Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  An oppressive silence reigned. No one moved. It seemed that each and every one of us was doing his own soul searching, and then my Uncle Leo-Li’or-Shlomo, continued his monologue, almost whispering.

  “When Tomer was discharged, after almost half a year in hospital, and your small living room was turned into a hospital, my visits grew less and less frequent. I felt as though I didn’t belong there. And when you were born, I really couldn’t stand to be there any more. They needed me, I know. Riki was running from you to Tzipi to your father’s bed. And with all the surgery he’d undergone, I’m not sure who was yelling more – you or him. They needed me, but the new life that had been created there, the intimacy between the wonderful woman, the wounded man, the little girl, the new baby, the old parents, just as it drew them all together like a huge magnet, it pushed me away. I had nothing but my anxieties. I decided to escape, to run as far away as I could.”

  “And this is where my angel came in.” Now his face softened, and a wide smile appeared as he turned his eyes to Diane and took her hand in his. “She could see the soul behind the scars. After a year, we got married and a year later Ron was born. He was named after a good friend of mine who was killed in the tank, next to me. Diane agreed, because it’s a name that sounds all right here too, although she was worried that every time I said his name I’d think of my pal and that war and everything that she had worked so hard to liberate me from. She even exempted me from helping with the baby after I was accepted at dental school. Finally, I began living a new life.”

  “And my father? You never saw him again?” I asked, when the oppressive silence set in again.

  “I saw him, but he never saw me,” Leo smiled sadly. “The first time was after Sadat’s visit to Israel. Diane and I sat and watched it on TV, holding hands and excited to the point of tears. I said that maybe I’d been wrong, maybe there was hope after all, and I wanted to go to Israel to see what was happening. And I did go. I called from the airport but Tomer hung up when he heard my voice. I called again and Riki answered. I heard them arguing whether they should speak to me. Riki asked me to give her time to prepare the ground for a family reunion, and in the meantime I would stay with our mutual friends, Ada and Kobi, you must know them. She succeeded, partly. My father and Tomer agreed, but only if I told them I’d come back for good. But I couldn’t say that then. With my mother it worked, and we met in Ada and Kobi’s apartment. My mother, your mother, your sister Tzipi and you. Riki was pregnant with Aliza. You were three. I don’t believe you will remember it.”

  I didn’t remember. But all at once, and very intensely, I realized the pain I would be inflicting on my father if it emerged that I was leaving Israel forever.

  “I showed them new pictures of Ronnie. I’d been sending them pictures since he was born, and everyone spoke about how he resembled you. That’s what the genetics produced. Your father and I were identical twins, you looked like him and Ron looked like me. My mother brought a sailor suit for him, the same as the one she had bought for you.”

  I remembered the pictures of Ron on the boat and me on Haifa beach.

  “For me, it wasn’t a successful visit, and I grasped how deep the rift was when Riki came to see me off at the airport and brought a bundle of photos that had been cut in half. In some of them I was with my father and in others with my mother, with Tomer cut out of all of them. I still have them. The other half must be with your parents.”

  As he spoke, Diane went over to a cabinet and took out an album where all the photographs had been neatly stuck in. I recognized them right away as the missing halves of the pictures I knew from home. In some of them there was a body with an amputated arm, which appeared in the photos at home, and in others there was a small hand belonging to my father or a large one, belonging to one of his parents, which had vanished from the pictures I knew.

