The fresh air turned stale between them. The valley contracted at the sound of their screaming from the mountaintop. Zohara felt Dad watching her. She remembered his promise to the judge—to see to it personally that she stayed out of trouble. Maybe he should never have made such a promise: because of it the judge commuted her sentence, but he turned Dad into her warden.
“Stop following me around,” she would hiss at him.
“I’m not following you around. Just tell me where you’re going with the horse.”
“Wherever I please, Sergeant Feuerberg. I’m a free woman.”
“Zohara, my darling, we’re so close to the border. There are smugglers out there, and armed infiltrators, and you’re alone.”
“I am not alone. I have myself and my gun.”
“What am I going to do with you, Zohara? What can I do to make you happy? Tell me. Teach me. I’m a good pupil!”
“Oh yes,” said Zohara, mounted on her horse, as though she were seeing him for the first time. “You are a good pupil,” she said pityingly. “And you certainly are diligent,” she added with a note of irony, then turned on her horse and galloped away.
“Sometimes she would disappear for a few days,” Lola recounted. “She would sleep in the hills, in the caves, who knows? She would come back starved and covered with scratches. Where were you, Zohara? But she wouldn’t speak. Sometimes she would ride to Tel Aviv on the motorcycle and spend the night at my house. She would go dancing, get drunk, come home or not come home … He would arrive to take her back. Terrible fights … Zohara screaming that she didn’t want to go back … that she didn’t belong anywhere. Neither here nor there …” Lola spoke softly, with her head bowed. I drank in her every word.
“And then once she set off on horseback and never returned. That was the end,” said Lola abruptly. “Maybe she crossed the border and was shot by Jordanian soldiers. Or maybe she fell to her death from a cliff. Maybe she was murdered by infiltrators. The army made inquiries. They searched all over the area. Your father’s army friends stole over the border at night and searched there, too. Nothing. She had vanished. Suddenly she was gone.”
“Suddenly,” sighed Felix. “All her life is like that: suddenly.”
I looked out at the golden panorama. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help it. And I felt Zohara riding toward them. Maybe she had galloped her horse over this very cliff. And all the while I kept hearing the question she had once asked as a child, Why isn’t there a fence around the world to keep people from falling off? There is no fence. That’s just it. You have to be careful and stop before you get to the edge.
She was twenty-six, the age when she had planned to die. But how could she have left us? I asked myself. Why didn’t she think about me, and about what it would be like for me without her?
“But before that, before she did … what she did, she called me on the telephone,” said Lola, her lips trembling. “It was a brief farewell with a single telephone token … ‘Mother,’ she said to me, and I could tell immediately from the sound of her voice that that was it, she was gone. ‘Mother, last time I was in Tel Aviv I left something there for my son, for Nonnik.’ ”
Nonnik?
“Is that what she called me?”
“Yes, always Nonnik.”
Nice name.
“It was a present for you, she said, but you weren’t to open it until your bar mitzvah.”
Nonnik.
So, I had a new name. No one had ever called me Nonnik before.
What a happy name.
“But what’s the present?” I finally dared to ask her.
“She said it was a secret. A surprise. She loved secrets and surprises. She said you had to go with Felix to take it out.”
The words “secret” and “surprise” made me tremble. “And that’s the present she left in the vault at the bank?”
“Yes, she wanted to give you a surprise, like a grownup: a safe-deposit box in the vault. Why do you jump like that? She wanted something reminiscent of her adventures that only you could take out. Those were the instructions she left with the guards.”
Only Nonnik may take it out, said my mother.
Maybe she didn’t know how to be a good mother, but she had thought of my bar mitzvah even then and how I would feel and how I would miss her. She knew. She had a strong feeling for me, and I mustn’t forget that.
“For you, she leaves present,” Felix grumbled, “for me, only your Mr. Father.”
Because Dad had vented all his rage and pain over her death on Felix. He had begun to suspect a mysterious link between Zohara and the legendary Felix Glick. Before then, he’d had no idea that Felix was her father. She had never told him, nor had Lola, and he had never asked. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Rumor had it that Felix and Lola were lovers, but then again, she had so many lovers … Dad came down from the mountain. He left the cabin to the looters, to the shepherds in the surrounding villages, and to the infiltrators and smugglers from across the border. He spoke to his former chief on the force and asked to return to the police department. For three months he shut himself up in the tiny office they assigned him, and sat there working, morning, noon, and night. Gabi would bring him sandwiches, make him coffee, and watch the baby. That’s when she fell in love with him. Maybe it was the pacifier in his holster, or whatever it is that makes people fall in love. Dad read through Zohara’s case file again. He even flew abroad to speak to Interpol, and talked long distance to the police in Zanzibar and Madagascar, the Ivory Coast and Jamaica, who gradually filled in the picture of her grand tour of crime with Felix Glick.
“And all this time,” said Felix with genuine amazement, “I am quietly working overseas. I know nothing. I sense nothing. I am busy taking banks, stamp collections, diamonds—earning my living—while he, your smart Mr. Father, is spreading his net around Felix Glick.”
