the Debba (2010) (15 page)

"Told you what?" My head had cleared suddenly and the words sang in my ears, each clear as a high gong.

"She spoke Arabic," Gershonovitz said. "She just picked it up."

"Better than me," Amzaleg said. "And I was born in Casablanca."

The cards were lying now in the middle of the table, forgotten.

"She told us things," Gershonovitz said softly. "The bomb in the Gordon beach, the attack on the Shapira quarter ... so many things she found out for us ... I didn't ask how ..." He passed a beefy hand over his face. "But I don't know if she ever found out who he really was. Nobody knew; and Isser never said anything after he ... finished him, in the Castel."

"Abu Jalood," I said.

For some reason the little hairs rose on the back of my neck.

"Yes," Gershonovitz said. "We were sure he was someone from Haifa, a lawyer or something, someone who knew how to organize, how to negotiate, give and take, keep people together, like Ben-Gurion was for us. A gift from history."

Amzaleg said, "Or maybe from East Jerusalem, from one of the old families. The Nashashibis, or the Erawats. I met some of them. Smart, almost like us."

"A cousin of the Grand Mufti," said Gershonovitz, "is what I heard. Or a Nablus
sa'eed."
A lord.

I said, "And she knew who Abu Jalood was, my mother?"

Gershonovitz said, "Maybe she heard something, in thirty-six, and she only told Isser, so he could catch him."

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

It was not a question. I was merely repeating, to show I understood.

"Yes," Amzaleg said, heavily.
"Hada hoo."
That's it.

There was a long silence. I broke it and spoke directly to Gershonovitz. "And you think he came back, the Debba?" I almost said "it," but caught myself.

"Don't be a donkey," Gershonovitz said. "It was a burglar who made it look as-if, a Jewish
ganef
, not their damn Mahdi."

I opened my mouth but Gershonovitz held up his hand.

"We'll catch the beast, don't worry," he said softly. "You just stop this foolishness with the play and go back to Canada to your shiksa." He gathered the cards and stuck them back into their box. Each of us picked up his own money pile. The poker game was over, but it suddenly felt as if another, bigger game had just begun.

As we congregated in the tiny hall, putting on shoes and sandals, Gershonovitz said to me with the same soft earnestness, "Leave this for us, Duvid, it'd be better for you. Listen to me!"

I laced my sandals, saying nothing. This, for the first time, sounded like a real threat.

25

T
HE FIRST FULL REHEARSAL
took place two days later, Friday morning, right after Independence Day--it was just one long reading. Kagan sat in the midst of the small warehouse in Ehud's chocolate factory, while the chosen actors read their parts in a subdued fashion, milling about. Kagan paid attention only to the timing, which he measured with a large stopwatch and wrote down laboriously after every speech.

The two crowds outside--the Kach demonstrators and the opposing high school students--were smaller, perhaps because of the previous night's Independence Day celebrations, which had lasted till the early morning, with rowdy wild-eyed crowds roaming the streets, chortling and banging on one another's heads with plastic hammers. Ruthy and Ehud and I had also gone out, screaming along with the multitudes, singing soppy prehistorical songs at the top of our voices, until we were caught in a huge hora circle in Kings of Israel Square where, arms on shoulders of strangers and on one another's, we twirled and swirled for what seemed like hours, even Ehud stumbling-dancing on his game leg, hanging on to Ruthy, and to me.

I do not recall how we arrived home, nor how we all fell together on the sofa where, early next morning, the three of us woke up, silent and embarrassed, curled up with one another, reeking with drink and heat and smoke.

Perhaps every actor had been out the night before, because no one was fit for reading that morning. Furthermore, the heat wave engulfing Tel Aviv had intensified during the night and it was hard to breathe in the small rehearsal room. Yet the screams of the Kach crowd were even more fervent than before, and the responding chants of the high school students, despite their smaller number, were stronger as well. When toward noon the cacophony penetrated even the inner warehouse, I left and strode to the parked police cruiser nearby. I rapped on its window; it rolled downward to reveal Amzaleg's swarthy face. At his side sat the skinny policeman from the Dizzengoff station, poking a thumbnail between his front teeth. I unleashed a tirade at Amzaleg, demanding that he get rid of the noisemakers.