  “It was a great gift for me, but one that sliced through my heart,” said Leo while Niki and I were studying the photographs. “You see, Tomer and I had been like this,” and he clasped his hands together with the fingers intertwined. “We were never separated for a moment. As children, as teenagers, on youth movement hikes. Our mother even kicked up a fuss when they put us into different classes at school, but it didn’t help. One time – can you hear me Diane?” he called out when she went to make coffee, “– one time, a young thug from another school, our age but known as the terror of the neighbourhood, came into our schoolyard looking for trouble. When the break began, I ran out first, straight into him, and he began beating me up. He didn’t need a reason. Everyone was standing around and watching – no one dared to intervene and get beaten up too. He got me on the ground and was sitting on top of me, punching me. Suddenly, he was gone, and I really mean gone. Tomer had come out and, without thinking twice, grabbed him around the chest and hurled him away. In a second we were both on top of the thug, beating him up.” He threw in a Hebrew phrase that translates literally as “cut him down” and looked at Udi, very pleased with himself. “Together we could have been a good Mossad team, no?”

  The saliva dried up in my mouth. What did he know? But Leo was on a roll and I couldn’t interrupt him.

  “I tried once again two years later. This time, Diane came with me and Ronnie too. It was my last year at university, and we wanted to check out the possibilities of living in Israel. Before I called your parents, we visited all kinds of cities and neighbourhoods and met friends and Diane didn’t rule it out. There was an optimistic atmosphere in the country. But your father and grandfather said, ‘First let him say he’s coming back to live here.’ I took that as a slap in the face. That obstinacy, that lack of trust.”

  Perhaps I should have said something in their defence but I knew exactly what he was talking about, and painful as it was, I felt that I was on his side.

  “I decided I would go to my parents’ home. I thought that seeing Ronnie would soften my father. After all, he was his grandson. But it was awful. My father revealed himself as a fanatical, benighted old man. ‘Look, I’ve brought you a little Friedlich, to keep the family name alive, what you wanted so much,’ I yelled at him, but he said ‘I need a little Simhoni. The Friedlichs died out in the Holocaust.’ It was only after the Yom Kippur War that he and your father had taken the Hebrew name Simhoni. I don’t know whether that was a Zionist act, a next step after they changed my name and your father’s name to Hebrew names after the War of Independence, or if some rabbi had suggested it as a magical way of helping your father recover. You were born a Simhoni and my father and your father expunged the name Friedlich from every document where it had appeared. They decided that a new family had been founded there – a family of heroes, but that’s my own observation. I felt excluded, rejected.”

  I remembered how happy my mother had been to tell me her maiden name, while my father had rebuffed me when I asked what our name had been, saying that those Jewish Diaspora names meant nothing, whether the Jews had chosen them themselves or the Gentiles had bestowed them. What was important, he said, was the Hebrew name we had chosen ourselves, in Israel. But in fact they had merely translated the “Diaspora” name Friedlich, which means happy, to the Israeli Simhoni, which derived from the Hebrew word for happy.

  Leo, who had not only preserved the original family name but had also abbreviated his Hebrew name, Li’or, to a more typical American one, continued:

  “At the end of that year I graduated and opened a clinic, and from then on my life steered its own course. I almost managed to disconnect myself, with great heartache, from my past, from my family. I felt as if a limb had been amputated but I pushed ahead, and built my own family. Nevertheless, when I heard Tomer had a new position in Ottawa, I was attracted there as if by some giant magnet. My information was only partial, and Diane advised me not to go,” Leo paused and gazed at her adoringly. “She said that if your family was now living here and hadn’t contacted us, it was a lost cause. For days I wandered around the vicinity of the Israeli embassy hoping to bump into him,
as if by chance, and to renew the connection. And once I did see him. My heart leaped out of my breast and I began walking towards him but then immediately a young guy popped up next to me, a security man, and stopped me and asked for ID. Your father disappeared in the meantime and I returned to Toronto shamefaced, frustrated and exasperated.

  “Years later, when I heard my parents’ condition had deteriorated and they’d entered an old people’s home, I visited them again. My father was almost blind by then, couldn’t tell me from Tomer, and he held my hand. Instead of being happy, I felt like a thief. Like Jacob pretending to Isaac that he was Esau. I came back again during the shiva but I didn’t want any drama so I told Riki I was coming and she told Tomer. He left as I was due to arrive: I saw him depart. You know, we are twins but, in addition to my beard, places also do things to people. I watched him. He looked hard, battle weary, introverted. Here, people tend to be open.”

