The Fury of Rachel Monette (6 page)

Simon Calvi sipped the sweet black coffee. One success cancels a thousand wasted lives. He had read an article in an American magazine about something called the black man in a Cadillac syndrome. It was an argument that only the haves found convincing. Calvi knew that his followers couldn't be bought with someone else's Cadillac. The
Post
editorial preached to the converted. His troubles would come from other sources.

The complaining squeaks of a rusting bicycle made Calvi look up from the newspaper. The height of his garden wall hid the bicycle itself, but not the head of the approaching rider—his speech writer, executive assistant, and friend, Moses Cohn. Somehow in the soft but very clear golden light of the early Jerusalem morning Moses Cohn's face seemed much closer than it really was, as if Calvi had the aid of a telephoto lens. He knew that Cohn must still be almost a block away, and yet he fancied he could see the details of the thin face, the strong straight nose, the russet hair, the strong tendons which underlay the taut cheeks, the incisive mouth, the intelligent blue eyes. Perhaps this heightened visual sense was brought on by a subconscious reaction to the editorial, Calvi thought. But when Cohn had pulled the bicycle through the old iron gate and sat down Calvi saw that there was more to it. The image itself was radiating an overabundance of visual data—of color, of tension, even of violence, Calvi thought. He could see it in the flushed spots on the pale skin, and the movements of the wiry neck.

“Coffee?” Calvi asked. Long ago he had learned patience. He poured some into his own cup and handed it to Cohn. Cohn drank some, put the cup on the grass, and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard; the kind of pinch that drives out demons. He looked at Calvi in an odd way, almost, Calvi thought, as if he were trying to see him totally anew, as if they hadn't known each other for twenty years.

“Do you know a man named Grunberg?” Cohn asked finally.

“I don't think so. Why?”

“Major Grunberg.”

Calvi waited. A fat red-eyed pigeon landed heavily in the garden and began to peck among the flowers, its head, neck, and breast pumping in a grotesque modern dance.

“He's with Army Intelligence. So he told me about an hour ago. Very efficient fellow. Managed to enter the apartment without waking any of us. No need to worry about the knock at the door. Just wait for the tap on the shoulder while you're sleeping.” His fury had knotted the sinewy muscles in his forearms. “To get away from that sort of barbarity is why I came here.” The Hebrew gutturals tore at his throat.

“What did he want?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, what did he say, Moses?” Calvi asked, more aggressively than he had intended. It was the wrong way to get information from Moses Cohn. Cohn made that very point by suddenly noticing that the pant legs of his old gray flannels were still rolled up for bicycling. Giving the matter all his attention he carefully rolled them down, smoothed out the wrinkles and gave each leg a quick shake. He'd been bullied once already, he wouldn't allow it again.

“Maybe he dropped a few hints, at least.” Calvi was a politician after all and knew how to give ground.

Cohn allowed a little smile to move across his face, like a ray of light, but when it had passed he looked worried.

“He asked a lot of questions about you.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Questions,” Cohn snapped. He was very angry. “How long I had known you. How we got together. That sort of thing. He sat right there on the bed, with Sarah and me still in it, under the covers. It was humiliating: worse than being taken into the back room.”

Calvi knew the comparison was not accidental. The British had interrogated Cohn twice during the dying days of the mandate. The little man was a member of the Irgun and could have told them a lot. But he didn't. Perhaps it was more humiliating when it came from one of your own.

“So?” Calvi prodded.

“So I told Grunberg how we got together. What is there to hide?”

“What did you say exactly?”

Cohn made an impatient gesture. “That I was working on the settlement program for new immigrants. That you were an immigrant with a bit of money who was interested in politics. What kind of politics, Grunberg wanted to know. I didn't understand what he meant. So he read me something from an interview you gave in the late fifties: you said that immigrants should be assimilated into a western life-style as soon as possible. Do you see? Then he asked me about the rally in Tel Aviv last month. Did you really say that the Oriental Jews have more in common with Arabs than they do with the European Jews? Did you really say that the survival of Israel lies to the east, not the west? So, what are you getting at, I asked him. It's a matter of public record. He agreed. It's public record.”

