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  Then she talked to a lawyer, who was impatient with her and not very pleasant, and kept saying he was very busy. She pleaded with him, was aggressive, asked when the trial was. The lawyer said they hadn’t yet gotten the review of the probation service, that Yotam hadn’t made it to a meeting with them. “That’s very bad,” he stressed. “The probation service is his only hope. You know he’s on probation—that judge will toss him in jail without batting an eyelid. I don’t think your son is built for jail. They’ll eat him alive there. You’ve got to talk to him, he needs to go to the probation officer, make a good impression, agree to go into a drug rehab program. Otherwise, neither I nor anybody else can help him. Now I’ve got to go, people are waiting for me.”

  My ears were burning. I still had to go to the Russian Compound that night to meet some interrogation subjects myself, I didn’t see when I’d have a chance to get home. Nevertheless, I played the next conversation.

  The man from Gaza spoke good Hebrew. In the conversation with him, Daphna was another woman, completely different: not desperate like the one who talked with the lawyer, not impatient and bitter as in the conversation with the publisher. “How do you feel?” she asked him with concern and warmth. “Still so much pain?”

  He told her he went to the seashore that afternoon, somebody drove him. There are families who live on the shore in tents all summer, he said, because it’s too stifling in the camps. Whole clans, the women dressed as in Saudi Arabia, go into the water with all their clothes on. He tried to get away from them all a bit, but it was very crowded. Not even the sea helped him anymore.

  “Come here, we’ll go down to the beach on Gordon Street,” laughed Daphna, trying to cheer him up. “You remember how we’d go into the water at night, when you’d teach us the songs of Abd El-Wahab?”

  “I want to come,” said the man from Gaza. “I miss you, Daphna. Have you got any news about my case?”

  “I don’t know who to talk to anymore,” said Daphna. “I sent letters to everyone I could, I don’t know anybody anymore. Once there was somebody in the army that I knew, but he was discharged. I called Shimon Peres’s office, they promised to give me an answer. I’m willing to move heaven and earth for you, Hani. I don’t know how. It’s not like it used to be. Is it my imagination or did it used to be better?”

  “It was always shit,” he laughed, and he went on in a slow and precise Hebrew. “But at least we could laugh. Today they can shoot you like a dog, let you rot . . . Oh, it hurts, ya’lan . . . I’m sorry I curse, Daphna, it hurts too much.”

  “Don’t you have something for the pain?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing they can give me. The situation is really bad. Can’t sleep at night for the pain. I tried hashish, but it didn’t help, just brings bad thoughts, and alcohol is forbidden. I’m waiting for the end now, Daphna. This isn’t a life.”

  “My thoughts are with you,” said Daphna quietly. “And I’ll get you out of there, don’t worry. I’ll do whatever it takes. Call me in a few days.”

  I invested too much time in those literary conversations, suddenly I noticed that it was awfully late. I ran down to the parking lot and dashed onto the freeway toward Jerusalem. My cell phone was full of messages, they called me to come urgently, in the air there was a sense that things were spinning out of control: somebody with a belt of standard explosives and nails was walking around in the area, on lighted streets, in front of cafes, looking for a place with action to set it off, in a crowd of living flesh he would turn into dead flesh, and we couldn’t find him.

  After I passed Latrun, there was an enormous traffic jam, apparently there had been an accident. I put the blue siren on top of the car and drove up onto the shoulder, the cops at the wreck of the vehicles looked at me and waved me on with their flashlights. I dashed down the slope of Motsa. I opened the window because the heat of the Coastal Plain had dissipated and was replaced by the wind of Jerusalem. The square was empty when I got there, but the spires of the Russian Church were lighted beautifully for the tourists who didn’t come. In front of the area of the police station marked off with barbed wire, I got out of the car a moment, called home, asked Sigi to talk with the child. “He fell asleep a long time ago,” she said. “Where are you? When are you coming home?”

  I went into the human pens to spend the night.

  I tried to persuade Haim to take me off that side job. He was one of the last holdouts of his generation in the service—almost fifty years old, one leg crushed in a screwed-up mission in Lebanon, a workaholic. When I first met him, he didn’t wear a kippa, even though he always was observant. In recent years he was wearing a black kippa again.

  “You can put anybody on that file,” I said. “Take somebody from the Jewish branch, take somebody from the girls, I don’t have time for those literature lessons. I’m running around like a maniac, I haven’t taken a shower in two days, I smell worse than the detainees. Do me a favor, Haim, take me off it.”

  Haim growled that I was the only one who could do that job. Her story is complicated and only I could connect with her background; he couldn’t send any of the butchers to her, not even a girl. Besides, I write well. He likes to read the reports of my interrogations, I don’t write endless platitudes like the others. And I shouldn’t forget that, in my job interview, I told them I was taking a course in creative writing. “It couldn’t have sounded worse if you had said you shoot heroin,” laughed Haim. “I barely convinced them to accept you. They didn’t want such bohemians. They were afraid you were a spy from the press. Aren’t you sorry sometimes you didn’t become a writer?”

  I told Haim to leave me alone.

