THRILLER: The Galilee Plot: (International Biological Terror, The Mossad, and... A Self-contended Couple) (5 page)

I had a cousin, eight years
older than me, articulate and well-mannered, shrewd although uneducated, not
renowned for his diligence or for his conscientious approach to work. In the
tradition of Jews of Spanish ancestry, he was named, as was I and a dozen other
cousins on my father’s side, Shlomo, after our grandfather.

In the place where I was
born and grew up, sustaining a family was the mark of manhood, and more
important still was the achievement of sustaining that family with integrity
and honour. Also in the place where I was born, an acute economic crisis
erupted, and thousands were thrown out into the street, without any source of
income whatsoever. My cousin, may he rest in Paradise, was one of them. He had
a family: a pleasant and sharp-witted wife, two wonderful children.
Responsibility for the family was laid on him, and slowly but surely it became
clear that he needed no help from relatives, and more than this, my cousin
proved himself a man, in other words – he sustained his family with integrity
and honour. Obviously not through his former profession, seriously damaged as a
result of the economic crisis, or any other regular profession either. My
shrewd cousin, with a total of four years of primary education behind him,
sustained his family with integrity and honour, incredible as it may sound – by
playing poker. We were good friends and enjoyed each other’s company and
conversation, so I suggested a meeting and asked him directly, as was customary
between us: “Tell me, Cousin,  do you really earn all your income in these
turbulent times – from poker? And the big head with the tousled, dense and
curly black hair, went down and up again, twice, in an abrupt movement. His
vocal version of the answer was a resolute: “Yes!”

“But how can it be so?” I
wondered. “I know you’re a member of a poker club for factory managers, which
was disbanded although it continues to meet secretly, and there, to the best of
my knowledge, anyone caught cheating is thrown out. Final and irrevocable
expulsion.”

“They’ve never caught me
cheating and they never will.”

“So how is it that you
always win?” I pressed him: “Can you explain?”

“Willingly!” he declared.
“You’re familiar with all the thirty-two cards. You see the cards dealt to you,
remember the cards you’ve discarded and what replaced them. With a sidelong
glance, often enough – you catch the edge of a card that’s been discarded or
has fallen, and you make your calculations, which aren’t particularly
complicated. You have a rough idea of who’s holding what. You also know the
personalities of the other players. There are the frivolous ones and the
sensible ones, the pedantic and the broad-minded. All of this guarantees you an
adequate return at the end of the working day, and we’re talking one day a
week.”

“One day a week, i.e. four
days a month, earns you enough to  support a family of four, with honour
and integrity?” I expressed my astonishment.

“Exactly so!” my cousin
retorted, still miffed by the suspicions I had raised over cheating.

“But my dear Cousin,” I persisted.
“it still depends on the luck of the cards.”

“You intellectuals call it
the luck of the cards.”

“And what do you call it?”

“By the right word and the
true name.”

“Which is?” – I wasn’t
letting up.

“God.”

This was not a comfortable
situation, since in that country there was a communist regime, and anyone
mentioning the name of God aroused immediate suspicion and could expect his
situation to become immeasurably more serious.

“Can you elucidate?” I
asked.

“Gladly,” my cousin
replied and for the first time I felt he had got over the offence I had caused
him with my suspicions. “You have to be worthy of God’s attention.”

“And that means?” I
pressed him, conceding nothing but full of curiosity.

“Behaving as God wants you
to behave.”

“How?”

“Not lying, not deceiving,
not cheating and most of all, being charitable.”

“That’s all there is to it
then, being charitable?”

“Hardly a case of ‘that’s
all there is to it’. You have to give with all your heart.”

“For example?” I demanded
an illustration and it was supplied at once.

“For example, you see one
of the players in the game, in desperation, making a fatal mistake, and you can
tell, just by looking at his face, that he’s in a desperate financial plight and
his family is destitute. There’s a thousand dollars in the pot. You make an
educated guess at which cards he’s holding. You know for sure that with the
cards you have, the pot is yours, but you fold all the same. You let him win
and he takes the thousand dollars with a warm sense of achievement. You don’t
see yourself as a sucker, but on the contrary, you know for certain that your
conduct is compatible with the will of God and you feel greatly relieved at
heart. You even breathe more easily. You haven’t strayed onto the slippery
slope of chasing petty profit.

“God will refund you
double, fourfold or more, whatever sum you donated to that poor sod, thereby
giving him a few moments of happiness and satisfaction.”

“And that’s all?” I
concluded, disappointed.

“That’s all,” he confirmed
in his deep, throaty, manly voice.

“And what about all those
duplicate packs and switching cards?” I knew I was offending him again.

“That’s all!” he repeated
emphatically in that throaty, deep voice, tempered by years of chain-smoking.

“May God be with you!” I
blessed him, a strange thing for me to say in those days, and quite dangerous.

