The Emoticon Generation (13 page)

I hear voices on the other side.

“Stop the camera,” I say.

A tiny red light, still seen through the one-way mirror, vanishes.

I turn to face him. “The camera is off.”

~

“I’m sorry, sir,” I tell him. “There was no reason to record this in the first place. I’ll make sure it never gets used.”

Shamgar looks at me with the eyes of a man who had lost. “It doesn’t matter. You won a battle. Take your victory lap, and enjoy the applause...” he looks down, and there is a tear in his eye when he says, more to himself than to me, “While it lasts.”

He puts his hands on the table and clearly is about to pull himself up.

“Wait,” I put my hand next to his, but do not touch. “Stay. You don’t have to go
immediately
.” He looks at me. “Please. I meant what I said earlier, and back then I knew what I was going to show you. You
are
my hero. You are still my hero. Take a couple of minutes to calm down. Drink some water. Have some coffee or tea. Breathe. Just... Stay a couple of minutes.”

For a long time, he just thinks. Then he says, “I’ll have some tea.”

~

Even before the tea arrives – Wissotzky, no sugar, just the way I know he drinks it – Shamgar closes his eyes, and sinks into his own world.

Within a minute, he begins to slam his open hand against the conference table in small baby slams. “The traitors...” – slam –”The traitors...” – slam –”The traitors...” – slam –”Such traitorous...” his fingers curl. “Such destructive... That something so filthy should be the cause for... The excuse!” He raises his voice on this last one. “Everyone who followed them... Everyone who believed them... For
sex
?! Sex! ... Such... traitors...”

Then he sinks into silence again, his eyes closed.

~

He drinks his tea in silence, his eyes far away from here. Suddenly, anger flares again. “He was my friend! My friend! For thirty years after we got our independence! For thirty years until he died! Lied to me, hugged me, told me how brave I was. Looked me in the eyes. And never... never... said... anything...”

He takes another sip of his tea. “The traitorous bastard. Traitorous bastard!”

He raises his cup, but his hands shake and the tea spills onto the table.

“I’m sorry.” He looks aside, ashamed.

~

“I can’t believe it!” Five minutes later, he claps his hands together and gives me the look he had given me when we had met an hour ago. “I can’t believe it! Not true! Fabricated! Great fabrication, but inconceivable.”

“I assure you, the tech—”

“I don’t need your words,” he silences me. “Play it again. Then, after that, I want to hear something else. Play something else, something that can’t be faked. I want to hear the time I met Dinah.”

I nod. “All right.”

I reach for the remote.

~

The original track begins to play.

“Louder,” he says.

His old ears probably heard half of what I had heard.

I turn up the volume.

A few more words said by Shmuelevitch, and Shamgar cries again, “Louder!”

And a few seconds later, “Louder!”

“Louder!”

“Louder!”

Then, almost at max volume, he is content. And he listens to the conversation again, to its very end.

~

I was prepared to show him all the segments we had prepared, but it is his meeting with Dinah that brakes him. He listens to it, head bent over, reacting to every sound, then, once it was over, he raises his hand, and says, “Enough.”

I look at the remote and press ‘STOP’.

When I look back up at him, he is holding his chest and leaning back. “Ow. Ow.”

I leap up and run to the other side of the table.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”

I grab his hand to feel his pulse, he shoves it away.

“Stay away from me!”

“Shall I call an ambulance?”

He shakes his head. Maybe he isn’t able to speak. I reach for my cell phone.

He slaps it out of my hand.

“Enough,” he says, still holding his chest. “Sit down.”

I look at him. He looks straight into my eyes.

“Sit down. It’s just pain. It will go away.”

I freeze in place. I want to do what he says, but I am unable to move away.

He looks away, and takes a deep breath. With seeming effort, he lowers the hand that held his chest. I still don’t move. He doesn’t look at me.

His hand reaches down to his pocket, then up again. “I miss cigarettes,” he says. His hand is at his pocket a second time, searching for something that hadn’t been there in ten years. “I could use one right now.”

