Then the doorbell rang. Three strangers. A little old man; a taller one, middle-aged; and a bleached blonde, all twinkly, reeking of perfume. “I’m your Cousin Barney,” the middle-aged man said, “this is your great-uncle Morrie, and what we have here,” he added, grabbing the blonde by the buttocks to propel her forward, “is the former runner-up to Miss Conduct. You can look but you can’t touch.”
Mr. Morrie sighed and clacked his tongue. “To think that a grandson of Solomon’s would have to live like this.”
“The first thing we’re going to do,” Barney said, “is buy you some decent threads.”
“I’ll bet a motorcycle would be more his life-style.” Darlene crinkled her nose. “Mine too, honeychild. Vroom Vroom!”
“You ever eaten at the ‘21’?” Barney asked.
Their fingernails bearing the talons of an owl, Isaac remembered, staring at Darlene’s fingernails. “What do you want from me?” he asked, retreating.
Barney took the spray paint can out of his hands. He aimed it at the bumper sticker on the wall that read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW and squirted a line through it, crossing it out, as it were. Then he found a blank space and wrote:
WE WANT MCTAVISH NOW.
Mr. Morrie lingered in New York for a week, absolutely refusing to leave until he had established Isaac in a decent apartment, and had provided him with an allowance proper to his brother Solomon’s grandson. They ate lunch together every day. “You know,” Isaac said, “you are like the first relative ever to take an interest in me.”
“After what you’ve been through. What about your Aunt Lucy?”
“Don’t even mention that sex-crazed elephant’s name to me.”
“Lucy sex-crazed? You’ve got to be kidding.”
So Isaac showed him his file of photographs.
Tears welled in Mr. Morrie’s eyes. “To think that the poor child could have once been so unhappy,” he said, stuffing the photographs into his briefcase. “Now tell me, Isaac, what is it you want to do with your life?”
“I want to make movies.”
“You know what I say? I say why not, once things are settled.”
Six
One night that same summer, the summer of 1976, Sam and Molly Birenbaum went bumping across the Aberdare Salient in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Their guide, a former white hunter, was pursuing a loping, slope-shouldered hyena. Soon they were overlooking a pack of them, their pelts greasy and bellies bloated, hooting and cackling as they fed on a dead hippo lying on its side in a dry riverbed. The hippo hide impenetrable, the hyenas were eating into the animal through the softer anus, emerging from the cavity again and again with dripping chunks of pink meat or gut, thrusting the scavenging jackals aside.
“I’ve seen all I can bear,” Sam said. “I was raised on Rashi, not Denys Finch Hatton, so let us repair to our tent, tzatskeleh.”
Molly was delighted to see him in such high spirits. Only three months earlier, in Washington, he looked pasty and was growing increasingly sour. Obviously he had had his fill of hurrying to airports, flying hundreds of miles only to come back with another thirty-second sound bite from a politician or a film clip trivializing a disaster. “Judging by our commercials,” he told her one night, “outside the beltway, the only people who watch our newscasts suffer from loose dentures, insomnia, heartburn, flatulence and, put plainly, they don’t shit regular.”
So, on the night of his birthday, Molly took him to La Maison Blanche for dinner and told him, “Enough.” Lapsing into Yiddish because she knew it gave him pleasure, reminding him of Friday nights at L.B.’s, the men holding forth at the table with the crocheted cloth, he and Moses in the kitchen, overcome with awe as Shloime Bishinsky combed nickels out of their hair. She told him that when she had married him, a cub reporter on the Gazette, cultivating a moustache to make him look older, she had never dreamed that one day he would provide in such style for her and the children. But now the boys were grown, and Sam had more than enough money socked away, so the time had come for him to put in for early retirement. He could take a year off, maybe two, nobody was counting, and then he could decide whether to teach or write or join PBS or National Public Radio, both of which had made offers.
“Yeah, but what would I do for a year, never mind two?”
“We’re going away,” she said, presenting him with his birthday present, a safari for two in Kenya.
It worked wonderfully well for the first few days. Then, the morning after they had seen the hyenas feeding on the dead hippo, they stopped at the Aberdare Country Club for lunch, and Sam caught up with the news.
Air France Flight 139, originating in Tel Aviv on Sunday, June 27, bound from Athens to Paris, had been hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The airbus had refuelled in Libya and was now on the ground at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where His Excellency al-Hajji Field Marshall Dr. Idi Amin Dada, holder of the British Victoria Cross, DSO, MC, appointed by God Almighty to be saviour of his people, announced that he would negotiate between the terrorists and the Israelis.
“They’ll fly out that no-nothing kid, Sanders, to cover for us.”
“It’s no longer any of your business, Sam.”
The next morning they crossed into the Rift Valley, hot and sticky, the dung-coloured hills yielding to soaring purplish walls on both sides. Then they took a motorboat across the crocodile-infested waters of Lake Baringo to Jonathan Leakey’s Island Camp. The camp overlooking the lake was hewn right out of the cliffside, embedded with cacti and desert roses and acacias. Sam made directly for the radio in the bar.
Wednesday, June 30. The hijackers demanded the release of fifty-three convicted terrorists, five held in Kenya, eight in Europe, and the remaining forty in Israel. If there was no Israeli response by three P.M., Thursday, they threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the airbus. Another report, this one out of Paris, revealed that forty-seven of the two hundred and fifty-six hostages and twelve crew members had been freed and flown to Charles de Gaulle airport. They said that the Jews had been separated from the others under guard in the old terminal building at Entebbe, this segregation imposed by the two young Germans who appeared to be in charge of the operation. Yet another report stated that Chaim Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the UN, had appealed for help from Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
Sam asked to use the office telephone. After endless delays, he finally got through to the network in New York, and then he stumbled out of the office ashen-faced, searching for Molly. He found her by the poolside. “Kornfeld, that coke-head, put me on hold. I hung up on him.”
The next day they continued on to Lake Begoria. Sam, to Molly’s chagrin, only feigning interest in the herds of antelope and gazelles and zebras they passed. Then, fortunately for Sam, there was to be a four-day break in Nairobi before they moved on to the Masai Mara. They no sooner checked into the Norfolk Hotel than Sam bought every newspaper available and drifted out to the terrace to join Molly for a drink. He was not altogether surprised to find that the terrace, usually thinly populated in the early afternoon, was now crowded with Israelis. A sudden infusion of tourists. Obviously military men and women in mufti. They talked in whispers, occasionally rising from their tables to chat with an old man who sat alone, a bottle of Loch Edmond’s Mist before him. He was a short man, wiry, his hands clasped together over the handle of a malacca cane, his chin resting on his hands.