Black Box (15 page)

You have the womb—you have the advantage. That is the answer to your question. I never had a chance and that was why I ran away from you. Until your long arm reached me in my hideaway. Your victory was child’s play. From a range of twelve thousand miles you managed to score a bull’s-eye on an empty abandoned tank.

Ten to midnight. The storm has died down a little but there is still no regular power. Perhaps I’ll call Annabel, my secretary, and wake her up. I’ll tell her to get the Scotch out and make me a light supper. I’ll tell her I’m on my way. She is a divorcee, about thirty, embittered, diminutive, bespectacled, ruthlessly efficient, always dressed in jeans and chunky sweaters. Chain-smokes. I’ll call a taxi and in half an hour I’ll be ringing her bell. The moment she opens the door I’ll shock her with a hug and proceed to crush her lips with mine. Before she can collect herself I’ll ask her to marry me and demand an instant reply. My famous name, plus my aura of grim manliness, plus the smell of battlefields that clings to me, plus my property, minus love, plus the growth that has been removed from my kidney, in return for her stunned consent to bear my surname and look after me if my illness gets worse. I’ll buy her a sweet house in one of the delightful suburbs, on condition that we share it with a mentally disturbed giant of sixteen, who will have permission to invite girls home without any obligation to leave a light on in the shower or inspection doors open. The ticket will be sent to him in Hebron tomorrow morning. Zakheim can worry about the rest.

It’s no good, Ilana. My hatred is peeling away from me like old plaster. By the neon light in the room, with the lightning falling into the lake in the darkness, I do not have it in my power to thaw the cold in my bones. In fact, it’s extremely simple: when the electricity was cut, the heating also stopped working. And so I got up and put on a jacket. But no improvement was apparent. My hatred is being dashed from my clasp like the sword from the hands of Goliath after the pebble sank into him. This is the sword you will lift and kill me with. But you have nothing to boast about: you slew a dying dragon. Perhaps you will get the credit for putting me out of my misery?

Just now there was a hoot outside in the darkness. Because the darkness outside is complete, apart from a thin line of radioactive purple on the horizon. A hoot from the outer darkness where according to Jesus there is “howling and gnashing of teeth.” Was it a boat? Or a train arriving from the prairies? It is hard to know, because the wind is frenziedly whistling a single, sharp high note. And the power is still off. My eyes ache from writing in this mortuary light. I have here in my office a bed, a closet, and a small bathroom. But the narrow bed, between two metal file cabinets, suddenly frightens me. As though there is a corpse laid out on it. Surely it is only the clothes I unpacked in a hurry when I got back from London this morning.

There is that hooting again. This time nearby. So it wasn’t a boat or a train, but the plaintive siren of an emergency vehicle. An ambulance? A police car? There’s been a crime in one of the neighboring streets. Somebody is in big trouble. Or is there a fire—a building on fire and threatening to take its neighbors and all the neighborhood with it? Has a man decided he’s had enough and jumped from the top of a skyscraper? Someone who lived by the sword dying by the sword?

The emergency lighting sheds its pallor on me. It is a ghostly mercury light, the kind used in operating theaters. I loved you once and there was a picture in my brain: You and me on a summer’s evening sitting on the veranda of our home facing the Jerusalem hills and the child playing with bricks. Sundae glasses on the table. And a newspaper that we are not reading. You are embroidering a tablecloth and I am making a stork from a pine cone and slivers of wood. That was the picture. We weren’t able. And now it’s late.

Your Vampire

***

(Note delivered by hand)

Dear Mr. Zakheim, I shall hand you this note at the end of our meeting today at the Cafe Savyon. I’m not going to go on meeting you. My ex-husband will have to find another way of getting his letters to me. I can’t see why he doesn’t send them by mail, as I shall do from now on. I am writing this note only because it would be difficult for me to tell you to your face that you disgust me. Every time I have had to shake hands with you I have felt as if I were holding a frog. The shady “deal” that you hinted at, in connection with Alex’s inheritance, was the last straw. Perhaps the fact that in the past you were a witness to my misfortune has unsettled you completely. You did not understand my misfortune and even today you understand nothing. My ex-husband, my present husband, and perhaps my son too, know and understand what happened then, but you do not, Mr. Zakheim. You are on the outside.

