Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  “That’s because this isn’t really our place. It’s a flat the Mossad is renting for us,” was my excuse. “We’ll have to find a home of our own.”

  “Don’t you like it?” Niki wondered. True, from the large windows there was a magnificent view out over the shore of Lake Ontario, the Toronto islands, including nearby Olympic Island and its park, and many other green islands all the way out to the horizon. From the windows on the east, we could see dozens of the city’s skyscrapers, where the lights were beginning to go on.

  “Yes, I like it,” I said.

  “So, it’s only a matter of procedure. They’ll stop paying, and we’ll start,” said Niki, always practical.

  At two a.m., ten in the morning in Israel, I woke up bathed in sweat. The debriefing was beginning at our squad’s base in Tel Aviv. I took a shower and went back to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep.

  “Jetlag,” I told Niki, who had woken up, worried.

  “That happens only in the other direction, something’s bothering you.”

  “In the morning we’ll visit Ron’s parents,” I said. “I have to cut off all ties with the Office.”

  “OK, but we’ll tell Udi before we do so,” Niki responded, taking command. “I’m going to phone him right now.” So saying, she dialled the base’s open number.

  Udi was on the line in a minute and she put him on speaker. There were triumphant voices in the background.

  “Everyone congratulates you two. You were terrific,” he said, “but if you’re calling there must be something you want to say.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to go and see his parents today. You know who I mean.”

  The background voices disappeared. Perhaps Udi’d left the briefing room.

  “In principle, that’s OK, but you don’t know what to tell them. Things aren’t exactly the way you see them. So I suggest you wait for me, and please don’t do anything dumb that could cause a lot of grief.”

  “Unavoidable grief,” I responded.

  “You reckon you know the whole story but you don’t. You’ll see them, but not today. Niki, watch him for one more day, all right?”

  “All right,” she replied, and hung up.

  “What is going on?” I asked. Clearly, Niki knew something that I didn’t.

  “I prefer to let Udi tell you. It’s more complicated than you think.”

  “And you know the story?”

  “Look, I know – knew – Ron, and his parents. It’s complicated. Please, wait another day, and meanwhile come let’s try to get some sleep.”

  She managed to fall asleep, with or without jetlag. I didn’t, until much later.

  When I woke up Niki told me Udi was on his way and that at his request she’d arranged a visit to the Friedlichs the next evening.

  “Is he coming with us?”

  “I don’t know. He just asked me to set the visit up, and I did.”

  I decided not to question her any further. But now I knew, with even greater clarity, why I wanted to cut off any remaining ties between us, both of us, and Udi and everything he represented.

  We spent the day shopping and visiting Niki’s parents although she didn’t tell them we were back for good, and they were happy enough that we were there at all. I also had a long talk with my parents, who were sorry to hear I was in Canada and that it would be some time before I got to see them. I collapsed into bed early and again woke up in the middle of the night, something that hardly ever happened to me. Udi hadn’t been in touch – at least not with me – and I spent the day waiting impatiently for our meeting with the Friedlichs.

  My heart was beating faster than ever and only Niki’s presence beside me calmed me a little. How was I going to feel when two elderly parents thought they were seeing their lost son standing in front of them, and right after that hear that he was actually dead? How would Niki and I introduce ourselves, bearing in mind that she had once been the girlfriend of their dead son?

  “I don’t want to lie to them,” I said to Niki when I suggested that we refrain from speaking about our relationship. “This encounter is going to be very strange for everyone. We mustn’t bring in things that could create a lack of trust in us.”

  As we stood before their front door, I hesitated. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all? Niki watched me questioningly, or expectantly. I knocked. Footsteps were heard from inside. The door opened, and there was Leo. This close up, I could see that his beard partly covered a scar that ran from his cheek through his chin to his neck.

  No one moved. We looked at each other in a friendly but anxious way, and then Leo’s lower jaw started trembling. He couldn’t hold himself back from crying and the tears began to flow. My own eyes were also teary but I knew that my own emotions were as nothing when compared to the depth of his own grief.

