The Debba Page 16

  Riva’s eyes turned opaque. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. There had been a burglary at the Atta store a month before, so my father wouldn’t have opened the door for just anyone—unless he knew him—” I took a deep breath. “Mr. Glantz said you came to visit my father every week—” I waited.

  She stared at me, then gave a theatrical sigh. “Give me the cigarettes from my bag.”

  I handed her the crumpled packet of Dubeks; she lit one and inhaled. She said, “I had come to pick up my check, if you must know. From Paltiel’s estate.”

  “Every week?”

  Her eyes were black pinpoints. “Also I went to talk to your father, at the beginning, to tell him not to be an idiot—to go back to her—”

  “To—my mother?”

  Riva nodded diagonally, not denying, not confirming.

  “But why did he leave her?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “She was sick already, when he left her … Why didn’t she tell him?”

  Riva let out a dry laugh. “She had her pride, too.”

  “But did they quarrel? Fight over something?”

  Silence.

  “He never fought with anybody,” I said. “Not even with … with his murderer—” I waited, but she remained immobile, smoking in furious silence.

  I went on. “Ruthy, she thinks it’s somehow connected, to the thing from forty-eight, with Paltiel—because they did the same to him. The same beasts—”

  At last I got a spark. “So what do you want me to do, Dada? Sit shivah once more?”

  “Just help me catch him. When I catch him, I’ll leave.”

  Riva lit another cigarette with the stub of her first.

  I said, “I have a girlfriend in Canada.”

  For a long minute Riva stared at me, and all at once she seemed to have come to some conclusion. “In thirty-one, in Cassit, that’s when I met him for the first time, your father. He just came to my table and told me I looked like his sister—”

  “Her name was Hinda Malka. She went with Hitler.” I felt my chin vibrate.

  “I was sitting there,” Riva went on, “talking Bialik and Shakespeare with Paltiel, when the lout suddenly left and your father sat down.” She smiled bitterly. “I bet your father paid him to leave, so he could have a free hand with me … A Debba he could fight, this hero, but to talk to me, oh ho ho, for this he needed Paltiel’s permission …” She stared at me with her made-up animal eyes. “But we were hardly ever alone. In one hour, five times he gave money to people. Paupers, actors, two waiters—”

  “Yes.”

  “—and all the time he kept talking about this play he was writing—this shit in yogurt, the dreck about the Arabs, the poor beasts.”

  “And he wanted you to play in it, in this play?”

  “Yeah,” Riva said. “Me and him and Paltiel, and maybe Shein—but of course I said no. You know how many wrote plays for me? Bialik, and Tchernichovsky, and Cohen-Kadosh—” The famous names rolled off her tongue. “I didn’t have time.”

  “So that’s why you said no?”

  She flushed. “You think maybe I was afraid to play in this dreck? That’s what you think?” She raised her voice. “Well, I am telling you, I just didn’t have time!”

  There was a long pause. I asked, “Why did Paltiel give my father a half share in his work?”

  Riva’s face closed. “I don’t know. Ask the lawyer.”

  “Gelber said it was in return for a favor—”

  “He’s an idiot. Asking to be paid for favors? Your father?”

  I got up shakily to my feet and she grinned up at me. “So that’s it? Nothing else you want to know? Maybe if I did it with him?”

  I stopped. “Who killed him?”

  Her smile did not waver. “Ask the police. They know.”

  For a moment we stared at each other. Riva’s smile became fixed; then it twisted. “Three times, David, three times he asked me to take the role, three times I told him to put the play in the drawer, to forget about it, that it would only bring grief, to everyone, and to him—” Her neck swelled. “And it did … just like it did to Paltiel … and to her …”

  My heart thumped. “So you also think that it … that my father was killed because of the play?”

  Riva grabbed at my hand. “Dada, you leave Ruthy alone! You hear? She’s just like Paltiel—this shmendrik just took anything and anyone he wanted, without thinking about the cost, to others, or to himself … She got it from him … and now you are here, with this play … How can she say no?” Riva’s eyes blazed. “It caused so much grief already to so many, I don’t want this dreck to bring grief to her also … and to you, too … Go back to Canada, leave …” Riva’s knobby fingers clamped on my wrist with feral strength. “Leave!”

