Black Box
Page 3
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Dr. A. A. Gideon
16 Hampstead Heath Lane
London NW 3, England
Jerusalem
28.3.76
My dear Alex,
If you think the time has come for me to go to hell, just send me a four-word telegram, “Manfred go to hell,” and I shall be on my way right away. But if, on the other hand, you’ve decided to take a look at a psychiatric ward from the inside, then would you please mind doing so alone, without me. I won’t get any kick out of it.
In accordance with your instructions and against my better judgment, yesterday I unfroze our citrus grove near Binyamina (but not the Zikhron Yaakov property: I haven’t quite taken leave of my senses yet). In any event, I can realize about one hundred thousand U.S. at twenty-four hours’ notice for you and hand it over to your lovely ex-wife’s husband, provided I have your final instructions to that effect.
However, I have permitted myself not to finalize the deal yet, so as to leave you an opportunity to change your mind and cancel your whole Father Christmas act without suffering any loss as yet (apart from my commission).
At least could you kindly let me have urgently some convincing evidence that you haven’t gone stark, staring mad: please excuse, my dear Alex, my caustic language. The only thing I’ve got left to do in the fine situation you’ve put me in is to send you a nice letter of resignation. The trouble is that I’m somewhat fond of you.
As you are well aware, for some thirty years your remarkable father shortened my life, before and during his sclerosis and even after he had already forgotten his own name and my name and how to spell Alex. And no one knows better than you do how hard I worked for five or six years to arrange for you to be appointed sole trustee of all his property, and without three-quarters of it disappearing in inheritance tax or senility tax or some other Bolshevik siphon. The whole exercise brought me—I shall not attempt to hide it from you—a measure of professional satisfaction, a fine apartment in Jerusalem, and even a bit of fun, for which I have paid, it would appear, with an ulcer. But if I had imagined then that in ten years’ time Volodya Gudonski’s one and only son would suddenly start dispensing fortunes to Les Misérables, I wouldn’t have made those titanic efforts to transfer the whole damn dowry intact from madman to madman—for what?
Allow me to inform you, Alex, that the slice that you are intending to hand to that pocket-sized zealot comes, at a rough calculation, to seven or eight percent of everything you own. And how can I be sure that tomorrow you won’t have another brainstorm and decide to parcel out the rest between the Home for Unmarried Fathers and the Shelter for Battered Husbands? And, if it comes to that, why should you give him money at all? Just because he deigned to marry your secondhand ex-wife? Or as emergency aid to the Third World? Or perhaps it’s reparations money for discrimination against Orientals? And if you have gone completely crazy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind making one tiny effort more: Go crazy at a slightly different angle, and leave all your property to my two grandchildren. I’ll arrange it for you without taking any commission. Surely we Germans have suffered here at least as much as the Moroccans have? Didn’t you despise us and trample all over us, you the Frenchified Russian aristocracy from the region of North Binyamina? And don’t leave out of the calculation, Alex, the fact that my grandchildren will invest your fortune in the development of the country! Electronics! Lasers! At least they won’t squander it on restoring ruins in Hebron and turning Arab shithouses into synagogues! For I have to inform you, my dear Alex, that your beloved Mr. Michel-Henri Sommo may be a little man, but he’s a great zealot. Not a noisy zealot, but of the latent variety: soft-spoken, polite, and ruthless. (See, when you can spare a moment, the chapter in your excellent book entitled “Between Fanaticism and Zealotry.”)
I checked Mr. Sommo out yesterday. Here in my office. He earns barely two thousand six hundred pounds a month, of which he contributes a quarter each month to a small national religious splinter group, roughly three fingers to the right of the Greater Israel Movement. Incidentally, you might have thought your dazzling wife, after trying out every fifth man in Jerusalem, had settled in the end for some Gregory Peck—well, it turns out that this Mr. Sommo begins (like the rest of us) on the ground, but he terminates abruptly at five foot three or thereabouts. In other words, he is a good head shorter than she is. Perhaps she bought him cheap, by the yard.
