The persian, p.23
The Persian, page 23
Which did Glitzman want? I pondered that question while we worked.
To answer that, we’d need access inside the house, and for that we needed Roya.
While terabytes flew on encrypted wings to Glitzman and Caesarea, I waited for her call, or for a signal from Glitzman that she had installed the cable. And though in those weeks I often found myself worrying about Roya—which worried me as much as the actual worrying—there was nothing I could do.
I wanted to see her again, if I am being honest.
And after all, it is honesty that will save me—
The Interrogation Room
Location:
Present day
KAM NEARLY DROPS THE crayon as the General swings open the door. His last word has mutated into a long blue squiggle across nearly half the page. There’s no eraser, of course, and, dammitall, Kam is going to have to throw out this sheet and—
The General joins Kam at the table and says, “I didn’t say stop writing.”
Kam nods uncertainly, sets the paper aside, snags a fresh one, and starts over at the top. The crayon tip—this one is dangerously near a nub—has barely kissed the A4 when the General shouts, loud as he can: “Stop!” He slams his hand into the table.
The crayon goes flying. Don’t move, Kam reminds himself. Don’t chase after it. Kam tries to stuff his shaking hands out of sight, in his lap. The General can tell the difference between the jitter of a muscle cramp and a tremor of fear. Kam does not like to let the General win these little intimidation sessions, ridiculous though they are, and terrified though he is. Kam is losing the bigger battles, why lose the small ones too? You can’t win, but it’s an option not to lose. And here not losing means the General’s not sure if you’re terrified. He’s got a little doubt, and doubt spoils his fun.
The General is not interested in Kam’s hands, though. The General is flipping through the papers.
“How far are you now?” he asks, frowning.
“The surveillance work on the Niavaran compound,” I said.
The General had been rapt at this part of the story in the early drafts, demanding every little detail, but Kam lately has wondered if the old psychopath has lost interest. He already found all the cameras, of course, and Kam’s already opened the messaging program on his phone, showed them how to access the partition, given them the codes, read them Glitzman’s questions. The General even sent a note to Glitzman a few years ago, though Kam’s got no idea what it said.
“You’re not to the botched escape?” the General asks gruffly. “To their deaths?”
The General smiles because he knows talking about that night is the purest form of torture he can administer. Kam would rather submit to the pipe, the Chicken Kebab, even to Colonel Salar Askari himself, than talk about watching those two drift beneath the waves.
Guards are summoned to bring Kam to his cell.
The General enjoys punctuating their sessions with this memory, working on the theory that it’s a sort of autopilot for the pain, a way to keep the torture rolling even when the General is fast asleep, or at home scarring his children, or the poor Mrs. General, if any of them exist in the first place. Unfortunately, the General’s theory is correct. Until Kam comes back here to write, he won’t be able to think of much else.
CHAPTER 44
Tel Aviv / Rosh Pinna
Three years ago
GLITZMAN, ON THE DUTY SHIFT, was wide awake on a cot in his office, fantasizing of smoking guns. The encrypted data from the tap on the fiber line at Niavaran would soon be pouring in—Roya would do her work with the cable any day now—and whenever that happened a group of techs, analysts, and Persian linguists were going to climb the mountain of data. When Glitzman got up he logged in to find a message which said that Roya had been called off work that morning—no reason was provided— and the cable implant in Colonel Ghorbani’s office would be postponed. Nothing, Kam wrote, will happen this weekend. The house is quiet.
Glitzman kicked over the cot. He considered making coffee but instead sat at his desk and stared at the ceiling until his open line rang. The phones were ancient, you couldn’t tell who was calling, but Tzipi was the only person who had this number. He also knew what she wanted to talk about, and he could not believe he’d just been stripped of his only reason to say no, at least without lying. But truthfulness was a habit Glitzman embraced at home, not for ethical reasons, but for the coldly practical: he wished to stay married.