  I had to twist my arm this way and that, before I could tear it away and escape.

  31

  FROM A MUCH DEFACED telephone booth at the Dizzengoff Center I called Professor Gershon Tzifroni of Tel Aviv University, who the week before had castigated the play in Davar. The Rubin expert whose book about Paltiel was no longer available.

  “Oh, yes, Isser’s son,” he rasped. “What do you want? I have a lecture soon.”

  I saw no need to pussyfoot around. “So you think my father stole it?”

  “I didn’t say stole. I only said it was similar to Rubin’s work—”

  “So? They were friends!” I rattled off some famous cases of mixed artistic parentage. Cohen-Kadosh and Slonim, Bialik and Ravnitzki. “So why the hell couldn’t my father and Paltiel Rubin also …”

  Professor Tzifroni hung up in my mid-sentence.

  32

  I BREATHED THE BOOTH’S fetid air, slowly, then called Uncle Mordechai in Tveriah.

  “No,” Uncle Mordechai said. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  I said he had promised to tell me about the prehistory. About my father, and Paltiel, and the play.

  “I said I’ll tell you only before the Angel of Death comes for me, maybe. Until then, don’t you mix me up in this! Understand?”

  I wiped my face. Professor Tzifroni had hung up before I finished. And Uncle Mordechai did, too, after repeating what in one way or another every merchant on Herzl Street had said to me, what Mr. Gelber had told me the day I arrived, and what Gershonovitz had warned me against: getting mixed up in this.

  But mixed up in what?

  There was no other way. Swallowing my bile, I took bus number 1 to Abdallah’s store in Yaffo.

  It was twelve years since I’d been there last, when my father had taken me to buy the leather for my first combat boots.

  Abdallah was sitting in the same old chair in his low-ceilinged basement, waving his arms and talking into a black telephone in rapid French. “But no, no!” he shouted, his silvery mustache quivering. “I told you, never on Friday! Never!”

  I stood there, my heart pounding. The same faded theater photographs hung on the walls that his dead brother, the cinema owner and poet, had hung there many years before, the same stacks of yellowing Arab poetry magazines, the same smell of raw leather. I felt like a small boy all over again.

  Abdallah slammed the receiver down. “Yes?” he snapped; then as he turned he saw me and grabbed at his aluminum canes. “Ach, ach, ach …” With the canes he herded me onto a hard grimy sofa near the wall, then clapped his palms over his head. “Mas’ouda! Ya Mas’ouda-a-a!”

  A small crone appeared in a dark doorway.

  “Coffee!” Abdallah shouted. “With hel!” Cardamom seeds.

  He unfolded his thin legs sideways and sat beside me. “Ach, ach, ach.”

  I saw that he had tied a sharit alhidad on his thin right arm—the black armband of mourning; my nose tingled. From the wall, the large photograph of Abdallah’s dead brother glared down at me.

  The crone shuffled in with a copper tray carrying two tiny porcelain cups and a steaming copper finjan. She peered into my face as she poured.

  “Shukran,” I
said stiffly. Thank you.

  Abdallah raised the cup toward the photo of his dead brother. “In the bosom of Allah shall he reside,” he said in a ringing voice in literary Arabic, not making clear whether he meant this for his brother or my father, “with wings of angels above his head—”

  We drank up in silence. Outside on the sidewalk, legs kept passing in the high narrow window. Legs in abbayas, legs in galabiehs, legs in blue pants.

  I felt the same urge to flee that I had felt in Gelber’s office, but suppressed it. I said bluntly to Abdallah, “I came to ask you, did my father write it? This play?”

  Abdallah put his cup down. “Which play?”

  “The Debba.” I explained my father’s stipulation in the will, and what the newspapers were writing, hinting my father had stolen it, and how it prevented us from getting any hall. “I want to show it was he who wrote it, and not his friend, the poet.”

  “Baldiel,” Abdallah said. Not as a question.

  “Yes. You knew him?”

  An undefinable expression crossed the narrow face. “His salesman, the liar, the skirt-chaser—” Two spots of dark had appeared in Abdallah’s gray cheeks.

