“Slow night,” he said, paying his bill.
“Rabbits,” Willi said. “They hear a noise, they go running.”
“Not you.”
“Where am I going to go? I’m here.”
Friday night, when Mrs. Ohanesian’s phone rang and she called him downstairs, Brand remembered Willi’s philosophy.
“This is Mr. Grossman,” Fein said. “There’s been a change of plans. I have to cancel my pickup for tomorrow morning.”
There was no pickup for tomorrow morning. “I’m sorry. I hope everything’s all right.”
“Thank you, no. At the last minute some unexpected guests have decided they want to drop by, so tomorrow’s no good.”
“Would you like it for another day?”
“No, I just thought I should let you know. Now I need to go tidy up. They’re supposed to be here early, and everything needs to be put away.”
“I understand,” Brand said. “Good luck.”
His first urge was to run, grab Eva and head for Jaffa, only she was like Willi. Even if Brand managed to get through the checkpoints, she’d never go. He needed some of her stubbornness, some of her outrage. Like so many of his pricklier traits, he’d lost them in the camps, had become a model prisoner, waiting for his bowl of thin soup, waiting for the day to end. The same patience that saved him made him no better than a penned animal. Rabbits, Willi said, and he was right. If Brand had a rabbit hole, he’d vanish down it, like those waiters taking off for Morocco, leaving the police an empty room. They were coming for him, Fein had warned, except he wasn’t telling Brand to run. He was telling him to get ready.
He wondered if Eva knew. She had to, yet he was tempted to call Mrs. Sokolov, and then when he did, Eva wasn’t there.
“Who shall I say called?”
Mr. Grossman, he was going to say, when there was no reason. “Jossi.”
“Oh, hello, Jossi. She’s doing some last-minute shopping. You know we’re having company tomorrow.”
“I heard. Do you have anything special planned?”
“No, we’ll just be here and see how things go. I think that’s the best plan.”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted. He saw Asher’s face, soft as a rotten apple, and thought of Koppelman.
“Good luck,” he said.
“Good luck to you too, Jossi. I’ll tell her you called.”
He didn’t need to dig through his things. He’d been careful all along, from habit, as if his flat being searched were inevitable. He didn’t trust his cigar box to the crypt. He wrapped Eva’s note and half of the money in oilcloth, tiptoed downstairs and, by moonlight, stopping every few turns of the shovel to make sure it was just the cuckoo, buried the bundle under a mound of dead flowers behind the caretaker’s shed.
In the driveway the Peugeot shone. When he turned the key, he pictured Mrs. Ohanesian cocking her head toward the noise like her budgie. There were spots in front of the other boardinghouses, but he didn’t want the police to see the car at all, and to be safe moved it to a quiet side street below David’s Tomb, checking all four doors before climbing back up the hill.
Still he wanted to run, even if there was nowhere to go. After eluding them for so long, surrendering seemed a mistake. He’d never been tortured, or never professionally, only Nosey kicking at him as they fell out for roll call, forcing him to lie facedown in the snow, a daily, pointless torment. He wasn’t like Asher or Koppelman, he was like Lipschitz. He might tell them everything, betraying Eva. He didn’t know where any of the rest lived. He suspected Asher had set it up that way, his careful plans ruined by Brand falling for her.
In the morning he woke with the sun. Before he could wash, the radio told him the British had shut down the main phone exchanges and begun rounding up suspects. They’d had to fight their way into Kibbutz Yagur. There were reports of casualties.
Fein had been right about the operation but wrong about the scale. Tel Aviv was under a total curfew, an extra affront on the Sabbath. Here they’d cordoned the western neighborhoods and raided the headquarters of the Jewish Agency, whose leadership was under arrest. It was a baffling shift in tactics. Instead of going after the Irgun and the Stern Gang, they were targeting the Haganah, a strategy Brand thought idiotic. They might as well try to arrest the whole country. Strangely, the idea gave him hope, as if he were no longer alone.
