the Debba (2010) (7 page)

Ruthy screamed.

"Dada!"

I saw Ehud kick with the edge of his left foot over my head, twice.

The shadow stumbled, half racing, half tumbling down the stairs, clasping something under its armpit. Without thinking I clutched its arm and tried to drag it down. It kept going, immensely strong.

A white envelope fell out, fluttering, into the stairwell. I snatched at it. The smaller envelope slipped out and glided all the way down, like a white square butterfly.

At that moment Ehud sprawled over me, legs akimbo, and we both rolled down, from stair to stair. I grabbed at the rail and felt it scraping at my wrist as it evaded my grasp.

"Dada! Uddy!"

Ehud held on to my belt, like a paratrooper whose own parachute had failed to open. Desperately I tried to hook my thumb on the railing and reach for the large envelope with the other four fingers.

Thirty feet below, the shadow paused. Its eyes flashed briefly as it looked up, staring right at me. Just then my thumb caught one of the spindles and was nearly wrenched out.

When I looked down again the shadow was gone.

Ruthy screamed, "Did you see? A fucking burglar!"

Hissing and cursing, she disentangled us. "How's your leg, Uddy?"

"I'm okay," Ehud said, grim-faced with shame at his infirmity.

Doors began to open. Mr. Tzukerman, wearing red pajamas and carrying a black shoe by its tip, stared wildly at us, his pink mouth working. "Nazis!" he shouted. "Murderers!"

Mr. Farbel looked up from the first floor. "Anybody need help?"

"No," I said.

"What did he take?" Ruthy said.

"Nothing," I said, clasping the large envelope to my body.

But a moment later, when I went down to look, the little envelope with my father's letter to me was gone.

Back at the apartment I sat at the kitchen table and gulped down some tepid tea that Ruthy had made with hot water straight from the tap.

"Call the police!" Ruthy hissed at me. "What're you waiting for?"

When I didn't get up, she marched to the phone and dialed.

I heard Amzaleg's voice rasping tinnily.

"No," Ruthy said, "they took nothing, but--"

Amzaleg's voice squawked further.

Ruthy snapped, "What do you mean, what do I want? Maybe it's connected to the murder?"

The receiver squawked.

"Connected how?" Ruthy hollered.
"Connected how?
Maybe they don't want him to do this play? He has only six weeks--"

Squawk.

Ruthy cursed Amzaleg in Arabic and hung up. "Lazy Moroccan beasts. He said if they didn't take anything else to call him in the morning. They probably open only at ten." She sat beside me. "Why do you think the burglar wanted it, this play?"

I shook my head. The jet lag, and now this odd burglary, somehow combined to reproduce in me the same queer black sensation I used to get before a takedown, when the past merged into the future and both dimmed into nothingness until only the present remained, hard and monstrous and clear.

Ehud muttered, "Maybe he grabbed the first thing he saw, when we came--"

"From under the sofa?" Ruthy said.

There was a long silence.

Ruthy said, "You think it's the same one that--that killed him?"

"'Ana 'aref,"
I said in Arabic. What do I know?

Ruthy whispered, "Maybe, like my mother said, it did come back, you know, like the stories from forty-eight--"

"Shit in yogurt!"

"Leave him alone," Ehud said to Ruthy, then turned to me. "Put it someplace safe. Tomorrow I'll make you photocopies."

Toward the end of May '46, two weeks before the Six-Day War started, Ehud and I crossed over into the Sinai for a couple of dreck jobs: I to take down the operations officer of the Bir Gafgafa airfield, and Ehud the chief of radar maintenance on Um Marjam hill, five miles to the north. We had gone together, dressed as Bedouins, via the Gaza Strip, then hitchhiked south on an Egyptian fuel truck, paying the driver with hashish. But because we walked the last few dozen kilometers across sand dunes, we were late by two days, and on the morning of June 5, within five kilometers of our target, we heard the roar of planes and saw Mirage jets with Stars of David on their wings streaking overhead and diving onto the radar station on the hilltop.

Ehud kicked at the sand. "These fuckers! They couldn't hold off until we finished?"

As if anyone in the Israeli Air Force even knew we existed.

