The Silencer
Bloomsbury, 1991, original paperback.
Interlink Books, Brooklyn, NY, 1993, hardback & paperback.

From Part 2: IS REAL?

The West Bank. To some a bane, to others an endangered home, to yet others, the centre of the universe, the nub of an ancestral promise. To me, a foreign country, tacked on to the heartland of Israel by means of rubber bands, tank grease, brute force, and the dreams of my bites noires, the settlers, who claim an infinite lease, signed by God. Genesis, Chapter 17, Verse 8. A genuine problem for me, as far as physical travel is involved. In `normal' times, before the intifada, one could move about with reasonable impunity, apart from sporadic burning tyres, an occasional grenade, and permanent dagger looks from the suppressed. Today, it is all stimmt verboten, the press locked out by military order, lest they report that the Palestinian inhabitants no longer love us, and the solidarity patrols of the Peace Now movement, gathering information on human rights abuses, can only penetrate the area singly in Arab taxis, hoping to slide unseen among the familiar enemy through the army roadblocks. The only sure way through is, as Lauterman said, with beard and hattie, the stigmata of the resident Jewish settlers. And therein of course lies the rub. Having habitually refused to wear the skullcap in the Conquered Colonies, to avoid identification with my ideological sworn enemies, could I now afford to jettison it as the sole disguise to get me through the lines? The dilemma being, what if the rebellious inhabitants, spying my stigmata, decide to treat me with their usual mode of greeting to their zealous neighbours, of stones, petrol bombs or other solid objects such as sticks with nails or iron bars? With this in mind, no settler travels in the Occupied Areas unarmed. Often they shoot first to prevent the offence, or, for general purposes, at random, pour encourager les autres.

Well, I warned them but they wouldn't listen to me. I wrote all about it, in my Moishe-Ganef My doubts, my scepticism, my reservations, as soon as the tanks had rolled in, 1967, about the grandiose certainties of the conquest, the efficacy ofthe clearing out of the `nests' of `saboteurs', the mass arrests, the intimidation, the harassment, the coercive network of total control. All the colonial methods that had lost France Algeria and Indochina, the Portuguese Africa, the British everywhere else. The `liberal occupation'. Ah, the nostalgia! We brought in agricultural and industrial experts, shining and sweating with goodwill and enthusiasm, bringing the backward natives new forms of cultivation, advanced farming techniques, a better health service, and so on. But the ungrateful Arabs failed the test of our generosity, agitating repeatedly for political rights, self-determination and other subversive concepts, instilled in them by terrorists and Commies. Nevertheless, for twenty years, it worked. Despite the agitation, the people co-operated in their daily lives with our administration, applying to its offices for permits and licences, generally keeping the peace, outbreaks of nationalist verve notwithstanding. Or so it seemed, until December 1987, when something snapped, and the shit finally hit the fan.

The West Bank: 3,500 square miles, a blip so small on the global map it might be a fly speck to be brushed away. Two hours' drive north to south (petrol bombs permitting), seventy minutes west to east (ditto). Despite the offers of Israeli progress, an effective time warp of brown, rolling terraced hills, dotted with villages that might be snoozing in an eternal siesta. At the best of times, sheep grazing lethargically across the hillsides, women and men bent over green fields, little boys selling fruit by the roadside, teenagers by watermelon stalls, an old man in traditional robes smoking under an olive tree. The Bibleland of American Jewish fantasy, except that it is peopled with real people, with real desires, not audioanimatronic robots.

To these places came people like my brother-in-law Elisha, all agog with Biblical excitement. Genetic place names inscribed on his retinas: Hebron, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the afterglow of the presence of Abraham, Sh'chem, where he could nose out, like an ethnographic Sherlock Holmes, the footsteps of Abraham, Jacob and Joshua, to name but a meagre few. Beit El, Anatot, Gilgal, Shiloh, Jericho, Giveah, Beit Lehem. There was no shortage of markers. No matter that by now there were people living there, with their own ancestral lodestones: Al Khalil, Beitin, Anata, Sinjil. Usurpers, strangers, latecomers. My brother-inlaw and his friends were interested in ontological, not political rights.

