Galerie

by Steven Greenberg

  Compared to the previous year, December 1937 was dry and cold in Kadima. That night, the moon was hiding behind thick rainless clouds, peeking out only every now and then, like a hesitant child behind a drawing room drapery. Both Zvi and Sofia had drawn guard duty on the graveyard watch, from midnight to six a.m.

  The military outpost had an eerie magic that reached its peak just before sunrise. There was a deafening silence when gun metal reached its coldest, and breath fogged out most thickly. Senses were dulled from lack of sleep, yet heightened from growing fear. Zvi felt restless that evening, a bullet in the chamber of his Enfield rifle, his right forefinger caressing the trigger guard. There had been a major raid in Tel Mond the previous day—more like a minor battle. Two Hagannah fighters, whom Zvi knew from basic training, had been killed, and Nabil had brought news of more and more shabaab coming into Kalansua. Something big was afoot, and Nabil had promised to provide advance warning if at all possible.

  Zvi blew on his chilled hands and hunkered lower behind the sand bags, while still keeping vigilant watch on the edge of the dark scrub forest just beyond the Pomer fields. He reached behind him to caress Sofia’s shoulder, but she shrugged off his hand. She was too nervous for physical contact. The silence weighed heavy, and the air smelled of musty swamp. Their eyes adjusted to the cloud-cover darkness, and were momentarily blinded as the first rays of the sun broke through the clouds to the East. The light flooded the scene below, revealing a backlit shadow running rapidly toward them across the north field.

  This was it! It had begun! Without hesitating, Zvi raised his rifle and fired a single shot. The shot split the silence of the dawn, the figure fell, and the quiet returned, covering Zvi and Sofia like a thick blanket.

  Seconds later, they heard the voice. “Zvi… Sofia… my friends… Zvi….” It came from across the field, weak yet recognizable. It was Nabil.

  Sofia hissed, “What did you do?” and hurried toward the rickety wooden ladder at the rear of the roof.

  Zvi grabbed the arm of her wool khaki jacket. “Wait!” he commanded in a low voice. “Think for a moment. What if it’s a trap? Why would Nabil have come now?”

  “Zvi… Sofia….” Nabil’s voice sounded lower now, but still clearly audible.

  Sofia shrugged out of Zvi’s grasp and turned back toward him. Her eyes flashed with anger. “He’s our friend, and you shot him. If you’re so worried about a trap, stay up here and cover me, because I’m going to help him!” She slung her carbine over her shoulder on its worn canvas strap, quickly descended the ladder, and silently made her way across the plowed field toward Nabil’s now quiet figure, some 200 meters from the rooftop position.

  “The sun was fully up, so I saw her going to him,” Zvi told me. “I watched her walk away from me. Then the morning fog parted, and a whole line of figures emerged from the woods. I could see the long rifles, scythes, curved Turkish swords, and even picks in their hands. They were on her, a young woman clearly in a Hagannah uniform, before I could even begin firing. I watched as she fell and a wall of people closed in, blocking my view. The others had woken up, and we somehow held them off for the next several hours. They gave up just as our ammunition began to run low. As soon as the area was clear, I ran down to Sofia, but there… there wasn’t much left to bury.”

  “And so you see,” Zvi said, straightening up and trying his best to speak ideologically, which I knew masked his pain. “You see, there is a price to be paid for each and every decision you make, for each and every action you take. Never forget that what you do today in a very real sense determines what you will be tomorrow.”

  After the incident in Kadima, Zvi had volunteered to parachute into occupied Europe and help organize both emigration and resistance. After participating in the Vilna Conference, he made his way back into Poland, and was captured by the Nazis in Warsaw.

  After many other adventures, about which I hope he’ll soon tell me, he ended up here in Prague.

  Tel Aviv, 1973

  My Vanesa was eight years old. Tel Aviv’s summer heat came early that year, creeping up on a short spring in the night, the latter retreating as if ashamed of its inadequacy. To celebrate the gloriously hot weather, both her mother and father had spontaneously taken the day off for a family beach outing.

