the Debba (2010) (20 page)

After a while the policeman said, "So what did you want this old actor for, this Ovadiah?" He inserted the photographs, one by one, into the flap in the back of the file.

"So he could tell me, maybe, what happened then." I didn't ask Amzaleg how he knew I was asking around. Maybe he had talked to Kagan.

Amzaleg squared the files on his desk. "In forty-six? In the show?"

I hesitated. It seemed silly somehow to suspect this bungling policeman of anything just because the man he had sent to clean the store had wiped off the fingerprints.

"Maybe," I said.

I could feel him tense up.

I said, "Also, from before, at the beginning, when they, Paltiel Rubin, and my father, when they were just starting." I waited, then added, "Before my father wrote his first skit, even, his first Purim
shpiel."

Amzaleg lowered his gaze.

"You find him, let me know," he said, feigning disinterest. "I'll tell you when I catch him."

And all at once my instinct told me I was on the right track, that this was where I should look.

39

W
E LEFT THE NEXT
day at seven in the morning to look for Ovadiah Tzadok, the old Yemenite actor, I driving, Ruthy sitting by my side. One of my father's smaller knives, still in its leather sheath, was in my back pocket. After the Samson's attack I made up my mind I was no longer going to play by Amzaleg's rules. It was Saturday, the Shabbat, and the traffic was still light. As far as I could see, no one followed us. But this of course meant little.

The day before, when I had asked Ruthy for her car to drive to some Yemenite villages in the Sharon valley, she said right away she would come along.

"What," she shouted at Ehud, "he'll look for this Yemenite to learn about Paltiel, and I'll stay home? I have the right to hear what this guy says about my father."

It was the first time she had called Paltiel "my father" in my hearing. I tried to dissuade her, but nothing helped.

We arrived at the Sharon by midmorning. At Moshav Elchanan, near Chadera, we found nothing, nor at Moshav Chanitt-LeMazmera, nor at Moshav Eliakim, nor at the next two
moshavim
. Only the land, its mood dusty and hot, kept flowing by the car window, making my nose tingle with a nameless emotion that I tried to suppress. Finally, at three in the afternoon, I called it quits. We drove back home in the baking Beetle, neither of us speaking. Just before Herzliya, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Ruthy said, "Turn here. At the beach, so we can at least talk."

I hesitated, remembering the Samson, then turned.

The Beetle hopped and rattled from one bump to the next, from one pothole to the other, the wheel shaking in my hands.

Ruthy rummaged in her raffia bag, unearthing suntan lotion, a crumpled Dubek cigarette pack, and, inexplicably, a dry yellow rose.

"From someone, I don't remember," she said, rubbing suntan lotion on her thighs. "No, not Ehud, someone."

"From when?" I didn't know why I cared all of a sudden.

"Six months ago, a year, I don't know. What do you want? You screw this shiksa in Canada, maybe her girlfriends, too."

"She doesn't have girlfriends."

"So her boyfriends," Ruthy said.

"I am not Paltiel."

Without warning she slapped my face. The car was still moving, but she had opened the door, and before I could find the brake, she had already jumped out, stumbled, and begun to run off into the dunes. "I hate you forever!" she shouted at me from some way off, her voice weak and wavering.

My cheek stung. After a little while I got out of the car and followed her up the dune.

I sat down beside her, on the hot sand, the sheathed knife awkward in my pocket. "I am sorry about--what I said."

She turned on her side, away from me. "I'm going with you to look for this Yemenite--why? I don't know why."

"To learn who killed--maybe also to help prove that the play--" I stopped.

"Prove what? That your father wrote it? Maybe that he wrote other things, too?"

"I already said I am sorry."

"So you said.
You
had a father." She stared at the yellow sky.

There was a pause.

After a while Ruthy said, "I am sorry. I am a donkey."

I shook my head.

Ruthy said, as though continuing a previous line of conversation, "That's what my mother said, too, that your father had let him go, and now the Debba came back to kill him--"

"Stop talking nonsense."

Ruthy said, "Because even two people together--Mother said your father wasn't big, but he had the power of a giant ... Once in Yaffo he wrestled a hyena in a cage, near the harbor. Did you hear about that?"

"Yes." I had read the stories.

"For a wager, because the Arabs taunted him. I would never do a thing like that, if I were a man. To save someone, maybe. But not for a boast."

"It wasn't a boast. It was for the honor of the Jews."