God walked here! Forget about Jesus, and Mohammed, who just flew in for a quickie at Mount Moriah, then moved on. At first the settlers came by stealth, setting up small units, a few tents, a caravan and mobile water tanker. Then they took to turning up, in army trucks, in the dead of night, to hammer the tent pegs into the ground and assert their presence by daybreak, creating ersatz `fortress and watchtower' villages, as if the British were still in the land. Then, when Menachem Begin became Prime Minister, they came in great numbers, singing and dancing, with iced containers of soft drinks and sandwiches, and several Cabinet Ministers in tow. `This soil, to which we have returned after two thousand years of exile…' My brother-in-law Elisha always cried. One saw him on the television news, the tears flowing down the black-bearded cheeks as potent a pull for the TV cameras as aniseed is for dogs.

The West Bank. A pin-sharp blue-skied pre-spring day, the breeze fresh and sweet, flicking my face through Alexander's rolled-down windows. Security requires windows to be shut here, so the army never fails to advise, in case of hostile missiles at close quarters. A commercial company, I saw in my evening paper, is now marketing special wire mesh protection to be fitted over the windows of private cars. `The Answer To The Intifada, Can be installed and removed within minutes: Enables the motorist to travel with protection in the Necessary Areas Only.' It's a good thing they don't advise you to use it in your backyard. The neighbours might get weird ideas. Of course, the settlers here already use it regularly, they never leave home without it. It is part of the Quality of Life and Freedom they sought, having bussed themselves all the way from Brooklyn to live behind their barbed wire and ammunition belts. Zionism, to paraphrase old Karl, repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, and then as God knows what.

To minimise my time in hostile country I drove first towards the coast and turned through Kfar Saba towards the old `green line', flashing my hattie at the first army roadblock, which waved me by, then whipping it off rapidly as I passed through Kalkilya, the Arab town immediately beyond the defunct, but mentally redrawn border. Inching by the shuttered shops and closed cafes, nodding my head vacantly at the little knots ofyouths sitting silently on railings, mumbling Good Morning, `marhaba', and generally trying to give the air of an imbecile who has lost his way. If looks could kill. The town basked in its ominous silence, an air of pride in its buttoned-up ambience of non-cooperation.

I was glad I had not taken the gun, my prize World War I I Luger. I had considered the idea, took it out of its glass case in the study and put a box of shells beside it. Anat came in, giving me a look which expressed our seventeen years of living together, the war weariness of stalemated arguments, the entire history of the Jewish people in capsule. I put the gun back. But I did hold up, determinedly, the Pink Floyd at Stonehenge cassette.

`You cannot sever me from my roots,' I told my wife. She left the room without comment. Next week we use Apache smoke signals. After our brief reunion and day and a half of rest following my return from protective custody, Anat has been too busy with the Municipality's current crop of exhibitions for any more in-depth consultations. In fact, she has been busy all year. The Uprising, occurring in the State of Israel's fortieth year, exacerbated the outbreak of Exhibitions and Festivals, which have proliferated like locusts. The Arts, Music, Theatre, Cinema, Sanitation, Basket Weaving, Origami, Folk Dancing. We have been celebrating our anniversary with a growing manic depressive compulsion. Ersatz tent cities of 1950s' immigration camps spread over the Tel Aviv Exhibition Gardens, complete with young Moroccan girls washing clothes in old tin basins, babies bathed in wooden tubs, recreated standpipes, old men lolling on piles of blankets, while white-coated men and women, in a special hut, sprayed incomers with disinfectant. The good old days! Anat had no part of that horror, but she was fully engaged preparing a `Jerusalem in Miniature' exhibit, due to open at the coming Independence Day celebrations, April, six weeks ahead.

But I had no time to play my Pink Floyd cassette before the town of Amiel loomed before me, sans watchtower or surrounding fence, an unexpectedly large conglomerate of gleaming white stonework and fresh black asphalt roads, with an arched gate cheerfully announcing `WELCOME TO AMIEL' in Hebrew, English and French. I whipped my hattie back on as a bag of khaki rags rose off a folding chair to meet me, dragging his pouches and M16 carbine on the newly tarred road. `Yes, honey,' he said, `what can I do for you?'His eyes were bloated with fatigue. A smart, white-shined local with beard and hattie and matching rifle sauntered over.

`I'm looking for Didi Schaeffer,' I told the local. `I was with friends of his in New York, who wanted me to pass on a message.'

`You're a friend of Didi?' he asked.

`We met in the winter,' I told him. Why tell a he when small truths can prevail?

`He's at the plantation,' said the smart local. `Straight down the road, past the synagogue, turn right at the post office, half a kilometre, left again, past the school.'