  I understood, in the very depth of my soul, my uncle’s pain and his need to unload his tale, but I wanted to get to the most important point. What seemed to me most important. I took a deep breath and asked, “And what happened to Ron?”

  Leo and Diane both sighed. Niki also sat up. “Ronnie was my American dream,” said Leo. “I wanted him to grow up the way I would have if my father had chosen Canada instead of Palestine.” I was astonished to hear my own thoughts coming out of his mouth. “And he didn’t let us down. A good student, a well-brought up boy, an outstanding athlete – Niki can tell you about it, she was his girlfriend.”

  Niki paled. “I’ve already told him,” she said, and it was clear from her tone that there was a gap between what she’d told me and whatever there had been between the two of them.

  Diane took up the story: “Ronnie was, how should I put it, something of a free spirit. He loved sports, but wasn’t good enough to be a pro. It was perhaps our fault that we never pushed him enough to excel at anything. We wanted him to take life easy. When he decided in high school that he wanted to be captain of the football team and began training for hours every day, Leo was even worried about it.”

  “Because that’s not what’s called taking life easy,” Leo chimed in, and he again astonished me when he said “I was afraid that he’d want to get into some elite unit in the Israeli army, as an act of rebellion against his father.” I felt that it was Leo’s soul, my uncle’s and not my father’s, that was inside me and that his ideas were occupying my mind.

  “In brief, no pro team drafted him from the Varsity Blues,” Diane continued. “He’d studied a little environmental science and a little anthropology and comparative cultures and he liked people and places, but he didn’t know exactly what to do with himself. I believe Niki thought the same, didn’t you Niki?”

  Niki blushed, and didn’t answer.

  “And then he took off on his grand tour of the world, saying ‘Every Israeli guy goes on a long trip after the army,’ so he’d do it after graduating. By the way, he had wanted to go to Israel and join the army, after graduating from high school and after his first year at university, and even after getting his BA, but Leo wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “When he finished high school, the Israeli army was still in Lebanon,” Leo justified himself. “I don’t have to tell you about it, you were there. I spoke to your mother and I knew exactly what was happening. What had happened to me, and of course to my brother wasn’t enough? Did I have to send my son as well? Forgive me for saying this, after what you went through in Lebanon,” he said, as Diane pressed her hand on his thigh, “but I had made my choice, to run away from the wars. So I’m a coward. OK, and I have been paying for it every day since I got onto the plane out of Israel. So, should I have been a hero on my son’s back?”

  Leo was upset, Diane tried to calm him down. She continued talking. “He left on his trip on the spur of the moment, as if he was running away from himself, and it dragged on and on. He was in China, Laos, Vietnam before he got to India, and the drugs …”

  Leo picked up the narrative. “He dropped out of our lives. We knew he was in India. I made some inquiries and understood he’d got mixed up in drugs. I flew out there. It was too awful to see him like that. He didn’t know me. Didn’t remember or want to acknowledge that he was our Ronnie, my son. It’s a terrible thing for a father. I saw that he was very confused, but he was independent enough to refuse to come back with me. I managed to persuade him to enter some rehab institution, and I left him there. My plan was to go back a month later – I couldn’t stay there with him the whole time, I had patients here in the middle of treatments. But then he disappeared. When I inquired at the institution, all they said was that the problem wasn’t drugs. He’d been cured of his addiction, but still hadn’t got himself together.”

  It was easy to see that Leo was struggling with a serious guilt problem but when Diane wanted to speak instead of him, he put his hand on her arm and continued.

  “It took us a long time before we discovered he was in Sinai. I flew to Egypt to look for him and spent more than a month in Sinai. I went from one Bedouin tribe to another with his picture. No one had seen or heard anything. There was no trace of him. After a while they became antagonistic towards me so I hired someone to carry on searching for me and returned to Canada.”

