The Death of Moishe-Ganef
William Heinemann, 1986
Paperback – Black Swan, 1987

JERUSALEM:

Nevertheless, Jerusalem, the impact that never fails. The sharp contours of sun on stone, the hard brownness of the hills. The massive walls of the Old City, spires and cupolas forested with television aerials, tourists perambulating the battlements for a dollar a throw, gazing across the valley at Gethsemane and the Intercontinental Hotel. Concrete blocks of the new infiltrating the old, art galleries set in Roman marketplaces, junkshops in Byzantine sewers. A hundred rival convictions rising from the ground, striking you in the face like a dead porcupine. Every return a winner, hitting the jackpot of your deepest traumas and fears. The shock of constant change which is no change at all, endless episodes in the horror serial. The shekel has fallen twenty percent since I left, and that was barely three weeks ago. A cup of coffee now costs what a two-bedroom flat went for in 1953. The date for general elections had been agreed: fifteen weeks ahead - July 23rd. A decisive battle looming for what is left of the kingdom, the Promised Land of dreams and nightmares. The opposition Labour Party promises profound change, a return to the Good Old Days. The ruling Likud promises more of the same, a consumer paradise in the Greater Land of Israel. Ex-generals are vying to outflank each other on the party political battlefield. Meanwhile, the police have arrested two groups of Jewish zealots for indiscriminate attacks upon Arabs. One group fired on a bus in the Occupied West Bank. Another planted grenades at Moslem and Christian targets, and had been stockpiling explosives in order to blow up the two great mosques of Islam. They called themselves the Sons of Judah, and lived in an abandoned ruin of an Arab village at the western edge of the city. They did not eat meat and always faced the sun, even if that meant walking backwards. In Jerusalem, unfortunately, they were not conspicuous. The police had a hard time finding them. And there were other acts of terror, Jewish and Arab, whose perpetrators were still at large...

Jerusalem, the anvil of history. Never a dull moment. Blood and fire from the very beginning: Joshua, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus. Godfrey of Bouillon, Salah e-Din. And in our time, the feuding cousins. Arabs killing Jews at the Western Wall, Jews destroying the Moghrabi Quarter ... Nor is one's flesh and blood exempted: witness my father acting as a scout for the Irgun, circa 1946, while performing his innocent duties as Surveyor for the Water Department. Patiently listing the daily movements of the British patrols so that later the "boys" would fire at them from ambush, or limpet mine their armoured cars. You would not tell it of him now, in a less heroic era, as he reclines on cushions at the head of the family Passover table, holding the plate of "matsah shmura" aloft as he leads the main invocation:

" 'THIS IS THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION WHICH OUR FOREFATHERS ATE IN THE LAND OF EGYPT. LET ALL WHO ARE HUNGRY COME FORTH AND EAT. LET ALL WHO ARE IN NEED COME AND CELEBRATE PASSOVER. THIS YEAR WE ARE HERE, NEXT YEAR IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL. THIS YEAR WE ARE SLAVES, NEXT YEAR - FREE MEN."'

But he did not follow the underground leader, Menahem Begin, into post-Independence politics, and opposed the "Herut" Party Begin founded to carry on the "revisionist" battle. My father was of those who believed the Irgun had fulfilled its purpose the day the State had been declared, and should not wage a political war against the majority Labour government. Mistrust and loathing of Begin from that point on has been our only common ground, apart from basic religion, though he never understood mine, shaking his head and saying sadly: "You can't wipe away daily sins, my son, with a yarmulka and some prayers." He never unerstood I was not concerned with my sins, but with my private inquiries. "You know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah," eventually became his favourite statement. It used to refer to the girlfriends of my youth, and later to my non-marriage with Anat, but still later it was wielded more and more as a catch-phrase to take in the State of the nation. The corruption of ministers, noveau-riche ostentation, the growing crime and violence in society. "I don't know why you're surprised at what we do to the Arabs," he told me recently, "look what we do to each other." As usual, he had got it the wrong way round, but I had long ceased to argue. He did not despise the leftist path I took after the army, but considered it hopelessly naive. He was a German Jew, who had escaped Hitler early, and hated all brands of Socialism. "Hitler, Stalin, Bevan, Ben-Gurion," he said, "they are just varying degrees of the blindness." He claimed to believe in unfettered competition, although he was a failure in business. Oddly enough, he loathed Americans too, for their lack of culture and vacuity. "In twenty years, they will cease to be human," he declared with his usual conviction. The only people he had a soft spot for were German Jews, and they had proved the greatest flop of all. Now he subsisted, ironically, on German reparations, living, like so many of his generation, collapsed into himself, besieged. My old man. My mother kept him going, with strudel and applecakes, a listening ear and oceans of Russian tea.

