In “Poisoned Peace,” his book on the end of the Second World War, Gregor Dallas writes about the “margins” which accompanied the allied forces as they advanced into the countries occupied by Hitler. The margin that preceded the liberating armies (though true liberation was, of course, the last thing on Stalin’s mind) comprised the indigenous resistance forces, such as the Home Army in Poland and De Gaulle’s National Council of Resistance. These quasi-armies had sprung up soon after their respective countries were occupied, but their activities were mainly low-level, hit-and-run affairs until just before the arrival of the Soviet or Western forces. At that point, when it was clear that the Germans were on their way out, full-scale uprisings erupted in many of the occupied countries.
The margin that followed in the wake of the liberating armies was a period of chaos: haphazard violence and looting, revenge attacks on collaborators and internecine warfare between ethnic and political groups. The latter, exacerbated by the undeclared but increasingly obvious intention of the Soviet Union to control all the territories its armies passed through, to a large extent determined the map of Europe until the fall of communism in the early Nineties. The most far-reaching result of World War II, other than the overthrow of Nazism, was the forced transfer of much of Eastern Europe into the Soviet orbit and the strengthening of Communist movements in the countries of Western Europe, from Greece to France.
Interestingly, the occupation of Germany itself was not preceded by a margin of resistance activities. That could be attributed, if only partly, to the sheer brutality with which the Nazi regime dealt with the July 20 conspirators up to and including those on the furthest fringes of the conservative military revolt. That, plus the penchant of the retreating Nazis to hang both military personnel and civilians at the least sign of defeatism, put paid to any further thought of resistance, even as the Soviet forces converged on Berlin and the Western allies occupied the country’s industrial heartland.
Another reason was given by Field Marshall Montgomery in an order of the day to his troops. Crossing the German frontier would be entirely different from entering into France, Belgium or Holland, Montgomery said. The allies would not be seen as liberators but as invaders. Even after the horrors of the war precipitated by the Nazi regime, Germans would not take kindly to the invasion of German territory.
That was then. What struck me, while reading Dallas’ fascinating book, was the thought that the invasion of Iraq has been accompanied by its own margins and it is of interest (if not more than that) to reflect to what extent they were taken into account by the war planners in the Bush Administration.
As in the case of Nazi Germany, there was very little internal resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, a consequence no doubt of the regime’s viciousness in putting down the revolt of the Shiites following the first Gulf War as well as its gassing of the Kurds. Thus, the entry of the invasion forces was not accompanied by an Iraqi resistance uprising – and nor was such an uprising anticipated by the Americans, to the best of my knowledge. What they did expect, though, was a rapturous reception by the downtrodden civilians (showers of petals, if my memory of Paul Wolfowitz’s statements doesn’t fail me) and for a while it seemed as if they just might get it. But the tearing down of Saddam’s statue was as good as it got. From then and until today, the Americans have been contending with the other margin, the chaos in the wake of the invasion.
First came the looting - of the national museum, of hospitals and of private property – followed by revenge attacks on Baathists (with the benign neglect, if not connivance, of Paul Bremmer’s administration. Then, and most ominously, came the internecine warfare. Replace communist cadres with Islamic fundamentalists and you have a reasonably accurate facsimile of the events in the Balkans and the Baltic states in 1945 and 1946. The overthrow of tyranny was accompanied by the unwelcome invasion of sovereign territory and the machinations of an unscrupulous group with its eyes on the world stage. Like Stalin in the last year of the war, Bin Laden, Zarqawi and the other amorphous Islamic fundamentalist leaders saw the opportunity and took it.
Whatever good the invasion of Iraq was intended to bring (and that is another discussion,) it has resulted in a virtual civil was between Sunnis and Shiites and has provided radical Islam with a windfall it could never have dreamed of when it lost its power base in Afghanistan. In circumstances eerily similar to those that lead to the communist-inspired civil war in Greece after the defeat of the Germans, fundamentalist Islam is taking advantage of the anarchy provoked by the American invasion to advance its own agenda. Greece was saved from Communism by the timely and tough intervention of British forces; the Americans at the time were curiously disinterested in the Communist encroachment in Europe.
The invasion of Iraq was similarly, inexcusably blind. If the so-called War on Terror was indeed at the forefront of its strategy, the Bush Administration should have had the historical awareness to understand that the invasion of a sovereign state in the heart of the Middle East with inadequate forces and minimal world backing would be more likely to serve the interests of the enemy than its own. But America, dazzled by its own strength and omnipotence, has never been good at learning from history.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Cyril
One by one our pets were being poisoned. In the fractious way of the kibbutz, there were as many explanations for the killer’s motives as corpses. Some surmised he was after the bloated gangs of cats that haunted the place, defiling garbage cans at night and peering out from the trees during the day with their evil, luminous eyes. Others attributed the homicidal spree to one of the founders, whose experiences with the vicious, yellow-toothed German Shepherds of the Nazis had left him with a pathological fear and hatred of all dogs.
Whatever the motives of the poisoner, his little meatballs impregnated with death went a long way towards decimating the animal population of the kibbutz, both cats and dogs.
One of the younger kibbutz members found a half-eaten meatball clenched in the frozen jaws of his Afghan one morning and, being more enterprising than most, took it to a laboratory in the city to be analyzed. It was an organophosphate, the lab results showed, of a type widely used as a spray for fruit trees. That focused suspicion on the orchard workers. But seeing that the store room which housed the canisters of poisonous spray was always left unlocked, we were no closer to discovering the identity of the killer in our midst.
Almost every morning, the carcass of an animal was found in the bushes or lying on the step of its owner’s house like a bulky doormat. A tremor of panic coursed through the ranks of the kibbutz mothers, whose children were also quite capable of taking a bite out of a strategically placed meatball. The carefree existence of the kibbutz came to an abrupt end as parents reined in their offspring and dog owners kept their pets well-leashed and close to home. Fear and suspicion flourished; animals continued to die.
Yet, with all the killing going on, he never got Cyril.
Cyril was a mutt; a canine melting pot. As a puppy he was round and furry and colored a pristine white. Having a fairly good idea of his antecedents, I should have anticipated that the promise of his infancy would soon give way to a more realistic compromise between the stringy off-white of his mother and the mangy brown of his likely father. It took a love far deeper than the aesthetic appreciation that had been aroused in me originally to keep Cyril and I together as he grew older. He elongated alarmingly without ever gaining in height and the whiteness of his fur soon yielded to a mottled dung-brown.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that his sweet nature, at least, had not changed. But that only held true until I took him for his distemper shot at the age of six months. He whimpered pathetically in the car while returning from the vet and regarded me accusingly, his eyes saucers of betrayal. Once home, he crawled into my cupboard and ensconced himself on a shelf using my sweaters as bedding. He stayed there for a week, refusing to come out and demonstratively ignoring the bones and scraps I tossed in to him.
Eventually, he deigned to leave his retreat and rejoin the material world; but he had changed perceptibly. Like a guru returning from a period of isolated meditation, Cyril gave the impression of having found Truth in his cupboard sanctuary. Nonplussed, I waited for him to tire of the spiritual life until a chance encounter with a lascivious terrier named Beauty revealed to me the true nature of Cyril’s calling.
It was at the height of the poisoning spree. Cyril and I were relaxing on my verandah one late afternoon when Beauty came by, trailing her heat behind her like a snail’s slime. Unknown to both Cyril and myself, Beauty had encountered one of the fatal meatballs only seconds before she became the object of Cyril’s ardor. With uncharacteristic verve, he bounded off the verandah and, being a dog of the old school, accosted her from behind without even perfunctory foreplay.
Cyril locked into Beauty with dour determination. His eyes rolled back and his tongue lolled heavily from his panting mouth. At first, she accepted his invasion with abject resignation, this not being the first time he had violated her and Cyril, in his macho mood, not being one to argue with.
Then suddenly she began to shudder. Grey flecks of foam erupted from the corners of her mouth. Spastically, she angled her face towards him, depositing a wad of foam on his snout. Encouraged by her reaction, Cyril humped away with renewed vigor. He spread his hind legs for greater traction and sunk his nails into her flanks.
Beauty began to jerk uncontrollably. Cyril matched his rhythm to hers, pumping at a manic pace and beating time on the top of her head with his slack lower jaw. Here, finally, was a bitch transported beyond herself by his sexual exertions. Cyril let her have it.
With a choked moan, Beauty dropped down dead. Caught unawares on a down-stroke, Cyril somersaulted wildly over her prostrate body. He sprawled in confusion for a moment then stood up and went over to her, lying drenched with spittle and dead at his feet. An ugly smile twisted his mouth. He had done it. He had fucked her to death.
He nudged her with his paw, as if to make certain, and sniffed her genitals with what seemed like mild regret. Then, with his head rampant with pride and his tail waving cockily, he strolled nonchalantly off.
We never discovered who the poisoner was. He evidently finalized his solution shortly after Beauty’s death, for the killings stopped and the kibbutz reverted to its slow, serene existence. Animal lives are cheap and poison is necessary to keep the trees in fruit. Those whose dogs had died got new pets and the cats returned to their nocturnal scavenging. Nothing changed, though Cyril was insufferable after that.
+++++
I was preparing to replace a section of sunken floor tiles in the bedroom of an elderly couple with five sons, one of whom was an army general and was destined to become prime minister of Israel. It was a simple, characterless room, with two single beds separated by a wooden night stand.
Pulling one of the beds away from the wall to expose the floor, I revealed instead a stockpile of foodstuffs. There were tins of baked beans, tuna and sweet corn, slabs of chocolate, a large salami, vacuum packed slices of cheese, assorted tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and salad greens and bread from the kibbutz bakery. All stacked meticulously under the bed as if in preparation for placing on shelves.
It was what Israelis call a slik, a term used to describe the illicit stockpiles of weapons hoarded by the Hagana and other Jewish fighting units in the years preceding the establishment of the state. But this slik was of a different variety altogether.
The kibbutz had been established in 1946 by Czech survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom had been through Thereisenstadt and other Nazi death camps. They had arrived in pre-state Palestine after the war on small, mostly illegal, refugee boats and had erected tents on the bare ground that they had been allocated for their new home. They planted orchards, dug fish ponds and erected rows of rickety chicken sheds. They also built a communal dining room, a clinic and children’s houses, carved out paths with lighting for the dark nights and planted gardens and trees.
By the time I arrived, a generation later, the kibbutz was a lush and leafy retreat, a quiet, verdant place that combined the rough utilitarianism of a farm with the placidity of a holiday resort. Its founders were mostly in their sixties by then, small, tough people, dressed in simple work clothes and with an air of uncompromising industriousness about them. In all material respects, they had come a long way from the hollow, haunted survivors of the killing fields of Europe.
Or had they?
My stereotyped image of the forever-scarred survivor did not last long. Not that they weren’t scarred, but their wounds were a lot less overt than I had expected. They were concealed under an abrasive crust that had hardened layer by layer over the course of a generation. Each year, I was struck by their nonchalance on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The German volunteers on the kibbutz would sniffle and squirm during the simple evening ceremony in the black-fringed communal dining hall while the founders of the kibbutz invariably sat impassively. Some even joked about it.
One time, I sat next to Isadore, the feisty, veteran manager of the vehicle garage. He nudged me during the ceremony.
“Not a bad shiksa,” he remarked, gesturing towards a sturdy German girl with tears glistening on her swollen cheeks.
“Not bad,” I agreed.
“Have you fucked her?”
I was astounded. He and I had never discussed anything more personal than brake pads.
“Not yet.”
“Do it,” he said mildly. “Her grandfather probably fucked us.”
It wasn’t indifference, I learned. It was obstinacy. They weren’t about to give a bunch of interlopers the vicarious satisfaction of sharing in their purgatory. That was theirs alone.
I had never had much to do with Holocaust survivors before the joining the kibbutz. I had read a huge amount about the Holocaust but had rarely come face to face with its principals. That wasn’t only due to lack of opportunity. All my life I have shied away from personal encounters, preferring the written word to the awkwardness and discomfiture of sharing someone else’s misery.
The two, identical brothers who ran the decrepit grocery store in my Jerusalem neighborhood and wore fedoras indoors, winter and summer, had faded camp numbers on their arms and I had seen the same numbers on the shrunken arms of old women on the bus. In the supermarket one time, I broke off a petty argument with an old man when he raised an arm to remonstrate and I saw the tell-tale smudge on the loose skin of his inner forearm.
That had been the extent of my interaction with the Holocaust generation until I got to kibbutz.
Living with them up close schooled me in the limitless complexities and contrariness of the human psyche. Most of the survivors were profoundly cynical, disparaging of anything that smelled of sentiment. They had turned hardness into a virtue and were soft only with children, preferably those who were one or two generations removed.
Amongst themselves, the veterans were often caustic and derogatory, insulting each other casually to their faces. In the beginning, I took it for a pervasive callousness that stemmed from the harshness of their wartime experiences. Over the years, I came to a deeper understanding. They had an intimacy that was exclusive yet raw and discomfiting. It was as if they shared a secret which, if revealed, would incriminate them all. It was a sub-text of mutual confidence, suspicion and unwelcome reliance. The collective culpability of the victim.
I’m generalizing, of course, and maybe I read too much into it. It’s easy to mistake the tones and inflections of people from a culture with which one is not familiar. Not only were they, as a group, impenetrable to me but they spoke a patois of Hebrew, Yiddish and Czech that excluded me from a lot of their repartee. I was a stranger and with strangers they were mostly off-hand and grudging. We weren’t even in the outer orbit of their club.
But standing in that modest kibbutz bedroom with the stockpile of foodstuffs at my feet, I came as close as I ever would to touching the soft underbelly of the Holocaust survivor.
The loaves of bread on the floor were same-day fresh, the cheese well within its expiry date. It was no forgotten stash, dusty and mold-covered with age. Someone had gone down to the bakery that very morning and replaced the bread before I got to the house at seven. Assumedly, someone did that every morning.
A generation after they were liberated from the camps and in the manifest security of their home for the past 30 years, these two aging people, parents of a future prime minister, were stockpiling provisions for the next Holocaust.
I decided to start with the floor in the bathroom, where years of seepage through the cracks between the tiles had resulted in a dangerous sinkhole. Moving the slik would have been too much of an intrusion. It would have been like going through their underwear or rifling through the old photo albums on their shelves. As it was, I felt embarrassed. There was something intensely personal, naked even, about that pile of food on the bedroom floor.
I pulled up the bathroom tiles and carted them outside, where I chipped the old plaster off those that could be reused and discarded the rest. Back inside, I cleared out the old sand that covered the concrete base and laid a layer of fresh beach sand, damping it down with a plastering trowel. Then I prepared a stack of new tiles by the side of the hole and laid out my tools; a couple of trowels, a meter-long builder’s spirit level, a roll of string and a short-handled, heavy hammer for knocking the tiles into place.
It was lunch time. I looked around for Cyril but he had evidently made his own lunch arrangements.
At the entrance to the dining room, I bumped into Emanuel, co-owner of the slik, washing his hands in one of the basins.
“How’s it going?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his grubby workpants.
“OK. I’m doing the bathroom today and I’ll do the bedroom tomorrow.”
“So I’ll have to piss in the kitchen sink tonight?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s OK with me,” he said, walking away. “But I don’t know what my wife’s going to do.”
He made no mention of the salad under the bed. Perhaps they all do it, I thought. Perhaps it has become so much a part of their lives that they don’t even find it worth mentioning. Was it conceivable that I was the only one on the kibbutz who didn’t sleep on top of a private supermarket?
Over lunch, I scrutinized Emanuel, sitting at the table diagonally opposite to me. Like most of the kibbutz founders, he was short but built like a tank. Stubby, powerful arms extended from the rolled-up sleeves of his blue work shirt and his spotted, gray-spiked head rested on a sun-browned neck as thick as the barrel of a cannon. He ate his food with one hand, grasping the fork shovel-like in his fist.
It was as difficult to picture him stockpiling fresh loaves of bread every morning as it was to imagine him as a fragile refugee from Hitler’s death machine.
I returned to the cottage after lunch and mixed up a batch of plaster, using a packet of cement, a bucket of white, jelly-like lime and sea sand that I had brought over earlier that morning on the tractor-trailer. I filled two buckets with the mixture and carried them into the house.
A snuffling noise came from the bedroom. I glanced inside to find Cyril on the floor with the contents of the slik scattered around him. He had pinned a package of cheese to the floor with his two front paws and was foraging inside it with his snout. He looked up at me with a glazed expression as I entered the room, scraps of food dangling from his nose like Christmas decorations. Around him was the residue of the salami and scraps of plastic packaging.
Bizarrely, my immediate association was with war profiteers, Rothschild and the like, who made fortunes out of Europe’s many wars. Cyril, it occurred to me, was gluttonous proof that one man’s war is another’s opportunity. But in Cyril’s case, profiteering didn’t take much effort; he had simply lucked out.
Leaving the buckets of plaster on the floor, I headed towards the kitchen, pondering how I would persuade the woman responsible for the groceries to part with a salami, several herrings and a packet of vacuum-packed cheese. Cyril trotted beside me, sated and self-satisfied.
+++
Cyril and Yankel were at loggerheads from the start. Yankel’s initial kick, which caught Cyril square in the ribs and sent him squealing down the path towards the chicken houses, was not designed to get their friendship off on the right foot. After that, Cyril treated Yankel with defiance, though leavened with a good deal of wariness.
He would seek out Yankel and bark at him raucously from a safe distance. When Yankel made a move to respond, usually by raising an arm or kicking out with a leg, Cyril would yelp loudly as if wounded and retreat behind the nearest shelter. In that way, he would follow Yankel around the kibbutz.
Cyril’s histrionics were annoying. I fully understood Yankel’s exasperation with him. But it went deeper than that. Yankel’s initial kick had been vicious and unprovoked. Had he instead bent down to pat Cyril or even thrown him a kind word, like a bone, he would have made himself a lasting and undiscerning friend; one who didn’t mind that his breath stank of garlic and his work clothes of stale sweat. But Yankel hated dogs and Cyril was not one to allow a man his prejudices.
It took a return bout between the two of them for me to understand what lay behind Yankel’s unrestrained loathing of dogs and how it tied in with his generally brusque and callous behavior. It also had something to do with the grotesque remnant of his left ear that clung to the side of his head like a lump of useless meat.
Yankel was squat and thick, with the physique and power of a wrestler. Which is exactly what he had been in the old days in Poland, he told me, and he would have made it to the top had Hitler not intervened. He had out-fought all the boys on the shtetl with ease and had gone on to create a new, grudging respect for Jews in most of the larger towns of Silesia. He was the new Jew, with sidelocks removed and a leather jerkin instead of a long black coat; a Jew prepared to meet the Poles on their own grounds – brute strength.
His prodigious strength was supplemented by a quick cunning and an iron determination to beat the shit out of the Poles, a combination that soon had him fighting in the professional ring in Warsaw. But then the war broke out and Yankel soon had other problems to wrestle with, such as how to survive in the ghetto of Warsaw and, later, in Auschwitz.
Somehow he survived. He arrived on the kibbutz after the war, still relatively young, without a family and with no ambition to return to the wrestling ring. What he did have was a compulsion to build. When I met him years later, he was still building. The house I lived in had been built by him as had many others on the kibbutz. By then, he was well into his sixties; he had grown stouter and heavier but he had lost none of his strength. He was still the strongest man I had ever known.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that he was the nicest, though, after working with him for a couple of years, I was able to identify a certain naive kindness underlying his brutishness. Between the shtetl, the ghetto, Auschwitz and the kibbutz, Yankel had never managed to pick up life’s graces. He was incapable of waiting in line or allowing someone else to go first and his table manners were atrocious. Human contact was a disaster. On the one or two occasions that he attempted to pat my shoulder for a job well done, it was delivered like a back-hander. Children cried when Yankel smiled, admittedly not too often, and praise spilled from his mouth like a snarl. That gulf between intention and effect created its own spiral of misunderstandings. He could not help but be aware that his small attempts at niceties were, more often than not, met with affront by those on whom they were conferred.
So he refrained from pleasantness and built houses instead of bridges. That is what he was doing when I joined the kibbutz and that is what the two of us were doing when, some months later, I fell in love with a round, furry chimera and got lumbered with Cyril.
Two creatures could hardly have been more dissimilar. Where Cyril, at least in his puppy days, was delicately featured and almost beautiful, Yankel’s features were coarse and lumpy. Cyril was sly and conniving, his true nature often hidden beneath an exterior of fawning sweetness, while Yankel had the naive simplicity of a peasant. With Yankel, what you saw was what you got, even if what you saw was not particularly appealing.
Above all, Yankel was a laborer, obsessed with building and repairing houses, while Cyril was a dilettante.
Yankel abhorred laziness, even in a dog. And he abhorred it most of all when the laziness was manifested in shortcuts through freshly-laid concrete, leaving a trail of celebrity paw-prints for posterity. For his part, Cyril seemed to regard Yankel’s industriousness as a blot on an otherwise placid and amenable landscape. He would lie in the shade, head resting on fastidiously folded paws, and sigh delicately at the unpleasant sight of Yankel’s exertions. Soon enough, one would do something to annoy the other, nails would fly, strident barks would rend the air and I would have to step in as mediator.
In between his bouts with Cyril, Yankel worked at a hectic pace. He would be on the building site long before breakfast and could be seen trudging up the path to his workshop after dark, long after the rest of us had showered, rested and readied for supper. He carried his tools in a long, wooden box and usually had a ladder, plank or length of pipe balanced easily on one shoulder. For a city boy like myself, his dexterity was amazing.
He would hammer in nails while instructing me in some task and never miss a stroke. Stubborn screws, which brought me to the brink of suicide, would unwind meekly into his palm at the merest hint of coaxing. He never hesitated, never seemed to need to consider his next step. He worked with a ceaseless, blunt rhythm, even when yelling at me or tossing things at Cyril.
But he wasn’t an innovative builder. He had no time for newfangled techniques or materials, insisting on doing a job as he had always done it. The modern silicones and epoxies that I tried to introduce remained in their boxes. The only conceivable reason for compromise was price. If I could prove that my method was cheaper, he would sometimes listen. Granted, he didn’t listen graciously; he would grumble about my wasting his time and would invariably be pulling a nail out of a plank as I spoke or performing some other minor task that could reasonably be construed as work.
But he did listen sometimes and there were even occasions when he took my advice. On the whole we got along. He was not only the strongest person I have ever known but also the most stubborn and exasperating.
The day of the Cyril-Yankel rematch started out pleasantly enough. It was another steamy kibbutz morning and Cyril was relaxing in the shade of some scaffolding doing his best to ignore the splattering of plaster from Yankel working above. I was knocking together a crude wooden frame for the concrete verandah that we intended laying that afternoon. Cyril’s deep brown eyes gazed at me compassionately from above his delicately folded paws.
Then Cyril spotted a lurking cat. Cyril had a problem with cats. They drove him to distraction. They seemed to affront him, as if all four-legged creatures, even an honorary two-legger like himself, were tarred with their sneaky, skulking brush. He was certainly not about to tolerate the presence of a vagrant cat on his building site.
With a drive usually reserved for his sexual couplings, Cyril took off after the cat, forgetting that I had leashed him to one of the supports of the scaffolding as a compromise with Yankel after the paw-prints-in-the-concrete incident.. Cyril’s acceleration came to an ignominious halt as the leash tautened and his collar bit into his throat. He rose horizontally into the air and seemed to levitate for a second or two before crashing onto his back. The scaffolding swayed drunkenly and a bucket of wet plaster plummeted to the ground, landing inches from the stunned dog. Yankel held onto a protruding roof beam and, cursing madly, groped blindly for the first weapon he could find. His claw hammer, a massive, cast-metal monster, sailed through the air and struck Cyril heavily on the back leg. Cyril cried out in pain, leapt up and fled. This time, he brought the entire construction, scaffolding, buckets of plaster and Yankel, down in a seething mass around him.
Ignoring Yankel, who had picked himself up and, cursing bitterly, was wiping gobs of plaster off his pants, I rushed to Cyril. He was yelping pathetically and his injured leg hung limply. When I touched his leg, deep moans welled up from inside him and he sank his head into my arms. Without a word to Yankel, I unleashed Cyril from the pipe of scaffolding he was trailing and carried him to the sick bay. The nurse, not at all happy at the presence of a dog in her impeccably antiseptic clinic, hurriedly arranged us a lift to the vet in the nearby town.
It was evening by the time Cyril and I returned to the kibbutz, X-rays in hand and shiny, new plaster on Cyril’s hind leg. Distracted by the constant, hysterical tattoo of Cyril’s nails on his metal examination table, the vet had given Cyril too much sedative. He lolled in my arms like a drunk and licked my face earnestly whenever it came within licking distance. His breath was thick and cloying.
After a couple of days recuperation at home, Cyril took to the paths of the kibbutz, hobbling gamely on three legs and displaying his white cast of courage for all to see. He wore his injury like a medal. He may not have won his skirmish with Yankel but he had put up a damn good fight. Not even the cats could shake Cyril’s self-satisfied equanimity.
I returned to work the day after the incident, leaving the injured Cyril at home. Yankel had cleaned up the mess by then, re-assembled the scaffolding and laid the concrete verandah in my absence. I went to work silently, tiling the bathroom of the house with Italian ceramic tiles, the latest craze on the kibbutz, while Yankel continued plastering the exterior. Neither of us spoke. The next morning, I arrived at work to find bare, cinder-block wall where I had tiled the previous day.
“You forgot the water pipe,” Yankel muttered and kept on working. He was right. That was the extent of our conversation for the day.
We continued that way for several days. Yankel would sooner have donned a tutu and danced on his toes than apologize and I, angry and upset, was waiting for him to make the first move. Neither Yankel nor I was much of a talker and banter had never been a feature of our work environment. But there had always been an easy camaraderie between us. That was now gone. We worked in sullen silence.
It must have been a week or so after the incident that Yankel came to visit. I had returned to my room after supper and was drinking a beer on the porch, considering my options for the evening. Cyril was lying at my feet gnawing at his cast. The novelty had worn off by then and the cast, muddy and shredding at the edges, had begun to irritate him.
Suddenly, Cyril sensed something. He stood up, glowering in the direction of the dark silhouettes of the pecan trees that separated my room from the parking lot, His tail quivered at half mast and a throaty growl bubbled up from inside him. A shape materialized out of the blackness but remained standing in the shadows of the trees. Cyril recognized Yankel before I did. His growling bravado evaporated and he retreated in a flash through the open door to the safety of the room.
“Who is it?” I asked in the direction of the shadows.
“Me.” On hearing Yankel’s voice, I recognized his stocky, powerful shape.
“Why don’t you use the path like normal people?”
“I was in the shed.” The store room where we kept our building equipment was the other side of the parking lot. He had cut through the trees to get to my room.
“So, why are you just standing there?”
“Will he attack me?”
I laughed at the absurdity of it. Cyril was cowering under my desk while Yankel, the ex-wrestler, the strongest man I had ever met, was too scared of him to leave the safety of the trees.
“I hope so.”
He had started moving towards the room but stopped as I said it. Humor was lost on Yankel.
“Come on,” I said. “He won’t touch you.”
Yankel approached the room cautiously. There was something different about him. His movements, normally blunt and staccato, were loose, vague even. Then I saw that he had a bottle in one hand, gripping it by the neck as if to ward off attack by Cyril.
Yankel had never visited me in my room and I certainly had never seen him drunk. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him even have a drink. It was a night of firsts.
He held out the bottle as he climbed the couple of steps to the verandah. I looked at the label. It was Slivovitz, a plum brandy much beloved by eastern Europeans of his generation. I thought it was vile.
“The real thing,” Yankel said proudly.
Cyril, still hiding in the room, yapped at the sound of Yankel’s voice. It was a hybrid sound, half warning, half protest. I got up and fetched some plastic cups from the room, closing the mesh mosquito door behind me. I figured it would be enough to keep the adversaries apart, though Cyril had been known to charge right through the mesh when the feeling moved him. He still sported the scar on his snout from the last time he had done it.
Yankel sat down in a garden chair facing the room. Presumably he wanted fair warning if Cyril came bursting through the mosquito mesh. I sat facing him, looking out over the dark, shapeless trees. We drank Slivovitz and I smoked cheap kibbutz cigarettes. The plum brandy tasted surprisingly good. I knew there had to be a purpose to the visit and let him take his time.
“You know,” he said finally, just when I began to consider the possibility that there wasn’t in fact a purpose, “I don’t … I mean … dogs, you know. I don’t really like them.”
“Ahuh,” I agreed gravely, as if something profound had been uttered. I took a long, foul drag on my Dubek cigarette, spitting out stray pieces of unidentified organic matter.
“I was in the camps, you know.” He said it in an off-hand sort of way. He might have asked me to hammer in some nails in the same, flat tone.
I nodded.
“The dogs there, they weren’t like … your dog.” He gesticulated vaguely in the direction of the room, from which came a persistent, rumbling growl like the constant buzz of a bee hive.
“That’s when I started building. They took me to Auschwitz, well Birkenau really. We built the factory for IG Farben. I had never built before in Poland but I found that I had a skill for it. And of course I was very strong. Even after four years of the ghetto and the labor camp and then Birkenau, I was very strong. That’s what kept me alive. Everyone else was … gone. My family. Gone.”
That was more than I had heard him say in an entire day. He spoke casually, a trifle boastfully even. But the fact that he was stringing together full sentences, one after the other, indicated a drive to communicate that I had never known in him.
“There were dogs there. Everywhere there were dogs. Big, ugly things on chains. They would pull on the chains trying to get us and the guards, yemach shemam, would laugh. Sometimes, they let them go, just for the fun of it. Just for … for sport. I saw Jews torn apart by the dogs.”
Yankel gulped down a mouthful of the sweet, astringent plum brandy. He shuddered as it seared its way down, then smiled ruefully and held up his cup.
“Lehayim. This reminds me of parties we used to have before the war. We weren’t really drinkers, you know, though we thought we were.. Not like the goyim. The Poles, they could drink. Anti-Semitic bastards. But I enjoyed a drink in the old days.
“Anyway, we were building the factory. It was winter. People were dying from the cold. There were bodies lying in the snow at the building site. They just left them there.
“I was working inside, thank God. Preparing the foundations for the boilers. It was still cold, of course, but not nearly as bad as outside. I wasn’t well that day. I don’t remember what was wrong with me but I wasn’t thinking straight. I found a … a corner, a little niche downstairs that was isolated and I sat down. Just for a moment, for a rest.
“Next thing I knew, I was waking up from a sleep. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping. It couldn’t have been … well, maybe a few minutes. So, I woke up and there in front of me was a guard, one of the Ukrainians, yemach shemo, with a dog. A big, horrible brute. The Ukrainian, I mean. The dog was even worse”
He smiled again. A smile that creased his mouth but came nowhere near his eyes. A touch of humor from Yankel. Another first.
“I could smell him from where I was lying, well, crouching really by now. And his spit showered all over me. He was that close and slobbering as he tugged at the chain. I started the usual song and dance in my best German. How sorry I was and it wouldn’t happen again and I was looking for something I dropped in the corner. He just looked at me, the Ukrainian. I knew him well. He’d been on the guard detail for a few months. They said he had been in Treblinka before that. Once I saw him and his dog play with a man, trying to herd him like a sheep, until he ran into the electric fence and killed himself. The guard thought it was a big joke. He gave the dog a biscuit afterwards. I would have killed for that dog biscuit.”
Yankel paused for breath and a drink. He seemed to have surprised himself with his garrulousness. Or maybe he was just drunk. He looked vulnerable, which is not something one would normally have said about him. And he was making a big dent in the Slivovitz.
“He bent down slowly, the Ukrainian, and slid the chain off the dog. Pulled it over his head, like this.” He stretched the arm that wasn’t holding the cup of plum brandy over the top of his head and demonstrated the chain coming off.
“The dog was onto me in a second. He grabbed me by the ear. He was wet from the snow and his stinking fur was all over me. The noises in my ear as he tore at it like a piece of meat were terrible. I tried to push him off but I couldn’t. He was very heavy and I wasn’t strong that day. I couldn’t move. The pain was awful.”
