by Dara Horn
It was a woman, wearing a black sheath that covered her entire body but her eyes, like the Saudi wives she had seen on the Nile waterfront in Cairo walking several paces behind their husbands. The woman’s eyes, like the man’s, were hidden behind opaque sunglasses. She was holding a large white plastic bag.
The woman took a dark pile of clothing out of the bag. “Take off your clothes, and put these on,” the woman said. Her English was much better than the man’s. She placed the clothing on the floor, a shapeless brown shirt and shapeless brown pants.
Josie remained curled against the sarcophagus, too weak and too terrified to move.
“It is only because your own clothes are covered with filth,” the woman said. “I will stay with you until you change.”
So she wouldn’t be raped after all, Josie thought, astounded. She clung to the thought like a piece of driftwood in a shipwreck, its truth irrelevant. They can’t possibly hurt me if this woman is here. She was still too weak to stand up alone. She allowed the woman to ease her out of her blouse and skirt, sliding on the baggy pants and a shirt that was more robe than shirt, reaching to her knees. A uniform. She was a prisoner now, stripped. The woman put Josie’s stained clothing in the white plastic bag.
“Drink this water,” the woman said, holding out a plastic bottle. “And take this pill. It will help your stomach.”
The woman was sitting on the floor beside her. Josie tried to twist the cap off the bottle, but she couldn’t, plastic sliding in her weakened hands. The woman took it back from her, snapping the cap off effortlessly and holding it up to Josie’s mouth. Josie sucked the liquid like a baby, opening her mouth obediently as the woman placed a tablet on her tongue, a coin for the underworld. She glanced down at the woman’s feet and noticed her shoes, black ballet slippers.
“Nasreen?”
The woman leaned back, or Josie imagined that she did. Had the woman’s voice sounded like Nasreen’s? Only slightly, but perhaps slightly was enough. Josie looked back at where the black sheath rose around the woman’s nose, then looked again at the shoe. It was an extremely common type of shoe, she admitted to herself, surely irrelevant. But it couldn’t be irrelevant, she thought desperately. If it were irrelevant, then everything was irrelevant, being alive was irrelevant. Josie squinted, searching for features beneath the veil, behind the plastic sunglass lenses. She could see nothing, but that hardly mattered.
“Nasreen! You have to help me!” Josie wailed. She gagged, choking on water and remnants of vomit in her throat. The woman turned from her acrid breath. “Are we in the City of the Dead?”
The woman said nothing.
“It’s the City of the Dead. It has to be,” Josie cried, and pressed a hand against the sarcophagus. “There’s a dead person in this room with me.” She barely knew what it meant anymore. She swallowed acid.
“You do not know where you are,” the woman said. “You do not even know if it is day or night. Finish the water.”
If this woman was Nasreen, Josie reasoned, it must be nighttime. Otherwise she would be at the library, wouldn’t she? Nighttime is our only chance to really be alive.
“Nasreen, you—you—but I don’t understand it. We were eating ice cream together.”
“Finish the water,” the woman repeated.
Josie saw what was happening. Strategy was necessary. She tried another move, a desperate one. “Nasreen, I know that there is nothing more important to you than the will of God. You can’t possibly—”
Now the woman answered. “You know nothing about the will of God,” she said.
“Why would you help that man?”
The woman leaned toward Josie, and Josie could feel the expression on the woman’s face, through the sheath of black cloth. The woman’s presence made Josie shrink, until she was very, very small, cowering in the corner of the small stone room. “Because he is my husband,” she said.
“But—but your husband is dead,” Josie ventured. A dare. She felt a wave of strength as cold water flooded her gut.
The woman laughed. “In my dreams.”
Josie gagged. Was it just an expression, or did the woman mean it literally? To Josie at that moment it didn’t matter. “Nasreen, please, you have to save me. Nasreen, I have a daughter at home. You saw her picture. Please, don’t let them kill me. Nasreen, please, you have to tell them—”
The woman bent toward her again. Then she lowered her face to Josie’s, crouching on the floor beside her. “Do not be ridiculous. No one is going to kill you. Your company is going to pay the ransom, and everything will be over.”
Josie looked down at her new brown shirt. “The company can’t pay twenty million dollars for me,” she said softly.
“Why not?” the woman intoned.
