The Fury of Rachel Monette (38 page)

Sergeant Levy beamed down at her, delighted that she was catching on. Perhaps they could still be friends. “No, he is not very happy. He is saying what the Major told him to say. He is a clever fellow. The Major,” he added, in case there was any ambiguity.

The almost bovine self-satisfaction in his tone gave Rachel a jolt: she realized then that her hand was being taken away; others were playing the cards she had gathered, and they would play them toward ends of their own. Calvi was slipping away. “I want you to take me to the rally,” she said.

The expression on Sergeant Levy's face spoke of the limits to friendship. “I don't think it is possible.”

“Why not? Am I still being held here?”

“No, no, no.” The idea shocked him. “The Major says that you are a great friend of the state of Israel. He thinks you will be given a medal.”

“Good. This friend of Israel wants to go to the rally.”

Sergeant Levy bit his lower lip. “The Major thought you would prefer to rest here until he returned.” To keep her out of the way, to have the field to himself. But she had an hour coming to her. An hour alone with Calvi.

“That just shows how little he knows me. Where is he?”

“At the rally,” Sergeant Levy said resignedly.

“Let's go.”

Sergeant Levy drove her to the university in a green Fiat which seemed to constrict his movements like a too-tight suit. Rachel saw soldiers everywhere—in twos and threes on street corners, parked in jeeps by the roadside, standing beside a tank in a green park. They had grenades hanging from their belts, rifles or submachine guns slung over their shoulders, steel helmets on their heads.

“All that for a public speech?” she asked.

“For war,” Sergeant Levy said.

He turned on the radio. An operatic tenor was singing a dramatic aria. Sergeant Levy slapped the steering wheel in sheer delight: “‘Nessun Dorma.' My favorite, favorite aria.” He listened carefully. “And that is Pavarotti, of course. I love him.” The song ended on a passionate crescendo with the singer crying something that sounded to Rachel like “finch adore.” He repeated it three times to get the idea across, throwing at least five ringing notes into the last “adore” alone. Completely forgetting the traffic Sergeant Levy closed his eyes in ecstasy. Then he shook his head like a man emerging from a trance, breathed deeply, and turned the dial.

Simon Calvi's voice came through the little speaker, subdued and weary. And something else: tense? afraid? The shoddiness of the speaker, or Calvi's self-control prevented her from knowing what it was. The crowd, she noticed, had grown noisier. She could hear pockets of grumbling, muted more by their distance from the microphone than by any reticence of the grumblers. Rachel had trained her ear for detail like that. None of it interested Sergeant Levy. Under his breath he was singing “finch adore” over and over. He didn't hit a note.

They drove up a long winding hill. At the top a line of soldiers stood across the road. They had stopped an emaciated little man who was sitting on a donkey even less well nourished than he. The man pulled some tattered papers from inside his stained shirt and handed them to the officer in command. Sergeant Levy honked the horn. The officer whirled around, his features turning angry. Then he saw Sergeant Levy in the driver's seat and his features in ragged order assumed a respectful expression. The soldiers parted and Sergeant Levy drove through. He didn't need to show any papers. They all knew who he was.

Rachel glanced back. The officer had recovered his angry look before it faded entirely. He made an imperious gesture and the skinny man slid down off the donkey's back. He turned his gaze inward where there was no one to take offense.

Ahead lay the rolling lawns of a broad campus. The modern white buildings were arranged in the simple geometric patterns of someone's master plan. They caught the sun's glare and bounced it right back. Rachel liked her universities old and musty. If, she thought suddenly, she liked them at all. She peered for a moment into a muddy future.

Sergeant Levy parked behind a large L-shaped building which, with another L-shaped building, bracketed a row of I-shaped ones in between. He led Rachel across the lot toward the entrance. Two soldiers stood by the door, submachine guns in their hands. An officer sat in a chair nearby, tanning his face and smoking a pipe.

“Hello, Pinchas,” he said to Sergeant Levy. Sergeant Levy nodded. One of the soldiers held the door open for them. They climbed three flights of stairs. Rachel heard Calvi's voice, like an echo across a canyon. It seemed to come at her through the walls, growing louder as they went up.