—
WHAT HAD BEGUN AS hints had evolved into requests, then urgings, and finally, in recent weeks, had risen into full-throated demands. Tzipi wanted to spend a weekend out of town, at the family’s second home up in Rosh Pinna. “Tel Aviv is a prison,” was her trusted and most predictable line, “I want to breathe freely up north. And Lebanon is quiet. No missiles! Think of Oriana. Think of me.”
Tzipi.
Oh, Glitzman sure as hell did think of Tzipi. He suspected—knew!— she would use the getaway as fodder to haul them all away from Tel Aviv for good once he’d retired. I will sell dresses, Arik, Tzipi would say. And Glitzman wanted to reply that he did not believe any retail property in Rosh Pinna, save for maybe a few of the more high-end zimmers, generated any cash flow whatsoever, but when he would consider this retort he would regard the shifting shine of her eyes, and he could practically see the ledger calculating his absolutely gigantic debt to the family accrued over a twenty-six-year career in the Mossad. Missed birthdays. Forgotten anniversaries. The vanishings, as Tzipi liked to call them, when a phone would ring and Arik Glitzman flew off somewhere for a few days, weeks, or months, and which had happened mere weeks earlier when he’d flown off to Istanbul with about an hour’s notice. Tzipi managed the house, raised Oriana. She was sharpening her knife for life after Mossad, when she would exact a most gruesome revenge: Rosh Pinna.
The Glitzman family drove up that Friday afternoon.
Two hours north of Tel Aviv, a crop of Glitzman’s forebears had arrived from Poland (at the time, it was technically Austro-Hungarian Galicia) in the 1890s and settled here, on a piece of land granted originally to Baron Rothschild. The home was up in the older neighborhood of the city, just below the Lookout, and its backyard and balconies boasted wide views of the Hula Valley and the snowcapped peaks of the Golan and Mount Hermon. The air was sweet. The streets were built of cobblestones hauled in on Rothschild credit. And they were deserted. Quiet.
Too damn quiet for Arik Glitzman, who, like the murdered Meir, was congenitally unable (unwilling, Tzipi would say) to stop and enjoy the briefest moments of peace. The quiet was noise to his soul.
On Saturday morning Glitzman had only just finished tangling with a piece in Haaretz about another fucking corruption inquiry on yet another goddamn snake in the Knesset when Oriana appeared.
“I have a request, Papa,” she said. Tzipi had coached her daughter to describe any and all demands as requests. How could a request be anything other than reasonable?
“What is it?” he asked, hiding a smirk.
“I request,” Oriana began, and she cast a sidelong glance into the hallway, offstage, where her mother was doubtless mouthing the lines, “a Papa day! It will be fun!” It could be fun, but Oriana’s tone made it sound like a threat. Also: Glitzman liked to improve his negotiating leverage by refusing up front, no matter the request.
“Papa has work to do.” He said it loud enough for Tzipi to hear in the hall. Bracing himself, he flipped into the International Section and pulled the paper in front of his face. He could not see how her face contorted, but she made a noise that he would have believed required far larger lungs, followed by a deluge of foot-stamping and tears, the wicked little actress.
Out the window a strip of haze had settled across the valley. All around him were open spaces, and yet Glitzman felt the walls closing in.
—
THE “NEGOTIATION” ENDED with Glitzman giving Oriana exactly what she wanted: a walk to the springs. Glitzman packed chocolate bars and cookies and filled water bottles. Hand in hand they trotted downhill until they reached the synagogue. Behind it was a stone staircase that bent down to the stream, the water now little more than a trickle with the summer approaching. They chose the furrowed path, cutting through groves of pine and wild olive and patches of wildflowers, which Oriana stopped frequently to pick. She wore a pink backpack. Her nails were painted bright pink. She’d chosen a pink tutu over tights (also pink) and had fought bitterly against the larger coat—an unfortunate beige—which Tzipi had insisted she wear and which, once they’d reached the staircase, Glitzman had permitted her to stuff into the pack. The day was bright, clear, and cold for late spring, and Glitzman was chilly, even in his coat. But not Oriana. The golden skin of her arms and shoulders was bare to the wind and she did not mind in the least. Across the wooden bridge, and they were in a meadow of pines.
