"No. Don't. I'm fine." I came to a sitting position and sat for a moment with my eyes closed, fighting a spell of dizziness and wondering if what I'd just said was true, and then decided it probably was. My head still ached, but the world had stopped somersaulting around me.
"Good," the man said. "We were starting to get worried."
"I told you he was all right," said the other smoker, shorter and stouter. "Way he was mumbling in his sleep, he couldn't have been too far gone."
"I was talking in my sleep?" I asked. "What did I say?"
"Nothing any of us could understand."
An exaggerated sense of relief flooded me. As if I might have let slip some intimate secret, though what that secret might have been, I couldn't say.
"You were speaking Hungarian," the stout man said. "I recognized the language, but none of us speaks it."
"Where are we?"
"Jerusalem. There are a few dozen of us here. They took the rest to other jails. Probably worried we'll riot."
"The rest?"
They filled me in on the news, gleefully delivered to them ten minutes ago by a spiteful guard: The demonstration had ended following the arrival of reinforcements that included army units. None of the demonstrators had made it inside the Knesset. Hundreds had been arrested.
"How many wounded?" I asked.
The lanky man scowled. "Also hundreds, I'd say. A good many of them cops."
He said this with bitter pride in his voice, and two of the others echoed it. I said nothing. Before my eyes hovered the battered face of the cop I'd tried to help. I wondered how he was doing.
"Any dead?"
"Probably not," the lanky man said. He no longer sounded proud, just surly and glum. "They would have told us, I think."
I let out a breath. Lines had been crossed that day, by both sides, but at least no one had been killed.
Testing my legs, I walked to the back of the cell where there was a tiny sink and a toilet. My legs were a bit rubbery, but they managed to bear my weight. I unzipped my trousers and grimaced as I filled the toilet bowl with red. Blood in my urine, and plenty of it. I hoped my kidney hadn't suffered any lasting damage.
At the sink, I gulped several mouthfuls of tepid water and splashed my face and hair. The wound on my head stung like a fire, but I doused it over and over, trying to clean it as best I could. There wasn't a mirror, so I couldn't see how I looked. Judging by how wretched I felt, that was probably for the best.
I studied my hands. One fingernail was partially torn, and the knuckles on both hands were heavily bruised and aching. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to conjure up the faces of the men I had punched. No face appeared. The fog of battle had blotted them from my mind. I supposed that, just like not being able to see my own face, that was also a blessing.
Feeling a little better, I returned to the cot. The lanky man lit a fresh cigarette, which made me crave one of my own, but a search of my pockets yielded nothing. The pack I'd been carrying—an almost full one—was gone. Even worse, so was my wallet.
I looked on, under, and around the cot. Nothing but bare mattress and dirty floor.
"What is it?" the lanky man asked, and grunted when I told him. "Probably lost them during the skirmish."
That seemed improbable. The cigarettes and wallet were in separate pockets. One of them might have fallen out. But both?
All four of my cellmates swore they had not seen my lost possessions. "We were here together the whole time," the stout man said. "If any of us had tried to steal from you, the others would have seen him."
Which left another possibility. But not one I could do anything about.
The lanky man offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. Then I and the others exchanged names and places of birth and residence. The two smokers had been born in Poland. A third man in Slovakia. The fourth in Estonia. All but the Estonian had come to the Land of Israel before the war. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Estonian had joined the partisans and endured four years of harsh fighting. All four had lost most if not all of their families in the Holocaust. Just like I had.
They hailed from all corners of Israel. From Rehovot in the south to Nahariya in the north. The one from Slovakia lived in a kibbutz in the Negev. Another a stone's throw away in Jerusalem.
"I can't believe they would do this," the kibbutznik said, and made it clear that by they he meant the government when he cursed Ben-Gurion and a few of the ministers by name.
"What did you expect?" the lanky man said. "Ben-Gurion has always tried to curry favor with the gentiles. Been doing it for years. That's why he called us terrorists when we fought against the British."
"You were in the Irgun?" I asked him.
"Lehi. We and the Irgun drove the British out of here, you know. With very little help from Hagannah and Ben-Gurion. He always thought that by being nice and docile, the gentiles would simply bequeath us a country. It's not surprising he would be willing to take money from Germany. The man has no morals."
"We won't be getting any money," the man from Rehovot said. "The Germans will never pay, no matter what promises they make. Just like they did after the previous war. Ben-Gurion is a fool."
The Rehovot man had been in the Irgun, and he and the lanky man began exchanging stories of ever greater daring from their days of resistance to the British, stories that seemed to grow ever more fantastical with the passing minutes.
They ran out of wild tales after a while, and the conversation returned to the matter of Ben-Gurion's perfidiousness. But it didn't last long. Guards came and removed the two Poles and the Slovakian to another cell. I and the Estonian stayed. His Hebrew was bad, and he was not the talkative type anyway. We were spared the awkwardness of silence when a guard shouted, "Lights out!" and we settled in our cots to sleep.
A little before noon the next day, a guard escorted me to a stuffy interrogation room with depressing gray walls and no windows.
"Wait here," he said, depositing me in a wooden chair before a metal table. On the other side stood another chair, this one slightly taller. Maybe it was an interrogation trick, designed to make the suspect feel smaller than the interrogator. Or maybe the police, low on budget like Israel in general, used whatever furniture it could lay its hands on.
I did not have to wait too long. Twenty, twenty-five minutes at the outside. Then the door opened, and inside strode a police inspector trailing the scent of cologne.
He was medium height and trim, with close-cropped rigid black hair that had started thinning, making the top of his head look like an overburdened pincushion. He had an austere face: narrow, with a humorless mouth and a nose like a dagger blade. His uniform had been meticulously pressed, the crease in his trousers as sharp as his nose. A no-nonsense expression molded his features into a disciplinarian cast. He sat in the other chair and did not waste time on pleasantries.
"I'm Inspector Kulaski. You're Adam Lapid?"
