The Jerusalem Inception (32 page)
The truck traveled along a dirt road, raising a storm of dust. When it slowed down to cross a dry stream, a dust cloud caught up, filling the back of the truck and covering his friends’ faces with a ghost-like white layer.
T
he day after Passover, Elie Weiss boarded a Swissair flight to Zurich. The plane was packed with well-to-do Israeli families fleeing the country—a recent phenomenon that demonstrated new cracks in the idealistic spirit that had typified most Israelis until the Eshkol government began to fumble indecisively while the Arabs prepared to attack. The children were oblivious to the tension, marveling at the airplane and its accoutrements, but the adults furtively glanced at each other in a camaraderie of shame.
Elie kept on his wool cap and sunglasses. He was travelling under the name of Rupert Danzig, a junior SS officer, who in January 1945 was raping a woman at her kitchen in a village near Munich while his comrades ransacked the house. Abraham pulled Danzig off the woman and held him while Elie clipped his vocal cords with a quick stab. They prodded him out the back door and deep into the forest, where they tied him to a tree, his pants still down at his knees.
Danzig eagerly answered Elie’s questions by nodding or shaking his head while air gurgled through his perforated vocal cords. With the war about to end, Danzig had planned to don civilian clothes and avoid capture by the approaching American forces. That explained the passport and cash in his pocket. After removing his identification tags, papers, and uniform, Elie used his
shoykhet
blade to peel off the rest of the Nazi’s identity. When he finished, Danzig had no face, only a mask of raw flesh, bare jaws exposing a perfect set of teeth, and lidless eyes glaring downward at the puddle of blood on the soft carpet of pine needles.
Since the war, Elie had maintained bank accounts and a tiny apartment in Paris under Rupert Danzig’s identity. He travelled to Europe often to continue his private hunt for SS veterans. The years had thinned out their ranks, but had also lowered their guard. He used them as cash cows, making them pay for their past sins and current freedom, making them work hard for money he then used to finance his SOD operations in Israel and Europe. And those who refused to pay, or ran out of money, were found dead. In most cases, no one ever detected the surgical entry point under the right ear, where Elie’s blade had severed the brainstem without external bleeding.
But this trip was different. By gaining control of the fortune Tanya’s Nazi lover had stashed in Zurich, Elie would no longer have to chase the aging small fish. Rather, he would put his energy into a revolutionary reversal of the global balance of power between the Jews and their enemies.
When the plane leveled off over the Mediterranean, Elie unzipped his leather briefcase and took out a bunch of envelopes held together with a rubber band. He had arranged with the IDF postmaster to stop all mail addressed to, or from, Private Jerusalem Gerster. Checking the stamps on the envelopes, Elie opened Temimah Gerster’s first letter, dated approximately six weeks earlier:
My dearest Jerusalem,
Your father gave me the address in the Zionist army and allowed me to write to you. With God’s help, after many weeks, I am recovering from the terrible shock. What you did is still incomprehensible to me. I know that young men sometimes desire to assert their independence, to rebel against authority. But why did you have to go to such extremes? And why didn’t you speak with us first, before stripping yourself of all that distinguishes a God-fearing member of our community? You defied your father, rejected our whole way of life, and broke God’s laws. I cannot understand it. I pray that you realize your error soon. I beg of you, my son, to think of what you have done. I plead and implore you to repent. It’s not too late—as the Talmud says, ‘He who repents and corrects his ways shall be treated with compassion.’ God will show you the way when you are ready to see it. Meanwhile, make sure to eat and sleep well, and say your prayers. I ask God every day for your safe return to us. May the Master of the Universe watch over you, my son. Please write back.
Your loving mother,
Temimah Gerster.