Yankel sloshed the brandy around in his cup and stared fixedly at it. He was talking as much to himself as to me. He had clearly forgotten about the pampered canine in the room who, having been ignored for too long, had ventured out from under the desk and was standing behind the mosquito door with his muzzle pressed up cautiously against the mesh.
“I was lucky that the ear came off. Or a big chunk of it anyway. Otherwise the dog would have just kept on eating, I suppose. But he had my ear in his mouth and he lost interest in me. He was playing with my ear like it was a piece of meat. A piece of Jew meat.
“The guard also seemed to lose interest in me. There was no-one else down there. Just him and me and the dog. So, maybe he wasn’t inspired without an audience. Usually, when they killed or tortured us it was to impress the other guards. To show off. But down there in the boiler room he had no-one to show off to. So, he put the chain back over the dog’s head and pulled him away. The dog still had my ear in his mouth and blood was running down his jaws.
“That was it.” Yankel looked up.
“The Ukrainian didn’t say anything to me. He just walked off with his dog and my ear. I went outside and put snow on my ear to stop the pain and the bleeding. I was sure it would get infected and I’d die. But it didn’t. It healed.”
Instinctively, he touched the creased, shapeless blob where his left ear used to be. I looked away. I had examined it surreptitiously many times over the years but to look at it now it seemed too personal. Too much of an intrusion.
We sat in silence for a while, drinking our Slivovitz. I felt strangely put-upon. I think I preferred Yankel as an enigma. Knowing conferred obligations and I didn’t want to feel obliged to Yankel.
From my youth, I had been a Holocaust groupie. My curiosity was not a Jewish involvement of the sort that takes youth delegations to the death camps every year with Israeli flags and subliminal political messages. I was, I must confess, a lot more interested in the killers than in the victims. There was no mystery, no puzzle, in being led like sheep to the slaughter. Sure, there was tragedy and pathos in the Jewish story but few questions. The Nazis, on the other hand, were a riddle that I returned to compulsively. What was it that made normal men and women into beasts? What confluence of events and circumstances did it take? Was every person capable of making the leap? And the clincher: Could Jews become Nazis?
I would gladly have sat all night listening to Yankel’s stories. But to do so would make me privy to his secrets; it would give me a stake, however small, in his being. It would change the tenor of the comfortable working partnership that we had built up over several years. In short, we ran the risk of becoming friends.
I drank up and smoked, feeling the limp cylinders diminish in my fingers as I dragged on them. Eventually, Yankel yawned, stood up and left, taking what remained of the Slivovitz with him and acknowledging the intimacy that we had shared with a curt nod.
Cyril was scratching at the mesh. I let him out of the room and he hobbled to the edge of the verandah, barking derisively in the direction that Yankel had gone. I let him bark. I remembered a saying we had taunted each other with as kids. “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Cyril’s barks would never hurt Yankel. There was nothing more to hurt.
++++
My first intimation of danger was a low, throaty rumble from Cyril’s end of the bed. Surfacing from a deep sleep, I propped myself up on one arm and glanced down to where he normally lay like a deadweight between my feet. It was not yet a full-scale alert. Cyril was still curled up in sleeping position though his head was raised and staring fixedly at the door. I could feel his tension through the thin, summer blanket.
Cyril had not yet taken an irreversible position on the intrusion. Though he was growling, his tail vibrated in pole position, ready to beat out a greeting for a welcome visitor. It could go either way. Cyril was usually disappointed by late-night visits on the kibbutz. They often began with Cyril being absentmindedly petted but soon degenerated into petting of a different sort. Invariably, he found himself being tossed around on the bed like a buoy in a storm and eventually dumped onto the floor, where he would lie in undignified, offended silence. I got the feeling that Cyril would have preferred that I did my couplings elsewhere and in private.
Sex may not have been what inspired the socialist founding mothers and fathers of the kibbutz movement but it sure kept the rest of us going. Through some fortuitous stroke of luck (it was just too good to have been the product of design), kibbutzim had become a magnet for young, careless volunteers from all parts of the world. They lived simply, two or three to a room, worked wherever they were assigned, drank prodigiously and fucked gloriously. My kibbutz specialized in lanky, randy Danes and Swedes, with some dour Germans and English roses thrown in for good measure. That, too, was not planned. I could just as easily have ended up with the tight-zipped fundamentalist Baptists who were the staple of the volunteer corps on a kibbutz down the road. But, happily, I found myself with the Scandinavians.
Whatever it was that had alerted Cyril, I couldn’t hear it. The dense silence of the night enveloped the room. I sat up and listened, straining to hear something. Nothing. Not even the muffled shutting of car doors from the adjacent parking lot or the regular revelry of tipsy volunteers as they diligently trashed the flower beds while attempting to keep to the dark paths.
And then I heard it. The squeaking of rusty hinges as the mesh mosquito door was slowly opened. It was a sound that was almost as familiar to me as my own breathing, but now, in the dead of night, it grated like fingernails dragged over polystyrene.
My initial annoyance at the intrusion quickly yielded to a hard-on and tingling thoughts of sneaking, anonymous, groping-in-the-dark sex. I glanced at the alarm clock, which flickered “3:21” in luminous green. Instinctively, I did the arithmetic. I had barely been asleep four hours and had less than two to go. It would have to be a quickie.
The lights from the parking lot threw a glow into the room. Cyril was standing on the bed now, his body rigid like steel rope. I put my hand on his back to silence him and felt him throb with anticipation. I pulled him into my arms and held him against me as, together, we watched the door handle rotate.
The door cracked open and a hand materialized. It patted the wall next to the door as if searching for the light switch. Then the door opened further and I saw a tall, featureless figure, outlined against the light of the naked bulb on the porch. It was not the shape of a female, certainly no female that I wanted to meet.
In the doorway stood a man, unfamiliar and menacing.
My hard-on depleted. The hot, pulsing anticipation of seconds before dissolved in a cold rush of dread as, in a sudden flash, I recalled the events of the previous afternoon.
There had been a terrorist incident not far from the kibbutz. I first heard about it when I came across a scrum of women behind the communal kitchen, huddled around a transistor radio. From where I sat on the rattling tractor, I was unable to hear what was being said on the radio, but the taut stillness of the women radiated bad news. I jumped off the tractor and joined the group.
A bunch of terrorists had hijacked a bus outside Haifa a couple of hours before and driven it, with the passengers inside, for about 50 kilometers down the coastal road, pursued by an armada of police and military vehicles. Determined to prevent the bus from entering the heavily-populated central plain that begins just north of Tel Aviv, the army had prepared a roadblock on the highway at the junction with the road leading to the kibbutz. We all knew the junction well. It was less than ten kilometers from where we were standing.
The bus had attempted to run the roadblock. It had punctured its tires on the sharp spikes of the concertina-like obstacles on the road and slammed into a group of military vehicles by the side of the highway. Commandos had stormed the stricken bus, lobbing tear-gas grenades into it and shouting to the passengers to stay down. There was a brief, fierce shoot-out. The radio reported dead and wounded among the passengers, who were being evacuated to hospital. Initial reports said that three terrorists had been killed. But a passenger interviewed by the radio said that there had been four or even five hijackers.
After listening for a while, I continued on my way to the store-room, where I parked the tractor and off-loaded equipment. As I was locking up, a military jeep pulled up beside me. Two grim-faced officers hopped out, leaving the motor running and the canvas doors of the jeep flapping open. They asked me where the kibbutz secretary could be found and I pointed them down the path towards the low, nondescript building that served as our administrative center.
Kibbutz bush telegraph swung into action. The officers had barely entered the secretary’s office before the purpose of their visit was generally known and even disputed. A small crowd gathered on the grass separating the administrative center from the dining room. One, possibly two, terrorists were thought to have escaped the carnage. The army was mounting a massive search mission but it didn’t have the manpower to post guards at every settlement. We were instructed to go onto emergency footing.
The rest of the afternoon was a tumult of activity. Vehicles were sent to bring in the workers from the orchards and the fish ponds. Guards were posted at the entrance to the kibbutz, children were gathered in the children’s houses and air-raid shelters were unlocked and provisioned. I was tasked with plugging the holes in the kibbutz fence. Gathering together a group of volunteers, I hitched a trailer onto the tractor and loaded up with rolls of fencing, barbed wire and fence poles.
It was a lost cause. Before the war of 1967, the kibbutz had been regarded as a border settlement, its outlying orchards slap up against the border with what was then the West Bank of Jordan. The place was still littered with scraps of barbed-wire, disused bunkers and even the odd tank trap. Relics from a previous era. But security had lapsed in the intervening years and the kibbutz fence had been breached in numerous places. Several meters of fencing had disappeared entirely in the gloomy, wooded area separating ourselves from the larger, neighboring kibbutz where our children attended high school. On the other side of the kibbutz, a large opening gave easy access to the bus stop in the adjoining village.
We did what we could but it wasn’t much. Erecting a good fence takes time. Mostly, we drank the beer that one of the volunteers had thoughtfully brought with him and smoked cheap cigarettes. Cyril entertained himself by chasing birds.
It was almost dark by the time we returned to the parking lot, which by now resembled the staging area for a military campaign. The armory had been opened and men milled around with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. Two pickups had been allocated to the ad hoc response team and they stood at the ready in the parking lot, with doors open, motors running and headlights lit. An ambulance was also parked there. I had never seen the place in the grip of such intensity and purpose. War brings out the best in the Israeli.
After a tense, distracted supper, the kibbutz security officer handed me an M-16 with two, full magazines which were taped together for rapid replacement.
“You know how to operate this thing?” he asked.
I nodded gravely. Those were the days before my military service but I had occasionally guarded groups of volunteers and ulpan students on their excursions to the desert or the nature reserves in the north of the country. I had even shot off a couple of rounds in practice.
“Well, God help us all if you have to use it.”
I didn’t much like his tone but I had to agree with the sentiment.
We were visited later that night by the general commanding the central sector. He was one of us, born on the kibbutz to a couple with five sons. He was already a local icon, the best and brightest of the first generation of kibbutz kids and destined to go far, it was said. Prime minister material. I had worked with him a few times in the fish ponds during his days off from the army and had found him arrogant and condescending. Still, it was comforting to have one of our own in charge at a time like this.
“I hope you know how to use that,” he remarked to me in passing as he strode to his car at the end of his visit, trailed by a clutch of officers in flak jackets. It was nice to be appreciated.
That had been a few hours earlier.
With the terrorist framed in the doorway, I reached gingerly down for the M-16 that I had casually discarded on the floor by my bed before going to sleep. Cyril seemed to have understood the gravity of the situation. He had stopped his growling at the first sign of real danger and flopped, soft and warm, in my lap. The thought passed through my terrified mind that he had fainted, but more likely he was simply playing dead.
The terrorist just stood there. Those who have never been face to face with a terrorist are probably unaware of just how much can actually flash through one’s mind in the space of a second or two. I couldn’t see a weapon on him but had no doubt that he would kill me with his bare hands if he had to. Years before I had seen a TV report on Palestinian fighters training in Syria. As part of some sort of initiation ceremony, they had bitten off the heads of live snakes and strangled puppies with their hands. At the time, I scorned it as ridiculous; the huffing and puffing of primitives who didn’t have what it takes to fly F-16s or fire precision-guided missiles.
Having a snake biter right on your doorstep is a different proposition entirely, however. With the only puppy in the room pretending to be a fur rug, I had little doubt who would be singled out for strangling.
I groped desperately for the rifle with my left hand while attempting to remain in a sitting position and appear motionless. I had no idea what the terrorist could see from the doorway but assumed that any sudden movement would set him off on a murderous rampage. Luckily the bed was low and my flailing fingers eventually collided with the cold, hard metal of the rifle.
I moved my hand slowly along the length of the weapon until I felt the safety lock and, with one finger, clicked it upwards into what I hoped was the single-round position. Then I ran my hand back down until I was grasping the plastic flash shield. Gingerly, I bent my elbow and tested the weight. I couldn’t remember whether I had inserted the taped magazines or simply tossed them on the floor with the rifle. One thing, was becoming clear. There was no way that I would be able to lift the M-16, insert a magazine, cock it and fire without alerting the murderer in my doorway to something amiss.
He didn’t move. Just about anything would have been preferable to his still, looming presence and the deathly quiet in the room. Well, not exactly deathly. I swear I could hear Cyril snoring gently.
The only way to do it, I decided, would be in one deafening, cataclysmic movement. Clutching the rifle inches off the floor in my left hand, I breathed in deeply and flexed my leg muscles, feeling the weight of Cyril in my lap. My heart was pounding and I felt like someone had cut off my oxygen supply. My body was emitting so much heat, I must have been glowing in the dark. Then, with what was intended to be a simian roar, I sprung up onto the bed, catapulting Cyril onto the floor, and lifted the M-16 to chest height.
It appeared that I had taken the terrorist by surprise. He stumbled backwards and blurted out something in a surprisingly squeaky voice. It sounded like a name, “Janie” or “Jeanie,” though it could just as easily have been “Jihad.” I wasn’t about to stop and find out.
I slapped the underside of the rifle with my right hand, feeling the magazine thump satisfyingly into my palm. I pushed hard and it clicked into place. Swapping hands, I held the rifle by the magazine and groped for the bolt with my left hand. Finding it, I tugged it sharply towards me and felt the easy, well-oiled motion as it slid backwards into the breech, ejecting a cartridge.
By this time, the terrorist had disappeared from view, though I heard him thrashing around on the porch. What happened next was entirely out of character, but I was a fear-crazed, testosterone-charged coward with a loaded gun. I leaped off the bed straight onto Cyril, who yelped pitifully and scurried for safety underneath my desk. Then I charged out of the room, the M-16 preceding me at waist height like a monstrous phallus.
The terrorist was at the bottom of the stairs and starting down the path. He must have hurt himself because he was dragging one leg. I hesitated momentarily. I had never shot anybody before, never mind in the back. Never mind that he was injured and not carrying any visible weapon. To my meager credit, I didn’t aim. Holding the rifle on my hip, macho-style, I squeezed the trigger.
The retort was deafening. The rifle recoiled painfully into my hip and then swung upwards, glancing off my chest. In fright, I let go of it and it clattered to the ground. I looked at my victim. He had fallen and was lying face down in the path, his legs shaking spastically. In the piercing silence that followed the shot, I heard him sobbing.
No, I didn’t feel like Cyril after his triumph over Beauty. I felt numb, stunned. I felt as if I were drained of blood.
People came running. First my next-door neighbor, pulling on his pants, and then the guards, who had been patrolling nearby. They crouched around the terrorist and turned him over. I stood frozen on the verandah, the rifle at my feet, I couldn’t see the terrorist’s face but I could hear him as his sobs became strangled words and before long he was shouting. It sounded oddly, horribly, like Hebrew.
One of the guards came over to me and picked up the rifle. With the barrel pointing upwards, he cocked it twice in quick succession and then flipped the safety catch on.
“You’d better go inside,” he said awkwardly.
I nodded and remained standing where I was.
He pointed at my groin. I looked down to see my penis in full retreat and a harsh, red welt where the rifle had kicked into me. I was stark naked.
I entered the room and sat dully on the bed, my bare feet on the cool tiles of the floor. Cyril left his refuge under the table and curled up between my feet, licking my toes in commiseration. Outside, I could hear the voices of other people joining the fray and the insistent yelling of the man I had shot.
A little later, the kibbutz secretary came into the room, accompanied by the guard who had emptied the rifle and my neighbor. I pulled the blanket over my lap to hide my nakedness.
“You OK?” he asked.
I nodded.
“He’s OK too. You didn’t hit him.”
I was too drained to say anything but a wave of relief licked over me. My body drooped and tears welled up in my eyes.
“He must’ve fallen out of fright,” the secretary added. “You sure shook him up.”
“Is he … is he one of the guys from the bus?” I asked my voice surprisingly strong and controlled.
There was an awkward pause before the guard took over.
“We don’t think so. Looks like he’s one of ours… He says he’s from Netanya.”
The intruder was escorted to the dining room, where he was soothed with cups of coffee and biscuits. I remained in my room in the company of some friends. We were like two bloodied boxers after a bout, separated but obsessively scrutinizing the actions of the other just minutes before.
Apparently, he had met one of the American ulpan girls in town earlier in the day. She had told him her name, Jeanie, and which kibbutz she was on before it dawned on her that he was not the sort of guy her mother would approve of. He was what we derogatorily called an ars, a smug punk, often a petty hustler, indigenous to the streets of urban Israel. Jeanie had given him the brush-off but he had apparently decided that what the force of his personality had not achieved during the day, some other form of force would achieve late at night.
Seeing guards on the main gate, he had driven a little further, parked in the shadows beside the road and hopped over the fence. The first room he had come across was mine. All he had wanted, at three o’clock in the morning with the kibbutz on high alert, was to ask where he could find Jeanie.
There was a police inquiry a few hours later. Shooting people was taken seriously in those days, before two rounds of intifada elasticized the definition of terrorism and gave carte blanche to any idiot with a gun. I told of how I had chased the intruder from my room and fired a warning shot into the air as a last resort, after he repeatedly ignored my calls to halt.
For once, I didn't allow my propensity to humanize Cyril get the better of me. It was, after all, a serious incident and the two cops questioning did not seem to be the types who would appreciate doggie humor. So, I left him out of my version of the events and brought him a bone from the kitchen instead. He was happy.
Whatever the motives of the poisoner, his little meatballs impregnated with death went a long way towards decimating the animal population of the kibbutz, both cats and dogs.
One of the younger kibbutz members found a half-eaten meatball clenched in the frozen jaws of his Afghan one morning and, being more enterprising than most, took it to a laboratory in the city to be analyzed. It was an organophosphate, the lab results showed, of a type widely used as a spray for fruit trees. That focused suspicion on the orchard workers. But seeing that the store room which housed the canisters of poisonous spray was always left unlocked, we were no closer to discovering the identity of the killer in our midst.
Almost every morning, the carcass of an animal was found in the bushes or lying on the step of its owner’s house like a bulky doormat. A tremor of panic coursed through the ranks of the kibbutz mothers, whose children were also quite capable of taking a bite out of a strategically placed meatball. The carefree existence of the kibbutz came to an abrupt end as parents reined in their offspring and dog owners kept their pets well-leashed and close to home. Fear and suspicion flourished; animals continued to die.
Yet, with all the killing going on, he never got Cyril.
Cyril was a mutt; a canine melting pot. As a puppy he was round and furry and colored a pristine white. Having a fairly good idea of his antecedents, I should have anticipated that the promise of his infancy would soon give way to a more realistic compromise between the stringy off-white of his mother and the mangy brown of his likely father. It took a love far deeper than the aesthetic appreciation that had been aroused in me originally to keep Cyril and I together as he grew older. He elongated alarmingly without ever gaining in height and the whiteness of his fur soon yielded to a mottled dung-brown.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that his sweet nature, at least, had not changed. But that only held true until I took him for his distemper shot at the age of six months. He whimpered pathetically in the car while returning from the vet and regarded me accusingly, his eyes saucers of betrayal. Once home, he crawled into my cupboard and ensconced himself on a shelf using my sweaters as bedding. He stayed there for a week, refusing to come out and demonstratively ignoring the bones and scraps I tossed in to him.
Eventually, he deigned to leave his retreat and rejoin the material world; but he had changed perceptibly. Like a guru returning from a period of isolated meditation, Cyril gave the impression of having found Truth in his cupboard sanctuary. Nonplussed, I waited for him to tire of the spiritual life until a chance encounter with a lascivious terrier named Beauty revealed to me the true nature of Cyril’s calling.
It was at the height of the poisoning spree. Cyril and I were relaxing on my verandah one late afternoon when Beauty came by, trailing her heat behind her like a snail’s slime. Unknown to both Cyril and myself, Beauty had encountered one of the fatal meatballs only seconds before she became the object of Cyril’s ardor. With uncharacteristic verve, he bounded off the verandah and, being a dog of the old school, accosted her from behind without even perfunctory foreplay.
Cyril locked into Beauty with dour determination. His eyes rolled back and his tongue lolled heavily from his panting mouth. At first, she accepted his invasion with abject resignation, this not being the first time he had violated her and Cyril, in his macho mood, not being one to argue with.
Then suddenly she began to shudder. Grey flecks of foam erupted from the corners of her mouth. Spastically, she angled her face towards him, depositing a wad of foam on his snout. Encouraged by her reaction, Cyril humped away with renewed vigor. He spread his hind legs for greater traction and sunk his nails into her flanks.
Beauty began to jerk uncontrollably. Cyril matched his rhythm to hers, pumping at a manic pace and beating time on the top of her head with his slack lower jaw. Here, finally, was a bitch transported beyond herself by his sexual exertions. Cyril let her have it.
With a choked moan, Beauty dropped down dead. Caught unawares on a down-stroke, Cyril somersaulted wildly over her prostrate body. He sprawled in confusion for a moment then stood up and went over to her, lying drenched with spittle and dead at his feet. An ugly smile twisted his mouth. He had done it. He had fucked her to death.
He nudged her with his paw, as if to make certain, and sniffed her genitals with what seemed like mild regret. Then, with his head rampant with pride and his tail waving cockily, he strolled nonchalantly off.
We never discovered who the poisoner was. He evidently finalized his solution shortly after Beauty’s death, for the killings stopped and the kibbutz reverted to its slow, serene existence. Animal lives are cheap and poison is necessary to keep the trees in fruit. Those whose dogs had died got new pets and the cats returned to their nocturnal scavenging. Nothing changed, though Cyril was insufferable after that.
+++++
I was preparing to replace a section of sunken floor tiles in the bedroom of an elderly couple with five sons, one of whom was an army general and was destined to become prime minister of Israel. It was a simple, characterless room, with two single beds separated by a wooden night stand.
Pulling one of the beds away from the wall to expose the floor, I revealed instead a stockpile of foodstuffs. There were tins of baked beans, tuna and sweet corn, slabs of chocolate, a large salami, vacuum packed slices of cheese, assorted tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and salad greens and bread from the kibbutz bakery. All stacked meticulously under the bed as if in preparation for placing on shelves.
It was what Israelis call a slik, a term used to describe the illicit stockpiles of weapons hoarded by the Hagana and other Jewish fighting units in the years preceding the establishment of the state. But this slik was of a different variety altogether.
The kibbutz had been established in 1946 by Czech survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom had been through Thereisenstadt and other Nazi death camps. They had arrived in pre-state Palestine after the war on small, mostly illegal, refugee boats and had erected tents on the bare ground that they had been allocated for their new home. They planted orchards, dug fish ponds and erected rows of rickety chicken sheds. They also built a communal dining room, a clinic and children’s houses, carved out paths with lighting for the dark nights and planted gardens and trees.
By the time I arrived, a generation later, the kibbutz was a lush and leafy retreat, a quiet, verdant place that combined the rough utilitarianism of a farm with the placidity of a holiday resort. Its founders were mostly in their sixties by then, small, tough people, dressed in simple work clothes and with an air of uncompromising industriousness about them. In all material respects, they had come a long way from the hollow, haunted survivors of the killing fields of Europe.
Or had they?
My stereotyped image of the forever-scarred survivor did not last long. Not that they weren’t scarred, but their wounds were a lot less overt than I had expected. They were concealed under an abrasive crust that had hardened layer by layer over the course of a generation. Each year, I was struck by their nonchalance on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The German volunteers on the kibbutz would sniffle and squirm during the simple evening ceremony in the black-fringed communal dining hall while the founders of the kibbutz invariably sat impassively. Some even joked about it.
One time, I sat next to Isadore, the feisty, veteran manager of the vehicle garage. He nudged me during the ceremony.
“Not a bad shiksa,” he remarked, gesturing towards a sturdy German girl with tears glistening on her swollen cheeks.
“Not bad,” I agreed.
“Have you fucked her?”
I was astounded. He and I had never discussed anything more personal than brake pads.
“Not yet.”
“Do it,” he said mildly. “Her grandfather probably fucked us.”
It wasn’t indifference, I learned. It was obstinacy. They weren’t about to give a bunch of interlopers the vicarious satisfaction of sharing in their purgatory. That was theirs alone.
I had never had much to do with Holocaust survivors before the joining the kibbutz. I had read a huge amount about the Holocaust but had rarely come face to face with its principals. That wasn’t only due to lack of opportunity. All my life I have shied away from personal encounters, preferring the written word to the awkwardness and discomfiture of sharing someone else’s misery.
The two, identical brothers who ran the decrepit grocery store in my Jerusalem neighborhood and wore fedoras indoors, winter and summer, had faded camp numbers on their arms and I had seen the same numbers on the shrunken arms of old women on the bus. In the supermarket one time, I broke off a petty argument with an old man when he raised an arm to remonstrate and I saw the tell-tale smudge on the loose skin of his inner forearm.
That had been the extent of my interaction with the Holocaust generation until I got to kibbutz.
Living with them up close schooled me in the limitless complexities and contrariness of the human psyche. Most of the survivors were profoundly cynical, disparaging of anything that smelled of sentiment. They had turned hardness into a virtue and were soft only with children, preferably those who were one or two generations removed.
Amongst themselves, the veterans were often caustic and derogatory, insulting each other casually to their faces. In the beginning, I took it for a pervasive callousness that stemmed from the harshness of their wartime experiences. Over the years, I came to a deeper understanding. They had an intimacy that was exclusive yet raw and discomfiting. It was as if they shared a secret which, if revealed, would incriminate them all. It was a sub-text of mutual confidence, suspicion and unwelcome reliance. The collective culpability of the victim.
I’m generalizing, of course, and maybe I read too much into it. It’s easy to mistake the tones and inflections of people from a culture with which one is not familiar. Not only were they, as a group, impenetrable to me but they spoke a patois of Hebrew, Yiddish and Czech that excluded me from a lot of their repartee. I was a stranger and with strangers they were mostly off-hand and grudging. We weren’t even in the outer orbit of their club.
But standing in that modest kibbutz bedroom with the stockpile of foodstuffs at my feet, I came as close as I ever would to touching the soft underbelly of the Holocaust survivor.
The loaves of bread on the floor were same-day fresh, the cheese well within its expiry date. It was no forgotten stash, dusty and mold-covered with age. Someone had gone down to the bakery that very morning and replaced the bread before I got to the house at seven. Assumedly, someone did that every morning.
A generation after they were liberated from the camps and in the manifest security of their home for the past 30 years, these two aging people, parents of a future prime minister, were stockpiling provisions for the next Holocaust.
I decided to start with the floor in the bathroom, where years of seepage through the cracks between the tiles had resulted in a dangerous sinkhole. Moving the slik would have been too much of an intrusion. It would have been like going through their underwear or rifling through the old photo albums on their shelves. As it was, I felt embarrassed. There was something intensely personal, naked even, about that pile of food on the bedroom floor.
I pulled up the bathroom tiles and carted them outside, where I chipped the old plaster off those that could be reused and discarded the rest. Back inside, I cleared out the old sand that covered the concrete base and laid a layer of fresh beach sand, damping it down with a plastering trowel. Then I prepared a stack of new tiles by the side of the hole and laid out my tools; a couple of trowels, a meter-long builder’s spirit level, a roll of string and a short-handled, heavy hammer for knocking the tiles into place.
It was lunch time. I looked around for Cyril but he had evidently made his own lunch arrangements.
At the entrance to the dining room, I bumped into Emanuel, co-owner of the slik, washing his hands in one of the basins.
“How’s it going?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his grubby workpants.
“OK. I’m doing the bathroom today and I’ll do the bedroom tomorrow.”
“So I’ll have to piss in the kitchen sink tonight?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s OK with me,” he said, walking away. “But I don’t know what my wife’s going to do.”
He made no mention of the salad under the bed. Perhaps they all do it, I thought. Perhaps it has become so much a part of their lives that they don’t even find it worth mentioning. Was it conceivable that I was the only one on the kibbutz who didn’t sleep on top of a private supermarket?
Over lunch, I scrutinized Emanuel, sitting at the table diagonally opposite to me. Like most of the kibbutz founders, he was short but built like a tank. Stubby, powerful arms extended from the rolled-up sleeves of his blue work shirt and his spotted, gray-spiked head rested on a sun-browned neck as thick as the barrel of a cannon. He ate his food with one hand, grasping the fork shovel-like in his fist.
It was as difficult to picture him stockpiling fresh loaves of bread every morning as it was to imagine him as a fragile refugee from Hitler’s death machine.
I returned to the cottage after lunch and mixed up a batch of plaster, using a packet of cement, a bucket of white, jelly-like lime and sea sand that I had brought over earlier that morning on the tractor-trailer. I filled two buckets with the mixture and carried them into the house.
A snuffling noise came from the bedroom. I glanced inside to find Cyril on the floor with the contents of the slik scattered around him. He had pinned a package of cheese to the floor with his two front paws and was foraging inside it with his snout. He looked up at me with a glazed expression as I entered the room, scraps of food dangling from his nose like Christmas decorations. Around him was the residue of the salami and scraps of plastic packaging.
Bizarrely, my immediate association was with war profiteers, Rothschild and the like, who made fortunes out of Europe’s many wars. Cyril, it occurred to me, was gluttonous proof that one man’s war is another’s opportunity. But in Cyril’s case, profiteering didn’t take much effort; he had simply lucked out.
Leaving the buckets of plaster on the floor, I headed towards the kitchen, pondering how I would persuade the woman responsible for the groceries to part with a salami, several herrings and a packet of vacuum-packed cheese. Cyril trotted beside me, sated and self-satisfied.
+++
Cyril and Yankel were at loggerheads from the start. Yankel’s initial kick, which caught Cyril square in the ribs and sent him squealing down the path towards the chicken houses, was not designed to get their friendship off on the right foot. After that, Cyril treated Yankel with defiance, though leavened with a good deal of wariness.
He would seek out Yankel and bark at him raucously from a safe distance. When Yankel made a move to respond, usually by raising an arm or kicking out with a leg, Cyril would yelp loudly as if wounded and retreat behind the nearest shelter. In that way, he would follow Yankel around the kibbutz.
Cyril’s histrionics were annoying. I fully understood Yankel’s exasperation with him. But it went deeper than that. Yankel’s initial kick had been vicious and unprovoked. Had he instead bent down to pat Cyril or even thrown him a kind word, like a bone, he would have made himself a lasting and undiscerning friend; one who didn’t mind that his breath stank of garlic and his work clothes of stale sweat. But Yankel hated dogs and Cyril was not one to allow a man his prejudices.
It took a return bout between the two of them for me to understand what lay behind Yankel’s unrestrained loathing of dogs and how it tied in with his generally brusque and callous behavior. It also had something to do with the grotesque remnant of his left ear that clung to the side of his head like a lump of useless meat.
Yankel was squat and thick, with the physique and power of a wrestler. Which is exactly what he had been in the old days in Poland, he told me, and he would have made it to the top had Hitler not intervened. He had out-fought all the boys on the shtetl with ease and had gone on to create a new, grudging respect for Jews in most of the larger towns of Silesia. He was the new Jew, with sidelocks removed and a leather jerkin instead of a long black coat; a Jew prepared to meet the Poles on their own grounds – brute strength.
His prodigious strength was supplemented by a quick cunning and an iron determination to beat the shit out of the Poles, a combination that soon had him fighting in the professional ring in Warsaw. But then the war broke out and Yankel soon had other problems to wrestle with, such as how to survive in the ghetto of Warsaw and, later, in Auschwitz.
Somehow he survived. He arrived on the kibbutz after the war, still relatively young, without a family and with no ambition to return to the wrestling ring. What he did have was a compulsion to build. When I met him years later, he was still building. The house I lived in had been built by him as had many others on the kibbutz. By then, he was well into his sixties; he had grown stouter and heavier but he had lost none of his strength. He was still the strongest man I had ever known.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that he was the nicest, though, after working with him for a couple of years, I was able to identify a certain naive kindness underlying his brutishness. Between the shtetl, the ghetto, Auschwitz and the kibbutz, Yankel had never managed to pick up life’s graces. He was incapable of waiting in line or allowing someone else to go first and his table manners were atrocious. Human contact was a disaster. On the one or two occasions that he attempted to pat my shoulder for a job well done, it was delivered like a back-hander. Children cried when Yankel smiled, admittedly not too often, and praise spilled from his mouth like a snarl. That gulf between intention and effect created its own spiral of misunderstandings. He could not help but be aware that his small attempts at niceties were, more often than not, met with affront by those on whom they were conferred.
