the Debba (2010) (13 page)

20

E
XCEPT FOR A FEW
people, no one wanted anything to do with me: the old as if they knew something I didn't, the young as if they had been warned by the old. Every day I called old friends and high school classmates, asking for a loan to help produce the play. All claimed empty pockets. The occasional envelope did appear in Ehud's mailbox with a few bills inside, but none carried a name, and these paltry gifts were far outnumbered by letters cursing me, my father, and the play, all unsigned, each nastier than the last.

I tried to disregard the poison letters--as I had disregarded the speech by the Israeli consul in Toronto--yet they weighed on me. So even though Ruthy was hostile, it was a relief to see her and Ehud in the late afternoons, as she returned from one more fitting at the seamstress, and he returned from the chocolate factory. Then the three of us would go to Cafe Cassit to eat, and simply yak. My constant followers--usually two, but often only one--would sit three or four tables away and stare at me, as if marking me for everyone else to see. I didn't point them out to Ruthy, and to Ehud of course I didn't need to.

Much later in the evening, I would go alone around Tel Aviv, from one bohemian cafe to another, trying to interest actors in doing the play, handing out photocopies of the main speeches and the songs. Occasionally some younger actor ignored the frowning hints of his elders and the grim stares of the constant tailers and read a few pages over his mud coffee; but when I said actors would have to work for "points," all demurred.

"No one wants to do it," I said to Ehud later at night, "without money up front. I thought actors took chances if they thought it was good."

"I would do this for free," Ruthy said.

I told her not to do me any favors. "You go ahead and get married."

Ehud said nothing.

Despite the rejections, or perhaps because of them, and because the play seemed to be my only hope against the blackness, my wish to stage it only grew. More than once I considered asking Ehud for help. But after all he had done for me, after saving my life at such a cost to himself, I now repaid him by screwing his future wife under his own roof; the last thing I needed was one more favor from him.

So I took the bus to Herzl Street, and went one by one into stores whose owners had known my father for thirty years, beseeching them, reminding them of my father's deeds. But like my old friends and classmates, no one had anything to give. It was tax time; after Passover it was always slow; how they wished they could help me. If they had any money to give, they would. Even for this play. Even for this.

It was strange how a play that, strictly speaking, had never been fully performed, still generated so much fear, even in those who had once been my father's friends, and mine.

Later at night, I called Jenny from the living room phone. She picked up on the first ring, cried with joy and began to recite another poem she had written for me. I closed my eyes and, when she finished, asked her whether I could borrow some money for my father's play.

There was a short silence. Then she said in a small voice, "Are you sleeping with her?"

"Who?" I said.

"Swear!" Jenny said. "Swear!"

For a brief moment I could not speak; then I rasped, my voice tight with panic. "She's the fiancee of my best friend. They're getting married in three weeks! In three weeks!"

There was a long pause.

"I--I'll try," Jenny whispered at last. "I can borrow maybe two thousand on my credit card, because the plane ticket already--"

"Whatever you can send, send." I gave her Ehud's address, and before she could say anything else or quote to me any more love poems, I said I'd call tomorrow and hung up.

But two thousand wasn't enough, and it was now clear what I had to do. That evening Ehud and I sat in the kitchen while Ruthy sat by, pretending to read
Ha'Olam HaZeh
. For an hour Ehud kept telling me all that had befallen him since I had left. His early ventures with small theater groups; how he no longer did this, "because no one cares anymore about good theater." How he and Ruthy came to live together; how he now focused on work at his father's chocolate factory, resisting the lure of the stage.

Finally, I interrupted him and asked roughly if he could lend me some money, maybe also help with the production. "I only have five weeks," I said. "I must do it by the fifteenth or lose it but no one wants to talk to me. Maybe if you produce it, not me--" I stopped.

"But we have the wedding in three weeks--"

"You can postpone it," Ruthy said without raising her head from her cinema magazine. "We're screwing already, no?"

There was a long brittle silence.

"All right," Ehud whispered at last, his face pale, "if you want." He looked at me.

I forced myself to look at him, nodded jerkily, then explained that Mr. Gelber had said it would cost 150,000 shekels. "But in five weeks, you'll get it all back--"

"Nah, it's eighty thousand maximum." Ehud explained how one calculated the actual costs: number of actors, props, play length, complexity of material, lighting--

"Ehud--" I said, but could not continue, so much love I suddenly felt for him; like the love I had once felt for my father.

