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Jerusalem, September 11, 1942
What could I possibly have wished for the eve of the new Hebrew year? Prosperity? Abundance? Health? Rosh HaShana greetings for the year 5703 were more visceral. That year, Jews around the world—in Europe, of course, but also in Palestine—prayed for life. Full stop. For one cannot live a good life, a bad life, an unexamined life, or even a squandered life... without the prerequisite of life itself. They prayed for life, though there was no one to hear their prayers. They prayed for life, though millions of identical prayers were mockingly ignored.
I secretly longed to pray, yet could not. The purity of belief in beauty and trust in humanity’s potential for good—prerequisites to prayer—always eluded me. I could at least enjoy, however, the caressing call of others’ prayers. These whiffs of the divine drifted lightly like the sweet smell of home baking from the synagogue across the courtyard of the Russian Compound. They flitted through the bars of the small window near the ceiling, and alighted gracefully next to me on the cold stone floor of my cell. They sang into my ears with voices of butterfly delicacy. They called to me, these strangers’ prayers. They sought a way in, yet could not pierce my armor of cynicism, which I’d worn with pride for too many years to readily shed.
I imagined the prayers squeezing through the crack under the rough-welded iron door—my sole portal to the outside world for the previous week. Then I pictured them turning on their heels and leaving the same way, in search of more fertile ground to sow their seeds of hope.
I had no need of hope, as I was in hell. Almost literally. Prisoners referred to the solitary confinement cells in the Central Palestine Prison in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound as gehenome. What many did not know is that actual hell, according to Jewish tradition, was less than a kilometer away from their cells. The word for hell in Hebrew evolved from “Gai Ben-Hinnom,” the Ben-Hinnom Valley, whose curved palm cradled and caressed Jerusalem’s Old City from the south. In that place of beauty, one could gaze at the majesty of the golden stone walls from below. Yet its rough stones were, according to legend, stained with the blood of countless children sacrificed to the Canaanite god Molech by the good citizens of Jerusalem, many hundreds of years before Jesus.
A fitting setting for hell on Earth, if ever there was one.
So, in fairness, I wasn’t actually in hell—but I was close—close to hell, and close to despair. I was close to embracing the finality of the searing aloneness that had pursued me since childhood. I was close to accepting that my estrangement from whatever family remained living had become irrevocable. I was close to finally rending the veil of naïve optimism from my face, the veil that had for so long enabled me to see light—however elusive and faint—around the next corner.
The loss of Sean and my imprisonment had brought me this close to hell, but I’d been closer. Alone in that cell, the devils of memory exploited my loneliness, tormenting me in an endless mental matinee. For depravity leaves a scar, and fourteen years previously, what happened in the mud of a verdant summer forest on the banks of the Vistula had scarred both Samuel and myself.
***
“What are you doing to him?”
Samuel’s annoying little brother voice ripped me back to the here and now, the summer of 1928. It ripped me, damn him, back from a heaven more than just physical pleasure. It ripped me from the bliss of sharing myself, in a visceral sense I’d not previously conceived, with another human being. It ripped me so cruelly away, and thrust me so quickly into the murky waters of shame, that I immediately began to question whether the bliss had ever actually existed.
“He... I... he... he was hurt. I was... helping him.” I drew the back of my hand roughly across my lips, wiping Antoni Wawrzaszek’s saliva away and smearing dark river mud across my cheek. At the first sound of Samuel’s voice, I’d pushed myself away from the tree against which I had pressed Antoni.
A slight boy, Antoni stood a head shorter than me, and now looked up at me with surprise and longing as I pulled away. His long smooth hands still clutched my shirt. His swollen lips called me back to their moist warmth.
“It looked like you were kissing him,” Samuel said.
“Shut up, you little shit. I wasn’t. He was hurt and I was helping him. That’s all. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway? I told you to wait by the sandbar! Are you too retarded to follow a simple instruction? Are you fucking stupid?” My breath was still ragged, and my voice hoarse.
Antoni’s fingers had uncurled from my shirt, and he was already busy straightening his own rumpled clothing.
“You were kissing Antoni. Ew! Why were you kissing Antoni?”