  They’d taken the stuffy Dan Cooperative bus to the sparkling beaches of north Tel Aviv, ostensibly to ensure the outing was a true adventure. The truth was, Vanesa knew, her father preferred the urbane safety of the Gordon Pool, its salt water replaced nightly by powerful pumps that sucked the sea into a more controlled environment. While he swam in the nearby pool, she and her mother sat on the beach just south of the still-new Tel Aviv marina.

  Vanesa loved the wildness of the sea, the way it licked at her toes with an unquenchable thirst for power, always demanding more of her than it would ever return. Her play at the water’s edge was serious and concentrated. Her metal bucket and shovel created fortified structures of grave importance, then funneled quantities of water and sand to and fro with the urgent purpose of saving the people within from the evils without.

  Her mother dozed gently in the shade of a faded beach umbrella, her body demurely covered by thin cotton pants and a long-sleeved shirt. She wore no bathing suit, nor had Vanesa ever seen her mother’s naked body. She wore long sleeves most of the year, and in all her years Vanesa had only seen passing glimpses of the mysterious number tattooed on the top of her mother’s left forearm. The number was, she understood with a child’s intuitive sagacity, not something to be discussed, not something to be shown, and certainly not something to be flaunted openly, like Uncle Tomas did. She’d seen the look of displeasure on her mother’s face whenever Tomas appeared, sleeves rolled up, making no attempt to hide the shameful mark—indeed, apparently proud of his brand.

  The jellyfish came early that year, too, as the waters warmed quickly. The clear blob looked like water floating within itself, inviting and intriguing to an eight-year-old eye as it bobbed in the waist-high surf. Looking back to ensure her mother was still there, Vanesa left her sand-encrusted bucket lolling half-in and half-out of the calm water, the already placid waves having been further tamed by Tel Aviv’s rocky breakwaters.

  She didn’t scream. That task fell to her mother, who awoke to find Vanesa standing in front of her, fighting the tears that the red welts—running from her neck, across her bare chest, and down to below her waist like a crazed roadmap—struggled to elicit.

  “It doesn’t hurt much, Mama.” She squinted in the sunshine, even as something feral burst from her mother’s throat. It was a sound matched in Vanesa’s young experience only by the air-raid sirens that screamed overhead during civil defense drills, which had begun that winter as rhetoric from Egypt began to echo more loudly across the region.

  The screams brought the lifeguard running, as well as several off-duty soldiers, who charged up in bathing trunks, Uzis at the ready, sure that a team of Egyptian commandos had landed and begun wantonly slaughtering bathers.

  The lifeguard pried her mother away and, along with the disappointed young soldiers, saw the true nature of the incident.

  “My child! My child!” Her mother sobbed uncontrollably, attracting a crowd of onlookers even as Vanesa tried to calm her, embarrassment trumping the pain of the sting.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” she said in an urgent whisper. She could take pain, she explained. She was strong. She could even hold her breath for a really long time, like she would have had to in the gas chambers. They played at this sometimes during recess, her and Zivit and Keren, and she never died because she was so strong.

  Her mother’s sobbing faded to mute, beseeching despair.

  The lifeguard led Vanesa to the first aid hut, where the medic on duty applied a liberal dose of vinegar to lessen the pain.

  Her father’s silhouette appeared in the doorway of the hut. He ignored her mother’s limp, weeping form slumped on the chair in the corner, and rushed past the startled medic. He quickly asses
sed Vanesa’s condition and slapped her across the face so hard that her ear began to ring high and strong, and her face stung almost as much as her chest. Furious, he bent down until his face was only inches from hers. “What were you thinking? Look at you! How could you be so careless?”

  He roared at her so loudly that the medic retreated, after a perfunctory attempt to explain that it was a common, and not at all life-threatening, injury. A passing policeman intervened, pulling her father out of the hut and past the gawking onlookers.

  She sat on the rickety treatment table, ear ringing, face burning, her torso on fire, and guilt for causing her parents such suffering already creeping into the pit of her stomach.

  The long walk home was permeated with the silence of something deep and unfixable. Her mother’s eyes watched the ground while her father stared fixedly ahead, giving the appearance of a man deeply focused on the immediate, when in fact Vanesa knew he had left on another “Trip.” It was not the first time he’d traveled this way. Her mother had explained that sometimes Father needed to go away in his head, and that she should just wait patiently for him to return.