Ilana Sommo

Despite everything, I would do what you want if only you could find a way of bringing him back to me. And because of his illness it is urgent.

***

Mr. Michael Sommo
Isaac’s Tent Religious State High School
Jerusalem

Jerusalem
5.7.1976

STRICTLY PRIVATE: FOR ATTENTION OF ADDRESSEE ALONE

My dear Mr. Sommo,

I am in receipt of yours of 13 Sivan. I delayed replying so as to learn your proposals. Meanwhile we have succeeded by a combined effort in getting our elephant through the eye of the needle. It would not occur to me to compete with you on your home ground, but I wonder if my memory can be deceiving me about the city of Kiryat Arba, or is it somehow connected with giants even in the Bible? You did an excellent job with our young hero. (I gather that his new police record has been closed through internal intervention.) I take my hat off to you. Would it be possible to make use of your magical powers again on other occasions? With talents and contacts such as yours, it is not you who should hire my humble services—as you suggested in your letter—but perhaps the other way around?

Which brings me straight to the body of your letter and to our very fruitful telephone conversation of yesterday. I confess unashamedly that I have no special feelings about the Territories, etc. It is possible that I should be inclined, like you, simply to swallow them whole were it not for the Arabs who live there. And I can do without them. I therefore perused respectfully the prospectus for your organization that you kindly enclosed with your letter. Your plan is to pay each Arab in full for his land and property and give him a one-way ticket at our expense. The aspect that strikes me as problematical is, naturally, the multiplication of, let us say, twenty thousand dollars by two million Arabs, give or take a billion dollars or so. To finance this migration we would have to sell the whole of the state, and would still get into debt. Is it really worth selling the State of Israel to buy the Territories? Surely instead of that we could simply do a swap: we can go up to the cool sacred mountains, and they can take our place on the damp coastal plain. They might agree to that of their own free will.

With your permission I shall dwell for another brief moment on the notion of exchanging the coastal plain for the mountains. To my regret it would appear that our dear Dr. Gideon has changed his mind about selling his property in Zikhron Yaakov. Even though it is possible that in the near future he will change it back again. Recently it has proved rather hard to gauge his state of mind. Mr. N. of Paris will therefore have to gird himself with patience. You see, my friend, Zakheim’s long nose sniffs into everything: from certain delightful persons it has become known to me that Mr. N., who at one time was your friend in the Betar youth movement in Paris and who over the years has built up an empire in women’s clothing, is the holy ghost that begat, with your collaboration, the Jewish Fellowship Movement. Between you and me, Mr. Sommo, I am also aware of the fact that it was our very own Mr. N. who financed your semisecret trip to Paris last spring. Moreover, I am also aware that the purpose of your trip was to negotiate on behalf of your organization with a certain Christian religious order, whose headquarters are in Toulouse, concerning some land belonging to the aforementioned order and situated to the west of Bethlehem, on the West Bank. And again, it was the same tireless Mr. N. who exerted himself to arrange for the restoration of your French citizenship, so as to give you a legal basis for a transaction that Mr. N. himself, for understandable reasons, preferred not to be involved with in any formal sense. You see, my friend, this transaction fascinates me too. The robed gentlemen from Toulouse are not prepared to sell you their God’s little acre in the Holy Land, but they will apparently agree to exchange the fields of Bethlehem for an ample building with appropriately ample lands attached in a central location within the pre-1967 borders. No doubt for missionary purposes. All this seems perfectly logical to me. While the readiness of Mr. N. to finance such a deal I accept as a fact. So far, all well and good. We would be able to complete the triangle Bethlehem-Toulouse-Zikhron admirably were it not for the volatile state of mind of our learned friend. I shall endeavor to soften him up to the best of my modest abilities and to the advantage of all the parties concerned.

