Prince of Fire Page 25

  “I must say, it appears she came through it remarkablywell.”

  “Is she talking?”

  “A little.”

  “Does she know where she is?”

  “Sometimes. I can say one thing for certain: she’s very anxious to see you.” The doctor looked at Gabriel over the top of his smudged eyeglasses. “You seem surprised.”

  “She went thirteen years without speaking to me.”

  The doctor shrugged. “I doubt that will ever happen again.”

  They came to a door. The doctor knocked once and led Gabriel inside. Leah was seated in an armchair in the window. She turned as Gabriel entered the room and smiled briefly. He kissed her cheek, then sat on the edge of the bed. She regarded him silently for a moment, then turned and looked out the window again. It was as if he were no longer there.

  The doctor excused himself and closed the door as he left. Gabriel sat there with her, content to say nothing at all as the pine trees outside receded gently into the gathering darkness. He stayed for an hour, until a nurse entered the room and suggested it was time for Leah to get some sleep. When Gabriel stood, Leah’s head swiveledround.

  “Where are you going?”

  “They say you need to rest.”

  “That’s all I ever do.”

  Gabriel kissed her lips.

  “One last—” She stopped herself. “You’ll come see me again tomorrow?”

  “And the next day.”

  She turned away and looked out the window.

  There were no taxis to be had on Mount Herzl, so he boarded a bus crowded with evening commuters. The seats were all taken; he stood in the open space at the center and felt forty pairs of eyes boring into him. On the Jaffa Road he stepped off and waited in a shelter for an eastbound bus. Then he thought better of it—he had survived one ride; a second seemed an invitation to disaster—so he set off on foot through a swirling night wind. He paused for a moment at the entrance of the Makhane Yehuda Market, then headed for Narkiss Street. Chiara must have heard his footfalls on the stairwell,because she was waiting for him on the landing outside their apartment. Her beauty, after the scars of Leah, seemed even more shocking. Gabriel, when he bent to kiss her, was offered only a cheek. Her newly washed hair smelled of vanilla.

  She turned and went inside. Gabriel followed her, then stopped suddenly. The apartment had been completelyredecorated: new furniture, new carpets and fixtures,a fresh coat of paint. The table had been laid and candles lit. Their diminished length suggested they’d been burning for some time. Chiara, as she passed by the table, snuffed them out.

  “It’s beautiful,” Gabriel said.

  “I worked hard to finish it before you arrived. I wanted it to feel like a proper home. Where have you been?” She tried, with little success, to ask the question without a confrontational tone.

  “You can’t be serious, Chiara.”

  “Your helicopter landed three hours ago. And I know you didn’t go to King Saul Boulevard, because Lev’s officecalled here looking for you.” She paused. “You went to see her, didn’t you? You went to see Leah.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to come see me first?”

  “She’s in a hospital. She doesn’t know where she is. She’s confused. She’s scared.”

  “I suppose Leah and I have a lot in common after all.”

  “Let’s not do this, Chiara.”

  “Do what?”

  He headed down the hallway to their bedroom. It too had been redecorated. On Gabriel’s nightstand were the papers that, when signed, would dissolve his marriageto Leah. Chiara had left a pen beside them. He glanced up and saw her standing in the doorway. She was staring at him, searching his eyes for evidence of his emotions—like a detective, he thought, observing a person of interest at the scene of the crime.

  “What happened to your face?”

  Gabriel told her about the beating he’d been given.

  “Did it hurt?” She didn’t seem terribly concerned.

  “Only a little.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his shoes. “How much did you know?”

  “Shamron told me right away that the hit had gone wrong. He kept me updated throughout the day. The moment I heard you were safe was the happiest moment of my life.”

  Gabriel took note of the fact that Chiara had not mentioned Leah.

  “How is she?”

  “Leah?”

  Chiara closed her eyes and nodded. Gabriel quoted the prognosis of Dr. Bar-Zvi: Leah had come through it remarkably well. He removed his shirt. Chiara covered her mouth. His bruises, after three days at sea, had turned deep purple and black.

