Cut Throat Dog

by Joshua Sobol

  Trust her, recommends Shakespeare. Let her take the lead.

  How did we get here? Yadanuga tries to return to reality.

  It all began from me abandoning you to Mona’s mercies, Shakespeare offers him a starting point and leaves it to him to choose between the present abandonment and the one that took place a quarter of a century ago, when he set out on the suicide mission in the snowy mountains of Norway.

  Yes, says Yadanuga. This time his tone is conciliatory, philosophical, suffused with a kind of aesthetic indifference, as if they were talking about the sexual habits of the lizard-fish.

  Imagine that I took your side, suggests Shakespeare. That I forced Mona to accept your idea. You would have been satisfied. You wouldn’t have invited me to come with you, we wouldn’t have ridden on your motorbike to the prostitutes’ beach, we wouldn’t have run on the sand, we wouldn’t have fought, we wouldn’t have gone wild, we wouldn’t have breathed the sea air, and our blood wouldn’t have sent ions of iodine to our nervous system, and then we wouldn’t have become hungry for fish and wine, we wouldn’t have arrived at this restaurant, and you wouldn’t have met your Talitha.

  Interesting, Yadanuga maintains his philosophical tone and ignores the ‘your Talitha’, interesting how things happen in life.

  On condition that we’re there when they happen, puts in Shakespeare.

  Yadanuga sips the golden liquid from which a sweet, pleasant smell, reminiscent of an English fruit cake, rises and spreads, gradually evaporating and developing into a bitter conclusion, like the insight which now enters his mind, that this noble single malt, with every sip, presents you with the taste of an entire life cycle, from the smoke of youth, through the ripe sweetness of middle age, where he is now, up to the rich bitterness of old age, which is approaching fast in order to put an end to the whole affair—and he wants to share this new insight with his companion, and he takes a deep breath, raises his glass, examines the reflection of the light in the golden liquid, and says in one breath:

  I’m glad that we finally found the courage to talk about something we’ve never talked about in our whole lives.

  It’s not a question of courage, says Shakespeare.

  Of what then? The wisdom of old age?

  God forbid, says Shakespeare. Once we were silent, because we were foolish enough to think that we were wise. Today we are wise enough at least to know how foolish we were.

  Were? Yadanuga grins. And what are we now?

  We’re not wise enough yet to know what fools we are now, Shakespeare agrees with his friend, but if we live a little longer perhaps one day we’ll know that too.

  And what in your opinion can we know in the place we’re at today? asks Yadanuga, and Shakespeare replies:

  Today we can know that every execution we carried out was tantamount to street theater.

  Street theater? You’ll have to explain yourself.

  Our executions provided entertainment for the mob that adored us when we turned the television screen for its sake into the hangman’s square. When the news arrived of another murderer whose mattress exploded underneath him in a hotel in Athens, or another terrorist who went up in smoke when he ignited his Renault 16 next to the Luxembourg Gardens, the mob would gather in the evening round the court of justice of our day, in other words the television screen, to celebrate the execution with beer and popcorn, and to applaud the anonymous hangmen who carried out the job professionally and skillfully. But beware, my friend: the very same mob will change its attitude and tear the hangman to pieces on the day he removes the electronic hood from his head and dares to show his human face on the television screen; on the day he informs the mob intoxicated by the blood of his decision to take early retirement from the hangman’s job. And God help him if at the same time he takes the opportunity to express his doubts as to the power of the death sentence to deter future murderers. Because the mob is still a long way from reaching the conclusions reached by its hangmen.

  What are you trying to say, wonders Yadanuga.

  I don’t know, Shakespeare admits. I simply went with the words and let them lead me where they would.

  Are you trying to say that everything we did was just part of some bloody carnival?

  If that’s what you understood, then apparently that’s what the words said, Shakespeare accepts the interpretation.

  But you also say that there’s no avoiding this bloody carnival, because the mob needs it.