When they came to the third floor they walked down an airy well-lit corridor. Two more soldiers stood in front of a heavy dark paneled door. A highly polished brass plaque on the door had writing on it, in Hebrew and English. President of the University, it said in English. The soldiers stepped aside. Very gently Sergeant Levy turned the knob and pushed the door open. Rachel followed him in. A soldier closed the door behind her.

They were in a large bright room, furnished mainly with books which packed the shelves from floor to ceiling. The furniture, a big desk, a couch, a few swivel chairs, had been pushed against the walls. A soldier stood in a corner by the door. His fingers moved restlessly on the stock of his rifle, but his face was inert. On the couch sat a man wearing jeans and a sweat shirt that seemed too big for him. He was the kind of man who usually would take care to comb his thin sandy hair over his bald spot, but not today. He turned as he heard them enter. He lifted a ginger-colored eyebrow at Sergeant Levy, but there was nothing in Dorschug's expression to show that he had ever laid eyes on Rachel before.

On the far side of the room two tall glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony. Seated on the thick red Persian carpet, out of line of sight of anyone on the ground outside, was Major Grunberg. He sat cross-legged, his back to the room. On the floor beside him lay Rachel's cassette recorder and a long black pistol. He held a dozen or more typewritten sheets of paper in his hands, and his eyes followed the text line by line.

On the balcony, a few feet in front of Grunberg, and also with his back to the room, stood Simon Calvi. He wore a very expensive-looking suit which fit his broad shoulders perfectly. It was a fine charcoal worsted; as Rachel came slowly forward she could see in the bright sunlight the thin red stripe running through it.

Calvi was speaking into a battery of microphones, some attached to the wrought-iron guardrail, others on floor stands. Two voices, one electronic, the other unaided, filled the room. They were not quite in unison. Rachel thought of the mighty Oz, hiding behind a curtain while he operated the machinery that made him a wizard.

Simon Calvi had no curtain. All he had was a sheaf of papers in his right hand. He and Grunberg seemed to be turning the pages at the same time. As he spoke Calvi seldom lifted his eyes from the text.

Rachel stopped just behind Grunberg. Over his shoulder she saw that the pages bore the sword and olive-branch symbol of the Israeli army. She raised her eyes and looked beyond Calvi at the crowd below: a field of dark faces stretching to the other L-shaped building a few hundred yards away. Those nearby were sitting; farther back they stood. She heard muttering, some of it puzzled, some irritated, some angry. His head bowed, Calvi did not appear to notice.

Suddenly Grunberg became aware of someone standing over him. He twisted his head, saw Rachel and impatiently waved her back. Although it was the kind of gesture Rachel hated, she complied.

But before she did she looked down, right into his sunken eyes, and said, “I want my hour,” in a quiet, but very clear voice.

32

The crowd. Second-class Jews from dark-skin backwaters: Yemen, Syria, Kurdistan, Algeria, Morocco. They arrived in Israel timid but hopeful; grew dissatisfied; died angry. To ease their dissatisfaction he tried to give them better jobs, better housing. To soothe their anger he gave them pride.

Sometimes it was simple. He could call them to a rally on the grounds of the university. Here at the seat of learning was the unspoken message, you belong as much as your Ashkenazi bosses. So they came, to feel for a few hours the pride in their veins, to demonstrate their strength. And more and more to hear him say that the future lay in the east, and in eastern ways.

But Simon Calvi wasn't saying it today. Instead, in a soft, almost diffident voice he murmured of patience and common enemies and long-term solutions. They did not want to hear it; he had never disappointed them before. Why now? He felt their frustration grow as he spoke. It rose up from the campus with their body heat, up to the balcony where he stood.

You don't like this speech? he thought. It's not mine. It's the unaided effort of Major Grunberg, typed with his own two hands. You find it bland? So do I. But the major sold it to me with the help of a short audio presentation. He's a very persuasive fellow.

I had another one, somewhat stronger. My friend Moses Cohn, who couldn't be with us today, wrote that one for me. He writes very good speeches, but the one he prepared for today was just part of a little joke I was playing on him.

