by Batya Gur
Michael did not answer him.
“Was it Benny who told you?”
Michael said nothing.
“I’ve never talked about Ras Sudar with another living soul. Never. Not even with Sroul or Benny,” Rubin said, his voice muffled. His blank expression did nothing to keep the immensity of his sorrow from his face.
Michael glanced at the stairs leading to the roof and at the strip of light that emanated from there.
“What is it you want now?” Rubin asked. “You want a story from history? From twenty-four years ago?”
Michael said nothing.
“Benny’s already told you,” Rubin said. “Why are you asking me?”
“Everyone’s got his own version,” Michael said after a long pause. “And every person’s got the right to tell his own version. The differences are more meaningful than the similarities. In any case, that’s surely true here.”
“That means he told you,” Rubin said, his voice filled with contempt. “I always knew he would. He’s weak, there are no two ways about it.”
Michael said nothing.
“All right, you want my version?” Rubin asked. “So you’ll get it. Exactly as it happened,” he said, and his voice had altered as though it really mattered for him to tell these things to, of all people, Michael Ohayon.
Michael sat up straight, and Rubin sat back down next to him. Both sat with their backs to the wall, staring straight ahead. Later, when Emmanuel Shorer asked him why Rubin had agreed to talk, Michael told him that more than all the crimes that had been committed here, there was one wound that was so huge it dwarfed the rest of Rubin’s life. The murders that were intended to quiet the voices and heal the wound did not quiet or heal; instead, they opened the wound even further. And Rubin felt it more than all the others, heavier and more violent than the crimes themselves and all the accusations about to come his way…
“It’s not like it seems,” Rubin said, turning his head to look at Michael’s face. When he saw that nothing had registered there, he continued. “It wasn’t just the two of us or the three of us; we were eight: Benny, Sroul, me; Bin-Nun, who’s since died of a heart attack; David Alboher, downed by a sniper’s bullet; Shlomo Zemah, who left for Brazil, and I for one have never heard about him since; Itzik Buzaglo, killed in a car accident; and Sasson. I have no idea what ever became of him.”
Michael stretched out his legs out in front of him and laid his hands on his knees.
“What do you want?” Rubin asked in a harsh voice.
“Me?” Michael responded. “I want to hear about Ras Sudar during the war, from your own mouth, without any mediators.”
And so they were, at that moment—the killer and the hunter—complete partners in one matter; and this matter was infused more than anything with grief and disappointment.
“Okay,” Rubin said peacefully, his voice now distant and detached. The words seemed to float up to the surface one after another, as if a boulder had been lifted from above them. “We were paratroopers,” Rubin said, “each one a great guy, real quality; idealistic and all that. You and I are about the same age, right?”
Michael nodded silently.
“So you know what I’m talking about,” Rubin said. “You know very well what I mean. Paratroopers, great guys to the last of us. Back then, thirty years ago, I don’t know, it’s tough to explain. What can I tell you? That I wanted to be an officer? That I was filled with militaristic ambitions? That that’s the reason I carried out an order? Was it even possible to disobey an order? Maybe it all happened because of the heat, because we’d already lost so many of our comrades; who knows the real reason why someone does something at a given moment? This is the way it was: they brought us in to guard Egyptian prisoners of war. There were maybe sixty, seventy of them, they were subdued, quiet. They were at our mercy, as the saying goes, bound at their hands and feet. The heat that day in Ras Sudar was insufferable, even though it was October.” Rubin fell silent, then after a moment let out a sound like a moan. “I can see it all now, just like it was yesterday or an hour ago,” he said. “Their eyes were blindfolded. Maybe that was why…”
“That was why…” Michael’s voice echoed Rubin’s, urging him on.