"And do what to them?" Amzaleg asked in a voice just as loud as mine. "They have a demonstration permit."

"But they don't let us rehearse. They're making enough noise to raise the dead, they're shouting--"

"So they are shouting! Nowadays anyone can say any damn thing he wants ..." He paused, as if baiting me to speak further.

I turned on my heels. Slamming on the car's side, I hurried back, toward the soaring, singing words.

26

A
FTER THE MORNING REHEARSAL
I made my way to the
Davar
newspaper's morgue, trailed by my twin shadows.

It was a dusty room on the second floor of a large industrial building on Balfour Street, not far from Gelber's office. They kept copies of all newspapers, including their competitors; perhaps out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

At first the bespectacled librarian refused to let me in. Suddenly she relented. "Starkman? Oh, yes, you are his son. He loaned me some money for rent, in forty-two."

Mr. Gelber was right: it was a wonder my father had not died in the poorhouse.

For the next three hours I browsed through old newspapers, decades-old literary supplements, long essays by forgotten theater critics about my father, Paltiel, and their small theater troupe. About the early Purim plays, the skits, the evenings of declamatory poetry. I photocopied
Davar
's own poisonous editorial following the interrupted 1946 performance, castigating all involved in it. I also found a
Hatzofe
article mocking the "primitive rumor" that the real Debba would appear at the end of the Haifa performance, to avenge himself upon the Jews and liberate his people. "A pity the show was interrupted," mocked the long-ago writer, "or the Arabs would've seen they had no savior and then leave. Or perhaps," he added as an impish postscript, "our brave boys would have caught this animal Mahdi and made an example of him, for the same ends?"

I asked for Paltiel Rubin's annotated earlier works, where the Debba's legend was first mentioned, and how it tied to the traditional belief in the Mahdi's second coming and the Muslim legend of the End of Days.

The librarian removed a key from a drawer, unlocked a dusty glass-paneled cupboard, and handed me two small volumes bound in red leather--the rare first edition of
Flowers of Blood
. I copied by hand a few of the early poems which mentioned "the evil Debba," steeling my heart against their singing cadences, so much like my father's play ...

Was this why Kagan had sent me to research the past? Did he really think the Debba's legend would help me understand the play and make clear why my father had asked me to stage it?

My father could not possibly have known that the play would serve as an antidote to his son's black dreams. Or did he really think that a mere piece of theater could serve as an antidote to the larger darkness here?

27

A
FEW DAYS AFTER
my visit to the
Davar
newspaper morgue, the paper published an article by Professor Tzifroni from Tel Aviv University, the Rubin biographer, who snidely alluded to the stylistic similiarity of the play to Paltiel's poems. The article did not say outright that my father stole Paltiel's play, but it came close. I was enraged, because even though I knew that my father--despite my grievances against him--had been most honest, it was still possible he had handed me Paltiel's play in all innocence--after all, there was no author's name on the front cover--thus causing himself posthumous grief.

At first I wanted to write to the paper's editor and explain, but Kagan urged me to keep quiet, quoting the Arab proverb that if you give a barking dog any attention, it would only make him bark all the more.

I did keep quiet; but a second, practical difficulty arose--the defamatory
Davar
article caused a rumor that I would sue the paper for slander. This made it harder for Ehud to find us a hall. What owner would be fool enough to get mixed up in a lawsuit?

Other papers then picked up the thread, and several other such articles appeared. I resolved not to read any, but it was hard--almost as hard as withstanding my recurring black dreams. It was as if a sinister force was determined to rob me of peace the moment I landed, any way it could. I could only hope that it would all end, once the play was performed.