My hands, which had just seconds before been caressing the impossible softness of Antoni’s lower belly, curled into fists. My voice steadied, and my breathing slowed. Samuel was supposed to have stayed by the river—I’d told him very clearly, and he’d nodded in agreement. As ever, the job of watching him had fallen to me at the worst possible time. Mrs. Chlebek, who spent the vast majority of her time sleeping while babysitting Samuel in any case, was ill the very day that Antoni had agreed to meet me in the thick woods by the river’s edge.
I turned to see Antoni running off towards the roadway high above us, still fidgeting with his pants as he ran.
At that moment, my younger brother Samuel turned into something different. He was not the pesky yet lovable burden that others seemed to see in their own younger siblings. He was far beyond this. At that moment, and for many moments thereafter, Samuel became the embodiment of the anguish that had been growing in me for the past years. He became the corporeal angst of knowing I was somehow different, yet unable to understand how or accept why. He became the knot in my stomach when I passed groups of kids chatting amicably in the school halls. He became the flush at the base of my neck when someone called someone else “faggot” or “Jew-boy.” He became the essence of my shame, and was—I say with no pride—sadly proximate whenever I needed a scapegoat.
Now he stood there, my scapegoat, with a mocking grin on his face, making kissing sounds, hugging himself and laughing—and my fists clenched so tight my knuckles grew white. He laughed, and pointed at my reddening face, aiming for my most tender wounds as only a sibling can. His laughter stripped me bare.
The silent forest swirled above me as if I were on a merry-go-round. I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears.
The next moments I experienced only in jerky snapshots, like a kinetoscopic movie—me moving toward Samuel, the pain of a throat-burning yell, my hands on his neck, the terror entering his eyes, the river wetting my sleeves, the bubbles rising from his mouth, his feet twitching.
His stillness.
As he came to, I sat near him, still breathing hard, my shoulders aching with the violence.
He whimpered, coughed, and spat water. Then he sat up, and his eyes focused enough to find my own. The look that crossed his face at that moment was a cross between abject, pants-wetting terror and deep betrayal.
I looked away, still too deep in my own pain to accept the existence of his. I could offer no solace or even apology. My voice came flat and numb, but steady. “I was not kissing him. And if you ever say anything about this, I’ll fucking kill you. Do you understand?”
He nodded, wide-eyed, and he never said anything, as far as I knew.
Later that year, I joined the youth movement with the clear intent of moving to Palestine. Samuel and I saw less and less of each other, despite living under the same roof. The interactions we did have, at least until my return from the Vienna debacle, remained cursory and politely correct. I was broken and jagged, and during my fall to the hell that was the muddy Vistula bank where I nearly killed my brother, I had sliced too deep for the fraternal flesh ever to heal.
***
I betrayed Samuel that day, I thought, gazing again upward toward the source of the prayers that still filtered into my cell. Yet my violence had been the culmination of the years of carelessness that preceded it. I’d been careless with Samuel’s fraternal admiration and love. I’d been careless with my parents’ trust in me as his protector. I’d been careless, in a very real sense, with the unwritten yet pervasive law of family cohesiveness and loyalty.
Now, my carelessness had again cost me, for carelessness had brought me here, and put Sean on that ship to Ceylon. The question was, would my carelessness again beget betrayal, as it had on the banks of the Vistula in 1928?
I’d been careless over the weeks preceding my arrest. I’d been euphoric, filled with renewed purpose, and immersed in the daydreams of love, ridiculous fantasies of a future that did not involve the drudgery of daily subterfuge—a future in which I could stroll down the shady boulevards of Tel Aviv on a cool late summer evening, openly holding hands with my love. In this future, I would wake up next to him every morning, smile at his tousled hair, and kiss the sleep-warm nape of his neck before getting up to make coffee the way he liked it. In this future, I would greet him at the end of each day. I knew, of course, this future would never come to pass.
It was, I believe, these daydreams—fueled by elation over surviving the London Square attack, killing the British soldier with apparent impunity, and sharing this information with Sean—that had blinded me to my own vulnerability.
Thus, when I threw myself into Sean’s arms, surprising him daringly in his quarters that evening, I was blind. When I drew him irresistibly—as I knew I could—into my passion, I was blind to the chance that a fellow officer might enter the shared room at any time.