  “We faced a choice between devoting our lives to the search and losing our daughter and granddaughter, or paying professionals to do it for us and to carry on with our lives, as far as that was possible,” said Diane, “and it really isn’t possible.”

  “No, we never got back to being ourselves, and half a year ago I returned to Sinai but again, I drew a blank and felt that I had lost a son and it would have been better if it had happened in milhamot Yisrael — Israel’s wars. Only last night, when Udi called, did what really happened begin to become clear.”

  “Let me take over from here,” said Udi, speaking with uncharacteristic gentleness. Diane and Leo gave way to him. All eyes were on him as he sat up straight.

  “Almost three years ago – there’s no record of the actual date – a group of Bedouin from Sinai crossed into Israel north of Eilat. Ron was with them and they left him at the side of Route 12, the road that runs along the border with Egypt. People travelling along the road saw him and called the police. He had no papers on him. He was taken to the hospital in Eilat where he was diagnosed as being in a state of dissociation, presumably caused by a drug overdose. After a while, when he still couldn’t remember anything about himself, his condition was described more precisely as a dissociative fugue, in which people detach completely from their identity. It can happen after a severe trauma, and drugs can pave the way for it.”

  So Ron was not dead! Ron was alive!

  The realization sliced through my consciousness. My eyes opened wide, and I almost jumped out of my seat. Then I saw that none of the others was moving. I was the last to know. What was happening here? That Udi had lied to me I had already grasped but had Niki also been in on the secret? What was the true story?

  Udi saw how upset I was, he had probably also expected it, as had Niki, who was gripping my arm harder, almost preventing me from moving or saying anything. Udi proceeded.

  “He was transferred to a psychiatric institution near Haifa. After some months of treatment he began to communicate and it emerged that he spoke North American English but he still couldn’t give his name. The change in his condition was very slow.”

  Udi wanted to continue with his chronological account but Diane wanted to know details of her son’s current state, and where he was. Udi was quick to reply, telling her that Ron had recently had episodes of clarity, remembering who he was, and that he was apparently on the way to recovery. He was under good supervision.

  Diane asked him to be more specific, and only then did I realize that Udi must have studied psychology. He gave a detailed explanation of dissociative fugue, a rare psychiatric disease in which patients lose touch with their previous lives and can leave their homes and occupations and begin wandering.
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br />   “That’s exactly what happened to Ronnie,” said Diane. She asked Udi how long it could go on for and he told her that, according to the professional literature he had read after speaking to the attending psychiatrist, it could be a matter of hours, weeks or months.

  Leo wanted to know why it had happened. Udi explained that it was believed that the causes were psychological, such as the need to blank out a painful experience, or a severe inner conflict, finding expression in repression of feelings and detachment from one’s identity.

  “What painful experience could he have had?” Leo wondered, and when Niki suddenly squeezed my arm I realized that she was thinking about her having broken up with him as being a possible cause. Diane rescued her: “Perhaps it was disappointment at the fact that no pro team drafted him when he graduated, and your refusal to allow him to go to Israel and enlist there?”

  Silence reigned after that.

  After giving us breathing space, Udi continued. “At around the same time as Ron was brought into Israel, the Bedouin began selling his passport on the black market. It went from hand to hand and landed up in the Israeli underworld where some patriotic thief thought the country could make good use of it and gave it to one of the government ministries from where it eventually reached us.”

  “And then it was discovered that I resembled the picture in the passport,” I interjected.

  “It didn’t happen quite so fast,” said Udi and for the first time the hint of a smile appeared in the corners of his lips. “You asked if we reached you by chance and I replied that chance is your best friend and your worst enemy, but I didn’t say that the connection was made by chance.” I couldn’t recall the details of that conversation back in the little house in the Kiryah but I assumed he was right. He had been speaking then with a goal in mind, and I’d been a tabula rasa, open to any interpretation.