  Apparently, agrees Shakespeare. The carnival of blood is apparently a vital part of the play in which we played the part of the hangmen.

  So what can the hangmen do at this stage? wonders Yadanuga.

  59

  Nothing, says Talitha, who joins their table bringing with her three double shots of Lagavulin, hangmen, like everybody else, can only play the roles assigned to them.

  Until when? Yadanuga asks the young woman who sits down at his left hand with all the naturalness and intimacy that exists between two people accepting their mutual attraction.

  Until the play is over, says Talitha and raises her glass and clinks it with Shakespeare’s glass, and then with Yadanuga’s, and toasts ‘Lehayim’, and sips the whiskey, her laughing eyes gazing intently and with undisguised delight into the childlike eyes of the man with the mane of gray hair.

  What a stinking drink! She pulls a face. How can you bear to drink it?

  With memories, says Yadanuga in a deep voice, with blood, sweat and tears.

  It smells like the stuff used to disinfect chicken coops, states Talitha, wrinkling her nose.

  Where do you know about chicken coops from? asks Yadanuga.

  Have you forgotten that Shakespeare brought me from a farm? replies Talitha.

  Let me smell, Yadanuga buries his nose in the golden wheat of her hair and confirms: right, from a farm. But which one?

  A funny farm for old men, she laughs. Don’t take it to heart, I’m only joking. The truth is that I have cousins in Ramot-Hashavim, who have a hatchery and a brooder house. When I was a child I used to spend my summer vacations there. Between one batch of chicks and the next they would disinfect the coop with something that smelled like this whiskey. Afterwards they would spread sawdust over the cement floor before bringing in the new batch of chicks. The air would fill with the soft cheeping of hundreds of chicks, who would gather under tin heaters in the shape of wide pyramids, where it was warm and cozy.

  And what kind of taste do you have in your mouth now? inquires Yadanuga.

  Actually a warm, sweet taste, like carobs, she sounds surprised.

  In a minute the bitterness will hit you, Yadanuga prepares her for the development of the taste of the golden liquid from Scotland.

  Whoa! confirms Talitha and grips Yadanuga’s tender hand. Awesome! Really awesome!

  And what do you really do, apart from waitressing? asks Yadanuga.

  Exactly what Shakespeare said, she laughs, I’m an actress.

  We saw the way you acted Winnie, says Shakespeare. Not bad at all.

  The truth is that I’m not quite an actress yet. I’m studying acting. In my third year.

  Do you have a steady job here? asks Yadanuga.

  The truth is that this is my last day here. From tomorrow I’m in Eilat.

  With friends? probes Yadanuga.

  Alone, she says. But before things get complicated, I have to confess that I’m not from a family of hangmen. My parents are doctors, and my grandfather was a doctor too.

  Dear oh dear, says Yadanuga, what are we going to do now?

  Just a minute, Shakespeare intervenes, what kind of doctors?

  My father specializes in back surgery, and my grandfather is an anatomist and a well known pathologist.

  Excellent! exclaims Shakespeare.

  What’s so excellent about it? demands Talitha.

