THRILLER: The Galilee Plot: (International Biological Terror, The Mossad, and... A Self-contended Couple) (4 page)

And then came another
blow, which could not in any way have been envisaged, one of those things which
happen when people go away on holiday.

One day my wife got up and
announced, with all the seriousness and maturity which distinguish her, that
she could not see. Incapable of reading a newspaper or watching television. We
made an appointment with an optometrist and paid him eight hundred Swiss
francs, ready cash. There are 3.6 shekels to a franc. My wife was treated to a
lengthy explanation of the defect that had shown up in her eyesight, and as
always happens with medical consultations in the private sector, she was told
she had arrived at the very last moment – any more delay and her eyesight would
have been severely endangered and the rest of her life turned to tragedy. On
our return from the optometrist, my wife asked, did the professional expert
mean that she would need a white stick wherever she went in the world.

I tried to reassure her.

“I’m right beside you!” I
declared with excessive confidence. She clutched my arm and almost wept with
emotion.

Sure enough, the next day
we went and received two pairs of gleaming spectacles. My wife was euphoric.

After a few hours of
gazing at the splendid world of the Holy One blessed be He, through one of
those pairs and a hasty attempt to read a newspaper standing up, my wife again
declared she could see nothing, could not pick out objects or letters.

We returned to the
optometrist. He repeated the process and checked everything with commendable
thoroughness, and found that in the laboratory his instructions had not been
properly followed and there had been confusion. He promised that the issue
would be rectified fully and expeditiously, and we were asked to come back the
next day.

Early in the morning we
presented ourselves, and were given repaired spectacles. My wife’s mouth was
filled with all the praises in the world. We reached the hotel, and the
phenomenon repeated itself – no distant sight, letters at close range
illegible. As I write these lines, we are planning yet another visit to the
professional and may God be with us.

We went down to Lake
Zurich. The temperature was cool, without being threatening, the climate for which
we flew to Switzerland in the first place and which we didn’t always get. We
walked with the stream of pedestrians and bicycle riders on the broad promenade
alongside the lake. People smiled at one another. If someone smiled broadly at
someone smiling at him, this was interpreted as an invitation to conversation
and so on. We didn’t need this. We reached the end of the promenade and
returned, slowing our steps, filling our lungs with invigorating, oxygenated
air. We returned the way we had come, walked over the broad bridge crossing the
garden where on Saturdays a flea-market was held. We made slow progress,
finally arriving at “Sprüngli”, a European café of petty bourgeois
flavour, famous for its homemade cakes and chocolate, not only in Switzerland but
outside it as well. “Sprüngli” had tables on the pavement and also a large
room on the upper floor. We decided to sit outside under the parasols, designed
to provide shade from the sun and now affording some protection from the light
rain. Before we sat down the rain started falling, adding to the ozone and to
the pleasure of the excursion. A waitress in a classic, starched-white Viennese
apron approached us, bowed lightly and stylishly and asked what we wanted. We
ordered what we ordered and it was served within less than five minutes. We
sipped “Sprüngli’s” excellent cappuccino with deep enjoyment, that
concoction which my wife, in her exalted mood, described as a “masterpiece”.
The rain was merciful to us and didn’t strengthen, while the pink parasol protected
us and contributed to the boosting of our spirits. And then we both noticed,
with our peripheral vision, and from our separate places, two guys standing by
the open-air counter and staring at us. Young men, in Swiss suits like those
worn by bank-clerks and schoolteachers. After about two minutes the shorter of
the two approached us and asked if the two chairs next to us were free. We
couldn’t say “No”, though we would have liked to. It isn’t the Swiss way to
refuse to accommodate people who want to share a table, rather the opposite. I
hurriedly nodded my head, not wanting to give the impression that the dwarfish
young man had broken my wife’s heart. The one who approached us thanked us in
clear German, signalled to his friend to come over and the two of them sat down
facing us. The waitress arrived, took their order, brought two cups of steaming
coffee. I began chatting with my wife in as animated a style as possible,
hoping to convey the message that we weren’t looking for new interlocutors. We
spoke English. This surprised the two men, and the dwarf addressed me again,
asking in English as deformed as himself, the most hackneyed question of all:
where were we from.

The atmosphere was not
pleasant, and the expressions on the faces of the two contributed to our
unease. The dwarf could have been a sergeant in the Wermacht, with his ruddy
face and big dark eyes in constant movement back and forth, like the eyes of an
animal in a cartoon film. The tall, thin one was reminiscent of one of Hitler’s
more spectacularly stupid generals, only his childlike devotion to his Fuhrer
rendering him photogenic to a certain extent. It seemed he knew about
photography, as he said a few words about cameras, enlargements and lenses. At
a certain moment, chosen by me, I lied to the dwarf about our origins:

“My wife is American,” I
said, “and I’m Bulgarian.” It wasn’t such a big lie: I was born in that country
and its language was my mother-tongue, while my wife had spent a fair number of
her years in the land of the buffalo and the Red Indian and the Hollywood soap
opera, and she spoke fluent American.  She took the initiative, turned to
me and said:

“Let’s not forget, the
Schwarzewald family are supposed to be visiting with us today.”