We greeted each other with laconic waves. My people, right or left. We communicate in codes, like Kwakiutl Indians. I was instantly co-opted into the clan. Israeli licence plate, hattie, New York, pass friend. I pressed Alexander up the road. Neat, one- and two-storey houses, freshly built, with little gardens in front. Larger blocks of apartment houses with terraces and rows of saplings in front. Young women wheeling laughing offspring in prams. Children gambolling with hoses. A strange pyramidal synagogue, built perhaps by an architect who was someone's brother-in-law. An odd monument at a road junction, all white-painted twisted girders. Signifying, perhaps, the coils of the Jewish soul, or Menachem Begin's brainscan. The whole giving a fresh feel of uncrowded spaces, peaking at the top of a rolling hill, overlooking the surrounding landscape, the brown hills, the stone terraces. The air clear and sparkling. A genuinely pleasant place to bring up your family, far from the urban sprawl, car exhausts, pollution. The Quality of the Environment. Hey, boy, which side are you on?

I turned right at the post office, half a kilometre, past a school playground with two dozen tiny tots happily yammering, most with kipas and sidecurls. A couple of buildings further on, the fringe of cultivated fields. I stopped the car and got out. Ploughed earth stretched ahead, and I ambled up a gravel path towards some huts by rows and rows of some crop protected under plastic wraps. Do I know a beetroot from a kohlrabi? Just about, but there it stops. At a corner of the field, a number of Arab workers were handling bundles and loading crates on to a truck. Two white-shirted, skullcapped settlers were standing by, giving instructions, one a short, thin individual, the other a beefy giant with a massive black beard. I walked up.

`Good morning.'

`Good morning,' they answered, diffidently. The thin man looked at me curiously. The giant barely threw me a glance. He was perturbed by something his workers were doing. `Hey, Farid, take it easy there, you'll smash the side . . .' He spoke Hebrew with an American accent. `I'm looking for Didi Schaeffer,' I said to the settlers. `I met him in New York, and then I saw some friends of his who asked me to give him a message.'

`What's the message?' asked the giant, without taking his eyes off his errant labourer.

`I have to speak to Didi Schaeffer himself,' I said, `it was a personal matter.'

`You're a liar,' said the giant. `Hey, Farid, for God's sake!' `Pardon me?' I said. I was not sure whether he had addressed me or the Arab.

`You're a liar,' he said. `I'm Didi Schaeffer, and I've never seen you before in my life.'

Oi vei. Perhaps I should have brought the gun after all. This man was built along the lines of Eric Campbell in the old Chaplin movies. He was about eight feet tall and had arms like tree trunks descending from mountainous shoulders. His eyes were very small, and could hardly be seen without a periscope by a normal-sized person.

But at least I had my hattie. Advertised as a fellow practitioner, I would not be pulped without due process. I scratched my head, drawing attention to my security badge.

`Well, that's something . . .' I shook my head in puzzlement. `The fellow I met… he introduced himself as… this is very strange…'

`Who sent you?' he asked in English. `Was it Murray Waiskopf?' Was he genuine, or just playing ignorant? I took a step back, just in case. 'Murray Waiskopf is dead,' I said. `Haven't you been told? He was found with his head bashed in, in an office on East 29th Street. It happened one week ago, last Monday.'

`Let's go talk,' he said. `Mottke, keep an eye on Farid. The crates break before they get to the stockroom. Everything spills. The food rots. Tell him I'm getting really pissed off.' The thin man waved. The giant grabbed me by the arm, off the field. `You've got wheels? Let's go.'

We parked at the outer perimeter of the settlement, where the asphalt road petered out at the side of a partly fenced hill. Old olive trees grew on one part of the slope, but on the other a brown gash in the earth signified a grove that had been uprooted. That particular part was fenced in. Between the trees and the non-trees we walked along a crumbling terrace, overlooking the plain.

`You see,' said the giant, as if mouthing rehearsed words, `on a clear day like this you see right through to the coast. An artillery battery from this hill can bombard Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv proper. That would wake up Peace Now from their beds.' He turned his head down to me so I saw a flicker of eyelashes. `I know you. You're that writer, Joe Dekel. You're the worst kind of Jew, a religious traitor. But that's the way things are with the Jews. We love other people but we hate ourselves. It's a sickness. The exile disease. The answer is, to come home and tell everyone else: Kiss my arsehole, baby. For thousands of years, they killed the Jew, tore his guts out, disembowelled his women, battered his babies' heads against the wall. Now let someone else suffer for a while.'