And so this African Bonaparte appears in my office wearing permanent-press slacks, a check jacket a little large for him, curly-haired, uncompromisingly clean-shaven, drenched in radioactive after-shave, sporting gold-rimmed spectacles, a gold watch on a gold watch chain, and a red-and-green necktie fastened with a gold tie-clasp, and on his head—as though to dispel any possible misunderstanding—a small skullcap.
It transpires that the gentleman is far from stupid. Particularly when it comes to money, or to manipulating guilt feelings, or to armor-piercing hints at all sorts of powerful relations he has strategically located in the municipality, the police, his party, and even in the revenue department. I can promise you almost for certain, Alex my dear, that one day you will see this Sommo sitting in Parliament and firing long, devastating patriotic salvos at do-gooders like you and me. So perhaps after all you should be watching out for him, instead of financing him?
Alex. What the hell do you owe them? You, who drove me mad during your divorce, in the best tradition of your deranged father, making me fight like a tiger to make sure she didn’t get a penny out of you, not a roof tile of the villa in Yefe Nof, not even the pen she was eventually forced to sign the papers with! It was only reluctantly that you agreed she could keep her underwear and a few pots and pans, as a special favor, and even then you stubbornly insisted on recording that this was “an ex gratia concession.”
So what’s come over you all of a sudden? Tell me, is somebody threatening you with something by any chance? If so, tell me all about it at once. Treat me like a family doctor. Send me a quick signal—and then you can sit back and watch me making mincemeat of them for you. It’ll be a pleasure.
Listen to me, Alex: The fact is, there’s no reason for me to get involved with your lunatic schemes. I’ve got a nice juicy case on the launching pad right now (concerning the property of the Russian Orthodox Church), and what I make from that, even if I lose it, is worth approximately twice the widow’s mite you have made up your mind to donate as a Passover gift to North African Jewry or the Association for Aging Nymphomaniacs. Go fuck yourself, Alex. Just give me my final instructions, and I’ll hand over whatever you like, whenever you like, to whomever you like. To each according to his greed.
Incidentally, the fact is, Sommo does not whine greedily. On the contrary, he speaks very nicely, in soft, rounded tones, with a smiling, didactic refinement, like a Catholic intellectual. These people have apparently undergone, on the way from Africa to Israel, a thoroughgoing refit in Paris. Outwardly he seems almost more European than you or me. In a nutshell, he could give Emily Post a few lessons in polite behavior.
I ask him, for example, if he has any notion why Professor Gideon is suddenly handing him the keys to the safe. And he smiles at me mildly, a sort of “come on, now” smile, as if I have put a truly childish question to him, beneath his dignity and mine, refuses to take one of my Kents and offers me one of his own Europas, but deigns—possibly as a gesture of Jewish solidarity—to accept a light from me. And he expresses his thanks and shoots me a sort of sharp look, which his gold-rimmed spectacles magnify like the look of an owl at midday: “I am sure Professor Gideon could answer that question better than I can, Mr. Zakheim.”
I contain myself and ask him whether a gift of the magnitude of a hundred thousand dollars does not at the very least arouse his curiosity. To which he replies: “Indeed it does, sir,” and shuts up like a clam. I wait for maybe twenty seconds for him to say something more before giving in and inquiring whether he has by chance any theory of his own on the matter. To which he replies calmly that, yes
, he does indeed, but that, with my permission, he would prefer to hear my own theory.
Well, at this juncture I determine to fire at point-blank range; I put on the grim Zakheim face I use in cross-examinations, and shoot, with little pauses for added effect between the words: “Mr. Sommo. If you don’t mind, my theory is that somebody is putting strong pressure on my client. What you and your friends would call ‘hush money.’ And I am tempted to discover as quickly as possible who, and how, and why.” That ape, unabashed, smiles a sweet, sanctimonious smile at me and replies: “His sense of shame, Mr. Zakheim; that’s the only thing that’s putting pressure on him.” “Shame? On account of what?” I ask, and the answer is ready on the tip of his honeyed tongue even before I’ve finished asking: “For his sins, sir.” “What sins, for example?” “Putting others to shame, for example. Putting people to shame in Judaism is tantamount to shedding their blood.”
