the Debba (2010) (6 page)

10

A
S WE WERE ENTERING
Cassit, Ruthy said, "Mother likes him. He's good. He never asks me where I go, or how much it costs."

"How much what costs?"

"Anything. And he helped me find--you know, get these roles, with Lo Harbeh, and others."

I wanted to ask her how much it had cost Ehud, but reconsidered. What did I care? He could spend his money any way he wanted. Jenny spent her money on me; Ehud could spend his on Ruthy. I had my shiksa. He could have his.

In Cafe Cassit, Ehud was eating hummus, his right leg extended. When he saw us he said, "Do they have any clues, the police? Who did it?"

"What do I know?" I said.

"I mean, fingerprints, footprints, whatever."

"You mean paw prints," Ruthy said.

Ehud flushed. "I mean, how he got in, how many they were--seventy-one or not seventy-one, your father was a wrestler once--"

"
'Ana 'aref,"
I said in Arabic. I am ignorant.

All Unit graduates spoke in half-Arabicized Hebrew. Six months we learned Arabic, in total immersion, as well as Arabic customs, proverbs, and Islam, to be able to act like Arabs and pass for them so as to kill them more easily. It became so ingrained that even back home it was hard to chuck off.

The hour now was still early, but Cafe Cassit was already teeming. Old journalists, aspiring actresses, writers drinking their mud coffees in the waning half light, old actors strutting their practiced young walks, young soldiers on furlough. The early theatergoers, too, had already taken their seats at the front tables, to catch a glimpse of actors as they made their way to the Cameri Theater. A tall Moroccan in a blue T-shirt sat at the corner, writing in a notebook.

Two waiters came in, for the night shift. Leibele Shiffler, at seventy-two the oldest waiter at Cassit, peered into my face. "Is that you? David?" Since I had last seen him, seven years ago, his hair had turned completely white.

"No," I said. "It's not."

Ruthy said, "He came to his father's funeral, from Canada."

Leibele shifted his weight from foot to foot. "I ... I am really sorry for ... for you. He was a ... a good man."

"Yes," I snapped. "A real tzaddik." A virtuous holy man.

I gave Leibele my order and he shuffled away.

More people kept coming, calling out to one another and waving their hands.

Ruthy said, "They will never catch him, these Moroccans in the police. Last year someone stole my car radio. You think they even bothered to look? It was probably their friends in the HaTiqva quarter that did it anyway."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Go and ask questions, you know, look around the store, like they taught you in the army--"

I swiped some hummus off Ehud's plate, saying nothing.

"You learned tracking also," Ruthy went on obstinately, "besides the other things."

Yeah. The other things. "Well I am not investigating anything and I'm not doing any play."

"What play?" said Ehud.

I swiped more hummus off his plate and told him briefly about the will, Mr. Gelber, my father's request, and the forty-five-day deadline. I didn't mention
Golyatt
and the sonnets.

"But he wants to fly back to Canada tomorrow," Ruthy said, "to his girlfriend. So he won't do what his father asked."

The policeman was right. She had a big mouth.

"Oh," Ehud said, "I almost forgot. Your girlfriend just called. Jenny." He removed his glasses and rubbed them on a napkin. "She said you should call her."

The roar of the street intensified. The tall Moroccan ambled to the back toward the wall-phone, stepping around someone seated on the floor slurping leftover gefilte fish from a plate. I saw it was Ittamar, the beggar from the police station.

"All right," I said. "Anything else she said?"

"No. Only that you should call when you're finished with the will and things." Once more he looked at me, then at Ruthy, blinking slowly, insistently.

Ruthy said to me, "That's her name? Jenny?"

"Yes. She's Polish." I didn't know why I was telling her this. What did she care where Jenny came from? "It's English for Zhenia."

There was another short silence.

Presently a thin waiter came by and squeezed my shoulder, furtively. Then Chetzkel's son, a bald strapping fellow who said something about his father and mine. How, once, together with Paltiel Rubin, they had sneaked an Arab or maybe a Yemenite into a Purim party of the old Tel Aviv
bohema
, for a lark.

From the other end of the cafe a high-pitched voice began to lament the rise of Menachem Begin in the polls, and of his right-wing coalition, the Likkud. Other voices rose, vehemently, in opposition.

"Listen to them," Ruthy said. "Talk, talk, is all they do."

