The Frozen Rabbi (40 page)

Not once during the succeeding years did he relax from participating in the relentless cycles of bloodletting. Despite the end of the so-called Arab Revolt and the monotony of terror and counterterror that intervened before the beginning of the next so-called Arab revolt, Ruby never gave up his part in the general effort to turn the Promised Land into a slaughterhouse. Of course there were interludes along the way, during which Ruby’s edgy impatience caused others to keep their distance. As he and the twins moved from safehouse to smallholder farm among the ranks of the maverick irregulars, the immigrant earned not only the fear and respect of his fellows but a reputation as a solitary of forbidding countenance. The Baal Shatikah, his comrades called him (though never to his face), the Master of Silence: “Silence, too, is sometimes a midrash.”

Over time he picked up enough of the language to follow orders and conversations, though never enough to respond to questions with any exactitude. He figured that the lashon hakodesh, the holy language, albeit secularized, might sear his tongue if he spoke it, and his failure to master even the rudiments of Hebrew often left strangers to conclude he was mute. All of which contributed along with his monkish aloofness to the legend he was unintentionally cultivating as a man apart. He was perceived by the superstitious (and there were many among the settlers fresh from the rustic culture of Eastern Europe) as quite possibly inhuman, a creature fashioned from clay to avenge all affronts to Israel; it was a notion that caused his uncles to worry that they had perhaps created a golem, though who could argue with success? And over the years, as the tit-for-tactics of terror and reprisal became almost routine, Ruby’s notoriety grew, his sketchy identity further subsumed by the numerous masquerades he was forced to adopt. In the end, fabled among the Jews, to himself he was no one at all: the Master of Silence had become a symbol referred to in secret circles as Ruben ben None, and his heartlessness among a people attempting to shed millennia of acute sensitivity and guilt was universally extolled.

Ruby’s unvarying silence, so conspicuous in places where talk was a mania, was sometimes construed as endorsement, sometimes disapproval, according to the attitude of the beholder. But the truth was he neither approved nor condemned, but was finally indifferent, just as he was indifferent to the life of the k’vutzah itself—which, with its religion of labor, was identical to the dozens of others that proliferated all over the Yishuv. Nevertheless, since not even the guardians were exempt from the work of the collective, Ruby became mechanically proficient at the chores he was assigned. Though he would ultimately settle into the loner’s occupation of tending sheep, he also milked goats, dug trenches, drained septic tanks, and erected stockades; he repaired roof girders and laths and even demonstrated some ingenuity in doctoring the commune’s capricious three-phase dynamo, called ironically Ner Tamid, the Everlasting Light. His uncles, though they praised his industry, compared the facile work of the current settlement to the herculean hardships of its primitive beginnings during the time called the Second Aliyah. Ruby had arrived during the Fourth, a piece of history for which he gave not a fig. Uninspired by the labors he conducted with due diligence, neither was Ruby aroused by the festivals that were the rigorous calendar’s only breathing spells. Shabbat, when the settlers allowed themselves a thimbleful of sweet Carmel wine, was as unremarkable as Purim, when they donned costumes and flogged an effigy of Haman. They sang patriotic anthems (“Yesh Li Kinneret” and “God Will Rebuild Galilee”) and danced the hora in concentric circles, the outer circle whirling as in a game of crack the whip. Then even Yehezkel and Yigdal, still agile for all their bulk, would join in, and girls with strong thighs—wearing the shorts that caused the Mussulmen to call them whores—might approach Ruby where he sat with his back against a eucalyptus tree. These were strapping girls bred to flirting with danger and tempting fate, but when they tried to draw him into the dance, Ruby only eyed them dispassionately and waved them away as he waited for the next summons to action.

