The Debba Read online

  “So maybe they went with someone.”

  We were silent for a moment. I remembered Fauzi, and other Yaffo shabbab.

  After a while Amzaleg said, “So you trust me all of a sudden?” A muscle twitched in his cheek, as in a wink. But the effect was not comic.

  I looked away. “I … I was here, too, in your office … a few hours ago.” For some reason I felt shame at this. “To check you out, to be sure.”

  I had seen the memos in his drawer, the ones from Gershonovitz, urging him not to make a fool of himself, to take care, especially now. Especially with this.

  He nodded without surprise or rancor. “I figured.” Then he stretched; first the palms, then the wrists, the shoulders, finally the mouth, the cheeks. Like a large gray cat. Again, the effect was far from comic.

  “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you some pictures. You think you can look?”

  His thick fingers were already riffling through the inside flap of one of the files on his desk.

  I tried to speak but no voice came. I nodded.

  Without looking into my eyes he began to hand the photos to me, one by one, speaking in a low monotone as he pointed with his thumb at details.

  The photographs were of an astonishingly high quality and resolution, like those taken by a high-flying reconnaissance jet, or by an Intel patrolman with a miniature Hasselblad. Every detail showed crisp and sharp.

  “That’s how the boxes fell, see?” Amzaleg’s beefy thumb swept the glossy surface. “From right to left, in one direction, then they stayed. See here? Looks like he pulled them down himself, trying to—to keep from falling, or something.”

  I nodded, dumbly.

  The photograph showed a mound of shoe boxes, looking like some gun emplacement that had been leveled with a plastic charge. Two boxes had spilled their contents—children’s rubber boots with felt lining. Another box had opened, empty. To the left of the picture a pale palm showed, the fingers curled—

  The photograph was snatched away.

  Something cold and rounded was pushed into my hand; a glass of water. I drank half of it and put it down. Amzaleg pulled the glass toward him and drank down the other half, then wiped his mouth in a short, violent motion.

  He looked at me with mute inquiry.

  I nodded.

  Another glossy photograph materialized before my eyes. Amzaleg went on in the same low monotone. “See here? No sign of smear, or pulling, or anything, just a lot of—splatter, here.” His thick thumb obscured the leftmost part of the photograph, pointing to a dark stain on the floor, in front of the inclined bench. I tried to push his thumb aside, and for a second saw a mottled wrist with the familiar Omega watch; then Amzaleg slid his thumb back.

  “No,” he said. “Believe me. No.”

  The photograph disappeared, and another flipped out of the deck.

  “The cash register, nothing was taken as far as we could see.”

  “It was open, when you found it?”

  “Yes … How much did he usually keep there?”

  “I don’t know … a few hundred shekels, three, four hundred, something like that.” It was hazy in my mind. “Sometimes six hundred, maybe.” I wiped my forehead.

  Amzaleg said, “That was when? In 1970? When you left?”

  I understood his drift. There had been some inflation since then.

  Amzaleg said, “We found seven thousand shekels there.” Then he added, “That’s almost three thousand dollars.”

  “How much?” I stared at him. “And they didn’t touch it?”

  “No.”

  I said, “Where’s it now?”

  Amzaleg gave me a steely look. “In the safe—don’t worry, you’ll get it back.”

  “No, I want to see it now, smell it, what do I know?”

  He eyed me narrowly. “All right.” He got up, twirled the safe’s combination, and pulled out a brown envelope. He slid a sheaf of bills out of it, in hundreds and fifties, clasped with a rubber band. “It sat just like this on the floor.”

  I sniffed at the bills. There was a faint smell of something, some odor I ought to have recognized.

  “Anything?” Amzaleg looked at me aslant.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  I should know this smell. I really should …

  Amzaleg waited, then pointed to the last photograph. “Anything you see missing?”

  Automatically I scanned the photograph with my eye-corners stretched wide, as I had been taught. “I don’t know.”

  The little heap of money lay on the floor in the midst of the usual assortment of junk my father kept in his cash box: rubber bands, a bottle of pills, the two black books of accounts—

  I said, “Where is his inhaler, for his asthma?”