Now there was nothing to do but wait; finally, a day and a half later, we saw the advance jeeps of the Armor Recon with their back-mounted recoilless guns driving down the Bir Gafgafa road. Ehud and I slid down the sand dune, in our Bedouin galabiehs, our palms raised with the fingers spread in the traditional gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the Blessing of the Priests, singing HaTiqva at the top of our voices, to make sure we wouldn't be shot.

In the first jeep, to our surprise, we saw Mooky Zussman and Yonathan Avramson, also Alliance High School boys. They didn't ask any silly questions about our Bedouin clothes, just fed us combat rations and gave us a lift to Um Marjam hill, where the Egyptian radars had just been toasted and where, until the airfield became operational again, the Sinai sector command would be stationed.

It was a windswept gravelly hill with one shallow incline and one steep shoulder, on whose peak a Hawk anti-aircraft missile battery was already operating. A platoon of Golani infantry reservists was to arrive any day for sentinel duty, but for now the Armor Recon unit was it. And to fend off boredom, while waiting for our ride north on a Hercules, Ehud and I joined them.

By that time, the Egyptian army was broken--thirty thousand Egyptian soldiers perished in the sand, and the remainder, mainly poor
fellaheen
who had been drafted against their will, threw off their shoes and tried to give themselves up, begging for water. But our sentinels, by direct order of the Hawk-base commander, chased them away: stragglers still carried arms and were considered treacherous.

On the third day, a few hours before Ehud and I were to drive down to the airfield to fly north, seven haggard skeletons appeared in the morning mist at the foot of the hill, and for several hours their thin voices wafted up, their pleas for water interrupted only for prayers, which they called out in a Masri accent, just like that of the muezzin at Hassan Ali mosque in Cairo, where I had once holed up after a dreck job. The beseeching voices wafted at us in the canteen, in the latrine, in the tent--just about everywhere. Once, Mooky Zussman shot long Uzi bursts from the cliff's edge over the stragglers' heads to chase them away, but their thirst was stronger than their fear and none left. Finally, unable to stand the unending pleas, I overruled both Ehud and Mooky and called down to the stragglers in Masri to come up to the water tanker.

I was helping a thin Egyptian boy-soldier hold my mess tin to what had remained of his mouth when the last skeleton in the line pulled from under his rags a Carl Gustav, and, cussing in high-pitched Arabic, shot Mooky Zussman in the stomach from a distance of five feet. The stuttering CaG swung on in a wide arc. More soldiers fell. When the barrel began to swing in my direction I nearly welcomed it, tensing my stomach to receive the bullet, but just then a sweaty khaki lump bounded off my hip into the line of fire--Ehud Reznik--and, spitting and hissing, caught the bullet in his right thigh. At that exact moment the top of the shooting skeleton's head blossomed. From where he sat slumped in a pool of pinkish water, Mooky Zussman had shot him once, under the chin, just before he died. And as the other skeletons fell to their knees, raising their hands in wailing supplication, Ehud slowly hobbled from one to the next, and with precision emptied one Uzi magazine after another into their upturned faces. The camp commander, his face lathered, came running out of his tent, heard what happened, and punched me in the mouth. I didn't even try to resist.

Two hours later Ehud and I were finally driven in a jeep to the airfield below--I accompanied by a military policeman, Ehud lying silent on a litter among the dead soldiers and sacks of mail in the back. From Bir Gafgafa we were flown in a dusty Hercules north: Ehud to Tel HaShomer Hospital; the eleven dead to the Sdeh Dov morgue; and I to military HQ in Tel Aviv, to stand trial.

My trial for disobeying a direct order and endangering the troops was held the next day, presided over by the Hawk camp commander himself. (He insisted that I had been under his jurisdiction when I committed my crime.) The prosecutor, an old reserve major who had once served under my father, apologized to me twice during his summary speech, saying he was only doing his duty. The young defense counsel spoke confusedly of the Bible, and the Prophets, and other such shit in yogurt. I did not bother to listen. The presiding colonel then informed me that I had to serve thirty-five days in Kele' 'Arba', Military Prison Number 4, where I was to report that same evening on my own, after doing my duty to the fallen's kin. ("You tell them, not me.") Then, as he was signing the jail papers, he added, "And you are lucky your father is who he was, or I would stick you in for five years."

