St. Urbain's Horseman

  “Run, you shmock.”

  “Go, man.”

  Sol, terrified, ran, carrying the bat with him.

  Monty Talman phoned home.

  “Who won?” his wife asked.

  “We did. 13–12. But that’s not the point. We had lots of fun.”

  “How many you bringing back for lunch?”

  “Eight.”

  “Eight?”

  “I couldn’t get out of inviting Johnny Roper. He knows Jack Monroe is coming.”

  “I see.”

  “A little warning. Don’t, for Chrissake, ask Cy how Marsha is. They’re separating. And I’m afraid Manny Gordon is coming with a girl. I want you to be nice to her.”

  “Anything else?”

  “If Gershon phones from Rome while the guys are there please remember I’m taking the call upstairs. And please don’t start collecting glasses and emptying ashtrays at four o’clock. It’s embarrassing. Bloody Jake Hersh is coming and it’s just the sort of incident he’d pick on and joke about for months.”

  “I never coll –”

  “All right, all right. Oh, shit, something else. Tom Hunt is coming.”

  “The actor?”

  “Yeah. Now listen, he’s very touchy, so will you please put away Sheila’s doll.”

  “Sheila’s doll?”

  “If she comes in carrying that bloody golliwog I’ll die. Hide it. Burn it. Hunt gets script approval these days, you know.”

  “All right, dear.”

  “See you soon.”

  10

  Lou CAPLAN, WHO HAD A THREE-PICTURE DEAL WITH Twentieth Century-Fox, beckoned to Jake at Talman’s house, and led him out into the garden. “You know what all these fucking flowers are called?” he demanded, irritated, his gesture sweeping.

  “Certainly.”

  “Ptsssh,” Caplan hissed, appreciative, and he suddenly thrust his finger out. “This one, then.”

  “Why, that’s a tea rose. Unmistakably an Ena Harkness.”

  “And this?”

  “Phlox.”

  “Bluffers I don’t care for. Sit down here. Why haven’t you made a picture yet? I caught your last play on TV. You’re a genius, Jake.”

  “What?”

  “That’s exactly how I would have directed it.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see.”

  “You’ve got style. You’re fast. You’re good with cameras. But I also hear you’re poison ivy with actors. A real grobber yung. There’s something I want you to read. If it excites you, I’ll talk to your agent. If not, who needs him. Right?”

  So yet again Jake read until two o’clock in the morning, cogitating, running through the novel twice.

  “It’s only a thriller, Nancy. But I could do things with it. I’m going to say yes.”

  “Where’s it set?”

  “Israel.” Then, sensing Nancy’s concern, he smiled and added, “I won’t get overexcited, don’t worry. For all I know five other directors are considering the project right now. At best, I’m third choice.”

  But, unbelievably, Caplan had lunch with his agent on Wednesday and they agreed on terms immediately. Naturally, Caplan would not allow him casting approval, but he said he could hire his own writer. “Maybe,” he ventured, “your hotshot friend Luke Scott wouldn’t ask for a million dollars to do the script if he knew you were directing it …”

  “No,” Jake said sharply. “Luke’s absolutely out.”

  A letter of agreement was signed and delivered by hand on Monday, just as Caplan had promised. Only one hitch remained, Twentieth Century-Fox, but after ten endless, nerve-wracking days, Jake was approved by their New York office.

  “That does it,” Jake said to Nancy, “now we celebrate,” which they did, and, afterwards, lying in bed together, he confessed, “I had begun to believe I’d never get my chance.”

  A fortnight later, still incredulous, Jake flew to Israel to search for locations and, he hoped, find out more about the Horseman, maybe even unearth his Israeli wife, who was supposed to be on a kibbutz somewhere.

  On arrival, it was balmy, marvelously bright and blue; and what with London’s wet gummy skies only six hours behind him, Jake began to feel elated. After all, this was Eretz Yisroel. Zion. He checked into the Garden Hotel, in Ramat-Aviv, stopping by a poolside table for a drink. Foot-weary, middle-aged tourists were sunning themselves everywhere. Among them, Mr. Cooper. Shooing flies away with a rolled newspaper, pondering his toes as he curled and uncurled them, the portly, bronzed Mr. Cooper, his eyes shaded by a baseball cap, basked in a deck chair, his manner proprietorial. “And where are you from?” he asked Jake.