"'The honor of the Jews,'" Ruthy said. "Don't make me laugh. 'Honor of the Jews.'"

When we came home it was late and Ehud was already sleeping. Without saying a word Ruthy went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

I lay down on the sofa. Sleep took a long while to come, and when it did, it came with a dark force I had not felt for a while.

When I opened my eyes the apartment was in shadow. Ruthy, wearing her blue Atta shorts and a green T-shirt with the words "Peace Now" across the back, sat cross-legged on the living room floor, her chin on her cupped hands. The play's pages were spread before her in the white parallel moonbeams thrown by the shutter.

I shook my head groggily. Again I had dreamed that an animal, or perhaps the cold-killing instructor, had been shouting into my face.

I coughed thickly. "Where's Ehud?"

"Sleeping." She peered at me from under her rumpled hair, then rose to her feet and in one fluid motion lay down beside me. "This play, it really is a little like
Golyatt
--the meter, the words--"

"No, it isn't."

She let her thigh slide down mine and traced a line on my hip with her nails. "Maybe they wrote it together, what do I know--"

"It's my father's handwriting."

I got up and collected the pages from the floor.

Ruthy looked up at me, her eyes half open. Presently she got up, too, then swiftly removed her T-shirt and put on Ehud's checkered shirt.

"I think they grew," she said, and tied the shirt at the navel.

"I didn't look."

"Nemosha,"
said Ruthy.

40

I
COULD RECOGNIZE MY
father's handwriting anywhere, from his letters to me.

A mere week after my arrival in Canada, the first arrived. Then, every two or three weeks, I received another, explaining to me why it was important that I come back. Patiently, in detail, in words that sang and sometimes oddly rhymed.

At first I read them all, but afterward, when my black dreams returned and his words began to appear in them, I tore the envelopes up without opening them. Not once did I write back. Somehow I knew that if I recognized his claim on me, if I acknowledged it even once, I could never again cut myself loose and would end up going back: to his love; to his land, and to mine; back to Ruthy. Back to the dreck, and the blood.

My mother, too, wrote. Short letters, simple ones. You don't have to write, she said, if it's hard for you. Just tell Rina you are all right, and she'll write us. We love you, all of us. All of us, she repeated at the ends of her letters, as if she were a messenger for more than my father and herself, and my brother; a messenger for something else.

Ruthy, too, wrote, but her letters I never opened. Finally both she and my father stopped writing, and my mother's letters were reduced to a New Year's greeting card, until her death in 1974.

My brother, Avraham, had stopped talking to me even before I left. The moment I told him and my parents (he was home on furlough, about to return to base) that I'd be emigrating to Canada, he got up, spit on my Pataugas boots, and turned around to depart. But my mother grabbed his wrist. "Clean it, Avraham!"

"No!" He tried to wrench his hand free but she had used a correct
gimmel
grip, and pushed him to his knees. It was amazing, a slight woman like her, in her fifties.

My father said in Yiddish, "Leave him be."

"Isser,
hafef,"
she said in colloquial Arabic. Butt out.

"Sonya," he whispered, "it's not your fault."

Her face went white and rigid. "Avraham, I said clean it!"

My brother struggled futilely. To unlatch a
gimmel
hold, he would've had to break her thumb. Tears of panic and rage rose in his calf-brown eyes. "I won't!"

"Then I will." She let go his wrist and went down on her knees, a towel in hand. I could smell her cyclamen eau de cologne, like a faint tingle in the throat.

"Sonya, no," my father said.

My mother said nothing; only her shoulders shook as she wiped my boots.

I stood frozen as Avraham tried to pull her up jerkily by the shoulders, but she would not rise. Finally he and I, not looking at each other, together pulled her to her feet.

My mother said, "He's your brother, no matter what."

I could not tell whom she was speaking to or about, and felt a nameless fear.

No matter?

I looked at my father but he said nothing.

My brother shouted, "No!" and clomped down the stairs. And from that moment on, he no longer recognized my presence. To my farewell party he did not even bother to come. Whether he stopped speaking to my mother, after I had left Israel, I don't know; but it might have been so. Men in my family have a great capacity for grudges that never end. Maybe it's something in the air, here. The Arabs have it, too, as did everyone else who had lived here, before.