  And he always did return.

  Where did he go on these Trips, she wondered. Did he visit the streets of his boyhood Prague? Could he peel away the layers of Tel Aviv asphalt and sand to reveal the rain-slick Bohemian cobblestones hidden just beneath the surface? Were the smells of sea salt replaced with wood smoke and roasting ham, when he went away like this?

  Vanesa tried not to touch her chest, sticky with the salve they’d purchased at the pharmacy, and watched her father as they trudged across the city, wondering what it felt like to visit another place in your head while your body stayed where it was. Did you ever truly come back?

  Tel Aviv, June 1991

  When my Vanesa received the diary, after Michael died, she began to understand.

  We’d only been married nine months and were living in a small flat on HaNevi’im Street, only a block away from Dizengoff Center. The gloriously nondescript old Tel Aviv apartment occupied a blandly-colored concrete building, featuring an elegant polished wood and glass entrance hidden from the street by concrete support pillars, and intricately-patterned ceramic tiles on the floors. Behind the heavy wood door of our whitewashed second-floor flat, floor-to-ceiling built-in wood closets lined both bedroom and kitchen, while a glass-enclosed kitchen porch created a bright yet cozy dining alcove. A balcony ran the length of the apartment, facing the Ficus trees that filled space between our building and the backs of the apartments on HaShoftim Street.

  On Saturday mornings, we’d drink our coffee on the balcony, perching precariously on rickety chairs we’d rescued from the street, the source of much of our furniture those days. Vanesa would rest one heavy leg on my lap, her glass mug—never ceramic—steaming on the balcony wall, a Marlboro Light held loosely between her fingers, her face buried in Friday’s Yediot Ahronot—never Maariv. The smoke would rise from her cigarette and dissipate along with the gentle sounds of Tel Aviv waking up.

  The bedroom was so small that we’d pushed the bed against the wall, leaving one of us—her—access to the floor and one of us—me—stuck against the cold cement wall, head directly underneath the electrical outlet into which we’d plug the sickly sweet mosquito repellent device. Despite this innovation, our spring and summer nights in the screen-free apartment were plagued by the ear-buzz of mosquitoes, who had apparently never read the device manufacturer’s marketing material.

  The phone call came, as such calls inevitably do, in the middle of the night, on the morning of June 5, 1991. Our gas masks, which we’d dutifully carried on shoulders in flimsy cardboard boxes that had deteriorated at more or less the same rate as our fear of Saddam Hussein using chemical weapons, had been put away since the First Gulf War ended in March. Our nights still belonged to fear, however, even after the quiet radio station—which had broadcast white noise all night during the war, unless a missile attack was detected—ceased broadcasting. The freakishly alarming electronic bleep that had woken us so many nights during the Gulf War, followed by the twice-repeated Hebrew code nachash tzefa—referring to the Vipera palaestinae, a local venomous snake—was not quickly forgotten.

  The phone call at four in the morning had us both out of bed in ten seconds, hands groping for gas masks, and me once again knocking my head on the highly-effective mosquito attraction device.

  I got to the phone first. It was one of those fateful moments, like deciding not to step off the curb just before the unseen bus rushes by, or sleeping in a building on which an Iraqi Scud fell, but did not detonate. Except I wasn’t saved by it, I was condemned. If only I’d tripped, or gotten tangled in something, and she’d reached the phone before me. If only she’d been the one to get the news directly from Uncle Tomas. Perhaps then she wouldn’t have spent the rest of our time together blaming me for being the one who told her that her father had died of a heart attack while out on a late-night walk.

  But I did get there first, and I did have to tell her, and she never forgave me.

  “He was on a Trip,” she said simply, after asking me to repeat the news twice. “He always comes back from his Trips. Always.”

  Since I had hung up the phone to break the news to her, she redialed Tomas, and the tears inevitably followed. She sat at the kitchen table the rest of the night, watching out the dusty glass windows for a dawn that came, but brought no comfort.

  She did not speak to me that night, nor the day after. She did not allow herself to be comforted, at least not by me. I was extraneous to her grief, neither a contributor nor a detractor.

