the Debba (2010) (29 page)

"I don't give a
zayin
for Gershonovitz," Amzaleg said.

Abdallah went on, "What happened, happened. They'll never let all this dreck go to the newspapers, the radio--" Bubbles appeared at the corner of the thin mouth.

"No," said Amzaleg.

I stared at the man on the bed, the man who had killed my father, the man who had first saved him from drowning, more than half a century before; who had helped him open his store; who had wrestled with him and loaned him money in his hour of need; who had helped him stage his one play; the man who was my father's friend by day, and his enemy by night; the man who had stolen his wife's heart and then slept with her--with my mother, yes, with my mother--only to discover that she was working for Gershonovitz, and the Shay, perhaps with the knowledge of my father.

No, not of my father. Of Isser.

Yes
. Of my
father
. My
real
father.

I said, "Were you--him, Abu Jalood?" I didn't know why I needed to hear it again from his own lips.

"Come," said Amzaleg. "Let's go eat something. He won't run away."

I nearly asked him whether Abdallah had given him his word about that, too, but refrained.

"Yes,
ya 'ibni,"
Abdallah said. "I was him."

There was a short silence.

"Come," Amzaleg said.

I said to Abdallah, "Why did he let you go, in forty-eight?"

"Come on," Amzaleg said.

Abdallah said in a flat voice of pure fury, "I said to him in the Castel, 'Yes, 'tis me, kill me.' But he wouldn't ... He said, 'The father of my child I cannot kill ...'" Abdallah looked at me with his olive-dark eyes, the pupils black on black, coal on coal, the eyebrows drawn together in ferocious puzzlement and wrath.

Amzaleg pulled at my hand, softly. "Come,
ya
Daoud."

Without much effort I disengaged his fingers.

Abdallah went on, "He said to me, 'Promise me you will lay down your arms forever, and I will not kill you ...' His knife was at my throat--the long knife ..." And suddenly Abdallah began to speak in flowery Arabic, in a singsong voice. "'No,' I said. 'Kill me now, for in a double shame I shall not live--' You understand?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes."

"So I said to him, 'It is not a favor that you wish to do unto me, to give me life. You have vanquished me, O enemy mine, do me the honor and slay me.' You understand? This favor I could not take."

I wanted to say he had done so many favors in his life, that he didn't know where to stop; but I could not speak.

I nodded.

Abdallah said, in the same odd singsong, "My child he took, and my woman, and my land, and now my honor--how much more? How much? 'Kill me, ya
mal'oon,'
I said, 'and be done with me. Be done.' But he would not. 'No,' he said, 'for kill thee I cannot. Swear to me that you shall lay your arms down, and I shall let thee go.' And as I looked up at the shining blade, the accursed
'Uzra'in,"
the devil, "whispered in my ear, and made me say, 'If you will swear, so shall I.'"

There was a long silence. Outside in the corridor someone shrieked, at length.

"And he said, 'I shall give thee my word,
ya
noble Debba--'" Abdallah emitted a rough rattle, perhaps laughter, perhaps a cough. "'Thy arms for mine--'"

"Yallah,"
Amzaleg said, weakly.

"He hugged me ... Bullets flying, men dying, we hugged--"

Amzaleg cleared his throat, like a distant grenade.

"--then he said, 'Give me thy dagger, and thy rifle, and thy mustache--" The face was so contorted now it looked nearly inhuman. "My
mustache!"

Amzaleg gave an angry sniff, and smacked one palm against another.

"Goddammit," he said.

Abdallah hissed, "But the last laugh is on him. No David art thou, but Muhammad. That's the name I gave thee before he gave thee his. Not David ben Israel, but Muhammad bin Abdallah--"

A pale black-dyed redhead edged into the narrow room, followed by a short muscular man, his hand bandaged: Ruthy and Ehud. For a brief second they looked like strangers.

"I cut my hand," Ehud announced, "taking down those limelights--" He stood a moment by Ruthy's side, his eyes like stones, then went over to the bed. Ruthy went to sit on the windowsill, laced her hands over her belly, and looked at me from a long way off.

I looked away.

"I wanted to thank you for the hall," Ehud said to Abdallah in a tight voice, "also I saw you, with the cane, when this fucking
shoo-shoo
was going to stab David--"

He looked at Ruthy, his chin raised with pride at having congratulated an Arab. "It was very brave of him," he said to her.