“And what are you, sir? Are you the tax collector? The bailiff?”
“Me?” he answers, without batting an eyelid. “My role is a purely symbolic one. Our Professor Gideon is a man of letters. He has a world-wide reputation. He is enormously respected. One might say admired. The only thing is, until he has put right what he has done wrong, all his good deeds count for nothing. Because they are built on sin. Now he is smitten with remorse, and it would seem that he is finally beginning to seek the path to repentance.”
“And you are the keeper of the gate of repentance, Mr. Sommo? You stand there and sell tickets?”
“I married his wife,” he says, fixing me, like a projector, with his eyes magnified three times in the lenses of his spectacles, “I healed her shame. And I also watch over his son’s footsteps.”
“At a price of one hundred dollars a day times thirty years, cash in advance, Mr. Sommo?”
And so, at last, I managed to ruffle his calm. The Parisian patina shattered and the African fury erupted like pus.
“Mr. Zakheim, with all due respect, you earn for your merry japes more money in half an hour than I have seen for all my labors. Kindly take note, Mr. Zakheim, that I did not ask to receive a penny from Professor Gideon. He was the one who offered. And it was not I who asked for the present meeting with you, sir. You asked to meet me. And now”—the little teacher suddenly got to his feet, and I had a momentary feeling that he was about to pick up a ruler from my desk and rap me over the knuckles; without offering his hand, barely concealing his loathing, he ejaculated—“and now, with your kind permission, I shall put an end to this conversation because of your malicious and indecent insinuations.”
And so I hastened to appease him. I effected what you might call an “ethnic withdrawal.” I put the blame on my impossible Germanic sense of humor. I begged him to be kind enough to ignore my unsuccessful joke and consider my last words as unsaid. And I immediately expressed an interest in the financial contribution he had sought from you toward some zealot monkey business in Hebron. Here he adopted an impassioned didactic air as, still standing on his short legs and with field-marshal-like gestures toward the map of the country on the wall of my office, he favored me with a free (apart from my time, which in any case you pay for on his behalf) mini-sermon on the subject of our right to the land, etc. I shall not weary you with matters we both know ad nauseam. The whole thing was embellished with Biblical quotations and allusions, and simplified, to boot, as though he thought me somewhat slow on the uptake.
I inquired of this miniature Maimonides whether he was aware of the fact that your political views happened to be more or less at the other end of the spectrum, and that all these lunatic schemes for Hebron were diametrically opposed to your publicly stated position.
He retained control of himself this time too. (I tell you, Alex, we shall hear more of this mad mahdi!) He replied patiently, in honeyed tones, that in his humble opinion “Dr. Gideon is currently undergoing, like so many other Jews, an experience of purification leading to intimations of repentance which will soon bring about a general change of heart.”
At this point—I shall not try to conceal it from you, my dear Alex—it was my turn to lose my European patina and to explode at him: What, in heaven’s name, gave him the idea that he knew what went on in your mind? How could he have the nerve, without even having met you, to decide for you—perhaps even for all of us—what is going on or what is going to go on in our hearts, even before we know it ourselves?
“Surely Professor Gideon is attempting even now to expiate the sins that stand between man and man. That is the reason why you invited me here to this meeting in your office, Mr. Zakheim. So why should we not take advantage of the occasion to open up, by means of this donation, a way to expiate the sins that divide man from the Almighty?”
And he was not content to leave until he had taken the trouble to explain to me the inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew word for blood, which can also mean money. Ecce homo.