  “It looks worse than it really is,” he said.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Take off your clothes. I’ll run a hot bath for you. A good soak will do you good.”

  She left the room. A few seconds later he heard water splashing against enamel. He undressed and went into the bathroom. Chiara examined his bruises again; then she ran her hand through his hair and looked at the roots.

  “It’s long enough to cut now. I don’t want to make love to a gray-haired man tonight.”

  “So cut it.”

  He sat on the edge of the bath. As always Chiara sang to herself while she cut his hair, one of those silly Italian pop songs she loved so much. Gabriel, his head bowed, watched as the last silvered remnants of Herr Klemp flutteredto the floor. He thought of Cairo, and how he had been deceived, and the anger welled within him once more. Chiara switched off the shears.

  “There, you look like yourself again. Black hair, gray at the temples. What was it Shamron used to say about your temples?”

  “He called them smudges of ash,” Gabriel said. Smudges of ash on the prince of fire.

  Chiara tested the temperature of the bath. Gabriel unwrapped the towel from his waist and slid into the water. It was too hot—Chiara always made it too hot—but after a few moments the pain began to retreat from his body. She sat with him for a time. She talked about the apartment and an evening she had spent with Gilah Shamron—anything but France. After a while she went into the bedroom and undressed. She sang softly to herself. Chiara always sang when she removed her clothing.

  Her kisses, usually so tender, pained his lips. She made love to him feverishly, as though trying to draw Leah’s venom from his bloodstream, and her fingertips left new bruises on his shoulders. “I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I was dead,” Gabriel said. “I was dead for a very long time.”

  The walls of their bedroom in Venice had been hung with paintings. Chiara, in Gabriel’s absence, had hung them here. Some of the works had been painted by Gabriel’s grandfather, the noted German expressionist Viktor Frankel. His work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1936. Impoverished, stripped of his ability to paint or even teach, he had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed on arrival along with his wife. Gabriel’s mother, Irene, had been deported with them, but Mengele had assigned her to a work detail, and she’d managed to survive the women’s camp at Birkenau until it was evacuated in the face of the Russian advance. Some of her work hung here in Gabriel’s privategallery. Tormented by what she had seen in Birkenau,her paintings burned with an intensity unmatched by even her famous father. In Israel she had used the name Allon, which means oak tree in Hebrew, but she’d always signed her canvases Frankel to honor her father. Only now could Gabriel see the paintings for themselves instead of the broken woman who had produced them.

  There was one work that bore no signature, a portrait of a young man, in the style of Egon Schiele. The artist was Leah, and the subject was Gabriel himself. It had been painted shortly after he returned to Israel with the blood of six Palestinian terrorists on his hands, and it was the only time he ever agreed to sit for her. He had never liked the painting, because it showed him as Leah saw him—a haunted young man, a
ged prematurely by the shadow of death. Chiara believed the painting to be a self-portrait.

  She switched on the bedroom light and looked at the papers on the bedside table. Her examination was demonstrative in nature; she knew that Gabriel had not signed them.

  “I’ll sign them in the morning,” he said.

  She offered him the pen. “Sign them now.”

  Gabriel switched off the light. “Actually, there’s something else I want to do now.”

  Chiara took him into her body and wept silently through the act.

  “You’re never going to sign them, are you?”

  Gabriel tried to silence her with a kiss.

  “You’re lying to me,” she said. “You’re using your body as a weapon of deception.”

