Black Box (27 page)

Why did I do it? An excellent question. I have no answer. At least not an easy one. With your permission I shall set forth the facts of the present plot, so that at least we can agree upon the sequence of events. At the end of February, like thunder out of a clear sky, you suddenly instructed me to sell the property in Zikhron so as to finance Rabbi Sommo’s crusade. I admit that I saw fit to play for time, in the hope of cooling off your Robin Hood caprice. I took the trouble to collect and set out for you the information required for a reconsideration. My hope was to coax you down with delicacy and tact from the nut tree you had climbed. As a token of gratitude you drenched me with a flood of reproaches and insults such as would delight your father himself if he could only remember who you are, who I am, and who he is himself. As for the saintly Manfred, he wiped your spittle off his face and religiously carried out your instructions: sell up, pay up, and shut up.

I confess without any shame: at this point I permitted myself to cut a few corners. I displayed initiative under heavy fire, and decided on my own to sell another of your properties to pay that protection money, but I saved Zikhron for you. I must have been under the influence of prophetic inspiration: you have to admit that I managed to foresee with amazing accuracy your next twist. Before I could say “mad Gudonski” you had changed your mind and were clinging to your property in Zikhron as if your life depended on it. Hand on my heart, Alex: if I had executed your original instructions in February or March and sold the Winter Palace, you would have wrung my poor neck, or at least plucked out my few remaining hairs.

And what princely thanks did I get, Marquis? You stood me against the wall and fired me. Just like that. Kaput! Anyway, I accepted the verdict and withdrew from managing your affairs (after thirty-eight years of unconditional devoted service to the glorious House of Gudonski!). I even felt relieved. But before I could finish my cigarette you sent an urgent cable to say that you had changed your mind again, craved my forgiveness, and needed, more or less, my emotional intensive care. And what did Magnanimous Manfred do? Instead of sending you to hell with all your whims and lunacies, he got up and dashed the very same day to London, where he sat at your feet for a night and a day and took a concentrated bombardment of fire and smoke from you (“Fink,” you called me, before you decided to promote me to the rank of Rasputin). And when eventually you managed to cool down somewhat, you issued a new set of orders: all of a sudden you wanted me to detach the Beauty from her Beast, and “buy the gentleman lock, stock, and barrel, no matter what the price.” Why? No reason. “Decree of the king in council” and that’s that.

And so, having received a proper dressing down, dear Manfred returned to Jerusalem with his bald head bowed and his tail between his legs, and began to pull on the strings. However, in the midst of all this he had an inspiration. Apropos of the taming of the Shrew, why not fix a halter on Sommo’s saintly snout, tether him with a little rope, so that your father’s fortune, instead of being wasted on founding a Fonivezh Yeshiva in Halhoul or a Chortkov Shtibl in Upper Qalqiliya, would be intelligently invested in solid real estate. So much for my sin and my crime. And bear in mind that the fortune in question was as much soaked in Zakheim’s blood and sweat as it was the fruit of the Tsar’s visions. It would appear that to my misfortune I have a sentimental bond with the orphaned wealth of the various generations of the Gudonski family. I have invested the best years of my life in building it up, and I do not get any kick out of demolishing it with my own hands. Once, in 1949, when I was the deputy military attorney, I managed to get a reduced sentence for a soldier by the name of Naji Santos, who had removed a hand grenade from his base, claiming that he had spent a year and a half writing the whole Book of Psalms in tiny letters on it in India ink. Apparently I too am becoming something of a Santos.

And so I sealed my nostrils carefully with a clothespin and descended deep into the masses. I burst my ulcer in a titanic effort to train Saint Sommo to be a Jesuitical fanatic instead of a Kamikaze fanatic. And believe me, my dear Alex, when I say that this was a very doubtful pleasure: so numerous were the missionary sermons that I was forced to swallow that I really should have charged your account by the yard.

And thus, while you were still cursing me and firing me and the Rabbi was saving my soul, I managed to tie Sommo hand and foot to my son-in-law Zohar Etgar and to turn him, if not through one hundred and eighty degrees, at least through ninety, give or take a degree. With the result that at this moment in time your hundred thousand are heeding the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, and very soon they will be two hundred thousand.