“And with you too,” he
replied and added: “Don’t worry, you haven’t got a dishonest cousin. Even in
these hectic times, he’s supporting his family with integrity and honour. And
if you ever need a loan, don’t be shy about approaching your cousin.”

He arrived in Israel with
his family, didn’t find work, but did find poker enthusiasts like himself, and
continued to practise his bizarre profession. Sometimes he was invited to the
homes of poker fanatics, and usually went away satisfied, with a clear profit,
leaving behind him among his fellow players not the slightest trace of a
suspicion that they had been duped.

One Sabbath, leaving a
house in which a game had taken place, with twelve thousand dollars in his
pocket, he was knocked down by a drunk driver and killed instantly. His body
was taken to the pathology lab, and was returned the following day to his wife
and two children. Everything was intact – identity papers, small change. Of the
money that he won, those twelve thousand dollars in hard cash, not a cent was
found on his body.

His family and fellow
players saw no point in claims and investigations; it was agreed that these
“would not bring the dead back to life”.

May he rest in Paradise!
This chapter is a modest memorial to him.

We strolled in the old
city, thronged as it was with people of every sex, race and age, noisy and
confident in their superior origin, trading in all kinds of weird and wonderful
merchandise – some of it stolen and offered at eminently reasonable prices, to
say the least.

Most brothels in Zurich
(such premises do exist), are located in the old city, and as in any profitable
and self-respecting business, each brothel individually advertises its wares,
in the most direct, unmediated and tangible way possible: an impressive display
of colour photographs showing the goods up for sale, in every imaginable
posture.

As we often had occasion
to cross the old city, we felt a certain sense of unease, confronted by the
shop windows of the spacious houses of ill repute, until my wife took the
initiative and suggested:

“Look at all the flesh on
show here!”

I refused.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m not interested.”

“Take a look first, and
then decide if you’re interested or not.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I can sense the curiosity
that you’re charged up with.”

We stopped in front of the
display window of one of the more respectable whorehouses. My wife asked me to choose
something. I refused.

“It can’t do any harm,”
she insisted, “it’s not as if you’re going in there. Just tell me which girl
and which pose appeal to you.”

I refused again. And it
was obvious I was going to keep on refusing, if necessary, from here to Alaska.
And since, under pressure from my wife, I glanced in passing at the lurid
display, it can be stated with confidence – there isn’t the faintest hint of
anything authentically Swiss there, taking its honoured place among the
artistic creations of Swiss artists and displayed in impressive nude
sculptures, at the corners and in the gardens of the city. Perhaps it’s to the
credit of the Swiss, or perhaps it’s the reverse: the Swiss are fed up with
Swiss people of the feminine gender and they chase after something, anything
else to experience, so long as it isn’t Swiss. One way or the other, you won’t
find in the shop windows of Zurich’s brothels anything reminiscent of the buxom
feminine form that is archetypically Swiss.

Every Saturday we visited
the colourful flea-market and bought items for which, in the final analysis,
there was no demand in our own country.

We weren’t bored, we
appreciated everything, and always promised ourselves we would return next
year, a promise which we have kept in the letter and in the spirit, for more
than a whole decade. We felt at home in Zurich. We enjoyed everything, and
especially the pure air, clear of smog, redolent of fragrant groves. Anyway,
this year was a departure from the familiar, agreeable and appropriate routine.
One way or  the other, a few days of relaxation made their invigorating
contribution, until that Tuesday when the telephone once again ripped apart the
smog-free air with typically Swiss brusqueness, and my wife and I knew that our
serenity was about to be broken. Shmulik was on the line and he gave me a stark
warning, one of the starkest imaginable.

“Beware,” he said,
“especially of anyone walking behind you. If this situation arises, do
everything you can to shake him off, as quickly and effectively as possible. If
there’s no other choice, just run away from him, go into a shop, a cinema, a
café, so you can come out again and disappear. I don’t need to teach you
these things, which I’m sure you learned in the ‘Combat Squads’ in Bulgaria.
Anyway, always try to be part of a crowd. Warn your wife too. Women, despite a
tendency towards hysteria, have a more highly developed instinct than men have
for detecting danger. My best wishes and my compliments to her. I hope there’ll
be no more need for phone conversations like this, before you come back to this
country. Enjoy your vacation! Incidentally,” Shmulik remembered – “checks in
the blood-banks of several hospitals have yielded surprising results, and a
number of cleaning workers and nurses, male and female, have been sacked, after
confessing what was on their consciences. There was a network, not so much
surprising as astounding. It’s in our hands now. Stocks of blood are being held
under rigorous supervision. You deserve a medal for this, but as you know, our
country doesn’t do medals. My best wishes again and see you soon!” End of
conversation.

I told my wife, who
characteristically became very tense. We went out for a walk in the woods,
which in a sense was the longest living of all our walks, having been part of
our routine for the past ten years.