  Jake told him.

  “Ah ha. And how long you here for?”

  “A week. Ten days maybe.”

  “Longer you couldn’t stay. This is Israel, it’s a miracle. So, Mr. Hersh, what line of business you in?”

  “The junk business.”

  Early the next morning a bellboy rapped on Jake’s bungalow door; a Colonel Elan, Lou Caplan’s Israeli partner, was waiting for him. Squat and sinewy, his solemn face hardened by the wind, Elan was casually dressed. “Shalom,” he said.

  Mr. Cooper passed with his wife, who was wearing flower-print pedal pushers. “So, Mr. Hersh, have you decided to settle here yet?”

  “What about you?”

  “Me, I’m too old. So I come here to spend.”

  Elan shrugged, his gray eyes scornful. No sooner had Jake climbed into his Ford station wagon than Elan said, “I wonder what that man’s name was before it was Cooper?”

  “And what,” Jake asked, surprised at his own indignation, “was yours before it was Elan?”

  “You’ll find that we’re a new kind of Jew here. We have restored Jewish pride.”

  The other side of Ramla, the car began the slow winding rise and fall, rise and fall, through the bony, densely cultivated mountains. Arab villages jutted natural and ravaged as rock out of the hills. The gutted shells of armored trucks lay overturned around the bends in the narrow steepening road. Here a dried wreath hung on a charred chassis; elsewhere mounds of stone marked where a driver, trapped in the cab of his burning truck, had died an excruciating death. These ruins, spilled along the roadside, were a memorial to those who had died running the blockade into Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli War, at a time when the Arab Legion had held the vital heights of Bab el Wad and Kastel, an ancient Roman encampment and crusaders’ castle which dominate the closest approaches to the city.

  “Look here, Elan,” Jake said, suddenly uncomfortable, his embarrassment rising, “have you read the thriller the film is to be based on?”

  “Yes.”

  “The script’s not going to be like that at all. I want you to know I’m not coming all this way to make a vulgar film.”

  “We need the foreign currency,” Elan said ambiguously.

  Jake told Elan that a cousin of his, Joey Hersh, sometimes known as Jesse Hope, had fought in the first Arab-Israeli War, and might even be in Israel again now, but Jake did not know where.

  “It’s a small country, but I don’t know everybody. Try the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel.”

  But Jake couldn’t get anywhere with the man at the Association.

  “Half the Anglo-Saxon Jews who come here,” he said, “leave after two or three years. Why do they quit? Let’s face it, most of them come from middle-class homes and settling here means a big drop in their standard of living. Many others miss their close family ties. Momma.”

  That, Jake replied pointedly, would not have been the problem with Joey Hersh, but the Association had no record of him. Or a wife.

  On Tuesday Jake drove to Acre with Elan, to look at possible locations. Old sacks had been stretched across the narrow stinking streets of the Arab marketplace, offering shade to vendors and buyers alike. Donkeys, chickens, and goats wandered somnolently through the maze of stalls. The wares on display were pathetic. Rusty keys for ancient locks, faded cotton dresses, split boots. Barefoot boys s
campered through the muck. Flies were everywhere. “They don’t have to live like that,” Elan said, anticipating Jake. “A lot of them own property. They bury their money in jars. Actually, there’s no such thing as an ‘Arab.’ What, for instance, has an Arab in Cairo in common with a Bedouin from Iraq?”

  “Jerusalem?” Jake dared.

  “All the Arabs have in common is the fact that they’re Moslem. We must teach them that it is not such a bad thing to be an Arab in Israel.”

  “Possibly,” Jake said, “the trouble is they have loyalties outside their own country. Like my friend Mr. Cooper.”

  The Canadian Embassy had no knowledge of Joseph Hersh.

  Wednesday morning Jake drove to Beersheba with Elan to look at the Arabian Nights Hotel, then still under construction. About a half hour out of Tel Aviv, the station wagon wheeled into a lush cultivated belt. Then, quite suddenly, they were streaking across the desert. “We are seventy miles wide here,” Elan said. “One day this will be our bread basket.”

