Homeland: Saul’s Game. Andrew Kaplan

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      Saul thought he would prep for his next meeting during the two-­hour flight from Reagan International to Tampa, but instead he kept his laptop closed. Officially, he was on leave. Officially, I don’t exist, he thought, looking out the plane’s window. Below, there were only wisps of clouds, and far below, the rolling green and brown hills of North Carolina.

      Suspended in midair. Disconnected. A perfect metaphor.

      He wondered if he would ever see his wife, Mira, again, because he certainly wasn’t going to India. He wasn’t even sure he would ever see Langley again. None of that mattered now. All that mattered was Carrie’s intel. It had changed the equation. It was about to change everything the United States was involved with in the Middle East.

      The dream.

      It had come back. For years, he’d had it almost every night as a child. And then one day it stopped. The day after he told his father he didn’t want to go to the old Orthodox synagogue in South Bend, the nearest to Calliope, anymore. He didn’t want to be Bar Mitzvah. And his father just looked at him, took his mother in the car, and, leaving him standing there, they drove off to the shul in South Bend without a word. Nothing. As if to say, Have your own war with God, Shaulele. You think because you say so, this is the end of the matter? You think God has nothing to say too?

      Not a dream. A nightmare. He was a little boy in a ghetto somewhere in Europe. It was like some old black-­and-­white World War II movie, only it didn’t feel like a movie. He was there. It was night and he was hiding in an attic. The Nazis, the Gestapo, were hunting him. He had heard someone talking, and even though he didn’t understand the language, he understood they were informing on him. The Nazis knew he was there.

      They were searching the lower floors of the house, coming closer. He could hear their dogs, German shepherds, panting, coming closer. Closer. He didn’t know where his parents were. In the concentration camps. Gone. Alive? Dead? He didn’t know. He didn’t know where anybody was. All the Jews were gone. He had been alone for days, weeks, without food. Living like a rat. Scavenging food from trash in the alleys at night; licking water from dirty pipes in the coal cellar. But now somebody had told on him and they were coming for him.

      The Nazis were talking in German, a language he didn’t know, although it was close enough to Yiddish that he got a sense of it. He was so afraid he couldn’t move. One of the dogs barked twice, very loud. It was close. Too close, just on the other side of the closet door. Suddenl, the door opened and light spilled in.

      “Heraus!” one of the soldiers shouted. The soldiers had rifles, but the ones he truly feared were two men who wore black leather overcoats with swastika armbands and death’s-­head insignias on their caps. The soldiers yanked him out and smacked his face so hard he saw flashes of light and the room spun. They were shouting and yelling at others as they hauled him down the stairs.

      When they got outside in the street, they kicked him and stood him facing a brick building with two others, a young woman with blond Veronica Lake peekaboo bangs, wearing a jacket with a yellow Jewish star on the pocket over a nightdress. She was shivering. Next to her was a little girl. The young woman and the little girl held hands. The little girl was crying.

      The three of them stood in the only light, the headlights of an army truck. A stream of exhaust came from the tailpipe of the truck.

      One of the Gestapo men in a black leather overcoat came over to the young woman. Saul noticed for the first time how pretty, no, much more, stunning, she was. Like a movie star. The German took out a Luger pistol.

      “I’m pretty. I’ll do anything you want,” the young woman said.

      “Yes,” he said, and shot her in the head. The little girl screamed. He shot her too, but it seemed to Saul that her scream didn’t stop. Although she was dead—­he knew she was dead. She had to be; he could see the blood streaming from her head on the cobblestones—­her screaming went on in the dark street.

      The German came to Saul and pointed the pistol at his head. Saul could feel the muzzle just touching his hair. The German started to squeeze the trigger. Saul couldn’t help himself. He began to pee. It was always at that moment that he would wake up, the bed wet, smelling of urine.

      He never told anyone about his dream. Not his parents, not even when they scolded him about the bed-­wetting. His parents never spoke about the war, the Holocaust. Once, when he was eleven, he started to ask. His mother just turned away. His father pretended not to hear.

      The second time he asked, his father told him to come with him. They were going on a trip.

      They drove all the way to Gary, Indiana, to the big steel mill on the shore of Lake Michigan. There was a platform where visitors were allowed to stand and watch the molten steel being poured from the giant bucket. They watched the fiery display of sparks and felt the heat of the blast furnace on their skin. His father held his arm tight like a vise.

      “You see that fire, Shaulele? First you stand in that fire. That fire. Then you ask me about the camps, farshtaysht? Because in that place, Shaulele, the place you’re asking, there was no God.” They drove home in silence and never spoke of it again.

      So he didn’t tell them about the dream. He never told anyone. Except Mira.

      He told her the night when, as a young CIA operations officer in Tehran in 1978, the Revolution turning too dangerous for her to stay in Iran any longer, he sent her back to the States.

      They argued. She didn’t want to go. She accused him of wanting to be apart from her, of wanting her to go. She knew better. It was all around them. Even their friends talked about what was happening every day. What Saul couldn’t tell her was that his friend and best intel source, a former SAVAK officer, Majid Javadi, had warned him, that it was time for all foreigners, especially Americans, to get out of Iran. Still she refused to go.

      That night in Tehran in 1978, for the first time since he’d been a child, the dream, the nightmare, came again. He had been moaning in his sleep, Mira said. That’s when he told her.

      “I forgot. You were the only Jews in this little town in Indiana, surrounded by Chris­tians. Were they mean to you?” she asked, putting her hand on his arm.

      “Sometimes. Sometimes kids called me ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘Christ killer’ or they would look at me funny. One of the teachers said something and they left me alone. I spent a lot of time alone.”

      “Little Saul, by himself on the playground,” she said.

      “Look, it’s not like Hindus and Muslims in India, Mira. The Chris­tians didn’t try to run us out or burn crosses on our lawn. I was an American kid. That’s all I ever wanted to be. The fear came from someplace else. My parents never spoke about what happened to them in the Holocaust. Never,” he said.

      “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

      “Because last night, for the first time since I was a child, I had that dream,” he said.

      “What does it mean?”

      “You have to go now. It’s a warning. Something terrible is coming,” he said. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew it was true.

      Barely speaking to him, she got on the plane. A month later, it was Javadi himself who would teach him how terrible—­and how true.

      A very fit-­looking African-­American СКАЧАТЬ