So he refrained from pleasantness and built houses instead of bridges. That is what he was doing when I joined the kibbutz and that is what the two of us were doing when, some months later, I fell in love with a round, furry chimera and got lumbered with Cyril.
Two creatures could hardly have been more dissimilar. Where Cyril, at least in his puppy days, was delicately featured and almost beautiful, Yankel’s features were coarse and lumpy. Cyril was sly and conniving, his true nature often hidden beneath an exterior of fawning sweetness, while Yankel had the naive simplicity of a peasant. With Yankel, what you saw was what you got, even if what you saw was not particularly appealing.
Above all, Yankel was a laborer, obsessed with building and repairing houses, while Cyril was a dilettante.
Yankel abhorred laziness, even in a dog. And he abhorred it most of all when the laziness was manifested in shortcuts through freshly-laid concrete, leaving a trail of celebrity paw-prints for posterity. For his part, Cyril seemed to regard Yankel’s industriousness as a blot on an otherwise placid and amenable landscape. He would lie in the shade, head resting on fastidiously folded paws, and sigh delicately at the unpleasant sight of Yankel’s exertions. Soon enough, one would do something to annoy the other, nails would fly, strident barks would rend the air and I would have to step in as mediator.
In between his bouts with Cyril, Yankel worked at a hectic pace. He would be on the building site long before breakfast and could be seen trudging up the path to his workshop after dark, long after the rest of us had showered, rested and readied for supper. He carried his tools in a long, wooden box and usually had a ladder, plank or length of pipe balanced easily on one shoulder. For a city boy like myself, his dexterity was amazing.
He would hammer in nails while instructing me in some task and never miss a stroke. Stubborn screws, which brought me to the brink of suicide, would unwind meekly into his palm at the merest hint of coaxing. He never hesitated, never seemed to need to consider his next step. He worked with a ceaseless, blunt rhythm, even when yelling at me or tossing things at Cyril.
But he wasn’t an innovative builder. He had no time for newfangled techniques or materials, insisting on doing a job as he had always done it. The modern silicones and epoxies that I tried to introduce remained in their boxes. The only conceivable reason for compromise was price. If I could prove that my method was cheaper, he would sometimes listen. Granted, he didn’t listen graciously; he would grumble about my wasting his time and would invariably be pulling a nail out of a plank as I spoke or performing some other minor task that could reasonably be construed as work.
But he did listen sometimes and there were even occasions when he took my advice. On the whole we got along. He was not only the strongest person I have ever known but also the most stubborn and exasperating.
The day of the Cyril-Yankel rematch started out pleasantly enough. It was another steamy kibbutz morning and Cyril was relaxing in the shade of some scaffolding doing his best to ignore the splattering of plaster from Yankel working above. I was knocking together a crude wooden frame for the concrete verandah that we intended laying that afternoon. Cyril’s deep brown eyes gazed at me compassionately from above his delicately folded paws.
Then Cyril spotted a lurking cat. Cyril had a problem with cats. They drove him to distraction. They seemed to affront him, as if all four-legged creatures, even an honorary two-legger like himself, were tarred with their sneaky, skulking brush. He was certainly not about to tolerate the presence of a vagrant cat on his building site.
With a drive usually reserved for his sexual couplings, Cyril took off after the cat, forgetting that I had leashed him to one of the supports of the scaffolding as a compromise with Yankel after the paw-prints-in-the-concrete incident.. Cyril’s acceleration came to an ignominious halt as the leash tautened and his collar bit into his throat. He rose horizontally into the air and seemed to levitate for a second or two before crashing onto his back. The scaffolding swayed drunkenly and a bucket of wet plaster plummeted to the ground, landing inches from the stunned dog. Yankel held onto a protruding roof beam and, cursing madly, groped blindly for the first weapon he could find. His claw hammer, a massive, cast-metal monster, sailed through the air and struck Cyril heavily on the back leg. Cyril cried out in pain, leapt up and fled. This time, he brought the entire construction, scaffolding, buckets of plaster and Yankel, down in a seething mass around him.
Ignoring Yankel, who had picked himself up and, cursing bitterly, was wiping gobs of plaster off his pants, I rushed to Cyril. He was yelping pathetically and his injured leg hung limply. When I touched his leg, deep moans welled up from inside him and he sank his head into my arms. Without a word to Yankel, I unleashed Cyril from the pipe of scaffolding he was trailing and carried him to the sick bay. The nurse, not at all happy at the presence of a dog in her impeccably antiseptic clinic, hurriedly arranged us a lift to the vet in the nearby town.
It was evening by the time Cyril and I returned to the kibbutz, X-rays in hand and shiny, new plaster on Cyril’s hind leg. Distracted by the constant, hysterical tattoo of Cyril’s nails on his metal examination table, the vet had given Cyril too much sedative. He lolled in my arms like a drunk and licked my face earnestly whenever it came within licking distance. His breath was thick and cloying.
After a couple of days recuperation at home, Cyril took to the paths of the kibbutz, hobbling gamely on three legs and displaying his white cast of courage for all to see. He wore his injury like a medal. He may not have won his skirmish with Yankel but he had put up a damn good fight. Not even the cats could shake Cyril’s self-satisfied equanimity.
I returned to work the day after the incident, leaving the injured Cyril at home. Yankel had cleaned up the mess by then, re-assembled the scaffolding and laid the concrete verandah in my absence. I went to work silently, tiling the bathroom of the house with Italian ceramic tiles, the latest craze on the kibbutz, while Yankel continued plastering the exterior. Neither of us spoke. The next morning, I arrived at work to find bare, cinder-block wall where I had tiled the previous day.
“You forgot the water pipe,” Yankel muttered and kept on working. He was right. That was the extent of our conversation for the day.
We continued that way for several days. Yankel would sooner have donned a tutu and danced on his toes than apologize and I, angry and upset, was waiting for him to make the first move. Neither Yankel nor I was much of a talker and banter had never been a feature of our work environment. But there had always been an easy camaraderie between us. That was now gone. We worked in sullen silence.
It must have been a week or so after the incident that Yankel came to visit. I had returned to my room after supper and was drinking a beer on the porch, considering my options for the evening. Cyril was lying at my feet gnawing at his cast. The novelty had worn off by then and the cast, muddy and shredding at the edges, had begun to irritate him.
Suddenly, Cyril sensed something. He stood up, glowering in the direction of the dark silhouettes of the pecan trees that separated my room from the parking lot, His tail quivered at half mast and a throaty growl bubbled up from inside him. A shape materialized out of the blackness but remained standing in the shadows of the trees. Cyril recognized Yankel before I did. His growling bravado evaporated and he retreated in a flash through the open door to the safety of the room.
“Who is it?” I asked in the direction of the shadows.
“Me.” On hearing Yankel’s voice, I recognized his stocky, powerful shape.
“Why don’t you use the path like normal people?”
“I was in the shed.” The store room where we kept our building equipment was the other side of the parking lot. He had cut through the trees to get to my room.
“So, why are you just standing there?”
“Will he attack me?”
I laughed at the absurdity of it. Cyril was cowering under my desk while Yankel, the ex-wrestler, the strongest man I had ever met, was too scared of him to leave the safety of the trees.
“I hope so.”
He had started moving towards the room but stopped as I said it. Humor was lost on Yankel.
“Come on,” I said. “He won’t touch you.”
Yankel approached the room cautiously. There was something different about him. His movements, normally blunt and staccato, were loose, vague even. Then I saw that he had a bottle in one hand, gripping it by the neck as if to ward off attack by Cyril.
Yankel had never visited me in my room and I certainly had never seen him drunk. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him even have a drink. It was a night of firsts.
He held out the bottle as he climbed the couple of steps to the verandah. I looked at the label. It was Slivovitz, a plum brandy much beloved by eastern Europeans of his generation. I thought it was vile.
“The real thing,” Yankel said proudly.
Cyril, still hiding in the room, yapped at the sound of Yankel’s voice. It was a hybrid sound, half warning, half protest. I got up and fetched some plastic cups from the room, closing the mesh mosquito door behind me. I figured it would be enough to keep the adversaries apart, though Cyril had been known to charge right through the mesh when the feeling moved him. He still sported the scar on his snout from the last time he had done it.
Yankel sat down in a garden chair facing the room. Presumably he wanted fair warning if Cyril came bursting through the mosquito mesh. I sat facing him, looking out over the dark, shapeless trees. We drank Slivovitz and I smoked cheap kibbutz cigarettes. The plum brandy tasted surprisingly good. I knew there had to be a purpose to the visit and let him take his time.
“You know,” he said finally, just when I began to consider the possibility that there wasn’t in fact a purpose, “I don’t … I mean … dogs, you know. I don’t really like them.”
“Ahuh,” I agreed gravely, as if something profound had been uttered. I took a long, foul drag on my Dubek cigarette, spitting out stray pieces of unidentified organic matter.
“I was in the camps, you know.” He said it in an off-hand sort of way. He might have asked me to hammer in some nails in the same, flat tone.
I nodded.
“The dogs there, they weren’t like … your dog.” He gesticulated vaguely in the direction of the room, from which came a persistent, rumbling growl like the constant buzz of a bee hive.
“That’s when I started building. They took me to Auschwitz, well Birkenau really. We built the factory for IG Farben. I had never built before in Poland but I found that I had a skill for it. And of course I was very strong. Even after four years of the ghetto and the labor camp and then Birkenau, I was very strong. That’s what kept me alive. Everyone else was … gone. My family. Gone.”
That was more than I had heard him say in an entire day. He spoke casually, a trifle boastfully even. But the fact that he was stringing together full sentences, one after the other, indicated a drive to communicate that I had never known in him.
“There were dogs there. Everywhere there were dogs. Big, ugly things on chains. They would pull on the chains trying to get us and the guards, yemach shemam, would laugh. Sometimes, they let them go, just for the fun of it. Just for … for sport. I saw Jews torn apart by the dogs.”
Yankel gulped down a mouthful of the sweet, astringent plum brandy. He shuddered as it seared its way down, then smiled ruefully and held up his cup.
“Lehayim. This reminds me of parties we used to have before the war. We weren’t really drinkers, you know, though we thought we were.. Not like the goyim. The Poles, they could drink. Anti-Semitic bastards. But I enjoyed a drink in the old days.
“Anyway, we were building the factory. It was winter. People were dying from the cold. There were bodies lying in the snow at the building site. They just left them there.
“I was working inside, thank God. Preparing the foundations for the boilers. It was still cold, of course, but not nearly as bad as outside. I wasn’t well that day. I don’t remember what was wrong with me but I wasn’t thinking straight. I found a … a corner, a little niche downstairs that was isolated and I sat down. Just for a moment, for a rest.
“Next thing I knew, I was waking up from a sleep. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping. It couldn’t have been … well, maybe a few minutes. So, I woke up and there in front of me was a guard, one of the Ukrainians, yemach shemo, with a dog. A big, horrible brute. The Ukrainian, I mean. The dog was even worse”
He smiled again. A smile that creased his mouth but came nowhere near his eyes. A touch of humor from Yankel. Another first.
“I could smell him from where I was lying, well, crouching really by now. And his spit showered all over me. He was that close and slobbering as he tugged at the chain. I started the usual song and dance in my best German. How sorry I was and it wouldn’t happen again and I was looking for something I dropped in the corner. He just looked at me, the Ukrainian. I knew him well. He’d been on the guard detail for a few months. They said he had been in Treblinka before that. Once I saw him and his dog play with a man, trying to herd him like a sheep, until he ran into the electric fence and killed himself. The guard thought it was a big joke. He gave the dog a biscuit afterwards. I would have killed for that dog biscuit.”
Yankel paused for breath and a drink. He seemed to have surprised himself with his garrulousness. Or maybe he was just drunk. He looked vulnerable, which is not something one would normally have said about him. And he was making a big dent in the Slivovitz.
“He bent down slowly, the Ukrainian, and slid the chain off the dog. Pulled it over his head, like this.” He stretched the arm that wasn’t holding the cup of plum brandy over the top of his head and demonstrated the chain coming off.
“The dog was onto me in a second. He grabbed me by the ear. He was wet from the snow and his stinking fur was all over me. The noises in my ear as he tore at it like a piece of meat were terrible. I tried to push him off but I couldn’t. He was very heavy and I wasn’t strong that day. I couldn’t move. The pain was awful.”
Yankel sloshed the brandy around in his cup and stared fixedly at it. He was talking as much to himself as to me. He had clearly forgotten about the pampered canine in the room who, having been ignored for too long, had ventured out from under the desk and was standing behind the mosquito door with his muzzle pressed up cautiously against the mesh.
“I was lucky that the ear came off. Or a big chunk of it anyway. Otherwise the dog would have just kept on eating, I suppose. But he had my ear in his mouth and he lost interest in me. He was playing with my ear like it was a piece of meat. A piece of Jew meat.
“The guard also seemed to lose interest in me. There was no-one else down there. Just him and me and the dog. So, maybe he wasn’t inspired without an audience. Usually, when they killed or tortured us it was to impress the other guards. To show off. But down there in the boiler room he had no-one to show off to. So, he put the chain back over the dog’s head and pulled him away. The dog still had my ear in his mouth and blood was running down his jaws.
“That was it.” Yankel looked up.
“The Ukrainian didn’t say anything to me. He just walked off with his dog and my ear. I went outside and put snow on my ear to stop the pain and the bleeding. I was sure it would get infected and I’d die. But it didn’t. It healed.”
Instinctively, he touched the creased, shapeless blob where his left ear used to be. I looked away. I had examined it surreptitiously many times over the years but to look at it now it seemed too personal. Too much of an intrusion.
We sat in silence for a while, drinking our Slivovitz. I felt strangely put-upon. I think I preferred Yankel as an enigma. Knowing conferred obligations and I didn’t want to feel obliged to Yankel.
From my youth, I had been a Holocaust groupie. My curiosity was not a Jewish involvement of the sort that takes youth delegations to the death camps every year with Israeli flags and subliminal political messages. I was, I must confess, a lot more interested in the killers than in the victims. There was no mystery, no puzzle, in being led like sheep to the slaughter. Sure, there was tragedy and pathos in the Jewish story but few questions. The Nazis, on the other hand, were a riddle that I returned to compulsively. What was it that made normal men and women into beasts? What confluence of events and circumstances did it take? Was every person capable of making the leap? And the clincher: Could Jews become Nazis?
I would gladly have sat all night listening to Yankel’s stories. But to do so would make me privy to his secrets; it would give me a stake, however small, in his being. It would change the tenor of the comfortable working partnership that we had built up over several years. In short, we ran the risk of becoming friends.
I drank up and smoked, feeling the limp cylinders diminish in my fingers as I dragged on them. Eventually, Yankel yawned, stood up and left, taking what remained of the Slivovitz with him and acknowledging the intimacy that we had shared with a curt nod.
Cyril was scratching at the mesh. I let him out of the room and he hobbled to the edge of the verandah, barking derisively in the direction that Yankel had gone. I let him bark. I remembered a saying we had taunted each other with as kids. “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Cyril’s barks would never hurt Yankel. There was nothing more to hurt.
++++
My first intimation of danger was a low, throaty rumble from Cyril’s end of the bed. Surfacing from a deep sleep, I propped myself up on one arm and glanced down to where he normally lay like a deadweight between my feet. It was not yet a full-scale alert. Cyril was still curled up in sleeping position though his head was raised and staring fixedly at the door. I could feel his tension through the thin, summer blanket.
Cyril had not yet taken an irreversible position on the intrusion. Though he was growling, his tail vibrated in pole position, ready to beat out a greeting for a welcome visitor. It could go either way. Cyril was usually disappointed by late-night visits on the kibbutz. They often began with Cyril being absentmindedly petted but soon degenerated into petting of a different sort. Invariably, he found himself being tossed around on the bed like a buoy in a storm and eventually dumped onto the floor, where he would lie in undignified, offended silence. I got the feeling that Cyril would have preferred that I did my couplings elsewhere and in private.
Sex may not have been what inspired the socialist founding mothers and fathers of the kibbutz movement but it sure kept the rest of us going. Through some fortuitous stroke of luck (it was just too good to have been the product of design), kibbutzim had become a magnet for young, careless volunteers from all parts of the world. They lived simply, two or three to a room, worked wherever they were assigned, drank prodigiously and fucked gloriously. My kibbutz specialized in lanky, randy Danes and Swedes, with some dour Germans and English roses thrown in for good measure. That, too, was not planned. I could just as easily have ended up with the tight-zipped fundamentalist Baptists who were the staple of the volunteer corps on a kibbutz down the road. But, happily, I found myself with the Scandinavians.
Whatever it was that had alerted Cyril, I couldn’t hear it. The dense silence of the night enveloped the room. I sat up and listened, straining to hear something. Nothing. Not even the muffled shutting of car doors from the adjacent parking lot or the regular revelry of tipsy volunteers as they diligently trashed the flower beds while attempting to keep to the dark paths.
And then I heard it. The squeaking of rusty hinges as the mesh mosquito door was slowly opened. It was a sound that was almost as familiar to me as my own breathing, but now, in the dead of night, it grated like fingernails dragged over polystyrene.
My initial annoyance at the intrusion quickly yielded to a hard-on and tingling thoughts of sneaking, anonymous, groping-in-the-dark sex. I glanced at the alarm clock, which flickered “3:21” in luminous green. Instinctively, I did the arithmetic. I had barely been asleep four hours and had less than two to go. It would have to be a quickie.
The lights from the parking lot threw a glow into the room. Cyril was standing on the bed now, his body rigid like steel rope. I put my hand on his back to silence him and felt him throb with anticipation. I pulled him into my arms and held him against me as, together, we watched the door handle rotate.
The door cracked open and a hand materialized. It patted the wall next to the door as if searching for the light switch. Then the door opened further and I saw a tall, featureless figure, outlined against the light of the naked bulb on the porch. It was not the shape of a female, certainly no female that I wanted to meet.
In the doorway stood a man, unfamiliar and menacing.
My hard-on depleted. The hot, pulsing anticipation of seconds before dissolved in a cold rush of dread as, in a sudden flash, I recalled the events of the previous afternoon.
There had been a terrorist incident not far from the kibbutz. I first heard about it when I came across a scrum of women behind the communal kitchen, huddled around a transistor radio. From where I sat on the rattling tractor, I was unable to hear what was being said on the radio, but the taut stillness of the women radiated bad news. I jumped off the tractor and joined the group.
A bunch of terrorists had hijacked a bus outside Haifa a couple of hours before and driven it, with the passengers inside, for about 50 kilometers down the coastal road, pursued by an armada of police and military vehicles. Determined to prevent the bus from entering the heavily-populated central plain that begins just north of Tel Aviv, the army had prepared a roadblock on the highway at the junction with the road leading to the kibbutz. We all knew the junction well. It was less than ten kilometers from where we were standing.
The bus had attempted to run the roadblock. It had punctured its tires on the sharp spikes of the concertina-like obstacles on the road and slammed into a group of military vehicles by the side of the highway. Commandos had stormed the stricken bus, lobbing tear-gas grenades into it and shouting to the passengers to stay down. There was a brief, fierce shoot-out. The radio reported dead and wounded among the passengers, who were being evacuated to hospital. Initial reports said that three terrorists had been killed. But a passenger interviewed by the radio said that there had been four or even five hijackers.
After listening for a while, I continued on my way to the store-room, where I parked the tractor and off-loaded equipment. As I was locking up, a military jeep pulled up beside me. Two grim-faced officers hopped out, leaving the motor running and the canvas doors of the jeep flapping open. They asked me where the kibbutz secretary could be found and I pointed them down the path towards the low, nondescript building that served as our administrative center.
Kibbutz bush telegraph swung into action. The officers had barely entered the secretary’s office before the purpose of their visit was generally known and even disputed. A small crowd gathered on the grass separating the administrative center from the dining room. One, possibly two, terrorists were thought to have escaped the carnage. The army was mounting a massive search mission but it didn’t have the manpower to post guards at every settlement. We were instructed to go onto emergency footing.
The rest of the afternoon was a tumult of activity. Vehicles were sent to bring in the workers from the orchards and the fish ponds. Guards were posted at the entrance to the kibbutz, children were gathered in the children’s houses and air-raid shelters were unlocked and provisioned. I was tasked with plugging the holes in the kibbutz fence. Gathering together a group of volunteers, I hitched a trailer onto the tractor and loaded up with rolls of fencing, barbed wire and fence poles.
It was a lost cause. Before the war of 1967, the kibbutz had been regarded as a border settlement, its outlying orchards slap up against the border with what was then the West Bank of Jordan. The place was still littered with scraps of barbed-wire, disused bunkers and even the odd tank trap. Relics from a previous era. But security had lapsed in the intervening years and the kibbutz fence had been breached in numerous places. Several meters of fencing had disappeared entirely in the gloomy, wooded area separating ourselves from the larger, neighboring kibbutz where our children attended high school. On the other side of the kibbutz, a large opening gave easy access to the bus stop in the adjoining village.
We did what we could but it wasn’t much. Erecting a good fence takes time. Mostly, we drank the beer that one of the volunteers had thoughtfully brought with him and smoked cheap cigarettes. Cyril entertained himself by chasing birds.
It was almost dark by the time we returned to the parking lot, which by now resembled the staging area for a military campaign. The armory had been opened and men milled around with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. Two pickups had been allocated to the ad hoc response team and they stood at the ready in the parking lot, with doors open, motors running and headlights lit. An ambulance was also parked there. I had never seen the place in the grip of such intensity and purpose. War brings out the best in the Israeli.
After a tense, distracted supper, the kibbutz security officer handed me an M-16 with two, full magazines which were taped together for rapid replacement.
“You know how to operate this thing?” he asked.
I nodded gravely. Those were the days before my military service but I had occasionally guarded groups of volunteers and ulpan students on their excursions to the desert or the nature reserves in the north of the country. I had even shot off a couple of rounds in practice.
“Well, God help us all if you have to use it.”
I didn’t much like his tone but I had to agree with the sentiment.
We were visited later that night by the general commanding the central sector. He was one of us, born on the kibbutz to a couple with five sons. He was already a local icon, the best and brightest of the first generation of kibbutz kids and destined to go far, it was said. Prime minister material. I had worked with him a few times in the fish ponds during his days off from the army and had found him arrogant and condescending. Still, it was comforting to have one of our own in charge at a time like this.
“I hope you know how to use that,” he remarked to me in passing as he strode to his car at the end of his visit, trailed by a clutch of officers in flak jackets. It was nice to be appreciated.
That had been a few hours earlier.
With the terrorist framed in the doorway, I reached gingerly down for the M-16 that I had casually discarded on the floor by my bed before going to sleep. Cyril seemed to have understood the gravity of the situation. He had stopped his growling at the first sign of real danger and flopped, soft and warm, in my lap. The thought passed through my terrified mind that he had fainted, but more likely he was simply playing dead.
The terrorist just stood there. Those who have never been face to face with a terrorist are probably unaware of just how much can actually flash through one’s mind in the space of a second or two. I couldn’t see a weapon on him but had no doubt that he would kill me with his bare hands if he had to. Years before I had seen a TV report on Palestinian fighters training in Syria. As part of some sort of initiation ceremony, they had bitten off the heads of live snakes and strangled puppies with their hands. At the time, I scorned it as ridiculous; the huffing and puffing of primitives who didn’t have what it takes to fly F-16s or fire precision-guided missiles.
Having a snake biter right on your doorstep is a different proposition entirely, however. With the only puppy in the room pretending to be a fur rug, I had little doubt who would be singled out for strangling.
I groped desperately for the rifle with my left hand while attempting to remain in a sitting position and appear motionless. I had no idea what the terrorist could see from the doorway but assumed that any sudden movement would set him off on a murderous rampage. Luckily the bed was low and my flailing fingers eventually collided with the cold, hard metal of the rifle.
I moved my hand slowly along the length of the weapon until I felt the safety lock and, with one finger, clicked it upwards into what I hoped was the single-round position. Then I ran my hand back down until I was grasping the plastic flash shield. Gingerly, I bent my elbow and tested the weight. I couldn’t remember whether I had inserted the taped magazines or simply tossed them on the floor with the rifle. One thing, was becoming clear. There was no way that I would be able to lift the M-16, insert a magazine, cock it and fire without alerting the murderer in my doorway to something amiss.
He didn’t move. Just about anything would have been preferable to his still, looming presence and the deathly quiet in the room. Well, not exactly deathly. I swear I could hear Cyril snoring gently.
The only way to do it, I decided, would be in one deafening, cataclysmic movement. Clutching the rifle inches off the floor in my left hand, I breathed in deeply and flexed my leg muscles, feeling the weight of Cyril in my lap. My heart was pounding and I felt like someone had cut off my oxygen supply. My body was emitting so much heat, I must have been glowing in the dark. Then, with what was intended to be a simian roar, I sprung up onto the bed, catapulting Cyril onto the floor, and lifted the M-16 to chest height.
It appeared that I had taken the terrorist by surprise. He stumbled backwards and blurted out something in a surprisingly squeaky voice. It sounded like a name, “Janie” or “Jeanie,” though it could just as easily have been “Jihad.” I wasn’t about to stop and find out.
I slapped the underside of the rifle with my right hand, feeling the magazine thump satisfyingly into my palm. I pushed hard and it clicked into place. Swapping hands, I held the rifle by the magazine and groped for the bolt with my left hand. Finding it, I tugged it sharply towards me and felt the easy, well-oiled motion as it slid backwards into the breech, ejecting a cartridge.
By this time, the terrorist had disappeared from view, though I heard him thrashing around on the porch. What happened next was entirely out of character, but I was a fear-crazed, testosterone-charged coward with a loaded gun. I leaped off the bed straight onto Cyril, who yelped pitifully and scurried for safety underneath my desk. Then I charged out of the room, the M-16 preceding me at waist height like a monstrous phallus.
The terrorist was at the bottom of the stairs and starting down the path. He must have hurt himself because he was dragging one leg. I hesitated momentarily. I had never shot anybody before, never mind in the back. Never mind that he was injured and not carrying any visible weapon. To my meager credit, I didn’t aim. Holding the rifle on my hip, macho-style, I squeezed the trigger.
The retort was deafening. The rifle recoiled painfully into my hip and then swung upwards, glancing off my chest. In fright, I let go of it and it clattered to the ground. I looked at my victim. He had fallen and was lying face down in the path, his legs shaking spastically. In the piercing silence that followed the shot, I heard him sobbing.
No, I didn’t feel like Cyril after his triumph over Beauty. I felt numb, stunned. I felt as if I were drained of blood.
People came running. First my next-door neighbor, pulling on his pants, and then the guards, who had been patrolling nearby. They crouched around the terrorist and turned him over. I stood frozen on the verandah, the rifle at my feet, I couldn’t see the terrorist’s face but I could hear him as his sobs became strangled words and before long he was shouting. It sounded oddly, horribly, like Hebrew.
One of the guards came over to me and picked up the rifle. With the barrel pointing upwards, he cocked it twice in quick succession and then flipped the safety catch on.
“You’d better go inside,” he said awkwardly.
I nodded and remained standing where I was.
He pointed at my groin. I looked down to see my penis in full retreat and a harsh, red welt where the rifle had kicked into me. I was stark naked.
I entered the room and sat dully on the bed, my bare feet on the cool tiles of the floor. Cyril left his refuge under the table and curled up between my feet, licking my toes in commiseration. Outside, I could hear the voices of other people joining the fray and the insistent yelling of the man I had shot.
A little later, the kibbutz secretary came into the room, accompanied by the guard who had emptied the rifle and my neighbor. I pulled the blanket over my lap to hide my nakedness.
“You OK?” he asked.
I nodded.
“He’s OK too. You didn’t hit him.”
I was too drained to say anything but a wave of relief licked over me. My body drooped and tears welled up in my eyes.
“He must’ve fallen out of fright,” the secretary added. “You sure shook him up.”
“Is he … is he one of the guys from the bus?” I asked my voice surprisingly strong and controlled.
There was an awkward pause before the guard took over.
“We don’t think so. Looks like he’s one of ours… He says he’s from Netanya.”
The intruder was escorted to the dining room, where he was soothed with cups of coffee and biscuits. I remained in my room in the company of some friends. We were like two bloodied boxers after a bout, separated but obsessively scrutinizing the actions of the other just minutes before.
Apparently, he had met one of the American ulpan girls in town earlier in the day. She had told him her name, Jeanie, and which kibbutz she was on before it dawned on her that he was not the sort of guy her mother would approve of. He was what we derogatorily called an ars, a smug punk, often a petty hustler, indigenous to the streets of urban Israel. Jeanie had given him the brush-off but he had apparently decided that what the force of his personality had not achieved during the day, some other form of force would achieve late at night.
Seeing guards on the main gate, he had driven a little further, parked in the shadows beside the road and hopped over the fence. The first room he had come across was mine. All he had wanted, at three o’clock in the morning with the kibbutz on high alert, was to ask where he could find Jeanie.
There was a police inquiry a few hours later. Shooting people was taken seriously in those days, before two rounds of intifada elasticized the definition of terrorism and gave carte blanche to any idiot with a gun. I told of how I had chased the intruder from my room and fired a warning shot into the air as a last resort, after he repeatedly ignored my calls to halt.
For once, I didn't allow my propensity to humanize Cyril get the better of me. It was, after all, a serious incident and the two cops questioning did not seem to be the types who would appreciate doggie humor. So, I left him out of my version of the events and brought him a bone from the kitchen instead. He was happy.
My Holy Trinity
“Stop it,” my mom says.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“WHAT?”
“Don’t what me! You know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t.”
“That bloody twitch. That’s what.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Oh yes you can. You just don’t want to. You’re doing it to annoy me.”
“No, I’m not. And anyway, I got it from you. It’s your genes.”
“My genes, hey? Tell that to your father next time we visit him. And don’t be cheeky.”
>>>>>
I had two distinguishing features as a kid. My dad was in jail and I had a ferocious tic. I also stuttered for a while but I concluded early on that it was not a stutter destined for greatness. It was a shy, tentative stammer and far too much effort was required to make something of it. Even then, aged seven, I was bone lazy and lousy at multi-tasking. So, I let my mom shlep me to a speech therapist and I dropped stuttering from my repertoire.
My tic, on the other hand, was a class act. At its best, it could stop adults in mid-sentence and send toddlers scuttling into their mothers’ arms in tears. I once reduced a slavering Doberman to a whimpering heap of petrified puppy with a simple triple-wink and a nod. That intervention saved my baby brother from a fate worse than death. Or so my mom used to say, though she didn’t attribute it to my tic.
“This kid is going to be a vet,” she informed my uncles and aunts. “He has such a way with animals.”
But I knew better.
My tic began with a simple shudder of the nose, a mere frisson, like the slight sniff of disdain that a butler might emit at the sight of a bottle of port passed with the wrong hand. In time, the shudder developed into a tremor and then into a subtle flare of the nostrils, as if in reaction to a sharp smell or an irritating whiff of pollen. Before long, my bunny imitations, with synchronized nose and ear movements, were the hit of the nursery school. From such humble beginnings grow great things.
By age eight, I was already a twitching virtuoso, orchestrating an ensemble of facial appendages in a complex and difficult routine of quivers, grimaces, and astonishing jolts. That, however, was just the prelude; eight was also the year I discovered music.
It was a rare evening alone with my mom. With my dad in jail and my brother and sister also jostling for her attention, I didn’t get to spend much time with my mom. But that evening we were alone, sitting together on the large, floral couch in our living room and listening to Ravel’s Bolero on the cabinet gramophone. I will never forget that moment. The rising, rolling motion of the music, like thunder gathering slowly over the Karoo, was a revelation. It transported me. For the first time, I understood the range of artistic expression at my disposal; the possibilities of tempo, timing and harmony. That evening I determined to compose the Bolero of tics.
I shared a bedroom with my brother, which made rehearsal difficult. He had little appreciation for art or the creative process and my facial contortions scared the living daylights out of him. He would charge off to my mom or to Mary, our maid, screaming that I was making him cry and one or both of them would come running to kick up a fuss. It’s not easy to create under such conditions. I was reduced to composing my art under the blankets, gasping for air and using a flashlight and a small, oval makeup mirror that I had removed from my mom’s handbag. Mary caught me at it once or twice and, with her large body jiggling with mirth, warned me that I’d go blind and hair would grow on my palms. It was only years later that I understood what she was getting at.