  “You really could have been a writer,” he flattered me now. “You’ve got a discerning eye. The good ones really do use common sense, not force. That takes self-confidence, letting yourself be sensitive, not being swept up in bestiality. Looking at a human being, putting yourself into his head, not putting the bomb in him right away.”

  I tried to recall the series of detainees from recent days that I had interrogated, and no face was etched in my mind. “I’m losing that, Haim,” I said. “I’m also turning into a butcher. I don’t have time anymore to be sophisticated with them. You’ve got to work with force from the first moment. They don’t understand you when you’re sensitive. They also follow the rules of the game, expect humiliation, beating, pants full of shit, so they’ll be justified in talking. They hate us anyway, and they want to earn our hatred honestly. There’s too much in the pipeline, there’s never a lull. No time for conversations into the night, to give him a cigarette, to hear about his grandfather who escaped on a donkey in the Nakba to arrive slowly to his brother who blew himself up. Elegance is dead, Haim, it’s not like it was in your day.”

  Haim looked at me and seemed a little scared. I didn’t usually talk a lot. “You need rest,” he said to me distantly. “When was the last time you were home? When did you spend an evening with your wife?”

  “Stop it, Haim,” I said. “You’re talking fantasies. I can’t stop the race now, Haim, I don’t have to tell you that. Even when I’m home, my mind is down there.”

  “You’ve got to rest sometimes,” said Haim, with a worried look I had never seen before. “Clean your head, think of other things. At least on the Sabbath. And the holidays are coming. Forbidden to mix prayers with foreign thoughts, forbidden to talk about money. That’s why I returned to God. In time, you’ll discover the greatness in that. Be with your wife. Sit at the table with her. Have another kid, later you’ll be sorry you waited too long. Take a load off your shoulders, nothing will get away from you. And don’t beat up anybody. That will destroy you.”

  Haim’s look stayed with me for long hours and many days afterward, but that very evening, as I was getting ready to go home in time to give the child a bath, my cell phone began running hot with more reports about the guy who disappeared, wearing his nice belt, like a bridegroom on his wedding day. I immediately went where I had to go and at dawn I
was hoarse from shouting. That night I wasn’t sensitive or elegant with anybody.

  I got to the second meeting on time, shaved and clean, wearing Bermuda shorts, looking like someone who’d struck it rich in high tech and taken early retirement. I was slightly excited. Going up the stairs, I was gasping. I expected to sit at the table in the cool kitchen, with the smell of rosemary, spin out a conversation about my imaginary text, talk with a cultured and terrific person.

  But this time, the apartment was dark, the blinds were closed, she opened the door in a robe as if I had woken her up, her hair was a mess.

  “I’m sorry, maybe I got the time mixed up,” I muttered awkwardly at the door.

  “No, come in,” she said with a nod. “Just give me a minute to get myself together. You can sit in the living room. I’ll open the window a little.”

  A bit of light came into the room and she hurried to the inner rooms of the apartment. On the wall was a big print of a Tumarkin, a woman standing in a circle of stones of a sheikh’s grave, with a sketch of a cathedral above it. Maybe that’s Daphna herself in the picture, twenty years ago. A few minutes later, she came out wearing jeans and a long faded cotton shirt that hid the lines of her body. She was pale and looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes. I looked for signs of blows and didn’t find any.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Oh, there was a little action,” she chuckled. “Uninvited guests came. Sorry about the welcome, I was sleeping a little before you came. Now I’m fine.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

  Suddenly she looked small and vulnerable, in need of protection. “A few more minutes, OK?” she asked. I heard her walking around the inside rooms and the kitchen, feverishly gathering things and throwing them, opening windows to let in air, destroying evidence of what had happened.

  When she came back, her face was more composed and her hair was tied back.

  “You’re sure . . . ”

  “Everything’s fine,” she insisted and furtively changed the props. “Come on, let’s talk about your book.” She filled the kettle. “I thought about you a little. The subject you’ve chosen really is interesting, maybe something can be built from it. I hope I didn’t discourage you too much. I think we left your man on the ship on the way to the island, right?”

  I hadn’t had time to write a thing since the previous week, and I’d have to improvise. “I thought of putting in a storm at sea,” I said. “But maybe that would be too dramatic.”

  “Put in drama, I’m for that,” she said with an exaggerated laugh. She sat down across from me on the broad sofa. “The Jewish Odysseus, why not . . . ” Her mind was definitely not on our meeting. This was the stage in the interrogation where detainees are sent to rest in a cell because it’s clear we won’t get a single rational sentence out of them.

  “I want to tell you something,” I said in a quiet voice, as if I were confessing. “I don’t know where to go with this story. I feel stuck with it. I almost called you to cancel the meeting today, the whole thing suddenly seemed so artificial. What do I have to do with that? Maybe it’s just a fantasy.”

  An afternoon glow capered in the big back window of the living room, a bird passed by it on its way somewhere, Daphna’s look stuck in me and passed beyond me, as if she saw something fateful through me. “You can go,” she said.

  I searched for a sentence to continue the conversation, struggled with myself not to get up and go to my real work. “You know that feeling?” I asked.