  “Yes.” But just to make sure, I added, “He who wrote Golyatt, Ben HaTan—” I stopped. To whom was I speaking of Hebrew poetry? An Arab?

  But to my surprise Abdallah nodded. “And Zonah Tamah,” he said, “and Shimshon, and Flowers of Blood—”

  “Yes! You read this?”

  An Arab, reading Hebrew poetry.

  “Yes, of course. We published it in this—” He extended his curved fingers at the dusty heap of magazines, piled behind the mounds of leather. “I translated, and Haffi published—”

  “Translated into Arabic?”

  “Yes, yes.” He stared at me, eyebrows raised. “Of course.”

  I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice. “You published translated Hebrew poetry in an Arab magazine in forty-eight?”

  My father had helped actors in the thirties; had staged an incendiary play in ’46; his Arab ex-partner in the shoe business and his brother produced a poetry magazine with translated Hebrew poetry. How much more did I not know?

  “No, not in forty-eight. In thirty-six.” His voice changing, Abdallah began to recite an Arabic verse with an oddly familiar rhythm. I recognized the double-metered Syrian verse, and the floating stresses.

  “And you did this translation?” I felt a tremor in my belly. Golyatt in Arabic.

  Abdallah sipped the dregs of his coffee. “No, no. Haffi did, together with—with him, with Isrool.”

  “My father? He helped your brother translate?” I felt dazed. “Yes, yes.”

  I made an effort to regroup my thoughts, to return to my first question. I said, “But did he also write other things, my father? Besides the Purim shpiels?” I had a hallucinatory odd feeling: talking with an Arab about Purim shpiels.

  “Yes, yes. This play, that you said.” His mouth pursed as if he shied away from mentioning the play’s name.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he showed it to me, to ask if he should translate it, so maybe we could publish it also, in the magazine.”

  Again I looked up at the wall, at the fiery black eyes of the man who had nearly published my father’s play in Arabic after my father had failed to stage it for the Jews.

  What else didn’t I know?

  Abdallah knocked on his canes with a yellow knuckle. “But Haffi died before we could do it.” He paused. “In forty-eight.”

  “Yes” I said with an effort. “Could you—could you perhaps write all this down for me, as a testimony?” I didn’t know why I needed this, or to whom I wanted to show it.

  “Yes, of course.” Without hesitation he hobbled up to his table, cleared a space amid a heap of bills, and scrawled for a minute, then handed me the note. It was written in flawless Hebrew. But the signature was in Arabic.

  “Shukran,” I said. Thank you.

  I searched for something else to say but could find nothing. I got up to leave, and as I climbed the grimy stairs, I could see him looking at me from the bottom of the steps, framed in darkness, his face inscrutable.

  I stopped. “Who did it?” I blurted. “D’you know? I mean, who could do such a thing?” And without letting him answer I went on, “Some young shabbab perhaps, someone strong—because he was strong—”

  Abdallah’s face closed like a fist. “Very strong.”

  I felt my eyes sting.

  The old Arab stared up at me. “You want me to help you also, in this?”

  I tried to speak, and couldn’t. I nodded wordlessly.

  Abdallah knocked on the stairs with a cane. “It’s for you, or for the policeman?”

  “For—for me.”

  “All right,” Abdallah said at last, placidly. “I’ll see.”

  He waited, unmoving, while I wrote down with trembling fingers the phone numbers at the apartment and the chocolate factory, then he turned and went back into the dark, his canes rattling on the floor, as I climbed back into the light.

  I stood a moment in the fierce sunshine; but when I turned to go, I found my way blocked. On the cracked sidewalk stood a young Arab, arms folded, barring my way with his foot. His thin face was flushed.

  “Yallah,” I said. “Move.”

  He barely reached my chin, and although his arms were finely muscled, he seemed more like a clerk than a street thug, in his faded white shirt with the buttoned low collar.

  He tightened the fold of his arms and raised his leg higher against the wall. On his feet, I saw, were sandals just like mine, with biblical clasps.

  “Yallah! Imshi!” I said in colloquial Arabic. Be quick about it!