  Then Leo extended his arms, placed his hands on my shoulders looked into my eyes and said, in Hebrew, with only a slight North American drawl, “Little Mickey, my how you’ve grown,” and he pulled me to his breast and began sobbing.

  My mouth dropped open. What was happening here? Hebrew? “Little Mickey”? I stole a glance at Niki. She was looking at me caringly and lovingly, and there were tears in her eyes too. But I also discerned the very slightest hint of a smile.

  Leo stood back a little, wiped his tears, leaving a hand on my shoulder, and said, in Hebrew again, “Please come in. Diane is very eager to meet you.”

  How could she be “eager to meet” me? And wouldn’t she think I was her son, coming back into her life?

  Leo’s hand slid gently to my back and he propelled me inside. Before us, I saw the diplomas and photographs on the wall, and at the end of the hall, with the staircase on the left, and two steps down to the living room on the right, stood the display case with the candlesticks and the menorah, and above them the Shalom plaque, which now, in the light, I could see was brightly coloured.

  At the entrance to the living room stood Diane, Ron’s mother, the good-looking woman I had glimpsed once before and who I knew from the photographs. She greeted me with shining eyes and a warm smile, holding her hands out to mine and offering me her cheek. This wasn’t the way a mother welcomed her long-lost son. The gentle words she said to me, about how happy she was to meet me, were in English. She beckoned us into the living room, which was a little darker than the hall and escorted me down the two steps with her. Leo and Niki followed us. There, sunk into a deep armchair, sat Udi. I gasped. What was he scheming? What kind of trap had he laid for me?

  He rose, ponderously. His goatee – like my moustache – was gone, but he was unshaven and looked as if he’d come here straight from the airport. He gave me his hand.

  “You’ve got to listen now,” he said quietly, holding on to my hand softly. “As I said, there’s a lot you don’t know. Let Li’or speak.”

  Li’or? Where had I heard that name?

  Then it came back to me. “In the end it’ll turn out that Li’or was right,” I’d heard my mother telling my father but I was still too confused to see the whole picture.

  We sat down, Niki and I on one sofa, Leo and Diane facing us, and Udi sank back into the armchair that suited his dimensions. Leo poured drinks from a new bottle of Alberta Premium that he’d opened in our honour. “Canadian whisky hasn’t yet received the appreciation it deserves but it is good, really good,” he said, mostly to break the silence.

  Then he lifted his glass and said, “To our reunion. L’Chaim.” He drank and pursed his lips.

  The suspicion that had emanated from my gut the moment Leo uttered my name and hugged me, and had grown stronger as he spoke about Diane, and had nearly been resolved when I saw Udi, became a certainty when I’d finished my whisky: an absolute clarity spread through my mind.

  “I’ll speak English so Diane will also understand,” Leo began, but Diane said quickly that it was fine if he practised his Hebrew because he’d “be needing it” and anyway she knew the story through and through. They exchanged a loving look,
intimate and sad, in a way that only a couple who have lost a child can. Then Leo turned his attention to me and saw Niki, so he decided, nevertheless, to speak in English.

  “I had no other option after the war, the Yom Kippur War. When I saw Tomer hovering between life and death, when I saw the bones of his leg where the flesh had been burned away. When I heard him screaming with pain, when I saw the enormous agony of your grandmother, and your grandfather, the most heroic man I’ve ever met in my life – a phoenix arisen from the ashes – weeping in despair, and when I saw the enormous anxiety on Riki’s face, not knowing where her life would go from then on with this burned, half-dead husband of hers, with all the tubes that were keeping him alive and all the operations and skin grafts that still awaited him – I knew that I would not be able to endure it again.”

  Leo poured himself another shot and wet his gullet with the Canadian whisky, and I used the pause to tell Niki, “You know of course that Riki and Tomer are my father and mother.” Leo added, “Yes, my sister-in-law and my twin brother.”