  At this hesitant stage of the development of the relationship Shakespeare hurries to inform his astonished listeners that the profession of modern surgery is closely connected to t
hat of the hangman. Since the Middle Ages, and on the threshold of the modern age, when the hangmen also carried out the sentences of amputation of the fingers, cutting off of the hands, and dislocation of the shoulders of those convicted of petty crimes, they had to be well versed in the anatomy of the skeleton, the muscles and the blood vessels, for a hangman who inadvertently caused the death of a person sentenced to have his hand amputated, risked being severely punished himself by having his arm cut off, and there was a well known case of a hangman from Klagenfurt, who was condemned to death after having caused the death of a man sentenced to have his arm amputated. And if this wasn’t enough, it turned out that doctors and anatomists kept in close touch with hangmen, so that the latter would put at their disposal, for a fee, the bodies of those condemned to death who had no relatives to claim their bodies. But the close connections between the hangmen and the physicians didn’t end there, for when the profession of hangman began to decline, and the execution of the death sentence was transferred from the gallows of the public square to the dungeons of the prison houses, hangmen were obliged to look for a new profession, and since the traditions of their calling had gained them a detailed knowledge of anatomy, many of them naturally turned to the profession of medicine, and ancient dynasties of hangmen produced dynasties no less illustrious of medical men, especially in the fields of anatomy, pathology and surgery. Thus the ‘killer’ became a ‘healer’, and from the philosophical point of view this is not surprising—for who is better qualified to rescue mortal men from the claws of death than the Angel of Death himself? And from where will the healers of the soul of a human society afflicted with the syndrome of the dance of death come, if not from the ranks of the hangmen carefully selected and trained by this same society to regale them with the rituals of the carnival of blood to which they have become addicted, the spectacles which have become one of the needs of the soul spoken of by the Jewish philosopher Simone Weil who sought death in the Spanish civil war—but who, in her ineptitude, one night walked straight into a cauldron of boiling oil in which some members of the International Brigade were frying chips on the Gerona front, and to her shame and disgrace forced her Yiddishe Mama to take a taxi from Paris to the Spanish front in order to collect her revolutionary daughter and take her back to the warm bosom of her bourgeois family in the sixteenth arrondissement, which annoyed her to such an extent that she became a fan of Hitler’s out of spite. And she didn’t rest until she killed herself in a fit of anorexia in the refuge which her mother imposed on her when the family fled to England for fear of the Nazis who invaded France, otherwise she would presumably have landed up in Auschwitz, where she would have marched happily into the gas chambers, just as she had marched into the cauldron of boiling oil, and thus fulfilled the dream of her executioners, who would have been delighted to see their victims becoming their own executioners, in order to prove the rule that the work of the wicked in always done by the righteous, and in certain cases even by the victims themselves—

  Shakespeare! Yadanuga tries to stop the gush of words.

  Leave him be! Talitha puts her hand on Yadanuga’s hand, it’s fascinating!

  But what fascinates Shakespeare at that moment is the sensual touch of the surgeon’s daughter’s fingers on the back of the hairy joints of the fingers of his friend the hangman, and when he sees the dialog of the fingers continuing longer than necessary, he notes to himself that the hangman of hearts is performing his role faithfully—

  60

  His reflections are interrupted by the cell phone which is fluttering in his palm again like a butterfly, and Timberlake says to him in a voice trembling with terror:

  Bill? Tony left me a terrible message on my voice mail.

  What did he say to you? asks Shakespeare.

  I can’t repeat it, she sobs in a broken voice.

  Calm down and tell me exactly what he said to you.

  He said he would cut out my tongue with a box cutter, and he would sit next to me and watch the color draining from my face, and he promised me that while it was happening he would sing to me in his lyrical tenor, and I know that he means everything he says.

  He can’t do it, Shakespeare tries to calm her down, he doesn’t know where you are.

  I’m afraid that he does know, her voice trembles over the phone. I guess the deaf-mute must have seen me.

  Where? asks Bill.

  In front of the house, she says.

  Did you go to the old apartment?

  No, it happened next to the new apartment.

  What happened exactly?

  I got out of a taxi, and before I went into the building I suddenly saw someone in a car photographing me with a little video camera. When he saw me looking at him, he drove off. Bill, she pleads, this is a real body crying and shaking with fear over here, this is a real person calling for help, and not a ghost, Bill! I have no one in the world to protect me. Come and rescue me, Bill, before all that’s left is my voice in your memory.

  Listen carefully to what I’m telling you, Shakespeare calms the sobs shaking his cell phone. Dress like a man, go down to the street, don’t stop the first cab that comes. If it stops, don’t get in. Let a few cabs go past, and only then stop one. After changing cabs at least twice on the way, take a room in my hotel in the name on the document I gave you. Don’t open the door to anyone. I’m getting on a plane in four hours’ time, and at six a.m. I’ll be landing at Kennedy. I’ll arrive at the hotel between half past seven and eight. Should I go over that again?