Later, in Canada, breathing the cold air of the north and Jenny's love, more than once I thought of calling my brother, to ask how he was and tell him I forgave him. He who, like me, was sent by our father to learn the same evil trade that our father once had. My brother who, when I deserted, only did to me what I would have done to him, had he left me behind. But I put off calling him and now he, too, was dead, without even a proper grave; while I, the deserter, was here once again in this goddamned land, playing a part in a play set in motion by our dead father.

But what part? And for what end? And was my mother in on it? How to find out?

There is a photograph of my mother in one of her childhood albums. She is standing between two other girls in the shade of the wild fig tree on Dizzengoff Street, right by her parents' newspaper kiosk.

In the picture she is a slim girl of fifteen, her oval face shaded by a floppy khaki hat--the emblem of the Haganah youth--from under which a mass of wild curls tumble every which way. The other two girls are hatless; but all three are wearing the two-tone uniform of the Bnot Ya'akov Religious School for Girls--mid-length dark skirts and long-sleeved white shirts, with the school emblem on the right breast. All are leaning on long sticks that reach up to their waists--they had probably just returned from a
kappap
lesson--face-to-face combat--taught by some Haganah instructor, in the school backyard. My mother had gone to school till she was sixteen, when she had to drop out and work as a seamstress in Yaffo, to help her parents.

She looks just like her photograph in
Vashti's Dream
, my father's Purim play in which she had played Queen Esther, many years later.

The scene is half in light, half in shadow, with my mother right on the dividing line, her left side lighter than the other. The photograph itself is brown at its edges, as if a dark fluid had seeped into it and begun to obliterate it, like time itself but not half as thorough, nor as pervasive as those who had kept lying to me ever since I arrived.

41

N
EXT MORNING, BEFORE EITHER
Ruthy or Ehud awoke, I took Ruthy's car keys, then squeezed myself into her Beetle and drove to Kibbutz Sha'ananim in the Sharon.

When I arrived an hour later, I made my way on foot down the main road, walking in the already sweltering heat through the orange groves, already blossoming, and the rows of dusty almond trees. Before me spread the wide fields of the kibbutz, and beyond them, the yellow-gray patches of thorns where the Arab village of Zachaleh used to be; and further away still, beige on gray-brown, rose the mountains of Efraim, ephemeral and craggy and blurred. Biting dry wind blew into my face, carrying ashlike dust in its wings, as if the door of a giant oven had been left open somewhere beyond the horizon. The smell of the orange blossoms and the mimosa was like a dainty foreign wetness upon the overarching heat and the desiccation.

As I marched between the two low stone columns that stood at the kibbutz's entrance, a balding kibbutznik passed by, a towel in hand, his head wet. I asked him where I could find Asa Ben-Shlomo.

He gave me a quick look, from head to foot. At last he seemed satisfied that I was not an Arab infiltrator. "And who are you?"

"Tell him Dada wants to talk to him."

"You have a full name?"

"Just tell him."

He left me in the dining room and went to fetch Asa. The room was the size of an average Tel Aviv cinema. Kibbutz Sha'ananim had more than three hundred members and they all ate at once, in this whitewashed concrete box with six wire-mesh windows, to guard against grenades, and two metal doors. The two windows behind me opened on a large swimming pool. Screams of laughter and the splashing of water came through. Beyond the pool I could see the pockmarked water tower. In '48 the Iraqi irregulars came within two hundred meters of the kibbutz. Until 1967, the kibbutzniks still had problems with infiltrators. I myself used to lie in ambushes, not far from here, during paratroopers' boot camp--

The door opened and Asa came in.

He was a small man with very large arms and a wild silvery beard that had streaks of red in it. He looked like an aging rabbi crossed with an orangutan walking upright in patched khaki trousers. He smelled of cow manure and his blue shirt was stained with water. He had probably washed up in a hurry, when he heard I was waiting.

"Ahalan
, Dada," he said evenly. He didn't sit down.

"Ahalan
, Asa."

There was a short wait.

"Do you want some coffee? Or something?"

"No, thank you."

He pushed by me and sat at the other side of the table, leaning forward on his thick arms. The family likeness with Yaro was striking. The hooked nose, the thick skin above the eyebrows, the tight manner.

"I was sorry to hear how he--how your father died."

"Yeah."

"I couldn't get away to come to the funeral--two cows were calving, one had twins--" He stopped.

I said nothing.

At last he said, "So?"

"Two
kackers
attacked me in Tel Aviv, last month. You heard about it?"