“That was why,” Rubin said, “all of us afterward were able…they were sitting the whole time, we couldn’t see their faces. We gave them water, and that was all. The only one we talked to was the doctor, and that was why we couldn’t…that was why we told him to walk away. And only when he was at a distance…only then, we shot him in the back. I swear I don’t know who it was. We were told, ‘The tanks are on their way.’ We thought that meant Egyptian soldiers were on the hilltops surrounding us. The commander of our platoon, Sasson—there was this command—I don’t know why we refused to carry it out, I don’t know why. The whole affair was so unnecessary that it’s hard for me even to describe it: in the hills there were thousands more Egyptian soldiers, like the sixty or seventy we were guarding, but nobody did a thing about them. Our prisoners? They sat for half a day in the sun, and we gave them water. Then came our orders to move out. ‘Head up north,’ we were told. We said, ‘What are we supposed to do with them?’ So over the transmitter and not…can you believe it, over the transmitter they tell us, ‘Solve the problem.’” Rubin fell silent, staring off into space, while Michael rested his chin on his arms and waited patiently. He caught sight of Shorer’s silhouette at the end of the corridor, listening to every word. Michael had a sharp sense of the gap forming between himself and the observers standing behind the wall as he bonded with Rubin. Rubin was not mistaken in feeling that a deep affinity was forming between him and Michael as he told his story. While he did not forget for a moment that he was a killer only just apprehended, there was something else—no less important—that begged to be said, to be heard by someone who could understand all these matters that perhaps no one would ever understand again.
“Sixty or seventy men were sitting cross-legged in the desert sand, and I’m telling you”—his voice suddenly cracked, and he whimpered—“that this action, having them get to their feet and hustling them into three rows; I can’t forget how they shook their legs after all those hours of sitting,” Rubin said, hiding his face in his hands and sobbing. “It was terrible, terrible to see that. After that we carried out the order and mowed them down with their hands and legs bound and their eyes blindfolded. And after that…”
“After that?” Michael prodded him gently, amazed at the tone of his own voice.
Rubin exhaled noisily, then speaking quickly, said, “After that our tank corps arrived, along with a bulldozer, and they plowed all the bodies into a pit. And the doctor…” He covered his face with his hands again and spoke from behind them. “He…he…he was…” He moved his hands away and looked at Michael. “He was the only one I’d spoken to. In English. The rest of them were faceless…”
“So someone shot him in the back? Who was it?”
“We couldn’t shoot him in the face,” Rubin said, as if he were offering condolences. “He had a face…”
“So who shot him?” Michael persisted. “Sroul?”
Rubin’s head drooped. “No, not Sroul,” he said after a pause. “Sroul didn’t shoot anyone. He didn’t shoot anyone, except for…except those prisoners, the faceless ones, the ones we all shot. Afterward, when Sroul got burned—it was that same night—he thought it was divine punishment, and that’s why he became religious.”
“And no one knew about this whole affair?” Michael asked. “Not even Tirzah, until her last meeting with Sroul in Los Angeles?”
“We never spoke about it,” Rubin said. “Benny and I. Not a word. Not with Sroul over the phone, either, or when I visited him there two years ago. Nothing. Not until Sroul told Tirzah. Because he was sick. He knew his days were numbered. Sroul told her, and when she came back from America, she said, ‘You have a week to get organized. If you don’t come clean with this story on your own, I’ll tell it. To the whole country, on televisi
on, in the papers. I won’t let it remain buried under the sands of Ras Sudar.’”
Michael stared at length at Rubin, then said, his voice full of compassion, “She wasn’t prepared to keep quiet. So you had no choice, you had to kill her.”
“I told her,” Rubin continued, as if he had not heard what Michael said even though he had heard him clearly, “I told her, ‘Tirzah, look what I’ve done with my life since: I’ve been atoning for twenty-four years—twenty-four years! Do you want to turn my whole life into dust? A huge nothing? Completely annihilate me? Don’t you understand what damage you’ll do to everything we’ve been fighting for? You’ll turn us into a laughingstock!’”
“But she wasn’t prepared to keep quiet,” Michael said.