  33

  JERUSALEM

  His days quickly acquired shape. In the mornings he would wake early and sit in Chiara’s newly decorated kitchen with coffee and the newspapers. The stories about the Khaled affair depressed him. Ha’aretz christenedthe affair “Bunglegate,” and the Office lost its battle to keep Gabriel’s name out of print. In Paris the French press besieged the government and the Israeli ambassador for an explanation of the mysterious photographsthat had appeared in Le Monde. The French foreign minister, a blow-dried former poet, threw gasolineon the fire by expressing his belief that “there may indeed have been an Israeli hand in the Holocaust of the Gare de Lyon.” The next day, Gabriel read with a heavy heart that a Kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers had been vandalized. Then a gang of French boys attacked a young girl as she walked home from school and carved a swastika into her cheek. Chiara usually awakened an hour after Gabriel. She read of the events in France with more alarm than sadness. Once a day she phoned her mother in Venice to make certain her family was safe.

  At eight Gabriel would leave Jerusalem and make the drive down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. The proceedings were held in the top-floor conference room so Lev would not have far to walk when he wished to pop in and observe them. Gabriel, of course, was the star witness. His conduct, from the moment he’d returned to Office discipline until his escape from the Gare de Lyon was reviewed in excruciating detail. Despite Shamron’s dire predictions, there was to be no bloodletting. The results of such investigations were usually preordained, and Gabriel could see from the outset that he was not going to be made the scapegoat. This was a collective mistake, the committee members seemed to be saying by the tone of their questions, a forgivable sin committed by an intelligence apparatus desperate to avoid another catastrophic loss of life. Still, at times the questions became pointed. Did Gabriel have no suspicions about the motivations of Mahmoud Arwish? Or the loyalty of David Quinnell? Would things not have gone differentlyif he’d listened to his teammates in Marseilles and turned back instead of going with the girl? At least then Khaled’s plan to destroy the credibility of the Office would not have succeeded. “You’re right,” Gabriel said, “and my wife would be dead, along with many more innocentpeople.”

  One by one, the others were brought before the committee as well, first Yossi and Rimona, then Yaakov and lastly Dina, whose discoveries had fueled the investigationinto Khaled in the first place. It pained Gabriel to see them in the dock. His career was over, but for the others the Khaled affair, as it had become known, would leave a black mark on their records that would never be expunged.

  In the late afternoon, when the committee had adjourned,he would drive to Mount Herzl to spend time with Leah. Sometimes they would sit in her room; and sometimes, if there was still light, he would place her in a wheelchair and push her slowly round the grounds. She never failed to acknowledge his presence and usually managed to speak a few words to him. Her hallucinatory journeys to Vienna became less apparent, though he was never certain precisely what she was thinking.

  “Where is Dani buried?” she asked once, as they sat beneath the canopy of a pine tree.

  “The Mount of Olives.”

  “Will you take me there sometime?”

  “If your doctor says it’s all right.”

  Once, Chiara accompanied him to the hospital. As they entered, she sat down in the lobby and told Gabriel to take his time.

  “Would you like to meet her?” Chiara had never seen Leah.

  “No,” she said, “I think it’s better if I wait here. Not for my sake, for hers.”

  “She won’t know.”

  “She’ll know, Gabriel. A woman always knows when a man’s in love with someone else.”

  They never quarreled about Leah again. Their battle, from that point onward, was a black operation, a covert affair waged by long silences and remarks edged with double meaning. Chiara never entered their bed without first checking to see whether the papers had been signed. Her lovemaking was as confrontational as her silences. My body is intact, she seemed to be saying to him. I’m real. Leah is only a memory.

  The apartment grew claustrophobic, so they took to eating out. Some evenings they walked over to Ben-YehudaStreet—or to Mona, a trendy restaurant that was actually located in the cellar of the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art. One evening they drove down Highway One to Abu Ghosh, one of the only Arab villagesalong the road to survive the expulsions of Plan Dalet. They ate hummus and grilled lamb in an outdoor restaurant in the village square, and for a few moments it was possible to imagine how different things might have been had Khaled’s grandfather not turned the road into a killing zone. Chiara marked the occasion by buying Gabriel an expensive bracelet from a village silversmith. The next evening, on King George Street, she bought him a silver watch to match. Keepsakes, she called them. Tokens by which to remember me.