"Nah. Leave it. I'll hang the ads in Cassit and Kapulski Cafe tomorrow, for the auditions. Then we'll go get us a director, and start on Sunday."

I could see I was in good hands now.

21

Y
ET NONE OF THE
directors Ehud called was willing, even those who were out of work and needed the pay. Everyone had different reasons; but it became clear that whatever fear was infecting the merchants and the actors was also causing directors to shy away.

Whether it was the play's peacenik message or something else, we didn't have a clue.

Then Ruthy learned from her mother that Re'uven Kagan had directed the play's ill-fated 1946 performance. So the next morning the three of us drove to see him. We climbed the four floors to his rooftop apartment on HaYarkon Street, not two hundred meters from the beach.

Kagan let us in without a word. Empty arak bottles were piled up in a wooden crate by the door, and a half-empty Stock 777 bottle stood on the floor beside the uncurtained window. There was very little furniture; it was an old rooftop laundry nook converted into a pauper's living quarters. The three of us avoided staring at the mess, as, one after the other, we implored him to direct the play for us.

Kagan kept saying no. He was done with serious theater; no one cared anymore. The public only wanted slapstick and dreck comedies. Good plays he was not even going to touch. "Especially this one. Last time, even with Paltiel and Isser and all the other Jewish wrestlers from the club--no, no." He lifted the arak bottle to his mouth and drank.

Finally Ruthy rose to her feet. "We're wasting our time, let's go find someone else--there must be some theater directors with balls ..."

"Just a minute." I turned to Kagan. "Why didn't they finish the show in Haifa?"

"The Events," he said in a distant rasp. "Also, there was ... this rumor--"

"What rumor?"

"Oh, nothing." Kagan flushed. "That this--that the Debba would appear after the show--the real Debba, the Mahdi--this
fakakte
Arab savior--"

Ruthy said to Kagan with exaggerated disdain, "So that's why you say no? What are you, a superstitious Bedouin?"

Kagan's flush deepened, "I am not saying this was the reason for the bedlam ... They probably rioted because of--of what happens in the play ... Also, the week before, this was April forty-six, a bus with nurses from Rambam Hospital was ambushed. And this kind of play, shown right after such a massacre--" He stopped.

We were all silent, digesting this. Finally Ruthy asked, "Who played the parts?"

"They did," Kagan said. "Isser, Paltiel, Nachman. Who did you think?"

Ruthy said, "And her? Sarah? Who played her--my mother?"

Kagan laughed bitterly. "Riva? No, no.
She
played it. Sonya."

The little hairs on my neck rose. It was the first I had heard of my mother's involvement in the play.

I felt the familiar hole in my stomach. "And the Debba? Who played it?"

Kagan said to me, "Why do you need all this
cholera?
Go back to Canada, see movies, sit in a cafe, eat ice cream, enjoy life. Don't dig up all this past dreck."

He and Gershonovitz, and Gelber.

Ruthy said, "I didn't know Sonya could sing."

Kagan said into the wall, "Many other things you don't know, sweetie."

Ruthy said tightly, "I know about--about Mother, and, and him, Paltiel."

It was commonly known that, as a favor, Paltiel Rubin had married Riva in a sham ceremony, after she had told him she was pregnant. A week later Paltiel and Riva were divorced by the full rabbinical court of Tel Aviv. The rabbis were not pleased. Five months later Paltiel was dead.

"Yes, yes." Kagan waved his hand, as if this wasn't what he had meant. "She could sing, Sonya, she could dance, she could
act
--" He shook his head in marvel and sorrow.

Ehud put his arm around Ruthy's shoulders.

"Kagan--" I said desperately. "Please ..."

Suddenly his nostrils flared and his bloodshot eyes moistened. "His friend, this Yemenite actor, what's his name. Ovadiah. He played the Debba." Then Kagan shouted in Yiddish,
"Nareshkeit!"
Foolishness. "I told him, Isser, why do you need this? You already wrote this crazy play? All right! It's written! You want to stage it? Fine! It's your money. Waste it. But why in Haifa? There are no better places in all of Palestine?--but he insisted. Why? I don't know why. Maybe he wanted some bedlam, for the advertising--maybe it was he who had started the rumor. I don't know. Don't ask me. Ask Tzadok."

I said, "Ovadiah Tzadok? The Yemenite actor?"

"Yeah. Him."