  “It was in his pocket.”

  Another photograph flashed by, and for a brief second I glimpsed a pale face, the dead eyes staring upward with anguish so profound, so unearthly, that I felt a blunt fist slam at my heart.

  Just as quickly the picture was gone.

  “Sorry.” Amzaleg’s right palm hovered above my wrist, hesitated, and withdrew. A moment passed.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  After a while I asked, “Any fingerprints elsewhere? On the door? Anywhere?” I was surprised to hear my voice, so normal, so clear.

  Amzaleg’s face darkened with blood. “Shit in yogurt. The guy we sent to clear the floor? The donkey cleaned everything, with a loofah.” He looked into my eyes with an effort. “The door, too.”

  I said nothing.

  “It happens,” Amzaleg said in a voice a trifle too loud.

  “Yes.” I wiped my neck. “Sure.”

  After a while the policeman said, “So what did you want this old actor for, this Ovadiah?” He inserted the photographs, one by one, into the flap in the back of the file.

  “So he could tell me, maybe, what happened then.” I didn’t ask Amzaleg how he knew I was asking around. Maybe he had talked to Kagan.

  Amzaleg squared the files on his desk. “In forty-six? In the show?”

  I hesitated. It seemed silly somehow to suspect this bungling policeman of anything just because the man he had sent to clean the store had wiped off the fingerprints.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I could feel him tense up.

  I said, “Also, from before, at the beginning, when they, Paltiel Rubin, and my father, when they were just starting.” I waited, then added, “Before my father wrote his first skit, even, his first Purim shpiel.”

  Amzaleg lowered his gaze.

  “You find him, let me know,” he said, feigning disinterest. “I’ll tell you when I catch him.”

  And all at once my instinct told me I was on the right track, that this was where I should look.

  39

  WE LEFT THE NEXT day at seven in the morning to look for Ovadiah Tzadok, the old Yemenite actor, I driving, Ruthy sitting by my side. One of my father’s smaller knives, still in its leather sheath, was in my back pocket. After the Samson’s attack I made up my mind I was no longer going to play by Amzaleg’s rules. It was Saturday, the Shabbat, and the traffic was still light. As far as I could see, no one followed us. But this of course meant little.

  The day before, when I had asked Ruthy for her car to drive to some Yemenite villages in the Sharon valley, she said right away she would come along.

  “What,” she shouted at Ehud, “he’ll look for this Yemenite to learn about Paltiel, and I’ll stay home? I have the right to hear what this guy says about my father.”

  It was the first time she had called Paltiel “my father” in my hearing. I tried to dissuade her, but nothing helped.

  We arrived at the Sharon by midmorning. At Moshav Elchanan, near Chadera, we found nothing, nor at Moshav Chanitt-LeMazmera, nor at Moshav Eliakim, nor at the next two moshavim. Only the land, its mood dusty and hot, kept flowing by the car window, making my nose tingle with a nameless emotion that I tried to suppress. Finally, at three in the afterno
on, I called it quits. We drove back home in the baking Beetle, neither of us speaking. Just before Herzliya, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Ruthy said, “Turn here. At the beach, so we can at least talk.”

  I hesitated, remembering the Samson, then turned.

  The Beetle hopped and rattled from one bump to the next, from one pothole to the other, the wheel shaking in my hands.

  Ruthy rummaged in her raffia bag, unearthing suntan lotion, a crumpled Dubek cigarette pack, and, inexplicably, a dry yellow rose.

  “From someone, I don’t remember,” she said, rubbing suntan lotion on her thighs. “No, not Ehud, someone.”

  “From when?” I didn’t know why I cared all of a sudden.

  “Six months ago, a year, I don’t know. What do you want? You screw this shiksa in Canada, maybe her girlfriends, too.”

  “She doesn’t have girlfriends.”

  “So her boyfriends,” Ruthy said.

  “I am not Paltiel.”

  Without warning she slapped my face. The car was still moving, but she had opened the door, and before I could find the brake, she had already jumped out, stumbled, and begun to run off into the dunes. “I hate you forever!” she shouted at me from some way off, her voice weak and wavering.