  She sat with her arms crossed, folded up in herself. “Of course it’s a delusion,” she said in a lucid voice. “With real things there is no beauty or reason as in a story. After the first of life’s setbacks, you understand that. I wrote a book when I was twenty-three, everything was as clear as a little girl strolling on the shore, easiest thing in the world, like breathing. Now I’m trying to write something new. It’s harder than hell. I torture myself. After all, this book won’t change the world, I know that, and there’s nothing genius about my thoughts, I know that, too. Which leaves the story. But every story has already been told—turn on the television and see all the variations. Nevertheless, I turn out pages and tear them up and am awfully sorry when it doesn’t work, sorry enough to cry. Don’t know why I’m bothering you with all this, maybe because I’ve had two hard days, with people coming and going in my house. You came here for my professional services, and instead I bring you into my life. You listen very well.”

  I asked: “Who came to your house?” I was mad at myself for not listening to her recent phone conversations.

  “People.” She looked at me with frozen eyes, but she went on: “They were searching for my son. They were searching for his things in drawers and under the mattress and in the pots in the kitchen. They tore my whole house apart. When they didn’t find anything, they took my jewelry. I don’t have anything left. They told me that when they found him, they’d cut his throat, that he owed them a lot of money. Here, take the story. Raw material for a novella.”

  She turned her face toward the big window, the treetop was moving slowly between its corners, and she wept. Maybe I’d reveal myself now, in her moment of weakness, I’d offer the deal.

  Too soon, I said to myself. Not professional.

  I asked how old he was and what he did in life, even though I knew everything.

  “I’m scared they’ll catch him,” she wept. “Those people have no fear. Say thanks, sweetie, that we don’t bash your face in. Maybe we’ll break something anyway, as a souvenir, I trembled next to them and waited for them to finish me off . . . ”

  I got up to look for some Kleenex for her. I could never bear women crying; they used tears to buy pity for themselves, or a little more time. It only infuriated me.

  “Did you call the police?” I asked.

  “I can’t call the police. What world do you live in? I can’t get my son involved any more than he already is.” She went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet again and washed her face and when she came back with her face puffy and red, she said, with a strange laugh: “Don’t worry, they aren’t your problems. Come on, let’s work with your historical tale. Have you thought of who will play your etrog merchant in the film?”

  “Would you believe,” I laughed. “I’m hesitating between Pacino and De Niro. The question is which one would make me more money.”

  “You’re a good fellow,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you came. You’re so normal.”

  She made tea and brought us some dates. Then she put on some quiet new age music in another room, folded her legs under herself on the sofa and asked me about my childhood in Rehovoth, my mother, my father. I told her about the child I was, secret things I had never told, a reward for the lie I wrapped myself in now. Daphna said that if she were me, she would write about those things, take the materials from there, before she’d flee to the etrogs of the rabbinic period.

  “That doesn’t sound so interesting to me,” I said. All those memories seemed to be dyed gray and dark blue.

  “In the beginning, you don’t need a story,” she went back to guiding. “Just train yourself on the details. Before you go splashing paint about, making a gigantic picture of Hannibal’s battles, you need to know how to draw a horse.”

  “You think I can ever draw a horse?” I asked.

  “Try,” she said. “I don’t yet know how far you can go.”

  She gave me a homework assignment for the next meeting. Small exercises for beginners, miniatures of writing on an eggshell. At the door, I asked again if I could help with something, I offered to change the lock. I hadn’t yet pulled out the box of solutions.

  Daphna smiled, held onto my hand and the bare middle finger with both her thin hands, and said: “It’s really good you came. You helped me. See you next week.”

  I made an urgent request for her recent phone conversations. The woman with the white braid from the Jewish branch brought them to me herself, and again pro
claimed how sensitive that material was, that I should take that into account. I almost kicked her out of the office, I didn’t know why she suspected me so much, as if I were stamped with some sign I didn’t see.

  She made call after call, like a madwoman, trying to get hold of some money. Girlfriends rejected her. Sorry, but we don’t have anything to give. Some men talked to her very nicely, even offered to meet. I need money, she said firmly, urgently.

  “Of course, I understand,” one of the voices pounced on the chance. “Come on, let’s meet this afternoon and talk about it.” She didn’t want to meet them this afternoon, or evening, and the conversations ended with nothing.

  Afterward, she called her son’s friends to find out if they knew where he was, to tell him he had to be careful, that they were looking for him. They all said they hadn’t seen him in years, that they hadn’t been in touch with him for ages.

  In the middle of all that, Hani called from Gaza, asked gently if the people from the Peres center had answered her. On the verge of tears, she replied that she couldn’t help him now.

  “What happened, Daphna?” he asked her.

  “It’s the boy,” she said. “Problems with him.”

  “Drugs?” he asked, as if that was a repeat conversation.

  There was static on the line in place of her answer.

  He coughed a long time and when he calmed down, he said: “I used to play with him. He was such a beautiful child. You said with a laugh that he was ugly, against the evil eye, so nothing would happen to him. I taught him to swim in the sea, remember? He swallowed a little water and got scared, I told him not to be afraid. Too bad I can’t see him now. I’d talk with him, he’d understand how lucky he was to be born to you. So he’d know what he’s losing . . . ”