And now you will ask why I had to bother. Surely I could simply have said to myself: Look here, Manfred, if your crazy Count has really got a fancy to hang a gold ring in a pig’s nose, just pocket your commission quietly and let him jump off the roof. At this point Tender Feelings enter the picture. Zakheim Iscariot may not turn his nose up at the thirty pieces of silver (or more), but he has no desire for some reason to hand his lord over to be crucified. Nor does good Manfred wish to be a party to the exploitation of orphans. We were friends, you and I. Or so I thought. When you were seven or eight, a strange, gloomy child who made statues for rhesus monkeys and tried to bite himself in the mirror, the undersigned had already placed his sharp wits at the service of your father’s visions. Together the two of us built an empire out of nothing. It all began in the roaring thirties. The day will come, my learned client, when I shall finally sit down and write my sensational memoirs, and you will discover how I wallowed for your father’s sake in the filth of degenerate Arab effendis, in foul British beer, in the Bolshevik phrases of nasal officials of the Jewish Agency—and all so as cunningly to add acre to acre, stone to stone, pound to pound, everything that you received from me on a silver tray, gift-wrapped and tied up with a blue ribbon. Take it or leave it, chum; I couldn’t stand the thought that you would waste it all on fixing a golden mezuzah on every Arab ruin in the territories, on tying tefillin on every Godforsaken Arab hill, on all that idolatry. On the contrary, before my mind’s eye there opened up the attractive prospect of using Sommo to renew our days as of old, to purchase at rock-bottom prices parcels of land in places where no white man had yet set foot, to hitch our wagon to this messiah’s donkey and do for you in the present twice as much as I did for your father in his day. That is the case for the defense, Alex. There are only one or two odd points left.

By efforts verging on martyrdom I set Sommo on the (relatively) straight and narrow path. I turned the black Pygmalion into a Zionist real-estate dealer, and attached Zohar to him in the role of safety pin. I hoped that in the course of time you too would calm down, sober up a little, and authorize me to mount in your name the new wagon I had built. I was confident that when the sound and the fury were over you might at last begin to behave like a true Gudonski. I was planning that your money plus my brains plus Sommo’s armor-piercing cousinhood plus Zohar’s dynamism would make all our fortunes and we would live happily ever after. In a nutshell, to quote the diminutive Moses, all in all I was trying to bring forth sweetness from the strong. And that’s all there is to it, mate. That was the only reason I associated myself with the Sommo-Paris axis, and plugged into the Toulouse deal. That was the reason I begged you to agree to exchange your ruin in Zikhron, which doesn’t bring you in a penny and only gobbles up property tax, for a foothold in Bethlehem, where the future lies. Take note, Alex: our Bolsheviks are on their last legs. The day is not far off when this country will be in the hands of Sommo & Zohar and their ilk. And then land in the West Bank and the Sinai will be released for urban development; and every clod of earth will be worth its weight in gold. Believe me, sweetheart, for a lot less than this your father would have sent me a little Mercedes and a case of champagne for my birthday.

And what did you do, darling? Instead of inscribing Manfred in the Golden Book, instead of offering thanks thrice a day to your father for bequeathing you not only his throne but also his own private Bismarck, instead of the Mercedes and the champagne, you fired me again. And you cursed and swore at me in your cables like a drunken mujik. And what’s more, you heaped your new lunacy on me: buying Boaz from them. As it says in Shakespeare: “My kingdom for a horse” (but not for an ass, Alex!). And this after all you forced me to do in your divorce suits? Why Boaz all of a sudden? What for? What’s the big deal?

For so it seemed good to you. “Le Roy le veult,” and that’s that. The Frenchified Russian aristocracy from North Binyamina Region smashes crystal goblets, and we the servants have to pick up the pieces submissively and scrub the stains off the carpet.