Without realising it, my
wife – despite her highly developed instinct for danger, as Shmulik had put it,
and I – despite the exercises of more than thirty years ago and my experience,
albeit ephemeral, of these things, were constantly turning our heads, checking
every shadow, moving or otherwise, and sighing with relief when the pedestrian
passed us by, taking no notice of us and making no impression on us whatsoever.
This was the way we liked it.

Meetings with Israelis
aren’t uncommon. Especially around Jewish festival days, almost every fourth
tourist arriving at the Bahnhoff is an Israeli. I went with my wife to the
“H&M” clothing superstore; she picked up an item and went into one of the
changing cubicles to try it on. At that moment I was approached by a tall woman
with sunburnt face, flushed as if she had just run a marathon:

“Oh, it’s you!” she began
in Hebrew, which could not be described as anything but ‘strident’, and
immediately added – “I recognised you! Speak Hebrew?” she went on to ask in
English, not giving me a chance to reply, “I recognised her too!” She pointed
to the cubicle where my wife had disappeared behind the curtain, passed a hand
over her scalp, indicating that my wife’s short hair was an unmistakable mark
of recognition, and in the same emphatic tone she added, “I’m listening to her
song all the time!”

“Which one?” I asked.

“All of them. All the
discs, all on auto-play, I’ve got her on continuous loop!”

A mannish, formidable
Israeli woman, and there’s no wonder that I felt cowed by her solid presence.
Suddenly she disappeared, as abruptly as she had descended on us, to my relief
and to the relief of my wife, who had apparently heard every word she said from
behind the curtain.

That’s the way we are, we
Israelis, and I only wish I could add “And it’s nothing to be ashamed of”.

We entered the “Manor”,
with the express intention of using the toilets on the top floor. As we climbed
the stairs, my wife stopped beside a wooden wall panel covered with socks, of
all materials, styles and sizes. She swooped on them with me following close
behind, examined some of them, picked out nine pairs, and smiled one of her
most charming smiles, pointing with her free right hand to the bundle clutched
in her left and explained:
“Exactly the fabric I was looking for. Top quality, there’s nothing like this
at home.” She went to the cash-desk, pulled out a credit card. While she waited
for the conclusion of the paying process, her eye strayed over an extensive
display of shoulder-bags, including an interesting specimen coloured khaki.

“This will go perfectly
with the khaki skirt that we bought,” she pointed out.

“A singular khaki
shoulder-bag for the khaki skirt that we bought,” I commented.

She picked up the bag, shouldered
it, paced to right and left in front of the mirror and concluded: “It’s a
perfect match.”

“And what about the bag
you already have?” – my voice wasn’t hoarse, rather it was surprisingly clear.

“It’s falling to bits,”
she declared, moving towards the cash-desk. Halfway there, she stopped, turned,
came to me and urged me in a tone of entreaty, “Please, say ‘yes’ as if you
meant it. Otherwise I won’t feel comfortable buying this wonderful
shoulder-bag, which is really cheap…”

“In francs,” I commented.

“Over here,” she replied,
“francs are worth the same as shekels. If you don’t want it, I’ll do without
it.”

Of course I wanted it,
contrary to all the principles of logic ingrained in my heart. But the day was
fine, and without the bag it was sure to cloud over and something of the
Japanese “wa” would go to waste.

We reached the toilets on
the top floor, laden with socks and the bag, and as it turned out, they didn’t
impede us at all.

We went down from the
toilets, not using the escalator but the lift that happened to be available. By
mistake, we arrived on the basement floor. As we emerged from the belly of the
lift, my wife’s expert eye lighted on a khaki waistcoat, for men. She made a
beeline for the waistcoat, as if all this had been planned a week ago, took it
down from the peg, handed it to me and said:

“Put it on! No obligation
to buy,” she added. The logic worked, the fitting room was close by; I put the
waistcoat on.

“Nice work,” I declared,
glancing in the mirror and feeling quite comfortable in the garment. In the
final analysis it’s as my wife said: francs abroad are the same as shekels at
home. Nevertheless, I tried to raise to the surface the ideologies of former
times, regarding the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the hunger
afflicting the Dark Continent and the man who doesn’t care, thinking only of
wearing elegant waistcoats, and so on and so on. My wife was on her way to the
cash-desk, the waistcoat over her left arm and the credit card in her right
hand. I caught up with her by the cash-desk.

The charming young cashier
was emitting lavish blessings. The credit card was proffered. I turned to my
wife, with a vehement request:

“Tell the cashier they
should be paying you a percentage…”

“How do I say that?”

“In English, of course.”

She did as I asked.

The cashier listened
attentively, and it turned out that unlike thousands of cashiers all over the
world, she did not become a computer. Her unequivocal answer was evidence of a
healthy sense of humour.

“Tell your husband,” she
said to my wife, “that he has a wonderful wife who buys him wonderful
presents!”

Indeed, the charming
cashier was absolutely right. My wife looked at her face and then at mine and
burst into laughter, pure, sincere and captivating. I laughed with her and the
cashier joined in. We left the “Manor”.