" 'SLAVES WERE WE TO PHARAOH IN EGYPT. AND GOD TOOK US FROM THERE WITH A STRONG HAND AND WITH AN OUTSTRETCHED ARM... WITH GREAT TERROR, AND WITH SIGNS AND WONDERS...
" 'BLOOD, FIRE, AND PILLARS OF SMOKE... THESE ARE THE TEN PLAGUES WHICH THE LORD BLESSED BE HE BROUGHT UPON EGYPT: BLOOD. FROGS. LICE. BEATS. BLIGHT. BOILS. HAIL. LOCUSTS. DARKNESS. SLAYING OF THE FIRST BORN...

Anat's knee nudges my thigh under the table. She has never liked the Passover Haggadah. "This bloodthirsty book that has screwed up generations. It will be the end of us yet.' What am I doing living with a woman who does not believe in God? Perhaps it is pure lust. The lure of the raven hair and, the hazel eyes. Or perhaps that the available religious women fill me with sheer terror. Opposite me at table is my sister Nehama, who is married to a fanatic West Bank settler of the "Gush Emunim" movement - the "Block of the Faithful" - who believe God has told them that Arabs are sheer scum. My brother-in-law Elisha: bushy beard and saggy eyes, a real sad sack exterior concealing the inner constitution of Attila the Hun. The heart trembles at the sight of their two little kiddies, Muki and Shuki, all brighteyed and bushy-tailed. God, wait until puberty, then the shit will really hit the fan. "What else can I do with this, Papa?" "Nothing, Mukileh, come out of the toilet." Utter catastrophe. As a contrast, beside them, my elder sister, Sarah,. who is a systems analyst and gives a fuck for nobody.

" The Haggadah celebrates a liberation from oppression," I have reminded Anat, "not a Mafia protection contract. When we were the Egyptians, andsomeone else was in Goshen, it was to us God handed out the drubbing." I gave her chapter and verse, but she was stubborn as a mule as usual. "This is just your wishful thinking," she said. "Everyone reads into the writings whatever they want. You have your God, Elisha has his. Is God a left-wing humanist, like you, or, as the Gush would have us believe, a proper right-wing bastard?"

" Lightning will strike you," I answered testily, moving for safety to the edge of the bed. Can one truly know another person? Twelve years and we're still slugging it out. She in her corner, I in mine, an endless boxing match with unspoken rules. She had grown up, like me, in a semireligious home, but with no lingering afterglow. When we first began living together she had one proviso: "You will not recite, when you get up every morning: 'Blessed art thou, our Lord King of the World, who hath not made me a woman.'" I kept the bargain. I struck it from my repertoire. And the "gentile" and "slave" clauses too. We put too much stock in what God has not made us, and not enough in some long looks in the mirror to see what handiwork He has in fact wrought ...

" 'BLOOD, FIRE AND PILLARS OF SMOKE..."' There has certainly been too much of that lately... 1948, '56, '67... The dead, spread like spoiled meatloaves across the crests and dips of sand dunes... Anat has true cause for alarm. And my own baptism of terrible signs and wonders: Mid-June, 1967. The newly occupied West Bank. A subject population, fleeing from the oppressor - myself, Joe Dekel, in person. Men, women and children, with pots and pans on their heads, blankets, knotted bundles of household bric-abrac. It had never occurred to me that I might be feared, people might shit themselves at the sight of my face. My gym teacher would have collapsed at the thought. But of course it was my uniform that made them quake. And the steel khaki ordnance with which I approached them. Nietzche might well have written: "Goest thou to a subject people? Do not forget thy tank." But...

" 'IN EACH GENERATION, EVERY JEW MUST SEE HIMSELF AS IF HE PERSONALLY CAME OUT OF EGYPT."'

" This is not my idea of the Jewish destiny," I remember saying to Meisinger, of all people, one night. We were in the officers' quarters of a Jordanian barracks, captured in the war the week before. The commandant's three-roomed den had a bath and bidet. The junior officers had a dorm and washbasin. The soldiers' quarters were cattle pens. Meisinger was testing the bidet and I caught him literally with his pants down. He had turned up, in mufti, at two in the morning, looking smug as ever, with a briefcase containing lists of local residents who were to be picked up for questioning. Obviously he had already been officially seconded from army Intelligence to SHABAK, or some other, equally shadowy branch of the "civilian" Family.

" You surprise me, Joe," he said, "a big boy like you being childish. What do you expect, tea parties and kaffeeklatshes?"

