the Debba (2010) (5 page)

7

"A
MZALEG?" SAID THE POLICEMAN
behind the desk. He squinted at me in the dim light. "What do you want with him?"

"I came to talk to him about a burglary. The one on Herzl Street? In the HaYarkon station they said--"

"They sent you to us?" The policeman eyed me with suspicion. "Which burglary?"

Ruthy said, "Listen to what he's telling you. The one on Herzl Street, he said."

"Tell your wife to be quiet," the policeman said, not even looking at Ruthy. "You filled out the forms already?"

"What forms?"

Ruthy said, "No, it's from two days ago, in the shoe store on Herzl." She turned to me. "What number is it?"

I said, "Sit over there, Ruthy, wait until I'm finished."

There was a ruckus behind us. A gangly policeman entered, his arm around the shoulders of a hiccuping fat beggar with disheveled hair who threw off a strong stench of urine. "Amzaleg is in?"

From somewhere within rose a cacophony of shouts, and over and above them, soaring effortlessly, a thin tenor voice began to sing:

My life is full of loss and fear,

I stretch my hand but no one's there--

It was the song of Military Prison Number 4, where I had once spent thirty-five days for disobeying an order. The more serious charges had been dropped after my father had intervened with someone in the Defense Ministry, perhaps Gershonovitz.

"Amzaleg, Amzaleg," growled the policeman, "all the world wants Amzaleg." The phone rang.

"Investigations Branch,
shalom,"
he said into the large black receiver.

Ruthy said to me, "Maybe I'll wait in the car."

"Whatever you want," I said.

The lanky policeman had deposited his charge on a bench, under a torn poster carrying the words "Be Wary!" over a picture of a large woman's handbag with a finger of dynamite sticking halfway out.

"See? What did I tell you!" the policeman said triumphantly, pointing the receiver at me. "Also for him." He tilted his head back and shouted, "Amnon! Aam-non!
Ta'al Hon!"
This was the paratrooper's war cry, calling on friends to come up and storm the hill. For some reason it is always made in Arabic, perhaps a remnant from the War of Independence, when Jews began to behave like Arabs.

From within a dark corridor waddled a burly man, his face puffy with lack of sleep. "Fuck your mother. What? What?"

I stepped up to him. "I talked to you over the phone, before? About the burglary on Herzl Street?"

He eyed me for a brief second, like a light-tower beam sweeping the terrain. "Come inside." He turned on his heels and walked into the corridor at the back.

The burly policeman kept on walking. Ruthy and I followed. The stench of urine intensified. Narrow nooks opened right and left; I heard moans and wails, and footsteps.

Inside Amzaleg's office I sat on the only chair. Ruthy remained standing by the door. I said, "I am his son. I just came from Canada."

The room was small and unlit, the walls painted some khaki color. The metal desk was cluttered with piles of paper, and files, and on its corner stood a photograph of a teenaged boy and an older girl--his children presumably. Framed citations hung behind the desk. It was too dark to see what they were for.

Ruthy said, "The policeman you have outside, he should learn how to speak."

Amzaleg eyed her with tired eyes. "Yeah." He burrowed into a mound of file folders on the desk. His thick fingers were yellow with nicotine.

I said, "When did--"

"Wait, wait." He flipped a few pages.

I waited. Ruthy said, "No, really, he should--"

"Just a moment, ma'am," said the man behind the desk.

The tenor voice outside began to sing again, sweetly.

"The man from Lillienblum found him," Amzaleg said suddenly in a raspy voice. "Glantz, the landlord. Where he rented the room. The deceased was supposed to come to the seder at eight, and when he still didn't come by ten--they had already finished singing--this Glantz went to the store and peeked through the glass, and he saw him."

My stomach gurgled and I laced my hands over it. "Can I go to the store?"

I had no idea why I asked this. What could I see there?

But Amzaleg did not seem surprised. Perhaps all relatives wanted to see where their kin had died. It was the same with bereaved parents, in the army. "Next week maybe,
ya habibi."
Amzaleg kept his eyes on the file. "We are still looking for clues there." And without any transition he said, "I used to know him, in the army."

Ruthy said, "Who do you think did it?"

Amzaleg said to me, "In forty-eight, in the final Castel battle--I was almost there with him, but a week before, he had sent me to the Yonah camp, for a course." Amzaleg raised his eyes. They were bloodshot. "I am sorry about your brother."

What was he sorry for now? My brother had died three years ago.

After a while Amzaleg said, "I don't know. It looks like an Arab job to me. Did he have anything to do with Arabs?"

"I live in Canada. What do I know?" I began to sound like Uncle Mordechai.

Ruthy said, "I think he had an Arab partner once." She turned to me, "No? Forty years ago, something."

I said, "That's in the prehistory."

Amzaleg stared at me. He said, "He bought leather from some people in Yaffo, but they are all old, maybe seventy, seventy-five."