I said nothing. It was no longer any business of mine.

After a while Ehud said, "What play is this,
The Debba?
I never heard of it."

My order had arrived: lamb ribs steaming under tahini sauce, a plate of
foule
with roasted eggplant, and a large bowl of lentil soup. I dug in.

I said, "The lawyer said it was staged once, in 1946, in Haifa."

More people came in, smoking and laughing.

"Anyway, I am not going to stage any play."

Leibele had also brought me a Maccabee beer bottle, without my asking, and I now drank it down. The lights across the street had begun to oscillate in little fuzzy circles.

"No, really," Ruthy said. "I mean, your father wanted you to do it. How can you say no?"

"So what if he wanted?"

I gobbled my lentil soup and sopped the green muck at the bottom with a pita. My stomach felt as if a huge beast had lodged itself between my heart and my groin. I kept eating. It was so good to eat, to plug the hole that felt as if it could never be filled.

"Really," Ruthy said. "Maybe it's a good play? Did you read it already?"

"No."

"Ehud can help, too. He doesn't do theater anymore but he knows everybody--"

"I don't need him to do me any more fucking favors," I said.

When Ehud and I joined Unit 508, it had twenty-two active members and fourteen reservists. Officially the unit did not exist, and so it was referred to as Sayeret Almonit--the Anonymous Recon, and its members, as Almonim--the Anonymous Ones. Our job was to do the necessary dreck, "so the rest of the Jews can live cleanly."

Doing dreck meant killing key individuals in Arab countries in times of non-war so that war, when it came, would be shorter and less costly for us. In my father's day, these cross-border killings were done by talented Haganah amateurs called the Mista'aravim--literally, those who act like Arabs; but after the State was born, everything became formalized and even dreck had to be taught in special courses. The one I took lasted six months and was held in the Sayeret's base near Jerusalem. There were three other trainees besides me: Ehud, like me an ex-paratrooper and a Tel Avivi boy; Yerov'am (Yaro) Ben-Shlomo, a kibbutznik and ex-infantry man; and Tzafi Margolis, an ex-naval commando from Natanya. On our first day, Colonel Shafrir gathered the four of us in the base's canteen, and gave us a short speech. "Everyone in the army, including yourselves, no matter where you served, is taught how to kill in groups. Each of you has had experience in this. But here you'll be taught how to kill alone, without help. Anyone who thinks he can't do it better step forward now, before it's too late."

None of us did. What did he think, that he'd scare us? Killing was killing, whether together with others or alone.

Wasn't it?

The course had three parts. The first two months, in between lessons in Arab dialects and Arab proverbs, we drove twice a week to the morgue at Tel Aviv's Hadassah Hospital, where the chief pathologist, Dr. Pinchas Munger, taught us about the human body and how it could be killed. (We called him "Dr. Mengele," which pissed him off greatly--he, too, had been to Auschwitz, where he was a bunkmate of Ehud's father.) The rest of the time we practiced using small arms, sharpshooting, hand-to-hand combat, and silent killing under the tutelage of a wiry Yemenite sergeant major who had once been a ritual slaughterer. (We practiced on dogs--their eyes are the closest to human eyes.) Toward the end we also got a week's instruction in nerve agents and toxins, by a section head from the chemical warfare center in Ness-Tziona. Today this is a major part of every takedown course. But back in 1966 we were the first ones to get it.

The following two months, having dispensed with the raw technicalities of dreck, we studied what Colonel Shafrir called self-support skills: more sessions with the judo and karate nuts from the Wingate Institute; lots of practice with two Tel Aviv pickpockets and an active burglar from Yaffo (the latter lessons we had together with a dozen Mossad trainees); fieldcraft, both urban (mainly tailing) and rural (mainly tracking); and finally, to our great surprise, we received acting lessons from Re'uven Kagan, the HaBimah director and famed disciple of Stanislavsky who taught us how to "get into a role" so as to dispense with the need for disguises.

And of course there were the obligatory weekly Bible lessons, taught by Colonel Shafrir himself. "So you never forget what you do all the dreck for." He thumped on the black-bound volume. "God's own
Mein Kampf!"

We laughed uneasily, dutifully.

We all hated the Bible lessons. But none of us shirked them.