I looked at him but he avoided my eyes.

Ruthy gave a chirp of laughter; it turned into a sob. She slid off the sill and put her arm around Ehud's shoulder, looking into my eyes all the while.

Amzaleg cleared his throat. There was a moment of silence.

Ruthy said to Abdallah, "Did you like the show?"

He said to the ceiling, "It was a good show. You were better than her." He didn't say whether he had meant my mother or Riva, and I didn't stay to ask. Amzaleg pulled me out; I no longer felt anything, or saw much. As I wiped at my face, my cheeks, smearing my blue
abbaya
with greasepaint, I heard Ehud and Ruthy walking behind, shuffling, as do two people whose gaits are different and who try to fit their strides to each other. I did not look back.

* * *

Outside, in the hospital yard, in the predawn half-light, some remnants of the terror came back. I twirled around, once, my hands raised, watching for an attacker, but there was no one. The yard was deserted.

My heart slowly settling, I followed the policeman to his car.

At first, when I saw it, I thought he had gotten himself a new patrol car, but then I saw the car had merely received a new and crude coat of black paint; the Arabic cuss words were barely visible underneath. Tiny drops of dew lay on the window.

The heat had broken during the night and the air was surprisingly cool. It was going to be a fine day.

We didn't speak in the car; suddenly, halfway to Yaffo, Amzaleg said, "Goddammit, this Begin. If he gets in, I don't know what will happen."

I said, "Carter will bend his arm, something will happen, maybe peace, what do I know."

There was no escape for me, Abdallah had said. The land will call me back, and my people.

Which people?

"Yeah," said Amzaleg. He threw me a brief look through the corner of his eye, as if admitting that he, too, didn't know why we were talking about Begin and Carter.

I said, "Gershonovitz was your commander, once?"

"Yes," said Amzaleg, driving at great speed along the Herbert Samuel Promenade. The sun had risen and I glimpsed pigeons strutting above Cafe Piltz, just behind the Israeli Aero Club; then we whizzed past.

"When I was in the Shay in Tveriah, he was the regional commander of the entire Galilee, and when he moved to Tel Aviv, he asked me to come help," Amzaleg said to the windshield. "Then after forty-eight he moved to the
shoo-shoo;
I joined the police." His mouth twisted. At the time, the Internal Security Service didn't take in Eastern Jews.

I said, "So they knew all along who did it, from the tape."

Amzaleg didn't reply. What was there to say?

But I didn't let up. "They protected his killer. They didn't want this to come out--"

"They protected you," Amzaleg said to the windshield. "Only you had to barge ahead like a donkey--"

"It was for him," I said, meaning Isser.

"For him?" Amzaleg said, bitterly. "Do you think he'd have liked all this to come out?"

"Yes," I said.

When Amzaleg said nothing, I said, "So were you working for Gershonovitz?"

"For him, not for him, what do I know? We're all here in the same shit, working for the rabbinate ... Look, look." Amzaleg pointed with a nicotine-stained finger at a line in front of Cinema Yaron. "See? They can't wait to vote, these corpses, to tell the fuckers what they think of them."

At first I couldn't understand. "Oh, it's today," I said. "Today are the elections." It had completely slipped my memory.

"Sure, today. Where have you been?"

I said, "So whom will you vote for?" I immediately regretted my words. It's the one thing one does not ask a policeman.

Amzaleg sucked on his teeth. The car accelerated, then sped on, past Manshiya, past the crumbling hovels of Adjemi. The tires screeched.

"I don't understand," I said. "Isser, letting him go like this, in forty-eight."

How virtuous can you get?

I felt dead inside, but tears, large and oily and thick, kept rolling down my cheeks, as they had when I first heard of my father's murder, a thousand years ago, in Toronto.

"Enough with all this," Amzaleg said gruffly. "Let's go eat." Without applying the brakes he threw the car into a screeching turn down a narrow alley behind the clock tower, the car nearly overturning. "Don't worry," he said, "in the army I once drove a tank." He guffawed at his own joke, without mirth.

We sat in the small dark back room of the same Arab cafe where I had once sat with Abdallah, and drank scalding coffee from cups of thick rough glass. It tasted just like the coffee Abdallah had served me, four weeks before, in the prehistory.