  Finally, the station wagon rocked to a stop on the outskirts of Beersheba. Squinting against the windblown sand, Jake saw an enormous roadhouse rising abruptly out of the desert. The proprietor, a Mr. Hod, hurried toward them. “I’m putting up the finest hotel in Israel,” he said. “We’re going to have a golf course, hot springs – the works. Soon we’ll have the biggest neon sign in the country. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS HOTEL. I’m even organizing a society to be called Sons of the Arabian Nights.”

  After lunch Hod began to knock back one snifter of brandy after another. “One day,” he said to Jake, “I met a Spaniard in Beersheba. A rich man. He told me that in Madrid he was an anti-semite. He said he didn’t believe these Jews would ever build a country so he thought he’d go and see for himself. Well, I’ve seen the country, he said, and it’s marvelous. But you’re not Jews here, you’re different. The Jews in Spain would only fight for their families and their businesses. You’re different here, he said.”

  “If you run into him again,” Jake replied tightly, “tell him some of the Jews in Canada not only fought for their country and this one, they also fought for Spain. Like my cousin.”

  On the long drive back to Tel Aviv, Jake feigned sleep. Finally, Elan dropped him outside the Garden Hotel.

  “You’re the fastidious one, aren’t you, Hersh? You wonder why we have vulgar hotels and would finance exploitation films to be made by second-rate people. It’s because we need the currency. We need it to survive.”

  “Yes,” Jake said feebly, “I’m sure you’re right,” and retiring to his bungalow, he combed through the thriller yet again and decided that with the help of a decent script, the right cast, it would be a good film, he would make it meaningful, and he wasn’t taking it on merely because he was no longer a boy, as time and pride dictated he had to direct a film now.

  Jake wakened resolved, even cheerful. Then Elan telephoned. “Your cousin,” he said, “went by the name of Yosef Ben Baruch here. He was a proper son-of-a-bitch, which shouldn’t surprise me. His wife is on the kibbutz of Gesher Haaziv.”

  Immediately after lunch, Jake hired a taxi and bounced across the coastal plain, through Haifa, and into the Upper Galilee to Gesher Haaziv, a kibbutz lodged in the hills hard by the Lebanese border, untroubled at the time except for smugglers bound for Acre with pork or hashish. He discovered Chava in the dining hall, a burly lady with frizzy black hair, lachrymose black eyes, and hairy legs. A two-gallon tin of pickles hooked under her broad arm, she shuffled from table to table, depositing exactly six pickles in each center plate for the evening’s feast. The Passover seder.

  “I’m your husband’s cousin. I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not that I know of. But why do you say that?”

  “Because I never hear from his family. I thought when he died there might be papers maybe. Something for our son.”

  Zev was ten years old.

  “Why would you need money on a kibbutz?”

  “It’s no life any more. I want to leave for the boy’s sake.”

  “Are you from … America?”

  “Before Theresienstadt, I don’t know where from,” she said, drifting off to another table with her pickles.

  “The family sent money. They asked me to give it to you.”

  “How much?”

  Jake scratched his head. He cogitated. “A thousand dollars.”

  “A thousand dollars?” She shrugged. “But they’re so rich.”

  “And a hundred dollars a month to help with support for the boy.”

  “Would they give more?”

  “No.”

  “You try. You talk to them. I’ll give you pictures of Zev to take back.”

  They strolled to her cabin, which comprised three rooms, including a bedroom for Zev. On Gesher Haaziv, the children were no longer brought up communally but lived with their parents. “We had hoped this generation would be different. They would be saved the curse of a Yiddish momma, but it didn’t work. Parents kept slipping off to the children’s house with candies for their own. If one of them caught cold, the mother was immediately there. Jews,” she said plaintively.

  There was a photograph of the Horseman on the mantelpiece, circa 1948. Cousin Joey was in uniform, astride a white stallion.

  “He won the horse from the mukhtar’s son. After a fight.”

  Had she known him at the time, he asked.

  “No, but I was familiar with the stories. He was one of those mixed up with Deir Yassin, a disaster for us. Some say he was even a ring leader, but who knows, he wouldn’t talk about it.”