The stamp on the second envelope was from about a week later. The letter inside was written on the same type of paper, and with the same blue pen, as the first letter:
My dearest Jerusalem,
You haven’t responded to my previous letter. Perhaps you are away on military drills. Today is Thursday, and I went out of the apartment for the first time since that terrible day, when your father, in his understandable anger, excommunicated you. Everyone was very happy to see me at the synagogue, and most of the donated clothes are gone. I asked Benjamin to take the rest to Shmattas to be exchanged, and he did it well. He also misses you very much and prays for your return. Please write a few words to let us know how you are. Your father agreed that you may come home to celebrate Passover with us, provided that you respect God’s laws while under out roof. Please, I beg you to come, even if you have to go back to the army after the holiday. Maybe you don’t understand what it means for me to think of sitting at the Passover table without you. When you have a child one day, God willing, you will understand my agony. So please come home for Passover. I pray for your safe return.
Your loving mother,
Temimah Gerster.
Elie folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. He read the next one, and the next, until he had read all six of them. With each successive letter, her tone grew more anxious, her pleas more urgent, especially with the approaching holiday. In the last letter, under his wife’s signature, Abraham had added:
Jerusalem,
Please respond to your mother, whose heart is broken. Cruelty is the gravest sin, while forgiveness is the finest virtue.
Your father,
Rabbi Abraham Gerster.
Elie wondered what would have happened if the boy had received these letters. Would Lemmy have gone home for Passover? It was a question that would never be answered. Both Abraham and his son had their separate roles to play in the historic struggle for Jewish survival, and Elie was determined to prevent any reconciliation between them. As to the mother’s grief, it was unfortunate. Collateral damage. But she would get over it soon. In the grand scheme of Jewish destiny, Elie could not afford to worry about Temimah Gerster’s spoiled Passover plans.
The pilot announced that the plane would land in Zurich in three hours. Elie lowered his seatback and closed his eyes. The constant engine noise soon put him to sleep.
T
anya’s phone rang near midnight on Saturday night. It was Lemmy, calling from a payphone at the central bus station. He had won a one-day leave at a sharp-shooting contest.
She drove Elie’s small Citroën, which he had left with her yesterday before departing for Europe. Lemmy waited at the curb, carrying an Uzi and a duffel bag. She took him home, and they fell into bed without turning on the lights. He smelled of dust and sweat and grease. His embrace was forceful, and his hands on her skin felt coarse in a way she found incredibly arousing. He was tireless, his breathing not labored even as their lovemaking intensified, sending her again and again beyond the limits of her self-control.
T
anya woke up with first light. She used the fast-forward feature on the recording device to scan for any UN communications that had occurred overnight, finding only a few casual exchanges. She called Brigadier General Tappuzi to tell him there was no news.
Around noon, Lemmy appeared at her side in his khaki boxer shorts. “What a setup you have here! What is it for?” He touched a knob on one of the receivers.
She slapped his hand, not too hard, but enough to make him recoil and laugh.
Daylight afforded Tanya a good look at him. She was amazed by the transformation. He seemed taller, with a narrow waist and sculpted shoulders. His muscles bulged like those of a man who worked with his hands. “I’m wondering,” she said, “where’s my skinny Talmudic scholar?”
“He’s gone. I’m all you’ve got.”
“You’ll have to do, then.” She stood and kissed him, reaching up to caress his cropped hair. “I’ve arranged a room for you in Tel Aviv. At Bira’s apartment. You can stay there during leaves from the army. It’s a fun group, around your age. You’ll be comfortable there.”
“I’m comfortable here.”
She traced the line of his jaw with her finger. “It’s not safe here, not until things settle down. And you’re better off with young people.”
His blue eyes were hurt. “Who says?”
“I do.” Tanya detached from him and went to the kitchen to make coffee. She had to ease him away, no matter how painful it was for her. It would be the height of hypocrisy to keep him hooked in a dead-end relationship after tearing him apart from Neturay Karta. She had to complete what she had started, set him free to experience a normal life, to date girls his age, to have fun like any other young secular Israeli, to pursue a career and eventually start a family with a woman who could give him a partnership of equals and a bunch of cute kids. “It won’t be long,” she said, “before you lose interest in me.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s no future for us together.”
