "Before the Castel attack."

"Yes," Amzaleg said at last. "Shimmel called me."

I waited.

Amzaleg's voice was a raspy whisper. "They could never do it themselves, these dainty Ashkenazim in the Haganah. Not in a thousand years. So who could he call?"

"You ... so you ..." My own voice shook.

There was a pause, of a different, nearly religious quality.

"Yes, I killed him, Paltiel." Amzaleg sipped some water from the paper cup he was holding in his thick nicotine-stained fingers.

I could not speak.

Amzaleg began to speak again, conversationally now. "It had just begun, the attack on Yaffo, when I got Shimmel's note ... He said, 'We need your help, please, Amnon, no one else can do it ...' So I left Begin on the roof of Alliance school, with all his idiot advisers ... and I went down to Zerach Brandt Street and waited ... and after half an hour I saw Paltiel, walking ... Glantz and Zussman and a few other Shay guys came out and called to him ... begging him to come back, but he just kept on going ... so I hid behind Shifrin's carpet store and I followed him in ... everyone was shooting like in the Wild West ... like in a movie ... mortar shells flying overhead ... but I recited psalms and followed, to see where he was going ... that maybe Shimmel had made a mistake ... but I saw where he went--three streets away he was already, from Seddiqi's house ... He was almost there ... So I called out to him in Yiddish, like I heard in rehearsals of Isser's plays ... 'Paltiel,' I said to him, 'come here a moment, I beg of you ...' So he came over and I let him have it." Amzaleg turned and looked at me, his eyes black and flat and empty, like Abdallah's. "With a
shubrieh
in the guts. Then I made it look like ... like it was Arabs ..."

"You ... cut--" I could not continue.

"Yes," Amzaleg said conversationally, sipping water. "I cut his
zayin
off, and--and did all the rest." He coughed and swiped at his lips with his knuckles. "Then after, I dragged him all the way back ..."

The roar of a jet engine intensified as a large Air Canada jumbo jet taxied by, faces peering from the windows.

Amzaleg was saying, "... was lucky, so lucky; if I were late maybe five minutes--five fucking minutes. Can you imagine what--" He gave his head a swift shake, then took another sip of water and spit it out.

I leaned on the low concrete rail and stared into the asphalted horizon, waiting for the tremor in my jaw to subside.

Amzaleg said, "Five minutes. Can you imagine? If the Castel had gone to them ... If
he
had gone on, to keep them together, like Ben-Gurion did for us--" Amzaleg poured the remaining water over the balcony and the wind took it away in a cloud of spray. "And this
feigele
poet, because he loved this cock-sucking Arab
cholera
... for his sick love he would have given up all of this ... Everything ..." Amzaleg shook his head in wonder.

It was odd to hear this Moroccan policeman using so many Yiddish words; as if living among the Ashkenazim had rubbed off on him, just as living among the Arabs had rubbed off on the Anons; as it had rubbed off on all of us, here.

I said to him, "Did you read any of Paltiel's ... stuff?" I had wanted to say poems but it didn't come out.

"Yes," Amzaleg said equably, "I read, I read." And suddenly, without warning, he mashed his large fist into the low concrete wall with a tremendous force. There was a sickening thud as the knuckles hit.

Amzaleg's thick nose rode up and down as he gave a loud sniff. "Was a good writer, goddamn him, a beautiful writer, with extra soul." He stared at me with his black Moroccan eyes, now filmed over with pain and moisture. I handed him my clean handkerchief to wipe his cheeks but he took it and wrapped it around his knuckles instead. They were red and raw and bleeding.

"Yes," I said. "Was a good poet, goddamn him."

I suddenly realized that Amzaleg, like everyone else (except for the discredited Professor Tzifroni), still thought it was Paltiel who wrote the poems, since Ruthy had made me keep quiet about it. It also dawned on me I would now probably continue to keep quiet, because my father would have liked it that way.

Another jet took off, trailing smoke that filled my eyes.

Amzaleg was saying something in a low guttural voice, but the noise of the jet swallowed up his words.

"What?" I said, leaning into him.

"'Thou art my enemy, O friend of mine,'" he said, "'my rival and my fate, thy giant shadow on my bride looms ...'"

"Yes," I said. I recalled the words I had quoted to Mr. Gelber, the first time we met.
"Golyatt."
My father's words. Isser's.
My father's
.

"Yes," Amzaleg said. "'In the midst of darkest night it blooms, thy hate; my love, my shadow, my one and only mate ...'" He unwrapped the handkerchief and gave it back to me.

I finished the stanza for him, "'For till the end of days, and ever, until my heart, like slate, with stones and slings and arrows--'"

"Yallah
, enough," Amzaleg said. "Let's take a piss before you go. I gotta be in Shfar'am by twelve."

As we stood side by side, shaking our dicks and bending our knees, the burly policeman said into my shoulder as though answering a question. "Goddammit. You want poetry, or you want a State." He did not say it as a question.

"Both," I said.

Amzaleg let go a huge fart, loud as one of Ittamar's fist trumpets. "Today you can have both." He zipped up, violently.
"Yallah
, go, or you'll miss your plane."

For a moment we stood outside in awkward silence, looking at the bustling terminal, the faded colors, the fluttering flags, anything but each other. I wanted to say I was sorry he had to be suspended, for my father's play to go on; that I understood his shame and anguish at losing his wife to someone he could not even hate; and that I forgave him for lying to me, and for acquiescing in the plan to kill me, because in this place people must kill not only their enemies, for the sake of old evil fictions, but also their kin; and if they didn't forgive each other, soon they would have no friends left. But there was no need to say anything, because whatever had gone before was now over. I was not one of theirs anymore, nor the others', since their fictions were no longer mine, and so there was no need for me to kill anymore, or to participate in killings. But their burdens were still mine to carry, and the burden my father had put on me, the one I could not escape, nor did I want to.

Presently a disembodied voice called for passengers to embark. Amzaleg extended his large hand and I took it awkwardly, minding the bruised knuckles. To my consternation he rose on tiptoe and laid both palms on my head, with the fingers spread in the gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the blessing of the priests. "God will bless you and guard you," he mumbled in guttural cantors' singsong; then he punched my shoulder with his bruised fist, gently (later I found blood stains on my shirt), and walked away in that lumbering gait of his, almost like an Arab.