by Sarah Blau
“I’d expect nothing else,” I reply.
“So, what did they tell you in the ER about your nose?” Again, that hint of a smile.
“It isn’t broken,” I say, and suddenly I’m sorry it didn’t shatter and land me in a comfy hospital bed for two months.
“And at what time did you get home?”
“I don’t know, it was already very late.”
“Ronit was murdered very late!” Froggy stirs awake. “And the pathologist thinks that—”
“Saul!” Shorty shouts, and it’s enough to shut him up.
So his name is Saul. Interesting – Saul and the Witch of Endor meet again, only this time I’m afraid it’s Saul who has all the information here, not the Witch. Use your famous intuition, come on, try to focus: do they actually think you’re a suspect or are they just fishing?
I try to pick up their energy, sense their intentions, but I can’t.
“You really think I killed her?” I have no idea how I let that question come out of my mouth, again!, but I can’t stop. “You honestly think I went to her house, stripped her, tied her to a chair naked, drained her blood and glued a doll to her hands? You really think I did that?”
Finally, I come to screeching halt, hoping Froggy won’t ask me again how I know all that, and judging by the icy glare Shorty shoots him, it seems she’s hoping for the same thing.
“Look,” she says, “people reported tension between you two.”
Big surprise. Ronit dragged my plus one to her bedroom, so, yeah, that could definitely cause what you’d call “tension.” But you should have expected it, Lilith will be Lilith.
“What people?” I ask.
“People.”
“So why aren’t you questioning them, if they were so eager to give a report?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll question everyone,” she says, “your boyfriend as well.”
For one insane moment it seems she’s referring to the palpably absent Micha, and actually, where have you gone?, but then I realize she’s talking about Eli.
“His story is just as strange as yours,” she states.
“I don’t see what’s strange about my story,” I say, but she offers nothing but a small and highly unpleasant smile, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so short any more. She keeps asking more and more questions from which I gather that they’ve got nothing. Zilch. Nada. Not even a lead to a lead. And when she leaves with Froggy, I realize two things: one, that she didn’t tell me her name, and two, that the smell left in her wake, the fragrance now filling my nostrils, is Blue Lagoon.
Eli is so appalled he can barely speak. He hardly ever comes by, and his presence feels almost eerie.
This time I’m the one serving him a can of Coke and a few cookies (given the hostility wafting from the duo’s direction, I wasn’t about to offer them snacks), but Eli just stares at them.
“They talked to me like I was some kind of criminal,” he says. “Especially her.”
Poor Eli, torn from his peaceful life by two cops at his doorstep. C’est la vie, my friend. He that lieth down with bitches shall rise up with fleas.
“They didn’t believe me when I told them nothing happened between me and Ronit at the party.”
“Nothing? Oh, please,” I snigger, “even I don’t believe you.”
Gone for half a night, locked up in her bedroom, and “nothing”? Who is he trying to fool here? Sure, she wasn’t the twenty-year-old siren she used to be two decades ago, but her song still echoed, luring him into her bedroom like a sailor to a shipwreck.
“I’m telling you nothing happened.”
“Chickened out, huh?”
The fragile male ego bruised, his lips pursed with insult. “Not in the least. I was totally into it,” he says.
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know, we kissed for a while.”
For a moment I picture his hamster teeth bumping against Ronit’s beautiful pearly whites, and try to imagine (and not for the first time) how he kisses. Probably with puddles of saliva, swallowing you with klutzy desperation.
He must have read my mind because he immediately adds, “And it was amazing. Boy, is she a great kisser!”
Irked by his little remark, I retort, “Was a great kisser, you mean.”
That shuts his trap.
We sit side by side in frozen silence, and he seems so miserable and hopeless, like a sick, scolded hamster, you kissed a dead girl, that I take his hand in mine. It’s cold.
“Don’t worry, Eli, everything will be okay,” I say, though I myself seriously doubt it.
