Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  No one asked me what I was doing at Bezalel. Just like my army-service, I took art school as a given. What I did best was drawing, what I enjoyed most was drawing, much of the little that I had to say I said in my drawings (after I’d finished with my comics), and it was obvious that what I wanted to study was art. At the best art school in the country, of course, and that’s what Bezalel was made out to be. I had an accurate hand and a good eye even before I went to high school, where it was clear that I’d major in art. My parents were more interested in my second major, biology, perhaps because they hoped I’d become a doctor, or an agronomist like my father. But I was only interested in biology because I had a distinct sense, from the time I was a boy, that like any other animal I was a machine: I wanted to understand how that machine worked and what made it go. At the time, I painted a lot of animals, and animal-human hybrids. My apes in funny poses with human faces – especially if they looked like one of our teachers – were a big hit with my friends.

  I arrived at Bezalel more prepared than most of the other students in the department, and no one had any reservations about the level of my work, but that didn’t make me popular. I didn’t understand why they had a problem with me or what attracted them to the opposite type, of whom there were plenty: guys who were all thumbs and had very little talent, but wore long coats and long scarves and preferably had long hair too.

  My graduate studies for the most part took place in an artists’ workshop complex in south Tel Aviv, which was always abandoned by all its denizens whenever there was some protest somewhere for or against something that was either vital or fatal to democracy or peace. I would go on working alone in the deserted studio, and my fellow students drew their own conclusions about me.

  Apparently, it was not only my unfashionable patriotism that stopped me from being “one of the gang” but also my positions on art in general and painting in particular. I’d always believed that an accurate hand and a sharp eye were essential to an artist, whereas here I discovered that these were no more than marginal elements in what was perceived as artistic skill. My teachers and fellow students would speak of “the meeting point between the world of art and postmodernist theories”, on “stratification and variation in the world of art” – phrases that found expression in abstract paintings and sculptures or spectacular installations, behind which there was neither skill nor true philosophical depth.

  I was a little surprised when I found that the various curators and gallery managers I spoke to about the possibility of showing my work knew not only about my “conservative” style but also more about my politics than I did myself. And it’s well known that a conservative or, heaven forfend, a nationalistic-minded person (or a fascist, to use the explicit epithet in use hereabouts), is a ruffian, and his hand must be pretty rough too, so it cannot be that his pictures are beautiful, or subtle, or worthy.

  I don’t think of myself as a conservative and, although I have never marched in a Gay Pride parade or taken part in any kind of women’s-lib or homo-lesbian happening, I am not perturbed by any orientation, religion, “ism” or conduct that doesn’t harm anyone else. And at least since the end of my adolescence, when I stopped making my Israman comics, I had never been nationalistic. It was clear to me that I must give my utmost during my military service, because I never had any doubt that without a strong army our state could not survive.

  I served in the combat engineering corps because I wasn’t accepted for the pilots’ course. I never put in for special ops units because I’m thickset and I find running long distances difficult. I didn’t want to go into the tank corps because of my fragmentary childhood memories of my father in hospital and the years-long rehab process he underwent after being wounded during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Taking all this into account, the best place I could serve was in combat engineering.

  I never let my opinions cross my lips, because I knew how superficial they would sound, and I wasn’t articulate enough to argue with my colleagues, who were all absolutely certain that the evils of the occupation of Palestinian lands were to blame for the absence of peace and brotherhood in our region. For them, and to a certain extent for me too, the period prior to the Six-Day War in June 1967, before those lands were conquered but when peace was as far off as ever, was shrouded in a fog of ignorance.

  But I was “a child of the winter of ’73”, in the words of an Israeli song. My parents conceived me in pain, after my father came home, a broken, weary and burned man. He had been wounded when his tank was hit. He changed tanks and was wounded again, earning a citation that he never bothered to collect. Secrecy enveloped that period, and the cloud it emitted and that enveloped my childhood contained an anxiety that merged with the anxieties of my father’s parents who survived Nazi death camps when they were young and met after World War II in a displaced persons camp. There they conceived twins, only one of whom apparently survived. My father never ever mentioned his brother, and I assumed that he’d died over there, in the camp. For me, as a child, Auschwitz and Majdanek were links in the same chain as the battle to block the invading Egyptian forces in Sinai. My grandparents’ survival and the wounding and heroism of my father were only elusive specks of light in a dark continuum of pain.

  “We don’t speak about that,” my father told me emphatically when I asked any question that threatened to penetrate the invisible circle of secrecy. From childhood, I was trained not to ask.

  Once, when I was stealing a glimpse at my parents’ photo albums, I found a whole package of cropped photographs. In each one, my father was with one of his parents and the other was missing, but here and there a little hand had stolen into the remaining half. I took them to my mother. She put her finger to her lips and I was blocked even before the question left my mouth. During the shiva mourning period after my grandmother died, I found some photographs of her and my grandfather in the drawer of her bedside cabinet, in the “White City” of Tel Aviv in the 1950s. They looked young and lean and were holding two babies but, as I was wondering which one was my father, he came and snatched the pictures away, almost violently. I never saw them again and I never dared to ask about them. I understood only that the death of the twin brother, who would have been my uncle, had happened later than I’d thought and apparently had been all the more painful.