When I had enough material, I transferred to the bathroom, where I strung it all together under the pretence of taking long, hot baths to calm my nerves and ease my twitch. I spent hours in there, with my siblings banging on the locked door and yelling at me to get the hell out because they had to pee. During the dress rehearsal, I stubbed my big toe on the sharp corner of a bath tile and got a pocket of blood trapped under the nail. The pain was awful. My mom took a hammer and a needle and drilled a hole in the nail to let the blood escape. It came out in a thin, crimson fountain, which frightened my brother even more than my contortions. But the pain eased immediately. Every performer should have a stage manager like my mom.
Finally, my bolero was ready. It was a masterpiece; a multicolored, swelling tapestry of tortured cartilage and abused flesh, surging to a jerking, twisting, writhing, gravity-defying crescendo. It was, I knew in my bones, a singular contribution to culture.
I tried it out on a bunch of mates during lunch break at school. Their response was intensely gratifying. George choked on his peanut butter sandwich and had to be whacked on the back until he coughed up everything including his Quaker Oats breakfast all over his shoes. The others stared at me in gaping-mouthed disbelief.
“That’s disgusting,” Barry uttered.
“I know. But do you like it?”
“It’s bloody amazing. Do it again.”
The girls shrieked and scattered when I approached them, convulsing like an epileptic. I was wearing one scruffy, white tackie due to my damaged toe and the odd shoes and pronounced limp that I had effected added an unintended dimension of pathos to my performance.
“Here comes Frankenstein,” one of them yelled.
“No, it’s the hunchback of snotty dame,” screeched another, her checked blue school dress billowing like a sail as she ran.
“We can see your broeks,” the boys shouted after her.
Flushed with the success of my first performance, I got a little carried away. I added my shoulders to the routine and at one stage I even developed a palsied pelvic movement that I thought quite compelling. I went so far as to do Stanislavski-like breathing exercises in my bed at night. Eyes clenched shut, I would imagine myself into the role of a tiny beggar in the snow, jerking frenziedly as I tried in vain to sell matches to Victorian ladies and gentlemen. The undiscovered Pygmalion of twitch.
But I soon noticed that I was losing my audience. George managed to keep his sandwich down and the girls turned their backs and ignored me when I approached. It was my first lesson in the intangible essence of performance. Even third-graders can tell when you’re faking it. It is a lesson that has remained with me until today. I dropped the exaggeration and refined my routine. Great art, I understood, does not need cheap trickery.
There was very little that my tic couldn’t achieve. Even Miss Lamb, unanimously acknowledged as the most formidable of the teachers, withered in the face of my grotesque twitch-and-shuffle when I stood to answer a question in class. It was a gift that I exploited shamelessly. Homework became a thing of the past, as did my participation in class activities. I would sit at my desk in the back of the classroom and chew on wads of toilet paper, flicking them onto the ceiling when they were mushy enough. Soon I had a forest of little stalactites dangling over my head.
“Look Miss,” I said to Miss Lamb one day, pointing at the mess above. “I think there’s a leak in the ceiling. Maybe we should tell the janitor?”
She looked straight through me.
That’s as good as it got. I enjoyed my notoriety but the truth is I was not a particularly creative soul. I didn’t have the restless, questing urge to take my art further and deeper. Instead, I rested on my laurels. I never created another twitch symphony after my Bolero and after a while I retired from the performing business. By then, my mates were playing soccer, which looked like fun, and I began to take an interest in girls that went beyond grossing them out with a tap-dancing nose and a squint that exposed the red-streaked whites of my eyes. My tic had played itself out.
So I reverted to the modest, bread-and-butter twitch that nature had granted me and took up soccer, girls and the other grubby pursuits of boyhood. I never lost my abiding interest in the ineffable mystery of the tic, though. While no longer a practitioner, I remained a dedicated aficionado.
>>>>>
Years later, I was fortunate enough to meet the master, the maestro of tics. He was a business guest from overseas who my wife and I were entertaining in a local game meat restaurant. It was early in the evening and we were getting acquainted over a few glasses of a deceptively potent Kenyan drink called the dawa. My wife, in her friendliest, most solicitous manner, asked him if he had any children. He opened his mouth to answer and then, without warning, let rip with the 1812 Symphony of tics..
For a split second I thought that something dreadful had happened, as his head dropped to his chest, mouth still open, and his jaw thumped into his sternum. The dreadful alternatives flashed through my mind; his heart had given way or he had suffered a cataclysmic aneurysm. I was about to leap forward to offer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, when he whipped his head sideways, as if trying desperately to swat a fly off his shoulder with his forehead. Having dealt with the fly, his head proceeded to do a complete circle, arcing backwards until it threatened to detach from its moorings and fly across the room into someone’s soup. His eyes bulged in their sockets and a staccato sound like a backfiring motor-scooter - “nda, nda, nda” – escaped from his straining throat. It was awe inspiring,
“Yes,” he said, when his head had completed its circuit around the room and his eyes had popped back into place. “I have two girls, Melissa and Jane.” He didn’t lose a beat,
I sat motionless, mesmerized by his performance. My wife, barely a social drinker at the best of times, knocked back her entire glass of dawa in one shot.
“Really?” she spluttered, a thin cord of honey dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. ”How nice.”
She leaned towards him in a confused, tipsy imitation of profound interest, her eyes warily scanning his rubber neck for signs of a repeat performance.
“And do they take after you?”
The rest of the evening was an anti-climax; a grinding chore of halting chitchat, punctured by bursts of my guest’s explosive tic. My initial, childish admiration rapidly gave way to a profound distress. Like a lapsed cultist, I felt trapped between a hankering after my past convictions and a new, poignant understanding of how sad it really was. He was a grown man with kids, not a schoolboy show-off with an itchy nose and a penchant for the grotesque. There, but for the grace of soccer and pre-pubescent girls, twitched I.
>>>>>
It was at about the same time as my meeting with the maestro that I made the connection between my long-gone tic and my father’s imprisonment. I was well into middle-age by then and my father had been dead for going on 40 years. To be honest, it was a shrink named Valerie who actually made the connection, though I supplied all the necessary background material. It came out of the blue, from an unexpected direction. We had been discussing my fear of elevators, a phobia that had filled the void left by my abandonment of a career in twitching.
“Have you ever considered that it might be related to your father being in jail?” Valerie asked.
No, I had never considered it.
I leaned back in Valerie’s severe armchair and gazed through the sun-screened window at the riot of purple and crimson bougainvillea in the garden. It was a torpid summer’s afternoon in Johannesburg, the sort of afternoon that seems to make sense of everything. I have only experienced such days in Africa; when nature is at peace with itself and all the imponderables of life seem to settle quietly into place. A throwback to the afternoons before Eve got suckered by the snake and ate the apple.
It didn’t seem right to be wrestling with the minutiae of my psyche on such an afternoon. But at R600 an hour I wasn’t going to quibble.
“How do you figure that out?” I asked.
“Look. You won’t go into lifts on your own but have no problem if there are other people in the lift. Right?”
“Right.”
“You have no problem flying in airplanes. Right?”
“Right.”
“But you do have a problem locking the door in public toilets. Right?”
“Right.” Put like that, I sounded more pathetic then even my own low self-esteem allowed.
“Well, it doesn’t sound to me like a classical lift phobia. Most people who are scared of lifts are scared whether they’re alone or with other people. It makes no difference. It seems to me that your problem is not with lifts but with being trapped; being trapped alone, to be more specific. I would say that you’re scared of being imprisoned. And that comes from what happened to your father.”
She paused, a note of triumph quivering in the lazy air of the room.
I was impressed. There was no way she could have known it, but I definitely was scared of being imprisoned; petrified wouldn’t be too strong a word. I had already established that several years earlier.
>>>>>
I had been called up to do another stint of Israeli Army reserve duty in the Gaza Strip. Not that I hadn’t served in the occupied territories before. In fact, I had done my basic training in a bleak, rain-swept military base beside the Jewish settlement of Bet El, the spot where the patriarch Jacob had laid his head on a rock and dreamed of a ladder reaching up to heaven. I had served my time and seen the latter-day manifestation of the Jewish dream first-hand.
But the Palestinian revolt, the intifada, had erupted since my last spell in the reserves and I could no longer rationalize my annual service in drab military olive as a fact-finding adjunct to my journalistic career. With the native population expressing their hatred for the occupation in a way that they never had before, I felt that answering the call would tar me with the same brush as the conscripts in the South African townships in ’76 or put me on the level of a German soldier facing members of the French Resistance.
Like my father, I was a committed left-winger, though, unlike him, I had little to show for it, other than a thin album of newspaper clippings and feverish letters on human rights abuses that I had written home during my university days in Jerusalem. I also had a grainy picture from a student newspaper of a group of self-styled Trotskyites occupying the university’s administration building, among them a long-haired yours truly with a defiant fist in the air. That was about the extent of my political activism. I had never doubted the sincerity of my political beliefs but I had come to accept a certain disjunction between the fervor of my faith and its practical expression. A child of the Sixties, I had always regarded sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as perfectly adequate articulations of the gospel of the Left.
And then came the call-up to Gaza and, with it, the realization that this was crunch time. Even a die-hard political dilettante has to draw the line somewhere. Mine was patrolling the cheerless streets of Khan Yunis with an M-16 rifle in my hands, while threadbare Arab children whose cause I believed in threw rocks and bottles at me with a passion that I had never been able to muster. I knew it in my bones.
The alternative was military prison. A friend of mine had refused to serve in Lebanon and had been sentenced to 28 days in the stockade. When his time was up he was handed call-up papers for another Lebanese stint and had again refused. So he served another 28 days in prison. That happened three times before the army grew tired of the game and sent him home. I had heard of other guys who had served five or six consecutive jail terms for refusing to serve.
My call-up notice in its distinctive brown envelope with a triangle in the bottom-right corner arrived at a particularly bad time. The day before, I had received another distinctive envelope, a green one, from the Israeli tax man, who brusquely informed me that a routine audit of my tax returns had uncovered certain disparities and requested, demanded would be more accurate, that I pay him a visit to discuss the matter. I knew all about the disparities, of course, and had a good idea of how much his routine audit could end up costing me.
Besides which, Valerie and I had a already established that I had a deep-rooted dread of authority combined - incongruously - with a nonchalant carelessness for the requirements of the law. It was a subject we had discussed at great length, not to mention expense, before we deviated onto the elevator problem. That, too, was apparently connected to my father, though we hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. Authority, in shrink-think, is synonymous with the father and a fear of authority is nothing less than … It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is. It could also be rebellion against a father I never had time to rebel against, as every son must, apparently. But, as I said, we had only scraped the surface of that one.
Sitting a world away from Gaza, in the gentle, abundant tranquillity of Valerie’s study, I felt the creeping, choking anxiety from years before. Every fiber of my being, every minute of my upbringing and every shred of my self-respect obliged me to refuse service in Gaza. Every outraged political statement that I had ever made and every impassioned article that I had ever written in my newspaper career demanded that I choose the path that led to the stockade. God knows, I expected it of myself. But I was petrified. The prospect of imprisonment paralyzed me. I was crushed by a terror that I had never known.
The cumulative effect of the green and brown envelopes was a God-awful panic attack. It hit me at a sensitive moment on the night of the brown envelope. Standing at the toilet bowl having a quiet pee, I suddenly convulsed as an intense pain tore through my chest. I couldn’t breath; as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get air into my lungs. As I gasped for breath, the room started to swirl around me. I lost my balance, groped for something to hold onto but found only the smooth surface of the tiled wall. Then I passed out. I came to on the cold, damp floor, my trousers at half-mast and blood pouring from my nose, which had apparently connected with the toilet seat during my descent.
I crawled out of the toilet and dragged myself to my feet, zipping up my trousers out of some residual sense of propriety. I was convinced I was going to die and didn’t want to be found with my flaccid penis exposed, still dripping urine. My heart was pounding. I was gasping for breath and my body trembled as if it was being shaken vigorously by some demonic force. I staggered into the lounge where my girlfriend (now my wife) was watching TV and, in a tremulous voice, informed her that I was having a heart attack and was about to die.
She herself almost died at the sight of me. She propelled me downstairs and, leaving me in a pathetic heap on the sidewalk, hopped around in the middle of the road like a mad woman until a taxi stopped and took us to the hospital. There, they hooked me up to an ECG, sampled my blood and x-rayed my chest, a procedure that had to be repeated a number of times before I stopped shaking long enough for the technician to get a clear image out of the machine. After determining that my heart was in all likelihood sound, they swabbed and set my nose, which had been broken in its collision with the toilet bowl, sedated me and let me sleep the night. Early the next morning, a pimply intern with bad teeth suggested that I consider seeing a psychiatrist.
So began the chain of events that lead to my sitting in Valerie’s rock-hard armchair, gazing out of the window on a sublime Johannesburg afternoon. Needless to say, I decided against prison, served my time in Gaza and lashed myself with guilt from then onwards. My moment of truth had come and, out of weakness, I had fluffed it.
“Not weakness,” Valerie interjected. “Certainly not weakness. We’re talking about a very deep childhood trauma connected with your father.”
My father again.
>>>>>
“What about my twitch?” I asked Valerie at our next session.
“What about it?”
“You said it tied in with my father’s imprisonment.”
“Of course it’s tied in. Do you know what a twitch is?”
I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t. I had given some of the best year of my life to twitching yet I hadn’t even bothered to understand what it was.
“A twitch is a short circuit of the nervous system. When the system gets overheated it sends an abnormal amount of impulses to the nerve endings, resulting in agitation of the parts of the body where the nerve endings are situated.”
I reflected on that. Frankly, I preferred my earlier artistic approach to her stark, clinical explanation. But at the rate I was hemorrhaging cash in her armchair, I wasn’t about to debate the merits of twitching. I wanted solutions.
“And my father?”
Valerie, in full clinical exposition mode, was not about to be sidetracked.
“Most tics are predisposed, or inherited. You’ve told me that you don’t remember when yours began but it’s a fair assumption that it began before your father’s troubles. However, in answer to your question, there is no doubt that the trauma of what happened to your father was an aggravating factor in the development of your tic.
“Look at it this way. You’re a young sensitive child. You already have a tic, which means that your nervous system is already highly active. Then your father gets imprisoned. How do you deal with that? Society tells you that people in prison are bad people, but your immediate surroundings, your family and friends of the family, tell you that your dad’s a good person. That he’s in jail precisely because of the fact that he’s a good person. Because he opposes the evil that is apartheid.
“Now, how do you deal with that inner conflict? You’re too young to be able to understand it on a rational level. So you internalize it. You walk around with the conflict inside you. But all inner conflicts are externalized in some way. Yours, or at least one of yours, is through an overloading of the nervous system. Your tic. Later, of course, you transfer it to a fear of lifts. And other modes of behavior too, of course.”
So there it was. The tic, the lift phobia and the panic attack. My Holy Trinity of obsessions.
We sat in silence for a short while. I disliked the finality with which she made her diagnoses, preferring to think of my life as being more random, more serendipitous than the textbook case that always seemed to emerge when I exposed myself to her scrutiny. But she certainly made the connections. Not once, as I trudged heavily up countless flights of drab, concrete steps with empty lifts glowing invitingly on every landing, had I ever thought of my father. I wondered whether having him to blame would put a spring in my step the next time I took to the stairwell.
“OK,” I said eventually. “I’m a fuck-up. I twitch, I’m scared of lifts and I dissolve into a palpitating mess whenever I have to confront a waiter. So where do we go from here?”
Valerie put on her suffering shrink face, a hybrid expression of knowing superciliousness and deep concern for the tragic individual in the nazi armchair.
“Tell me about when they took your father,” she said.
>>> >>
I found a footnote recently in a book about the white opposition to apartheid.
“Several hundred ex-servicemen had broken away from the main body of protesters and were preparing to march on the Union Buildings. This radical group was led by Jock Isacowitz, a communist and regarded as a revolutionary by the leadership of the Torch Brigade. Isacowitz’s group, armed only with flaming torches, was intending to take over the seat of power and overthrow the government.”
That was my dad, a footnote to history.
The torch-lit march took place in 1948, after the Afrikaner Nationalist Party had surprisingly beaten Jan Smuts’ United Party in parliamentary elections. It was the start of a half-century of Strangelovian racial experimentation that became known as apartheid. My dad didn’t take over the seat of power and had in fact left the stalinist South African Communist Party several years before the march, in an acrimonious schism with his old comrades. He met up with many of them a decade or so later in the Johannesburg prison called, appropriately if rather literally, the Fort, but by then they were beating very different drums. Stalin’s show trials were the last straw for my dad; though still a radical left-winger, he became a determined anticommunist.
That didn’t prevent the progenitors of apartheid from listing him as a communist and, later, arresting him under the Suppression of Communism Act. Twisted logic was their metier. A regime that was capable of kicking black students out of college in terms of the Universities Extension Act either had a wicked sense of humor or was somewhat lacking in the sagacity department. And no-one ever accused the Nats of having an over-abundance of wit.
My dad was detained three days after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the closest apartheid South Africa came to a popular revolt until, 25 years later, the kids of Soweto went on the rampage, triggering the slow implosion of Afrikaner power that culminated in the formation of Nelson Mandela’s government a couple of years before Valerie and I set out on our exploration of the uncharted regions of my psyche. I was back in South Africa by then, after two decades in the bosom of another of God’s chosen people; one, moreover, which was making as much of a hash of things as the Afrikaners did. I seem to have a propensity for the self-appointed.
For me, at nine, those heady days of national crisis and mass detentions after Sharpeville were interminable. Not because the country was on the verge of popular revolt and chaos but because I was on the brink of celebrity. Not many other kids in King David Primary could lay claim to a father in prison. In fact, as far as I knew, none could.
It was a close thing. The authorities declared a state of emergency and started arresting opponents of the regime as soon as they realized that shooting 72 unarmed black protesters in the back might be inimical to law and order. After the second batch had been arrested, including many of my father’s political allies, I began to wonder whether they intended coming for him at all. It was bad enough that my father hadn’t been included in the initial swoop but to have been overlooked altogether would have been too much.
I hurriedly checked the doorposts of our house for daubings of ram’s blood. It was, after all, March and Pesach was just around the corner. The last thing I wanted was for the God of apartheid to have identified my father as a Jew and passed him over. But the lintels were clean and the mezuzot appeared to be in good working order. I was spared the indignity of one of the Chosen not being chosen. In fact, dozens of the Chosen were carted away that week. There could have been a minyan in virtually every prison in the country, had they been so disposed.
I needn’t have worried. They came on the third night.
I never figured out what delayed them. Nor did I ever understand why they only arrived after midnight. I guess it served their clichéd sense of the dramatic. The Afrikaners are a very literal people.
My dad knew they were coming, His friend Ernie was taken on the second night and Ernie’s wife and child had moved in with us. So we had an experienced player on our team. Rosemarie, Ernie’s wife, knew the drill. I didn’t go to school on the day of his impending arrest and we spent the entire day getting rid of incriminating documents and seditious literature.
The “we” is an exaggeration, of course. The only incriminating document I knew of at the time was the diaphragm instruction sheet that my neighbor and I had discovered under the lingerie in his mother’s dressing table drawer one day while she was out. The step-by-step insertion instructions, accompanied by rudimentary sketches, kept us agog for months. The sheet also mentioned a mysterious foam that apparently accompanied the diaphragm and the image of my friend’s enormously fat, naked mother inserting the rubber diaphragm and with foam bubbling out from between her flabby thighs was unbearably titillating and disgusting.
We tore their house apart, searching for the diaphragm and foam, but we never found them. A few months later, my friend burned the house down while experimenting with matches in the attic. We were devastated by the loss of the instruction sheet, our one, genuine artifact from the impenetrable world of sex. Such treasures were not easy to come by in the repressed, puritan South Africa of the Fifties.
So, while my mom, dad and Rosemary sorted through mounds of books, pamphlets and pieces of paper, scanning them for subversive sentiments, I sprawled on the living room carpet paging through a bound volume of The Springbok, a publication produced by the South African forces in North Africa during the Second World War. My dad had been chairman of the Springbok Legion, a radical ex-servicemen’s organization established in the last year’s of the war, and his picture was scattered through the bound volume. My favorite was one in which he was presenting s scroll of some sort to the venerable Jan Smuts, prime minister and field marshal in the British Army.
My dad had fought up north, in Abyssinia, Libya and Egypt. His uniform still hung in the cupboard, including one pair of battle-dress pants with a patch in the knee, where he had taken a piece of shrapnel. My brother and I would dress up in his gear and play war games. I preferred wearing the smart dress uniform, with its ribbons and medals on the chest and a red flash on the shoulder indicating that that the wearer was a volunteer. I was Montgomery. My brother, in the rough battle-dress jacket that came down to his ankles like a voluminous dress, was Rommel. He didn’t mind because I never told him that Rommel was a German.
“Go get Mary,” my mom said abruptly, sitting cross-legged in a sea of paper.
“Where is she?”
“In the back, of course,” my mom snapped, distracted and tense.
Of course. All servants lived in the back. Mary’s area in the back was extra-territorial, part of our white house but not of it. It was a foreign, exotic and frightening place. Everything about it was different. Mary’s soft, old bed was raised on bricks to keep her safe from the evil tokolosh while she slept. It was more than a bed, it was an enveloping, pungent place of refuge. She would lift me on to the bed when I was small and I loved and feared the feeling of sinking into her warm wool blankets, especially in winter, when the room smelled of smoke and sweat.
There were other, unrecognizable smells, one of which I got to know well several years later. It was the odor of marijuana, what we used to call dagga. As kids we believed it was the stuff that gave the blacks red eyes and made them mad.
I went out to the dark, dank rooms smelling of sweat, Sunlight soap and the bitter, pungent concoction, called skokiyan or Bantu beer, that Mary would brew in her spare time and sell to the denizens of the neighborhood. She ran a shebeen, an informal and illegal drinking house, in the yard and the loud, throaty sounds of their partying would penetrate into my room as I was trying to sleep. Two worlds, separated by a thin pane of glass and the snaking wires of a burglar alarm that went off at the wrong times, scaring the hell out of us. No doubt, it wouldn’t have gone off in the event of a real robbery but it was never put to the test.
A tiny yard with a rickety pergola-like structure enveloped in grape vines with inedible grapes divided the main house and the servants’ quarters. The latter consisted of Mary’s room, a room for the second maid, a laundry room that had been seconded by Mary as her shebeen, a bathroom and a toilet, all in a row. They were horrible. We called them Mary’s rooms, even though there was invariably another, junior servant in residence as well. But Mary was the ruling authority. She had been with us for years and remained with my mother until long after I had left South Africa. She must have been old by then but to me she was ageless.
I found Mary in the laundry room, bending over the vast concrete sink in which she did all the washing by hand. It was perpetually dark and chilly in the laundry.
“My mom wants you,” I said. “We’re chucking out things before the police come.”
A veteran of many police raids on her shebeen, Mary seemed relieved that it was someone else getting into trouble for a change. She accompanied me indoors, drying her hands on her apron.
Mary was a small, round woman, as wide as she was high. She waddled around on rigid legs like skittles, bloated from illness and hard work and wore a regulation servants uniform in sky-blue or vomit green (bought in bulk at OK Bazaars) and an apron. Beneath the ubiquitous colored doek on her head was a large face, puffy and creased but with pronounced features. Mary was incapable of a mild expression. When she was happy, her face would illuminate a room like a lantern. But the sheer anguish that would saturate every wrinkle of her face when she was sad was enough to break hearts, even a heart as oblivious as mine.
My mom instructed Mary to begin feeding the papers into the ancient, caste-iron stove in the kitchen.
“Montgomery here will be your assistant.” She turned to me. “If that’s not too much of a come-down for the victor over the Desert Rats?”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“WHAT?”
“Don’t what me! You know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t.”
“That bloody twitch. That’s what.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Oh yes you can. You just don’t want to. You’re doing it to annoy me.”
“No, I’m not. And anyway, I got it from you. It’s your genes.”
“My genes, hey? Tell that to your father next time we visit him. And don’t be cheeky.”
>>>>>
I had two distinguishing features as a kid. My dad was in jail and I had a ferocious tic. I also stuttered for a while but I concluded early on that it was not a stutter destined for greatness. It was a shy, tentative stammer and far too much effort was required to make something of it. Even then, aged seven, I was bone lazy and lousy at multi-tasking. So, I let my mom shlep me to a speech therapist and I dropped stuttering from my repertoire.
My tic, on the other hand, was a class act. At its best, it could stop adults in mid-sentence and send toddlers scuttling into their mothers’ arms in tears. I once reduced a slavering Doberman to a whimpering heap of petrified puppy with a simple triple-wink and a nod. That intervention saved my baby brother from a fate worse than death. Or so my mom used to say, though she didn’t attribute it to my tic.
“This kid is going to be a vet,” she informed my uncles and aunts. “He has such a way with animals.”
But I knew better.
My tic began with a simple shudder of the nose, a mere frisson, like the slight sniff of disdain that a butler might emit at the sight of a bottle of port passed with the wrong hand. In time, the shudder developed into a tremor and then into a subtle flare of the nostrils, as if in reaction to a sharp smell or an irritating whiff of pollen. Before long, my bunny imitations, with synchronized nose and ear movements, were the hit of the nursery school. From such humble beginnings grow great things.
By age eight, I was already a twitching virtuoso, orchestrating an ensemble of facial appendages in a complex and difficult routine of quivers, grimaces, and astonishing jolts. That, however, was just the prelude; eight was also the year I discovered music.
It was a rare evening alone with my mom. With my dad in jail and my brother and sister also jostling for her attention, I didn’t get to spend much time with my mom. But that evening we were alone, sitting together on the large, floral couch in our living room and listening to Ravel’s Bolero on the cabinet gramophone. I will never forget that moment. The rising, rolling motion of the music, like thunder gathering slowly over the Karoo, was a revelation. It transported me. For the first time, I understood the range of artistic expression at my disposal; the possibilities of tempo, timing and harmony. That evening I determined to compose the Bolero of tics.
I shared a bedroom with my brother, which made rehearsal difficult. He had little appreciation for art or the creative process and my facial contortions scared the living daylights out of him. He would charge off to my mom or to Mary, our maid, screaming that I was making him cry and one or both of them would come running to kick up a fuss. It’s not easy to create under such conditions. I was reduced to composing my art under the blankets, gasping for air and using a flashlight and a small, oval makeup mirror that I had removed from my mom’s handbag. Mary caught me at it once or twice and, with her large body jiggling with mirth, warned me that I’d go blind and hair would grow on my palms. It was only years later that I understood what she was getting at.
When I had enough material, I transferred to the bathroom, where I strung it all together under the pretence of taking long, hot baths to calm my nerves and ease my twitch. I spent hours in there, with my siblings banging on the locked door and yelling at me to get the hell out because they had to pee. During the dress rehearsal, I stubbed my big toe on the sharp corner of a bath tile and got a pocket of blood trapped under the nail. The pain was awful. My mom took a hammer and a needle and drilled a hole in the nail to let the blood escape. It came out in a thin, crimson fountain, which frightened my brother even more than my contortions. But the pain eased immediately. Every performer should have a stage manager like my mom.
Finally, my bolero was ready. It was a masterpiece; a multicolored, swelling tapestry of tortured cartilage and abused flesh, surging to a jerking, twisting, writhing, gravity-defying crescendo. It was, I knew in my bones, a singular contribution to culture.
I tried it out on a bunch of mates during lunch break at school. Their response was intensely gratifying. George choked on his peanut butter sandwich and had to be whacked on the back until he coughed up everything including his Quaker Oats breakfast all over his shoes. The others stared at me in gaping-mouthed disbelief.
“That’s disgusting,” Barry uttered.
“I know. But do you like it?”
“It’s bloody amazing. Do it again.”
The girls shrieked and scattered when I approached them, convulsing like an epileptic. I was wearing one scruffy, white tackie due to my damaged toe and the odd shoes and pronounced limp that I had effected added an unintended dimension of pathos to my performance.
“Here comes Frankenstein,” one of them yelled.
“No, it’s the hunchback of snotty dame,” screeched another, her checked blue school dress billowing like a sail as she ran.
“We can see your broeks,” the boys shouted after her.
Flushed with the success of my first performance, I got a little carried away. I added my shoulders to the routine and at one stage I even developed a palsied pelvic movement that I thought quite compelling. I went so far as to do Stanislavski-like breathing exercises in my bed at night. Eyes clenched shut, I would imagine myself into the role of a tiny beggar in the snow, jerking frenziedly as I tried in vain to sell matches to Victorian ladies and gentlemen. The undiscovered Pygmalion of twitch.
But I soon noticed that I was losing my audience. George managed to keep his sandwich down and the girls turned their backs and ignored me when I approached. It was my first lesson in the intangible essence of performance. Even third-graders can tell when you’re faking it. It is a lesson that has remained with me until today. I dropped the exaggeration and refined my routine. Great art, I understood, does not need cheap trickery.
There was very little that my tic couldn’t achieve. Even Miss Lamb, unanimously acknowledged as the most formidable of the teachers, withered in the face of my grotesque twitch-and-shuffle when I stood to answer a question in class. It was a gift that I exploited shamelessly. Homework became a thing of the past, as did my participation in class activities. I would sit at my desk in the back of the classroom and chew on wads of toilet paper, flicking them onto the ceiling when they were mushy enough. Soon I had a forest of little stalactites dangling over my head.
“Look Miss,” I said to Miss Lamb one day, pointing at the mess above. “I think there’s a leak in the ceiling. Maybe we should tell the janitor?”
She looked straight through me.
That’s as good as it got. I enjoyed my notoriety but the truth is I was not a particularly creative soul. I didn’t have the restless, questing urge to take my art further and deeper. Instead, I rested on my laurels. I never created another twitch symphony after my Bolero and after a while I retired from the performing business. By then, my mates were playing soccer, which looked like fun, and I began to take an interest in girls that went beyond grossing them out with a tap-dancing nose and a squint that exposed the red-streaked whites of my eyes. My tic had played itself out.
So I reverted to the modest, bread-and-butter twitch that nature had granted me and took up soccer, girls and the other grubby pursuits of boyhood. I never lost my abiding interest in the ineffable mystery of the tic, though. While no longer a practitioner, I remained a dedicated aficionado.
>>>>>
Years later, I was fortunate enough to meet the master, the maestro of tics. He was a business guest from overseas who my wife and I were entertaining in a local game meat restaurant. It was early in the evening and we were getting acquainted over a few glasses of a deceptively potent Kenyan drink called the dawa. My wife, in her friendliest, most solicitous manner, asked him if he had any children. He opened his mouth to answer and then, without warning, let rip with the 1812 Symphony of tics..
For a split second I thought that something dreadful had happened, as his head dropped to his chest, mouth still open, and his jaw thumped into his sternum. The dreadful alternatives flashed through my mind; his heart had given way or he had suffered a cataclysmic aneurysm. I was about to leap forward to offer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, when he whipped his head sideways, as if trying desperately to swat a fly off his shoulder with his forehead. Having dealt with the fly, his head proceeded to do a complete circle, arcing backwards until it threatened to detach from its moorings and fly across the room into someone’s soup. His eyes bulged in their sockets and a staccato sound like a backfiring motor-scooter - “nda, nda, nda” – escaped from his straining throat. It was awe inspiring,
“Yes,” he said, when his head had completed its circuit around the room and his eyes had popped back into place. “I have two girls, Melissa and Jane.” He didn’t lose a beat,
I sat motionless, mesmerized by his performance. My wife, barely a social drinker at the best of times, knocked back her entire glass of dawa in one shot.
“Really?” she spluttered, a thin cord of honey dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. ”How nice.”
She leaned towards him in a confused, tipsy imitation of profound interest, her eyes warily scanning his rubber neck for signs of a repeat performance.
“And do they take after you?”
The rest of the evening was an anti-climax; a grinding chore of halting chitchat, punctured by bursts of my guest’s explosive tic. My initial, childish admiration rapidly gave way to a profound distress. Like a lapsed cultist, I felt trapped between a hankering after my past convictions and a new, poignant understanding of how sad it really was. He was a grown man with kids, not a schoolboy show-off with an itchy nose and a penchant for the grotesque. There, but for the grace of soccer and pre-pubescent girls, twitched I.