“Chocolate?” Oriana said. He had not seen more hopeful eyes.
Glitzman unwrapped two chocolate bars, gave one to Oriana, and ate one himself, in four manic bites. He lay down in the grass, listening to the nonsense of her songs. When he sat up the chocolate bar appeared to have been transferred to her face and hands. He wiped her clean with a cloth before setting out again. Here the stream began to dry out and the path marched upward into rocks and the complaints began.
“I’m tired,” Oriana said. Then: “Uuuggghh.” Her little shoulders stooped; she stopped.
“The hill cannot be conquered if there is no grave on the slope,” Glitzman said, smiling to himself.
“Papa, I’m sooo tired.” Oriana sat in the dirt.
“Should we go home?”
“No!” she screamed. “Not yet.”
“But you’ve stopped.” He wrinkled a threatening eyebrow, but now she had her hands up, fingers flapping into her palms. He looked up at the ascent and then at Oriana and he considered the risks of his blackened lungs popping or maybe his heart wheezing to a stop with an additional twenty or so kilos riding on him.
Notwithstanding the trauma for Oriana, he decided this was a fine place to die and, assuming the risk, swung her up onto his shoulders. He huffed on, enjoying the sweat seeping through his arms, the plotless banter of his daughter, the rustle of pines, the clean air. Glitzman had not enjoyed anything in a long while and he found to his incredible surprise that he was having some fun. He began to sing nonsense songs, and she would sing them right back. He forgot about work. He forgot about Iran and the mark on his head. The blackness in his gut, that constant companion, seemed to drift away for a few glorious minutes in which the Glitzmans were at peace and he—somehow—had found a way to enjoy it. Oriana was an old woman, Glitzman was long gone, and Israel was still here, vibrant and Jewish and free. Oriana lived in Rosh Pinna and visited his grave at the military cemetery and her sons and daughters were farmers and vintners like his great-greatgrandfather had been. He was pulled away from this pleasant vision only once, when she blindfolded him with her little hands, nearly causing them to trip over stones littering the path. He looked down at the valley below and made up more songs and walked under the shade of pines and cypress. After a while, they came upon the crossroads where the Blue Trail met Green.
Here, with Oriana still mounted on his shoulders, he looked out across the Galilee. The Sea was a flat satin carpet stretching beneath the gnarled heights of the Golan, tawny as lions in the sun. Beyond was the Syrian meat grinder—as the crow flies they were nearer to Damascus than Tel Aviv—and perhaps a dozen or so competent Arab militias that would be keen to sack Rosh Pinna and to murder every man, woman, and child if given the chance. To the north was Lebanon and the menace of Hezbollah. Of Tehran. Israel: turned on itself, engaged in eternal bloodletting with the Palestinians, and now, surrounded by Persia. The future was again a nightmare. They’d taken the hill, left graves on the slope, and now they were digging them on the summit.
Rosh Pinna was a crumble of white stone and orange roofs in the hillside below. He looked at it for a long time.
“Where’s our house?” Oriana asked.
Steadying her with his left hand, he pointed with his right. “You see the synagogue?”
“Yes.”
“You know the synagogue, Oriana?”
“What?”
“The synagogue. The big one down there.”
“Okay.”
“Well, count six houses up from that one.”
“Why?”
“To find our house.”
It took a good while. Glitzman helped.
“One of your great-great-grandfathers built that house,” Glitzman said. “The first bricks of it, at least.”
“Why?”
For much of the past year Glitzman had sought to distract Oriana from her Socratic methods. He’d gotten nowhere. She was like her mother—the best way out of a jam was through.
So he answered: “He needed a new home.”
“Why?”
“Some people made him leave his old one in Poland.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t like him.”
“Why?”
“A good answer to that question, sweetheart, and we Jews could be on our way to a better and brighter future. Haven’t gotten a workable response from the opposition yet. Maybe you can get one? You could fix things.”
The word fix conjured for the little girl images of housework, of responsibility. So she said, flatly: “No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Pretty please?”