`David Opatoshu, in Exodus,' I identified the quote. `I remember when I first saw the film, in 1960. That Eva Marie Saint, she made me go weak at the knees. Who was the actress who played Jordana?'

`You're a joker,' he said. `But there are no jokes here, unless it's all you leftist half-Jews. You want to give away the half that you've already given up, the half that makes us what we are. I know, I was like you, a long time ago. I was a secular Zionist. But that whole trip, being like everybody else, of course, it ends up castration. I heard a story about Egyptian peasants once, in the villages of Upper Egypt, who fuck the earth that the Nile overflows in. The Nile flooding leaves the soil a smooth, wet suction. The men put their cocks in and get off on the earth. It's an image I like.'

`It wouldn't work in this soil,' I observed, looking at the dry rocks and gravel.

`It's like in your book,' he said, `you look down on everything. If anybody thinks something's sacred, you piss on it. Why bother wearing that "hattie" of yours? Or go to the synagogue? What does the Messiah mean to you? Or the Covenant? The basis of the Faith. The Land and the People. What for? You might as well take the kfppa off and eat pork on Yom Kippur like the rest of them. What is a Jew to you?'

`I can't say,' I said. `I'm waiting for the next coalition statement on the issue.'

`We are a sick people,' he said, shaking his head. `The Arabs don't go around asking Who is an Arab? They just come out with their stones and petrol bombs. They know who is a Jew, that's for sure. At least I respect them for their certainties, for their single-mindedness. They know what they want -Jews out of the Land of Israel. But you don't even listen to their authentic voice, because you're too busy sticking your tongue up Arafat's arse, licking up that poisoned honey.' (Yucch!) `They know what you want to hear so they play you all the right tunes. Two states. Three states. Peace in our time. Dance, Jewboy, dance. Where have your brains gone, Dekel?'

I did not wish to engage the beefy giant in the Moral Debate of The Age, in this setting, at any rate not without at least a Kalashnikov to even the odds between us. I tried to steer him off that course, knowing I was entering as stormy if not more turbulent waters.

`If the man who came up to me in Manhattan wasn't you, then who was he? Do you have a brother?'

`We're triplets,' he said. 'Huey, Dewey and Louie. How do I know what you're talking about? You tell me Murray Waiskopf is dead. So, I used to work with the guy. He was a good Jew. He worked hard for his people. New York is no bed of roses for us either. We have Black Muslims there, Fatah propagandists, asshole Jews like you. You name it. A sea of troubles. So what's with you and Murray, and what's it got to do with me?'

`A man came up to me,' I said, `and told me he was my Silencer. He said his name was Didi Schaeffer and he worked for a man named Murray Waiskopf who worked on blacklisting Jewish subversives. He set up a meeting at a certain address for the next day. But I went there that night and found one dead man, who turned out to be Waiskopf. There was an obituary in the New York Times. I met some interesting policemen. But after that, it gets a bit strange.'

`What's strange is your head, Dekel. You've been smoking too much hashish. What's this blacklist crap you're trying to sell me? So I worked with Murray on information. We monitored anti-Semites, Nazis, Black Muslims, Arabs. What's this gotta do with subversive Jews? We'd need a battalion to deal with you lot. Who cares? You're not that important.'

`You said you read my book. How did you get it? I don't remember submitting to Murray Waiskopf.'

`I read it here, in Hebrew. Imit, our native language. Remember? Are you surprised? I read books. I'm curious. You think we're non-human. You see us the way you say we see Arabs. You're paranoid. You take self-hate beyond psychosis. Now we've got to "the Jews are after me". They're trying to ban your book in America. Gevaldt, you're not going to be the number-one bestseller, New York Times Book Review, front page. Is that what this is all about?' He reached out and grabbed hold of my shirt at the neck, shaking me as if I was a recalcitrant pussycat. `Look! Look in front of you, you asshole! Look at the landscape, look at your heritage! Breathe the air! Isn't it wonderful? Is this God's land or isn't it, idiot? Isn't this worth dying for?'

`Uuurgh! buurg! duurg!' I answered. But he wasn't going to let go of my collar, and all my other shirts were in the wash, at Zisselmacher's Laundry.

