The Black Widow

THEY HAD PLUCKED HER FROM the overt world without a ripple and smuggled her to their pastoral secret citadel. Now came the hard bit — the vetting, the probing, the inquisition. The goal of this unpleasant exercise was to determine whether Dr. Natalie Mizrahi, formerly of Marseilles, lately of Rehavia in West Jerusalem, was temperamentally, intellectually, and politically suited for the job they had in mind. Unfortunately, thought Gabriel, it was a job no woman of sound mind would ever want.

Recruitments, said the great Ari Shamron, are like seductions. And most seductions, even those conducted by trained intelligence officers, involve a mutual unburdening of the soul. Usually, the recruiter cloaks himself in a cover identity, an invented persona that he wears like a suit and tie and changes at a whim. But on this occasion, in the valley of his childhood, the soul that Gabriel opened to Natalie Mizrahi was his own.

“For the record,” he began after settling Natalie in her seat at the luncheon table, “the name you read in the newspapers after my alleged death is my real name. It is not a pseudonym or a work name, it is the name I was given at birth. Regrettably, many of the other details of my life were correct as well. I was a member of the unit that avenged the murder of our people in Munich. I killed the PLO’s second-in-command in Tunis. My son was killed in a bombing in Vienna. My wife was gravely wounded.” He did not mention the fact that he had remarried or that he was a father again. His commitment to truthfulness went only so far.

And, yes, he continued, pointing across the flat green-and-tan valley toward Mount Tabor, he was born in the agricultural settlement of Ramat David, a few years after the founding of the State of Israel. His mother arrived there in 1948 after staggering half-dead out of Auschwitz. She met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the Hebrew name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but one child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions. And then she promptly turned her back on him.

The housing estates and settlements of early Israel were places of grief where the dead walked among the living, and the living did their best to find their way in an alien land. In the little breezeblock home where the Allons lived, candles burned next to photographs of loved ones lost to the fires of the Shoah. They had no other gravestone. They were smoke on the wind, ashes in a river.

The Allons did not particularly like Hebrew, so at home they spoke only German. Gabriel’s father spoke with a Bavarian accent; his mother, with the distinct accent of a Berliner. She was prone to melancholia and mood swings, and nightmares disturbed her sleep. She rarely laughed or smiled, she could not show pleasure at festive occasions, she did not like rich food or drink. She wore long sleeves always, even in the furnace heat of summer, and placed a fresh bandage each morning over the numbers tattooed on her left forearm. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame. As a child, Gabriel learned to be quiet around her, lest he awaken the demons. Only once did he dare to ask her about the war. After giving him a hurried, evasive account of her time at Auschwitz, she fell into a deep depression and was bedridden for many days. Never again was the war or the Holocaust spoken of in the Allon household. Gabriel turned inward, solitary. When he was not painting, he took long runs along the irrigation ditches of the valley. He became a natural keeper of secrets, a perfect spy.

“I wish my story was unique, Natalie, but it is not. Uzi’s family was from Vienna. They are all gone. Dina’s ancestors were from the Ukraine. They were murdered at Babi Yar. Her father was like my mother, the only survivor, the last child. When he arrived in Israel he took the name Sarid, which means remnant. And when his last child was born, his sixth, he named her Dina.”

“Avenged.”

Gabriel nodded.

“Until now,” said Natalie, glancing at Dina across the table, “I was unaware she had a name.”

“Sometimes our Dina reminds me of my mother, which is why I love her. You see, Natalie, Dina is grieving, too. And she is very serious about her work. We all are. We see it as our solemn duty to make certain it never happens again.” He smiled in an attempt to lift the veil of death that had fallen over the luncheon table. “Forgive me, Natalie, but I’m afraid this valley has stirred many old memories. I hope your childhood wasn’t as difficult as mine.”

It was an invitation to share something of herself, an intimacy, some well of hidden pain. She did not accept it.