He never had to wait long. Marching orders were received from the heroes of the Resistance, who were all reputed to be half-mad: such as Orde Wingate, the philo-Semitic British colonel who’d become a sort of Lawrence of Palestine and liked to repeat with his unorthodox night squads the battle strategies of King Saul. Later came the storied leaders of the Underground like Gideon, Raziel, and the redoubtable Yair, figures whom the Yishuv simultaneously despised for their brutality and lionized for their courage. Like his uncles who reserved their independent right to attach themselves to any movement that took their fancy, Ruby swore allegiance to no special group. But he seldom missed an opportunity to participate in the lightning raids on Arab villages, where the men were pulled from their houses and selected for execution according to height or length of beard, and the women, to prove they weren’t concealing small arms, were made to bare their breasts. He tossed grenades into market stalls where the resulting carnage was indistinguishable from smashed pottery and the pulp of burst melons. Whenever there were mass attacks there was mass retaliation, but when individuals were hit a more personal response was called for, and here Ruby’s peculiar talents came into play. Always swift, he was groomed as well in furtiveness and in handling the Sten guns and pipe bombs he was familiar with from another life. He could be a sniper, a sapper, a strangler, an artist with the shiv or the ice pick (his stealth weapon of choice), and he preferred what his commanders also favored: that he work alone.

About hatsorer, the enemy, he had no detailed knowledge beyond what his fellows professed concerning Arabian culture at their fireside counsels: that they prayed on their knees with their butts in the air, inviting bullets; that to the Ishmaelite the yahudy were all
wallah al mitha
, the children of death. For all Ruby knew some of his victims might even have been guilty of the crimes for which they were punished, though that was not the point. What was the point? To fill the world with terror, the way a deaf composer makes music, and for this Ruben ben None had a kind of genius. Professional that he was, he left calling cards inscribed in Arabic by the partisans’ propaganda minister, notes he stuffed into some newly carved orifice, reading
AKHAZA
ASSAR
W’
NAFA
ELLAR
(Revenge has been taken and the shame done away with). This, he was told, was a message the enemy would comprehend. Though he took no pride in his deeds, neither did he feel any shame. He was aware that there was an end to which the Baal Shatikah was a means, but though he cared not a whit whether the nation of Israel ever came into being, he did what was expected of him to further that cause.

One night in thirty-six or -seven during the latest Arab rebellion, Ruby was dispatched with three other militia members to ambush a busload of Muslim pilgrims on their way to visit a shrine near Ein Musmus. Somewhere along the Afula Road, however, they were intercepted by a British patrol that had barricaded the highway. The patrol had been alerted by one of the informers, who abounded in those days when so many Zionists were horrified by the sanguinary tactics of the Underground. Just as the bus, with the pilgrims clinging to the luggage on its roof, disappeared over the brow of a hill, an armed blockade was erected ahead of the commandos, who swerved about only to face another obstruction behind. A shootout resulted during which three of the four passengers in the bullet-pocked landau were injured; the fourth, in the rumble seat next to Ruby, died on the spot, shards of his skull embedded in Ruby’s throat. The survivors were taken to the Jerusalem Central Prison, a massive stone citadel converted from an old Russian hostel, where after a brief stay in the infirmary they were confined to the zinzana cells on the jail’s lower level. When they were well enough, they were taken one by one from their isolation into the harsh light of the interrogation chamber, where they were tortured. The battery of questions was as relentless as the physical battery to the soles of their feet, which were whipped with leather falakot, a persecution made the more senseless due to the gag that prohibited them from answering inquiries. Cigarettes were stubbed out in their ears, fingernails and toenails extracted with plyers, their beards uprooted by the fistful. An officer donned rubber gloves with a physician’s fastidiousness to pinch their testicles; their noses were clothespinned and pitchers of water poured down their gullets in such volume that it seeped from their ears. Then they were taken back to their confinement to recuperate for the next round of abuse.

When his gag was removed, Ruby, tight-lipped as ever, refused even to divulge his name—what, after all,
was
his name? Then he heard one of his interrogators remark in an aside to his senior officer that the previous chap had offered as his sobriquet the very original, “My name is Death.” Which gave the Baal Shatikah a competitive pang. “
My
name is Death!” he asserted, and though his voice rasped from his injuries, so loudly did he make his claim that others along the corridor, upon hearing him, echoed the same declaration from their cells. It was the closest Ruby had come to laughing out loud in an age, and as for the torture, it was a blessing, really, as the exquisite pain revived the anger he could no longer generate on his own.