The Kach youth did not let us rehearse in peace either. Yet over the next few days, slowly and imperceptibly, the opposing crowd of supporters seemed to grow larger and bolder. Its composition changed also, and it now consisted of nearly equal parts high school students and old and middle-aged folk. They came early every day, and stood outside the chocolate factory in the burning sun, some hatless, others with folded newspapers over their heads, nearly all with copies of the play in hand, listening to snatches of song, occasionally repeating the words in low unison. The Kach rowdies tried to drown out our voices, but the very calm presence of the supporters seemed to unsettle them, and presently their harassment stopped. Even so we still had to pass daily between these two crowds that were only a hairbreadth away from coming to blows.

What did not stop, however, were the dozens of acts of vandalism and violence directed toward anything and anyone connected with the play. The actor who played Yochanan got into a tussle in a pub at the old Tel Aviv harbor with a one-armed '46 veteran, who hollered drunkenly that it was a disgrace and dishonor for his fallen comrades to have any Jew act in such a dreck play. When our Yochanan said something idiotic in return, about the fallen having bequeathed theater to us with their spilled blood, the veteran smashed our Yochanan's teeth with his arm stub. The police refused to arrest him and equally refused to transport our actor to the hospital. He got there on his own, where he remained out of commission for three weeks, and Kagan had to choose a new Yochanan.

And other actors left us, some on their own, others because of mishaps. But as fast as actors left or were ambushed and hurt, others joined and learned their roles and plugged right into the rehearsals, eerily fast. It was as if the play had acquired a life of its own and was barreling forward despite all opposition, imbuing newly chosen actors with uncanny powers of recall, so it took newcomers only a few days to learn their roles. Indeed, the play was so easy to memorize that all the actors seemed to know everyone else's lines, and Kagan often had to stop actors from muttering one another's words during rehearsals, or humming one another's songs. It was unlike any play I or anyone else had ever attended.

If during the day the violence seemed contained, at night the chocolate factory suffered a spate of vandalisms, which cost us several rehearsal days. Ehud posted some chocolate workers as sentinels, but feces were being thrown in through the rehearsal hall windows, and furniture kept being broken. It was as if those who did this could walk through walls. Ehud was angry and exasperated. He had never produced a play, he said, that raised so much emotion. It often seemed as if it simply made people lose their senses.

Or maybe it was not just the play. With every passing day the elections came nearer, and the two main parties, Labor and Likkud, appeared unable to break their tie in the polls. The general frenzy intensified and even mild debates on street corners turned into fistfights. It often felt as though a sinister force, long dormant, had crawled out of its lair and was intent on pitting all against all. It was clearly only a question of time before we would have a melee in front of the chocolate factory as well.

"It's never been like this before. Never," Leibele assured me one afternoon in Cafe Cassit, after I had helped him break up a brawl among three ancient HaBimah actors, none younger than seventy. "But what do you want? Some people hear the name 'Begin,' they see the devil."

"And you?" I asked him. "Whom will you vote for? Begin, for a change?"

Leibele hoisted a thin shoulder. "I--I don't know--sometimes I think, maybe we should let Begin cleanse the land for a few years ... After all, someone has to do this ..."

"Do the necessary dreck." I was surprised at the bitterness I felt. What was I so bitter about? Someone had to do God's dirty work for Him, as Shafrir used to say, so the rest of the Jews could rejoice in their purity.

"Yes, that's it exactly," Leibele said. "Then we could bring Labor back, be clean again like before ..."

I left him soon thereafter, mute with anger.

28

B
UT THERE WERE MOMENTS
of normalcy also, although I should have known that they couldn't last.