  I’d known it all, a moment before he began speaking. I’d begun to grasp it from the way he greeted me at the door, and now complete comprehension dawned on me. I saw the great resemblance to my father – the nose, the eyes, the forehead, everything that wasn’t hidden by the beard and the scars. Nevertheless, his words, which he was speaking in an almost casual manner, as if I was already aware of it all, fell like hammer blows on my head. My father’s dead twin brother had come to life, here in Toronto.

  Everything was linking up in my mind. I realized how I had been misled, as a child, to think that my uncle – whose very existence had been concealed from me for a long time – was dead. When my father absolutely refused to speak about him. When he snatched the pictures of my grandparents with their twin babies out of my hands. I remembered the pictures that had been cropped, and where a dismembered child’s hand could be seen. I understood how – with the logic of a child whose mind was replete with death and the smoke of the crematoria from which his grandparents had escaped, and the wars his grandfather and father had waged, and whose father had been so grievously wounded – I had decided that my uncle was dead. No other possibility had crossed my mind.

  Leo kept on talking. “And on top of this came my huge disillusionment with the country. The way our intelligence failed to see that war was about to break out, with the writing so large on the wall but that no one wanted to read. The Army that didn’t pass on the information to its troops on the borders. Golda Meir, the prime minister who was too scared of the Americans to approve a preemptive strike by our army. Moshe Dayan, the defence minister who turned from a lion into a pussycat. The wars of the generals, and their sheer arrogance in thinking that it would take them no more than a moment to knock ‘the stinking Arabs’ out.”

  The monologue continued: “I realized a malignant disease was spreading among us. And a malignant disease had broken out among the Arabs too. Their hatred, which until then had been suppressed to a certain extent, now erupted in full force. A localized cancerous growth can be removed surgically and the patient saved but you can’t do anything if the disease has reached the glands and the bones. I saw on TV the Egyptians celebrating victory when our forces stopped only a hundred kilometres away from Cairo, and the victory celebrations in Damascus when we were only thirty kilometres away, shelling the city’s outskirts, and I got it: the disease had spread to their brains. There’d be another war and another one after that, no matter how much stronger we’d be – because the tumour in their brains would always give them the feeling that they were on the brink of victory. When they look at the bigger picture – hundreds of millions of Arabs surrounding a few million divided and overconfident Jews, who also had over a million Arabs living among them – how could they not feel that it was only a matter of time? But I’m sorry, that’s not the point.” He swallowed what was left in his glass and poured himself yet another.

  “The state was a secondary matter for me. I felt that I was betraying it, but mainly that I was betraying my family. I do not have to tell you where my parents came from and what they went through. I can’t even imagine the hardships of bringing us into the world and raising us in the post-World War II conditions, during the Israeli War of Independence, and during the austerity of the first years of the state. After all that, I knew they wouldn’t forgive me for losing my faith in the country and leaving, and neither would Tomer. He had never allowed me to lag behind him or to fail. He wanted me to be exactly like him – a fighter and a winner – and I wasn’t like that. I was no hero. I didn’t inherit those genes of my father’s. Nothing to be done about that.”

  I comprehended exactly what he was saying. I felt so completely like him. I drank in his words, which were addressed directly to me.

  “I knew they wouldn’t forgive me, because of what had happened to Tomer, and despite the fact that I, too, had gone through quite a lot. Here, this,” and he pointed at the scars hidden behind his wispy beard and that went on down his neck and under his shirt. “These were also burns that happened in a tank, at the beginning of the war, but they can’t be compared to what happened to your father. These were second degree burns on my neck and chest. On my face, apart from a few spots, there were only first degree burns.

  “When Tomer was also wounded, seriously, towards the end of the war, and it wasn’t clear whether he would live or die, our parents broke down altogether. You see, when they began a new life, straight out of the camps, they didn’t think that their lives and the lives of their children would be one long war. When the War of Independence was over, in which my father – your grandfather – had to fight again, and the state became a fact, and your father and I were tots of three or so, our parents decided that now they had reached a state of peace and plenty. They even changed our names to new, Israeli ones – Tomer and Li’or.

