All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (40 page)

The philosopher? “Yeah. An old friend of mine.”

He seemed not to notice my surprise. Actually, why shouldn’t a man who knows heads of state be friends with a famous writer? I asked when I would see him again. “Tomorrow. I’ll call you.” In the meantime could I use what he had told me for a cable to
Yedioth Ahronoth?
“Oh no,” he cried. “Anything but that! That would expose me to risks you couldn’t possibly imagine.” But he promised that tomorrow he would bring me information for a sensational story. Something told me that it would be better not to press the issue. Better pretend to trust him. “Okay,” I said, “take my phone number.” His childlike blue eyes rested upon me. “No need,” he said. “We know how to reach you.” We? “Be at your phone tomorrow morning at 10:35.” Then he added, “Let’s synchronize our watches.” We shook hands and walked off in opposite directions.

In my dispatch I told Dov I might soon have important—indeed, sensational—revelations about Oren. He called back at five in the morning. “What’s this all about?” I told him I couldn’t say any more on the phone. He insisted I at least give him a hint. Now it was my turn to act conspiratorially. “Not on the phone.”

At 10:32 I took up my position at the phone. It rang at exactly 10:35. I recognized the drawling voice. “It’s all set,” he said. I realized I had forgotten to breathe. “That’s great, but …”

“But what? You’re happy, aren’t you? Be downstairs at 16:48 this afternoon.” And he hung up.

My head was spinning. I must have looked pale, because Léon Leneman, at whose home I was living at the time, seemed worried. “Bad news?” he asked. I told him everything was fine, but I wasn’t so sure of that. I didn’t think my new friend was lying, but I was afraid he might be drawing me into some kind of conspiracy. Why all these complicated arrangements? I decided to wait—did I have a choice?—until 4:45—excuse me, 4:48—that afternoon.

But waiting was not easy. I paced my room as if it were a prison cell, chain-smoking. Madame Leneman offered me coffee, but I didn’t feel like it. I tried in vain to read the papers, and to write an article.

Finally, it was time, or almost. At 4:40 the phone rang. “It’s for you,” Leneman said. I asked him to take a message. I had to go downstairs, Givon would be here any minute. “He says it’s urgent.” I took the receiver and recognized the now familiar voice. “I’m at the airport,” he said. “I’ve been called back to Prague, so we’ll have to postpone our meeting. Is next Monday all right?” Crushed, I stammered a feeble yes. Of course Monday was all right. “I might call you from there,” he added just before he hung up, “so don’t stray too far from the phone.”

I went to my room and locked the door. I didn’t want to see anyone, hear any news, send any dispatches. I was going to resign from the paper, go back to India, and become an ascetic.

It was a very long week. Then, on Saturday night I got a call from Prague. “Is Monday still all right?” Absolutely. “By the way, I set it all up.” Set what up? For whom? “For you, idiot.” What could he have set up for me in Prague? “I’ll tell you Monday. Downstairs. Same time.” Madame Leneman was worried about me. “You don’t look well. Is anything wrong?” I reassured her, thanked her for her concern. “Could it be love?” I smiled awkwardly and didn’t reply. Let her think what she wanted.

Unnerved, depressed, I spent the rest of the weekend waiting for the rendezvous, convinced it would be postponed again. I was wrong. At exactly 4:48 in the afternoon a taxi pulled up in front of 8 Avenue de la République. Givon invited me to get in. He put his finger to his lips, suggesting that we needed to be careful. We stopped near the Châtelet. He allowed me to pay for the cab, then pointed to a sidewalk café. “Do you think it’s all right?” I whispered. He looked around and decided it was.

“So,” I asked after we sat down at a table, “how was Prague?”

“Like always. I did what I had to do. Saw Mordechai. Gave him a package.”

The blood pounded in my head. “You saw Oren? In prison?” Yes. “Can I publish that?” No. “Why not?”

“Because I have something better.” Who wanted something better? That scoop was just fine. I could see the front page now: “Message from Oren, Exclusive to
Yedioth Ahronoth.”
My colleagues would not only be green with envy but also red with embarrassment. “No,” Joseph repeated impatiently. “Besides, you want to know everything, but you don’t give me a chance to talk.” I could feel he was closing up. I had to find a way to put him at ease. “Look, Joseph,” I said, “I’m sorry for interrupting. Go on, please. How is Oren getting along? Tell me, is he depressed? Confident? Is he alone in his cell? What is he eating? Do they let him read?” Givon pretended not to be listening. He finally halted my flow of questions with a wave of his good hand. “What would you say to an interview with Oren?” I was stunned. “Is this some kind of joke? How am I supposed to meet him?”