  In accordance with Jewish tradition, they buried Michael later that day in a simple ceremony in the Yarkon cemetery, on the outskirts of the city. None of us had a car, including Uncle Tomas, who was too frail to drive in any case. The only one who didn’t have to take two buses to get to the funeral was Michael himself. He arrived in a somber-colored van bearing the logo of Hevra Kadisha, the burial society. The driver doubled, economically, as the rabbi who officiated at the funeral.

  A glorious, sunshine-soaked June morning meant funeral guests arrived in sunglasses and hats, clutching bottles of water as they wound their way through the vast Yarkon cemetery, behind the gurney carrying Michael’s shroud-wrapped body. The countless thousands of boxy stone graves in the shadeless cemetery bobbed in the shimmering heat like a fleet of clunky sailboats, headstones straining upward in a vain attempt to catch and harness the light morning breeze.

  At the graveside, I stood behind Vanesa, one hand protectively on her shoulder, and nodded gravely to the many well-wishers. As far as prayers go, the rabbi/driver’s proved strictly of the form letter variety—“Insert Name of Deceased Here”—but he executed them convincingly. The man’s polished El Maley Rachamim, a traditional funeral prayer, managed to sound appropriately nasal and imploring—even as he discretely glanced twice at the card in his hand to get Michael’s name right. I wondered vaguely if any of the daily grief that surrounded this man rubbed off on him, or if he just passed through it with impunity.

  Throughout the funeral, Vanesa remained stony-faced, deep inside herself, staring fixedly at the grave as they lowered Michael’s shrouded body into it. I squeezed her shoulder in an attempt at comfort, and she shrugged my hand away.

  Tomas stood directly across the grave from us, the traditional kri’a ripped in the collar of his shirt. He had an appropriately grave look on his wrinkled face most of the time. However, as Michael’s body came to rest at the bottom of the grave and the eyes of all were on the first shovelfuls of sandy earth thrown over it—that moment when mortality slaps the face of even the most unexamined life—Tomas looked up, let out a long sigh, and allowed the corners of his mouth to gravitate momentarily upward. It did not seem a look of ironic memory, nor of maudlin wonder at the intricacies of life’s ebb.

  It was a look, unmistakable yet entirely inexplicable, of relief.

  Prague, December 1991

  Jonas Jako
bovits broke off his explanation mid-sentence, the wooden chair creaking ominously as he abruptly leaned his tall frame back, stretched his arms over his head, and leveled a penetrating gaze back in Vanesa’s direction.

  She noticed the muscles flexing under the thin fabric of his long-sleeve shirt, then quickly averted her gaze to yet another group of tarnished silver objects, this time a shelf of castle-shaped spice boxes, used in the havdalah ceremony at the end of the Sabbath.

  “So, enough of my rambling,” he blurted, poorly affecting shyness to disguise the suspicion in his narrowed eyes. “Let’s hear what brings you to Prague, and how I can be of assistance.” He leaned forward, resting his chin on one hand, and waited.

  Vanesa had gathered her hair back into a single ponytail that morning, and it had already loosened. She removed the hair band from her hair, holding it in her mouth while she re-gathered the unruly mass into a new and tighter arrangement, and then started speaking.

  She told her story succinctly and unemotionally, despite the flutter in her stomach and the tremor in her hands whenever she moved them. As she concluded her account, she retrieved the single sheet of paper from her briefcase and laid it on Jakobovits’ desk, on top of some folders and in between the piles of books.

  “This is why I’ve come to Prague, Dr. Jakobovits. This is why I need your help. And I do hope you can help me, because frankly….” She shook her head, smiled wanly and made a beseeching Princess Lea gesture with both hands. “You’re my only hope.”

  On the paper she’d painstakingly copied the odd symbol she’d found in her father’s diary. “It actually isn’t just in the diary,” she explained, “more like all over it.”

  Boldly emblazoned on the cover in thick black ink, doodled in the margins countless times in smeared pencil, carefully stylized in color inside the back cover—the symbol, whatever it was, had clearly occupied her father’s thoughts to the point of obsession in the years he’d kept this diary.