`Two weeks ago one of our residents, one of my friends, Oded Handeman, you've never heard of him, how could you, he wasn't a stinking leftist, drove down that road with his wife and two kids, one aged five months. They came out of that village over there, you see it, it's called Kafr whatever - they threw a petrol bomb in the car, which exploded. They burnt my friend's wife and his baby, dead. The other child and my friend got away with first-degree burns, they'll look like shit to the end of their lives. And you're out there in New York- I know what you were doing there, I read the newspapers, I can even make out your name - I'm not blind, you were hobnobbing with the people who did that to my friend, your beautiful peace-loving Palestinians! They burn our children and when we go in there and show them what the price could be, and try to catch the murderers - the army comes in and pulls us out! Your I D F oppressors! They defend the Arabs but they don't defend us! And you're kissing Arafat in New York!'

He let go of my neck. I dropped three feet, hit ground and rolled, crouching, ready for anything. But his spasm of rage had subsided. He walked away a few paces, sat under a tree and smoothed his beard with his hands.

`I have a wife and two kids myself,' he said, quietly. `We are going to live and die here. You can send your army to take us away, and you'll soon find out what we're made of. We've stopped running. There'll be no ovens here, and no black or white Nazis. Jew-haters, watch out.'

I gathered my wits, at a sufficient distance, gauging my escape route to the car. There was nothing I could do about his friend's tragedy. The old chicken and egg syndrome. Who killed who first? The primal murder. The politics of the most recent atrocity, that perpetuum mobile of our agonies. This was not the place and time to air the argument of presence and provocation. At points of life and death, dialogue vanishes. I turned to go, clearing my throat to make sure it was still there. He just sat under the tree, breathing harshly, his small eyes closed, as if dozing. There seemed to be nothing further to say, but, like the schmuck I am, I said it anyway: `You know a man named Nederlander Schatz?'

He said nothing, but his lips moved in a sort of raspberry. `Someone tried to kill him too. Do you know anything about a Jew-hating colonel who has the F B I on his tail?'

`You're looking for Jew-haters?' he said. `Look in the mirror. It's a needle in a haystack. Go away, Dekel. You're a madman. Don't infect me with your crazy fantasies about FBI agents and Israeli spies. We have enough problems here.'

There was that sort of silence in which one hears a grenade pin drop.

`I didn't say anything about Israeli spies,' I said quietly. He opened his piggy eyes and looked at me.

`You're a dead man, Dekel,' he said. And closed his eyes again, leaning against the tree trunk. I walked away slowly, then faster, up the hill, climbed gratefully into Alexander and drove away, slamming through the gate past the slumped soldier, and back towards the pre-Occupation `green line' and more familiar fears.

A dead man wanders round Jerusalem. So what else is new? From the old houses of the Bukharan Quarter with their old wrought-iron shutters, to the quiet leafy solitude and spacious, partly hidden gardens of the Bethlehem Road, Dekel's genuine old Jerusalem takes shape under the disappearing contours of the `reunited' city. Nothing older than 1853. Don't give me those ancient battlements of the Turkish Emperor, the raucous side streets down which they whipped Jesus, the captured splendour of the mosques which hold us captive, the scuff-marks and bloodstains of the Crusades and that Wall, that barrier of tears, with its surroundings bulldozer-cleared for worshippers, prompting my mentor, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, doyen of Jewish anarchists, to call it the biggest parking lot in the East.

Idolatry. Idolatry. Idolatry. The worship of old stones, of faded markers, of tombs, the entire excrescence built on the pristine structure of the Faith as she was. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Well, that puts paid to Anat's models of Jerusalem. But false Gods, they have always been a temptation. The state, with its flag, the blue and white schmutter. At least try the star-spangled banner, it has one more colour. The banned Palestinian flag has four.

So what am I left with? A complete stalemate. The further I pry, the murkier it gets. The FBI, Agent Kool, the mysterious colonel, the bandaged thug laid low by Dorothy Morgenthal's oriental talents, the Anti-Slander League, the Waiskopf carcase. Capped now by two Didi Schaeffers, not to speak of his friend's dead child.

There is no answer to an opponent's agony, except surrender to his viewpoint, or withdrawal. If you had not parked yourself by force in their midst, you say. What about Jaffa, and Tel Aviv, they reply? One has to stop somewhere. One cannot continue reprising the horrors of the past, over and over, expanding the circle of despair. Somewhere one says Stop, enough. I believe our enemies may have reached that stage. We had reached it earlier in our history, but then we swerved away, into our hubris and nightmare. We descend into our own abattoir…

(THE SILENCER, U.S. edition, is in print, and available at www.amazon.com)

 

 

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