They arrested me the following night, quietly at my apartment. The officers shackled me hand and foot, and roughly threw me into the back seat of their unmarked car. The loquacious officer that interrogated me in the Abu Kabir police station had explained, with no attempt to disguise his disgust, that I was under arrest pursuant to Chapter XVII of the General Penal Code for Palestine, for Offences Against Morality. He showed me a copy of the code, as if trying to convince me of the clear moral basis for my arrest. He did this despite me being utterly submissive to the Code in my shackled state—right or wrong, moral or immoral.
“You are accused,” he said in a clipped voice sharper than the ends of his waxed mustache, “of attempting to have carnal knowledge against the order of nature, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of seven years.” He paused for apparent effect. “Now, I’ll let you mull on that, pervert. I’m sure your fellow Fannies will be pleased to—how shall I put it?—make your acquaintance in prison. I hear they have a lovely initiation rite involving petroleum jelly and a cucumber.”
The officer sneered, turned on his heel primly, and left the interrogation room, slamming the door behind him with a deep thud.
Several hours later, they transported me in the back of a lurching lorry to the Russian Compound, where I would remain while awaiting trial, ‘for my own protection’ in the solitary confinement cell into which only prayers passed unimpeded.
***
During that first week alone, my demons relinquished their hold only infrequently, yet I did not dread the future. I still hadn’t yet reached dread. Instead, I struggled simply to regain the terra firma of reason after having my rug of reality yanked so swiftly from underfoot. I could not dread my future because, alone in that cell, I literally saw none.
Then one was presented.
Early one morning, they shackled me, herded to an interrogation room, and abandoned me. As hours passed, my arms ached from being trussed behind my back, and my bladder felt as if about to burst. Finally, as the sun reached its peak through the grimy barred window, the door banged open and an unfamiliar figure stepped halfway into the room. Before I could get a good look at him, he turned on his heel and left. I heard him summon the guard and bark a string of commands.
The guard entered immediately, efficiently released my arms and legs from their shackles, and asked me if I required the toilet. I replied in the affirmative, and he escorted me courteously.
When he brought me back into the room, a steaming cup of tea awaited me on the table. The unfamiliar figure, grey-haired and wearing a suit instead of a uniform, sat in the interrogator’s chair. He gestured politely for me to sit and drink, and I was at last able to study him.
He was at least ten years older than myself. Quicksilver strands of grey streaked a full head of wavy hair parted fastidiously directly above his left eye. His square Hollywood-star jaw line and flawless aquiline nose could not offset a pair of disturbingly thin lips, which he held in what seemed to be permanent disapproval. After I sat, he glanced up, and starkly grey eyes pierced, held, then relinquished my own.
When he spoke, he did so in the elegant baritone of no-nonsense gentry. “Mr. Katz, I am Thadeus Heathcliff. I work for the Joint Technical Board, which is attached to the War Office. I’d like to offer you a fairly simple way out of the mess you seem to have gotten yourself into. Are you interested in hearing what I have to say?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I shook my head ‘no.’ I knew of the “Joint Technical Board,” a bureaucratic pseudonym for the Special Operations Executive—British Intelligence, and I immediately understood what he would ask me.
Heathcliff blinked at my audacity, sighed, and looked momentarily skyward as if in silent reprimand to the gods of pliability. Then he shifted his lanky frame in the uncomfortable wooden chair and continued anyway.
“Mr. Katz, I think you would agree that the British and Zionist interests in Palestine—leaving aside the notably volatile issue of Jewish immigration—are fully aligned at the moment. We all face one overriding peril, Rommel’s army, together. This is the basis, indeed, for the deep nature of the cooperation between the leadership of your Yishuv and the portion of His Majesty’s government that I represent. We share a common enemy, Mr. Katz, and are thus allies in the truest sense.”
He leaned forward, rested his right elbow on the table, and met my eyes again. “And allies, Mr. Katz, help each other unreservedly.”
“No,” I said simply.
“’No’ to what, Mr. Katz? I haven’t asked you anything.”
“But you are about to, and the answer is no. No, I will not spy on the senior Zionist leadership, to whom you know I have access. No, I will not betray their trust, and no, I will not commit treason. Does this clarify my position for you, Mr. Heathcliff?”