“I came to the Wardrobe Department to persuade her,” Rubin explained. “But she was—how can I put it?—well, it’s well known: she was very stubborn. She was so pure, that Tirzah. She’d started telling things to my mother. My mother’s a Holocaust survivor. ‘You did to them what was done to your mother,’ Tirzah screamed at me. And then I saw red,” Rubin said. “I didn’t want her to…I had no intention…I didn’t want her to die, it was an accident. Something huge and terrible, much bigger than me, suddenly came into the picture. I’m not talking about anger or fear. Not at all. But this huge thing that Tirzah had bungled into so stupidly and innocently—my mother, the Nazis, the murder at Ras Sudar—those are the things that my whole life, our whole lives, are built on—our roots. No one would ever understand that. It was bigger than me and us back when we were ten and twenty years old. It dwarfed us back then when we were supposedly so strong…”
In the blink of an eye Michael could picture, with startling clarity, the line of Rubin’s thought. He shivered suddenly, and just as a feeling of alienation tends to explode into one’s awareness during the greatest moments of ecstasy, so, suddenly, did this thought push its way into Michael’s mind: “And so, in old age, you finally understand what it is to identify: To identify is a moment of identity.”
“We,” said Rubin. He could see clearly the ring of hostility and utter emptiness encircling him, at its center the tiny bubble of light and warmth that had formed between Ohayon and himself. “We, we, we were we, and if you shred this us-ness, all that’s left on each one’s shoulders is a burden too great to bear, literally too great to bear. In this us-ness of ours as the children of parents who came out of the concentration camps and this us-ness of ours as young men standing in the middle of the Sinai Desert facing helpless Egyptians, there flowed something that robbed us of ourselves. When we cried as we listened to ‘The Song of Camaraderie,’ we cried for ourselves and for the lies the song told us. The ‘camaraderie’ we sing about every Remembrance Day, the camaraderie the song tells of, which we ‘Carried without words / Gray, stubborn, silent,’ is what this country and this people saddled us with. We’d thought that the State and the People were a sort of mother and father, when really, no one was there but us, and our own broken-down parents.
“My whole life, our whole lives, are a cover-up for this truth, a cover-up for the murder of our mother and father, and for the murder we committed. It wasn’t exactly a lie; the fig leaf was not a lie, but a culture, a way of life. It was all we had. In fact, what Tirzah wanted to do would have been anarchy. What she was preaching wasn’t even post-Zionism; it was failing to understand the destruction out of which we arose and are, in fact, made. In her purity, Tirzah had preserved that Zionism, that constructive lie. Woe to that purity, that once I was married to, which I loved more than I loved myself. Woe to that purity; now it has overtaken me.”
And he fell silent.
“You pushed her, and the column fell?” Michael asked suddenly.
“I don’t remember exactly,” Rubin said. “I shook her. I held her by the shoulders, and then I grabbed her neck. She wouldn’t shut up, I wanted to shut her up. I wanted her to stop saying that nonsense.”
“And that’s what Matty Cohen saw,” Michael reminded him.
Rubin said nothing.
“He saw you,” Michael said. “At first he thought it was an argument, but in the morning he heard that Tirzah had died, and then he understood the connection to what he had seen. It was only in the morning that he figured it all out, right?”
Rubin said nothing.
“That’s when you put the digoxin in his coffee. Or was it in something else? Did you switch his ampoules? I haven’t figured out exactly if—”
Rubin said nothing. He felt sharply that the bubble of light and warmth between Michael and himself had dissolved. He acknowledged the gravity of the reality that had turned the tables on the feelings of friendship that had brought them close to one another for a moment, but he did not begrudge Michael returning to himself and his duties.
Rubin’s utter loneliness seemed to him more appropriate now than it had ever been before.
“You left the building to meet Tirzah?” Michael asked. “Was the meeting planned?”
Rubin’s head bobbed; it was unclear whether he was affirming Michael’s question.
“When?” Michael asked, persistent. “When did you leave the building? Before midnight or after?”
“Before,” Rubin said in a hushed, muffled voice. “At a quarter to twelve. She was waiting for me.”
“And no one saw you?” Michael asked.
“No one was there, nobody was in the editing rooms; the place was empty except for the newsroom. But they were all busy…”
“What about the guards at the entrance? How did they not see you leave the building?”