In the sky a cold west wind was pushing a dark cover of cloud over the city. The sunlight shone on the leading edge of the cloud like a gold vein in a coal mine. Calvi blew on his fingertips. It was going to snow.

“He wanted to know if I agreed with everything you said.”

Calvi looked up sharply. Cohn returned the look.

“I told him yes, so don't get nervous.”

“It's not a question of that. Why should he know about our internal business, that's all I'm saying.”

Cohn looked thoughtful. “Why indeed?”

Calvi reached inside his shirt pocket for one of the fat short cigars he liked to smoke. He was trying to cut down to two a day, one after lunch, one after dinner. But he felt like one now. He struck a cardboard match and said around the cigar:

“Was that all?”

“Almost. He asked a few questions about your life in Morocco. I told him I know little about it. It's true.”

“How little?”

“You come from Fez. You lived in the mellah. Your ancestors came from Spain. You left Morocco after the war. So did two hundred thousand others.”

“So we did.” He puffed on his cigar and glanced at Cohn to see if he was listening. “We landed in Haifa on a hot day in August. They put us into trucks, about a hundred of us, right at the docks, and drove us into the Negev. By the time we arrived it was almost dark. A little village of huts had been thrown together. Okay, everybody out, they said. Here's your new home. Happy farming. We looked at the rocks and the sand. We stayed where we were. So they fired a few shots in the air, and someone yelled it was an Arab attack, take shelter. We ran and hid in the huts. The trucks drove away. The next morning we divided the land and began to plow.”

Cohn appeared unmoved by the story. His eyes were far away, on the Old City. The clouds had hidden West Jerusalem in an obscure gloom, but they had yet to cover the Old City. By an accident of light and shade the centuries were rolled back like cheap rugs, and the walled city seemed more than a tourist attraction. But in a moment the vision was gone, and the golden Dome of the Rock looked once again like gold paint, and the limestone towers, churches, and synagogues like rubble.

Calvi realized that he had probably recounted the whole episode before, perhaps even in a speech somewhere; a speech written by Moses Cohn. And he realized too that this time he had told the story with no real bitterness. No sense pretending: he had been so grateful to be in Israel he would have happily planted apple trees in granite.

Cohn had been the radical in those days, a European socialist who believed in the impossibility of comparing cultures. Therefore no one could be superior to another. Just different. Did Cohn regret the political tutoring he had given him? He could see it on his face, feel it in the tension between them. They were like a married couple growing apart: united only by a contract and the accumulation of common property.

Cohn's clear blue eyes looked closely at Calvi. “What's behind Grunberg's heavy-handed little visit, Simon? Why this pressure?”

Before Calvi could answer the rear door of the house opened.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Gisela said. “I didn't realize you had a visitor.”

For one who had been in the country for less than a year her Hebrew was excellent, but neither man paid much attention to her speech. She wasn't wearing any clothes. She showed no trace of embarrassment, although she and Cohn had never met. No haute couturier would look twice at her body, but other men would. It was unfashionably heavy, especially in the hips and legs, but still retained remnants of the springy underpinning of nubility. With old-fashioned politeness Cohn looked away.

“Do you want breakfast?” she said.

“Breakfast?” Calvi asked Cohn.

“I really haven't the time this morning. But thank you.”

“He can't stay,” Calvi said to Gisela. In some way her nakedness required him to become an intermediary in the conversation. “But I'd like something, please.” Gisela turned and disappeared in the house.

“British?” Cohn asked.

“German. They are rather easy to attract in this country, you know. It must be some form of restitution.” Instantly he regretted the facetiousness of his remark. He felt more for Gisela than that.

“It doesn't bother you?”

“Why should it?” His cigar had gone out and he relit it. “She wasn't even born during the war.”

Cohn shook his head, the way faithful married men often do at their bachelor friends. Especially bachelor friends who are pushing sixty. He rolled up his pant legs and remounted his bicycle.

“I'm going to tell Grunberg all about this,” he called over his shoulder as he rode away. “Now you've gone too far.”