Trembling, he brings his hand up. He leans forward, elbows on the desk. “This is a good time to start again.” Without looking at me, he says, “Sit down.”

Wary, I sit down.

~

His fingers are on his forehead. He is licking his lips. Fifteen minutes have passed, and he is still hungry for cigarettes.

He hasn’t looked at me in a few minutes. That’s all right. I’m here for him, not the other way around. I suddenly realize I was here to cut his jugular, the purpose of his life and soul, and that now I was watching his arterial spray, watching him bleed, hoping he comes out alive on the other side.

“We died for them...” he suddenly whispers, maybe forgetting I was there. “We bled for them. I killed for them...”

He stares into space. Then he sighs. “No. We died for the country. We bled for the country. We killed for the country.
I
killed for the country. I killed... the wrong man for the country.”

A small, hollow laugh escapes him. “Ridiculous.”

~

“You!” he aims an accusing finger at me. “You’re probably happy. This fits so neatly into your political theories. We were all liars, weren’t we? The entire country is based on lies... That’s what you think!”

“No, I—”

“Our entire country is not based on lies. It’s based on ideals and a need. There were a few bad apples... Some rotten, rotten apples. But they can’t ruin it for the rest of us. The dream is just. The dream is true. And you can go to hell if you think that you can make a liberal out of me.”

I shake my head. “No, no, I don’t!”

“Rotten apples and that’s it!” He growls through his teeth.

~

Music begins to play.

He looks immediately sideways, then I realize it’s his cell phone, and then I remember it was on the floor, where he had thrown it.

He tries to bend down to reach it.

“I’ll get it for you,” I leap up.

I grab the phone and give it to him, not looking at the caller.

He answers without looking at who is calling him. “Yes, Dinah...”

I’m sitting back down, and a sigh escapes me when I hear the name. This will not be over for him when he leaves this place.

“Yes, I’m all right. It’s just taking too long... I promise, nothing bad... It might take a few hours, go to sleep. I’ll take a cab.”

“I’ll pay for a cab,” I say.

He shushes me with a finger. “I’m going to stay for a while, that’s all. ... Go to sleep. ... Great... Thanks... Yes, yes, I’m all right. ... Tell you all about it later. ... Good... Good night.”

He closes the cell phone, causing it to disconnect, and puts it on the desk.

His hand rests over it.

“Dinah...” he says softly, and looks at me with soulful, twenty-three-year-old eyes. “I never would have met her if I wasn’t on the run, if I hadn’t assassinated...”

He looks down. His fingers touch the cell phone softly, and I imagine how he had touched his wife when they were young and had just met.

~

“I met his daughter, you know,” he says after a ten minute silence. He had been drinking one cup of tea after another for the last three hours.

I look up, the question in my eyes.

“His wife wouldn’t meet with me. But I met his daughter.”

“Whose daughter?”

“Colonel Tanner’s,” he says. His eyes are elsewhere again. He’s reliving a meeting that had taken place decades ago. “He had a family, you know. A daughter. A wife. Which, apparently, was cheating on him. But a family, he had a family. I killed a man with a family for a cause, not for a...” he trails off.

“I met his daughter, you know,” he says again after a while. “Back in, uh, ’64. She was just getting married in her early twenties. I, uh... She wanted to meet me. I immediately agreed. There were concerns she would try to kill me. I said, No, don’t worry about it.” He stops for a while. This is where he would have taken a great inhale of smoke.

“How was she?” I say.

“You know... Young... She understood. ... She wanted to hear it from me... She wanted to hear the why... She wanted to know what I saw of him... how he was during those last minutes... She wanted a trace of her father.”

He trails off again, then continues. “I told her he was a great and honorable man. That is why he was a good target. I told her he died with honor. I told her I was sorry for her personal tragedy and that it wasn’t personal.”

When he trails off again and does not continue, I ask, “How did she take it?”

He shrugs. “All right. No anger there. She hardly even knew him. She just wanted to know.”

“She say anything important?”

He shrugs. “No. His wife, her mother, never agreed to meet me. That was all right. It’s understandable.”

“Yeah.”

“But, the thing is...”

“Yeah?”