I put on a serious face,
agreed with her at once, signalled to the waitress who was exceptionally alert
to hints such as these, and was standing beside me just a moment later, one
hand in the leather money-belt at her waist, rummaging among the assorted notes
and coins. We paid.

“Just a moment,” the dwarf
said as if suddenly waking up, “we know which way you’re going, and we’d be
happy to give you a lift to your hotel. We have a nice VW Beetle outside. You
can see, the rain has no intention of stopping, on the contrary – it’s getting
stronger.”

My wife turned to me,
looking for a response. Her eyes said – find us a way out of this! I found one:

“We prefer to use the
tram. Thanks all the same.”

Here the thin one
intervened, saying:

“Think about it for a
moment! You can hear the rain and the wind. It’s no trouble to us. We’re going
to the same destination.”

“We appreciate your offer,
Herr…”

“Obermann” – he filled it
in for me, listening intently to every syllable I uttered, and forcing me to
weigh every letter before articulating it.

“It’s been a great
pleasure meeting you, Herr Obermann!” I declared and almost clicked my heels,
in the style of long-dead officers of the Reich.

We moved towards the
street. At that moment, a Number 11 stopped. We both ran, the rain catching up
with us every other step. We boarded the tram, found dry seats, and relaxed,
taking deep gulps of invigorating, therapeutic air. Half an hour later, we were
in our tidy, spotlessly clean hotel room. On the table, a couple of ripe apples
and two small bars of chocolate. We attacked them without mercy, till nothing
was left but the chocolate wrappers, discarded in the bin. My wife was
agitated.

“You saw!” – she
pronounced the exclamation mark.

“There’s nothing to be
done. That’s what comes of going for a walk with a woman as attractive as you!”

“Leave out the Stone Age
wise-cracks.  They know where we’re staying.”

“That doesn’t  bother
me.”

“I don’t know why you’re
being so casual about this.”

“What is it about this
whole episode that you find strange?”

She repeated emphatically,
her voice quivering a little:

“They know where we’re
staying. They know us but we don’t know them.”

“I don’t mind not knowing
them,” I replied in a melodious voice, like a bird set free from a cage. My
wife went to the window, and suddenly let out a cry, something not
characteristic of her.

“Look!” she said pointing.
I rushed to her side, looked, and saw.

Someone was pointing a
telescopic camera at me. I wasted no time, putting the thumb of one hand to the
end of my nose, the other thumb on the little finger, and moved my hands this
way and that in a gesture of contempt, intending to annoy and generally
succeeding. Without expressing any opinion of me, my wife put on a raincoat and
ran to the lift. I followed her example and caught up with her. We went down in
the lift and to the edge of the field adjoining the hotel, and possibly
belonging to it, where the pair of clowns we met at “Sprüngli” were
standing, their faces expressing despair hard to gauge, like two buffoons who
have blundered in a popular farce and are exposed to the scorn and derision of
the audience.

“Get out of here!” my wife
shouted, though she had no legal right to demand this. The tall one got into
the Beetle, parked a few paces from us, put the telescopic camera away, picked
up a conventional camera from the seat and without any shame, pointed it at me.
My wife stooped and found something which I would never have imagined could be
found in a Swiss field – certainly not a ploughed field, replete with
germinating corn – a round stone, which was immediately flung at the tall man’s
face, to be more precise, at his camera, which a moment before had managed to
click a few times, being held in the hands of an expert. The dwarf approached
my wife, but I saw he had no fighting spirit in him, so I left him, for better
or worse, to the tender mercies of her hands, which soon found, to the shame of
the Swiss, two more round stones, hurled straight into the face of the dwarf. I
ran towards the tall one, and did what they do in all the films – I tapped him lightly
on the shoulder, and he obediently turned to me his Quixote-ish features. Two
fleshless jaw-bones received one after the other four well-aimed punches, two
apiece. He collapsed at my feet. I turned my attention to the dwarf, who in the
meantime had managed to take refuge in the vehicle, and from there he waved an
admonitory finger, sometimes in my wife’s direction, sometimes in mine – the
gesture of a prankster in a class of backward children. My wife approached Mr
Obermann, still prostrate at my feet. From the inside pocket of his tailored
jacket, peered the edge of a white piece of paper or card. She stooped and with
a swift movement, pulled out  something that looked like a visiting card.
We read the content: written there in square Teutonic manuscript was the name
of the hotel where we were staying, our room number, surname and first names.
My wife exclaimed:

“That which I feared has
come upon us!” – and put the card back in its place.