  No need, she says, I remember it all.

  I’ll see you tomorrow.

  Have a nice flight, she says and hangs up.

  Shakespeare clicks a number.

  Hello, Tony? He says in a businesslike tone, if you want to see Winnie, and if you’ve got the balls, go to Shakespeare, New Mexico, and wait for my call. I’ll contact you within twenty four hours and give you exact instructions where to go.

  Son of a bitch, spits Tony’s voice, I’ll finish you.

  I love listening to your voice, says Shakespeare. You have a lyrical tenor as soft as velvet. By the way, I’ll be coming to meet you alone, and unarmed. I want to talk to you face to face. If you have the guts to come to the meeting empty-handed, you won’t be sorry, he concludes the conversation and hangs up.

  Have you got a plane ticket? asks Yadanuga.

  I hope so, replies Shakespeare and dials the computerized ticket service, and clicks the number of the flight. He is asked to give his credit card number and expiry date, receives confirmation, and sighs: That’s it, now I have—

  61

  Two more hours to kill, his legs tell him, waiting impatiently to go into action while his eyes see the black Hummer, wide as a toad, driving slowly down the slope on the other side of the canyon and approaching the deep ravine, whose steep walls are impassable by vehicular traffic. The Hummer stops on the verge of the escarpment, exactly where Hanina indicated, between the many-armed yucca plant and the pine tree, the bittersweet taste of whose nuts fills the mouth of the country lad from the hills of Jerusalem.

  The man who gets out of the Hummer is wearing fashionable khaki pants, an imitation of army trousers with four side pockets and two back pockets, and a matching safari jacket. At the distance of one thousand, three hundred and thirty-two steps separating them at this moment it’s hard to tell if he is indeed the man in the black cashmere suit from the Irish pub who had brought him on this journey, which would reach its end in one and a half or two hours. The voice that had answered him on the cell phone that morning, after Hanina had warned him that if he showed up with anyone else, the meeting would not take place, and he would never see Winnie again, was without a doubt the lyrical tenor that had been seared into his memory years before, when he had listened to it for hours in recorded conversations.

  If so, this Tony is none other than Tino the Syrian, in other words, Adonis. Hanina endeavors to convince himself and get rid of any lingering doubt in his heart, but the heart has its reason
s of which reason knows nothing, in the words of the philosopher who according to rumor cut his reflections up with scissors and mixed them up in a box, in order to avoid imposing a forced order on them, so that they would sit in the box in the same muddle as that which exists in our brain, where our thoughts are not arranged in any kind of order either, but rise up from the darkness and disappear back into it, and if you allow your brain to operate in its own way, you never know what thought will surface in the next second. For instance, that very possibly this man, who has just stepped out of the Hummer, has nothing at all to do with the Adonis who murdered Jonas, and if so, are you about to confront someone you didn’t know from a bar of soap before your paths crossed on Christmas Eve in New York?

  Hanina raises the miniature digital telescope he wears on a strap on his right wrist to his eyes.

  The guy, who in the meantime has taken a few steps away from his vehicle, is holding an assault rifle, which looks from a distance like an AKS-74, equipped with telescopic sights and an unusually long barrel. Hanina notes that this rifle, when it has a regular barrel sixteen and a half inches long, can kill at a range of 1350 meters, one and a half times the distance separating them now. He trains the miniature telescope on the lower half of the man’s body, and discovers that in addition to the assault rifle, he is also carrying a large revolver, in a holster attached to his right thigh. Strapped to his right calf, below the holster, a little above his pseudo military boots, is a black sheath, from which the handle of a hunting knife peeks out. The latest model field glasses hang round his neck. The man armed to the teeth from top to toe goes up to the edge of the canyon to see if he can drive down to the bed of the creek in his car. Hanina presses 9 for speed dial. The guy reaches for the pouch attached to his belt and takes out his cell phone. He puts it to his ear.