He dressed, expecting the doorbell to ring at any second. His bed was made, the dishes put away, everything in its place, like a cell ready for inspection. It was the end of the month, so he left an envelope with his rent propped against the radio. He watered the cactus, and though there was no chance of rain, lowered the window so it was open just an inch, then sat down at his table and waited. After a while he got up and lit his Primus stove to make coffee. He was sipping it, looking out over the stony slopes of the cemetery at the Zion Gate, when from the front of the house came the low grumble of a diesel and the squeal of brakes.
How long he’d imagined this. That first time, in Riga, they’d grabbed him on the street. A car pulled up, and he hadn’t had time to run. Now he was surprised at how calm he was, how resigned. The jump from his window was no more than fifteen feet. He could hide out in the crypt, a gun in each fist like a Wild West desperado.
Downstairs there was a rapping at the door. He could hear Mrs. Ohanesian saying something, and the burr of a man’s voice. Rather than wait for them, he gathered himself and crossed the room. One hand on the knob, he gave the flat a last look, as if he’d never be back, then opened the door.
“Stop where you are,” a policeman at the foot of the stairs called, pointing.
Brand raised his hands.
Mrs. Ohanesian touched her heart as if stricken. “What is going on here?”
“This man is under arrest.”
“What has he done?”
“It’s all right,” Brand said, suddenly proud of her. She was more upset than he was.
The policeman was accompanied by an Airborne soldier in a bright red beret. Poppies, they were called, notorious for their bar brawls and overzealous searches. The staircase was narrow, and the two advanced on Brand warily, as if he might resist. He held out his wrists to be handcuffed, but the policeman just took his arm.
The policeman went through Brand’s pockets, glancing at his papers, confiscating them.
“I left the rent on the table,” Brand told Mrs. Ohanesian as they hauled him off.
“Be quiet,” the Poppy said, bending back Brand’s hand so it felt like his fingers might snap, making him gasp.
“You’re hurting him!” she protested, and followed them out onto the porch.
Brand struggled in their grasp, and the Poppy twisted his hand again, buckling his knees. Brand swore.
“I told you to shut up.”
“Stop it!” Mrs. Ohanesian screamed.
In the street a convoy idled, a jeep and a police van escorting a sand-colored bus with wire mesh windows from which a dozen prisoners watched. Brand recalled the old Arab with his box of scarves, the beseeching look he’d given him. Brand didn’t want anyone’s pity. He wanted to jerk his arm free and shatter the soldier’s nose, and would have if they weren’t holding him. He planted his heels as they dragged him toward the open door, leaned back, deadweight, knowing he was only making it worse for himself. The prisoners clamored behind the wire, showering down curses. “Nazi bastards!”
The Poppy clamped a hand around Brand’s ear and twisted. The pain made everything else secondary. It took all of Brand’s strength not to faint. Before he could recover, they shoved him onto the bus and the doors folded closed. As he lay across the stairwell, covered in dust, his ear throbbing hotly, the prisoners gave him a round of applause he saw as mocking.
A man with a freshly split lip reached down from his seat to help him up. “Shabbat Shalom.”
Peaceful Sabbath. A comedian.
“Shabbat Shalom,” Brand said, brushing himself off.
As they pulled out, a squad of Pop
pies was crossing the yard for the porch, and while they wouldn’t find anything, he wanted to apologize to Mrs. Ohanesian. He hadn’t meant to make a scene.
The bus was less than half full, and smelled of burnt motor oil and sweat. He expected to see Fein or Yellin among his fellow passengers, but they were strangers—all of them men, several in rabbinical black, wearing prayer shawls and kippot. Some were white-haired, some just boys. All together, they resembled a modest minyan or a Torah class more than a secret army.
At the station road the convoy turned for Montefiore. Normally the sidewalks would be teeming with families in their Sabbath best on their way to shul. Instead, the neighborhood looked evacuated. Just past the windmill, outside a terra-cotta-roofed apartment block, they lurched to a stop. In silence, the prisoners watched the policeman and the Poppy approach the front door and knock.