  The young man detached himself from the wall. “Stealing our land,” he whispered, his voice quivering, “and our stories, too. You have no right.” He tried to spit in my face, but no spit came.

  I stared at him, waiting for him to back off. But he stood his ground. His large eyes, black with hatred and fear, held mine. I could see moistness welling up in their corners.

  “Fauzi!” A raspy voice called from the basement. “Ya Fa’uz!”

  The young Arab’s eyes shut tight. “Soon,” he hissed into my face. “Soon he’ll come again, then he’ll cut off all your zayins, and us he’ll set free! Free from all—”

  I pushed at him, blindly.

  A voice came from downstairs.

  “Fauzi! Where are you, you lazy cur?”

  I could hear the canes knocking up the stairs.

  “Coming, uncle,” the young man whispered.

  He picked himself up and disappeared down the stairs.

  33

  THIS WAS, FOR ME, the first sign that we would also encounter Arab opposition to our play. That we would encounter Jewish enmity was clear from the very start. Aside from my tailers, and Gershonovitz’s warnings, and the attempt to frame me in a mock-brawl, we could not obtain a hall anywhere. The newspapers continued to write almost daily about our play in the most poisonous terms. And after the rehearsals’ second week, the demonstrations before the chocolate factory grew larger every day.

  The two crowds still just stared at each other, but a more violent confrontation seemed imminent. And then midway into the rehearsal period, someone broke into the factory and trashed our rehearsal room thoroughly, spraying on the walls slogans about doing unto traitors as they deserved, and nastier things still about my father.

  I was enraged; but Amzaleg, whom I phoned, was coolly unsympathetic. “So put up more sentinels. We haven’t got time for this small shit. You know what’s going on outside?”

  With the elections so near, in the last few days violent demonstrations were a daily routine in Tel Aviv, with the violence increasing as the prospects grew that Labor, the ruling party since the state was born, could be toppled for the first time ever.

  “What sentinels?” I shouted. “It’s a chocolate factory! Not an army camp—”

  Amzaleg had hung up.


  And I had thought he was for us; obviously I was wrong.

  I told Ehud what Amzaleg had told me. Ehud nodded wordlessly and went to talk to the crew. That night, more of them—our gaffer, and the accountant’s office crew—stayed behind after work and, armed with sticks, patrolled the plant’s perimeter. Next morning, Ehud walked up to the crowd of supporters and spoke to a few, and that night some high school students joined in the plant’s guard duty, as well as two older men, perhaps bereaved fathers; I didn’t ask.

  There were no more break-ins.

  34

  IT WAS ODD. THE more the rehearsals progressed, the less Ruthy, Ehud, and I talked. Ruthy was mostly away, either at a poetry reading given by some rising poet, or at a drama class in which she had registered, to Kagan’s irritation and to Ehud’s, who had asked the actors, as a precaution, not go anywhere by themselves. Only late at night the three of us would sometimes meet in the kitchen and over glasses of tepid Nescafé spiked with 777, talk haltingly of things that did not matter at all. And later, after midnight, while Ehud snored fitfully in their bedroom, Ruthy would sneak out and wait for me in the bathroom, fulminating with angry silence, forcing me upon her the moment I came in; and both of us would ram against each other, breathing fast and shallowly like two hyenas in heat.

  Every morning I vowed to myself to put a stop to it; every night I found myself at it anew. I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it.

  35

  AFTER TWO MORE ACTORS were beaten up, our Yissachar quit.

  “It isn’t worth it,” he shouted at Kagan, as the actors playing ’Ittay and Yochanan showed their bruises all around proudly, telling how they fought back. “It’s just a play. I don’t want to get killed over a fucking old story!”

  Other actors also seemed to lose heart—our Yissachar was popular with them—so that same morning Kagan had Ehud convene all actors, stagehands, and the handful of high school students who had now become part of the crew, and Kagan gave yet another long emotional speech, speaking of duty and sacrifice, strangely resembling the speech I had gotten from the Israeli consul in Toronto. Later Ehud phoned around for a replacement; that afternoon we had him, and by evening our new Yissachar had learned most of his role by heart. He was not as good as the one who had left, but he would have to do.