>>>>>
It was at about the same time as my meeting with the maestro that I made the connection between my long-gone tic and my father’s imprisonment. I was well into middle-age by then and my father had been dead for going on 40 years. To be honest, it was a shrink named Valerie who actually made the connection, though I supplied all the necessary background material. It came out of the blue, from an unexpected direction. We had been discussing my fear of elevators, a phobia that had filled the void left by my abandonment of a career in twitching.
“Have you ever considered that it might be related to your father being in jail?” Valerie asked.
No, I had never considered it.
I leaned back in Valerie’s severe armchair and gazed through the sun-screened window at the riot of purple and crimson bougainvillea in the garden. It was a torpid summer’s afternoon in Johannesburg, the sort of afternoon that seems to make sense of everything. I have only experienced such days in Africa; when nature is at peace with itself and all the imponderables of life seem to settle quietly into place. A throwback to the afternoons before Eve got suckered by the snake and ate the apple.
It didn’t seem right to be wrestling with the minutiae of my psyche on such an afternoon. But at R600 an hour I wasn’t going to quibble.
“How do you figure that out?” I asked.
“Look. You won’t go into lifts on your own but have no problem if there are other people in the lift. Right?”
“Right.”
“You have no problem flying in airplanes. Right?”
“Right.”
“But you do have a problem locking the door in public toilets. Right?”
“Right.” Put like that, I sounded more pathetic then even my own low self-esteem allowed.
“Well, it doesn’t sound to me like a classical lift phobia. Most people who are scared of lifts are scared whether they’re alone or with other people. It makes no difference. It seems to me that your problem is not with lifts but with being trapped; being trapped alone, to be more specific. I would say that you’re scared of being imprisoned. And that comes from what happened to your father.”
She paused, a note of triumph quivering in the lazy air of the room.
I was impressed. There was no way she could have known it, but I definitely was scared of being imprisoned; petrified wouldn’t be too strong a word. I had already established that several years earlier.
>>>>>
I had been called up to do another stint of Israeli Army reserve duty in the Gaza Strip. Not that I hadn’t served in the occupied territories before. In fact, I had done my basic training in a bleak, rain-swept military base beside the Jewish settlement of Bet El, the spot where the patriarch Jacob had laid his head on a rock and dreamed of a ladder reaching up to heaven. I had served my time and seen the latter-day manifestation of the Jewish dream first-hand.
But the Palestinian revolt, the intifada, had erupted since my last spell in the reserves and I could no longer rationalize my annual service in drab military olive as a fact-finding adjunct to my journalistic career. With the native population expressing their hatred for the occupation in a way that they never had before, I felt that answering the call would tar me with the same brush as the conscripts in the South African townships in ’76 or put me on the level of a German soldier facing members of the French Resistance.
Like my father, I was a committed left-winger, though, unlike him, I had little to show for it, other than a thin album of newspaper clippings and feverish letters on human rights abuses that I had written home during my university days in Jerusalem. I also had a grainy picture from a student newspaper of a group of self-styled Trotskyites occupying the university’s administration building, among them a long-haired yours truly with a defiant fist in the air. That was about the extent of my political activism. I had never doubted the sincerity of my political beliefs but I had come to accept a certain disjunction between the fervor of my faith and its practical expression. A child of the Sixties, I had always regarded sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as perfectly adequate articulations of the gospel of the Left.
And then came the call-up to Gaza and, with it, the realization that this was crunch time. Even a die-hard political dilettante has to draw the line somewhere. Mine was patrolling the cheerless streets of Khan Yunis with an M-16 rifle in my hands, while threadbare Arab children whose cause I believed in threw rocks and bottles at me with a passion that I had never been able to muster. I knew it in my bones.
The alternative was military prison. A friend of mine had refused to serve in Lebanon and had been sentenced to 28 days in the stockade. When his time was up he was handed call-up papers for another Lebanese stint and had again refused. So he served another 28 days in prison. That happened three times before the army grew tired of the game and sent him home. I had heard of other guys who had served five or six consecutive jail terms for refusing to serve.
My call-up notice in its distinctive brown envelope with a triangle in the bottom-right corner arrived at a particularly bad time. The day before, I had received another distinctive envelope, a green one, from the Israeli tax man, who brusquely informed me that a routine audit of my tax returns had uncovered certain disparities and requested, demanded would be more accurate, that I pay him a visit to discuss the matter. I knew all about the disparities, of course, and had a good idea of how much his routine audit could end up costing me.
Besides which, Valerie and I had a already established that I had a deep-rooted dread of authority combined - incongruously - with a nonchalant carelessness for the requirements of the law. It was a subject we had discussed at great length, not to mention expense, before we deviated onto the elevator problem. That, too, was apparently connected to my father, though we hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. Authority, in shrink-think, is synonymous with the father and a fear of authority is nothing less than … It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is. It could also be rebellion against a father I never had time to rebel against, as every son must, apparently. But, as I said, we had only scraped the surface of that one.
Sitting a world away from Gaza, in the gentle, abundant tranquillity of Valerie’s study, I felt the creeping, choking anxiety from years before. Every fiber of my being, every minute of my upbringing and every shred of my self-respect obliged me to refuse service in Gaza. Every outraged political statement that I had ever made and every impassioned article that I had ever written in my newspaper career demanded that I choose the path that led to the stockade. God knows, I expected it of myself. But I was petrified. The prospect of imprisonment paralyzed me. I was crushed by a terror that I had never known.
The cumulative effect of the green and brown envelopes was a God-awful panic attack. It hit me at a sensitive moment on the night of the brown envelope. Standing at the toilet bowl having a quiet pee, I suddenly convulsed as an intense pain tore through my chest. I couldn’t breath; as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get air into my lungs. As I gasped for breath, the room started to swirl around me. I lost my balance, groped for something to hold onto but found only the smooth surface of the tiled wall. Then I passed out. I came to on the cold, damp floor, my trousers at half-mast and blood pouring from my nose, which had apparently connected with the toilet seat during my descent.
I crawled out of the toilet and dragged myself to my feet, zipping up my trousers out of some residual sense of propriety. I was convinced I was going to die and didn’t want to be found with my flaccid penis exposed, still dripping urine. My heart was pounding. I was gasping for breath and my body trembled as if it was being shaken vigorously by some demonic force. I staggered into the lounge where my girlfriend (now my wife) was watching TV and, in a tremulous voice, informed her that I was having a heart attack and was about to die.
She herself almost died at the sight of me. She propelled me downstairs and, leaving me in a pathetic heap on the sidewalk, hopped around in the middle of the road like a mad woman until a taxi stopped and took us to the hospital. There, they hooked me up to an ECG, sampled my blood and x-rayed my chest, a procedure that had to be repeated a number of times before I stopped shaking long enough for the technician to get a clear image out of the machine. After determining that my heart was in all likelihood sound, they swabbed and set my nose, which had been broken in its collision with the toilet bowl, sedated me and let me sleep the night. Early the next morning, a pimply intern with bad teeth suggested that I consider seeing a psychiatrist.
So began the chain of events that lead to my sitting in Valerie’s rock-hard armchair, gazing out of the window on a sublime Johannesburg afternoon. Needless to say, I decided against prison, served my time in Gaza and lashed myself with guilt from then onwards. My moment of truth had come and, out of weakness, I had fluffed it.
“Not weakness,” Valerie interjected. “Certainly not weakness. We’re talking about a very deep childhood trauma connected with your father.”
My father again.
>>>>>
“What about my twitch?” I asked Valerie at our next session.
“What about it?”
“You said it tied in with my father’s imprisonment.”
“Of course it’s tied in. Do you know what a twitch is?”
I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t. I had given some of the best year of my life to twitching yet I hadn’t even bothered to understand what it was.
“A twitch is a short circuit of the nervous system. When the system gets overheated it sends an abnormal amount of impulses to the nerve endings, resulting in agitation of the parts of the body where the nerve endings are situated.”
I reflected on that. Frankly, I preferred my earlier artistic approach to her stark, clinical explanation. But at the rate I was hemorrhaging cash in her armchair, I wasn’t about to debate the merits of twitching. I wanted solutions.
“And my father?”
Valerie, in full clinical exposition mode, was not about to be sidetracked.
“Most tics are predisposed, or inherited. You’ve told me that you don’t remember when yours began but it’s a fair assumption that it began before your father’s troubles. However, in answer to your question, there is no doubt that the trauma of what happened to your father was an aggravating factor in the development of your tic.
“Look at it this way. You’re a young sensitive child. You already have a tic, which means that your nervous system is already highly active. Then your father gets imprisoned. How do you deal with that? Society tells you that people in prison are bad people, but your immediate surroundings, your family and friends of the family, tell you that your dad’s a good person. That he’s in jail precisely because of the fact that he’s a good person. Because he opposes the evil that is apartheid.
“Now, how do you deal with that inner conflict? You’re too young to be able to understand it on a rational level. So you internalize it. You walk around with the conflict inside you. But all inner conflicts are externalized in some way. Yours, or at least one of yours, is through an overloading of the nervous system. Your tic. Later, of course, you transfer it to a fear of lifts. And other modes of behavior too, of course.”
So there it was. The tic, the lift phobia and the panic attack. My Holy Trinity of obsessions.
We sat in silence for a short while. I disliked the finality with which she made her diagnoses, preferring to think of my life as being more random, more serendipitous than the textbook case that always seemed to emerge when I exposed myself to her scrutiny. But she certainly made the connections. Not once, as I trudged heavily up countless flights of drab, concrete steps with empty lifts glowing invitingly on every landing, had I ever thought of my father. I wondered whether having him to blame would put a spring in my step the next time I took to the stairwell.
“OK,” I said eventually. “I’m a fuck-up. I twitch, I’m scared of lifts and I dissolve into a palpitating mess whenever I have to confront a waiter. So where do we go from here?”
Valerie put on her suffering shrink face, a hybrid expression of knowing superciliousness and deep concern for the tragic individual in the nazi armchair.
“Tell me about when they took your father,” she said.
>>> >>
I found a footnote recently in a book about the white opposition to apartheid.
“Several hundred ex-servicemen had broken away from the main body of protesters and were preparing to march on the Union Buildings. This radical group was led by Jock Isacowitz, a communist and regarded as a revolutionary by the leadership of the Torch Brigade. Isacowitz’s group, armed only with flaming torches, was intending to take over the seat of power and overthrow the government.”
That was my dad, a footnote to history.
The torch-lit march took place in 1948, after the Afrikaner Nationalist Party had surprisingly beaten Jan Smuts’ United Party in parliamentary elections. It was the start of a half-century of Strangelovian racial experimentation that became known as apartheid. My dad didn’t take over the seat of power and had in fact left the stalinist South African Communist Party several years before the march, in an acrimonious schism with his old comrades. He met up with many of them a decade or so later in the Johannesburg prison called, appropriately if rather literally, the Fort, but by then they were beating very different drums. Stalin’s show trials were the last straw for my dad; though still a radical left-winger, he became a determined anticommunist.
That didn’t prevent the progenitors of apartheid from listing him as a communist and, later, arresting him under the Suppression of Communism Act. Twisted logic was their metier. A regime that was capable of kicking black students out of college in terms of the Universities Extension Act either had a wicked sense of humor or was somewhat lacking in the sagacity department. And no-one ever accused the Nats of having an over-abundance of wit.
My dad was detained three days after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the closest apartheid South Africa came to a popular revolt until, 25 years later, the kids of Soweto went on the rampage, triggering the slow implosion of Afrikaner power that culminated in the formation of Nelson Mandela’s government a couple of years before Valerie and I set out on our exploration of the uncharted regions of my psyche. I was back in South Africa by then, after two decades in the bosom of another of God’s chosen people; one, moreover, which was making as much of a hash of things as the Afrikaners did. I seem to have a propensity for the self-appointed.
For me, at nine, those heady days of national crisis and mass detentions after Sharpeville were interminable. Not because the country was on the verge of popular revolt and chaos but because I was on the brink of celebrity. Not many other kids in King David Primary could lay claim to a father in prison. In fact, as far as I knew, none could.
It was a close thing. The authorities declared a state of emergency and started arresting opponents of the regime as soon as they realized that shooting 72 unarmed black protesters in the back might be inimical to law and order. After the second batch had been arrested, including many of my father’s political allies, I began to wonder whether they intended coming for him at all. It was bad enough that my father hadn’t been included in the initial swoop but to have been overlooked altogether would have been too much.
I hurriedly checked the doorposts of our house for daubings of ram’s blood. It was, after all, March and Pesach was just around the corner. The last thing I wanted was for the God of apartheid to have identified my father as a Jew and passed him over. But the lintels were clean and the mezuzot appeared to be in good working order. I was spared the indignity of one of the Chosen not being chosen. In fact, dozens of the Chosen were carted away that week. There could have been a minyan in virtually every prison in the country, had they been so disposed.
I needn’t have worried. They came on the third night.
I never figured out what delayed them. Nor did I ever understand why they only arrived after midnight. I guess it served their clichéd sense of the dramatic. The Afrikaners are a very literal people.
My dad knew they were coming, His friend Ernie was taken on the second night and Ernie’s wife and child had moved in with us. So we had an experienced player on our team. Rosemarie, Ernie’s wife, knew the drill. I didn’t go to school on the day of his impending arrest and we spent the entire day getting rid of incriminating documents and seditious literature.
The “we” is an exaggeration, of course. The only incriminating document I knew of at the time was the diaphragm instruction sheet that my neighbor and I had discovered under the lingerie in his mother’s dressing table drawer one day while she was out. The step-by-step insertion instructions, accompanied by rudimentary sketches, kept us agog for months. The sheet also mentioned a mysterious foam that apparently accompanied the diaphragm and the image of my friend’s enormously fat, naked mother inserting the rubber diaphragm and with foam bubbling out from between her flabby thighs was unbearably titillating and disgusting.
We tore their house apart, searching for the diaphragm and foam, but we never found them. A few months later, my friend burned the house down while experimenting with matches in the attic. We were devastated by the loss of the instruction sheet, our one, genuine artifact from the impenetrable world of sex. Such treasures were not easy to come by in the repressed, puritan South Africa of the Fifties.
So, while my mom, dad and Rosemary sorted through mounds of books, pamphlets and pieces of paper, scanning them for subversive sentiments, I sprawled on the living room carpet paging through a bound volume of The Springbok, a publication produced by the South African forces in North Africa during the Second World War. My dad had been chairman of the Springbok Legion, a radical ex-servicemen’s organization established in the last year’s of the war, and his picture was scattered through the bound volume. My favorite was one in which he was presenting s scroll of some sort to the venerable Jan Smuts, prime minister and field marshal in the British Army.
My dad had fought up north, in Abyssinia, Libya and Egypt. His uniform still hung in the cupboard, including one pair of battle-dress pants with a patch in the knee, where he had taken a piece of shrapnel. My brother and I would dress up in his gear and play war games. I preferred wearing the smart dress uniform, with its ribbons and medals on the chest and a red flash on the shoulder indicating that that the wearer was a volunteer. I was Montgomery. My brother, in the rough battle-dress jacket that came down to his ankles like a voluminous dress, was Rommel. He didn’t mind because I never told him that Rommel was a German.
“Go get Mary,” my mom said abruptly, sitting cross-legged in a sea of paper.
“Where is she?”
“In the back, of course,” my mom snapped, distracted and tense.
Of course. All servants lived in the back. Mary’s area in the back was extra-territorial, part of our white house but not of it. It was a foreign, exotic and frightening place. Everything about it was different. Mary’s soft, old bed was raised on bricks to keep her safe from the evil tokolosh while she slept. It was more than a bed, it was an enveloping, pungent place of refuge. She would lift me on to the bed when I was small and I loved and feared the feeling of sinking into her warm wool blankets, especially in winter, when the room smelled of smoke and sweat.
There were other, unrecognizable smells, one of which I got to know well several years later. It was the odor of marijuana, what we used to call dagga. As kids we believed it was the stuff that gave the blacks red eyes and made them mad.
I went out to the dark, dank rooms smelling of sweat, Sunlight soap and the bitter, pungent concoction, called skokiyan or Bantu beer, that Mary would brew in her spare time and sell to the denizens of the neighborhood. She ran a shebeen, an informal and illegal drinking house, in the yard and the loud, throaty sounds of their partying would penetrate into my room as I was trying to sleep. Two worlds, separated by a thin pane of glass and the snaking wires of a burglar alarm that went off at the wrong times, scaring the hell out of us. No doubt, it wouldn’t have gone off in the event of a real robbery but it was never put to the test.
A tiny yard with a rickety pergola-like structure enveloped in grape vines with inedible grapes divided the main house and the servants’ quarters. The latter consisted of Mary’s room, a room for the second maid, a laundry room that had been seconded by Mary as her shebeen, a bathroom and a toilet, all in a row. They were horrible. We called them Mary’s rooms, even though there was invariably another, junior servant in residence as well. But Mary was the ruling authority. She had been with us for years and remained with my mother until long after I had left South Africa. She must have been old by then but to me she was ageless.
I found Mary in the laundry room, bending over the vast concrete sink in which she did all the washing by hand. It was perpetually dark and chilly in the laundry.
“My mom wants you,” I said. “We’re chucking out things before the police come.”
A veteran of many police raids on her shebeen, Mary seemed relieved that it was someone else getting into trouble for a change. She accompanied me indoors, drying her hands on her apron.
Mary was a small, round woman, as wide as she was high. She waddled around on rigid legs like skittles, bloated from illness and hard work and wore a regulation servants uniform in sky-blue or vomit green (bought in bulk at OK Bazaars) and an apron. Beneath the ubiquitous colored doek on her head was a large face, puffy and creased but with pronounced features. Mary was incapable of a mild expression. When she was happy, her face would illuminate a room like a lantern. But the sheer anguish that would saturate every wrinkle of her face when she was sad was enough to break hearts, even a heart as oblivious as mine.
My mom instructed Mary to begin feeding the papers into the ancient, caste-iron stove in the kitchen.
“Montgomery here will be your assistant.” She turned to me. “If that’s not too much of a come-down for the victor over the Desert Rats?”
Blood Mixes with Blood
The small, bloated body was almost indistinguishable from the bleached rocks of the hill. It was not surprising that it had gone unnoticed for the better part of two days, as search parties scoured the wadi below and the nearby Arab village. From a distance, the killing hill looked as familiar and unassuming as it had every day for the past 25 years, since the settlers first adopted this land as their own.
Zalman was virtually on top of the body before he noticed it. He had scrambled up the hill from the far side, the village side, having broken away from the main group of searchers down below. It was hot and flies pestered his ears and neck where the sweat gathered. He clambered awkwardly over the rocks, breathing heavily and holding his side as the jarring steps sent arrows of pain through his wound. His ankles flopped alarmingly and his knees ached. It had been a long time since his hiking days. He stopped when he came to the crest of the hill and looked around, squinting in the pitiless sunlight.
It was not much bigger than the white clumps of rock that littered the hill.
She was naked, hunched over on her knees as if genuflecting deeply in prayer. Her head was bent grotesquely upwards and to the side, virtually severed from the neck. Her hands, purple and swollen, were tied behind her back with rope. The ground seemed to churn beneath the girl's head, where a mass of flies feasted on the blood that had drained out of the body and gathered in a pool on the ground. Other flies swarmed around the brown patches of dried blood that clung like lichen to her face and, Zalman noticed, her pathetically exposed backside. The air seemed to shimmer from the flies and the heat and the stench.
Zalman felt sick. He backed away, losing his balance and falling heavily on a rock behind him. He sprawled there for several moments, his stomach heaving and his right arm hanging numbly from breaking his fall. Dust and decay invaded his nostrils and burning bile filled his throat. Jagged flashes of light pierced his eyes. Then he heaved himself up, needles of sensation returning to his arm, and stumbled down the hill to report his find.
The girl was dead. And the alehum had begun.
++++
"Like sheep to the slaughter."
The hoarse voice thrust through the dense hubbub in the crowded room. Slumped against the wall, supported on both sides by women, the girl's mother confronted the general who was squatting on the floor opposite her. Slowly, she turned her ravaged face towards him, her eyes blistered with pain and anger and hate.
"We knew this would happen; it was only a matter of time. What do you think? That we can live in peace with these people? With these animals? They should be wiped off the face of the earth. Look what they did; look what they did ... nine years old ... look what they did ..."
As her voice trailed off into sobs, the woman beside her took over. The sister of the girl's mother, she, too, was dressed in a long, shapeless smock and sneakers, her hair covered by an incongruous flannel hat.
"Our blood is cheap," she shrieked, her voice rising from a whisper in the space of four words.
"The Arabs are a cancer; they should be cut out. They should be destroyed. Instead, what does the army do? It let's them butcher our children, that's what it does. They butcher our children."
The general kneeled silently on the floor, head bowed, as the emotion swelled around him. He had no words of comfort for these people. Anything he could possibly say would be pathetically inadequate in the face of the bottomless, almost frenzied, anger of the girl's family. What could he tell them? That the army and police would find the perpetrators and bring them to justice? They didn't want justice; they wanted revenge. They wanted a biblical kind of retribution, not the meager solace that a hamstrung officer, however senior, could offer.
Through lowered eyes, he examined the mourners, lining the walls of the large living room like a fallen, ancient frieze. Most were sprawled hopelessly on mattresses or irregular sofa cushions, as if drained of life. Three or four, all women, were leaning towards him aggressively, their sharp voices clashing as they shouted to make themselves heard. Above the mourners, towels and prayer shawls had been draped over pictures on the walls and a sheet shrouded the large mirror in the entrance hall. The room had an air of hasty conversion; some ceramic bowls and other knickknacks were thrust into a corner, reminders of a family life that had been abruptly shattered.
His eyes found the girl's father, hunched on a mattress near the door. The general hadn't seen him when he entered the room and had gone directly to the girl's mother instead to pay his condolences. The father had cut his plain, white tunic as a sign of mourning and the breast pocket drooped like the crippled wing of a bird. He sat alone and detached, unfocused on the activity around him. He seemed to be praying or talking to himself, his bloodshot eyes like beacons under his pale brow and flecks of spittle mottling his untidy beard.
Zalman came up to the general and helped him to his feet. The two men stood mutely as the calls for vengeance slowly wound down.
"The army will do everything in its power to find the people behind this abominable murder," he announced quietly to the girl's mother when he could finally speak. "The security of the settlements is our paramount concern and we will spare no effort to ensure that your lives carry on as normal. The entire country grieves with you tonight. My condolences."
The general and Zalman walked to the door, passing grave, bustling women with cups of coffee and plates of biscuits for the mourners. At the door, the general stooped down to the girl's father, placing both his hands on the man's shoulders and murmuring condolences in his ear. The fathered nodded solemnly, without losing his faraway look. Then the general stood and walked outside with Zalman
It was a warm, starry night with a languid breeze that the general found refreshing. He leaned against the low wall of the veranda and lit a cigarette.
"I understand that you were the one who found your granddaughter," he said abruptly.
"Yes."
"A terrible thing. I'm really sorry. My condolences."
"Thank you."
The general and Zalman had known each other a long time, usually as adversaries but seldom with rancor. It was the general's duty to maintain order in the occupied territories and it was Zalman's duty, as he saw it, to upset that order. Zalman had dedicated his life to settling the Land of Israel, legally or illegally. As it turned out, most of the time it had been illegal, though often with the connivance of the politicians of the day.
Despite that, the two men got along. The fiery passion of Zalman's youth had been tempered by age, injury and experience, though he had lost none of his ideological rigidity. And the general, never a believer in much, apart from an instinctive Zionism and his own advancement in the career force, found the veteran settler to be a useful ally in surviving the interminable and tortuous politics of the settlement movement.
The general was a frequent guest at Zalman's near-legendary mansion, a massive stone and concrete structure perched on top of a bare hill on the edge of one of the earliest Jewish settlements. The strange bulk of the house stood in stark contrast to the emptiness of the surrounding hills and the subtle conformity of the Arab village of al-Baidat in the wadi. It was a home that announced: "I am here to stay," though the general would often add silently "even though I clearly don't belong here," as he drove up the hill to the house and through the electric gates.
The two men would drink strong, black coffee and swap snippets of information like young boys swapping baseball cards. The general needed to know the prevailing mood in the settler leadership and didn't trust the pseudo-academic reports he got from Military Intelligence. Zalman's sources were better and his instincts more finely-tuned than those of the raw military recruits with degrees in spoken Arabic or Middle East studies. In return, the general would relay gossip from inside the General Staff and had, on occasion, bent the rules in Zalman's favor. Theirs was a friendship of mutual convenience and a shared taste for bitter coffee with hel.
"I've put the entire area under curfew and we'll be picking up suspects," the general said after a long pause. "We'll find whoever did it."
"That won't be enough. You saw them in there. We need something stronger."
"It's not up to me."
"Tell the minister we need something stronger. A nine-year-old kid, for fuck sake. God knows what those animals did to her. I can't go back in there and tell them that our response is a curfew and a few arrests. That those savages can violate and murder my grandchild and we announce another curfew. There'll be hell to fly. We need to do something big this time."
"I'll speak with the minister," the general said. "You know it isn't easy. In the meantime, keep your hotheads under control. I've got enough on my plate right now."
++++
The men set out that same night. There were eight of them; two of Zalman's sons, though not the girl's father, Zalman's eldest grandson and five men from the settlement. They were armed with M-16 rifles and hand guns and carried flashlights, walkie-talkies and a megaphone. Some had knives.
They left the settlement in two all-terrain cars which were normally used by the settlement security squad. Driving east, they skirted the roadblock at the nearby junction before turning off the road and heading into the valley in the direction of the small village of al-Baidat. The darkness enveloped them. Jittery and tense, high on adrenaline, they gripped their weapons tightly, careening into each other as the cars thrashed over the rocky surface. Mad spirals of dust pirouetted in the powerful headlights. There was no sign of the army.
The cars turned onto the dirt track leading to the village. Military bulldozers had gutted the track during previous curfews, throwing up mounds of rubble to obstruct the passage of vehicles. For many months now, villagers wanting to visit the nearby town had been forced to walk the five kilometers to the main road to flag down a taxi. The men who weren't driving went ahead on foot, clearing away boulders and heaving the cars out of craters when they got stuck.
Just short of the village, the cars stopped and the men got out. The night was still warm and fragrant with citrus and wild marjoram. A vast smudge of stars cast a dull glow over the low, bulky shapes of the village houses ahead of them, rising in terraces on either side of the dirt track. Getting to this point had been hard work and the men paused to get their breath back and drink water. Then they checked their equipment, loaded magazines and cocked their rifles. After a final, whispered repetition of the plan, they returned to the cars and, with headlights off, rolled silently into the village.
The cars traversed the village once, passing the low stone walls where the village men would congregate in the evening for a smoke, the mosque, with its squat, graceless minaret topped by a brass crescent, and the old concrete water cistern, now no longer in use. Simple stone houses loomed silently above them, shuttered and dark. Many of the buildings on the lower level were tattooed with graffiti and posters. A smell of sewage and dung clung to the place.
At the far end of the village, they stopped and turned the cars around with a gap of several meters between the two. Leaving only the drivers in the cars, the men took up positions on either side, rifles at the ready. At a hand signal, the drivers gunned their motors and flipped on the searchlight mounted on top of each vehicle. Emergency strobe lights pulsated. In an instant, the night erupted in a violent spasm of light and noise.
“Thus saith the Lord God,” intoned the driver of the lead car through the megaphone as he began to edge his vehicle forward.
“Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a spiteful heart, to destroy it for the old hatred.”
The shock troops flanking the cars were firing now. Furious volleys sundered the night.
“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
The first victim was a donkey, shot where it was tethered beside a building on the edge of the village. Then the settlers kicked in the door of a small, prefabricated structure and destroyed the village's electricity generator. As the cars crawled down the track, with lights blazing, motors screaming and a harsh, spectral voice calling down biblical vengeance over the megaphone, the assailants scrambled up the rocky terraces to target the houses higher up. They methodically punctured water tanks and shattered solar heaters perched on the roofs of the houses. They fired wildly, their bullets ricocheting drunkenly off the metal shutters.
Shooting and cursing, yelling and throwing stones, the rampaging settlers extracted cruel retribution from the sleeping villagers of al-Baidat. The blood debt incurred by the murder of Zalman's grandchild was repaid in a cacophony of bullets, screams, shattering glass and the agonized bellowing of a dying donkey. But that wasn't all.
A small child appeared on the balcony of one of the house on the upper terrace. Confused, petrified, she clutched the bars of the railing surrounding the balcony, mutely witnessing the mayhem below. Later, the attackers would deny that anyone had shot at the child; it was too dark to see anything clearly, they would tell the police. Besides, maybe one of the villagers had opened fire on the settlers and hit the girl instead. They left the child dangling limply over the railing, a small bundle in flannel pajamas with one, thin arm pointing downwards as if in protest.
The operation was swift and lethal. Several of the vigilantes were graduates of army combat units and knew their job well. It took less than ten minutes for the Jewish settlers to teach the villagers of al-Baidat a lesson they would never forget.
On leaving the village, the settlers detoured into the adjacent olive grove, where they slashed the tarpaulins used for gathering the ripe olives and lunged frenziedly at the fruit still on the trees. And then it was over. Their job done, they returned to the cars and drove soberly back to their homes. They were tired and subdued. The manic fervor of earlier that night was gone. Behind them, the first, pale pigments of daylight diluted the black sky. It had been a long day.
++++
At 69, Zalman had lived an eventful life. He had raised three sons and two daughters and they, in turn, had given him 17 grandchildren.
From the Giborei Shomron Web site:
"[The girl's] grandfather is Zalman Kirsh, patriarch of one of the leading clans in Yesha and a pioneer of the settlement movement. Zalman fought with distinction in all of Israel's early wars, among them the battle for the Mitla Pass during the Suez Campaign. He started buying land in Judea and Samaria soon after the Six Day War and was instrumental in the establishment of many of the early settlements, including the settlement at Sebastia. Arrested as a member of the machteret in 1984, Zalman spent seven months in prison before being released. Today, he continues to be in the vanguard of the establishment of new yishuvim."
He was a religious man, as were most of the so-called "ideological" settlers, an uncomfortable label that distinguished between themselves and the non-ideological, usually secular, Israelis who had moved to the territories to improve their standard of living. But his religion was a very different beast from the ghetto Judaism of the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox who usually typified religious Jewry to the outside world. Zalman's was a tough, muscular religion; not the religion of the wandering Jewish smous, the Jewish convert cowering in front of the Inquisitor or the Jew marched naked and helpless into the German gas chamber. His was a biblical Judaism, a religion of Jews who slew and smote their enemies and lived on the land promised to them by God.
Zalman liked to think that he had played a role in the creation of the Old-New Jew. He had done a bit of slaughtering and smiting in his time but his prime contribution had been the Land. Reclaiming the Land of Israel had been Zalman's mission virtually from the moment he landed on a dark beach somewhere north of Tel Aviv after a miserable journey from Europe on the deck of an illegal refugee boat; a wizened, 12-year-old survivor of Hitler's death camps. He had renounced the ghetto Jew in the daily battle for survival in the camps and found the new one in the stark hills and wadis of the Holy Land.
By the time Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the spectacular Six Day War, Zalman was primed. The war itself he regarded as miraculous, an unmistakable signal from God that the Jews of Israel had a job to do: to settle the newly-redeemed land. By now religiously observant, Zalman threw himself into the mission. He crisscrossed the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria with the passion of a lover, marveling at its stark beauty. With a bible in his pocket, he sought out and identified the sites of ancient Jewish settlement, most now covered over, abandoned and bearing Arabic names.
Not satisfied with merely identifying the biblical landmarks, Zalman wanted to embrace them, to return them to the descendants of the patriarchs. With the government vacillating between keeping the territories it had occupied or vacating them in return for peace treaties with its Arab neighbors, Zalman resorted to private enterprise. He began to purchase land. When there were willing sellers, he negotiated hard and paid cash, most of it raised from sympathetic Jewish circles in America. When the owners were not willing to sell, he was not above forging land sales contracts or bribing Arab witnesses to testify falsely to his claim to the land. Sometimes, when faced with a particularly recalcitrant land owner, he would simply arrive with a bulldozer or two and level the buildings that stood on the land he coveted.