  My cheek stung. After a little while I got out of the car and followed her up the dune.

  I sat down beside her, on the hot sand, the sheathed knife awkward in my pocket. “I am sorry about—what I said.”

  She turned on her side, away from me. “I’m going with you to look for this Yemenite—why? I don’t know why.”

  “To learn who killed—maybe also to help prove that the play—” I stopped.

  “Prove what? That your father wrote it? Maybe that he wrote other things, too?”

  “I already said I am sorry.”

  “So you said. You had a father.” She stared at the yellow sky.

  There was a pause.

  After a while Ruthy said, “I am sorry. I am a donkey.”

  I shook my head.

  Ruthy said, as though continuing a previous line of conversation, “That’s what my mother said, too, that your father had let him go, and now the Debba came back to kill him—”

  “Stop talking nonsense.”

  Ruthy said, “Because even two people together—Mother said your father wasn’t big, but he had the power of a giant … Once in Yaffo he wrestled a hyena in a cage, near the harbor. Did you hear about that?”

  “Yes.” I had read the stories.

  “For a wager, because the Arabs taunted him. I would never do a thing like that, if I were a man. To save someone, maybe. But not for a boast.”

  “It wasn’t a boast. It was for the honor of the Jews.”

  “‘The honor of the Jews,’” Ruthy said. “Don’t make me laugh. ‘Honor of the Jews.’”

  When we came home it was late and Ehud was already sleeping. Without saying a word Ruthy went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  I lay down on the sofa. Sleep took a long while to come, and when it did, it came with a dark force I had not felt for a while.

  When I opened my eyes the apartment was in shadow. Ruthy, wearing her blue Atta shorts and a green T-shirt with the words “Peace Now” across the back, sat cross-legged on the living room floor, her chin on her cupped hands. The play’s pages were spread before her in the white parallel moonbeams thrown by the shutter.

  I shook my head groggily. Again I had dreamed that an animal, or perhaps the cold-killing instructor, had been shouting into my face.

  I coughed thickly. “Where’s Ehud?”

  “Sleeping.” She peered at me from under her rumpled hair, then rose to her feet and in one fluid motion lay down beside me. “This play, it really is a little like Golyatt—the meter, the words—”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She let her thigh slide down mine and traced a line on my hip with her nails. “Maybe they wrote it together, what do I know—”

  “It’s my father’s handwriting.”

  I got up and collected the pages from the floor.

  Ruthy looked up at me, her eyes half open. Presently she got up, too, then swiftly removed her T-shirt and put on Ehud’s checkered shirt.

  “I think they grew,” she said, and tied the shirt at the navel.

  “I didn’t look.”

  “Nemosha,” said Ruthy.

  40

  I COULD RECOGNIZE MY father’s handwriting anywhere, from his letters to me.

  A mere week after my arrival in Canada, the first arrived. Then, every two or three weeks, I received another, explaining to me why it was important that I come back. Patiently, in detail, in words that sang and sometimes oddly rhymed.

  At first I read them all, but afterward, when my black dreams returned and his words began to appear in them, I tore the envelopes up without opening them. Not once did I write back. Somehow I knew that if I recognized his claim on me, if I acknowledged it even once, I could never again cut myself loose and would end up going back: to his love; to his land, and to mine; back to Ruthy. Back to the dreck, and the blood.

  My mother, too, wrote. Short letters, simple ones. You don’t have to write, she said, if it’s hard for you. Just tell Rina you are all right, and she’ll write us. We love you, all of us. All of us, she repeated at the ends of her letters, as if she were a messenger for more than my father and herself, and my brother; a messenger for something else.

  Ruthy, too, wrote, but her letters I never opened. Finally both she and my father stopped writing, and my mother’s letters were reduced to a New Year’s greeting card, until her death in 1974.

  My brother, Avraham, had stopped talking to me even before I left. The moment I told him and my parents (he was home on furlough, about to return to base) that I’d be emigrating to Canada, he got up, spit on my Pataugas boots, and turned around to depart. But my mother grabbed his wrist. “Clean it, Avraham!”