Ruthy said, "He's still alive? He had acted once with my mother in forty-two--"

"I don't know." He turned away.

"Kagan--" My voice seemed stuck.

"No," he said, looking at me fully for the first time. "I don't want to go back into the shit." His voice was pleading.

I said thickly, "I don't want to, either, but
he
asked me to do it, in the will ..."

"Well, he didn't ask me."

"So I am asking you," I said in a strangled voice. "For his sake ..."

I don't know how I could ask anything in my father's name, after the way I had rejected both him and all he stood for.

Kagan's face turned pale. He looked at each one of us, one by one. No one spoke. Finally he stood up, pinching his nostrils as if trying to hold back anger, or tears. "All right. I'll help you." His eyes twitched with moisture. "All right! But you do the research about the background, not me. You dig into this past dreck, not me. That's the condition!"

He looked into my eyes like Leibele had done, in the cemetery; as if trying to convey a meaning, or a message.

I managed to speak. "All right."

When we came down we saw that someone had broken the window of Ehud's Volvo. I stammered that I was sorry and would understand if he wanted to pull out, but he cut me off.

"You just do exactly what Kagan asked you," he said.

He didn't say "your father asked you," and I loved him for that.

As we drove away, Ruthy was quiet in the backseat. But Ehud leaned over and pulled out an old Unit knife from the glove compartment, its serrated blade blue-black and dull with use. I said I didn't want it, but he said he wasn't offering. "You get your own." He put it in his pocket.

I said I didn't need a knife.

"Yes, you do," Ruthy said. "Or they'll do to you what they did to him." She paused, "Or
it
will."

"You be quiet," Ehud snapped.

She obeyed, with unexpected shock; he had never spoken to her like this before.

"Did you hear this?" she said to me. "One might think we were married already."

22

T
HE NEWS THAT
T
HE
D
EBBA
was about to be staged again raised waves of alarm in various circles, and the vandalism of Ehud's Volvo was just the beginning.

A day after an article about the play had appeared in
Ha'Olam HaZeh
magazine, the daily newspaper
Ma'ariv
ran an editorial fulminating at the "unseemly wallowing in guilt, so typical of Labor circles, which brought us to the brink at Yom Kippur in '46."
Davar
ran an editorial in reply ("... it has never been the policy of the Labor Party ...") and the phone began to ring right after breakfast, the callers no longer just youthful Kahane disciples. "In this fateful hour," one caller intoned in flowery Old Hebrew style, "in these wind-tossed days, when the people's ship of state has nearly sundered--"

"Eat shit," I said, and hung up.

There were half a dozen more calls, mostly from old men, some incoherent in their rage; but the last one was different. A voice of a young man asked diffidently if he could speak to "the son of Isser from the Castel."

My stomach lurched as I said it was I.

"D-don't give up!" the young voice stammered. "D-don't let anyone stop you! I r-read the play and ... and ... it's your duty to do this for--" I interrupted him and asked angrily how he had gotten a copy. "There--there are lots of copies now," he stuttered. "I--please don't give up--" There was some muttering in the background and the line went dead.

"Well, send us money," I said into the dead receiver.

A little before noon, Yaro Ben-Shlomo, from the Unit, called.

"I read someplace you are staying."

Just like that. Seven years I haven't talked to him, and no hello, no nothing. Typical kibbutznik.

I said it was only for a few weeks, until I finished. "Then I go back."

There was a short silence. "Anyway, so you be careful--"

"Of what?"

"I don't know--anyway, if you need anything, you know--"

Like what? Was he, too, going to offer me a gun, or a knife? "I don't need anything, but if you can lend us some money--"

But he had already hung up.

There was one more phone call. Abdallah Seddiqi, my father's Arab ex-partner. In the background I could hear a donkey bray. He probably was calling from his basement store in Yaffo. More condolences, but in Hebrew this time.

"Yes, yes." I interrupted his flowery speech. "My heart aches too at the loss--"

"Anytime you want, any help you need. Or if you need leather--"

What would I need leather for?

When Abdallah finally hung up I called Mr. Glantz, my father's landlord, and said I'd like to come talk to him, ask him a few questions.

If no one else would talk, maybe my father's old landlord would.

He said, "So when do you want to come? Come today, so long as I am still alive."

There was a buzzing sound on the line, and a faint murmur, and then the line went silent.

"I'm coming," I said to the dead receiver.

It took me a long time to lace my sandals with fingers gone numb.