Ruthy said, "Maybe they have sons, no?"

Amzaleg did not move his eyes. "Ma'am, don't teach me my profession." He flipped through the folder. A few glossy photographs spilled out and he grabbed at them quickly and inserted them back into a flap at the back.

Ruthy turned around. "I'll wait for you in the car."

I heard her quick steps echoing down the corridor.

Amzaleg said to me, "Your girlfriend has a big mouth."

"She's not my girlfriend."

Amzaleg closed the file; his beefy hand remained on it. "We'll tell you when we find something, really." His eyes left mine and traveled up and down the wall, like Gelber's cousin. "Did he write to you ... anything?"

"We didn't correspond."

"No, no," Amzaleg said, his eyes flicking at my face. "I mean in the letter--I saw it when we went through the will. It was sealed and addressed to--to you." His eyes glinted. "Did you open it?"

I shook my head. "I saw the lawyer only this morning, I arrived last night."

"Ahh." Amzaleg's eyes resumed climbing the wall. "Well, let me know when you read it, if there's anything."

There was an awkward pause.

"So you are going to stage it?" the policeman asked casually. "The play?"

I shook my head and said I'd be leaving right after the funeral. "I can't stay here too long," I added, not specifying why. Let him think what he wanted.

There was another silence.

"We are doing the best we can," Amzaleg said.

"Yes." I knew I should ask him about the murder, but it was as if a fist had closed around my throat, and kept my teeth clenched.

Amzaleg scrutinized my face, then lowered his eyes to his nicotine-stained fingers. "You just leave this thing to us."

"Yes, sure."

But with the new budget, Amzaleg went on, his eyes on his swarthy hands, they only had five people who could work, one was on sick leave, two were doing reserve service in Dimona near the nuclear reactor--

I said, "Just tell me when you catch him."

He looked up sharply, then his gaze slid up the wall. "Don't worry. We'll tell you."

The policeman at the desk outside was drinking from a Tempo bottle, his head thrown back. The other policeman, the lanky one, was gone. On the bench, his tattered clothes exceedingly dirty, sat the fat beggar, still burping, his disheveled gray beard spread over his bulging stomach. I now saw it was Ittamar Gabisohn, the music teacher at my grade school who had lost his mind after his son was killed in the 1967 war (or maybe it was this on top of his experience in Auschwitz), and who afterward lived under an overturned rowboat by the Yarkon's bank. Every anniversary of his son's death he would run up and down Ibn Gvirol Street all night and make farting noises through his fist. Only after my father would go down and talk to him in Polish would he subside.

As I passed he hissed, "Armageddon. He has arrived."

I left.

In the Volkswagen Ruthy was listening to the Peace Station.

"Beasts!" she said vehemently as I folded my legs into the seat.

I said, "They'll let me know when they catch him."

"Sure! Even flies they can't catch." She twiddled with the radio. A series of sharp beeps came on. The news. The religious parties were threatening to leave the coalition; two more soldiers had been killed in the Jordan valley ... Ruthy abruptly turned the radio off. "David, I am really sorry about ... you know." She looked at me; I looked at the window. She said, "Mother cried so much when I told her. I never knew they were friends or anything."

"What do I know?"

"I always thought she hated him."

"Yes. Can you drop me here somewhere? I must look for a restaurant, or a cafe. Maybe near the old pizzeria?"

"I have to meet Ehud in Cafe Cassit, you want to come--no, I forgot, you are in mourning. You can't go to a cafe." She eyed me with reproach. "And you shouldn't shave, until the shivah is over."

I shouldn't cause my father any more grief. She and Uncle Yitzchak. "I don't give a shit about all this. Do they still have hummus at Cassit?"

"Yes. But Chetzkel died. It's his son now, so it tastes like gefilte fish."

"They all died."

"Not me," Ruthy said. "I am alive."

8

O
N THE WAY TO
Cassit I told Ruthy about the will, and my father's last request.

"I didn't know he wrote plays," she said.

"I don't know if it's his. Maybe it's--Paltiel's." I had wanted to say "your father's," but reconsidered.

There was a pause.

Ruthy said, "And after you do it, you'll go back and get married? In Canada?"

"I'm going back in two days. I'm not doing any play!"

"No, really. I can postpone the wedding if you want--so Ehud can help you--"

"I told you I am not going to do any play. I can't stay here too long."

I didn't want to mention the black dreams; let her think what she wanted.

But Ruthy was off on one of her enthusiasms. "I can ask Ehud. He stopped producing shows because he says no one goes to good theater anymore, just to skit shows and crap, but he's always helping theater people, like your ... your father used to. You know ..."

I knew. My father had always been putting up penniless comedians for the night, giving actors shoes for free, "lending" starving dramatists rent money. I never knew how he could afford to do this.

Not that my mother had been much better.