Then one day the torture stopped and the prisoners were marched into an open-air courtyard where an ad hoc affiliation of a military and civic tribunal summarily condemned them to be hanged. They were issued the red sackcloth uniforms reserved for the doomed and transferred to above-ground cells to await execution. Ruby’s companions were permitted to share a common cell, but the Baal Shatikah (whom the Brits never learned they had in their custody) was housed alone in deference to his own request. There in a tomb-size compartment with its bucket and lice-ridden bourge, Ruby set about determining his options for escape. This was not so much from any ardent desire to avoid the gallows as from an internal engine fueled by the years of barbarous application. He was further vitalized by the discovery, in a floor crevice where an earlier prisoner had secreted it, of a rusty razor blade. But before he had decided whether to use the blade to begin a tunnel or simply to slit a guard’s throat, the question became moot; for the wall of the adjoining cell was blown away, taking with it the cinderblock partition separating that cubicle from Ruby’s own.

It happened that his partners in crime, Aryeh and Asher, had taken it upon themselves to deprive the British command of their vengeance. Drunk on the idealism of Jewish revolution, Ruby’s neighbors called themselves Hasmoneans and were frequently heard singing the Revisionist anthem: “Soldiers without names are we.” In their ecstatic anticipation of dying for the Homeland, they had a fragmentation grenade smuggled into the jail inside a pineapple. What they had in mind was to detonate the grenade on the gallows, thereby going out like Samson taking the Philistines with him. But when they learned that the other prisoners were to witness the execution, they opted instead for a kiddish hashem, a private martyrdom. Singing “Hatikvah,” they hugged each other with the grenade wedged between their chests like a shared heart and together pulled the pin. The building was rocked to its foundation, and through the film of dust from the rubble and the mist of blood from the fallen, Ruby walked out onto the stone flags of the prison compound. While the guards were still stunned, he scaled the wall, rolling over the barbed wire on top, which claimed his uniform and bit his flesh, then dropped to the Jaffa Road on the other side. There he prevailed upon the first beggar he found to render up his rags.

He hid in attic rooms open to the weather, in flooded cellars; grew his beard and cut it again, cut his hair and grew it back out; wore cartwheel hats, tarbooshes, and sometimes the hijab burnoose and veil of the devout Muslim woman, his eyes rimmed in antimony. At some point Ruby got word to Yig and Yez that it was too dangerous for him to return to Tel Elohim. They tracked him to a fleabag safehouse in Nahariya and teased him that the mug shot that hung now in every post office in Palestine failed to do him justice, though at least the price on his head was handsome. Then they grew solemn as they informed him that his Aunt Esther and her husband Zerubavel, secretary of the Committee for National Liberation, had been identified among the martyrs at Kibbutz Szold, and Ruby had to think for a moment to remember who they were. Later on he received the news that his uncles themselves had been captured by a British squadron lying in wait for them as they set out to mine the railroad works at Emek Zvulun—for the targets of the Irgunists had shifted from Arab to Occupation holdings. They were hanged on the ramparts of the Acre fortress, whose scaffold (it was said) afforded a view over the delft blue Mediterranean as far as Europe, which like the Holy Land was becoming a charnel house.

RUBY
STOOD
ATOP
the watchtower in the hot khamsin wind and swiveled the mercury-vapor beam. He aimed it in the direction of the Arab village in the valley, where a dog barked, a muezzin sang, and the strings of an oud were being tuned. Beyond the village were the slopes of the Galilee, the massif of Mount Carmel, and the coast above Haifa scalloped with coves wherein lay the tramp vessels of the Beth Aliyah. These were the ships teeming with refugees fleeing a continent whose crimes were so incomprehensible that even its victims could not pronounce them. When they weren’t too busy blowing up British installations, the boys of the Resistance worked in concert with the Hagganah to spirit these illegal immigrants secretly ashore from their coffin ships. Once on dry land the refugees were dispersed to the outposts of Kfar Saba, Gan Hasharon, Kiryat Anavim, and Beit Haarava, which absorbed them. Sometimes Ruby joined the rescuers, if only to distract himself from the endless rounds of bombing post offices, bridges, barracks, and trains. As effective an assassin as ever, he found himself increasingly disengaged from such operations; his famous battle frenzy seemed to be lately in mothballs, and he’d begun to eye the survivors dredged from the sea as if they might embody something he’d lost. He was invariably disappointed, ready to toss the lot of them back overboard again; Master of Silence that he was, he couldn’t seem to forgive them for having no language with which to express what they’d seen.