  In April 1948, units of Etzel and the Stern Gang mounted an unprovoked attack on the quiescent Arab village of Deir Yassin, on the western fringe of Jerusalem. It was a calculated act of terrorism, meant to serve as a lesson. The Jewish Agency repudiated the massacre, but the Arabs were able to use it to justify their own atrocities.

  “He turned up again in the third convoy into Jerusalem, the one that took such a battering at Bab el Wad. Some of the burned-out chassis have been left by the roadside, a reminder.”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  “It was the last convoy to get through. They brought chickens, eggs, and matzohs for Passover, but there was no hope of getting out of Jerusalem again. Yosef joined a unit fighting in the Old City. More trouble. This time with Neturei Karta. The orthodox from the orthodox, you know. They still don’t recognize the state, it’s an intrusion, they’re waiting for the Messiah. One of their graybeards came to him, and said it was too much for the women and children, the shelling was awful. He wished to arrange a special truce with the Arabs to exclude their quarter from the fighting. Yosef said if the old bastard raised a white flag, he would shoot him. Just like that. There were maybe eight hundred orthodox women and children sheltering in the Yohanan ben Zakkai synagogue, with the Arabs just across the street. When the rabbis tottered out, carrying a white sheet between two poles, somebody shot from the Jewish lines, wounding one of them.”

  The Horseman, who drank prodigiously, was disliked on Gesher Haaziv. He would disappear for three days at a time, sometimes even a week, on a bender in Acre, where he was thick with the Arabs in the marketplace. Afterwards, there was no doubt that he was involved with the hashish smugglers.

  “What do you mean, afterwards?”

  After the Kastner business, she meant.

  Early in April 1944, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, a leader of the Hungarian Jewish community, established contact with Hauptsturmführer Wislicency of the Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann and, under conditions unimaginably chilling and gruesome, negotiated to purchase the freedom of some 1,700 Jews for 1,600,000 dollars. Those ransomed had to be selected from 750,000 who were consequently not warned that they were bound for the ovens and so had no opportunity to resist or flee to the woods. Among the 1,700 saved were Kastner’s relatives. Jews of substance and social importance were in preponderance.

  After the war, Kastner s
ettled in Israel. Years later an obsessed man took to the street corners of Jerusalem, brandishing a broadside that claimed Kastner was in fact a collaborator and his machinations had meant 750,000 Jews went unknowingly to their doom. And the Horseman, drunk in the dining hall of Gesher Haaziv, taunted the men, asking them what are you going to do about it, as if it was their affair. As if, like everyone else in the country, they were not torn by the accusations and the trial that ensued. Some taking Kastner to epitomize all that was corrupt in the Judenräte of Europe, others arguing that in an appalling time he saved as many as he could, and still others saying we can no longer comprehend what moved men to action then and it was time for silence.

  Kastner won a Pyrrhic victory in the libel trial held in 1953, his name not so much cleared as clouded, and the Horseman, rising the next morning, ostensibly to drive a truck to the turkey farm, did not stop there. The truck was discovered abandoned in Acre and the Horseman was not seen in Gesher Haaziv again.

  Kastner was completely cleared in another trial, held in 1957, but one night a few months later he was shot dead in the street by a Hungarian Jew.

  “Now one minute,” Jake said. “You mean you have not seen or heard from him in all these years?”

  “He comes to Israel from time to time, but never here. He left us for a year even before fifty-three, you know. He was in France for all of fifty-one.”

  At Maison-Lafite, where, being a foreigner, he was not allowed a license as a horse trainer, and so worked illegally, as it were, his papers classifying him as a gentleman’s jockey.

  “Did he ever talk to you about the family? About Montreal?”

  “When he was drunk. He said they were responsible for his father’s death and his, almost.”

  “He said that?”

  She nodded.

  “Were those his exact words? They were responsible for his death, almost?”

  “It was so long ago. He was drunk. We were quarreling. Listen, people quarrel. Yosef would not allow me to apply for my German reparations money. Oh, he was a purist, that one! Such a purist! About some things …”

  “What do you mean, some things?”

  “Oh, taking money from the Germans, who did they rob it from in the first place if not us, this was not right, but collecting from his women …” she broke off, laughing dryly, sunken in bitterness.