I wanted to ask Amzaleg what he was going to do now about Abdallah, and Gershonovitz; whether he was going to pursue this. But my tongue seemed to have dried up.

I said to him, "Did you like the show?"

I could still see Ruthy before me, her eyes made up garishly, her palms over her belly, swaying slightly in the yellow light; and Ehud's contorted mouth, and the knife in his hand; and behind them the hundreds of eyes, staring, looking on with nameless dread, their mouths open, Jews and Arabs alike, waiting for the Word.

"I saw only half," he said. And then he added, absurdly, "If they'll let him out of Hadassah today, even in a wheelchair, I'll take him to vote."

I stared at Amzaleg; he was drinking his coffee, his small finger sticking out. For the first time I noticed that its nail was longer than the others, like that of old Moroccan Jews. I had never noticed it before. Perhaps he had just started growing it.

"Well," he said tersely, "he's a citizen."

"Yes," I said.

We ate fried eggs and fresh white bread (the waiter apologized that there was no pita bread that day--the bakery had been sold last week to a new owner, a Jew), with sliced tomatoes on the side, red as open knife-wounds, soft and sweet like the ones Ruthy had served me after I arrived ...

A giant hand squeezed my heart. I never knew it was possible to suffer like that--not only with yearning for Ruthy, but also with deep shame at what I had done to Ehud, who once again had rescued me by pushing himself into the line of fire, so I could be free...

Free to do what?

"It's just like a Tnuva kiosk, now," said Amzaleg. "Give them time, they'll be just like us."

I started to say that, after doing enough dreck, in time we'll be just like them, but refrained, minding Amzaleg's feelings.

When we finished, I didn't know whether to return to the apartment. I wanted to see Ruthy so badly I nearly cried, but I knew it would do me no good to go back now. So I asked Amzaleg to drop me at Cafe Cassit on his way to the Dizzengoff station.

I knew I was being foolish, showing myself so openly, but I no longer cared.

"Now?" Amzaleg asked. "It's only eight in the morning."

But Cafe Cassit was open, and volunteers from the voting station at the back sat and drank coffee, with strudel slices. Leibele came by as I sat down.

"Your girlfriend was here," he said, "looking for you."

A wild dark flash seared through me. "Who?"

"The blonde one, the Canadian," he said, adding shyly. "Very good-looking."

"Thank you," I said, not knowing whether I was thanking him for the information, or for the compliment about Jenny. And suddenly and idiotically I wanted very badly to find her, so she could console me for what I had lost, as she always had, to forgive all the evil I had done, as she always did ...

I turned away, not wishing him to see me like this.

He loitered by delicately, averting his gaze, shuffling his sandals. "It was a very, very good show," he said at last. "I liked how you--how you--your role."

"Yes," I said. "Yes, thank you."

"Better than him, even, in forty-six, the Arab," said Leibele, and sat down beside me. He started talking, quietly and easily. "I didn't know how they could do it," he said. "Everyone knew he wasn't a Yemenite. It all started as a joke, when he--your father--when he brought him to the Purim party--"

"Yes," I said. Leibele put a coffee cup before me. I told myself I should not drink so much coffee, then drained half the cup.

"This friend of his, this
Arabush,"
said Leibele. His face was composed, peaceful. "Isser thought it was a great joke, to bring him dressed as an Arab, and everyone thought he was someone from Petach Tiqva, or Kerem HaTeymanim. A Yemenite in disguise. But she--" He stopped.

"I know," I said. "My mother."

"Yes," said Leibele. "Sonya. This
sharmuta
Sonya." This whore. But he said it with affection, as though according a compliment.

I said nothing.

"We all loved her," he said. "What she did for us, we all loved her."

I nodded.

"Everyone loved her," Leibele said. "Everyone."

"Yes."

"But she only loved him. The Arab."

"You knew?"

"Everyone knew."

"No one ever told me."

"No."

There was a short silence.

Leibele looked at the empty street. "What will you do now? You going back to Canada?"

"Yes," I said. Then I added, "But I'll be back in June, to finish something, that my father asked me--"

I could not see how I could even think of it, now; how I was hoping to get out of here, let alone come back.

Leibele nodded slowly and got to his feet. "They only write lies, the newspapers," he said, "only lies--"