“Five mils he’s a fighter,” his bloodied seatmate offered the bus at large.
“I’ve got five.”
“Make it ten.”
He’d forgotten what boredom could do. In the camps they bet on everything from the weather to the rats, all the way up to life and death. He’d thought it wretched, except it helped pass the time.
The man who finally emerged was the size of a bear, a young Hasid with dark sidelocks and a bushy beard. He dwarfed the Poppy, yet removed his hat and plodded down the walk between them, hanging his head as if guilty.
“Pff,” one of the bettors let out.
Another clucked his tongue, and Brand realized their cheers for him had been in earnest.
He’d been willing to go peacefully. Now his anger lingered, growing with each stop. He cheered the ones who fought, joining his voice to the chorus of scorn raining down on the Poppies, as did, later, the big Hasid. No matter how meekly they’d come, behind the wire windows they were a mob, with a mob’s cruel sense of humor. They jeered and threw coins when the Poppies’ backs were turned, until a squad boarded the bus and went row by row, making them empty their pockets, roughing them up when they stalled. Brand, used to the torpor of the camps, admired their defiance. When it was his turn, he acted as if he didn’t understand, answering in Latvian, earning him a cuff on his sore ear which brought tears to his eyes.
At the police station he expected more of the same, but instead of a team of interrogators beating him in a dingy cell, a clerk with bad teeth and perfect posture typed up the information on his papers and returned them to him. Another busload arrived. There weren’t enough benches for everyone, and after submitting to fingerprinting, Brand had to process outside to a shadeless courtyard and wait in line to get on a different bus. The Poppies stood guard with tommy guns. He thought of Katya and the train station in Rumbula and clenched his jaw. He hoped Eva was safe.
The rumor was that they were going to the detention camp in Rafah, down by the Egyptian border, or the old prison at Acre, above Haifa, on the water and much nicer, according to a fat Yemeni with a gold earring like a pirate. Sarafand, Netanya, Petah Tikva. Again, they bet, as if unconcerned for their own fate. The British had a secret camp in Eritrea reserved for Very Important Jews, but, by grudging consensus, unless their disguises were brilliant, no one on the bus looked very important. It was only when they headed west across the desert that they understood their destination was Latrun, the news triggering relieved laughter. Of all the camps, it was the closest. Brand didn’t see it as a victory.
From a distance the camp might have been a kibbutz, a water tower presiding over a dusty arrangement of war-surplus tents ringed by concertina wire. As the bus slowed and two guards walked the gates open to admit them, he felt his throat closing and gulped a lungful of air. On the parade ground, under the baking sun, clerks were waiting for them at tables, ledgers at the ready. As if reliving a dream, Brand knew exactly what would happen next. They’d be separated, their clothes and shoes taken away, leaving them naked as animals, defenseless. Then the selection would begin.
Occupation?
Mechanic, Brand had said, and was saved.
How many others were thinking the same thing? As the bus cleared the gates, a detail of Poppies fell in alongside them, machine guns slung high across their chests. No one heckled them.
Unlike the Germans, the British were surprisingly disorganized. For a long time, though no one complained, Brand’s line didn’t move. When he finally reached the table, the clerk informed him, apologizing like a waiter, that there were no more uniforms. The tent he was assigned to didn’t have enough cots. He and two other men ended up sleeping on the floor with only a thin blanket for a pad, and in the morning his hip hurt.
Latrun was designed to be a resupply base, not a prison. Water was rationed, the latrines overflowing, and still the buses came. The tent reeked of BO, though after a while Brand couldn’t smell himself. It reminded him of the transit camp near Trieste where he’d spent a week before shipping out, everyone sick with dysentery. Here the days lay empty before them like the desert, stretching to the horizon on all sides. There were no work details, no books, no playing cards, as if the heat and sheer boredom would make them confess. There was no news, only rumors, and he missed his radio. As he waited his turn to be questioned, he recalled details he needed to forget, like the initials on Asher’s valise, and Emilie de Rothschild’s being on the train, and Gideon’s scar. He knew the Irgun had taken Major Chadwick to Nablus and were planning something big at the King David. He could barely withstand the Poppy wringing his ear. What chance did he have against a trained interrogator?