For Felix had become his greatest adversary, the epitome of crime. The serpent that gave Eve a taste for sin. He wanted to catch him. To stop his insidious activities, and his forked tongue and its half-truths. Day and night he worked like a turbine: he had at least two hearts when he loved Zohara. At least two brains when he hunted for Felix Glick.
“One day I am back in Israel to visit, and next thing, hop, I am arrested.”
He was furious, his eyes flashing at the memory of that humiliation. “A fifteen-years sentence I get. And six months ago I am released for lousy health and good behavior. I am in for ten years, and he is to blame!”
“No, you’re to blame,” Lola corrected him. “But enough about that. We all paid a heavy price. All of us. Including Jacob.”
My father’s name sounded gently familial when she said it.
We went back to the car. I took one last look at the valley. At the secluded cabin. This is where I began my life. Here I was happy before everything went wrong. I wanted to run to the cliff and get the fluttering shred of cloth, but I didn’t dare. I picked up a stone instead and put it in my pocket, a smooth gray pebble shaped like an egg. To this day I have it. I keep it on my desk.
We drove away in heavy silence. At some point I fell asleep, and woke up just as we were entering Tel Aviv. When I rubbed my eyes, it all came back to me. What we had done that night, the longest night of my life, and what we were about to do. Meanwhile, as I yawned and stretched, the word “bank” recurred to me, putting me on the alert: bank and Felix—that pair of words sounded ominous.
“Did you say we were going to the bank?” I inquired.
“The bank. Yes. Good morning.”
“To get my present from Zohara?”
“Yes, and then you also get the golden ear of wheat I promise to our Miss Gabi.”
“Will it be hard to take it out of the bank?”
“Not at all, taking a bank vault is easy.”
I can’t do this, I thought. I wasn’t born to rob banks. The furthest I’ll go is hijacking trains, but a person has to know his limits.
Lola was sleeping at my
side. I tried to appeal to Felix’s conscience: “I’m too tired to rob a bank now.”
Dead silence. He was pretending to be a careful driver again. I tried to appeal to him as a grandfather. “Look, I’m really tired. I’ve had a hard night.”
“It is not work you have to do,” he grumbled. “It’s not crime. You will walk in and take your package and then I give you Felix’s last golden ear of wheat.”
“Without shooting a single guard?” snapped Lola, awakened by her sharp grandmotherly instincts.
“Without shooting.”
“Without crawling through a tunnel?” I asked.
“Why tunnel? What is this? We walk into bank, I tell you, you tell your name to vault guard, we go into room, open box, take present, and—”
“Good day, thank you, and shalom,” I chimed in.
He smiled in surprise. “Exactly so,” he said.
There was another silence.
“Look me in the eye, Grandfather.”
I looked into his eyes in the rearview mirror. They were as innocent and blue as the eyes of a baby.
28
This is Too Much
At eight-thirty that morning Grandfather Felix parked the Humber Pullman on a quiet side street, not far from the theater. Lola Ciperola (Katz, to me), the first lady of Israeli theater and winner of the award of distinction in the performing arts (my grandmother), crossed the street and walked into the bank with wind-tousled hair and wearing a pair of dirty, faded jeans; and in spite of Felix’s slurs, she succeeded perfectly in playing the part of a woman of the people. Not a queen, not an empress, not a goddess or a tragic heroine raising her hands on high or covering her eyes with grief, but a simple Jewish grandmother who wished to deposit five pounds into her account. Only, because of the heat, or her advanced age, or perhaps in order to distract the crowd from the old man and the boy who were slipping in behind them, she collapsed in a heap on the floor, moaning and groaning, and snorting most inelegantly.
It was the best role I’d ever seen her play. I had never enjoyed a character so much, and sometimes I think her success was due to the events of those two days, and because she had suddenly become a grandmother … Too bad I didn’t have time to stand and watch. A large crowd had gathered around her. People were shouting, giving advice, calling for help, while we two stole down the spiral stairs and into the vault.
The only one down there was an elderly guard, who was nibbling a cheese and tomato sandwich. I told him my name. It was a tense moment. His newspaper lay folded on the table before him with my picture smeared all over the front page. And my name as well. They had finally divulged it! I goggled at the headline with pride, AMNON FEUERBERG KIDNAPPED! it said. That was the most famous day of my life, but just then my publicity might have ruined everything. The guard opened a large notebook and began to leaf through it, muttering my name over and over, with yellow crumbs in his mustache. For a moment his eyes rested on the newspaper. He read my name aloud from the newspaper but didn’t notice any special resemblance. He continued leafing through his lists of names until he finally found mine.
“Here we are, Amnon Feuerberg. Authorization to take out mother’s safe-deposit box. Oho! That was a good long while ago, thirteen years! Time for the safety-deposit box’s bar mitzvah!” And he sprayed the newspaper with cheese crumbs as he laughed at his own little joke.
“Go right in. Is this your grandfather?”
Yes. He really was my grandfather.
Why is it that the truth can sound like such a lie!
The guard jangled through a pile of keys. He opened one iron door for us. And then another. He closed it behind us and left us alone.
“You have ten minutes,” he said, and we could hear him shuffle back to his chair and his sandwich.