  When he saw the surprise on my face he added: “Apparently you haven’t seen documents from those days. When we were born we were named after our two grandfathers, who were both killed in the Holocaust. Moshe, our father’s father, and Shlomo, our mother’s father. If you look at your father’s ID card, you’ll see that his name is given as Tomer Moshe. Mine was Li’or Shlomo.”

  “They had high hopes but when those hopes were dashed they were still willing to carry on fighting for the dream. The way they saw it, there was no forgiveness for abandoning the motherland. In their eyes, and in my own eyes too, I was like a deserter from the battlefield, someone who in other places, is simply shot …”

  “All you did was emigrate. That’s not desertion,” Diane said for our benefit, something she must have said to Leo many times before.

  “No, no,” Leo rejected this attempt to ease the verdict he’d handed himself. “The country was a battlefield, in the hospitals and on the borders. It is still a battlefield. You, Mickey, have also had to fight. When you were in Lebanon, I used to call your mother at work and she would keep me up to date about you.”

  Now I, too, swallowed my whisky and gave him my glass for a refill. I glanced at the others. Niki, whose hand was in mine, was pale. Diane was gently stroking Leo’s back and her face was full of pity. Udi, a hunched figure in his armchair, sat grey, withdrawn.

  “Tomer really cut me out of his life,” Leo went on, choked, “and my father did also. I don’t even know who incited whom.” His voice broke up. Diane rose and hugged his head as he wept into her chest. Twice he tried to speak, but couldn’t, and when he poured himself another drink, Diane took away the glass and the bottle, and returned with a bottle of water. I lowered my eyes. I could tell from Niki’s trembling hand that she was crying, and I did not dare look Udi in the face. I wanted to believe that someone else, at least my commander, could view this melodrama from the outside.

  Leo took a long draught of water, and began speaking again: “Your father, who was always quicker than me, already had a wife. And a little girl, Tzipi. And very soon you also made your appearance. How you were made, from all
that charred flesh and pain, only Tomer and Riki could tell. My mother and father buzzed around Tomer like bees, and gave him all the love that they could, and anyone coming close was in danger of getting stung. He went through hell in the hospitals and rehab. More and more operations, more and more skin grafts. The infections kept returning and it wasn’t clear whether he’d live or not and no one could say if he’d ever walk again – until they finished with the surgery he was forbidden to try to stand on his feet.

  “Don’t get me wrong; for months I sat next to Tomer’s bed, taking shifts with my mother and father and Riki. I gave up completely on my own treatments. Tomer’s condition was so bad that my scars seemed insignificant. Perhaps not to me, but to the people around me. My mother and father shut themselves off from me. All they could see was Tomer and they didn’t think they had to relate to me as well. When I saw on Tomer what skin grafts looked like, I decided that instead of that I’d grow a beard. And when it thickened a bit and got longer and covered the scars where hair didn’t grow, they were hardly visible. Only Riki saw that I was also going through hard times and was willing to listen to me. She was terrific. But she had a little daughter to take care of, and her wounded husband, and his parents, and she was pregnant. She didn’t have much time for me. I gradually withdrew to a point where there was only me and my nightmares – about what had been and what would be.

  “Our generation didn’t run to headshrinkers, no one had heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the term ‘shellshock’ was reserved for soldiers who couldn’t function. It wasn’t applied to a guy like me, who’d simply begun to think there wasn’t any point to anything, not only because of what had happened to him, but also because of what I saw clearly was going to happen.

  “I’d lost the will to live. I never went back to university, which reopened as soon as the war ended. I was so shaken up that I even believed the conspiracy theories about the war. You know them, don’t you?” and for the first time he looked at Udi, who returned a glassy gaze. “It may have been nonsense, but the notion that Golda and Dayan had collaborated with the Egyptians and the Americans was enough to make me lose my last remnant of trust in the state. I felt completely alone.”