Without exchanging another
word, we folded our tents and sounded the retreat. We ran up a hillock and soon
we were back in our room. We took off our coats and flung them down on the
upholstered chairs. My wife’s face showed anxiety which could not be hidden or
disregarded.

“What are you so worried
about?” I asked her.

“They’re looking for you,”
she replied.

“Why would they be looking
for me?” I asked innocently.

“Stop playing games. Only
you can foil their intentions.”

“Who are
they
, and
what intentions are you talking about?”

“Your Arab friend and his
cronies!”

“Why should they do that?”
I persisted.

“You’re the only one who
knows the material, the only one who can seriously jeopardise their nefarious
schemes.”

“They aren’t that clever!”
I declared, and hugged her shoulders.

“Your face is covered in
mud!” my wife cried, with an expression of horror.

“So is yours!” I replied.

She smiled.

I ushered her into the
bathroom.

In the media, especially
in the papers and on television, worrying reports began to appear about natural
disasters, and this time, unlike in previous times, Switzerland too was hit by
severe floods. In the forests of Portugal giant fires raged, and there were
victims. As happened every year, a hurricane threatened the coasts of America
and China. The mood was gloomy, the air in the room was dense, and not easy to
breathe.

After much hesitation and
cogitation, my wife plucked up her courage and turned to me with a question:

“Why is this happening?”

We were sitting in the
quiet room. Rain lashed the windows.

“There exists a divine
justice,” I began – “and it’s a sure foundation for the balance of forces in
nature. When this divine justice is impaired,” I went on to explain, “the
balance of natural forces is disrupted and the result: natural disasters, the
source of which is – immoral behaviour. In the Bible it is written: For all
flesh has corrupted his way (Genesis chapter six, verse twelve).”

“For example?”

“Incest. Not long ago we
heard about a man who seduced a mother and her daughter, or the brother and
sister, each of whom raised a family, and who then embarked on a sexual
relationship with each other, and other cases that we haven’t heard about, all
of them constituting a serious offence against divine justice and a no less
serious disruption of the balance of natural forces. The prophet Jonah, who
refused to obey God and to fulfil his mission, offended against divine justice
and disrupted the forces of nature. The ship on which Jonah meant to escape
from his God, was on the point of breaking up and sinking along with all those
on board. Jonah, whose faith was true, and whose trust in God was without flaw,
called on those praying on the ship to throw him in the sea, as he was the
reason for their disaster, he the one who offended against divine justice and disrupted
the balance of natural forces, and they believed him and did as he asked, and
the ship was saved with all hands. God rescued Jonah, his chosen and steadfast
envoy.”

“And what about the forest
fires?” she persisted.

“The same principle as for
the floods.”

“As far as I know,” she
continued, “the Jews have always been accused of offending against divine
justice and disrupting the balance of natural forces, as you call them.”

“The Jews are the only
people in the world who are not content with not acknowledging Jesus Christ and
not believing his message, but – unlike every other people, nation and race in
the world – the Jewish race persecutes Jesus Christ, hates him and curses him,
and this is a serious offence against divine justice and the balance of natural
forces.”

“And if the Jews stop
persecuting, hating and cursing Jesus Christ, who incidentally was born and
died a Jew – what will be the outcome?”

I replied with solid and
unassailable confidence: “It will be the age of the salvation of the human race.”

“Why do the Jews refuse to
stop persecuting, hating and cursing Jesus Christ?”

“Why does the blind man
not see the light, so that any small stone can trip him and bring him to the
ground?”

“I don’t think the Jews
will ever abandon their blind behaviour.”

“Then there will be no
salvation for the human race, of which the Jews are a part.”

“Why is a man born a Jew?”

“Why is an elephant born
an elephant?”

“That isn’t a fair
analogy!” – a note of serious protest in her voice.

“One necessarily exists as
does the other, so that divine justice will be revealed and the balance of
natural forces maintained. Any thought, word or deed which offends,
intentionally or otherwise, consciously or unconsciously, against divine
justice and disrupts the balance of natural forces, resulting in natural
disaster, is defined both in ancient and in modern Hebrew as a ‘despicable
act’.”

“An apt definition!” – she
expressed emphatic satisfaction. “And what your friend Amin is doing or
planning to do, isn’t that a ‘despicable act’?”

“A despicable act in the
first degree.”

“But that hasn’t caused
any natural disasters.”

“If that isn’t stopped,
it’s going to bring about the murderous business called war.”