“It was so weird,” he says. “We started kissing, and things were heating up, and then she suddenly pushed me off her, collapsed on the bed and burst into tears.”
“Tears? Ronit?”
“It all happened in a matter of seconds, I didn’t understand what was happening, and then she sat up and motioned me to sit next to her on the bed and started kissing me again. She was an excellent kisser.”
The pining tone is getting on my nerves. “And then?”
“Same thing. She pushed me again, and started sobbing like crazy.”
I conjure Ronit’s red-eyed image as she handed me the frozen peas. What I took for compassion towards me and my poor nose must have been residue from her little pity party in the bedroom, but what brought it on? Could it have had anything to do with what happened to her later that night? Was that the reason for her bizarre behaviour with Eli? Did Ronit know she was going to die? And then I remember, after I wished her a happy birthday, that bone-chilling whisper, “It’ll be my last,” and that mystifying look in her eyes. I wasn’t imagining it. Is that what she meant? My head starts spinning, enough, stop it, Sheila, none of this makes any sense. And the fact that she was murdered the very same sick way Dina was murdered, that makes sense to you?!
Eli opens his mouth to say something and pauses, but I can tell by his expression that it’s something important. I wait with an expectant gaze, knowing from experience that if I just sit here quietly long enough, he’ll eventually tell me everything. But minutes go by and he isn’t saying a word. And when a few more minutes pass, I see he’s fallen asleep.
He looks soft and vulnerable like a baby, and I resist the overwhelming urge to hug him.
And once again I find myself standing and staring at The Witch of Endor.
The painting is right in front of me, hung at eye-level, as in every apartment I’ve ever lived in, always at eye-level, so I can see it whenever I feel a moment’s weakness. And so she can see you. The Flemish painter decided to merge the Witch of Endor’s image with that of your commonplace European witch. The result: dark, fierce biblical eyes with a pointy witch hat.
Help me, I plead to her voicelessly, help me like you helped me back then. She gazes at me with those dark, lashless eyes, identical to the eyes of the painted Lilith in Ronit’s bathroom and the painted Miriam in Dina’s study, and a small part of my brain remembers that the same eyes used to hang in Naama’s room.
The images loop through my mind, four young women, billowing capes, toasting wine glasses. To us! The wine splashes against the rims, our cheeks flushed pink, Ronit raises her thin white arm, sashaying on the grass, forever young, the beautiful Ronit! Our mouths are chanting the same old tune: Forever four, never less, never more!
Now I’m the sole survivor.
13
I WAKE UP bright and early and can’t move, it feels like someone has nailed me to the bed by hammering needles into my spine. I’ve experienced back pain before, but never anything like this.
While trying to prop myself into a sitting position, a deep, ugly moan escapes my mouth, Watch out, Sheila, that’s an old lady’s moan. I mourn the twenty-year-old girl I used to be, gone forever.
Somewhere in the apartment my phone is ringing, but I don’t care, the thoughts swirling inside me are bitter and black, and I know that if I want to stay alive, I’d better expel them from my mind, but I can’t.
My phone is ringing again, and this time I manage to pull myself up, but when I finally get to it, the ringing has stopped. When I see who called, I don’t know whether to be happy or worried, but my hand is already reaching out to dial.
“Debby and Saul were less than impressed by you,” Micha says, brisk and matter-of-fact. So, Shorty’s name is Debby. Sounds about right, it’s a short woman’s name.
“And where have you been?” I ask.
“The investigation has expanded, so they had to put more people on it,” he says, before pausing for a moment. “But here I am.”
“They really think I did it?” My back starts throbbing again.
“What do you say I come over and we talk for a bit?”
“When?” I quake, but after a few seconds of blaring silence, I realize he has already hung up.
