“What was he sentenced to?” I asked
”I don’t really remember, I think a number of life sentences, as many as the people who were killed by the bomber.”
“Six people were killed, and more than 80 were wounded.”
“Right, I remember now. He got seven life terms, the seventh for the wounded.”
I thought about my injured students and the other victims, who would have to bear their disabilities for the rest of their lives, about the distraught families I’d seen at the hospital. There was no death penalty in Israel, but it should at least be life with hard labour, I thought, in return for their daily sufferings.
“Do you know how they caught him?” I asked.
“Yes. He sent another suicide bomber, to a Tel Aviv café, but this one was caught, and his interrogation led to Sharitakh.”
“And did they manage to go further up the chain? Do they know who controlled this Sharitakh?” I hadn’t given up on my hope of finding the other end of the chain in Cyprus. My desire for revenge had not died, it had just lain dormant inside me, and now it had awoken.
Moshik, who had turned out to be a friendly fellow who did not make an ideology out of secrecy, apologized. He only happened to know about Sharitakh’s arrest and sentencing, as well as the name of the suicide bomber, because he read every scrap of information about the terrorist organizations, and remembered it all. But it was not part of his direct duties.
I sensed that the capture of the recruiter diminished my motivation ever so slightly. But I well remembered my first talk with Udi. I was not there for personal revenge, but for the general good. I forced myself to overcome that slight drop in motivation. I studied the intelligence material until I knew it by heart: the faces of the objects, the maps of the vicinities of their homes, and the pictures of their houses. Fortunately, this was not a problem for me, as my visual memory was excellent, and just to make sure I also made quick sketches of what I saw in the pictures, sketches that put smiles of satisfaction on the lips of Moshik and Udi. But this was my first mission, so Udi sat with me for hours, going over all the actions I was to execute, stage by stage: what to say at my hotel, how to leave it, how to reach each location, how to photograph my targets, how and when to transmit the material to Israel. Only when he was sure that I had fully grasped my tasks and how to implement them, did Udi send me on my way, with a “See you in Toronto.” I had almost forgotten that the Cyprus assignment was just a stopover, and when I asked him when and how we would meet, he told me he would take care of that. The only rule was that I should not seek him out, but wait until he contacted me.
I knew I’d be away from home for a long and unbroken period of time, during which I would have to refrain from communicating with Israel, except for one phone call to my parents every two weeks, at the most. To do that I’d have to go to a different city, execute the drill for ensuring I wasn’t being tailed, and use a public payphone. Knowing this cast an additional shadow over my separation from mum and dad, and as my departure neared I felt a deep sorrow: I already sensed the imminent loneliness that would be my lot in the coming weeks and months.
Because I would now be making many more trips abroad, usually for short periods, it was decided that my cover story, as far as my parents were concerned, would be that I was still an artist and I was participating in various exhibitions. My few friends were not close enough for me to have to explain my absences to them; Dolly’s death had made most of them feel uncomfortable in my presence, and this led to a weakening of whatever links had existed between us.
I told my parents I’d been invited to show my work at a little museum near New York, and I would have to be there to set it up and stay for the duration of the exhibition, some two months, and then to dismantle it before returning home. I did not know what I’d be living on, and they shouldn’t expect me to call home too often. When my mother said, “You really don’t have to call every day, it’s too expensive,” and I replied that it wouldn’t even be every week, there was an uncomfortable silence.
“Two months is a long time,” she said. “Please don’t be stingy with your calls. Reverse the charges.” My father, as usual, was silent. I didn’t respond to mum’s generous suggestion, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to fulfil. There was nothing I could say.
My dear, long-suffering parents. Since Dolly’s death they had not spoken to me of marriage and kids, but I knew they were dreaming about it. Now, before their eyes, the dream was growing more remote. I understood their longing for “a little Simhoni” to keep the family name alive. From my dad’s extensive family, only his parents, miraculously, had survived the Holocaust, to produce him and his brother in the smoking ruins of Europe, with their past consumed by the flames and their future shrouded by fog. Smoke and fog, into which his brother had also melted away.
