Avraham Azrieli - The Jerusalem Assassin

Lemmy thought for a moment. “Elie saved my life. He offered me a great mission that will change the future of our people. And anyway, there was no one to stay for.”

“No one?” Tanya looked at him incredulously. “Your father!”

“Rabbi Abraham Gerster? The saint who excommunicated me, made me into a pariah, drove my mother to suicide?” Lemmy sneered. “My father was a fanatical jerk, and he hated me.”

“Don’t say that.” Tanya’s voice broke. “Abraham loved you. He still does-”

“Oh please! He didn’t even bother to attend my funeral!”

“That’s what Elie told you?”

“Yes.”

“Elie lied to you.” Tanya rose from the bench. “Your father cried at your funeral. At least what we thought was your funeral.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was there with Bira and your paratrooper buddies. And your father fell on your grave, broken up. And he’s been crying on your grave ever since, for twenty-eight years.” She paused, her hand pressed to her chest. “And I’ve been crying there too.” Her voice choked and her eyes became wet again. “I planted a few-”

“Shhh, it’s okay.” Lemmy hugged her. The rain had stopped, the clouds began to disperse, and patches of blue appeared in the darkening sky.

“You didn’t die, but you did lose your life.” Tanya blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s my fault. All of it. Everything that happened to you and Abraham and your poor mother, all my fault. I’m a stupid, stupid woman!”

“You’re making no sense. How could it be your fault?”

“ It goes way back, long before you were born. If you knew the real Elie Weiss, you wouldn’t follow him. He was raised to be a shoykhet, to slaughter livestock in the same village in Germany where your father grew up as the rabbi’s son. The two of them watched the SS murder their families. They spent three years in the forests, coming out only to kill Germans and steal food.”

“ And you?”

“ For me the war had started on a train ride to Dachau, where a handsome Nazi general plucked me out of the line before the gas chambers. It’s a long story, but Klaus von Koenig loved me as truly as it was possible under those circumstances. He was Himmler’s chief of finance-”

“Chief of looting.”

“Yes, he also handled the valuables they stripped from the Jews. He deposited most of the gems and jewelry with Armande Hoffgeitz, his high-school buddy.”

“But how did you connect with Elie and my father?”

“On the first night of 1945, my seventeenth birthday, I was in the car with Klaus, returning from the Swiss border. He was driving down a narrow, twisty Alpine road. They ambushed us. Your father shot Klaus.” She pointed at the Mauser, which Lemmy still held in his hand. “But I had the only proof of the deposits-a ledger that Armande Hoffgeitz had signed. Klaus had given it to me for safekeeping.” Tanya looked away at the Limmat River and the hills beyond. “That night, in the snowy Alps, while Klaus’s body was still warm, I fell in love with your father-a different love, more like a tornado that swirled both of us into its epicenter. We spent three months together. But one day Elie returned alone and told me that Abraham was dead, that a group of Germans had sprayed your father with bullets until Abraham looked like a red sieve.”

“ And you believed him?”

“ You’ve seen Elie work with his blade, so you know why I didn’t question him. That night, when he fell asleep, I ran. And ran. I gave birth to Bira a few months later in a refugee camp-”

“ Does she know?”

“ What?”

“ That her father was a Nazi general?”

Tanya smiled as if the question was a joke. “She didn’t need a father. All the other Mossad agents missed their kids, so Bira was everyone’s darling. You see, I joined the Mossad so that Elie wouldn’t find me.”

“ But he did?”

“ More than twenty years later. In sixty-six I was decorated for a successful operation, and he saw my name on a list at the prime minister’s office. It was bound to happen. Bira was already grown, serving in the IDF, and I was no longer afraid of Elie. Big mistake, as it turned out.”

Lemmy removed the handkerchief from the wound, which had stopped bleeding, and wiped the rain and tears from her cheeks. He noticed another bruise on her head, a week or two old, but didn’t ask her about it.

“ Abraham had somehow survived the Germans’ bullets. Apparently, to explain my disappearance, Elie had told Abraham that I was dead-do you see a pattern here? And my purported death so devastated your father that Elie was able to convince him to dedicate his life to serving Israel secretly. Abraham had been groomed to be a rabbi, so he infiltrated the most fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox sect in Israel, where anti-Zionist ideology was the seed of future civil war among Jews. He joined Neturay Karta in nineteen forty-six and married your mother. Having a son named after the divided city of Jerusalem added to his mystic aura, and with his charisma and brilliant mind, Abraham Gerster ascended to the leadership of the sect.”

“ I don’t believe it,” Lemmy said. “My father was sincere in his fanatical faith. What you’re saying is impossible. My father was a mole?”

“ That’s exactly what he was. Still is. Elie had recruited many other moles. That’s his expertise. Look at you!”

“No.” Lemmy stood up. “It can’t be. My father was a real tzadik. Elie told me that my father banished me, sat shivah in mourning for me, because I rejected Talmud-”

“Elie told you? Elie lied to you! And to me! He broke our deal!”

“What deal?”

“In sixty-seven, I gave him Klaus’s bank ledger in exchange for him ordering your father to let you leave Neturay Karta and become a normal Israeli.” She bent over, as if about to be sick. “I made a deal with the devil. And I got my just reward. Hell! ”

He helped her sit up. “I don’t understand.”

Tanya sighed. “When Elie found me, he told me Abraham was alive in Jerusalem. I came to your apartment-”

“ I remember that Sabbath.”

“ Yes. It was on a Sabbath. I begged him to leave Neturay Karta, to shave his beard and payos, and return to me. It was nineteen sixty-seven, and we were still young, not even forty. We could still have a life together. But he refused. Your father was committed to his mission, feared that without him the sect would engage in fundamentalist violence. And he felt a duty to your mother and to you. I was devastated. And angry. So I-”

“Seduced his son?”

“It wasn’t a rational process,” Tanya said. “You looked exactly the way Abraham had looked back in nineteen forty-five. For me it was like going back in time, a chance to reunite with a young Abraham through you. I convinced myself I was doing you a favor, saving you from the ultra-Orthodox prison he had confined you to. And I succeeded! You saw the outside world and embraced it, and Elie got Klaus’s ledger and instructed Abraham to let you leave the sect.”

“ Let me leave? He banished me in the synagogue, in front of the whole sect! They almost lynched me!”

“ Your father had no choice but to publicly excommunicate you. It was necessary for his credibility in the sect. And you did fine, joining the army, becoming a healthy, happy Israeli paratrooper. I was so proud of you. But then-”

“I died heroically?”

“But then Elie played the same old trick!” She took his hands. “All those years, you were alive. I can’t believe it. How could you do this?”

“ What choice did I have? Under my circumstances, Elie’s offer was enticing.”

“ You’re right.” Tanya’s voice broke. “It’s my fault. I caused this to happen.”