The last two months were live exercises. Some we did in teams, but most we did alone. We burglarized police stations across the border (I did Qalqilia, Ehud did Amman) to retrieve an item (mine was a razor blade) placed there the day before by Colonel Shafrir; we simulated takedowns of government clerks in Damascus and Cairo with Shafrir taking confirming pictures alongside; and finally, in the last week, each of us had to take down a live enemy target (for which the PM had to issue a special "black" permit), with confirmation done a day later by an Intel patrol.

We were all a bit apprehensive about this part, like pilots before their first solo flight. But after all the practice we'd had, it was almost a letdown. (Mine was a major in the Jordanian police in East Jerusalem, a nobody, whom I did with a pencil-knife in a cafe's washroom not three streets away from the Wailing Wall. He was short and thin and hardly struggled at all--it was easy. But I had probably eaten something bad at the cafe, because I later threw up for half an hour.)

My father must have been informed of my progress, because the morning after my final test, when I arrived home to sleep, he pulled a bottle of Stock 777 out of the cupboard and poured me a glass; then he poured himself one, too.

"Lechayim,"
he said as he tossed back the cognac. To life.

I echoed him sheepishly, and drank up.

I waited for him to say something else, perhaps to congratulate me; but he just poured himself another glass of cognac, none for me.

"Go," he said at last, "go see Ruthy. You need to."

When I returned to the barracks in the morning, I saw Ehud sitting cross-legged on his bed, his face white, reading a book in English--a collection of plays.

His cheeks were etched with deep scratches, one cheek nearly raw.

I asked him stupidly how it had gone.

Ehud grunted and turned the page with shaking fingers.

"What you reading?" I asked, more stupidly.

"Antidote to Shafrir's fucking
Mein Kampf,"
Ehud snarled. "Now can you leave me alone?"

The following week we graduated. It was a short ceremony, and an odd one. Unlike any other army graduation, no parents or girlfriends were allowed. We gathered, the four of us, in the canteen at the Sayeret's base, wearing long khaki pants and white shirts. Colonel Shafrir opened a 777 bottle, then brought out a photo album and showed us faded pictures of members of his family who had gone with Hitler. "You also have such albums?"

We nodded uncomfortably, avoiding looking at one another. What the hell was that about? Of course we had. Everyone did.

Shafrir thumped on the album with both hands. "From now on, let the goyim have such albums! No more for us!" He pinned our ranks on. "Now go do clean dreck!"

We laughed hysterically. Then we all got quite drunk.

It was about midnight when Ruthy, Ehud, and I left Cafe Cassit.

I had wanted to leave earlier, but the ceaseless stream of old actors, ancient pre-State fighters, and strangers kept passing by the table, shaking me by the shoulder and squeezing my hand surreptitiously, before scurrying away.

I hazily remember Leibele recounting to me in a trembling whisper how he had served my father a cup of Turkish coffee twenty-nine years ago, the morning after my father had slain Abu Jalood. "Black," Leibele mumbled into my ear, as if revealing a first-rate secret. "With hel." Cardamom seeds.

I tried to concentrate on my food, but he kept muttering into my ear. "His hand, steady, like that." He demonstrated discreetly, extending coffee-stained fingers.

Someone, a nondescript ancient with a leathery neck, whispered into my other ear, "His friend, the poet, they got in forty-eight. Now him."

Someone else said something about the police.

"Police, shmolice.
He'll
take care of it now. Like Isser taught him." The ancient slid a knobby forefinger across his goiter and patted my shoulder delicately, like a woman.

My stomach heaved.

"Nobody knows if it's an Arab," Ehud said.

"
'Esma mini,"
the ancient said in Arabic. Listen to me. "He came back, and no mistake."

"They remember," Leibele said to me. "They never forget."

We drove home in silence. The light switch at the bottom of the staircase didn't work, and so we climbed the steps in the darkness, silent still.

"Look, the door's open," Ruthy said. "You forgot--"

A black shadow burst out of the apartment and hurtled toward the stairs.

I received a fleeting impression of dark pupilless eyes, and a tight mouth under a bristling sparse mustache; a rancid smell came in my nose: old sweat and pungent spices; an almost animal smell. Then a huge hairy paw came from somewhere and crashed into my ear, and I found myself on the topmost stair, legs spread wide. With my arms flailing helplessly, I began to roll.