“I asked the authorities in Prague,” Givon calmly replied. “At first they were somewhat reluctant, but I managed to convince them it was necessary. You understand, the prosecutor’s secretary likes me. In fact, I think she has a crush on me.” He paused. “Come with me next week.” I had to force myself not to shout. “How am I supposed to get to Prague?” I asked.

“By plane,” he replied evenly. “I’ll pay the fare.” And the visa? “I’ll take care of it.” With what passport? As a stateless person, I couldn’t just up and go where I wanted, especially not behind the Iron Curtain. No government would come to my aid if I was arrested. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of that too. By the way, would you prefer a Swiss or a Belgian passport?” I thought it was a tasteless joke. How dare he offer me a false passport? “Oh no,” he said. “It wouldn’t be false. It’d have your photo, name, signature.” In other words, it would be a real
false passport, or a false real one. But wasn’t that illegal? “No, it isn’t. Sometimes they let us do this kind of thing. Legally. Rarely, but it happens.” Again the plural. Who were “us”? I told him I would think about it. He seemed offended. Didn’t I trust him? I tried to mollify him. Yes, of course I trusted him implicitly, but he had to understand my situation: I couldn’t make any decision without informing the paper. He was amenable: “I’ll give you five days. If you come with me, you’ll have the scoop of the year—no, of the decade. You’ll be the first—the only—Western journalist to penetrate Pancracz and to interview Mordechai Oren.”

I didn’t know where to turn for advice. Dov was too far away. It wouldn’t have been smart to talk about this over the phone. I had an idea. Colonel Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of Israeli military intelligence, happened to be in Paris at the time. Why not explain the situation to him? After all, he would know what was going on, since Givon was working for him, or for a service related to his. A friend from the embassy arranged a meeting for me. The colonel listened attentively and then confessed, “The name Givon sounds familiar, but I’m having trouble placing it. Let me look into it. Call me in forty-eight hours.” When I did, his response was brief: “In my view, you should say no.” That’s all? “Yes, that’s all.” But why? Who is Joseph Givon? Where does he get his power? Is he a double agent? And what about his friendship with Yitzhak Sadeh, Sharett, and Ben-Gurion? What about the photos, his trips to Prague, his relations with world figures? The colonel would not satisfy my curiosity. Was it possible that Givon was an agent so secret even the chief of military intelligence was unaware of his identity? If he wasn’t working for Israel, whom was he working for? What obscure organization employed him? Was he involved in some illegal, reprehensible activity? Was that why I was advised not to go with him?

“So, are you coming?” Givon asked when we next got together at a café on the Champs-Élysées. I invented a thousand excuses: A stateless person can’t be too careful, I could be imprisoned or deported if I were caught with a false passport. “You’re afraid, is that it?” I admitted that yes, I was a coward. I didn’t want to risk my freedom and my future for a scoop, no matter how sensational. Givon seemed disappointed. I was too.

He left by himself, or at least without me. He called me from Prague several times, usually to tell me overtly or in code that he would call again. But the missed opportunity left me bitter and troubled.
Dov tried to make me feel better. “These things happen.” Still, I felt like a fool.

I was to see Givon again, there were to be more “adventures” with him. But the Oren chapter was closed. I now had to turn my attention to other situations. I was sent on several European trips related to the Israeli-German conference on reparations, then on another journey to Israel, and finally to Brazil.

Brazil was Dov’s idea. It seems the Catholic Church was conducting suspicious missionary activities in Israel, particularly among Jews recently arrived from Eastern Europe. They were poor and unhappy, and Rome’s emissaries offered them visas for Brazil, free passage, and two hundred dollars each, provided they converted to Catholicism. “I want you to go and see what’s going on,” Dov said.

I was happy to go. My poet friend Nicolas, now immersed in South American literature, proposed to go with me. A resourceful Israeli friend somehow managed to come up with free boat tickets for us. But before sailing, let me pick up the thread of another story. If you recall, we left Hanna in front of her building near the Sacré-Coeur, in the middle of the night. She had just asked me to marry her.

