The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  “The subject spent a routine day—”

  “Yochi!” Shamgar shouts. I press ‘PAUSE’. “Yochanan Sfard!”

  That’s right. Yochanan Sfard was tasked a year earlier with creating the Lehi’s intelligence system out of nothing, a task he had done magnificently well, and would soon become one of the Lehi’s legendary leaders. Sfard and Shamgar would be friends, though not close friends, for most of the fifties, until Sfard develops cancer and dies in 1962.

  “Go on,” Shamgar orders me. “This is unbelievable. Go on, go on!”

  I rewind a bit, and press ‘PLAY’.

  “The subject spent a routine day in her home—” Sfard is saying.

  “Don’t call her ‘the subject’,” Shmuelevitch interrupts. “She’s got a name, and this isn’t about the resistance.”

  “Elizabeth,” the young Sfard amends his statement, “was at her friend’s house all day and all the previous night.”

  “‘Elizabeth’?” Shamgar whispers to himself. It sounds familiar, but he hasn’t put the pieces together yet.

  “At six she began to dress for an auspicious occasion,” Sfard continues to report.

  “Yes?” Shmuelevitch said.

  “What are they talking about?” Shamgar whispers to me.

  “Listen!” I say.

  “At seven she met with Colonel Tanner at Chaled’s fish restaurant at the Jaffa pier.”

  “She met with him?” Shmuelevitch’s voice is wound tight.

  “They ate for an hour,” Sfard continues the report. “They seemed... amicable. Smiling a lot. Intimate in nature.”

  “Yes?” It is as if Shmuelevitch was gritting his teeth.

  “They left together, and took a long walk on the beach to his house.”

  “Colonel Tanner’s house?”

  “Right.”

  Shamgar squints and looks at me. “There were two Elizabeths?”

  I shake my head and raise a finger, indicating there was only one.

  “She stayed the night at his place... At their place.”

  Shamgar touches his cheek. “Tanner’s wife was living at her friend’s house? Why were they following her?”

  “Listen,” I say.

  “At eight twenty seven p.m. I took a risk and looked through the window. They were in the middle of a... sexual act. Then I—”

  “All right, all right,” the young Shmuelevitch interrupts him. “Thank you. We got the data we wanted.”

  “We certainly did.”

  There is silence for a long time, then a chair is pushed back on the floor quickly: Shmuelevitch had gotten up suddenly, no longer able to sit down, “She told me she was never coming back to him. She told me it was over. She said she felt revulsion when he was near her. I felt she was...”

  Shamgar looks at me, horrified. “Are you saying they had an affair?”

  “I’m not saying anything. What we’re hearing is what happened.”

  Shamgar listens. “Why am I not hearing anything?”

  “There’s quiet,” I said. “Listen.”

  All we can hear is more and more vendors setting up shop in the street. The muezzin had finished his prayer. The silence lasts for more than a minute, in which I could see Shamgar’s impatience grow.

  Then, finally, we heard Shmuelevitch’s voice. “Yochi, Yochi... I can’t let this happen. I can’t lose her. I can’t lose her to him. I can’t let her do that. I can’t think when she’s... I would die if she was...” And as if we could hear the wheels turning, one thought of death becomes another thought of death, “I’m going to kill him! He’s not going to take my woman from me!”

  “No,” Shamgar says.

  “You know I’ve always thought we should kill high-profile British soldiers,” Sfard says. “And who’s more high-profile than Colonel Tanner? You’re too fearful of killing the British.”

  “No no no,” Shamgar shakes his head.

  “Yes... Yes...” Shmuelevitch says. “We should kill them. You’re right. It will send a message to the Brits!”

  “It will.”

  “That we’re powerful.”

  “Yes.”

  “No!” Shamgar shouts. His eyes were screaming.

  The recording continues, “That we’re not ones to be messed with.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. All right. Let me think. I need a devoted soldier, one willing to die for the cause. A brave soldier.”

  “No! False! No! False!” Shamgar is shaking his head almost uncontrollably.

  “I’ve got just the man for you. Aryeh Shamgar.”

  “He’s young, isn’t he?”

  “Not as much as the others. He’s been around. He has nerves of steel. And he’s been begging me for some real action. And... he’s disposable.”

  “Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies!” Shamgar slams his open hands on the table, and then buries his face in them.