With the benign concurrence of the political authorities, the first Jewish settlements were established on land that Zalman had acquired. It began slowly, with all the false starts and confusion of a new and immature enterprise. But soon the crusade hit its stride. Tight clusters of red-roofed settlements sprouted on West Bank hilltops, dominating the Arab villages in the wadis below like the manors of feudal lords. Roads were built connecting the settlements to the hinterland, power lines were strung and water and sewerage pipes buried in the rocky earth. Within little more than a decade, a massive, concrete and steel grid had been overlaid on the original topography, squeezing the native population into increasingly stressed pockets of poverty and resentment.
The inexorable momentum of colonization spawned an inchoate, bitter resistance. Only a few Arab landowners initially stood their ground in the face of the Israeli juggernaut but far larger numbers of their children and grandchildren did. Forced off the land and confined in the seething, hopeless towns, they turned to crime, violence and Islam. The militant nationalism of the Jewish settlers was mirrored in a nihilistic Islamic fundamentalism amongst the displaced and disenfranchised Arab masses. The two sides faced off in a bleak, uncompromising contest of mutually exclusive divine right.
Zalman was no longer a young man when he joined the machteret, a clandestine settler group that rejected state-sponsored repression in favor of less ambiguous forms of action. He did so with no small measure of hesitation. Though he fully identified with the group's commitment to fighting terror with terror, he had profound doubts about its other central tenet: a doomsday scenario of all-out conflagration between Jews and Arabs out of which would emerge the promised Jewish kingdom. The trigger was to be the destruction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Arab shrine that stood on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple.
Zalman's world view had always been a pragmatic one, composed in equal parts of realpolitik and religion. He had never been comfortable with the messianism that had taken root in the second generation of the settlement movement and that saw the rebuilding of the temple, preceded by the destruction of the mosque, as the ultimate expression of Jewish national identity. Zalman had survived Armageddon once and didn't fancy his chances, or indeed those of the reborn Jewish people, a second time around. He participated in the underground's attacks on Arab notables but steered well clear of the plot to blow up the mosque.
When Zalman emerged from prison, well over a year after the uncovering of the machteret and seven months after his sentencing to a five year prison term, he had lost a lot of the ardor of his early years. He returned to his land dealing and became wealthy, raised his family and, eventually, became a grandfather. A patriarch in his own right, Zalman exercised his authority in the movement he had founded while inwardly disavowing the messianic madness of its younger devotees.
In his 68th year, he was attacked by an Arab gunman while driving his car on a quiet road near his home .Soldiers quickly arrived on the scene and a helicopter evacuated him to hospital, where a large part of his right lung was removed, along with the bullet that had eviscerated it. After several weeks in hospital, Zalman returned home, where, now semi-retired, he tramped the beloved hills of the land he had made his own.
++++
Zalman stepped out into the sharp, afternoon sunlight to greet the deputy commander of the local police district. He was grateful for any excuse to escape the oppressive mourning inside the house.
The police had arrived in a plain car, accompanied by a drab, olive-green Border Police jeep. Zalman ushered them to seats in the shade of the large verandah and disappeared inside for refreshments. The three police officers, in jeans and T-shirts, sat in silence, surveying the baked, naked landscape, while the two uniformed border policemen lit cigarettes and lounged in the shade of their jeep. Though relatively new to the territories, the deputy commander was already familiar with the mansion on the hill. Working with Zalman was a pre-requisite for any representative of the state who wanted to succeed.
He had interviewed the girl's parents the previous day, soon after Zalman discovered the body. The discussion had been brief and difficult. Angry and dazed with grief, the girl's mother had lashed out at him, while the father was submerged in a unanimous, enveloping silence. Now, with the funeral over and armed with the results of the autopsy, the time had come to investigate.
While waiting for Zalman to return with the refreshments, the deputy commander retraced in his mind the contours of the murder scene.
He had spent almost three hours at the site the day before, pacing the flat crest of the hill while forensic experts in white overalls scoured the area for evidence. The body, covered by a rough, gray blanket, awaited the arrival of the state pathologist.
He had been a crime scene officer in the Serious Crimes Unit in Tel Aviv before being promoted to his current position and missed the challenge of solving difficult cases, of pitting himself against the cunning and calculation of a deliberate murderer. Crimes of passion or of drunkenness held little interest for him; they were tawdry sideshows, the pathetic detritus of human folly. But a premeditated killing was something else entirely. As a young trainee officer he had taught himself to play the ancient Eastern game of Go in order to understand strategy, deduction and, above all, patience. But his partner had been killed in action soon after and he had never met anyone else who knew, or wanted to learn, the game. Still, he thought, as he studied the ground around the gray heap in the center of the hill, he had learned a lot from Go.
A pile of twigs and branches was lying at the girl's head, partly obscured by the blanket that covered the body. He moved closer and bent down, breathing shallowly into the sleeve of his shirt to filter the smell of decomposition. The wood was slightly charred, as if someone had tried unsuccessfully to light it. Like kindling, he thought. Hesitantly, he lifted up a corner of the blanket where it covered the partly-severed head. Through the seething mass of flies, he saw that the branches extended down under the girl's head and below her knees, over which the small torso was hunched.
Dropping the blanket, the deputy commander lurched away, acid bile filling his mouth. He spat it out and ground it into the earth with his shoe, gasping for breath. Slowly, he straightened up and looked around, his vision blurred by the tears that flooded his eyes. The hill was bare of trees or bushes. The only vegetation was the stringy grass that grew in clumps amongst the innumerable, smooth, white boulders. For whatever purpose, someone had carried the branches to the top of the hill.
Pulling rubber gloves over his hands, he reluctantly went back to the body and gently withdrew two twigs from under the girl's head. Then, rubbing his eyes and breathing in short spurts, he walked over to where one of the forensic men was kneeling on the ground a few meters from the body and asked him to bag it.
"Hang on a minute," the man said as he took the twigs from the deputy commander and dropped them into a clear plastic bag. He pointed to a small heap of sand and pebbles on the ground. "What do you think this is?"
The deputy commander bent down and examined the heap. "No idea," he said eventually. "An ant hill maybe?"
"Could be," the forensic expert said skeptically. "I've never seen ant hills in this area before, though.”
The deputy commander could not recall ever having seen an ant hill.
"How about termites?" he suggested. The forensic expert looked at him quizzically and shrugged.
"I'll get it photographed," he said helpfully and walked off.
The deputy commander examined the baked ground. The earth surrounding the heap seemed scratched or lightly gouged. He moved a meter or two to the side till he found a relatively clear patch of earth and swept up the sand into a mound with his hands. The ground was hard and he had to push forcefully with the sides of his hands to get a reasonable pile of dirt. Then he compared the two. His mound was lacking the pebbles that made up the bulk of the original heap but the marks in the earth were identical. He hauled himself to his feet and began a methodical search of the area around the body.
He found the second heap on the other side of the girl's body, directly opposite the first. This one was thinner and more conical, with a pointed pebble at its apex. Like a burial mound for a small animal, he thought The third and fourth heaps were at the other end of the girl's body. Together they formed a square, as if demarcating the area around the body.
Intrigued, the deputy commander paced out the distance between the heaps. He was not surprised to find that they formed a perfect square, or as perfect a square as he could estimate, using his stride to measure. There were eight meters between each heap, vertically and horizontally, with the girl's body at the epicenter.
Everything else seemed untouched, dancing in the intense heat and light.
Trying another tack, he walked partly down the side of the hill until he could no longer see the top. Then he turned and walked up again, squeezing his eyes almost shut and squinting as one does when trying to find a hidden shape in one of those trick pictures. At the top, still squinting, he looked straight ahead and tried to spot something unusual in his peripheral vision. Nothing. He repeated the exercise three times, each time coming at the crime scene from a different side of the hill.
On the fourth attempt, approaching the body from the direction of Zalman's house, he thought he noticed a vague pattern in the random distribution of the boulders on the hill. He retraced his steps and looked again. It was as if a number of small rocks had been placed in parallel lines, creating a rough path that led to the girl. He got down on his haunches and looked closer. On either side of the two lines of rocks he found fresh, bare patches of earth, where the rocks had been removed to form the trail. He stood up and followed the rocks to where they ended just before the body. No doubt about it. Someone had marked out the place.
"Smells fucking awful."
Jolted out of his train of thought, the deputy commander turned to see the state pathologist coming up to him. He nodded.
"So, what do you think?" asked the pathologist, as he pulled on gloves and surveyed the scene.
"You tell me."
The pathologist grunted and approached the body. An angry cloud of flies assailed him as he lifted the blanket. "Shit," he exclaimed, flailing at them uselessly. The deputy commander stood back, holding his shirt to his nose, as the coroner got to work.
++++
Zalman emerged from the dank interior of the house, accompanied by a young woman carrying a tray with glasses of water and juice. Behind him, as if in a trance, shuffled Yehuda, the girl's father.
Yehuda was Zalman's youngest son. Like his father and his siblings, Yehuda was a fervent believer in the righteousness of the cause. But unlike his brothers, who were both hard-edged and stridently militant, Yehuda was far removed from politics; he was a mystic, something of a recluse.
The deputy commander had done his homework. It was said that Yehuda had turned an outhouse of the extended family home into a workshop, dedicated to the creation of articles of worship for the rebuilt Jewish Temple. He also bred a unique strain of cattle in an enclosure behind the outhouse, aiming to produce a single, pure red heifer. During temple worship, he had read, the ashes of the red heifer were used to purify those who had come into contact with dead bodies.
Father and son sat down at the table opposite the police officers. The deputy commander recoiled at the sour, pungent smell of sweat that rose from the girl's father.
Yehuda was wearing the same clothes as he had worn the previous day. He had on a rough, white tunic, which he wore over shapeless gray pants, and had simple, leather sandals on his feet. The breast pocket of the tunic was torn in mourning and hung down limply. Food stains were splattered carelessly on the front and sleeves. His head was entirely covered by a large, crocheted yarmulke, out of which his long, lank hair protruded.
"Do you mind if my men look around?" the deputy commander asked.
Zalman nodded his assent. Without a word, the two plainclothes police officers downed their glasses of juice, stepped down from the verandah and disappeared around the side of the house, leaving the deputy commander alone with Zalman and his son.
"When did you last see your daughter?" he asked Yehuda.
The father's face, where is wasn't covered by an unruly beard, was blotched with red. Pearls of perspiration gathered at his temples and on the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes were feverish and unfocused. Yehuda's mouth opened but no words came out.
Zalman put his hand lightly on his son's shoulder. "Yehuda, come on. Stay with us now."
"I ... I don't know." Yehuda's cracked voice was like the sound of an old-fashioned phonograph. "I don't remember, really. I, I think maybe when she went to school that morning. I was in the workshop. In the morning, I'm always in the workshop in the morning. Maybe she came out to say goodbye. She did, sometimes..."
Yehuda's voice trailed off. The deputy commander scrutinized him. Yehuda was sweating profusely and refused, or was unable, to make eye contact. His thin, bony fingers were clasped tightly on the table, under which a leg jerked spasmodically.
The deputy commander knew the elementary rules of his profession. In the death of a child, the first suspects are always the parents. In the death of a daughter, look to the father. Understand the dynamics between the parents. Children are all too often victims, cannon fodder in the interminable war of the sexes.
Too simple. Before him sat a father whose daughter had been horribly murdered; a man who had hardly slept in three days. Besides, Yehuda was not an unknown quantity. Although the policeman had never met him before the girl disappeared, he had certainly heard of him. Yehuda was well-known in the settler community as an eccentric and a temple zealot, the odd black sheep in a prominent fighting family.
"Were you close to your daughter?"
Yehuda was silent, rubbing a finger up and down his right cheek, besides his mouth. "She was my blood," he said finally, flatly. "She was my blood... I loved her." His body trembled and tears swamped his faraway eyes.
"Can you think of anyone who would want to do this to her?"
Yehuda shook his head.
"Does your family have any enemies that might want to harm you?"
"Of course we have enemies," Zalman cut in sharply. "They're all around us; they hate us. Who do you think did this?" His voice was harsh, as if in protest at the line of questioning.
The deputy commander paused, giving due weight to Zalman's outburst. It would not be wise to alienate the old man. Then he turned back to Yehuda.
"Has there been any background to this? Any incident that preceded it? I mean, has anything happened recently that might be related?"
"One of the villagers has been hanging around here," Yehuda said quickly, gesturing vaguely in the direction of al-Baidat. "I saw him near the fence when I was with the cows last week. I didn't know him."
"Did you speak with him. Do you know what he wanted?"
"No."
The policeman turned to Zalman "Did you notice anything suspicious?"
Zalman considered the question. "I didn't see anyone but I haven't been getting out much recently." He paused to change gears. "But you don't need to get too carried away with the detective work, commander. The Arabs don't need an excuse to murder us. They do it for fun, for pleasure. They're animals. Only an animal could have done that." Zalman's voice shuddered.
"They're down there, commander. The cursed murderers are down there. All you need to do is go and get them." He was shouting now.
"I understand that someone already did that," the deputy commander murmured, regretting the words as soon as they had left his mouth. But the older man didn't respond. He drank deeply from his glass and looked away. Yehuda sat hunched, silently mouthing prayers.
"Deputy commander." One of the police officers was standing below the verandah. He turned to him.
"Yes?"
"We've looked around. Can we have a word?"
++++
While the police were at the house on the hill, other members of the security forces were sifting through the village of al-Baidat in the wadi below. The task force had entered the tiny village at dawn in half-tracks and jeeps. Calling through megaphones, they assembled the men and boys into the open area in front of the mosque and ordered the women to stay in their houses. Troops in combat kit cordoned off the village, taking up positions in the scant shade of the old olive trees that surrounded it. When the area was secured the shabak moved in.
Ostensibly, they were conducting two simultaneous investigations into the killings of two children, one Jewish and one Arab. In fact, they were under strict orders to produce a suspect in the killing of the Jewish girl - and fast. The gruesome murder had outraged the insular settlement community, which made up for its lack of numbers in political clout. Zalman's colleagues in the community leadership had mobilized their political patrons with blunt, emotional demands and the politicians, in turn, had bullied the heads of the security forces. Appropriate orders had gone down the ranks.
In the dusty mosque square, dozens of village men squatted submissively in three rows under the harsh sun. They had been there since dawn, stripped down to their underwear and without water or food. In the shade of the mosque entrance, plainclothes security men with rifles slung over their shoulders studied intelligence material and talked on radios with the men searching the houses higher up on the terraces.
They did not seem to be in any particular hurry. Every now and again, they would pull a man out of the sullen rows and take him behind the mosque for interrogation. Those whose stories did not satisfy their interrogators had their hands bound behind their backs with tight plastic straps and were led blindfolded to a waiting jeep.
A dour quiet hung over the village, disturbed only by the whining of vehicles and the static of the radios. Every so often, a yelp of pain could be heard from behind the mosque. The villagers waited in passive, defeated silence, faces to the ground. They neither spoke amongst themselves nor looked at their tormentors.
The general arrived to take charge, several young, serious officers with maps and papers in his wake. He consulted with the shabak and took crisp reports on a radio from the men searching the houses. Then he inspected the grim rows of men in the sun, handing a bottle of mineral water to the first man in each row and ordering him to drink and pass it on.
Suddenly, a shot erupted from the terraces behind the mosque. Pigeons scattered into the air, their wings thrumming violently, and the quiet, almost laid-back, diligence of the army convulsed instantly into a storm of uncoordinated, energized activity. Rifles in hand, soldiers and shabak set off in a headlong rush up the terraces, shouting orders which no-one heard or obeyed; a babble of voices spewed from the walkie-talkies.
The general yelled to make himself heard above the chaos and sent the members of his entourage sprinting after the attacking men. For a few moments, senior officers and enlisted men grappled with each other in confusion, the soldiers swearing in frustration at the intrusion. The villagers on the ground stared at the scene in bewilderment.
Within minutes, the general had succeeded in restoring order. He hastily gathered his officers together and ordered them to form two ad hoc units. The shabak remained in the square with the detainees, rifles cradled hopefully in the crooks of their arms and their eyes scanning the terraces. One unit, with the general at its head, went directly up the terraces to the source of the fire, moving deliberately in single file and taking cover behind the houses as they ascended. The other unit set off at a jog down the dirt track that ran through the village in an attempt to flank the enemy.
They had barely reached the end of the village and turned onto a path up the slope when the radio crackled into life. "Medic, we need a medic. We have one wounded. Over."
"One of ours? Over," asked the officer in charge.
"No," replied the tinny voice on the other end. "One of them. Trying to escape. We're all OK."
By the time the wounded man was brought down on a stretcher, the pursuing soldiers had returned to the square. They gulped water from their canteens, slipped the safety catches back on their rifles and discussed the incident heatedly in testosterone-charged voices.
One of the search parties had come across a young man cowering in the basement of a house. They had dragged him out of his hiding place, slapped him up against a tree outside the house and demanded to know what he was doing there. Instead of responding, the man had spat at the soldier closest to him and set off on a frenzied, hopeless dash for safety. He hadn't run ten meters before one of the soldiers dropped him with a single bullet in the thigh.
The wounded man lay on the stretcher on the ground, groaning in pain as a medic wound a bandage around the field dressing that covered the bullet wound. The senior shabak man on the scene searched him roughly, finally withdrawing a battered identity document from the back pocket of his torn, grubby pants. He walked off to check the document against the lists that had been dropped at the entrance of the mosque when the firing started.
When the secret serviceman returned a few minutes later, the wounded man was already hooked up to an infusion bag held aloft by one of the medics and the stretcher was surrounded by a gaggle of curious, but not overtly hostile, young soldiers.
"We have our killer," he said to the general, who was standing at the head of the stretcher and discussing the incident with the group of soldiers that had discovered the man.
"Who is he?" asked the general.
"Jamal Faris al Bashir. A hamasnik. We've been after him for quite a while."
"Is he from here?"
"From Jenin. I don't know what he was doing here. Hiding out probably."
"What's he wanted for?"
"The shooting attack on the bus outside Ganei Urim. You remember? About four or five months ago. We also want to speak with him about some other things. We think he's been working with Abu Hashahsh in Jenin. He's a nasty little bastard."
"Has he done anything with children?" the general asked.
"I wouldn't put it past him."
"Has he?" the general persisted.
The secret serviceman hesitated. "We don't know... But we'll get it out of him."
"Take him away," the general ordered.
The wounded man's hands were tied and he was strapped to the stretcher. Then the stretcher was shoved into a jeep and the infusion bag fixed by duct tape to the metal piping of the jeep's roof. He moaned loudly as the stretcher was maneuvered into the vehicle but did not utter a word. Two of the bound and blindfolded men who had aroused the suspicions of the shabak were thrust in beside him. The others were released and the men who had been squatting on the ground since dawn were told they could return to their homes.
One of the men, wearing only underpants and with rank trails of sweat crisscrossing his dusty brown body, approached an officer standing beside the jeep. "He's my cousin," the man said simply "He's been staying with me because he got into trouble in Jenin. He didn't do anything wrong. He's been helping me with the olive harvest."
"We'll see," the officer said as the jeep drove off, bucking on the rough dirt track.
++++
An enormous, beaten copper urn guarded the entrance to the workshop. It seemed to balance precariously on its pedestal, the slender base thickening into a rotund belly from which protruded a circle of spigots. It reminded him of the antique Russian samovar that had presided over the sideboard in his grandmother’s small living room when he was a child.
Water was dripping from one of the spigots and had spread into a small puddle on the floor. Avoiding the puddle, the deputy commander stepped into the large, cluttered room and glanced around. The night outside the windows was an impenetrable black. For a brief moment he felt disoriented, as if the entire universe had been suddenly reduced to this single, muggy room, suffused in an abrasive fluorescent light. Behind him, Zalman shut the metal door.
A photo-montage of the rebuilt temple, superimposed on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in place of the golden-domed mosque of Omar, dominated the far wall. The deputy commander knew the poster well. His first posting after entering the force had been to the police station inside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, a dank, crumbling building thrust up against the outer wall of Jerusalem’s ancient citadel. There, he had dealt with the Temple Zealots and other groups of temple devotees. They had differed on a multitude of esoteric, fiercely-argued issues, he recalled, but the one thing they shared was this poster, the lowest common denominator of temple cultists.
Unlike many of his colleagues, the deputy commander had never grown blasé about intruding into people’s lives. He felt like a alien presence in the workshop, an interloper. He recalled a picture he had seen of Tutankhamon’s tomb immediately after Carter had broken through the seals to reveal an artless, haphazard assortment of possessions for the pharaoh’s use in the after-life. This place, too, was an ante-chamber to the after-life, he thought.
He looked around. Yehuda’s workshop belied the external peculiarity of the man. It had an air of industriousness about it; the down-to-earth simplicity of a hardware store.
A large loom, with sky-blue warp threaded through the reed and a half-woven fabric suspended between the two beams, took up a good part of the room. Beside it stood a skeletal spinning wheel made of the same light-colored wood as the loom. Raw yarn spilled out of a wicker basket on the floor. Behind the spinning wheel, stacked up in piles resembling mini-pyramids, were large, wooden bobbins of unrefined thread, white, blue, crimson and mauve.
A rope had been strung diagonally across a corner of the room. Suspended from the rope were a dozen or more hangars, each holding what appeared to be an old-fashioned, woven garment. One of the items was a plain white tunic identical to the one Yehuda had been wearing since the deputy commander first spoke with him after the discovery of the girl’s body.
“Is Yehuda the only one who works here?” He turned to Zalman, who was still standing at the entrance, one hand resting on the door handle.
“Yes,” Zalman said simply. His wily, old face was blank.
“He doesn’t have any help?”
“Sometimes he lets the kids help him with little things.”
What are these?” The deputy commander gestured in the direction of the hanging garments.
“Priests’ stuff. Robes, that sort of thing.”
“Is that what he does? Make priests’ clothes?”
“He also makes models.” Zalman pointed to a large replica of the temple on a workbench behind the urn.
The policeman went over to the urn. “And what’s this thing?”
“It’s called a laver. The priests used it to wash their hands.”
He ran a hand over the dimpled, cold surface of the laver, letting the water drip into his palm from the running spigot. Then he pushed the spigot shut.
“What does Yehuda do with all the stuff he makes?”
Zalman wavered. His eyes flickered over the room before returning to the policeman.
“He packs it into crates.”
“And then?”
“He waits.”
The deputy commander decided not to take it any further. Both men knew what Yehuda was waiting for.
The deputy commander stepped over to the model.
Up close, he saw that it was not the same as the one he had once seen in the Jerusalem center of the Temple Zealots. That model had depicted the exterior of the projected Third Temple, situated on a sanitized version of the Temple Mount where the two Moslem mosques stood. The model in front of him seemed to be a replica of the interior of the temple. It had miniature walls and columns, painted to look like marble. Between each set of columns was a perfect little wooden door with tiny hinges and a bulge at the top as one sometimes finds in classical Arabic architecture.
In the center of the model, the center of the temple, if that’s what it was, was a large, elevated structure with a flat surface and a ramp leading down to the floor. It dominated the model building and was almost as high as the outer walls. It appeared to be solid, without doors or windows, and painted to look like stone. The surface of the structure was made of sand, fine grains of real sand.
The deputy commander marveled at the intricate work that had gone into building the model; at the patience of the builder.
He moved away from the model towards the spinning wheel. Then he stopped. Something, a gut instinct, took him back to the model.
He examined it again, this time with the wariness of a detective rather than the admiration of an enthusiast.
Now he knew what had brought him back to the model, what he had seen the first time without noticing. He felt a prickly sensation creep over his scalp. It was a feeling he recognized from previous investigations; the thrill of things beginning to fall into place. His heart pounded in his chest.
At each corner of the raised, flat structure in the middle of the temple was a small, box-like protrusion. He couldn’t tell if the protrusions had some function or were merely decorative. At the center of the square formed by the four boxes was a pile of wood, a bundle of exquisitely carved little branches. “Kindling,” he murmured triumphantly. Fire wood.
The deputy commander clutched the edge of the workbench. He felt lightheaded, disembodied. As if in a dream, he saw the girl, a pitiful, purple-white thing. She was no longer on the hill but perched on the model, on this raised, flat platform in the center of the Temple-to-come. Her small body was hunched over the kindling, hands bound tightly behind her back.
He glanced up at the photo-montage poster on the wall. Instead of the temple he saw the model, superimposed on the hill. He saw the fire wood under the girl. The four box-like protrusions where he had found the heaps of sand and pebbles. The parallel lines of stones leading up to the body, like the sweep of the ramp.
He knew what had happened. He could feel the heat of the hill on his skin and the taste of dust in his mouth. He smelled the damp, charred branches that refused to burn.
“Come here, please,” he uttered, without turning towards Zalman. His voice echoed thinly in the humid space.
Zalman came up behind him.
“What’s this?” the deputy commander asked.
Zalman glanced at the model with mild distaste.
“It’s meant to be a model of the altar,” he said. “It’s nonsense. Temple nonsense.”
He turned away from the model and grasped the policeman’s shoulder.
“Come. Let’s get out of here. You’ve seen what you came to see.”
The deputy commander felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder, hot, heavy and insistent. He didn’t move.
“What did they do on the altar?”
Zalman let his hand drop.
“Sacrifices.”
“Sacrifices.” The deputy commander repeated the word fastidiously.
Zalman stared at the police officer. Comprehension slowly crept over him. He snorted derisively and turned away.
“You’re mad,” he ejaculated over his shoulder.
“Sacrifices.” The policeman was rooted to the spot.
Zalman spun around as if to grab the cop, possibly to hit him. But his body rebelled. He took a shuddering step forward before his legs buckled, tilting him sideways into the replica of the temple. He sprawled on the broken model, splinters of wood dangling from his outstretched arm.
“You’re out of your mind,” he whispered. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“What sort of sacrifices?” The deputy commander insisted.
“Animal sacrifices.” Zalman spat it out like a challenge. “Animal sacrifices.”
++++
The deputy commander pressed the button at his elbow to open the car window. It was not yet seven in the morning and he was en route to Zalman’s mansion, without a warrant and without a plan.
He angled his head into the rush of warm air, letting it massage his temples and caress his stinging eyes. He shut his eyes for a moment, feeling the tingling pressure on his eyelids, before turning back to the road. He pulled his flack jacket closed and checked the M-16 on the passenger seat beside him. Zalman had been shot on this stark, lonely stretch of road a year-and-a-half before.
The previous night had been long and had ended badly. The few hours between returning home and setting out on this mad, unauthorized mission to confront Yehuda had been a restless, sleepless blur. Now, driving unsteadily in the bright, early-morning sunlight, he was unsure whether he had finally decided to resign from the force, go to the press or leave Yehuda to his own, damn conscience and move on. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had a pounding headache over his left eye and craved a cigarette for the first time in years.
To prepare for the encounter, he turned off the car radio and rehearsed the previous night’s events.
Zalman had recovered from his shock in the workshop quickly enough and reverted to form. It was a form that the cop had never seen but that had been described in detail by numerous Arab litigants in disputed real estate cases: by turns bullying, threatening and cajoling. He had flatly rejected the suggestion of Yehuda’s guilt and threatened to bring all manner of calamities down on the deputy commander’s head if he as much as mentioned it outside the workshop.
The deputy commander had wanted to question Yehuda but Zalman demurred. Without a warrant no policeman was going to enter his house. Both men understood that Zalman would have no problem mobilizing his political benefactors in the time it took the police officer to get a warrant. Besides, the deputy commander had to acknowledge to himself, if not to Zalman, that he had no proof; some branches and a few piles of sand did not constitute probable cause. Given the political sensitivities of the situation, a warrant would not be easy to obtain.
He left Zalman’s house after receiving a message on his beeper that the shabak was interrogating a suspect they had picked up in the Arab village in the wadi. Driving to shabak headquarters outside Tel Aviv, he received a call on his mobile phone. Zalman had already managed to get hold of the commissioner of police.
The deputy commander had never spoken with the commissioner though he had once received a service ribbon from him and shaken his hand. The conversation was brief and succinct. He had better be aware of what he was getting himself into because his arse was on the line. He wasn’t dealing with some petty car thief or junkie selling dope. This guy could ruin him and the commissioner wouldn’t be there to help him. God alone knew where he had come up with the outrageous sacrifice idea but not even God would be able to help him when Zalman got going. So, if he had any sense, he would take some friendly advice and find himself another suspect.
The pressure had begun. He jabbed grimly in the dark at the red button to end the call.
The wounded Arab had been moved to hospital by the time the deputy commander arrived at shabak headquarters, so he spoke with the man’s interrogators. They had no doubt that they had their killer, though, it transpired, he had vociferously denied having had anything to do with the girl. But a small amount of mild pressure had convinced him to confess to participating in the Ganei Urim shooting and the shabak men were confident that it would take just a little more persuasion to close the case.
No, they said, the suspect did not have a history of child crimes, or, at any rate, not as far as they knew. But the coroner had already reported that the girl had not been molested. So, as far as they were concerned, it was a terrorist killing, pure and simple. No, they had not seen the crime scene report or spoken with any of the detectives involved. As they saw it, this was a terrorist case and thus in their domain. Perhaps the police should stick to catching Ukrainian prostitutes?
Seething with anger and frustration, the deputy commander drove home. The cell phone rung again as he was parking. It was well after midnight.
“Deputy commander?” a quiet, male voice inquired. He felt sure it wasn’t a cop; it wasn’t a cop’s voice.
“Speaking.”
“This is Menachem Bar-On.” The minister of public safety and security paused to allow the effect to sink in.
“Good evening,” he responded lamely when it became clear that the minister was not going to continue. The pressure had ratcheted up faster and higher than he had expected.
“Good evening, deputy commander. I assume you know why I’m calling.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I live in Zahala. How about popping by for a chat?”
“Now?” the deputy commander asked?
“Yes, now.” The minister gave him the address and hung up.
++++
The minister lived in a pleasant but unpretentious apartment building. The deputy commander flashed his badge at the security man in the lobby and dragged himself wearily up the stairs to the second floor. The minister himself opened the door. He welcomed the visitor with a curt nod and led him down a corridor to his study. Seating himself in a leather armchair, the minister gestured to the deputy commander to sit in the chair opposite him. The police officer sat. A small wooden coffee table with Holy Land picture books on it divided the two men.
“I understand you had a run-in with my friend Zalman Kirsh today,” the minister began lightly. He was wearing a light blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark pants and slippers. A grayish sheen of 12 o’clock shadow covered his jowls. He was a slight, energetic man but his inscrutable brown eyes were bleary.
The deputy commander dipped his head in acknowledgement.
“You don’t really believe that Kirsh’s son killed his own daughter?” The deputy commander wasn’t certain if it was a statement or a question. “I mean it’s preposterous. It’s outrageous.”
“I do believe it,” he responded.
“What proof do you have?” The minister made no effort to conceal his exasperation.
The deputy commander explained about the kindling under the body, the heaps of sand and the parallel lines of stones. Then he told of seeing the model, with its firewood and ramp and boxes at the corners. As he spoke, he realized how feeble it sounded. He was absolutely convinced of his case but he wasn’t certain that he would buy the argument were the roles reversed. He certainly didn’t expect the minister to buy it.
“The murder weapon was a knife, I understand,” the minister said when the police officer had presented his case.
“The autopsy confirmed that the deceased’s throat had been cut, most likely with a serrated knife such as a hunting knife.”
“Do you have the knife?”
The deputy commander shook his head.
The minister nodded sagely. One to him. “And I understand that the girl was naked when discovered,” he said quietly, a murmur almost. “Have you found her clothes?”
Again, the deputy commander shook his head. Two to the minister.
“And other than these … these stones and pieces of wood,” the minister waved his hand dismissively, “do you have any evidence that Kirsh’s son was at the scene at the time of the murder?”
The deputy commander knew where this line of questioning was going. He tried to head it off.
“Without a warrant I can’t search for evidence,” he said forcefully. “I need a warrant.”
The minister held himself in check. “So let me understand this,” he said patiently. “You have no evidence, no murder weapon, no proof that this person was anywhere near the scene of the crime yet you want to accuse the son of one of the country’s most prominent men of murder?” The irony hung in the air-conditioned room like a mist.