I even had a third, so hard do I labor in your behalf. You won't know the author of this one, a certain Captain I knew in my early years, but he is a true friend of yours. In the past decade he more than anyone else, far more, has been responsible for making me the tough uncompromising champion of the Sephardim you came to see today. I have a notion it was just the sort of thing you wanted: it called for action. Nothing irresponsible. Merely a two-hour nationwide strike of all Oriental and Sephardic Jewish workers, to begin today at one
P.M.
Tough, yes—it wouldn't have left the government much time to react. But hardly an act of revolution these days. No, nothing wrong with it at all, except that you needed the right copy of
Crime and Punishment
to decode the text, and the Captain was keeping company with a few friends who may have come from the wrong side of an obsolete canal.

Calvi paused at the end of one of Grunberg's tedious phrases and raised his eyes from the pages in his hand. He looked over the heads of the crowd, scanning the top-floor windows of the L-shaped library on the far side of the quadrangle. He didn't see the boy.

He returned to the text and read a sentence about the need for cooperation. An analogy was drawn to the story of the Tower of Babel. In no way could he find it apposite. He mumbled quickly through it, deleting what repetitious parts he could. He hoped that nothing was keeping the boy, that nothing had gone wrong.

One step at a time. In a few minutes if all went well, it would be out of his hands, and he would be beyond the reach of Grunberg's power. Or the Captain's. Then it would depend on the undertaker's boy, his sons, the undertaker, and, by the following dawn, Gisela. By the following dawn. If all goes well.

Perhaps she loved him after all. Perhaps he could even learn to love her.

In a way he knew he was relieved that Grunberg had forced this abject little speech on him. How often had he asked himself what would happen in those two hours from one to three? Nothing, he had answered every time, but the question never went away. Now he would never know. To comply with the Captain and get out, or not to comply and get out. He preferred the latter. But the important thing was getting out.

Where was the boy?

He sensed the crowd growing more restless. Did someone jeer, there, by the economics building? Let them jeer: how they will regret it very soon.

Behind him he heard a door softly open and close. He felt eyes on his back, could almost hear Grunberg breathing. A woman said, “I want my hour.” There was such menace in her tone that he almost turned around. Then he recognized the voice. The American woman. She was far more clever than he had thought. Had she been working for Grunberg from the beginning? No. Still, in only a few hours she had been able to find him and set him into action. She was very impressive. But it wasn't going to be enough.

As he turned a page he saw an ambulance approaching on Magnes Boulevard. It pulled to the curb and parked nearby. No one would have looked at it twice. At any moment in a crowd this size someone could have a stroke, or a baby.

And then like a fish about to break the surface a shadow flitted behind one of the windows on the top floor of the library. Calvi's pores opened wide. He felt the sweat streaming over his body, soaking his silk shirt and his worsted trousers, making the hot water bottle slippery on his chest. The words crawled over the page like bacteria under a microscope. He stumbled over them, skipped two lines so that the beginning of one sentence married the end of another, plunged on. His throat felt dry as ashes.

The window opened. His heart beat so violently that his whole body pulsed to its rhythm. Sweat ran off his face in torrents. Couldn't anyone see? Couldn't Grunberg, a few feet away? But no one moved behind him, and the sour mood of the crowd remained unchanged.

The boy leaned out the window. Calvi realized that he had almost forgotten to hook his thumbs over his belt. He found that his hands were glued to the speech. It required all of the power of his will to relax his fingers. The pages fluttered to the floor of the balcony. As slowly as a somnambulist he lowered his hands to his waist and felt for his belt. He stood there, thumbs hooked over the belt, the way men do when they are about to talk tough. But he wasn't talking tough; he wasn't talking at all. His text lay at his feet. A wild urge seized him suddenly, an urge to call for the strike after all. A crazy thought, and Grunberg right behind him. He fought it down.

Seeing him abandon his prepared speech and strike an aggressive pose, the crowd began to stir. Here was the old Simon Calvi at last. But he had nothing to say. He heard himself muttering again the idiotic analogy with the story of the Tower of Babel.

Why was he so slow, the boy? He seemed to be gazing out the window, watching the crowd. At last he poked his arm out. There was a small black object in his hand. He pointed it toward the ground. Calvi's thumbs were knotted around his belt, the muscles in his wrists and hands rigid.