We were inside a small room. Four walls covered with safe-deposit boxes from floor to ceiling. Rectangular gray boxes. Each with a little round dial bearing numbers from zero to nine, and a small, arrow-shaped pointer. Felix immediately found ours.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “In ten minutes Lola must to get up off the floor. That is very short time. Do you think you can do it?”
“Do what?”
“Open box.”
“If you give me the key, I can.”
“Well, you see, that is problem.” Felix cleared his throat. “There is no key.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean, no key? How are we supposed to open it?”
“You must to do it alone. Without key,” he said, shrugging his shoulders again. “You must to guess five-number combination, and then, chop-chop, we open it.” I gave him a long, hard look.
“It is secret combination,” he added, as if that solved anything. “Like special password, this number Zohara wants you to guess.”
“Just a minute.” I was becoming annoyed. “You mean to say she didn’t tell you the secret number?”
“No. She only said you will guess it when time comes.” Again he shrugged his shoulders. “I know it is problem, sure I know!”
“Wait! Wait!” I shouted. “You think I can guess all five numbers of the combination in the right order?”
“Nu, sure, and better hurry.”
“But that’s impossible!” I blew up at him, feeling cheated and disappointed, because right in front of my nose here, behind this armored wall, was the only present my mother had ever given me and now I would never be able to get to it!
“It’s impossible to guess five numbers like that!” I shouted in a whisper so the guard wouldn’t hear me. “My chances of hitting on the right combination are less than one in a million!” Why had she done this to me? Why couldn’t my family give nice, normal bar mitzvah presents?
“Yes, yes, don’t shout. Very difficult, I know. But you must to remember it is your mother who chooses numbers for combination, right?”
“So?”
“So … that is it! She is your mother! You are her son! Her only son, blood of her blood!”
For some reason I was touched by this, though it didn’t make sense. But I had lowered my expectations of things making sense over the past few days. It’s true, I thought. I am her son. I’m the only person alive with her blood in his veins. And she’s not alive, so I’ll have to try.
“Okay,” I said to Felix, “I’m ready. Keep a lookout and don’t let anyone bother me.”
I shut my eyes and gradually cut myself off from my surroundings.
From the guard munching his sandwich on the other side of the iron doors. From Felix, who was gazing fondly at me. From my grandmother Lola, still sprawling on the floor upstairs, trying to gain precious time.
And from Dad and all the things he would say to me when we met up again. And how I’d explain. And what about Gabi? Was she still with him, or had she left him forever? Did I have anyone to go home to?
Five numbers.
Zohara. Zohara. I’ve worn your clothes. I’ve slept in your bed. I’ve eaten the raspberry candies you hid in your mattress. You had black hair. You had dark, wide-set eyes. I inherited the wide-set part, but not the black of them.
Hello, Zohara, this is Nonnik. I know more about you than I knew two days ago. But that’s still not much. Lola will tell me about you later. I’ll ask her about the kind of girl you were, and how you felt at the theater when you saw your mother acting onstage, just like me; I want to know more, I want to know everything: what you liked to eat besides chocolate and jam, and what your favorite movies were when you were my age, and what your favorite color was (blue, like me?), and how different my life would have been if you hadn’t left me.
Zohara, you probably always wore pants. I’m sure the skirt Felix gave me to wear was your party skirt. Maybe you hated it. You were a tomboy, weren’t you? A real tough cookie.
1.
“One,” I muttered with my eyes shut. I just blurted it out. I had forgotten all about the numbers. But as soon as I said it, I just knew that was the first number Zohara would have chosen. Because it was the first of all t
he numbers, and also because the shape was right for her, a single line. I heard Felix move the pointer on the dial.
I immersed myself in Zohara again.
She grew up, and still she was lonely. But she was popular now. Because she started to blossom. People couldn’t help noticing her beauty, and those incredible eyes and the way they sparkled with the magic of Zohara. Deeper and deeper I plunged, not thinking in words anymore. I’m only adding the words now, but at the time I dove way down under them to a place of inspiration, where I writhed and tingled inside, as though seeking the center, my point of origin.
Zohara was becoming a woman. More feminine, but wilder than ever; shapely but a real whirligig. Sweeping her admirers from party to party, indifferent to them all, flirting with them all, yet always lonely, even as the belle of the ball. She flashed through the night like a bolt of lightning, ever the ringleader of their shenanigans, their wagers and their cruel but hilarious pranks, and always unpredictable: a woman, but, like Felix, a curved line with a little zigzag—
2.
“Two,” I said.
I could hear the pointer click in the lock.
And then Felix arrived on the scene and took her off to Paris. She didn’t want to go home, so they continued on a tour of exotic places where exiled monarchs rode in gilded carriages and stolen diamonds were reflected in the black river and there were sea captains and nuns, and Zohara floated among them and from one to the other, swirling in circles where the figments of her imagination merged with the sights she saw around her, till she could no longer distinguish between dream and reality, and everything swirled like the smoke rings from the old king’s pipe, and she closed her eyes and surrendered to the pleasure of inventing a fiction more sinuous than a snake, and learned that she, too, like her father, knew the trick of fusing true stories with the lies people believe; and all the while she was swirling down, down, down …