"Don't do me any favors," I said. "You go ahead and get married, and good health to you both."

We were driving now in the midst of a thick double column of automobiles, the sidewalks on both sides a veritable zoo: soldiers in aleph uniforms; overly-made-up young women; gawking American Jews trailing cameras; ancient party hacks; smoke-trailing
Dan
buses; neon lights. Dizzengoff.

Ruthy said, "So you'll give it all up? Is it a lot of money, the estate?"

"Sixty-five thousand Canadian dollars." A bulb of wrath rose in me, about the will, and about my father's posthumous request, this transparent ruse to keep me here. "Next week I am gone!"

Honks rose around us. We had almost plowed into a red Volvo. Behind us, a gray Toyota had almost plowed into us. Ruthy swerved, sharply. "Everybody today has a car!" she said, her nose pink. "You know how much it costs?"

"I don't care." We sat in vibrant silence as she slowly inched her VW ahead, looking for a parking spot. Ruthy said in a low voice, "So you won't do what he asked you?"

"I've done enough for him already."

Ruthy said, "Can I read the play at least?"

"No."

We drove some more in silence. At last Ruthy said, "Here is a spot."

As I got out of the car, the entire street, the people, the lights, everything wavered as if I were seeing it all through a heat wave; as if I were once again in the Sinai in '46 and the people were a ghostly caravan treading up Um Marjam hill, a long procession of all those I had killed, Arabs at the front, Jews at the back.

"Careful of the sewage." Ruthy grabbed my elbow as I swayed.

"I'm all right," I snarled and pulled my arm away.

9

I
WAS DRAFTED INTO
the army in 1965, right after high school, and immediately volunteered for the paratroopers. The first furlough I got from boot camp, I hitchhiked home to Tel Aviv and proudly showed my father my red beret. "See?"

He nodded without expression. "How's it going?"

I said it was great: I couldn't wait to finish boot camp and go catch some fedayeen.

Those days, Arab infiltrators sneaked in daily from the Gaza refugee camps, to shoot at kibbutzniks, blow up irrigation pumps, and ambush buses.

"Don't worry," my father said. "You'll have a chance."

I asked him for any tips he may have. Any advice, from his '48 days. Anything.

"There are no tips. You just do what you have to do."

I pressed him further, but he would not elaborate. "You just do what's necessary."

What did that mean?

"You'll see."

Following the five-month boot camp, I was posted to Nitzana in the Negev for border duty. Ehud was posted nearby, in another encampment. Our squads laid ambushes for infiltrators in wadis and gulches, following information we received from the Intelligence Recon guys. From time to time we caught a few infiltrators. Those who were not killed in the first fireburst we delivered to the Intels for a brief interrogation, then finished them off. After a while it got to be just like work.

One morning when I was returning from an all-night ambush (we caught no one that night), a handwritten note was waiting for me at the operations tent, to go to the commander's tent immediately.

"What for?" I asked No'a, the operations secretary.

"Don't know. Someone came in, and he's interviewing guys."

"For what?"

I had declined offers before, to go to flight course, and to the naval commandos. I preferred the desert, the open spaces.

"Don't know."

I went to the commander's tent. To my surprise I found Ehud Reznik standing before it, too, dressed in his formal aleph uniform.

"What gives?" I asked him.

But Ehud didn't know either. Then someone inside called my name, and I entered.

Inside, seated on a field bed, was a small, sunburned man with a shiny bald pate and huge hands, dressed in rankless khakis. Without any preliminaries he said that his name was Colonel Shafrir (no first name), and that he needed a few volunteers who would do anything necessary, for their country. "Anything," he stressed.

I asked him straight off if my father had pulled strings to get me a cushy job, because if he had, I was not interested.

"Your father had nothing to do with it, and it sure ain't cushy."

I asked what kind of a job it was.

"Can't tell you. Only if you accept."

"But is it combat or staff?"

"Oh, combat, don't worry."

I asked where I would be posted, in what base camp. "Because if it's close to home, I don't want it either."

"Don't be a donkey. Most of the time you'll be far away. Very far."

He then proceeded to ask me a few questions to which I could not see the point--the languages I spoke (French, Arabic, Hebrew, some English), if I played chess (I did) or any musical instruments (the violin), whether I had ever played soccer seriously (I hadn't) or was a member of the Boy Scouts, Young Maccabees, or any other youth movement (I wasn't).

"I think you'll do," he said at last.

"But what is this job?"

"Can't tell you yet."

I asked a few more questions, to which I received no answers.

"The only thing I can promise you," he said, "is that you'll be asked to do the hardest thing and get next to no help doing it."

And this was meant to convince me? "What thing?"

"You'll see."

"And what did you mean by 'anything'?" I asked him again later, as I was signing the several forms he handed me. (I didn't read even one.)

"You'll see."

Later I learned that Ehud had signed up also.

And that's how it began.