“Forget the future.” He hugged her from behind. “Right now, it’s really good.”
Tanya poured coffee into two mugs. He was right, of course. It was more than “really good.” Their night together was a hundred times better than the hesitant, tender love they had made during their brief time together, before he had joined the army. The experience was like a sudden, wild storm that tossed her back in time, not only in the sense of a physical joy, of reaching heights she had assumed herself too old to experience again, but also emotionally, an overwhelming sense of wholeness and completeness that must have been false considering the enormous gaps in age, life experience, and
realism
—a word better than
cynicism
—that she had acquired through witnessing true evil time and again. How could their bond be anything but an illusion, when Lemmy didn’t know the evil she knew, when he didn’t understand that the evil of Jew-demonizing and Jew-hating and Jew-killing was everywhere, that the evil which had robbed her youth and killed her family and put her life on a path of clandestine armed struggle, the evil that won again and again, the evil that was clever and resilient and unbeatable, the evil that hid behind inspiring ideologies, behind nationalism and fascism and communism and even humanism, that evil which spoke grammatically-correct French, German, English, or Arabic, was everywhere, yet unfamiliar to this boy-turnedman, who was embracing her and breathing in the scent of her hair as if it were life-supporting oxygen. How could Lemmy’s love be true, when he didn’t know what she knew, that Gentiles sipped the loathing of Jews with their mother’s milk, goat milk, or coconut milk, that it flowed smoothly into their veins and hearts and minds with each shot of Rémy Martin under the Eiffel Tower, or a squirt of fig juice under a palm tree. The worlds she and Lemmy occupied weren’t overlapping at all. And why should they? He lived in a world of optimistic youth and patriotic hopes, a world without an end, while she lived in a dark world, a world lurking with death, a world of kill or be killed—or better said, a world of kill, kill, kill, and eventually be killed for being a Jew.
By now, Tanya was crying silently, her face away from him, her hands holding the two coffee mugs, her shoulders shaking.
He kissed her earlobe, then her neck, not in passion but in the tenderness of those early explorations of last year, when he had still worn a black coat and a black hat and those golden, ringlet side locks. And as she leaned back into his arms and surrendered to his gentleness, the onslaught of her sorrow began to recede, and she stopped crying.
“You think too much,” he said. “Don’t over-analyze what we have. It feels good, so it must be good. Leave the hair-splitting to the Talmudic scholars.”
The mugs safely on the table, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. The last few months have been tough.” She stopped there, not explaining further, not sharing with him the terror of a victim’s
déjà vu
, of recognizing the rising ghosts from another war, gathering again, circling gleefully with the single goal of exterminating the Jewish people. It was Hitler all over again, only that his incarnation had taken the three-headed identity of Nasser, Assad, and King Hussein. They spoke Arabic instead of German. They propagated Pan Arabism instead of Nazism. But just like Hitler, their language and ideology was but a masquerade for their true aim. And among their chosen prey, among those they sought to murder, were the two people she truly and unconditionally loved. But unlike the Nazi Holocaust, which caught her as a budding and hapless young teen, this coming war would include her as a fighter. All her training and skills were now going to count in the struggle to prevent this war from following the Nazi Holocaust with an Arab Holocaust. And the fight would require her total commitment, all her physical and mental resources, as she would be fighting not on the front lines, but in the back alleys of Marseilles, or the power hallways of Paris, where armament, money, and military secrets could give Israel the upper hand in what seemed like an unavoidable calamity. And for her to win the secret battles under her command, Tanya had to regain the single-minded ferocity of a hunter who was simultaneously being hunted. She had to focus, to forget everything else, including the two souls that occupied her heart—Bira and Lemmy—a daughter she loved by force of motherhood and two decades of a perilous-yet-joyous life together, and a boy she loved by force of fate, or coincidence, or sheer stupidity and feminine weakness for which she had only herself to blame.