This time I have nothing to hide. All the boxes have been unpacked, and as I’ve mentioned, he’s already seen my Witch of Endor. Yes, this time he’ll walk into a (relatively) tidy apartment, with clean bowls, filled with cookies that weren’t bought at that awful grocery store down the street. The only problem is that my aching back is making me drag myself around the apartment with stooped, elderly caution. Really? You think that’s your problem? Not the fact that all the others have died? That you’re the only one left standing?
And here he is, at my door, standing in front of me, with that dimple and bright eyes, those flexible limbs, only this time my heart skips no beats. When you’re fighting for your life, passion is the casualty.
“Are you aware that you are very much a suspect?” He sits in front of me, waving away the (spotless!) bowl of cookies I placed in front of him. If you must carry yourself like a bent old lady, at least be a good hostess.
“Do you think I’m a suspect?”
I don’t care for his silence.
“We’ve already covered this!” I shrill with a voice so loud it bounces off the walls. “It was someone who didn’t like Dina’s anti-birth agenda, and whacked her, and now Ronit, the same exact thing! Another woman who didn’t want to be a mother ends up with a baby glued to her hands!”
Drifting into my mind is the image of a twenty-year-old Ronit, forever twenty. She’s holding a brand-new baby doll, fresh out of its box, and hands it to me. I take it and smile at her, and we both share a knowing giggle, while Dina stares at us from a distance. But now Ronit is also far away… very far away. You’re the only one left. And you don’t dare utter the other possibility aloud.
“Are you sure about that?” His voice is sharp and tight.
“About what?”
“That she and Dina felt the same way about motherhood?”
“Haven’t you read all the interviews they did with her?” And all the ones they didn’t.
“Yes, we read them,” he says. I don’t like this we. I picture him with Shorty and Froggy, analysing the evidence with solemn expressions. “Yes, Ronit Akiva was certainly outspoken against having children,” Froggy would state while the three pored over newspaper clippings. Newspaper clippings, really? Everything’s online today! You don’t only move like an eighty-year-old, you think like one.
I remember one of Ronit’s very first interviews. It was after she had a supporting role in some trite, uninspired TV drama, but the interview she gave was anything but dull, including statements such as: “I have no intention of becoming a reproductive assembly line, I have far more interesting things to do,” and “Childbirth is a national obsession, a cult that borders on terrorism. You’re expected to have children, and if you decide not to, then society will treat you like you’re somehow damaged. I am not damaged!” At the time, she got some serious PR out of that “not damaged.” But she sure is damaged now.
“Ronit might have been very vocal against childbirth in the past,” Micha says, “but in her last interview, she didn’t mention the subject at all.”
“Maybe because her last interview was after Dina’s murder, and she was afraid to talk about it?” I propose, but then remember her hesitant reaction towards the young woman who approached our table at the café to pay her respects, Ronit’s sudden and uncharacteristic modesty, how she passed on the credit to Dina, and even gave me some, She was the one who gave Dina the idea… Maybe if I’d paid more attention to this oddity at the time, I could have prevented everything that came after. And everything yet to come.
“There could be another reason,” he says, and I can see on his face that he already regrets it.
“What?”
His gaze silently hovers just above my head, lingering on the painting. Still he says nothing, and my spinal nerves respond to his silence by coiling in unimaginable pain again. In an attempt to loosen my crimped muscles, I stand up, accidentally knocking over the bowl of cookies, which hits the floor with a bang. By some miracle, it doesn’t break, and Micha and I stand over it, watching it spin around itself like a dreidel. This is also the moment I realize there’s absolutely no way I can bend to pick it up.
Micha doesn’t bend either. Instead, he looks straight at me. “What is this, some kind of test?”
“What?”
“Why aren’t you picking it up?”
“Why aren’t you being a gentleman and picking it up for me?”
“You answer first.”
My mind strains to find a plausible answer other than the truth, but there doesn’t seem to be any. “My back hurts,” I finally reply, and witness a slight alteration in his expression.