  These things happened during my early childhood and my memories of them are blurred. Auschwitz and Majdanek, and the near-destruction of the Third Jewish Commonwealth (as the historically minded call the modern State of Israel) in the Yom Kippur War, were the real story, overshadowing the mysterious details of the family story, which took second place behind the sense of menace, if not terror, that hovered around those events. The cloud that enveloped me from my early childhood was a cloud of existential apprehension that allowed for only one certainty: if we are not strong, if we are not prepared to fight, we will be destroyed.

  And so, instead of drawing landscapes or girls, I drew Israman. And although I was slow-moving and a little clumsy, strong but not athletic, I became a combat soldier. For the sake of my father, my grandfather, the state and the nation. “The state” in this sense was my neighbour-hood in Haifa, and “the nation” was my extended family, perhaps also neighbours and friends. For me it was natural, although it might sound a little strange, that my state and nation included my friends from Abbas Street, chiefly Arabs, with whom I spent most of my time. And then we moved away from the street that climbs from the lower city towards Stella Maris, the Carmelite Monastery on the hill. For two years we lived in Canada, where my father did advanced studies in forestry, and when we returned to Israel, it was to a neighbourhood high on Mt. Carmel.

  I wasn’t concerned with finding definitions for my views, but because I never thought that our country or our people were better than the others, and even on the matter of the occupied territories I had very pragmatic opinions, I certainly was not nationalistic. I could have been defined as security-minded, but only people with fine judgement could see a dif
ference between the two, and my fellow students saved their fine judgement for other matters.

  My artistic talents were, needless to say, more clearly seen in my later works, but at the age of twenty-eight, about thirteen years after I drew them and ten years after I joined the army, and when I was almost recognized as an artist, I did not want to give up on the content of my comics. In one of them, Israman appeared on the railway platform, as I imagined it, from which grandpa and grandma were being transported to the camps. He smashed the heads of the Germans and liberated all the Jews gathered there to be sent to die. In another comic, he had apparently arrived late, because he hovered in front of the moving train, blocked it with all his might, and released the Jews imprisoned in the freight cars. And when he was even later, he turned up in the death camp itself, knocking the guards out and leading the inmates through the snowy forest to a safe haven.

  I also focused on the War of Independence and the Six- Day War, and in my last comic book on the Yom Kippur War. In the latter, Israman managed to soar over the Suez Canal, bodily diverting the shells that had been mauling the Israeli forces crossing the waterway. Then he used an Egyptian landing craft to scoop water from the canal and douse a certain burning tank and save the life of one of its crew, a man whose face I could have drawn in the dark, and whose groans of pain still echoed in my mind.

  I liked Israman, I believed in the goals he was fighting to achieve, and I did not want to give him up. The negotiation with the gallery owner almost fell through, with him trying to explain how much damage it would cause me, but when I stood my ground he agreed.

  The photocopies of the comic books were fixed to polystyrene boards and I hung them myself, while the curator of the gallery was responsible for the rest. She was a wild-haired redhead, with large breasts and no bra, who for some reason thought it was a given that while we were hanging the exhibition together at night, we’d also hang onto each other for a while.

  Although I’d already been with Dolly for a long time, I didn’t think this was so very wrong. Since my marvellous night with Niki I had completely separated sex and love, and what I had was only sex. Casual, student-type sex, and relationships which lasted until the girl realized we weren’t going anywhere. And if she stayed with me for a while, it was apparently because, after all, I wasn’t bad looking, my face was even quite handsome, and I was also interesting to talk to. They had no reason to run away. But love never waxed, and the sex eventually waned.

  Three years earlier I had celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday with my parents and sisters at a restaurant. My mother asked, with extreme delicacy, if I didn’t have “someone serious”. I said no, and she never asked again. I knew that my parents saw a special importance in generational continuity, but it looked as if they would have to make do with my sisters’ offspring. That’s what I said, but my sisters were already Ben-Abou and Rosenstein, and my taciturn father asked, “So, what about our name, Simhoni?”

  “But dad, it was you who changed the name to Simhoni. You broke away from everything that had gone before, so why does the name matter at all?” I must have been happy with this name, and never asked what it had been back in Europe.

  My father looked at me sadly, disappointed that I didn’t understand. I knew that he was on the verge of saying that what the Nazis had started I was continuing. But his silence said it all. What was I to do to console him? I simply was not able to fall in love. Certainly not enough to think about marriage and children who would bear his family name. I couldn’t think of a logical reason for this, just as there was no logical reason for my sudden infatuation with Niki and that wild sex with her. But logic, it seems, isn’t what counts. There, in Tokyo, there had evidently been a kind of convergence of various factors: that “abroad” feeling that naturally intensifies emotions, my distance and disconnection from the person I had been, my loneliness, my sense of being lost, and of course Niki’s loveliness, her gentleness and diffidence that contrasted so starkly with her startling openness and forthrightness. Niki was now a distant memory that almost never bothered me but, if it had not been for those thirty-six hours in Tokyo, perhaps I would never have known that I could feel so differently and I would have stuck with one or other of my girlfriends. They were really nice.

