Michael said nothing.
“How many years have we known one another?” Shorer asked, but he did not wait for an answer. “Your uncle Jocko, my best friend—who brought you to me—what did he tell you? In my presence he told you to trust me like a father. And hasn’t that been true all these years? Have I ever let you down? Did I ever fail to back you up?”
Michael bowed his head.
“So, what? Suddenly I’ve turned into a villain? You yourself in another few days—maybe before that even— you’ll discover for yourself … After all, you studied history, didn’t you? What are you going to do with this truth we heard here today? Do you believe that every wrong can be righted? That the truth is always the highest value, that the truth wins out over life itself even? Do you know what kind of material we’d be handing over to … to everyone! To the Palestinians and the Egyptians and to … to us, ourselves. There is no question about it; in any event the Censor’s Office would never allow this to get out… . It’s just a waste of time, do you understand me?”
After a pause, Michael said, “I don’t know if I can keep quiet about this. I don’t know how a person can live with a secret like this.”
“Oh, yes, you do!” Shorer said sadly. “You most certainly do. You’ll keep quiet, and how,” he said, his grief deepening. After a brief silence, he added, “We’re evolving, you see? We’re learning to keep quiet about bigger and bigger matters.”
Afterward, everything took on a quality of unreality. As though weightless, Michael followed the policemen who escorted Rubin to the police van, and as though in sleep he heard bits of a news broadcast from car radios in the parking lot: “… he shot his wife, fatally wound-ing her,” came the broadcaster’s voice. “The couple’s two children were in the apartment at the time… .” And when Michael entered Shorer’s car—the radio was on there, too—he heard that seventeen women had been murdered by their husbands or partners during the previous year, and heard, too, the item about Shimshi and the other workers who had been brought to court for a hearing to extend the period of their arrest.
Natasha was awaiting their arrival at the entrance to police headquarters. Her gaze followed Rubin as he stepped out of the van, his hands in cuffs. She moved the canvas bag from her shoulder, ran a hand through the lank locks of her hair, and tugged at the ends of her scarf. She approached Rubin. “Rubin!” she exclaimed. To Michael, who was plodding heavily nearby, she said, “What’s going on here?
Why is he—” When Michael said nothing, Natasha said, “It’s a mistake, a big mistake. Rubin is the kind of person … what, are you really arresting him?” She choked on her words.
Michael did not answer her.
“I came here for a totally different reason,” Natasha mumbled, her eyes on Rubin’s back. “Now I really don’t know what to do, because …”
Something in her lost expression prevented Michael from telling her to go away, to leave him alone. She stood next to him talking, though only fragments of her sentences reached his ears. “Now Hefetz is no longer willing … I told him you knew … I told him … that you would help me bring it to air … the State Prosecutor’s Office … if you saw the video you’d know …” And without knowing how it happened, he found himself following Natasha up the stairs, her light-colored, dirty canvas bag bouncing against her gaunt thighs as she led the way
to his office. “Do you have a VCR?” she asked, winded. “Because if you don’t—” He opened the office door; he still had not spoken, or at least that was the way it seemed to him. Then again, several minutes later Balilty entered the room carrying a VCR. He inserted the cassette into the appropriate slot, and without intending to, Michael heard the sounds and viewed the scenes that flooded his office, and noticed Tzilla, too, who had entered his office by pushing the door open with her foot—her hands occupied with three mugs—and was now watching the screen. They were looking at aerial shots of a green city on the banks of a river, Natasha’s voice in the background explaining that this was an area, not far from Montreal, to which Rabbi Elharizi had smuggled the money and gold bricks he had gathered from his followers.