In the morning, after the tent stood for head count, the master sergeant read off the names of the unlucky few. They said goodbye, settling up any last bets as they stripped their cots and gathered their belongings. Guilty or innocent, they weren’t coming back. Every morning Brand expected the master sergeant to call his name, but as the days passed he began to entertain the absurd notion that they’d forgotten him, or were simply too busy. And then, one morning, the master sergeant looked up from his clipboard and called: “Jorgenen.”
By his tone Brand was certain he knew the name was a fake. Clever. They’d let him think he was safe to make breaking him easier.
“Here,” he said.
“Step forward.”
Like a volunteer, he did.
Instead of a dungeon with sweating walls, they took him to a tent on the far side of the parade ground, where, after standing outside in the wilting sun for several hours, he entered the stifling darkness and sat across from a CID officer with thinning ginger hair, an epidemic of freckles and a toothbrush mustache. The man’s right hand was bandaged, making it hard for him to turn the pages of the report in front of him, and he smelled of flowery cologne. Brand expected a more sinister inquisitor, and considered that it might be a trick.
“Name,” the man asked.
Brand gave it.
“Is this your current address?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Eight months.”
“Have you ever been arrested before?”
“No.”
Everything the man asked him was in the report, and yet with each answer Brand felt he was further incriminating himself. The man didn’t write anything down, at times didn’t even seem to be listening, just watched Brand as he answered, cocking his head, examining the planes of his face like a surgeon.
“You’re certain you’ve never been arrested before.”
“Yes, sir.”
“May I see your papers?”
Brand unfolded them.
The man glanced from the grainy photo of Brand to his face as if they might be different, then opened a fat binder filled with mugshots. He licked a fingertip and, haltingly, with an insulting deliberateness, leafed through the cellophane-covered pages, sucking his teeth so his mustache twitched, pausing every so often and squinting up at Brand to compare him with the wanted. Finally he closed the binder and set it aside. He held out Brand’s papers, then, when Brand went to take them, d
idn’t let go. He drew closer, craning over the table so their faces were inches apart, as if to tell him a secret.
“Jossi Jorgenen,” the man said, looking into his eyes like a mindreader, and Brand was afraid to blink.
“Yes.”
“Do you know why you’re being detained?”
“No.”
“You’re being detained because someone gave us your name. Do you know who that person is?”
Lipschitz. Asher. But that was exactly what the man was fishing for.
“No.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
Eva had said they had people inside the CID.
“No,” Brand said.
The man let go of his papers and sat back, arms folded over his chest as if he’d won. “I want you to think about that person when they take your picture. I want to see it in your face.” With a finger he beckoned a guard. “Goodbye, Mr. Jossi Jorgenen, and good luck.”
In the next tent Brand stood still, trying not to think of anything while a photographer blinded him, then followed the guard to the camp laundry to turn in his blanket. He had no personal property to claim, just signed where the clerk indicated and was officially released. The interrogator had scared him, and he was relieved he wasn’t going to prison. His fellow parolees waiting for the bus were mostly students. They treated the whole thing like a joke, mouthing off to the guards, singing protest songs. Someone broke into “Hatikvah,” and Brand joined in, bellowing it out to show the Poppies they could never take away the people’s hope. It was only on the ride back to Jerusalem that the giddiness of being free again wore off, and he realized that, while he hadn’t said anything, they had a record of him now.
He walked to Eva’s from police headquarters, taking a winding route through the Old City, sneaking down alleys and across courtyards to make sure he wasn’t followed. Curfew was over. While he’d been detained, the British had commuted the death sentences. The next day the Irgun released the officers, as if the two sides were even. Brand had been a pawn all along.
Eva was safe. They never searched her place. “You stink,” she said, pushing him away before rewarding him with a stingy kiss.
City of Secrets Page 13