  It was then that Dolly turned up. She met most of my demands. A good-looking young woman, with both feet (and long, slender legs) on the ground, a captivating smile, and a practicality that was lacking in most of the female artists who’d surrounded me in recent years. She was an investment adviser, an area about which I knew nothing. This did not make her any less otherworldly than the girls of the fine arts faculty, certainly no less exciting a lover. I’d been summoned to a meeting with her by my bank, where she worked, and she told me that it was a waste to leave my money lying in a low-interest deposit account, and that there were much more interesting and profitable things that could be done with it. When I asked what, she asked me if I was daring and ready to take risks. One thing led to another, and we made a date for our next meeting, but away from the bank. I asked if this was standard procedure between an investment adviser and a bank customer, and she said no, but she’d make an exception this time.

  After a few months, I had to reply – to her, to myself, to my parents’ unasked question – that it seemed to be as good as it gets, and we moved in together.

  I am quite an adaptable type, at least when it comes to relationships. My demands from others, and from myself, are minimal, as are my expectations. Most small details don’t matter at all to me – what we’ll have to eat, what film we’ll watch – and I think I’m easy to get along with. Dolly and I got on well. We had similar tastes, she liked my few friends, and I liked the few friends she had. We were a stable couple, and I asked myself if this was enough.

  Despite the Niki episode, as I called that affair when I discussed it with myself, I am no romantic, and my attitude to love is quite mundane, one might say. To my mind each of my emotions served a biological purpose: just as my survival was served by fear on the one hand, and anger and aggression on the other, I assumed that this was true about love as well. Clearly, it’s purpose was to speed up the mating process (when it emerges as falling in love and as lust) and to make coupling easier (when it takes the form of a calmer and more stable love). There was no falling in love here, there was lust, and there were feelings of intimacy which in my opinion made a long-term family relationship possible. But was this enough?

  When Dolly brought it up I told her exactly what I felt. She cried a little, but understood, and she obliged by giving me the time I needed to decide. On the first anniversary of our relationship, she brought it up again. I promised to reply soon. I was busy with the upcoming exhibition, and the school year that had just begun had saddled me with nine art classes a week at the three high schools where I had been teaching since I graduated from art school. I didn’t have the time to weigh up my feelings.

  The quickie with the redheaded curator was the only time I cheated on Dolly, and strangely I didn’t feel bad about it afterwards. But I did feel bad about not feeling bad. As if it was quite natural for something like this to happen if a man and a woman were alone in a small room, in the middle of the night, and they brushed up against each other, once with his head against her buttocks when she was on a ladder hanging something on the wall, and once with her face against his genitals as she was handing him a picture and he was on the ladder. Totally insulated from their relationships outside of this insulated room. Only after it was over – it was done standing up, wild, strong and fast – it occurred to me that I didn’t even know if she was married. When I got home late that night, I was so aroused that I made love to Dolly while she was half asleep.

  It was clear to me that this incident had, somehow, to affect my decision about the future of our relationship, but I still didn’t know how. I put off, for the time being, the possibility of telling Dolly, not because it could have made her get up and leave, but because I thought she didn’t deserve t
o be hurt. And strangely, when it was over and Dolly dozed off on top of me, clinging to me securely and lovingly, I also felt, perhaps for the first time, that I was in love with her. I asked myself if I wasn’t confusing it with pity or a need for forgiveness. But at that moment, after two sexual encounters like these, and the day before my exhibition opened, what I felt most was that I needed some sleep.

  The opening launch of my exhibition began as a joyful occasion for me, my parents and my sisters, although my mother, embarrassed that I was still unmarried, insisted on telling anyone who would listen that Dolly and I were “getting married, only they haven’t yet set the date”. They also didn’t quite get my attraction to painting and they hadn’t really been proud of it, but now they suddenly had something to boast about: a solo show in a Tel Aviv gallery! For them, provincial Haifaites that they were, this was something like a one-man exhibition in an important New York gallery: they even had invited some of their friends to the opening. My sisters and their families, whose celebrations I always attended whereas this was my own very first “event,” were very happy and told me they had bought their kids new clothes for the occasion.

  Friends from Bezalel were also glad for me and told me they would come. We weren’t burdened by baggage from our differences while we were studying, because I’m not the type to bear grudges and they had no cause for grudges – even then I’d lacked the competitiveness that made others fake a smile whenever teachers praised someone else’s artwork. We’d kept in touch, perhaps because, as they said about me, “You can always rely on him.” In the years since graduation I had helped some of them erect installations all over the country, and others to find posts as art teachers, after receiving more offers to my job applications – with portfolios of sketches – than I could handle myself.