“Two days ago,” Natasha’s voice proclaimed, loud and clear, an image of Rabbi Elharizi on the screen, “I fell into a trap, I let myself be led blindly by facts that were fed to me in order to keep us from seeing what was really going on. And that begins with this,” she said as the film skipped to Rabbi Elharizi, standing at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport dressed as a Greek Orthodox priest, his head bent but the hood covering his face slightly pushed to the side, exposing him. “What is Rabbi Elharizi doing at Ben Gurion Airport in the garb of a Greek Orthodox priest?” Natasha asked. “What is he doing? He’s preparing the groundwork for realizing his vision; in order to bury this scoop of ours, I was led astray two days ago. But now there are no more diver-sions. Let’s watch a snippet from a secret cassette distributed by Rabbi Elharizi among his believers.” Again the film skipped to Rabbi Elharizi, speaking as if possessed: “The Holy Land of Israel will be laid to waste, the destruction of the Third Temple is near. Soon, no stone will be left unturned and all will be ashes and dust. Our Arab enemies will lay our cities to waste and run our fields asunder. Jewish women will fall prey to them, our homes will be set aflame and our children annihilated.
Destruction and desolation, my brothers! But we, we wish to keep our breed holy! Let us depart for the New Jerusalem!”
“Stop, stop the tape!” Tzilla shouted. From inside that same weightlessness Michael watched as Balilty’s finger moved to the VCR and pressed the button, freezing the frame.
“What is this?” Tzilla cried out. “Call everyone, they’ve got to see this. They’re running off with the taxes we’ve paid! Everyone’s got to see this, these people are skipping out on us!”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Balilty proclaimed, “they’re welcome to leave yesterday, along with all their corruption. Come on, let’s keep watching,” he said to Natasha. To Tzilla he added, “You want us to call Eli?”
“Eli’s with the kids now,” Tzilla said as she sat down. “Go on, go on,” she told Balilty. “This is something that you just can’t—something everyone needs to know.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve got to keep watching even if it makes me sick.”
Michael thought that on any other day he would have been shocked by this cassette tape, he would have been highly disturbed by the insult of it and overcome with nausea at these scenes of the rabbi’s “vision”
and the Jewish way of clinging to exile and boxes of gold. But today these images were simply floating in the chasm of grief that had opened up inside him these past few hours.
Balilty pressed the button, and the film lurched forward, Rabbi Elharizi’s voice echoing in a closed room. “Unlike Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who was smuggled to Yavneh in a coffin when Jerusalem was under siege by the armies of Vespasian,” cried the rabbi prophetically,
“we shall leave proudly in an aerial convoy, my brothers, every hour another plane departing. These ships shall transport you to the land of water: Canada. Pack your belongings; no redemption, no revival, awaits us here. A voice came down from on high in the still of the night and visited both me and the mystic Rabbi Bashari. And it said,
‘And I will make them as a vexation to all the kingdoms of the land …
and the carcass of this people will be as food for the birds of prey and beasts of the field. And there shall be no succor, for the land shall be laid to waste.’ Soon it shall come to pass! Rise and depart! Depart!
Depart before the destruction! There will be seventeen meeting points,” the rabbi said before Natasha’s clear voice interjected to read a list of the names of towns in the Negev and in the north of Israel, as well as the names of the rabbis in charge at each point. This was followed by the continuation of the rabbi’s speech: “We must save the souls of our brethren, our fellow Jews,” Rabbi Elharizi intoned, behind him the wizened old mystic himself, struck dumb years earlier and
exploited now by his sons and followers at festive gatherings for the purpose of dispelling doubts on questionable matters. “Canada!”
Rabbi Elharizi cried, and the head of the old mystic, who sat sunken into a velvet armchair and propped up by huge pillows, lolled backward. “We shall build the New Yavneh there, we shall save our race before—” Suddenly the speech was cut short, and the film showed Rabbi Elharizi humming a tune from the Neilah prayers of Yom Kippur: El Norah Alilah, which Michael, like any traditional Eastern Jew, recognized from his own childhood. The rabbi sang, “Judge them now, in the hour when the gates of repentance are closing,” while a choir of ultra-Orthodox men carrying suitcases and boxes joined in for the chorus: “Oh Lord of deed and action, provide us with forgiveness.”
And with that the picture was cut off, the voices fell silent, and the screen was blue and empty.
“What … What are they planning?” Tzilla whispered. “They’re taking all their—”
“They’re leaving for Canada,” Natasha explained. “A whole city is being built for them there. All the government allocations they’ve received, all the contributions from wealthy benefactors, it’s all been converted into