My father told me once that there was no way his parents had survived without a purpose. He knew no more than I did about his father, but at night he’d heard his cries and seen his mother – who had also undergone her share of agonies – placing cold compresses on his father’s forehead, holding his hand and consoling him. He also picked up something about their experiences from their conversations. I suppose that it wasn’t easy for him, growing up in the Israel of the 1950s, the son of Holocaust survivors, feeling more committed to them than to himself, and never trying to fulfil his own potential. Yet, his forestry seemed to satisfy him completely and he saw it as a contribution to his country. I thought that it was easier for him to be with his trees than to be with people.
Because it wasn’t possible to discuss the Holocaust and the wars in our home, I recoiled from dealing with them in any way while I was growing up, and I couldn’t feel any empathy with my grandparents or my father. In the “My Roots” project at school, I focused on my mother’s family. This attitude changed only after I myself faced the tangible possibility of being killed, and even more so, after I myself had killed.
By the time I enlisted, in the early 1990s, the Israeli army had retreated from the heart of Lebanon, which it had invaded during the first Lebanon war in 1982, in an attempt to drive Palestinian rockets out of range from Israeli communities which were frequently fired at. The forces had withdrawn into a “Security Zone” in southern Lebanon, just north of the border between the two countries, but by now the enemy had become Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia backed by Iran and Syria. After we completed our advanced training, my engineers’ unit was sent to support the Golani infantry brigade that was holding the line of fortified positions along the Litani river, the northern border of the security zone. We were responsible for maintaining fences and minefields around the positions, defusing mines that had become exposed or washed away by rain and, because of a shortage of manpower, we also had to do sentry duty. Over time, against standing orders, we were also called upon to provide reinforcements for the ambushes that were laid each night outside the fortresses.
About a month after our deployment along the line, as we lay in a routine circular ambush covering all angles of approach at the foot of a fort’s sand rampart, I felt a blow on my leg – the signal that a suspicious movement had been detected. Together with the rest of the platoon, I wriggled into a straight line facing the direction of the movement. Night vision equipment had picked up three armed figures working their way through the bushes towards the fortress. We knew the combat procedures, but the platoon commander nevertheless pointed out the targets. The section on the left, including me, were to aim at the third man in the approaching enemy squad. The other sections aimed at the other two. The open-fire order was given when they were about twenty yards away from us. I squeezed the trigger of my rifle, together with all the others. I saw my target fall. The noise of the firing was frightening. I wasn’t ready for it and I almost jumped up. The man next to me held me down, and perhaps saved my life. The explosives the three armed men were carrying blew up and the fragments flew over our heads. When we went up to where they had been, only charred body parts rem
ained, scattered around. It was a shocking sight, and the image of the falling militiaman, a split second before the racket deafened me, kept coming back to me for many nights a long time afterwards.
When I went home on leave, and saw my parents, whose eyes were bleary from lack of sleep because they knew where I was and what was happening there, and my elderly grandparents, I told them about it. At first I had wanted to say that I had been at a base inside Israel, at Biranit or Metullah, far from the events that were filling the news, firefights that also led to the loss of many Israeli soldiers’ lives. But I felt the need to share my frightening experience with them. Then my grandfather told me about the first time he had killed a man.
It happened soon after the end of World War II, when the men of the Jewish Brigade, a British army unit made up mainly of volunteers from among the Jews of Palestine, came across this young man who spoke German, and enlisted him into a unit that was engaged in doing away with Nazi war criminals who were still at large. His task was to talk to the suspected Nazi and make sure that he was the man they were looking for, a death camp commander, say, or an SS officer, or a camp guard. The Germans never suspected the slender youth who spoke their language, and willingly identified themselves. At granddad’s signal, the Brigade soldiers moved in, took the Nazi to a nearby forest, read him his death sentence and executed him.