He sat back and deftly fished a pack of Simon Artz’s from his shirt pocket. He offered me one, and I accepted. He lit his own cigarette with an expensive-looking metal lighter, and passed the flame across to me. He drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled smoke to the side, and continued.
“I admire your adamant loyalty, Mr. Katz. I too, consider myself a man of principle. Yet it seems to me you’ve already betrayed the very leadership you now seek to protect. Carrying on a personal relationship with a British officer carries a very stiff penalty in Hagana circles, does it not? In fact, I can think of a number of recent instances where gentlemen such as yourself ended up dead owing to mere suspicion of just such a liaison.”
“It’s not the same thing—”
“Let’s just save our time, Mr. Katz.” He cut me off with a dismissive wave of his cigarette, which sent flakes of ash drifting down over the tabletop. “Here’s what I can offer you: charges for your indiscrete behavior will be immediately dropped. You will return home today and can be back at your desk in Kofer HaYishuv tomorrow morning. There will be no repercussions whatsoever from this incident, save the reassignment of Major—now Captain, I believe—Sean Deakins to an outpost in Ceylon. He’s already left, by the way.”
He paused to let this sink in. Then he lit another cigarette from the stub of his first, leaned back in the creaking chair, crossed powerful arms across his chest, and continued.
“All you have to do for me, in exchange, is answer a few questions now, and make yourself available to answer any future questions I may have, or provide any documents I may request. There won’t be many, I assure you. I’m quite careful not to over-extend my assets. And I’m sure you’ll agree that my offer, unpalatable though it may seem now, is your best option. It’s better than jail, and certainly better than what will happen if the Hagana discovers your relationship.”
Again, I shook my head.
He nodded as if in understanding, gathered himself to leave, then swung around so quickly that I never even saw the open-handed slap coming. Even before my brain registered ‘pain’ from the slap, Heathcliff had viciously pushed my chair backwards. I lost balance and crashed backwards to the floor. My cranium met the floor with a dull thunk, and then his shoe was on my windpipe. With a practiced movement, he fitted the depression between sole and heel just on my larynx, and leaned forward with just the right amount of pressure. It was a choking lead weight, immune to my ineffectual attempts to loosen it. He leaned further toward my face, increasing the crushing pressure on my throat, and pointed his lit cigarette directly at my left eye. With each pause in the monologue that followed, he jabbed the fag a bit closer.
“Let me put it bluntly, Mr. Katz. I don’t give a shit (jab) who or what you fuck, but any way you look at it, you are fucked (jab). If you don’t agree to work with me, you will be fucked (jab) the moment you step out of this jail by the very heroes in the Hagana that you’re protecting. If I send you to prison, I will ensure that you are fucked (jab) by a long line of lonely, large men. With my deal you can fuck (jab, jab) whomever, whatever, and wherever you please—as long as it’s not me. I’d strongly suggest that you choose to be the fucker, Mr. Katz, rather than the fuckee.”
With that, Heathcliff relented.
I gasped for air and blinked wildly to clear the cigarette ash that was burning my eye. I back-scrabbled away from him and ended up with my back pressed against the cold wall, trembling, coughing, and trying to regain a semblance of composure.
Heathcliff ground out his cigarette on the floor at my feet. Then he turned and half-sat, half-leaned on the table’s edge. His grey eyes said, “Well?”
In the war of principle against self-preservation, self-preservation almost always triumphs. What does a martyr gain from his own death if not relief from the very ills that led him down the convoluted path to the Reaper in the first place? In this sense, self-sacrifice and self-preservation are one and the same, and I could choose either in good conscience.
Yet I’d had my fill of betrayal. I’d betrayed my family, betrayed my integrity, betrayed Sean with my recklessness, and—according to the British—betrayed the very foundations of morality itself. I was not ripe for more betrayal.
At the same time, every betrayer seeks—consciously or unconsciously, overtly or subliminally—to return stasis to the chaos of his soul. He seeks the pressure valve of conscience that the churches and poets call redemption. I’d started down a path that could lead me back to my younger brother, and could not bear to abandon it, no matter what the cost.
Thus, when I nodded and then voiced my hoarse assent to Heathcliff’s offer, it was, in the truest sense, both self-serving and self-sacrificing. There, in such close proximity to the bloodstained golden stones of hell, I’d discovered a path that led to both betrayal and redemption.