Friday evening, Ehud took the phone off the hook and Ruthy cooked a traditional Shabbat meal just like my mother--boiled chicken, soup with farfel, sweetened carrots, prune compote. My mother cooked in large pots because there were always charity guests at our kitchen table--poor actors and impoverished playwrights invited by my father, or Auschwitz widows with no kin and old rabbis whose congregations had gone with Hitler invited by my mother. In the small kitchen there was never enough room to sit, but always plenty to eat. But tonight there was plenty of room because the only charity guest was me. As Ruthy laid down the white table cloth, Ehud and I washed our hands meekly at the kitchen tap and dried them on a towel that Ruthy had given us, as if she were our mother; then we sat down, one on each side of Ruthy. She lit and blessed the Shabbat candles, covering her face with her palms briefly, as my mother did, and Ehud made the blessing on the wine, then, to my surprise, over the challah also, as my father used to. We ate and chatted peacefully. After we finished eating we sat barefoot, the three of us, on the living room carpet, and talked of nothing but the past: high school classmates who had fallen in '46 and '46; guys from the Unit, like my brother, who had gone on deep penetrations and never come back; books we had read ten years back, and old movies. We did not talk of the play, or the elections, or my father's murder, or the ruckus that all this seemed to generate.

Riva Yellin made an entrance a little after ten o'clock. I feared her anger would shatter the peace, as I knew she fiercely objected to Ruthy appearing in the play. Before I returned, Ruthy had agreed to abandon theater and dedicate herself to family life so that she did not end up like her mother, yet here she was, acting again. Or maybe Riva objected to the play because it brought Ruthy and me into daily proximity once more, though Riva made no mention of it now. She just nodded to me frostily and said she would take tea. Ehud she embraced sideways and let him kiss her on the cheek. Then she sat on the sofa and turned to me. "Someone wrote disgusting things on the fence downstairs. Better wash it off."

I grabbed a rag from under the sink and dashed downstairs in my bare feet and loose gym shorts. On the street side of the stone fence, someone had sprayed a message in large cursive Hebrew, in red:

"We shall get you too like we got him,
ya
Arab-loving
cholera--!"

The paint was still wet and dripping, in slowly congealing drops. I rubbed at it in smoldering rage until the letters smeared.

These goddamn punks--calling
me
an Arab-lover!

I was so intent on my work that I did not hear the rustle behind me. But suddenly there came a whistling whoosh and a blue light exploded above my right temple. My head slammed against the stone fence and immediately something smashed against my right ribs, long and narrow and hard-edged.

Seven years melted away and training and instinct took over. Even as my head still gonged I let my legs crumple, and the second blow swished over my head. With my head tucked under my arm I rolled left, and rose to face whoever had hit me.

They were two stocky men wearing orange Kach shirts clearly too small for their bulging shoulders. They danced lightly right and left, boxer-style, swinging pieces of lumber from their fingertips.

I stood still in the semidark. The streetlight had gone out. Smashed, probably--I felt glass shards under my bare toes. No one was about. Even the curtained Toyota seemed deserted. I kept still, assessing, suppressing the dark Other inside me that had been taught the necessary dreck, as the two shadows exchanged furtive glances. I had not uttered a sound when hit, nor moved after my roll; just stood in a frozen wait. My immobility seemed to throw them into unease; then, as if by silent agreement, they separated, preparing to attack from both sides at once.

I heard a scrape behind me, but it was only Mr. Tzukerman, the Auschwitz survivor who lived on the second floor. He shuffled by, carrying an embroidered prayer-shawl bag--probably returning from the Jabotinsky synagogue. He flicked a filmed glance at me and continued on his way up. As if by tacit understanding my attackers waited. I bent my knees and dug out a stone fragment from the fence, for ramming against the soft bone at the temple. Then I rose slowly and waited, scanning the advancing body parts--as I had been taught: solar plexus, testicles, throat, eyes, nose bridge, temples ... A car door slammed. I ignored it and flexed my knees. Then a rough voice rasped, "Stop. Where. You. Are. And. Don't. Move."

It was Amzaleg. What the hell was he doing here?

His scratched cruiser was parked parallel to the Toyota, and he now stepped between the twin orange shirts and me, a policeman's truncheon in his left hand. One shadow hissed, "Get the hell out of here,
ya kaza
policeman." It was the voice of the same yeshiva boy who had been outside Gelber's apartment.

Amzaleg paused.

Kaza
is a derogatory term for Moroccan Jews. It refers to Casablanca, from where most arrived. Somehow it came to mean in Hebrew what "nigger" means in English.