When I carried out my humanitarian duty of delaying the execution a little in case you reconsidered your mad orders, you fired me again and hired Roberto in my place. Just as you threw your father in the bin, just as you threw Ilana and Boaz on the scrap heap, just as now you have decided to throw yourself in hell: like throwing away a pair of old socks. After thirty-eight years of service! Me, who built the whole Duchy of Gudonski out of nothing! You’ve heard of how the Eskimos throw their old people out in the snow? Well, even they don’t spit in their faces as well. Roberto! That will writer! That maître d’!

And then, lo and behold, dear Uncle Manfred, that great-souled avatar of King Lear and Pere Goriot, determined, despite the blow, to remain at his post. To turn a blind eye to his dishonorable discharge. “Here I stand, and can do no other.” In the military court of appeals we once had a case of a soldier who had refused to operate a mortar on the grounds that he had personally signed for the shells.

And in the meantime you bought Boaz, shook off Roberto, and turned to me again pleading that we start afresh. You know, my genius, there’s method in this madness. First you trample (Ilana, Boaz, me, even Sommo), then you apologize, you grovel, you shower with money and excuses, you mollify and attempt to purchase retroactive absolution. And even to beg for mercy. What is this: folk Christianity? “They that shoot in tears shall bandage in joy”? “As you have murdered, so shall you bind up”?

And at once you imposed a new task upon me: to lay my hands on the monumental child on your behalf and at your expense, and to assist him to set up a sort of hippie colony on your father’s abandoned land. (By the way, that Gulliver is evidently fashioned of passably good materials, albeit totally demented, even by the standards of the Gudonski family.) Manfred, your unconditional lover, once more gritted his teeth but discharged your lunatic instructions. Like a cobra dancing to a fakir’s pipe. He betook himself to Zikhron. He pleaded. He paid. He lubricated. He pacified the local police. Evidently I still have some sort of little gland that goes on secreting a kind of affection toward you and constant anxiety about your health. If you will permit me, I shall remind you that even the great Shakespeare himself did not let Hamlet, in the mass-stabbing scene, casually run through his faithful Horatio. In my humble opinion, it is not I who owe you an explanation, but your lordship who owes me at the least a formal apology (if not a case of champagne). And by the way, you also owe me money: I invest some two hundred fifty dollars per month in your Goliath as per your orders. But you deigned to forget (since when do you have a head for trifles?) that you have no ready cash here. On the other hand you now have, thanks to me, a great pile in your William Tell account, following the Magdiel-Toulouse deal. It’s not very nice to descend from the sublimity of moral stocktaking to the banality of the financial vale of tears, but I would still ask you not to forget. And don’t wave your famous will at me again with the sweet item for my grandchildren: old Manfred may be a bit doddery, but he is still far from being senile. Nor has he volunteered in the meantime for the Salvation Army.

Or perhaps he has joined up after all, without noticing it? Unknowingly joined the motley ranks of holders of the Legion of Honor for rescuing Alexander the Wretched? Otherwise how to explain his peculiar devotion to you and all your successive whims?

Go fuck yourself, Alex. Go and get married to Sommo, adopt your ex-wife as your mother, her hoodlum as a rhesus monkey, and Roberto as your adjutant. Get lost. That’s what I should have said to you once and for all. Go and donate your trousers to the Union of Reformed Nymphomaniacs for Judaea and Samaria, and get the hell off my poor back.

The sad thing is that sentimentality is constantly getting the better of my pure reason. Antediluvian memories tie me to you like a pair of handcuffs. You are stuck in my soul like a rusty nail without a head. And apparently I am stuck in you too, somewhere among the cogwheels you are equipped with instead of a soul. I wish you’d explain to me one day over a glass of whisky how your black magic works on us. How do you manage to manipulate us all, over and over again, including foolish Uncle Manfred? In 1943, when I was still a little second lieutenant in the British Army, I was called out in the middle of the night once to Montgomery’s field HQ in the Cyrenaica desert, to translate some German document for him. Why is it that in your presence I always feel as I did then, with him? What is there about you that makes me jump to attention? Time and time again I click my heels (symbolically) and whisper submissively “Yessir” to all your whims and insults. What is the spell that binds us all to you, even from beyond the Atlantic?

Perhaps it is the mysterious combination of ruthlessness and helplessness.