Back in the café, when she popped the question, I instantly began to imagine our future together. I tried to picture us as a couple, united by common plans and obligations. We would leave the house together in the morning, she for her job, me for mine. We would go to dinner with friends. On Friday night we would celebrate Shabbat. There would be candles on the table and songs with the meals. I tried to picture our home. What would it look like? Would it resemble that of my childhood? Would we live in Israel, France, or somewhere else? I tried to picture our children. I imagined Hanna at thirty, at fifty. Would I still love her? Did I really love her, or was I only attracted by her beauty and inaccessibility? “Listen, Hanna,” I finally said. “The answer is yes. I’m ready to marry you. But I don’t want you to regret it someday.” There were tears in her eyes. “I won’t regret it,” she whispered. I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t want to humiliate her. I felt trapped. At a loss for what to do, I suggested we postpone the decision.

“Why?” she asked.

“To give you—give us—time to think.”

“I’ve already thought it through.”

“Even so,” I insisted.

She swallowed, smiled sadly. She was as beautiful as ever. I felt
myself wavering, but she was asking: “When you say put off the decision until later, what do you mean?”

I reminded her that I was leaving for Brazil in two days. “I’ll be gone six weeks. When we see each other again, you’ll ask the same question, and I’ll say yes, and it will be a yes without reservations. But you’ll have to ask it again. Okay?” She agreed.

I walked her home. A strange peace mingled with disquietude swept through me. We walked hand in hand, like lovers, slightly embarrassed, confused and silent. I felt close to her but wasn’t sure how to act. It was late. The streets were empty, the windows shuttered. Was there any couple in Paris like us? All lovers in this city made for lovers must have wondered the same thing. We were sure we were different. For the second time in forty-eight hours we arrived at the gate of Hanna’s building, and once again we didn’t know what to do. Go upstairs? Embrace? I wanted to, of course, more so than at Versailles, more so and differently. In a sense, we were almost engaged. “Should we kiss?” Hanna asked. We kissed. Not on the cheek, but on the mouth, shyly, our lips barely touching. It was the first time. How I had dreamed of this moment. How many sleepless nights had I spent imagining how it would be to hold her in my arms. I loved her, there could be no doubt.

She called me the next day, and the day after that. I gave her my itinerary, including the addresses where she could write to me.

Her first letter was waiting for me in Marseilles, where I embarked on
Le Provence
. Her letter was hesitant and cautious, mostly about the past: Versailles, the choir, the evenings. “How could you have been so blind so long?” she asked. As for the future: “Let’s try to be happy, let’s make up for all the lost years.” I was touched, and happy, but anxious too. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get married right away. How would I provide for a family’s needs?

These questions haunted me during the crossing. I was worried sick that I might be making the greatest mistake of my life: Should a man marry a beautiful, intelligent, and impulsive woman with a marvelous voice just because he had once loved her and because she had now proposed to him? And because he did not want to hurt her?

I spent most of the voyage in my cabin working. I was writing my account of the concentration camp years—in Yiddish. I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival. I wrote to speak to those who were gone. As long as I spoke to them, they would live on, at least
in my memory. My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation. I was going to have to open the gates of memory, to break the silence while safeguarding it. The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship’s activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers, fearing only that we would arrive in São Paulo too soon.

We were there before I knew it. Nicolas, an Israeli citizen, was quickly cleared for disembarkation, but as a stateless person, I was an object of suspicion. As I waited to go ashore, I suddenly heard shouts in Hebrew. I turned around and, to my surprise, saw a group of some forty Israeli emigrants who had made the crossing in third class. I was furious at myself. My subject had been right here at hand, and I had wasted my time recording memories that could easily have waited a week or a month. I went to speak to them and found them dismayed, even desperate. They had been forbidden to disembark. A local priest pleaded for them: “But their visas are in perfect order.” Sorry, the officials replied. “Their visas have been annulled. We’re just following orders.” While the priest went for help, I asked one of the ship’s officers what would happen to these poor people when the ship lifted anchor. He said that if their visas were not reinstated, they would have to remain on board. “For how long?” He frowned. “Until someone gives them visas.” My journalist’s instinct was aroused. If I stayed with them, I would get my story.