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 Remy 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 deja 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.
“Enough,” he said as if reading her mind. “There’s only here and now, okay?”
They held each other for a long moment.
Tanya breathed deeply. She rebuked herself silently for letting gloom and fear take over. Israel wasn’t a Shtetl, or a ghetto, but a Jewish state with an army of dedicated men and women, ready to defend it. And she had a vital role in that effort. “My assignment here will end soon. I’ll probably be sent back to Europe. This house might be empty or occupied by someone else when your next leave comes around.”
“I’ve never been abroad. Can I visit you?”
There was no way she could see him in Europe. Mossad life didn’t allow for casual visitors. To change the subject, she asked, “Have you received any letters from home?”
“Are you kidding?”
Tanya was surprised. Abraham had clearly said that his wife would write to Lemmy. “Your mother didn’t write to you?”
“She probably forgot about me already.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Tanya immediately regretted her sharp tone. “There’s nothing my daughter could do to make me forget her. Your mother will never-”
“What do you know about Neturay Karta?”
“I know how a mother feels.”
“Not my mother. She feels what my father allows her to feel, which obviously can’t include feelings for a banished son.”
“That’s not what-”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” Lemmy put down his coffee and left the kitchen. She heard him enter the bathroom, and a moment later the water was running in the shower.
E lie Weiss had spent the night at the Pension Naurische, a small hotel run by an elderly couple near Zurich’s train station. When he came downstairs, Frau Naurische handed him a thick envelope addressed to Herr Danzig. Taking his breakfast in the cozy lounge, Elie used a butter knife to open the seal.