  When they returned home that night, there was a message on the answering machine. Gabriel pressed the playback button and heard the voice of Dina Sarid, tellinghim that she’d found someone who had been there the night Sumayriyya fell.

  The following afternoon, when the committee had adjourned, Gabriel drove to Sheinkin Street and collectedDina and Yaakov from an outdoor café. They drove north along the coast highway through dusty pink light, past Herzliyya and Netanya. A few miles beyondCaesarea, the slopes of Mount Carmel rose before them. They rounded the Bay of Haifa and headed for Akko. Gabriel, as he continued north toward Nahariyya, thought of Operation Ben-Ami—the night a column of Haganah came up this very road with orders to demolishthe Arab villages of the Western Galilee. Just then he glimpsed a strange conical structure, stark and gleaming white, rising above the green blanket of an orange grove. The unusual building, Gabriel knew, was the children’s memorial at Yad Layeled, a museum of Holocaust remembranceat Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’Getaot. The settlementhad been founded after the war by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Adjacent to the edge of the kibbutz, and barely visible in the tall wild grass, were the ruins of Sumayriyya.

  He turned onto a local road and followed it inland. Dusk was fast approaching as they entered al-Makr. Gabrielstopped on the main street and, with the engine still running, entered a coffeehouse and asked the proprietor for directions to the house of Hamzah al-Samara. A momentof silence followed while the Arab appraised Gabrielcoolly from the opposite side of the counter. Clearly he assumed the Jewish visitor to be a Shabak officer, an impression Gabriel made no effort to correct. The Arab led Gabriel back into the street and, with a series of points and gestures, showed him the way.

  The house was the largest in the village. It seemed several generations of al-Samaras lived there, because there were a number of small children playing in the small dusty courtyard. Seated in the center was an old man. He wore a gray galabia and white kaffiyeh and was puffing on a water pipe. Gabriel and Yaakov stood at the open side of the courtyard and waited for permission to enter. Dina remained in the car; the old man, Gabriel knew, would never speak forthrightly in the presence of a bareheaded Jewess.

  Al-Samara looked up and, with a desultory wave of his hand, beckoned them. He spoke a few words to the oldest of the children and a moment later two more chairs appeared. T
hen a woman came, a daughter perhaps,and brought three glasses of tea. All this before Gabrielhad even explained to him the purpose of his visit. They sat in silence for a moment, sipping their tea and listening to the buzz of cicadas in the surrounding fields. A goat trotted into the courtyard and gently butted Gabriel’s ankle. A child, robed and barefoot, shooed the animal away. Time, it seemed, had stopped. Were it not for the electric lights coming on in the house, and the satellite dish atop the roof, Gabriel would have found it easy to imagine that Palestine was still ruled from Constantinople.

  “Have I done something wrong?” the old man asked in Arabic. It was the first assumption of many Arabs when two tough-looking men from the government arriveduninvited at their door.

  “No,” Gabriel said, “we just wanted to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  The old man, hearing Gabriel’s answer, drew thoughtfullyon his water pipe. He had hypnotic gray eyes and a neat mustache. His sandaled feet looked as though they had never seen a pumice stone.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “The Valley of Jezreel,” Gabriel replied.

  Al-Samara nodded slowly. “And before that?”

  “My parents came from Germany.”

  The gray eyes moved from Gabriel to Yaakov.

  “And you?”

  “Hadera.”

  “And before?”

  “Russia.”

  “Germans and Russians,” al-Samara said, shaking his head. “Were it not for Germans and Russians, I’d still be living in Sumayriyya, instead of here in al-Makr.”

  “You were there the night the village fell?”

  “Not exactly. I was walking in a field near the village.” He paused and added conspiratorially: “With a girl.”

  “And when the raid started?”

  “We hid in the fields and watched our families walking to the north toward Lebanon. We saw the Jewish sappers dynamiting our homes. We stayed in the field all the next day. When the darkness came again, we walked here to al-Makr. The rest of my family, my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, all ended up in Lebanon.”