I called at Amzaleg's back, "It's okay, Amnon, leave them to me."

He ignored me. I saw his right hand ram at his ample belly, slam on the belt buckle, twist, and tug. The belt slid out and the metal buckle was suddenly swinging, Unit style, in blurry figure eights.

Amzaleg?

The shadows paused, hesitated, then spread further and without a word plunged into the whirl, sticks swinging. There was a slash, and one shadow stumbled back, a dark welt on his cheek; another slash. The other held his neck. Amzaleg hissed something I could not hear. There was an uncertain interval. And then the two turned and ran off, and were gone.

Amzaleg said to me, "Drop the stone, you idiot. You want to be arrested?" He turned and thumped on the roof of the Toyota with his truncheon, hard. No one came out. I watched with surprise as Amzaleg swung his truncheon and smashed one of the Toyota's back lights, then hit the car's roof a second time. Nothing. He smashed one of the front lights, and again thumped on the roof, harder this time, denting it.

I could hear a sound inside the car. Amzaleg raised the truncheon. Now the door opened and a man came out--it was the driver of the taxi I had taken from the airport, when I arrived. Before he could speak Amzaleg said to him, "Give it to me."

"You fucking
kaza--
"

Amzaleg swung at the man's knee, slowly enough to let him jump back. I could not believe what I was seeing. What the hell was this?

The man moved his hand toward the small of his back.

"Yes," Amzaleg said in perfectly neutral voice. "Oh yes, do it."

The man's hand slowed; then very meticulously he pulled out a small Beretta, holding it by the barrel with thumb and forefinger. It was similar to the one Amzaleg had in Tveriah. Slowly he bent over and put it on the ground.

"Now the rest of it. Together with the film inside."

The man turned silently, leaned into the car, and pulled out a boxy Hasselblad camera, the kind used by our Intel patrols, with an infrared filter. I gawped at it.

"Now open it."

The man snarled deep in his throat, like a jackal, but obeyed. He pulled the back open and stripped out the film.

"Any more film inside?"

A shake of the head.

"If you lie--"

The man cursed at length, in military Hebrew.

"You finished?" Amzaleg said. "Now fuck off."

The man said in a voice of pure venom, "You are fucking crazy, you
kaza
policeman, you will pay for this--"

Amzaleg swung his belt in another figure eight, lazily, and the man sprang back and got into the car, started the engine, and drove off. I stood gaping at the Toyota as it drove away, then turned to stare at Amzaleg.

What the hell was that about?

Amzaleg bent over and picked up the gun, then opened the cruiser's door and crooked his finger at me. "Come inside."

Still dumbfounded, I got in beside him.

The cruiser's interior stank of stale cigarettes and cheap Nescafe--police-car smell. But on the dashboard was a sprig of white blossoms, of the kind that grows on every corner by stone fences. "Milk tears" we used to call them. He saw me looking and said, "Smells good. You have this in Canada, too?"

I shook my head. As Amzaleg adjusted his belt I said, "Were you in the Unit?" Because it was always possible he had taken a cold-killing course somewhere else.

"Yes, in fifty-one, the second course. The first Moroccan they took."

I felt myself redden at the express mention of this.

Amzaleg went on, "But your father said, doesn't matter, take him." He sniffed. "Now lift your feet."

"What?" I could not understand what he wanted, but Amzaleg grabbed my left foot and with his fingernails extracted some glass shards. "Now the other."

I turned in my seat in embarrassment and he grabbed the other foot and pulled more shards out of it. He rummaged in the glove compartment and from an assortment of police handcuffs, spare Beretta magazines, and plastic pens pulled an iodine bottle and proceeded to daub it on my cuts. Without raising his head he said, "Why did you accept the fight, you donkey?"

"They hit me, and--" I stopped. It sounded ridiculous, as if I were telling a teacher the other guys had started it.

He said, "You could have run off or shouted, something." He pointed with his chin to where the Toyota had been filming the provocation. "You wanted to spend the next thirty-three days in jail?"