“I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything,” the deputy commander retorted, a little more heatedly than he had intended. “All I want to do is follow up probable cause.”
“Probable cause,” the minister cut in, raising his tone a notch or two above that of the police officer. “What probable cause? A harebrain idea of some biblical sacrifice is probable cause? What are you talking about?”
The deputy commander had feared that he would say that. And the minister was right. He’d have a hard time finding a judge who would issue a warrant.
“I have reason to believe that the father might have been involved,” he said quietly. “All I want to do is follow up a suspicion. No-one is being accused and no-one need know about this. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t pursue it.”
“And you certainly won’t be doing your job any more if you do,” the minister expostulated. He seemed to be tiring of the diplomatic approach.
The deputy commander shrugged his shoulders. Now for the tightening of the screws.
The minister leaned towards the policeman, elbows digging into the armrests of his chair. For the first time, the deputy commander noticed the deep, dark pools under his eyes.
“I practiced the law before entering public service, deputy commander. And since taking office I have had to deal with hundreds of sensitive and difficult cases. In my considered opinion, there is no case. No case. Do you hear me? I cannot let you continue with this nonsense.”
The moment had arrived. The deputy commander looked around the study, considering his options. It was a compact, unprepossessing room. An assortment of books lolled on formica shelving and he noticed silver trophies in a glass-fronted cabinet. He seemed to recall having read that the minister had been a fencer in his younger days. Or was it an archer? Some form of domesticated killing, at any rate. He returned his eyes to the minister.
“Are you ordering me to stop my investigation?”
“I am advising you to stop the investigation.” Suddenly, he lost patience with the stubborn officer. “For God’s sake, man, don’t you understand what you’re doing? This didn’t happen in Tel Aviv or in Herzliya. These people are the salt of the earth; they’re heroes. They spend their lives on the front line, surrounded by our enemies. You can’t go around accusing them of murder, of infanticide, without any evidence. Use your head. Don’t you know what this could lead to?”
He had stood up during the outburst and was standing behind his chair, gripping the back like a lectern.
The deputy commander knew that he had to make a stand.
“I understand the sensitivity of the situation, minister, but I’m not a politician. I’m a policeman. A professional policeman. My job is to uphold the law. That’s the only thing I’m trying to do. To uphold the law.”
The minister didn’t miss the implication.
“No-one is asking you not to uphold the law,” he said soothingly. “That’s the last thing I’d do. The last thing. What I’m saying is that, as a lawyer, I don’t believe you have a case. As a lawyer, not as a politician, you understand? But I can’t close my eyes to what you’re trying to do to a man … to the son of a man who has contributed so much to the state.”
He walked over to the policeman’s chair and stood over him.
“It’s late deputy commander and I’ve had a long day. I understand that the shabak already has a suspect in custody. So, why do we need this? Why do you need it? I understand that you’re one of the most promising officers in the force. I’m sure you’re going to go far. Very far. What do you need this for?”
He held out his hand. The deputy commander suddenly felt an enormous tiredness come over him. He rose to his feet, pushing against the armrests of the chair for leverage. Then he took the minister’s hand. The meeting was over and the decision was now his. He had been left in no doubt as to what was at stake.
Walking down the corridor to the entrance, the minister rested his hand on the policeman’s shoulder.
“Thank you for coming over, deputy commander,” he said sweetly. As they reached the door, he added:
“No-one needs to know we spoke tonight, right?”
++++
The deputy commander turned on the car radio in time to hear the last of the three beeps that preceded the seven o’clock news. The beeps were one of the few constants in his life, he mused. He remembered as a child during the Yom Kippur War how adults would freeze whenever the beeps were heard. Since then, numerous Israeli traditions had fallen by the wayside – it was easier to find a Big Mac than a felafel in Tel Aviv these days – but the beeps announcing the hourly news on Israel Radio were immutable.
His mind meandering, he missed the first news item. The second jolted him back to awareness.
“ … are holding a suspect in the gruesome killing of Yael Kirsh three days ago. The man, an Arab from Jenin, has confessed to murdering the nine-year-old girl, security sources said. He also confessed to participating in the attack on the bus near Ganei Urim seven months ago in which three people died.”
He swung the car to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. Opening the door, he stepped out into the brilliant morning. Only the low stuttering of the motor disturbed the silence. He looked down into the scrubby wadi that dropped to al-Baidat and then rose beyond the terraces to Zalman’s settlement, perched like toy houses on the far hill. Beyond it and to the right, he could make out the killing hill, shimmering slightly in the hazy light. It was going to be another hot day.
It was not that he hadn’t anticipated the announcement. But he had expected at least another day’s grace. A day in which he could somehow, without a warrant and without support, confront Yehuda and prove his case. The shabak must have worked on the Arab during the night. Come to think of it, they probably hadn’t taken him to hospital in the first place. The Arab could have been lying bleeding on the floor of an interrogation room while he was drinking coffee and being duped by the man’s interrogators next door.
The minister and the commissioner, Zalman’s friends, certainly hadn’t taken any chances.
A car stopped abruptly beside him. For a split second he panicked; diving into his car for his weapon.
“You OK?”
The driver was a young man in his twenties, wearing a flak jacket and with the muzzle of a rifle peeking through the open window.
“I’m fine. Thanks.” He felt ridiculous, crouching in the car.
“I wouldn’t stop here, if I were you. Been attacks on this road.”
“I know. I’m on my way.”
“Sorry to scare you.”
The car moved off and the deputy commander sank down behind the steering wheel. He was going to pieces. There had been no reason to panic like that. He shut his eyes and concentrated on controlling his breathing. The radio announcer was concluding an item about forest fires in the Jerusalem hills in which arson was suspected.
The next item concerned two settlers who had been questioned by the police about a recent disturbance in the Samarian village of al-Baidat, during which an Arab girl had died. Sources told Israel Radio that the police were not expected to press charges. He listened without opening his eyes.
It was all wrapped up. Neatly, cleanly just as Zalman knew it would be. They weren’t about to allow the febrile imagination of a district police officer to overturn the apple cart. There was terror to be fought, a country to be run. Enemies within and without. He thought of the girl, a casualty of the war; another dismal victim to add to the roll of the fallen. So be it.
He tried to dredge up the determination, the passion that had compelled him, less than an hour earlier, to set out on this quixotic mission. The quivering excitement he had experienced at seeing the model and deciphering its reproduction on the hill of death. The scorn he had felt for the sweet-talking minister. Nothing. He was beaten. A flat tire on the road to Zalman.
What on earth had possessed him to believe that he could take them on? He flushed, embarrassed and angry with himself. A minor police officer with pretensions. And now, maybe not even that. He had no idea if he still had a job to return to.
He turned the car around and returned the way he had come, driving slowly and enjoying the prickling of the wind on his face. Behind him was the hill with its mysterious sand mounds and path of stones.
++++
The deputy commander saw Yehuda one more time. It was late at night, about six month later, and Zalman’s son was lying on his back a few meters from the road with a single bullet lodged in his shattered skull. Beside him, one finger still curled in the trigger guard, was his father’s pistol.
Yehuda’s body was not visible from the road and the security forces had been on the scene for well over an hour before they came across it while searching the area. What brought them there in the first place was his car, which had been abandoned, its motor still running, on the side of the road, with it’s front wheels lodged in the drainage ditch and the passenger door open. A passing motorist had seen the car and called the police.
Yehuda’s wife, the mother of the murdered girl, was in the front passenger seat. Her neck had been slit through to the spine and her head was lodged between the headrest and the door. Her felt hat had slipped forward over her eyes as if to protect them from the glare of the powerful arc lights that had been erected around the car. The front of her dress was soaked with her blood and a knife, presumably the knife that had been used to slaughter her, lay at her feet.
The security forces had treated it as a terror attack at first, though the circumstances were highly unusual. They had sent out alerts and erected roadblocks at nearby intersections. Only after they found Yehuda’s body and deduced that he had committed suicide after killing his wife did they hand it over to the police. The police handled family crimes.
The coroner was already on the scene and examining Yehuda’s body when the deputy commander arrived. Zalman was there too, surrounded by a shuffling scrum of armed men. His formerly powerful, stocky frame had collapsed like a de-bowled beanbag and was being supported by a younger man. The general hovered over him solicitously.
The ranking cop on the crime scene handed the deputy commander an evidence bag with a folded sheet of paper inside.
“What’s this?”
“Looks like a note. Maybe a suicide note. I found it in his shirt pocket.”
The deputy commander walked over to the area that was lit by the arc lights, pulled on rubber gloves and removed the paper from the bag. He laid the evidence bag on the hood of Yehuda’s car and placed the note on the bag. Then he carefully unfolded it. Blood had soaked a folded corner of the note, creating macabre patterns when it was opened.
It was scribbled in pencil and had neither greeting nor farewell. It appeared to be a few biblical phrases, some of which were illegible due to the bloodstains. The deputy commander thought that it looked more like a private jottings than a suicide note intended for post-mortem examination.
He read Yehuda’s last testament.
“Our daughters have committed whoredom and our wives have committed adultery. … There is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of G-d in the land. We [illegible] swearing and lying and killing and stealing and committing adultery.”
“We have forgotten the law of G-d and our children too have been forgotten. Israel is defiled [illegible] desired mercy not sacrifice.”
“Blood mixes with blood.”
Zalman was virtually on top of the body before he noticed it. He had scrambled up the hill from the far side, the village side, having broken away from the main group of searchers down below. It was hot and flies pestered his ears and neck where the sweat gathered. He clambered awkwardly over the rocks, breathing heavily and holding his side as the jarring steps sent arrows of pain through his wound. His ankles flopped alarmingly and his knees ached. It had been a long time since his hiking days. He stopped when he came to the crest of the hill and looked around, squinting in the pitiless sunlight.
It was not much bigger than the white clumps of rock that littered the hill.
She was naked, hunched over on her knees as if genuflecting deeply in prayer. Her head was bent grotesquely upwards and to the side, virtually severed from the neck. Her hands, purple and swollen, were tied behind her back with rope. The ground seemed to churn beneath the girl's head, where a mass of flies feasted on the blood that had drained out of the body and gathered in a pool on the ground. Other flies swarmed around the brown patches of dried blood that clung like lichen to her face and, Zalman noticed, her pathetically exposed backside. The air seemed to shimmer from the flies and the heat and the stench.
Zalman felt sick. He backed away, losing his balance and falling heavily on a rock behind him. He sprawled there for several moments, his stomach heaving and his right arm hanging numbly from breaking his fall. Dust and decay invaded his nostrils and burning bile filled his throat. Jagged flashes of light pierced his eyes. Then he heaved himself up, needles of sensation returning to his arm, and stumbled down the hill to report his find.
The girl was dead. And the alehum had begun.
++++
"Like sheep to the slaughter."
The hoarse voice thrust through the dense hubbub in the crowded room. Slumped against the wall, supported on both sides by women, the girl's mother confronted the general who was squatting on the floor opposite her. Slowly, she turned her ravaged face towards him, her eyes blistered with pain and anger and hate.
"We knew this would happen; it was only a matter of time. What do you think? That we can live in peace with these people? With these animals? They should be wiped off the face of the earth. Look what they did; look what they did ... nine years old ... look what they did ..."
As her voice trailed off into sobs, the woman beside her took over. The sister of the girl's mother, she, too, was dressed in a long, shapeless smock and sneakers, her hair covered by an incongruous flannel hat.
"Our blood is cheap," she shrieked, her voice rising from a whisper in the space of four words.
"The Arabs are a cancer; they should be cut out. They should be destroyed. Instead, what does the army do? It let's them butcher our children, that's what it does. They butcher our children."
The general kneeled silently on the floor, head bowed, as the emotion swelled around him. He had no words of comfort for these people. Anything he could possibly say would be pathetically inadequate in the face of the bottomless, almost frenzied, anger of the girl's family. What could he tell them? That the army and police would find the perpetrators and bring them to justice? They didn't want justice; they wanted revenge. They wanted a biblical kind of retribution, not the meager solace that a hamstrung officer, however senior, could offer.
Through lowered eyes, he examined the mourners, lining the walls of the large living room like a fallen, ancient frieze. Most were sprawled hopelessly on mattresses or irregular sofa cushions, as if drained of life. Three or four, all women, were leaning towards him aggressively, their sharp voices clashing as they shouted to make themselves heard. Above the mourners, towels and prayer shawls had been draped over pictures on the walls and a sheet shrouded the large mirror in the entrance hall. The room had an air of hasty conversion; some ceramic bowls and other knickknacks were thrust into a corner, reminders of a family life that had been abruptly shattered.
His eyes found the girl's father, hunched on a mattress near the door. The general hadn't seen him when he entered the room and had gone directly to the girl's mother instead to pay his condolences. The father had cut his plain, white tunic as a sign of mourning and the breast pocket drooped like the crippled wing of a bird. He sat alone and detached, unfocused on the activity around him. He seemed to be praying or talking to himself, his bloodshot eyes like beacons under his pale brow and flecks of spittle mottling his untidy beard.
Zalman came up to the general and helped him to his feet. The two men stood mutely as the calls for vengeance slowly wound down.
"The army will do everything in its power to find the people behind this abominable murder," he announced quietly to the girl's mother when he could finally speak. "The security of the settlements is our paramount concern and we will spare no effort to ensure that your lives carry on as normal. The entire country grieves with you tonight. My condolences."
The general and Zalman walked to the door, passing grave, bustling women with cups of coffee and plates of biscuits for the mourners. At the door, the general stooped down to the girl's father, placing both his hands on the man's shoulders and murmuring condolences in his ear. The fathered nodded solemnly, without losing his faraway look. Then the general stood and walked outside with Zalman
It was a warm, starry night with a languid breeze that the general found refreshing. He leaned against the low wall of the veranda and lit a cigarette.
"I understand that you were the one who found your granddaughter," he said abruptly.
"Yes."
"A terrible thing. I'm really sorry. My condolences."
"Thank you."
The general and Zalman had known each other a long time, usually as adversaries but seldom with rancor. It was the general's duty to maintain order in the occupied territories and it was Zalman's duty, as he saw it, to upset that order. Zalman had dedicated his life to settling the Land of Israel, legally or illegally. As it turned out, most of the time it had been illegal, though often with the connivance of the politicians of the day.
Despite that, the two men got along. The fiery passion of Zalman's youth had been tempered by age, injury and experience, though he had lost none of his ideological rigidity. And the general, never a believer in much, apart from an instinctive Zionism and his own advancement in the career force, found the veteran settler to be a useful ally in surviving the interminable and tortuous politics of the settlement movement.
The general was a frequent guest at Zalman's near-legendary mansion, a massive stone and concrete structure perched on top of a bare hill on the edge of one of the earliest Jewish settlements. The strange bulk of the house stood in stark contrast to the emptiness of the surrounding hills and the subtle conformity of the Arab village of al-Baidat in the wadi. It was a home that announced: "I am here to stay," though the general would often add silently "even though I clearly don't belong here," as he drove up the hill to the house and through the electric gates.
The two men would drink strong, black coffee and swap snippets of information like young boys swapping baseball cards. The general needed to know the prevailing mood in the settler leadership and didn't trust the pseudo-academic reports he got from Military Intelligence. Zalman's sources were better and his instincts more finely-tuned than those of the raw military recruits with degrees in spoken Arabic or Middle East studies. In return, the general would relay gossip from inside the General Staff and had, on occasion, bent the rules in Zalman's favor. Theirs was a friendship of mutual convenience and a shared taste for bitter coffee with hel.
"I've put the entire area under curfew and we'll be picking up suspects," the general said after a long pause. "We'll find whoever did it."
"That won't be enough. You saw them in there. We need something stronger."
"It's not up to me."
"Tell the minister we need something stronger. A nine-year-old kid, for fuck sake. God knows what those animals did to her. I can't go back in there and tell them that our response is a curfew and a few arrests. That those savages can violate and murder my grandchild and we announce another curfew. There'll be hell to fly. We need to do something big this time."
"I'll speak with the minister," the general said. "You know it isn't easy. In the meantime, keep your hotheads under control. I've got enough on my plate right now."
++++
The men set out that same night. There were eight of them; two of Zalman's sons, though not the girl's father, Zalman's eldest grandson and five men from the settlement. They were armed with M-16 rifles and hand guns and carried flashlights, walkie-talkies and a megaphone. Some had knives.
They left the settlement in two all-terrain cars which were normally used by the settlement security squad. Driving east, they skirted the roadblock at the nearby junction before turning off the road and heading into the valley in the direction of the small village of al-Baidat. The darkness enveloped them. Jittery and tense, high on adrenaline, they gripped their weapons tightly, careening into each other as the cars thrashed over the rocky surface. Mad spirals of dust pirouetted in the powerful headlights. There was no sign of the army.
The cars turned onto the dirt track leading to the village. Military bulldozers had gutted the track during previous curfews, throwing up mounds of rubble to obstruct the passage of vehicles. For many months now, villagers wanting to visit the nearby town had been forced to walk the five kilometers to the main road to flag down a taxi. The men who weren't driving went ahead on foot, clearing away boulders and heaving the cars out of craters when they got stuck.
Just short of the village, the cars stopped and the men got out. The night was still warm and fragrant with citrus and wild marjoram. A vast smudge of stars cast a dull glow over the low, bulky shapes of the village houses ahead of them, rising in terraces on either side of the dirt track. Getting to this point had been hard work and the men paused to get their breath back and drink water. Then they checked their equipment, loaded magazines and cocked their rifles. After a final, whispered repetition of the plan, they returned to the cars and, with headlights off, rolled silently into the village.
The cars traversed the village once, passing the low stone walls where the village men would congregate in the evening for a smoke, the mosque, with its squat, graceless minaret topped by a brass crescent, and the old concrete water cistern, now no longer in use. Simple stone houses loomed silently above them, shuttered and dark. Many of the buildings on the lower level were tattooed with graffiti and posters. A smell of sewage and dung clung to the place.
At the far end of the village, they stopped and turned the cars around with a gap of several meters between the two. Leaving only the drivers in the cars, the men took up positions on either side, rifles at the ready. At a hand signal, the drivers gunned their motors and flipped on the searchlight mounted on top of each vehicle. Emergency strobe lights pulsated. In an instant, the night erupted in a violent spasm of light and noise.
“Thus saith the Lord God,” intoned the driver of the lead car through the megaphone as he began to edge his vehicle forward.
“Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a spiteful heart, to destroy it for the old hatred.”
The shock troops flanking the cars were firing now. Furious volleys sundered the night.
“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
The first victim was a donkey, shot where it was tethered beside a building on the edge of the village. Then the settlers kicked in the door of a small, prefabricated structure and destroyed the village's electricity generator. As the cars crawled down the track, with lights blazing, motors screaming and a harsh, spectral voice calling down biblical vengeance over the megaphone, the assailants scrambled up the rocky terraces to target the houses higher up. They methodically punctured water tanks and shattered solar heaters perched on the roofs of the houses. They fired wildly, their bullets ricocheting drunkenly off the metal shutters.
Shooting and cursing, yelling and throwing stones, the rampaging settlers extracted cruel retribution from the sleeping villagers of al-Baidat. The blood debt incurred by the murder of Zalman's grandchild was repaid in a cacophony of bullets, screams, shattering glass and the agonized bellowing of a dying donkey. But that wasn't all.
A small child appeared on the balcony of one of the house on the upper terrace. Confused, petrified, she clutched the bars of the railing surrounding the balcony, mutely witnessing the mayhem below. Later, the attackers would deny that anyone had shot at the child; it was too dark to see anything clearly, they would tell the police. Besides, maybe one of the villagers had opened fire on the settlers and hit the girl instead. They left the child dangling limply over the railing, a small bundle in flannel pajamas with one, thin arm pointing downwards as if in protest.
The operation was swift and lethal. Several of the vigilantes were graduates of army combat units and knew their job well. It took less than ten minutes for the Jewish settlers to teach the villagers of al-Baidat a lesson they would never forget.
On leaving the village, the settlers detoured into the adjacent olive grove, where they slashed the tarpaulins used for gathering the ripe olives and lunged frenziedly at the fruit still on the trees. And then it was over. Their job done, they returned to the cars and drove soberly back to their homes. They were tired and subdued. The manic fervor of earlier that night was gone. Behind them, the first, pale pigments of daylight diluted the black sky. It had been a long day.
++++
At 69, Zalman had lived an eventful life. He had raised three sons and two daughters and they, in turn, had given him 17 grandchildren.
From the Giborei Shomron Web site:
"[The girl's] grandfather is Zalman Kirsh, patriarch of one of the leading clans in Yesha and a pioneer of the settlement movement. Zalman fought with distinction in all of Israel's early wars, among them the battle for the Mitla Pass during the Suez Campaign. He started buying land in Judea and Samaria soon after the Six Day War and was instrumental in the establishment of many of the early settlements, including the settlement at Sebastia. Arrested as a member of the machteret in 1984, Zalman spent seven months in prison before being released. Today, he continues to be in the vanguard of the establishment of new yishuvim."
He was a religious man, as were most of the so-called "ideological" settlers, an uncomfortable label that distinguished between themselves and the non-ideological, usually secular, Israelis who had moved to the territories to improve their standard of living. But his religion was a very different beast from the ghetto Judaism of the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox who usually typified religious Jewry to the outside world. Zalman's was a tough, muscular religion; not the religion of the wandering Jewish smous, the Jewish convert cowering in front of the Inquisitor or the Jew marched naked and helpless into the German gas chamber. His was a biblical Judaism, a religion of Jews who slew and smote their enemies and lived on the land promised to them by God.
Zalman liked to think that he had played a role in the creation of the Old-New Jew. He had done a bit of slaughtering and smiting in his time but his prime contribution had been the Land. Reclaiming the Land of Israel had been Zalman's mission virtually from the moment he landed on a dark beach somewhere north of Tel Aviv after a miserable journey from Europe on the deck of an illegal refugee boat; a wizened, 12-year-old survivor of Hitler's death camps. He had renounced the ghetto Jew in the daily battle for survival in the camps and found the new one in the stark hills and wadis of the Holy Land.
By the time Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the spectacular Six Day War, Zalman was primed. The war itself he regarded as miraculous, an unmistakable signal from God that the Jews of Israel had a job to do: to settle the newly-redeemed land. By now religiously observant, Zalman threw himself into the mission. He crisscrossed the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria with the passion of a lover, marveling at its stark beauty. With a bible in his pocket, he sought out and identified the sites of ancient Jewish settlement, most now covered over, abandoned and bearing Arabic names.
Not satisfied with merely identifying the biblical landmarks, Zalman wanted to embrace them, to return them to the descendants of the patriarchs. With the government vacillating between keeping the territories it had occupied or vacating them in return for peace treaties with its Arab neighbors, Zalman resorted to private enterprise. He began to purchase land. When there were willing sellers, he negotiated hard and paid cash, most of it raised from sympathetic Jewish circles in America. When the owners were not willing to sell, he was not above forging land sales contracts or bribing Arab witnesses to testify falsely to his claim to the land. Sometimes, when faced with a particularly recalcitrant land owner, he would simply arrive with a bulldozer or two and level the buildings that stood on the land he coveted.
With the benign concurrence of the political authorities, the first Jewish settlements were established on land that Zalman had acquired. It began slowly, with all the false starts and confusion of a new and immature enterprise. But soon the crusade hit its stride. Tight clusters of red-roofed settlements sprouted on West Bank hilltops, dominating the Arab villages in the wadis below like the manors of feudal lords. Roads were built connecting the settlements to the hinterland, power lines were strung and water and sewerage pipes buried in the rocky earth. Within little more than a decade, a massive, concrete and steel grid had been overlaid on the original topography, squeezing the native population into increasingly stressed pockets of poverty and resentment.
The inexorable momentum of colonization spawned an inchoate, bitter resistance. Only a few Arab landowners initially stood their ground in the face of the Israeli juggernaut but far larger numbers of their children and grandchildren did. Forced off the land and confined in the seething, hopeless towns, they turned to crime, violence and Islam. The militant nationalism of the Jewish settlers was mirrored in a nihilistic Islamic fundamentalism amongst the displaced and disenfranchised Arab masses. The two sides faced off in a bleak, uncompromising contest of mutually exclusive divine right.
Zalman was no longer a young man when he joined the machteret, a clandestine settler group that rejected state-sponsored repression in favor of less ambiguous forms of action. He did so with no small measure of hesitation. Though he fully identified with the group's commitment to fighting terror with terror, he had profound doubts about its other central tenet: a doomsday scenario of all-out conflagration between Jews and Arabs out of which would emerge the promised Jewish kingdom. The trigger was to be the destruction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Arab shrine that stood on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple.
Zalman's world view had always been a pragmatic one, composed in equal parts of realpolitik and religion. He had never been comfortable with the messianism that had taken root in the second generation of the settlement movement and that saw the rebuilding of the temple, preceded by the destruction of the mosque, as the ultimate expression of Jewish national identity. Zalman had survived Armageddon once and didn't fancy his chances, or indeed those of the reborn Jewish people, a second time around. He participated in the underground's attacks on Arab notables but steered well clear of the plot to blow up the mosque.
When Zalman emerged from prison, well over a year after the uncovering of the machteret and seven months after his sentencing to a five year prison term, he had lost a lot of the ardor of his early years. He returned to his land dealing and became wealthy, raised his family and, eventually, became a grandfather. A patriarch in his own right, Zalman exercised his authority in the movement he had founded while inwardly disavowing the messianic madness of its younger devotees.
In his 68th year, he was attacked by an Arab gunman while driving his car on a quiet road near his home .Soldiers quickly arrived on the scene and a helicopter evacuated him to hospital, where a large part of his right lung was removed, along with the bullet that had eviscerated it. After several weeks in hospital, Zalman returned home, where, now semi-retired, he tramped the beloved hills of the land he had made his own.
++++
Zalman stepped out into the sharp, afternoon sunlight to greet the deputy commander of the local police district. He was grateful for any excuse to escape the oppressive mourning inside the house.
The police had arrived in a plain car, accompanied by a drab, olive-green Border Police jeep. Zalman ushered them to seats in the shade of the large verandah and disappeared inside for refreshments. The three police officers, in jeans and T-shirts, sat in silence, surveying the baked, naked landscape, while the two uniformed border policemen lit cigarettes and lounged in the shade of their jeep. Though relatively new to the territories, the deputy commander was already familiar with the mansion on the hill. Working with Zalman was a pre-requisite for any representative of the state who wanted to succeed.
He had interviewed the girl's parents the previous day, soon after Zalman discovered the body. The discussion had been brief and difficult. Angry and dazed with grief, the girl's mother had lashed out at him, while the father was submerged in a unanimous, enveloping silence. Now, with the funeral over and armed with the results of the autopsy, the time had come to investigate.
While waiting for Zalman to return with the refreshments, the deputy commander retraced in his mind the contours of the murder scene.
He had spent almost three hours at the site the day before, pacing the flat crest of the hill while forensic experts in white overalls scoured the area for evidence. The body, covered by a rough, gray blanket, awaited the arrival of the state pathologist.
He had been a crime scene officer in the Serious Crimes Unit in Tel Aviv before being promoted to his current position and missed the challenge of solving difficult cases, of pitting himself against the cunning and calculation of a deliberate murderer. Crimes of passion or of drunkenness held little interest for him; they were tawdry sideshows, the pathetic detritus of human folly. But a premeditated killing was something else entirely. As a young trainee officer he had taught himself to play the ancient Eastern game of Go in order to understand strategy, deduction and, above all, patience. But his partner had been killed in action soon after and he had never met anyone else who knew, or wanted to learn, the game. Still, he thought, as he studied the ground around the gray heap in the center of the hill, he had learned a lot from Go.
A pile of twigs and branches was lying at the girl's head, partly obscured by the blanket that covered the body. He moved closer and bent down, breathing shallowly into the sleeve of his shirt to filter the smell of decomposition. The wood was slightly charred, as if someone had tried unsuccessfully to light it. Like kindling, he thought. Hesitantly, he lifted up a corner of the blanket where it covered the partly-severed head. Through the seething mass of flies, he saw that the branches extended down under the girl's head and below her knees, over which the small torso was hunched.
Dropping the blanket, the deputy commander lurched away, acid bile filling his mouth. He spat it out and ground it into the earth with his shoe, gasping for breath. Slowly, he straightened up and looked around, his vision blurred by the tears that flooded his eyes. The hill was bare of trees or bushes. The only vegetation was the stringy grass that grew in clumps amongst the innumerable, smooth, white boulders. For whatever purpose, someone had carried the branches to the top of the hill.
Pulling rubber gloves over his hands, he reluctantly went back to the body and gently withdrew two twigs from under the girl's head. Then, rubbing his eyes and breathing in short spurts, he walked over to where one of the forensic men was kneeling on the ground a few meters from the body and asked him to bag it.
"Hang on a minute," the man said as he took the twigs from the deputy commander and dropped them into a clear plastic bag. He pointed to a small heap of sand and pebbles on the ground. "What do you think this is?"
The deputy commander bent down and examined the heap. "No idea," he said eventually. "An ant hill maybe?"
"Could be," the forensic expert said skeptically. "I've never seen ant hills in this area before, though.”
The deputy commander could not recall ever having seen an ant hill.
"How about termites?" he suggested. The forensic expert looked at him quizzically and shrugged.
"I'll get it photographed," he said helpfully and walked off.
The deputy commander examined the baked ground. The earth surrounding the heap seemed scratched or lightly gouged. He moved a meter or two to the side till he found a relatively clear patch of earth and swept up the sand into a mound with his hands. The ground was hard and he had to push forcefully with the sides of his hands to get a reasonable pile of dirt. Then he compared the two. His mound was lacking the pebbles that made up the bulk of the original heap but the marks in the earth were identical. He hauled himself to his feet and began a methodical search of the area around the body.
He found the second heap on the other side of the girl's body, directly opposite the first. This one was thinner and more conical, with a pointed pebble at its apex. Like a burial mound for a small animal, he thought The third and fourth heaps were at the other end of the girl's body. Together they formed a square, as if demarcating the area around the body.
Intrigued, the deputy commander paced out the distance between the heaps. He was not surprised to find that they formed a perfect square, or as perfect a square as he could estimate, using his stride to measure. There were eight meters between each heap, vertically and horizontally, with the girl's body at the epicenter.
Everything else seemed untouched, dancing in the intense heat and light.
Trying another tack, he walked partly down the side of the hill until he could no longer see the top. Then he turned and walked up again, squeezing his eyes almost shut and squinting as one does when trying to find a hidden shape in one of those trick pictures. At the top, still squinting, he looked straight ahead and tried to spot something unusual in his peripheral vision. Nothing. He repeated the exercise three times, each time coming at the crime scene from a different side of the hill.
On the fourth attempt, approaching the body from the direction of Zalman's house, he thought he noticed a vague pattern in the random distribution of the boulders on the hill. He retraced his steps and looked again. It was as if a number of small rocks had been placed in parallel lines, creating a rough path that led to the girl. He got down on his haunches and looked closer. On either side of the two lines of rocks he found fresh, bare patches of earth, where the rocks had been removed to form the trail. He stood up and followed the rocks to where they ended just before the body. No doubt about it. Someone had marked out the place.
"Smells fucking awful."
Jolted out of his train of thought, the deputy commander turned to see the state pathologist coming up to him. He nodded.
"So, what do you think?" asked the pathologist, as he pulled on gloves and surveyed the scene.
"You tell me."
The pathologist grunted and approached the body. An angry cloud of flies assailed him as he lifted the blanket. "Shit," he exclaimed, flailing at them uselessly. The deputy commander stood back, holding his shirt to his nose, as the coroner got to work.
++++
Zalman emerged from the dank interior of the house, accompanied by a young woman carrying a tray with glasses of water and juice. Behind him, as if in a trance, shuffled Yehuda, the girl's father.
Yehuda was Zalman's youngest son. Like his father and his siblings, Yehuda was a fervent believer in the righteousness of the cause. But unlike his brothers, who were both hard-edged and stridently militant, Yehuda was far removed from politics; he was a mystic, something of a recluse.