“The first time, I felt really bad, like you,” my grandfather told me, “and I stepped aside and vomited. It is a terrible thing to see the fear in a man’s eyes, even if he is a war criminal, and then the hole in the forehead and the body crumpling like a sack. But I got used to it, and after a few executions, I even asked if I could be the one to squeeze the trigger. They let me do it. I did it once for my mother, once for my father, and three more times, once for each of my brothers.”
Only then did I see for the first time that my grandfather still possessed the hardness of someone who had escaped, hidden, lived from hand to mouth, survived, fought, and avenged by killing with his own hand people whom he believed shared the guilt of murdering his family. And with this storm raging in his breast, he had married, started a family, migrated to Israel, and joined – as a young man of barely eighteen years old – the forces fighting for the establishment of the Jewish state, and fought again in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, and the Six-Day War of 1967.
This hardness had passed on to my father as well. He had fought with his father in the Six-Day War, a young tank officer and an old reserves officer, and a few years later it was granddad who was the first in the family to hear that his son had been seriously wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. My father never volunteered any information about what had happened to him.
All of a sudden, my grasp of the ties between these two taciturn men changed completely; of their withdrawal, even their self-denial, which I had until now interpreted as meanness. People who have been through all that they had don’t see the point in having and spending money, in luxury apartments, in fine furnishings, in going out and having fun. All at once, I felt a deep kinship with them. Now I too had joined “the fighting family”. Now I had been accepted into it. My feelings about my own deed, only a few days before, on the banks of the Litani River, were totally transformed.
In a similar way, I felt proud of my mother, who had been conceived during the siege of Jerusalem and grew up in the gun-sights of the Jordanian army snipers in the eastern part of that city, which had been divided until the Six-Day War straightened the backs of her generation. I was glad that despite her life of deprivation and anxiety, there was still softness and joy in her.
I was a gentle and easygoing man, like her; at least that’s what I tended to believe. Not taut and strict and tough like dad. I also thought that I was open and congenial and forgiving, like her, and not secretive and silent and grudging like him. Although I had inherited his facial features, it was from her that I had received my rotund physique. If my childhood had not been enveloped in the dark clouds arising from his injury, the treatments, the changing of the bandages, that went on for years, something that cannot be kept out of the life of a small child; if that war had not been shrouded in secrecy; if this commitment had not seeped into me, drop by drop, a word here and a sentence there – perhaps I would still have been an artist. Without that baggage borne on my shoulders since my childhood, perhaps even Dolly’s death would not have diverted me from the path that had been hewn for me by my clearest and most manifest talent. Perhaps I would actually have had to settle a score with dad – but even with all of this in the background, all I felt for him was kinship.
But now I was leaving my parents behind, albeit with my sisters, who lived nearby, and their loveable grand-daughters, but without a little Simhoni. “Just don’t bring us some shiksa from over there,” mum surprised me by saying, using the Yiddish word for a Gentile woman. I knew her as an open, liberal woman, but that little Simhoni would have to be, from her point of view, a Jew, born to a Jewish mother. In the context of my parents’ biographies, I could definitely understand why.
I spent the evening before my departure with them, drawing it out until their eyelids, and mine also, drooped with weariness. My sisters, who’d come to say goodbye, had already left, and then, with a heavy heart and heavy eyes, I said goodbye and drove back to my apartment in Tel Aviv, glad that I was too tired to think. In the morning, I went to HQ for a last briefing, and then travelled back to Haifa, to the port, where my journey was to begin. I felt a pang in my heart when I passed the turnoff to the French Carmel, the way I always took to my parents’ home, a pang that stayed with me as I boarded the ferry. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Udi, standing in the crowd on the quay.