“Oh, poor woman,” he says, “I know what that feels like, really, I do.” He bends over to pick up the bowl and the cookie shards, and I see how his back arches with elegant elasticity, opening out like a folding fan of healthy vertebrae. Healthy and young.
“Believe it or not, when I was young I had to wear a back brace to straighten my spine,” he says, still hunched over the floor. I try to imagine him trapped in a brace, but my mind can’t conjure up the image, certainly not when he’s bending in front of me, all flexible and springy.
“What was wrong with your back?”
“Bad genes.” He rises back up. “My grandmother had a hump.”
I flinch, imagining that hump ticking inside him like a time bomb waiting to explode, if not in the near future then maybe in one of his descendants. Blood never forgets.
“I see that every time I come over I end up working as your cleaner,” he says, straining a smile, and once again he seems like a vulnerable youth while I’m ensnared in my stiff, aching body. He takes a step closer and pauses. I can smell his aftershave, covering the subtle scent of young sweat.
“Where exactly does it hurt?” he asks, and I don’t dare move or even breathe, Is he going to touch you? Remember, it has to come from them, always from them! We’re standing at arm’s length from one another in complete silence. My lips are located directly opposite his neck, but I’m as still as a wax figurine. He isn’t moving either, and for a moment I wonder whether he’s holding back because of his job or because he’s just not interested, and this entire drama is taking place in my own head and nowhere else. I always seem to put myself in these elusive, ambiguous situations, but at the same time I always make sure there’s some secret escape route by which I can explain to myself that it isn’t rejection, It’s not you, of course not, it’s because he’s here in an official capacity, otherwise you’d both be rolling all over your couch, which isn’t white and for that reason can never get dirty.
He takes a step back and sits himself down in the armchair. When he pierces himself into the seat, his back as straight as a board, for a moment there he reminds me of Froggy.
“Let’s review the facts,” he says with a gravelly voice. “You had a big fight with Dina, immediately after which she was murdered. With Ronit you also had a…” He pauses for a moment, “disagreement.”
“I see you’re well informed.” I can barely get the words out, still trying to process this quick shift in his mood. Well, that’s how it always is with these infantile boys, don’t you know that
by now?
“In your case it’s not so easy to keep up.” He smiles again, his eyes soften again, my heart leaps in my chest again, until I remember Ronit dragging Eli into her bedroom, Ronit with the red eyes, who, by Eli’s account, lay on her bed and cried her heart out. Ronit who was tied to her armchair, naked and branded with the mark of motherhood, Ronit whose flesh had already started to decay, the baby glued to her hands, Ronit who was drained of all her blood, drained!
“Say, how did they drain her?”
I can’t quite read his expression when he hears my question; it isn’t disgust, but it’s something in the vicinity. “You don’t know?” he asks.
“You know I don’t.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “They slashed her thigh, severed the femoral artery.”
The beautiful Ronit, prancing on the grass, limbs intact… Ronit teaching me how to apply lipstick so it won’t get on your teeth… Ronit that night, her lipstick all smeared… the rage and panic erupting from her body like crushing waves… and Dina looking at us from afar, like Miriam watching over baby Moses, stealing peeks through the reeds.
“So that was the cause of death?”
“When the blood flows out uninterruptedly, yes, you can absolutely call it a cause of death,” he replies drily.
“But why the thigh?” I ask.
“Where would you have liked them to cut her?”
Where? A very old memory flickers and quickly fades, I try to hunt it down but my mind is already charging ahead and I fail to notice that Micha is still talking and I’m not following, until I suddenly hear the words “the group.”
“What group?” I blurt.
What group.
“The only group I could be talking about, your college gang, your posse.”
“I’ve already told you we were a group of friends.”
“But you didn’t tell me what kind of group.” We lock eyes, all three of us – me, Micha and the Witch of Endor with her inquisitive gaze. You beware.
Here comes the moment of truth. Should I or should I not tell him? And like always, when a young man is involved, I manage to make the wrong decision.