“Maybe they did. Sure they did,” Rubin said pensively, closing his eyes, “but there was a basketball game on, and they weren’t paying much attention. I come and go all the time, it wasn’t like someone unfamiliar. I left and returned.”
“How did you get into the String Building?” Michael asked. “From the back entrance?”
“Yes. I have a key.”
“And that’s how you met up with Tirzah, killed her, and managed not to be seen by a soul.”
“No one. There was nobody around,” Rubin said.
“Except for Matty Cohen,” Michael reminded him.
“Yes,” Rubin said, his voice breaking. “He passed by, and I wasn’t sure if he’d…I hoped…I went back to the editing rooms. It was raining, I’d gotten wet. I told them I’d needed to fetch some stuff from my car. In fact, I myself don’t know where I got the resourcefulness from—is that what you’d call it, resourcefulness?” he asked bitterly. “The whole time I kept thinking that…and then Natasha came along…I know,” he said, suddenly coming to life, “you think I’m some kind of monster: kill someone, commit a murder, then go back to work like…like nothing had happened.”
“And in fact that wasn’t the way it happened?” Michael asked matter-of-factly, trying to disguise any trace of irony.
“It was…it was as if I hadn’t been there, as if it weren’t really me,” Rubin said. “I can’t explain it.”
“And what about Zadik?” Michael continued. “Did Sroul tell Zadik?”
“Zadik called me in to his office,” Rubin said, as if stunned by Zadik’s intervention, as though he thought of Zadik as unconnected to the affair; a stranger, a disturbance. “Sroul had been to see him in the morning, and Zadik told me…by telephone, he phoned my office—it was an internal call, which is why you have no record of it, why you knew nothing about this—Zadik called me to his office, and I knew Sroul had been to see him, and I already knew what Zadik wanted to say to me. That’s why I entered through the door from the hallway. I didn’t want Aviva to see me going in, even if I didn’t know beforehand that I…I didn’t know I would need to…but anyway, I entered from the hallway. He told me…he told me I would have to tell the whole world…and suddenly he sounded just like Tirzah. Suddenly…you would think that Zadik…after all, he was such a pragmatist, a guy with no principles. There’s no way of knowing about people….”
From the end of the hallway c
ame the sound of footsteps. Michael could make out the silhouette of Emmanuel Shorer; Rubin fell silent.
“What actually happened with Zadik?” Michael asked. “What was with the drill? Where did all that anger of yours come from?”
“It wasn’t…I…I had no choice,” Rubin explained in a choked voice, averting his gaze. “He sent me into despair, I simply went berserk—that’s the only way to describe it. He’d told me over the phone that Sroul had been to see him, he said, ‘I’ve got a clear picture of what’s happened here, Rubin. Come in to my office right away so we can decide together what to do.’ Well, I understood that was the end of me. I didn’t mean to…I didn’t know how…on a hunch I entered through the door from the hallway, I didn’t want anyone to even see me going in there. Only when I was already in the office, at first from behind, with the big ashtray…and when he fell, I bashed him again. It was only after that that I put on the technician’s overalls and picked up the drill. I didn’t have a…I can see exactly how you’re taking all this in. I think I can even explain it all, but never mind, it doesn’t matter. In any case, nobody’s going to think they have anything to learn from me anymore.” He fell silent, and his head drooped.
“And what about Sroul? Your childhood friend Sroul?” Michael asked. “Was he asphyxiated when you took away the oxygen mask, or did you actually have to strangle him?”
“He was already dying,” Rubin said in a voice that rose from the depths; “it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“So, we started with three great guys of real quality,” Michael said as though reciting “Ten Little Indians.” “One went on to be a defender of the weak and disenfranchised, one became an Orthodox Jew, and one brings the stories of Agnon to the screen.”
He looked up to find Shorer standing in front of him. “Did you hear all that? Did you get it?”
“No,” Shorer said quietly. “That’s not the story. It just seems to you as if that’s the story.”
“What?” Michael asked, astonished. “I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