She said no, but he could picture her up there, a little smile cracking through.
“Extra pretty please?”
“Okay.” The smile surely widened a bit, but she spoke in the same sullen tone she used to agree, with extreme reluctance, to make her bed.
They turned back, and for a while walked in silence, though Glitzman could tell she was thinking hard on something. He was thinking about his great-grandfather and how he would have seen Arik Glitzman’s peaceful stroll with his daughter through the woods outside Rosh Pinna as nothing other than total victory. Glitzmans on the slopes of the Galilee, alive, prosperous, multiplying.
She giggled, and little hands made the world go dark. He gently pried them off and scolded, “No, Oriana. You must stop.”
“Why?”
“You will kill us,” he said, his tone warm.
CHAPTER 45
Ein Shiloh Settlement, West Bank
FROM THE BENCH outside the yeshiva, Haim watched the white pickup bounce up the hillside through the fading light. The air was dry, the spring wind cool, rustling through the olive trees on the slopes, and up the hill through his sidelocks. The next gust blew off his black woven kippah, which he rearranged as he lost sight of the car. To the east, beyond the Arab village of Tal Ammus, the Jordan Valley glowed the color of bone. The lights flickered on as darkness began to swallow the hills.
Those lights angered Haim—there had been no electricity, not even a paved road, before the creation of Ein Shiloh and a string of her sister villages, inhabiting the holy flesh of Judea and Samaria. Or what Haim’s sister back in Tel Aviv would have called “the West Bank.”
His sister, who did something or other for a technology company in Herzliya, who had her own apartment, who took the pill to avoid the consequences of her sin, she said that the Land belonged to the animals down in Tal Ammus. But he was here, wasn’t he? Ein Shiloh was home. It was his. It was his sister’s, too. But she would not claim it.
Two girls marched past the yeshiva, their long hair fluttering in the evening breeze. Haim waited until he heard the door of the girl’s trailer slap open and then shut.
Haim watched the truck crest the last rise, its headlamps now illuminated. It rolled to a stop outside the yeshiva.
The school was the largest building in town: a low-slung pile of concrete blocks that Haim had helped build with his own hands.
Itamar stepped from the truck, clutching his purple kippah against the wind. Was it the same truck Haim had driven to Jerusalem? They embraced warmly. Haim almost had to stand on tippy-toes to plant kisses on the large man’s cheeks. When Haim shook his hand, it felt—as always—like warm leather. Where had Itamar’s family come from? Haim thought his skin was dark as an Arab’s, but he’d never had the courage to ask. And what was that Hebrew accent? At times it almost sounded American. Itamar made no sense to Haim’s worldly instincts. And yet, he thought, what holy man had ever made sense to the world?
He examined the truck and decided that it was different, though the color was the same weather-beaten white. This one was a Toyota. Haim thought the truck he’d driven into Jerusalem had been a Nissan, though he’d been so anxious then that his memory did not inspire confidence.
Haim followed Itamar into the office in the back of the yeshiva, where they kept the crates. Haim felt Itamar’s large hand settle onto his shoulder, then gently squeeze. Haim went into one of the classrooms and read from Yehoshua for what might have been an hour.
He sensed a presence in the doorway, and when he looked up he saw Itamar bow his head and tap his knuckles on the doorframe. Together, Haim and Itamar lugged a crate into the bed of the pickup. There was a strange mechanism with a small keypad affixed to the wood, just as there had been on the crate he’d delivered to Jerusalem. Then, Itamar had said it was a lock, and Haim thought that was partially true, because he’d shamefully read a few of the articles in the aftermath of Jerusalem— though the rabbi discouraged them from consuming such filth—and some of the security officials, those Hellenizers, had said that the crate had been flung open by remote control, and Haim had wondered . . .
Crate inside, Itamar slammed shut the doors of the truck’s camper shell. For a moment they looked off at the shadowed outlines of the valley, down to the lights of Tal Ammus. The wind had returned, colder now.
“The rabbi says your studies are coming along well,” Itamar said, “that you are making great progress.”