My dear Alex, I hope that you have been duly infuriated on reading this account. Or, better still, that you had a good laugh and changed your mind about the whole business. That was the reason I took the trouble to reconstruct the whole scenario for you. How does the little preacher put it? “The gates of repentance are never closed.” So repent you at once of your strange idea and send the pair of them to hell.
Unless there is something in that old intuition of mine, which whispers to me that somebody somehow has got wind of some embarrassing detail, and this devil—or whoever is hiding behind him—is using it to threaten and blackmail you so as to use your money to buy his silence (and also the ruins of Hebron). If that’s the way of it, I implore you once more to give me the slightest signal and you’ll see how elegantly I defuse their explosive device for you.
Meanwhile, following the instructions in your telegram, I put a small private investigator onto Sommo (our old friend Shlomo Zand), and I attach the report. If you take the trouble to read it attentively, you will no doubt realize that if it comes to intimidation, we also have something to go on, and we can easily persuade the gentleman in question that two can play at that game. Just give me the go-ahead, and I’ll send Zand to him for a nice little tête-à-tête. I guarantee that within ten minutes it’ll be all quiet on the eastern front. You won’t hear another cheep out of them.
So there are three documents enclosed with this letter: (a) Zand’s report on Sommo; (b) Zand’s assistant’s report on the boy B. B.; (c) photocopies of the decision of the Rabbinical Court in the matter of the termination of your marriage and of the decision of the District Court on your lovely’s claim against you. I have underlined the important parts for you in red. But do try not to forget that the whole business ended more than seven years ago, and that now it is no more than ancient history.
So much for what you asked me to do in your telegram. I hope that at least you are pleased with me, because I’m not at all pleased with you. I await further instructions, in my usual humble way. Just don’t go mad, for God’s sake.
Your very anxious
Manfred
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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
YOU HAVE EXCEEDED YOUR AUTHORITY PAY THE HUNDRED PRECISELY INSTANTER AND STOP PESTERING ME ALEX
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A GIDEON NICFOR LONDON
IVE PAID RESIGN FROM HANDLING YOUR AFFAIRS AWAIT IMMEDIATE INSTRUCTIONS ON TRANSFER OF YOUR PAPERS YOU ARE STARK STARING MAD MANFRED ZAKHEIM
PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
YOUR RESIGNATION NOT ACCEPTED TAKE A COLD SHOWER CALM DOWN AND BE A GOOD BOY ALEX
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A GIDEON NICFOR LONDON
MY RESIGNATION STANDS GO TO HELL ZAKHEIM
PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
DONT LEAVE ME IM MISERABLE ALEX
A GIDEON NICFOR LONDON
IM LEAVING THIS EVENING ARRIVE AT NICHOLSONS EARLY MORNING JUST DONT DO ANYTHING STUPID IN THE MEANTIME YOURS MANFRED
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To Michael Sommo
Tarnaz 7
Jerusalem
; Hello Michel. Look Ill come strate to the point with you—I need a lone. Im working hard for your brother in law Abram Abudram, Im shifting crates of vegtibles all day. You can check with him that Im OK. Im happy too because he treats me fare and pays daily and even gives me two meals a day. Thanks for fixing it up. The lone is to by materials to build a do it yourself telescop. Your friend Janin (Mrs. Fuks) as you no also fixed me up as a night watchman (with acomodation) at the Planetarium for nothing. I mean they dont pay me and I dont pay them. But if Im good enough at optikal equipment that Im getting the hang of and theyve got a vacancy their even going to pay me a little. The outcome is I havent hardly got any expenses, only incom. But I want to start on the telescop rite away and the price is 4000 pounds so Im asking you to lend me 3000 (Ive already got 1000 put away). Ill pay you back 300 a month out of my pay, assuming you dont want any interest. If you cant or its just dificult for you forget it never mind. In the meantime I havent killed anyone yet. The only thing Im asking is dont let the woman know anything about it. To you personaly and the little girl all the best. Thanks