The deputy commander had done his homework. It was said that Yehuda had turned an outhouse of the extended family home into a workshop, dedicated to the creation of articles of worship for the rebuilt Jewish Temple. He also bred a unique strain of cattle in an enclosure behind the outhouse, aiming to produce a single, pure red heifer. During temple worship, he had read, the ashes of the red heifer were used to purify those who had come into contact with dead bodies.
Father and son sat down at the table opposite the police officers. The deputy commander recoiled at the sour, pungent smell of sweat that rose from the girl's father.
Yehuda was wearing the same clothes as he had worn the previous day. He had on a rough, white tunic, which he wore over shapeless gray pants, and had simple, leather sandals on his feet. The breast pocket of the tunic was torn in mourning and hung down limply. Food stains were splattered carelessly on the front and sleeves. His head was entirely covered by a large, crocheted yarmulke, out of which his long, lank hair protruded.
"Do you mind if my men look around?" the deputy commander asked.
Zalman nodded his assent. Without a word, the two plainclothes police officers downed their glasses of juice, stepped down from the verandah and disappeared around the side of the house, leaving the deputy commander alone with Zalman and his son.
"When did you last see your daughter?" he asked Yehuda.
The father's face, where is wasn't covered by an unruly beard, was blotched with red. Pearls of perspiration gathered at his temples and on the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes were feverish and unfocused. Yehuda's mouth opened but no words came out.
Zalman put his hand lightly on his son's shoulder. "Yehuda, come on. Stay with us now."
"I ... I don't know." Yehuda's cracked voice was like the sound of an old-fashioned phonograph. "I don't remember, really. I, I think maybe when she went to school that morning. I was in the workshop. In the morning, I'm always in the workshop in the morning. Maybe she came out to say goodbye. She did, sometimes..."
Yehuda's voice trailed off. The deputy commander scrutinized him. Yehuda was sweating profusely and refused, or was unable, to make eye contact. His thin, bony fingers were clasped tightly on the table, under which a leg jerked spasmodically.
The deputy commander knew the elementary rules of his profession. In the death of a child, the first suspects are always the parents. In the death of a daughter, look to the father. Understand the dynamics between the parents. Children are all too often victims, cannon fodder in the interminable war of the sexes.
Too simple. Before him sat a father whose daughter had been horribly murdered; a man who had hardly slept in three days. Besides, Yehuda was not an unknown quantity. Although the policeman had never met him before the girl disappeared, he had certainly heard of him. Yehuda was well-known in the settler community as an eccentric and a temple zealot, the odd black sheep in a prominent fighting family.
"Were you close to your daughter?"
Yehuda was silent, rubbing a finger up and down his right cheek, besides his mouth. "She was my blood," he said finally, flatly. "She was my blood... I loved her." His body trembled and tears swamped his faraway eyes.
"Can you think of anyone who would want to do this to her?"
Yehuda shook his head.
"Does your family have any enemies that might want to harm you?"
"Of course we have enemies," Zalman cut in sharply. "They're all around us; they hate us. Who do you think did this?" His voice was harsh, as if in protest at the line of questioning.
The deputy commander paused, giving due weight to Zalman's outburst. It would not be wise to alienate the old man. Then he turned back to Yehuda.
"Has there been any background to this? Any incident that preceded it? I mean, has anything happened recently that might be related?"
"One of the villagers has been hanging around here," Yehuda said quickly, gesturing vaguely in the direction of al-Baidat. "I saw him near the fence when I was with the cows last week. I didn't know him."
"Did you speak with him. Do you know what he wanted?"
"No."
The policeman turned to Zalman "Did you notice anything suspicious?"
Zalman considered the question. "I didn't see anyone but I haven't been getting out much recently." He paused to change gears. "But you don't need to get too carried away with the detective work, commander. The Arabs don't need an excuse to murder us. They do it for fun, for pleasure. They're animals. Only an animal could have done that." Zalman's voice shuddered.
"They're down there, commander. The cursed murderers are down there. All you need to do is go and get them." He was shouting now.
"I understand that someone already did that," the deputy commander murmured, regretting the words as soon as they had left his mouth. But the older man didn't respond. He drank deeply from his glass and looked away. Yehuda sat hunched, silently mouthing prayers.
"Deputy commander." One of the police officers was standing below the verandah. He turned to him.
"Yes?"
"We've looked around. Can we have a word?"
++++
While the police were at the house on the hill, other members of the security forces were sifting through the village of al-Baidat in the wadi below. The task force had entered the tiny village at dawn in half-tracks and jeeps. Calling through megaphones, they assembled the men and boys into the open area in front of the mosque and ordered the women to stay in their houses. Troops in combat kit cordoned off the village, taking up positions in the scant shade of the old olive trees that surrounded it. When the area was secured the shabak moved in.
Ostensibly, they were conducting two simultaneous investigations into the killings of two children, one Jewish and one Arab. In fact, they were under strict orders to produce a suspect in the killing of the Jewish girl - and fast. The gruesome murder had outraged the insular settlement community, which made up for its lack of numbers in political clout. Zalman's colleagues in the community leadership had mobilized their political patrons with blunt, emotional demands and the politicians, in turn, had bullied the heads of the security forces. Appropriate orders had gone down the ranks.
In the dusty mosque square, dozens of village men squatted submissively in three rows under the harsh sun. They had been there since dawn, stripped down to their underwear and without water or food. In the shade of the mosque entrance, plainclothes security men with rifles slung over their shoulders studied intelligence material and talked on radios with the men searching the houses higher up on the terraces.
They did not seem to be in any particular hurry. Every now and again, they would pull a man out of the sullen rows and take him behind the mosque for interrogation. Those whose stories did not satisfy their interrogators had their hands bound behind their backs with tight plastic straps and were led blindfolded to a waiting jeep.
A dour quiet hung over the village, disturbed only by the whining of vehicles and the static of the radios. Every so often, a yelp of pain could be heard from behind the mosque. The villagers waited in passive, defeated silence, faces to the ground. They neither spoke amongst themselves nor looked at their tormentors.
The general arrived to take charge, several young, serious officers with maps and papers in his wake. He consulted with the shabak and took crisp reports on a radio from the men searching the houses. Then he inspected the grim rows of men in the sun, handing a bottle of mineral water to the first man in each row and ordering him to drink and pass it on.
Suddenly, a shot erupted from the terraces behind the mosque. Pigeons scattered into the air, their wings thrumming violently, and the quiet, almost laid-back, diligence of the army convulsed instantly into a storm of uncoordinated, energized activity. Rifles in hand, soldiers and shabak set off in a headlong rush up the terraces, shouting orders which no-one heard or obeyed; a babble of voices spewed from the walkie-talkies.
The general yelled to make himself heard above the chaos and sent the members of his entourage sprinting after the attacking men. For a few moments, senior officers and enlisted men grappled with each other in confusion, the soldiers swearing in frustration at the intrusion. The villagers on the ground stared at the scene in bewilderment.
Within minutes, the general had succeeded in restoring order. He hastily gathered his officers together and ordered them to form two ad hoc units. The shabak remained in the square with the detainees, rifles cradled hopefully in the crooks of their arms and their eyes scanning the terraces. One unit, with the general at its head, went directly up the terraces to the source of the fire, moving deliberately in single file and taking cover behind the houses as they ascended. The other unit set off at a jog down the dirt track that ran through the village in an attempt to flank the enemy.
They had barely reached the end of the village and turned onto a path up the slope when the radio crackled into life. "Medic, we need a medic. We have one wounded. Over."
"One of ours? Over," asked the officer in charge.
"No," replied the tinny voice on the other end. "One of them. Trying to escape. We're all OK."
By the time the wounded man was brought down on a stretcher, the pursuing soldiers had returned to the square. They gulped water from their canteens, slipped the safety catches back on their rifles and discussed the incident heatedly in testosterone-charged voices.
One of the search parties had come across a young man cowering in the basement of a house. They had dragged him out of his hiding place, slapped him up against a tree outside the house and demanded to know what he was doing there. Instead of responding, the man had spat at the soldier closest to him and set off on a frenzied, hopeless dash for safety. He hadn't run ten meters before one of the soldiers dropped him with a single bullet in the thigh.
The wounded man lay on the stretcher on the ground, groaning in pain as a medic wound a bandage around the field dressing that covered the bullet wound. The senior shabak man on the scene searched him roughly, finally withdrawing a battered identity document from the back pocket of his torn, grubby pants. He walked off to check the document against the lists that had been dropped at the entrance of the mosque when the firing started.
When the secret serviceman returned a few minutes later, the wounded man was already hooked up to an infusion bag held aloft by one of the medics and the stretcher was surrounded by a gaggle of curious, but not overtly hostile, young soldiers.
"We have our killer," he said to the general, who was standing at the head of the stretcher and discussing the incident with the group of soldiers that had discovered the man.
"Who is he?" asked the general.
"Jamal Faris al Bashir. A hamasnik. We've been after him for quite a while."
"Is he from here?"
"From Jenin. I don't know what he was doing here. Hiding out probably."
"What's he wanted for?"
"The shooting attack on the bus outside Ganei Urim. You remember? About four or five months ago. We also want to speak with him about some other things. We think he's been working with Abu Hashahsh in Jenin. He's a nasty little bastard."
"Has he done anything with children?" the general asked.
"I wouldn't put it past him."
"Has he?" the general persisted.
The secret serviceman hesitated. "We don't know... But we'll get it out of him."
"Take him away," the general ordered.
The wounded man's hands were tied and he was strapped to the stretcher. Then the stretcher was shoved into a jeep and the infusion bag fixed by duct tape to the metal piping of the jeep's roof. He moaned loudly as the stretcher was maneuvered into the vehicle but did not utter a word. Two of the bound and blindfolded men who had aroused the suspicions of the shabak were thrust in beside him. The others were released and the men who had been squatting on the ground since dawn were told they could return to their homes.
One of the men, wearing only underpants and with rank trails of sweat crisscrossing his dusty brown body, approached an officer standing beside the jeep. "He's my cousin," the man said simply "He's been staying with me because he got into trouble in Jenin. He didn't do anything wrong. He's been helping me with the olive harvest."
"We'll see," the officer said as the jeep drove off, bucking on the rough dirt track.
++++
An enormous, beaten copper urn guarded the entrance to the workshop. It seemed to balance precariously on its pedestal, the slender base thickening into a rotund belly from which protruded a circle of spigots. It reminded him of the antique Russian samovar that had presided over the sideboard in his grandmother’s small living room when he was a child.
Water was dripping from one of the spigots and had spread into a small puddle on the floor. Avoiding the puddle, the deputy commander stepped into the large, cluttered room and glanced around. The night outside the windows was an impenetrable black. For a brief moment he felt disoriented, as if the entire universe had been suddenly reduced to this single, muggy room, suffused in an abrasive fluorescent light. Behind him, Zalman shut the metal door.
A photo-montage of the rebuilt temple, superimposed on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in place of the golden-domed mosque of Omar, dominated the far wall. The deputy commander knew the poster well. His first posting after entering the force had been to the police station inside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, a dank, crumbling building thrust up against the outer wall of Jerusalem’s ancient citadel. There, he had dealt with the Temple Zealots and other groups of temple devotees. They had differed on a multitude of esoteric, fiercely-argued issues, he recalled, but the one thing they shared was this poster, the lowest common denominator of temple cultists.
Unlike many of his colleagues, the deputy commander had never grown blasé about intruding into people’s lives. He felt like a alien presence in the workshop, an interloper. He recalled a picture he had seen of Tutankhamon’s tomb immediately after Carter had broken through the seals to reveal an artless, haphazard assortment of possessions for the pharaoh’s use in the after-life. This place, too, was an ante-chamber to the after-life, he thought.
He looked around. Yehuda’s workshop belied the external peculiarity of the man. It had an air of industriousness about it; the down-to-earth simplicity of a hardware store.
A large loom, with sky-blue warp threaded through the reed and a half-woven fabric suspended between the two beams, took up a good part of the room. Beside it stood a skeletal spinning wheel made of the same light-colored wood as the loom. Raw yarn spilled out of a wicker basket on the floor. Behind the spinning wheel, stacked up in piles resembling mini-pyramids, were large, wooden bobbins of unrefined thread, white, blue, crimson and mauve.
A rope had been strung diagonally across a corner of the room. Suspended from the rope were a dozen or more hangars, each holding what appeared to be an old-fashioned, woven garment. One of the items was a plain white tunic identical to the one Yehuda had been wearing since the deputy commander first spoke with him after the discovery of the girl’s body.
“Is Yehuda the only one who works here?” He turned to Zalman, who was still standing at the entrance, one hand resting on the door handle.
“Yes,” Zalman said simply. His wily, old face was blank.
“He doesn’t have any help?”
“Sometimes he lets the kids help him with little things.”
What are these?” The deputy commander gestured in the direction of the hanging garments.
“Priests’ stuff. Robes, that sort of thing.”
“Is that what he does? Make priests’ clothes?”
“He also makes models.” Zalman pointed to a large replica of the temple on a workbench behind the urn.
The policeman went over to the urn. “And what’s this thing?”
“It’s called a laver. The priests used it to wash their hands.”
He ran a hand over the dimpled, cold surface of the laver, letting the water drip into his palm from the running spigot. Then he pushed the spigot shut.
“What does Yehuda do with all the stuff he makes?”
Zalman wavered. His eyes flickered over the room before returning to the policeman.
“He packs it into crates.”
“And then?”
“He waits.”
The deputy commander decided not to take it any further. Both men knew what Yehuda was waiting for.
The deputy commander stepped over to the model.
Up close, he saw that it was not the same as the one he had once seen in the Jerusalem center of the Temple Zealots. That model had depicted the exterior of the projected Third Temple, situated on a sanitized version of the Temple Mount where the two Moslem mosques stood. The model in front of him seemed to be a replica of the interior of the temple. It had miniature walls and columns, painted to look like marble. Between each set of columns was a perfect little wooden door with tiny hinges and a bulge at the top as one sometimes finds in classical Arabic architecture.
In the center of the model, the center of the temple, if that’s what it was, was a large, elevated structure with a flat surface and a ramp leading down to the floor. It dominated the model building and was almost as high as the outer walls. It appeared to be solid, without doors or windows, and painted to look like stone. The surface of the structure was made of sand, fine grains of real sand.
The deputy commander marveled at the intricate work that had gone into building the model; at the patience of the builder.
He moved away from the model towards the spinning wheel. Then he stopped. Something, a gut instinct, took him back to the model.
He examined it again, this time with the wariness of a detective rather than the admiration of an enthusiast.
Now he knew what had brought him back to the model, what he had seen the first time without noticing. He felt a prickly sensation creep over his scalp. It was a feeling he recognized from previous investigations; the thrill of things beginning to fall into place. His heart pounded in his chest.
At each corner of the raised, flat structure in the middle of the temple was a small, box-like protrusion. He couldn’t tell if the protrusions had some function or were merely decorative. At the center of the square formed by the four boxes was a pile of wood, a bundle of exquisitely carved little branches. “Kindling,” he murmured triumphantly. Fire wood.
The deputy commander clutched the edge of the workbench. He felt lightheaded, disembodied. As if in a dream, he saw the girl, a pitiful, purple-white thing. She was no longer on the hill but perched on the model, on this raised, flat platform in the center of the Temple-to-come. Her small body was hunched over the kindling, hands bound tightly behind her back.
He glanced up at the photo-montage poster on the wall. Instead of the temple he saw the model, superimposed on the hill. He saw the fire wood under the girl. The four box-like protrusions where he had found the heaps of sand and pebbles. The parallel lines of stones leading up to the body, like the sweep of the ramp.
He knew what had happened. He could feel the heat of the hill on his skin and the taste of dust in his mouth. He smelled the damp, charred branches that refused to burn.
“Come here, please,” he uttered, without turning towards Zalman. His voice echoed thinly in the humid space.
Zalman came up behind him.
“What’s this?” the deputy commander asked.
Zalman glanced at the model with mild distaste.
“It’s meant to be a model of the altar,” he said. “It’s nonsense. Temple nonsense.”
He turned away from the model and grasped the policeman’s shoulder.
“Come. Let’s get out of here. You’ve seen what you came to see.”
The deputy commander felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder, hot, heavy and insistent. He didn’t move.
“What did they do on the altar?”
Zalman let his hand drop.
“Sacrifices.”
“Sacrifices.” The deputy commander repeated the word fastidiously.
Zalman stared at the police officer. Comprehension slowly crept over him. He snorted derisively and turned away.
“You’re mad,” he ejaculated over his shoulder.
“Sacrifices.” The policeman was rooted to the spot.
Zalman spun around as if to grab the cop, possibly to hit him. But his body rebelled. He took a shuddering step forward before his legs buckled, tilting him sideways into the replica of the temple. He sprawled on the broken model, splinters of wood dangling from his outstretched arm.
“You’re out of your mind,” he whispered. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“What sort of sacrifices?” The deputy commander insisted.
“Animal sacrifices.” Zalman spat it out like a challenge. “Animal sacrifices.”
++++
The deputy commander pressed the button at his elbow to open the car window. It was not yet seven in the morning and he was en route to Zalman’s mansion, without a warrant and without a plan.
He angled his head into the rush of warm air, letting it massage his temples and caress his stinging eyes. He shut his eyes for a moment, feeling the tingling pressure on his eyelids, before turning back to the road. He pulled his flack jacket closed and checked the M-16 on the passenger seat beside him. Zalman had been shot on this stark, lonely stretch of road a year-and-a-half before.
The previous night had been long and had ended badly. The few hours between returning home and setting out on this mad, unauthorized mission to confront Yehuda had been a restless, sleepless blur. Now, driving unsteadily in the bright, early-morning sunlight, he was unsure whether he had finally decided to resign from the force, go to the press or leave Yehuda to his own, damn conscience and move on. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had a pounding headache over his left eye and craved a cigarette for the first time in years.
To prepare for the encounter, he turned off the car radio and rehearsed the previous night’s events.
Zalman had recovered from his shock in the workshop quickly enough and reverted to form. It was a form that the cop had never seen but that had been described in detail by numerous Arab litigants in disputed real estate cases: by turns bullying, threatening and cajoling. He had flatly rejected the suggestion of Yehuda’s guilt and threatened to bring all manner of calamities down on the deputy commander’s head if he as much as mentioned it outside the workshop.
The deputy commander had wanted to question Yehuda but Zalman demurred. Without a warrant no policeman was going to enter his house. Both men understood that Zalman would have no problem mobilizing his political benefactors in the time it took the police officer to get a warrant. Besides, the deputy commander had to acknowledge to himself, if not to Zalman, that he had no proof; some branches and a few piles of sand did not constitute probable cause. Given the political sensitivities of the situation, a warrant would not be easy to obtain.
He left Zalman’s house after receiving a message on his beeper that the shabak was interrogating a suspect they had picked up in the Arab village in the wadi. Driving to shabak headquarters outside Tel Aviv, he received a call on his mobile phone. Zalman had already managed to get hold of the commissioner of police.
The deputy commander had never spoken with the commissioner though he had once received a service ribbon from him and shaken his hand. The conversation was brief and succinct. He had better be aware of what he was getting himself into because his arse was on the line. He wasn’t dealing with some petty car thief or junkie selling dope. This guy could ruin him and the commissioner wouldn’t be there to help him. God alone knew where he had come up with the outrageous sacrifice idea but not even God would be able to help him when Zalman got going. So, if he had any sense, he would take some friendly advice and find himself another suspect.
The pressure had begun. He jabbed grimly in the dark at the red button to end the call.
The wounded Arab had been moved to hospital by the time the deputy commander arrived at shabak headquarters, so he spoke with the man’s interrogators. They had no doubt that they had their killer, though, it transpired, he had vociferously denied having had anything to do with the girl. But a small amount of mild pressure had convinced him to confess to participating in the Ganei Urim shooting and the shabak men were confident that it would take just a little more persuasion to close the case.
No, they said, the suspect did not have a history of child crimes, or, at any rate, not as far as they knew. But the coroner had already reported that the girl had not been molested. So, as far as they were concerned, it was a terrorist killing, pure and simple. No, they had not seen the crime scene report or spoken with any of the detectives involved. As they saw it, this was a terrorist case and thus in their domain. Perhaps the police should stick to catching Ukrainian prostitutes?
Seething with anger and frustration, the deputy commander drove home. The cell phone rung again as he was parking. It was well after midnight.
“Deputy commander?” a quiet, male voice inquired. He felt sure it wasn’t a cop; it wasn’t a cop’s voice.
“Speaking.”
“This is Menachem Bar-On.” The minister of public safety and security paused to allow the effect to sink in.
“Good evening,” he responded lamely when it became clear that the minister was not going to continue. The pressure had ratcheted up faster and higher than he had expected.
“Good evening, deputy commander. I assume you know why I’m calling.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I live in Zahala. How about popping by for a chat?”
“Now?” the deputy commander asked?
“Yes, now.” The minister gave him the address and hung up.
++++
The minister lived in a pleasant but unpretentious apartment building. The deputy commander flashed his badge at the security man in the lobby and dragged himself wearily up the stairs to the second floor. The minister himself opened the door. He welcomed the visitor with a curt nod and led him down a corridor to his study. Seating himself in a leather armchair, the minister gestured to the deputy commander to sit in the chair opposite him. The police officer sat. A small wooden coffee table with Holy Land picture books on it divided the two men.
“I understand you had a run-in with my friend Zalman Kirsh today,” the minister began lightly. He was wearing a light blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark pants and slippers. A grayish sheen of 12 o’clock shadow covered his jowls. He was a slight, energetic man but his inscrutable brown eyes were bleary.
The deputy commander dipped his head in acknowledgement.
“You don’t really believe that Kirsh’s son killed his own daughter?” The deputy commander wasn’t certain if it was a statement or a question. “I mean it’s preposterous. It’s outrageous.”
“I do believe it,” he responded.
“What proof do you have?” The minister made no effort to conceal his exasperation.
The deputy commander explained about the kindling under the body, the heaps of sand and the parallel lines of stones. Then he told of seeing the model, with its firewood and ramp and boxes at the corners. As he spoke, he realized how feeble it sounded. He was absolutely convinced of his case but he wasn’t certain that he would buy the argument were the roles reversed. He certainly didn’t expect the minister to buy it.
“The murder weapon was a knife, I understand,” the minister said when the police officer had presented his case.
“The autopsy confirmed that the deceased’s throat had been cut, most likely with a serrated knife such as a hunting knife.”
“Do you have the knife?”
The deputy commander shook his head.
The minister nodded sagely. One to him. “And I understand that the girl was naked when discovered,” he said quietly, a murmur almost. “Have you found her clothes?”
Again, the deputy commander shook his head. Two to the minister.
“And other than these … these stones and pieces of wood,” the minister waved his hand dismissively, “do you have any evidence that Kirsh’s son was at the scene at the time of the murder?”
The deputy commander knew where this line of questioning was going. He tried to head it off.
“Without a warrant I can’t search for evidence,” he said forcefully. “I need a warrant.”
The minister held himself in check. “So let me understand this,” he said patiently. “You have no evidence, no murder weapon, no proof that this person was anywhere near the scene of the crime yet you want to accuse the son of one of the country’s most prominent men of murder?” The irony hung in the air-conditioned room like a mist.
“I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything,” the deputy commander retorted, a little more heatedly than he had intended. “All I want to do is follow up probable cause.”
“Probable cause,” the minister cut in, raising his tone a notch or two above that of the police officer. “What probable cause? A harebrain idea of some biblical sacrifice is probable cause? What are you talking about?”
The deputy commander had feared that he would say that. And the minister was right. He’d have a hard time finding a judge who would issue a warrant.
“I have reason to believe that the father might have been involved,” he said quietly. “All I want to do is follow up a suspicion. No-one is being accused and no-one need know about this. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t pursue it.”
“And you certainly won’t be doing your job any more if you do,” the minister expostulated. He seemed to be tiring of the diplomatic approach.
The deputy commander shrugged his shoulders. Now for the tightening of the screws.
The minister leaned towards the policeman, elbows digging into the armrests of his chair. For the first time, the deputy commander noticed the deep, dark pools under his eyes.
“I practiced the law before entering public service, deputy commander. And since taking office I have had to deal with hundreds of sensitive and difficult cases. In my considered opinion, there is no case. No case. Do you hear me? I cannot let you continue with this nonsense.”
The moment had arrived. The deputy commander looked around the study, considering his options. It was a compact, unprepossessing room. An assortment of books lolled on formica shelving and he noticed silver trophies in a glass-fronted cabinet. He seemed to recall having read that the minister had been a fencer in his younger days. Or was it an archer? Some form of domesticated killing, at any rate. He returned his eyes to the minister.
“Are you ordering me to stop my investigation?”
“I am advising you to stop the investigation.” Suddenly, he lost patience with the stubborn officer. “For God’s sake, man, don’t you understand what you’re doing? This didn’t happen in Tel Aviv or in Herzliya. These people are the salt of the earth; they’re heroes. They spend their lives on the front line, surrounded by our enemies. You can’t go around accusing them of murder, of infanticide, without any evidence. Use your head. Don’t you know what this could lead to?”
He had stood up during the outburst and was standing behind his chair, gripping the back like a lectern.
The deputy commander knew that he had to make a stand.
“I understand the sensitivity of the situation, minister, but I’m not a politician. I’m a policeman. A professional policeman. My job is to uphold the law. That’s the only thing I’m trying to do. To uphold the law.”
The minister didn’t miss the implication.
“No-one is asking you not to uphold the law,” he said soothingly. “That’s the last thing I’d do. The last thing. What I’m saying is that, as a lawyer, I don’t believe you have a case. As a lawyer, not as a politician, you understand? But I can’t close my eyes to what you’re trying to do to a man … to the son of a man who has contributed so much to the state.”
He walked over to the policeman’s chair and stood over him.
“It’s late deputy commander and I’ve had a long day. I understand that the shabak already has a suspect in custody. So, why do we need this? Why do you need it? I understand that you’re one of the most promising officers in the force. I’m sure you’re going to go far. Very far. What do you need this for?”
He held out his hand. The deputy commander suddenly felt an enormous tiredness come over him. He rose to his feet, pushing against the armrests of the chair for leverage. Then he took the minister’s hand. The meeting was over and the decision was now his. He had been left in no doubt as to what was at stake.
Walking down the corridor to the entrance, the minister rested his hand on the policeman’s shoulder.
“Thank you for coming over, deputy commander,” he said sweetly. As they reached the door, he added:
“No-one needs to know we spoke tonight, right?”
++++
The deputy commander turned on the car radio in time to hear the last of the three beeps that preceded the seven o’clock news. The beeps were one of the few constants in his life, he mused. He remembered as a child during the Yom Kippur War how adults would freeze whenever the beeps were heard. Since then, numerous Israeli traditions had fallen by the wayside – it was easier to find a Big Mac than a felafel in Tel Aviv these days – but the beeps announcing the hourly news on Israel Radio were immutable.
His mind meandering, he missed the first news item. The second jolted him back to awareness.
“ … are holding a suspect in the gruesome killing of Yael Kirsh three days ago. The man, an Arab from Jenin, has confessed to murdering the nine-year-old girl, security sources said. He also confessed to participating in the attack on the bus near Ganei Urim seven months ago in which three people died.”
He swung the car to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. Opening the door, he stepped out into the brilliant morning. Only the low stuttering of the motor disturbed the silence. He looked down into the scrubby wadi that dropped to al-Baidat and then rose beyond the terraces to Zalman’s settlement, perched like toy houses on the far hill. Beyond it and to the right, he could make out the killing hill, shimmering slightly in the hazy light. It was going to be another hot day.
It was not that he hadn’t anticipated the announcement. But he had expected at least another day’s grace. A day in which he could somehow, without a warrant and without support, confront Yehuda and prove his case. The shabak must have worked on the Arab during the night. Come to think of it, they probably hadn’t taken him to hospital in the first place. The Arab could have been lying bleeding on the floor of an interrogation room while he was drinking coffee and being duped by the man’s interrogators next door.
The minister and the commissioner, Zalman’s friends, certainly hadn’t taken any chances.
A car stopped abruptly beside him. For a split second he panicked; diving into his car for his weapon.
“You OK?”
The driver was a young man in his twenties, wearing a flak jacket and with the muzzle of a rifle peeking through the open window.
“I’m fine. Thanks.” He felt ridiculous, crouching in the car.
“I wouldn’t stop here, if I were you. Been attacks on this road.”
“I know. I’m on my way.”
“Sorry to scare you.”
The car moved off and the deputy commander sank down behind the steering wheel. He was going to pieces. There had been no reason to panic like that. He shut his eyes and concentrated on controlling his breathing. The radio announcer was concluding an item about forest fires in the Jerusalem hills in which arson was suspected.
The next item concerned two settlers who had been questioned by the police about a recent disturbance in the Samarian village of al-Baidat, during which an Arab girl had died. Sources told Israel Radio that the police were not expected to press charges. He listened without opening his eyes.
It was all wrapped up. Neatly, cleanly just as Zalman knew it would be. They weren’t about to allow the febrile imagination of a district police officer to overturn the apple cart. There was terror to be fought, a country to be run. Enemies within and without. He thought of the girl, a casualty of the war; another dismal victim to add to the roll of the fallen. So be it.
He tried to dredge up the determination, the passion that had compelled him, less than an hour earlier, to set out on this quixotic mission. The quivering excitement he had experienced at seeing the model and deciphering its reproduction on the hill of death. The scorn he had felt for the sweet-talking minister. Nothing. He was beaten. A flat tire on the road to Zalman.
What on earth had possessed him to believe that he could take them on? He flushed, embarrassed and angry with himself. A minor police officer with pretensions. And now, maybe not even that. He had no idea if he still had a job to return to.
He turned the car around and returned the way he had come, driving slowly and enjoying the prickling of the wind on his face. Behind him was the hill with its mysterious sand mounds and path of stones.
++++
The deputy commander saw Yehuda one more time. It was late at night, about six month later, and Zalman’s son was lying on his back a few meters from the road with a single bullet lodged in his shattered skull. Beside him, one finger still curled in the trigger guard, was his father’s pistol.
Yehuda’s body was not visible from the road and the security forces had been on the scene for well over an hour before they came across it while searching the area. What brought them there in the first place was his car, which had been abandoned, its motor still running, on the side of the road, with it’s front wheels lodged in the drainage ditch and the passenger door open. A passing motorist had seen the car and called the police.
Yehuda’s wife, the mother of the murdered girl, was in the front passenger seat. Her neck had been slit through to the spine and her head was lodged between the headrest and the door. Her felt hat had slipped forward over her eyes as if to protect them from the glare of the powerful arc lights that had been erected around the car. The front of her dress was soaked with her blood and a knife, presumably the knife that had been used to slaughter her, lay at her feet.
The security forces had treated it as a terror attack at first, though the circumstances were highly unusual. They had sent out alerts and erected roadblocks at nearby intersections. Only after they found Yehuda’s body and deduced that he had committed suicide after killing his wife did they hand it over to the police. The police handled family crimes.
The coroner was already on the scene and examining Yehuda’s body when the deputy commander arrived. Zalman was there too, surrounded by a shuffling scrum of armed men. His formerly powerful, stocky frame had collapsed like a de-bowled beanbag and was being supported by a younger man. The general hovered over him solicitously.
The ranking cop on the crime scene handed the deputy commander an evidence bag with a folded sheet of paper inside.
“What’s this?”
“Looks like a note. Maybe a suicide note. I found it in his shirt pocket.”
The deputy commander walked over to the area that was lit by the arc lights, pulled on rubber gloves and removed the paper from the bag. He laid the evidence bag on the hood of Yehuda’s car and placed the note on the bag. Then he carefully unfolded it. Blood had soaked a folded corner of the note, creating macabre patterns when it was opened.
It was scribbled in pencil and had neither greeting nor farewell. It appeared to be a few biblical phrases, some of which were illegible due to the bloodstains. The deputy commander thought that it looked more like a private jottings than a suicide note intended for post-mortem examination.
He read Yehuda’s last testament.
“Our daughters have committed whoredom and our wives have committed adultery. … There is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of G-d in the land. We [illegible] swearing and lying and killing and stealing and committing adultery.”
“We have forgotten the law of G-d and our children too have been forgotten. Israel is defiled [illegible] desired mercy not sacrifice.”
“Blood mixes with blood.”
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