“He had a family. A daughter who is now a grandmother. And a wife who remarried. He had a family. I destroyed his family... for my commander’s shag in a bed. That’s why his family was destroyed.”

I nod. I didn’t know what was appropriate to say now.

“Yeah,” he says. “For a shag in the bed.”

~

“Decades I spent on this. Decades.”

“These last three decades, this is practically the only thing I did. Meetings like this. Invited to lectures and seminars. Answering hecklers and ill-wishers. ... The documentary film they did on me... following me around for a year... needs to be revised. Nothing is true. No reason for it anymore.” He looks down, ashamed. “I was wrong... I was mistaken... My cause was unjust... No, my cause was just, my deeds were unjust...”

“You didn’t know. As far as you were concerned, you had just cause to assassinate him and protect your people.”

“A man is dead. A family is dead. Bystanders were hurt. What does that matter?”

“The tide of war turned because of that incident. The British Mandate began to leave.”

“Yeah... That’s good. It’s good that it happened.” He falls silent, no doubt thinking about that point. Then, after a while, he says, “The results were accidental, weren’t they? It wasn’t because...” He shrugs again and puts his fingers to his lips as if he is smoking. “Just a lucky accident.”

~

His lips curl. “People think I’m brave.”

I look up. He had been silent for something like twenty minutes.

“You are brave.”

“Pfah. I’m not brave. I just like to think I’m brave. No, no, I am brave.” He waves dismissively at his own thoughts. “I’m rambling.”

~

After five minutes of silence, he starts again. “
Other
people think I’m brave.”

I don’t respond this time. He already knows I’m one of those people.

“Other people...” he holds his forefinger tight against the desk, and moves the rest of his hand this way and that way, like a seven year old. “Other people... they thought I was brave... I got a medal... Then another... Then another... Honored at this or that ceremony every year since... Ben Gurion made me a minister. Do you think he would have done that if not for the...?”

He looks down, like a child under punishment. “I’m sorry.”

~

When he doesn’t say anything for a few more minutes, I ask him, “What are you sorry for?”

He looks at me with doe eyes. “I should call her.”

“Dinah?”

“His daughter. Tell her I’m sorry.”

I think about that. “Maybe you shouldn’t do that. It’s bygones. It’s history. We’re just fixing history here, not people.”

“I’m living it still, every day. She’s living it still, every day.”

He purses his lips and tears begin to form in his eyes. “No, I’m not brave. I just like to think I am.”

He sighs, and in front of me he seems to deflate.

~

“I was a good minister, damn it!” He slams his fist on the table, suddenly enraged again. Slamming his fist on something is something he had been famous for doing during cabinet meetings. “I was a good minister!”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“I did good. I helped build the country! I fought for roads, hospitals, military acquisitions that saved us in wars...” He trails off, and more light seemed to leave his eyes. “What does it matter?”

And in his chair, he seems to deflate even more.

~

“No one will remember anything of me. They won’t remember the good I did. They won’t remember I was an accomplished member of the Knesset. They won’t remember I was a successful CEO of four companies.”

“Five,” I correct him.

He squints for a second, then nods. “Yes, five. I brought success to whatever I touched. Shmuelevitch took that away from me. At that moment in time, when I was twenty three, he handed me my future. But he also took away my future.” His eyes begin to look here and there, as if searching for something. “He took that away from me.”

He shuts his eyes and puts five fingers on his forehead. “I would never have met Dinah without this.”

He opens his eyes, and he seems like a shy sixteen year old, suddenly. “I wonder if she would have liked me without... She stood by me all this time... She believed in what I did... She believed in me... Our entire lives... Together... Together...”

He wipes a tear from his left eye, then looks at me as if he had been caught stealing. I look away.

~

“Don’t think that makes me a liberal,” he isn’t being aggressive now. It’s four thirty in the morning. Most of the strength has left him. He is now completely deflated, and his voice is raw. And yet he sits there, unable to leave, running through thoughts in his mind, thoughts and scenarios I couldn’t begin to guess.

“Hey!” he says, snapping me out of my own thoughts.