  “Yes... Yes...” Shmuelevitch is excited. “All right. I’ll start planning. I want Colonel Tanner’s complete itinerary for the next few days. I need to know where and when would be the best place to strike.”

  “I’ll have it for you in two hours.”

  “Excellent.”

  “We are not going to rest until that man is dead.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “No, we’re not. Now go. You have a job to do.”

  There are noises of people walking on stone, and then a door closing. Shamgar is looking at me. I look down. The recording isn’t over.

  Without warning, we hear Shmuelevitch scream, “Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore!”

  Shamgar’s mouth opens in horror. “No! No! No!” And then Shamgar shouts at the screen, “What are you doing?!”

  “Whore! Whore! Whore!” the screen shouts back, joined by the clear sound of furniture being thrown against the walls then kicked around. “Whore! Whore! Whore!”

  I press ‘PAUSE’. “That goes on for a while. Then there’s a long silence. And then he begins to plan the pieces to allow for the assassination.”

  Shamgar’s mouth is puckered tight, and he is shaking his head. He looks to the right. He looks to the left. His fingers begin to drum on the table. “It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It must be a lie. There is no way... You forged their voices somehow. You..”

  “I assure you—”

  He raises his hand to silence me. “I want to hear it again,” he says.

  His cheeks are red and puffy. I keep my calm. “All right.”

  I press a few buttons, and the recording is played again.

  As he listens to it again, his eyes seem to sear through whatever they are focused at. I follow their gaze, but they are not focused on anything in the room. They are focused on the past. They are searing through to the past, just as our technology does.

  “Again. I want to hear it again,” he says once the recording has played through.

  He listens again. And he listens again. And he listens again.

  The more he listens, the more awake he seems. The more he listens, the shorter his breathing. The more he listens, the redder his cheeks. A vein in his neck I hadn’t noticed before is making its presence known: His heartbeat is rising. I try to time it, in my head. Around 130 a minute. Not good. Not for a ninety-year-old man.

  After five times, in the middle of the recording, he raises his hand and says, “That’s enough.”

  Immediately, I fumble with the remote, find the button, and press ‘PAUSE’.

  He looks at me. His eyes are shaking. His body is shaking. His fingers are shaking.

  He looks away from me, and at the table. He looks at his trembling hands. He reaches for his pocket. For a second, I think he’s reaching for a gun. But of course he isn’t. He takes out his cell phone, opens it, is about to push a button – probably to call his wife – when he hesitates. Then he throws the cell phone at the wall. “Traitors! Fucking traitors!” he yells.

  He looks down, gathering his breath.

  Then he looks up, straight at me. His eyes are clear,
not trembling, sharp – even sharper than when he had come in. Without moving his eyes, I can see that he is no longer looking at me but at the mirror behind me. “You’ve had your fun. You took your shot, got your blood, and now you have your victory. Do you really need to keep filming this?”

  I look behind me, at the mirror, and get a chill. It’s true. Why do we need to film an old man lose his life purpose? What historical purpose does that serve?

  “Cut the feed,” I say. “Stop the camera.”

  I hear voices on the other side.

  “Stop the camera,” I say.

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

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

  ~

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

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

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

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

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

  ~

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

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

  Then he sinks into silence again, his eyes closed.

  ~

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry.” He looks aside, ashamed.

  ~

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

  “I assure you, the tech—”

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

  I nod. “All right.”

  I reach for the remote.

  ~

  The original track begins to play.

  “Louder,” he says.

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

  I turn up the volume.

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

  And a few seconds later, “Louder!”

  “Louder!”

  “Louder!”

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

  ~

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

  I look at the remote and press ‘STOP’.

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

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

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes.”

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

  “Stay away from me!”

  “Shall I call an ambulance?”

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

  He slaps it out of my hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Wary, I sit down.

  ~

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

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

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

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

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

  ~

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

  “No, I—”

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

  I shake my head. “No, no, I don’t!”

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

  ~

  Music begins to play.

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

  He tries to bend down to reach it.

  “I’ll get it for you,” I leap up.

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll pay for a cab,” I say.

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

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

  His hand rests over it.

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

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

  ~

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

  I look up, the question in my eyes.

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

  “Whose daughter?”

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

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

  “How was she?” I say.

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

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

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

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

  “She say anything important?”

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

  “Yeah.”

  “But, the thing is...”

  “Yeah?”