  “No!” He tried to wrench his hand free but she had used a correct gimmel grip, and pushed him to his knees. It was amazing, a slight woman like her, in her fifties.

  My father said in Yiddish, “Leave him be.”

  “Isser, hafef,” she said in colloquial Arabic. Butt out.

  “Sonya,” he whispered, “it’s not your fault.”

  Her face went white and rigid. “Avraham, I said clean it!”

  My brother struggled futilely. To unlatch a gimmel hold, he would’ve had to break her thumb. Tears of panic and rage rose in his calf-brown eyes. “I won’t!”

  “Then I will.” She let go his wrist and went down on her knees, a towel in hand. I could smell her cyclamen eau de cologne, like a faint tingle in the throat.

  “Sonya, no,” my father said.

  My mother said nothing; only her shoulders shook as she wiped my boots.

  I stood frozen as Avraham tried to pull her up jerkily by the shoulders, but she would not rise. Finally he and I, not looking at each other, together pulled her to her feet.

  My mother said, “He’s your brother, no matter what.”

  I could not tell whom she was speaking to or about, and felt a nameless fear.

  No matter?

  I looked at my father but he said nothing.

  My brother shouted, “No!” and clomped down the stairs. And from that moment on, he no longer recognized my presence. To my farewell party he did not even bother to come. Whether he stopped speaking to my mother, after I had left Israel, I don’t know; but it might have been so. Men in my family have a great capacity for grudges that never end. Maybe it’s something in the air, here. The Arabs have it, too, as did everyone else who had lived here, before.

  Later, in Canada, breathing the cold air of the north and Jenny’s love, more than once I thought of calling my brother, to ask how he was and tell him I forgave him. He who, like me, was sent by our father to learn the same evil trade that our father once had. My brother who, when I deserted, only did to me what I would have done to him, had he left me behind. But I put off
calling him and now he, too, was dead, without even a proper grave; while I, the deserter, was here once again in this goddamned land, playing a part in a play set in motion by our dead father.

  But what part? And for what end? And was my mother in on it? How to find out?

  There is a photograph of my mother in one of her childhood albums. She is standing between two other girls in the shade of the wild fig tree on Dizzengoff Street, right by her parents’ newspaper kiosk.

  In the picture she is a slim girl of fifteen, her oval face shaded by a floppy khaki hat—the emblem of the Haganah youth—from under which a mass of wild curls tumble every which way. The other two girls are hatless; but all three are wearing the two-tone uniform of the Bnot Ya’akov Religious School for Girls—mid-length dark skirts and long-sleeved white shirts, with the school emblem on the right breast. All are leaning on long sticks that reach up to their waists—they had probably just returned from a kappap lesson—face-to-face combat—taught by some Haganah instructor, in the school backyard. My mother had gone to school till she was sixteen, when she had to drop out and work as a seamstress in Yaffo, to help her parents.

  She looks just like her photograph in Vashti’s Dream, my father’s Purim play in which she had played Queen Esther, many years later.

  The scene is half in light, half in shadow, with my mother right on the dividing line, her left side lighter than the other. The photograph itself is brown at its edges, as if a dark fluid had seeped into it and begun to obliterate it, like time itself but not half as thorough, nor as pervasive as those who had kept lying to me ever since I arrived.

  41

  NEXT MORNING, BEFORE EITHER Ruthy or Ehud awoke, I took Ruthy’s car keys, then squeezed myself into her Beetle and drove to Kibbutz Sha’ananim in the Sharon.

  When I arrived an hour later, I made my way on foot down the main road, walking in the already sweltering heat through the orange groves, already blossoming, and the rows of dusty almond trees. Before me spread the wide fields of the kibbutz, and beyond them, the yellow-gray patches of thorns where the Arab village of Zachaleh used to be; and further away still, beige on gray-brown, rose the mountains of Efraim, ephemeral and craggy and blurred. Biting dry wind blew into my face, carrying ashlike dust in its wings, as if the door of a giant oven had been left open somewhere beyond the horizon. The smell of the orange blossoms and the mimosa was like a dainty foreign wetness upon the overarching heat and the desiccation.