The play's performance was due in thirty-three days. I said with wonder, "You
want
us to do the play!" I turned to face him, trying to understand.

Gershonovitz didn't want the play to be staged, and Amzaleg reported directly to him. Yet he had just come to my rescue. Nothing made sense here. "Why didn't they take you off the case?"

Amzaleg shook his head. "Not this one, not now." He stared at me with his puffy eyes, and suddenly I understood: they could not take Amzaleg off the case, but they could make him report to Gershonovitz, in an unsteady stalemate. I could almost glimpse the outline of two invisible bureaucratic forces poised, like two fists pushing against each other, unmoving, perfectly matched.

I said, "Because of the elections?"

Amzaleg shook his head.

"Because of the play, then?"

He said nothing.

I pointed to his belt. "They can sack you for this."

Amzaleg rocked his jaw from side to side. "In Casablanca," he said slowly, "my mother had four servants, my father was a lawyer. In 1932 he decided to bring us all here to Zion. I was four. You know how they treated us here, these Ashkenazi fuckers?" I could not see why he was telling me all this now. "Like niggers they treated us. Like Arabs!" He breathed through his mouth.

I recalled his daughter, now living with her mother and her Arab stepfather in Shfar'am, and held my breath, saying nothing.

Amzaleg stared ahead. "Forty-nine years old in July, and still only an inspector. Why?"

At last I said, "And my father--"

Amzaleg swiped at his eyes. "For him there was no difference. Arabs, Moroccans, Yemenites, Ashkenazi, it was all the same." He seemed unable to comprehend this. I couldn't either.

I said, "And that's why you--" I stopped.

What was I going to ask? Whether he'd be trying harder to find my father's killer, because my father treated him decently? And so imply that otherwise he wouldn't?

But Amzaleg nodded. "Yes, also."

"And also because of the play?"

"Yes. Also."

I weighed my words carefully. "So there are some who don't want the play produced, like Gershonovitz, but also some--others--who do?"

Amzaleg gave a squeak with his lips to indicate a maybe.

I said, "The
shoo-shoo
doesn't?" The secret services. "And who else?"

When he remained silent I changed tack. "Who does want it?"

I didn't think he'd reply, but he did. "Old
chevermanim."
Brave old fighters, from before '48. "Here and there, not in one place, not just the police, or--or anywhere special, just here and there." He paused. "Old, mostly." Then his mirthless grin reappeared, fierce and scary. "Bereaved parents."

I gazed outside the window at the dark sky, recalling Amzaleg's fallen son and brothers, and Zussman's, and my own brother, and the silent crowd outside the rehearsal hall. "But why now?" I asked at last. "What's with this play? It's just a play." And its essence could be read every now and then in
Ha'Olam HaZeh
editorials.

Amzaleg gave a double squeak of the lips. At last he said, "Go on up, finish your gefilte fish, or whatever." Then he added. "And be careful,
ya
donkey!" He thumped me on the shoulder, hard.

I wanted to tell him not to teach me my profession, but refrained. I nodded and stepped out of his cruiser, walking carefully on the sides of my soles. I was surprised no one had gone out to see what the fracas was about. But everyone probably thought it was just one more violent argument about the elections.

When I came back up I kept quiet about what had happened. Ruthy was tearing into Riva, fuming, talking about new beginnings, historic chances, the unstated wishes of the dead. Ehud, pale and blinking, was trying to pacify both; then Ruthy turned on him. I kept out of it.

At last Riva got up to leave. She gave me a brief nod, as if satisfied that there was indeed nothing between Ruthy and me; that whatever there once had been was finally over. Her nod filled me with unexplained joy, as if all the evil I had done to Ruthy was now absolved. I nodded to her civilly in return.

Later, when I told Ehud about the attack and how Amzaleg had intervened, he said sardonically, "Damsel in distress, eh?"

I knew exactly what he meant. The classic way to gain a patsy's confidence is to save him from a fake threat. Was this what Amzaleg had done here?