He performed a diagonal nod, then shook his head in sorrow, to indicate disapproval of such idiocy.

I said tightly, "Then the same people sent a Samson after me, last week."

A long silence while he stared at me, keeping his head fixed.

Finally he said, "So what do you want from me? Go to the police."

I said, "This donkey Samson? He had a Batya on his leg." There was a pause.

"Shit in yogurt." Asa kept his eyes on mine, with an effort.

"Yeah," I said. "And three weeks ago, someone tried to steal my father's play. And right afterward, another someone tried to attack me in Tveriah ..."

There was another pause.

"This I don't know anything about."

I said bluntly, "D'you know why the
shoo-shoo
is after me?"

A longer silence, this time. Asa passed his thick fingers in his beard. "Why do you come to me, about this?"

"Yaro told me you said my name came up, in the Mo'adon."

"So maybe I shouldn't have."

I said sourly, "Fuck off,
ya
Asa. You passed me a message. It was a message from them, that they had talked about me. What do they want from me?"

He straightened up. "Look, Dada. Why do you want to poke your nose into all this? Go back to Canada. This is not Toronto."

I was getting tired of this.

I spoke slowly. "Asa, if anyone wanted to take me down, they could have done it five times over. So why don't they? And why like this?"

He looked at me with eyebrows joined, his mouth clamped; then all at once he grabbed my palm with both of his. His callouses were as hard as pebbles. "Dada, do me a favor. Please. Go back to Canada. Today they are crazy. Crazy! If they think you are a risk, they'll send you back in a casket."

"A risk to what? To whom?"

"What do I know, to the State, to everything."

"But how?"

It was so idiotic! How could I be a risk?

Two young women came out of the kitchen and began to arrange plates on the tables for lunch.

Asa stared at them, unseeing. Without looking at me he said, "You diddling Ruthy again, I hear."

I fulminated in silence. What business was it of his?

"Dammit,
ya
Dada." He shook his head. "Isser would have belted you, for this."

"He screwed, too, when he was young. Actresses, soldier girls ..."

"Not his friends' wives."

It was funny. The
shoo-shoo
guys fucked right and left. Everyone. To cheat on their wives was okay. But not their friends.

I said, "Can you tell me why they talked about me, in the Mo'adon?"

He shook his head. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

He sucked his lips in, hesitating.

"Is it the play?"

"Also," he said.

"And the murder?"

"Also."

He sounded like Amzaleg.

"And what else?"

He shook his head.

I said sarcastically, "Maybe the Debba? They're afraid he'll come back after the play, to save the Arabs?"

To my immense surprise, he nodded. "Yes,
hada hoo."
That's it.

I got up in disgust and, without looking back, made my way to the car.

Ruthy was home, but not Ehud. As I closed the door she came to me, and with a fierce and unexplained anger kissed me, as if punishing me for something. "Don't go away again without me."

Together we went to the kitchen.

I said, "It was the
shoo-shoo
that tried to filch the play."

"Sure," she said. "Who did you think? I knew all along."

"You did not," I said. "You said it was the police."

"The police, the
shoo-shoo
, what's the difference? They are all the same."

I could not understand her. I thought she would explode with rage, at least show shock, indignation, something. Not this calm acceptance.

"They don't want us to do this," she said. "Don't you understand? They never did, from the beginning."

I wanted to tell her that they were not all the same, that some were quietly on our side, like Zussman and perhaps Amzaleg, but with no pause she began to tell me about the rehearsals, how well the last songs were suddenly progressing, how the scenery buildup was nearly complete, the leather horse, and the costumes. Outside, the heat had intensified. Fumes and dust seeped in, as a bus roared by. Mad thoughts raced inside my head, round and round.

I said, "When it's over, if you want, you can come with me to Canada--"

Ruthy said, "No, you stay here--"

I shook my head. Rage, impotent rage, swelled inside me. What did they all want of me?

Ruthy got up and took off her shirt, then her skirt. "Come, Dada, come, before he returns."

Afterward, as I was dressing, she said abruptly that Jenny had called. "So I talked to her. You know what? She's nice--"

I said nothing; my heart was dark. I didn't care about Jenny anymore, or about Ehud.

Ruthy went on, as she put on her bra, "So I wrote down this poem she is sending you, I should look to see where I put it--"

"Doesn't matter," I said. Because now nothing really did. Nothing except Ruthy, and the play, and the beast that had killed my father.