And in the meantime my advice is as follows: Out of both ethical and practical considerations it is preferable for me not to undertake to manage your private affairs or to represent your organization. Which relieves you of the obligation to pay me any fee. On the other hand, I shall be delighted to advise you gratis on any matter on which you may decide to rely on my modest talents. (And with your permission I shall commence with the suggestion that you have one or two decent suits made: from now on you are, after all, a highly respected man of property, and liable to be even more highly respected in consequence of the tragic aspects of the Dr. Gideon episode. Provided of course you know how to take a hint here and there.) Your public position too contains the seeds of great and wonderful things, Mr. Sommo; it is possible that the day is nigh when you will be called to higher spheres.

But the matter of dress is, of course, peripheral. The substance of my hopes I pin on the meeting I have arranged for Monday between you and my son-in-law, the industrialist Zohar Etgar, of Herzlia. (Zohar is married to my only daughter, Dorit, and he is the father of my two grandchildren.) I have no doubt, Michel—if you will permit me to address you by this name—that you will find him to be a young man after your own heart. Recently he has been planning, like you, to move into land. And by the way, Zohar, even more than I, is inclined to bet on a change of government within the next two years. Such a change is bound to entail the opening up of exciting new horizons in the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip for forward-looking men like ourselves. I am certain that the two of you, my son-in-law and you, will bring abundant advantages to one another: your wealth and good connections will be worth their weight in gold in the aftermath of the aforementioned change, while Zohar’s energy will be directed into promising channels.

As for me, as I have said I will continue to keep an eye on things from Dr. Gideon’s angle. I have reason to hope that I will soon be able to bring you glad tidings concerning the property in Zikhron. Provided we gird ourselves with patience and trust one another.

In conclusion I am compelled to touch on a somewhat delicate point. I will do so with extreme brevity. An intensive correspondence has evolved between your good wife and her former husband. This correspondence strikes me as, to say the least, puzzling: in my humble opinion no good will come of it to any of the parties. Dr. Gideon’s illness is likely to drive him into unexpected behavior. His will in its present disposition is rather positive from your point of view (you will appreciate that I am unable to expatiate on this point). This matter opens up numerous avenues for future collaboration between your good self and my son-in-law. Whereas the renewed contacts with the lady are liable to upset the applecart, not to mention other avenues implied in this liaison, which are not compatible with good taste from your point of view. Women, my dear Michel, are in my humble opinion very much like us in certain respects, but in others they are astonishingly different. And I am referring to those respects in which the most stupid woman is cleverer than the cleverest of us. Therefore if I were you I would keep a sharp lookout. I shall take my leave of this embarrassing topic with the age-old words with which you closed your esteemed letter:
“verb. sap.”

With hopeful good wishes,
Yours admiringly,
Manfred Zakheim

P.S.: Contrary to the supposition expressed in your letter, I do not have the honor to be numbered among the survivors of the Holocaust. My family brought me to this country in 1925, when I was a child of ten. This in no way detracts from my admiration for your perspicacity. M. Z.

***

Sommo Family

Tarnaz 7

Jerusalem

Hi Michel and Ilana

Everythings fine with me here in Kiryat Arba and I havent got into trubble with anybody. But you no Michel your not rite? Even tho I respect you and Im not forgeting all the favors youve done for me every time Ive been in trubble but thats just the problem. I never hit anyone only when Im rite—not 99 percent rite but 100 percent rite. Even then I dont always hit them, mostly I just drop it. Thats how it was that time with the teacher in Telamim when I was rite and the same the time with Abram Abudaram and the time with the cops in Sharm. I was always in the rite and I still got into trubble and you really saved me, only every time you want to run my life for me do this dont do that like if I wasnt rite and like if I had to pay you back all the time for the things Ive done wrong that I havent done wrong at all. Your not rite Michel.