Calvi laughed and turned to the newspapers. Politicians read the news avidly, the way actors read theatrical reviews. Calvi was not aware of the first few snowflakes that drifted through the trees into the garden, melting as they touched the ground. He scarcely noticed Gisela return, dressed in old jeans and a woolen sweater and carrying a breakfast tray. Politics are serious in Israel and the word
crisis
means what the dictionary says it does. Gisela sat beside him eating her breakfast. After a while she ate his, too. When she felt cold she went inside to do the dishes, or at least to stack them in the sink.

Because he read each paper from beginning to end it was some time before Simon Calvi reached the classified page of the
International Herald Tribune.
Among the personals his eye caught a brief notice addressed to Walter D. In his armpits the pores opened suddenly.

“Walter D. Did you get my present? Marie.”

He went quickly into the house, into the little study on the ground floor, and locked the door. Taking a French edition of
Crime and Punishment
from the shelves he sat at the desk and began marking numbers on a sheet of paper.

Walter D. was meaningless. It was just to get his attention. He began with
did. D
was twenty, page twenty, fourth word, first letter.
I
was forty-five, ninth word.
D
again. It was an elementary code. All you needed was the right edition of the right book.

6

Simon Calvi stood near the Damascus Gate wishing he weren't. It wasn't the cold, he had been cold before, many times. It wasn't the night, night didn't bother him either. Perhaps it was age. He had never been old before. He knew he wasn't going to like it.

He looked up at the crenellated wall that topped the gate. The half moon was doing a terrific lighting job on the old stones, cutting centuries off their age. No Hollywood director with all his fancy filters could have done better work for his fading star. In the pale light Calvi could almost see a real fort, with Crusaders lurking behind the wall getting ready to shoot their arrows through the slits. In the daytime it would be a Crusader's dream come true from up there: the square packed with peddlers, beggars, tourists, housewives, and donkeys, like the cast and crew of
The Ten Commandments
on a break. Now Calvi had the place to himself, except for an emaciated old Arab sleeping behind his felafel stand.

Calvi sank deeper into his fleece-lined duffel coat. A muezzin, in a dyspeptic voice that told listeners it was just a job, and not a very good one, began singing the last call to prayer. The scratchy notes heralded the arrival of two soldiers who came through the gate quite suddenly, Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Groggily the old Arab got to his feet and stood behind the pile of dirty orange crates that served as his stand, his eyes on nothing. From a distance of thirty or forty feet the soldiers gave Calvi a careful look. Indifferently he turned his back on them and slowly walked over to the felafel stand. He felt the soldiers' eyes on his back while he asked the old man in Arabic if he had anything left to sell. The old man had white cataract smears on both eyes. He reached into a crate and pulled out a little lump wrapped in shreds of greasy newspaper. Calvi dropped a coin into the man's hand and forced himself to bite off a piece and chew it. He heard the soldiers start walking away, their heavy boots making hard sounds on the unyielding stone.

When he turned around, they were gone. Around to the Jaffa Gate and back inside the walls, he reckoned. They probably patrolled the Old City quarter by quarter. He tossed the remains of the felafel away and resumed his position near the gate. It was hard to feel inconspicuous when your face was in the morning paper.

Calvi heard the old man mutter something and saw him walk stiffly into the square to retrieve the felafel. He returned to his stand, wrapped it in another tatter of newspaper and tucked it out of sight. Calvi leaned against the wall and thought about the trouble between the Arabs and the Jews.

From the Nablus Road came the rough sound of a car motor that needed tuning. Calvi looked north and saw the approaching headlights. Slowly a dusty, dark-colored Volkswagen entered the square and swept around the perimeter until its beams fastened on Calvi by the wall. Then the lights were shut off and the motor cut. It was very quiet. The old man slept on the stones.

Calvi waited for a minute before he walked across the square to the car. He opened the passenger door and sat inside. Immediately the car began a startling high-pitched buzzing. The driver turned to Calvi and said, “Seat belt.” He said it in English but the barely detectable lilt came from Germany, perhaps Austria. Calvi, a polyglot, knew accents.