" I don't expect kids to run screaming from me. I am not yet the wicked witch of the west."

" Have you looked in the mirror lately?" he asked, spritzing water on his nuts. "War is hell. We do what we hav to do. It's the law of the jungle, baby."

" Dragging people from their homes at night," I said, "blindfolding them, unleashing sadistic interrogators on them with fists and clubs?"

" We're a new nation," he said, contorting himself into a ball, trying to look up his arsehole. "We kick and scratch to survive. If we play fair, we'll be torn limb from limb."

" What about them?' I asked, gesturing out into the dead Samarian night. The fearful silence of crickets, the growl overhill of a night commandcar patrol. "Infiltrating cowsheds, blowing up houses? Won't they have to kick and scratch too?"

" They'll never be a nation," he said, uncoiling, "and if they are, it's tough shit. You know there's no room for both of us in town. Take your pick, Joe - Self or Other."

If this is my Self, I want an id transplant. "'WHEN ISRAEL CAME FORTH FROM EGYPT..."' But then it had been the Egyptians who had the tanks; we, the little bundles of bric-a-brac... As in '73, when they caught us napping, and almost had us in the bag. The Yom Kippur War, another National Trauma, the day our great rulers ate humble pie. No sign of Meisinger then, with his clever planning, his lists of everyone and his computer brain. Maybe all his energies were taken up with the case of MoisheGanef, who had been snatched from Rio to be put on secret trial four months before the war. Acase that only came up, in the T-n cafe, many months later, in the form of misty rumour... "Do you remember your old friend, Sherman…? Well, you won't believe this story..." Not that it would have registered anyway, lost in the mass of several thousand casualties... The era of the awful graveyard jokes: I know a friend who has stopped smoking... he's gone to sniff flowers from below… I gave a hand to the security effort... I let my fingers walk before me... And Joe Dekel, spewed out of The Family, stuck on shit detail on the Jordan River, quaking for an attack that never came on that particular front...

" 'BLESSED ART THOU, GOD, KING OF THE WORLD, WHO HATH REDEEMED US AND OUR FOREFATHERS FROM EGYPT, AND BROUGHT US TO THIS NIGHT ON WHICH WE EAT MATSAH AND BITTER HERBS ...
" SHULKHAN OREKH - DINNER IS SERVED"'

The following day, after the Seder night, I pursued my atavisms. In the evening a quiet time at home with Anat. I had already briefed her on the course of events in London, the accumulation of ghosts. She said: "If theywant to get you they'll get you anywhere. Just relax and let me take off your angst." It is no easy task, it is attached so tightly. We made love, but the tightness remained. Now we sat, gathering in the night silence that oozed through the apartment window. Silence, except for the tippy-tap of holiday shoes, the creak of unoiled pram wheels as the orthodox residents of our quarter visit their relatives within the prescribed sphere. Anat, sunk in a Garcia Marquez novel. She does her own travelling inwards. Often I find it difficult to work out if she is with me or deep in the jungles of Macondo. Myself, meanwhile, continuing to catch up with the enormous press backlog. Bad enough to have to read this shit day by day. Three weeks' pile up is a health hazard. The limbs become heavy, the brain soft, the eyes tremble to a blur. You gasp, like a fish out of water. Chronic persistence has been known to be fatal:

" PRESIDENT HERZOG TOLD QUEEN ELIZABETH: THE ARABS ARE TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING." "FROM JUNE: WEEKLY FLIGHTS TO MOZAMBIQUE." "GRENADE ATTACK ON POLICE AGENT." "THROWN FROM THIRD FLOOR IN DRUNKEN ARGUMENT." "DOLLARS HIDDEN IN DENTIST'S SURGERY." "SHARON: MINISTERS PLOTTING AGAINST ME."

Somehow the entire mechanics of the collapse of the government had passed me by while I was out there, playing Philip Marlowe, tripping over dead bodies and being flummoxed to hell.

" NAVON AND PERES ATE FISH AND SUNFLOWER SEEDS AND DECIDED NOT TO FIGHT FOR THE LEADERSHIP." Still, the glimmer of Moishe's death mask, Gingi Arse-Face's unseen shroud... Why had I not lingered, at Lancaster Gate, to press the Arab lady on her story? It might have been possible, if I had only had time, to check the hearse, to track down the funeral arrangers, to separate the lies and half-lies… As Lord Hercule Peter Wimsey Marlowe I was a complete herring.

I may have left London behind. But I had come to the centre, the nub of the whole damn stew. If there was any answer, it lay within reach of me.
Overnight, I made the wrong decision.

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