The ship set sail at sunset. I put my suitcase in my cabin, which was small, with a porthole, and went out onto the upper deck. To the west, the sun was sinking over the horizon, but I took a seat at the stern, where Haifa was growing ever more distant from me, a white city with a green mountain, a darkening sky and a strip of sea serving as a picture frame. The windows flashed the setting sun’s rays back at me. I sought out my parents’ house from this unfamiliar angle. The Sail Tower skyscraper with its billowing sides and pointed spire served as a salient landmark from which my eyes moved up and southwards. The golden dome at the centre of the Bahai gardens shone in the waning light and, on both sides of the garden, chains of street lamps flickered on, marking out in yellow the descent of the German Colony towards the sea. The aura they created was swallowed up by the glow of the port’s lights, and I pictured in my mind the cafés and restaurants opening their doors for the evening.
I identified the buildings and radar installations at Stella Maris, and from there my gaze wandered to the haunts of my childhood. The buildings of Abbas Street, built on the hillside slope with half of their six or eight storeys below the bridge leading from the street to the apartment block and the other half above it, were blurred in the advancing dark. Really blurred, as were those childhood years when I played on the bridge level overlooking the port, together with the children of the new immigrants and the children of the Arab families who lived down the road. When we returned from our stay in Canada, we moved higher up the Carmel and there, right above the broad green swathe that remained in the centre of the mountain, we could see the houses which stood between one street with the rather obliging name of Zionism Avenue and the smaller Jubilee Road, where we lived. In the evening mists, the houses merged into one lump, but I could see our home, the one on the end, painted a pinkish-orange, and another lump, made up of melancholy and emotion, echoed it inside me, beating like a tom-tom.
When the whole of Mount Carmel was nothing more than a dark smear with only the towers of the Panorama Buildings and Haifa University flickering above the skyline, and my eyes had shifted from the gradually shrinking lights of the port and the glowing halo over my hometown, towards the greying foam in the wake of the ship, I walked to the bow. On the horizon, there was still a reddish glimmer, and the clouds hanging high above had pink and yel
low linings, the last remnants left by the sun, whose light was still marking out the course of the vessel on the surface of the sea. A cold gust of wind ruffled my hair and the last of the passengers left the deck and descended into the warm belly of the ship. It was late in September, autumn, and I had a clear sense of leaving one phase of my life, which had encompassed almost thirty years, and sailing towards a new phase. But I didn’t do any summing-up. Instead I allowed a pleasant, poignant melancholy to float around inside me, as if I had just drunk a strong and tasty liqueur. I wondered if Udi had chosen this form of departure for me so that I could take my leave from my life so far, and enter the new world of espionage gradually and not in one abrupt hop in a plane. I stayed like that until the darkness engulfed me and the cold sent me shivering indoors.
In the passenger hall, gaiety reigned. A small band was playing Greek tunes, some couples were dancing, people were sitting around at tables eating the light meal supplied by the ship’s galley. A lot of them were migrant workers speaking different languages, mostly Greek, and there were also young Israelis and backpackers, who had chosen this inexpensive way to leave Israel. I found a seat in a corner, next to one of the portholes that looked out into the darkness. My heart contracted as it occurred to me that this could have been a romantic evening. Being alone in a happy crowd only intensified the feeling of loneliness that was overwhelming me, or was perhaps draining me. I skipped the meal, went down to my cabin and fell asleep.
I awoke to the blast on the ship’s horn that heralded our arrival at the port of Limassol. As I stretched my limbs, I could actually feel the energy generated by my upcoming mission coursing through my veins. I quickly got my things together and went on deck. It was dawn, and mists covered the city and the tops of the Troodos Mountains that formed its backdrop. As the passengers prepared to disembark, the sun began breaking through the mists, warming my body and my soul. I felt invigorated and ready for action. I knew this feeling from the army: the apprehension and gloom of the night before a battle, dispelled by the adrenaline pumping through your bloodstream the moment you set out.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 9