When I left the courtroom, the prosecutor offered me a lift, but I refused. Instead, I walked in the noon heat all the way to Mooky Zussman's home, a dusty two-room apartment on the third floor of an ancient building near the old Tel Aviv harbor. Mooky's father, thin and yellow in overlarge striped pajamas, offered me a cup of Nescafe with Tnuva milk, and tried to pat my hand shakily with his palm, while his wife wept in the toilet, helping Mooky's little brother, Oded, take down his pants.

Yonathan's parents were luckily abroad (they had emigrated to British Columbia), so it was the Israeli consul in Vancouver who gave them the news.

The other nine had come from one kibbutz in the Galilee. A jobnik colonel took it upon himself to let their parents know, so I wouldn't be late for jail.

Upon my release from Military Prison Number 4, I hitchhiked back to base and had a long talk with Colonel Shafrir, at his request. That is, he talked and I listened, standing at immobile attention in his small heat-choked office while outside the window some rowdy bluebirds cackled in the sycamore tree. I forget what he said, exactly. Nobody could fault me, he said. This was the difference between us and them, he said. He was sure my father was proud of me, he said. (My father never said a word about the entire affair. My mother said nothing either but cried for an entire day, hugging me at length and shaking her head whenever I asked her why she cried.) "Your father was once like that, too," Shafrir said. "And I, too, was like this," he went on, "before I learned my lesson. You have now learned yours. We must do some things the Prophets would not approve of, if we want to keep these sons of whores away from Dizzengoff. You hear? So don't you ever fuck up again! For your own good, Dada, and for ours! All of us! We know them, not from today! You hear?"

He hit at my shoulder with a balled fist, hard.

"Yes sir," I said, staring straight ahead.

"Fuck this
yessir
shit! Get out of here before I get mad! Get out! Dismissed!"

He saluted me and I saluted back, slowly.

Ehud, with his bum leg, could not return to the Unit, and until the end of his service was posted to a staff job in army HQ in Tel Aviv. I went back to doing dreck, and over the next three and half years, until my release, didn't fuck up once--even though my nightmares became steadily worse. At first I tried to ignore them, but finally in 1970, after a routine dreck job in Cairo, I didn't cross back, just lay low in Heliopolis for two weeks, drinking coffee and playing backgammon with street idlers in the City of the Dead. Finally, a week before my five-year service was over, I returned to base, refused to sign for an additional period, hitchhiked back to Tel Aviv, and applied for a visa for Canada. (My father objected terribly; my mother said not a word.) Uncle Yitzchak cosigned it, and the visa arrived quickly.

A week later, I left.

There's a photograph of Ehud and me on Um Marjam hill at night, against the full moon, our hair blowing in the wind. He stands with his legs spread wide. I tower over him by a head, my hand grabbing onto his shoulder, as if he's planted in the soil and I must hold on to him so as not to be blown away. Behind us is a shadow--the Thompson tent where the Armor Recon guys are sleeping, unseen but still alive. A darker shadow at its side may be a jackal, or perhaps a wild dog, one of those the Egyptians had left behind. And high above it all, round and jagged, floats the moon, like a peephole in the sky out of which some invisible jailer is watching over the birthplace of the evil scribblings that begat all the blood.

Some time later during the night I awoke from a black dream, my hair on end.

It was a dream I had never had before: I was standing in the moonlit yard of Har Nevo school and my father was calling to me from within a shallow hole in the ground, his tongue lolling through his blood-filled mouth, as he struggled to make his voice heard. I tried to get down on my knees to hear him, but my Nomex coveralls were so tight, it was as if my body had turned to wood. And when at long last I managed to kneel on the gravel, my father had vanished and I inexplicably saw before me the black snout of some beast leering at me, its mouth dripping blood and froth.

I awoke with a snarl. For a terrifying moment I imagined that the black beast had touched its snout to my face before retreating to watch me from afar.

I stared wildly about me.

Ruthy, in a white T-shirt and panties, was sitting on the edge of the sofa bed, her freckled arms hugging her chest, her nose a silver dot in the moonlight.

She said, "Did you read it already? I can't sleep."

For a moment I did not know what she was talking about.

"The play," she said.

I hissed at her to go back to bed, before Ehud woke up.

She said with derision, "Don't worry. One time, he's gone the whole night."

"Well,
I
have to sleep. The funeral--"

"So you'll sleep on the plane. Come on. Don't be a louse."