“We—we—I know there’s a lot of hype, but we’re not profitable yet. We don’t have twenty million to pay—not in liquid, not in anything. It would take ages to pull that together, if it could be done at all. Is this—is this negotiable?” As she said it, she felt the slap against her face again.
The woman clicked her tongue, a sound that rattled against the walls of the room. “You are supposed to be smart, but you must be very stupid,” she said. Josie listened to the voice, the tone, the dismissive snap, and was sure it was Nasreen. But her own mind was unreliable now, a wasteland. “The money comes from insurance,” the woman was saying. “They only take foreigners from overseas companies, because they know the insurance will pay.”
The woman hadn’t touched her, but the words were a blow to Josie’s gut. She was remembering Itamar sitting with her in her bare apartment, the size of this room—the bed a couch, the table a desk, the window a square of shadowed concrete overlooking a parking lot—right after she incorporated the company, working through strategies, still dizzy from sudden success. “‘Comprehensive K & R coverage,’” she had read aloud to him from an insurance company’s brochure, laughing. “That’s kidnap and ransom insurance, of course. I love how there’s even an abbreviation for it.”
But Itamar’s face had turned pale. “Don’t buy it, Yosefi,” he had told her, his voice in English carefully controlled. “That’s what makes it possible. Did you know that Lufthansa used to pay the PLO not to hijack their planes?” His earnestness surprised her; the did you know sounding strangely teenaged even through his accent, reeking of a weird and shameful urgency. This was before she met his father, before she heard how he had been taken prisoner in 1973 in Egypt, in the war Egypt hadn’t won.
Josie looked at the floor, at the streaked vomit at her feet, and breathed in filth. “There’s no insurance,” she heard herself say. Aloud.
In that terrible instant she understood what she had done. A mistake, a catastrophic mistake, a mistake that dwarfed the correctable error of not getting out of the car: a mistake so enormous that it swallowed her alive. She had put herself in check. Her nausea returned, a thick wool blanket stuffed into her mouth. The sarcophagus slid into her line of vision, bearing her own body to the underworld. She would die in this room.
The woman paused, a black statue. Then, very quickly, she stood. “Goodbye, Miss Ashkenazi,” she said.
Josie tried to rise from the floor, but she was still too weak. Instead she rose only to her knees. She fell on her hands and began groveling, begging like the blind.
“Don’t tell him, Nasreen. Please, please don’t tell him.” Was it Nasreen? Or was she delusional? “You can’t tell him. Nasreen, please—”
“Goodbye,” the woman repeated.
Josie tried again to stand as the woman opened the door, but even sitting up was a struggle. As the woman walked away, she turned in the doorway, pure darkness behind her. She reached into the white plastic sack and pulled something out, which she cast on the ground.
“This was in your bag,” the woman said. And then she closed the door.
Alone, Josie crawled across the floor to retrieve it. It was a crumbling book, otherworldly, like something from a half-forgotten life. It smelled
of vomit from her clothes. On its cover were words in French, Le Guide des Égarés. She flipped it to the other side, reading the Hebrew letters: Moreh Nevukhim. Guide for the Perplexed. She lay down, prone on the floor. She pulled herself to the bucket in the corner, and vomited again before collapsing into dream.
When she woke, the man in the bar mitzvah shirt had returned to the room. She tried to pull herself up, managing to struggle to her knees.
“Something very bad has happened,” the man said. “Very, very bad.” He slid the truncheon casually along the surface of the stone coffin. “But you can make it better again.”
Now Josie was shaking again, not from the illness but from fear. She saw the sheathed woman standing behind him, a dark shadow beside the closed door.
“You are going to be in another movie,” the man announced. “But in this movie, you are going to be very, very ugly.” He pointed the truncheon at her, and then held up his cell phone in his other hand.
“We have decided that we do not want your money. What we want is you.”
3
JUDITH HAD COME TO treasure the feeling of opening the door of Josie’s house—which she now simply thought of as the house, the way she once thought of the apartment where she and Josie had grown up: not quite hers, technically, but nonetheless, if you had to describe it, home. The house. It was a feeling of peace.
It happened slowly. The software might have tracked it, the program constantly running in the background, beeping to alert her to dangerously high levels of smugness. But the first thing Judith did when she came to the house was to shut down the software. For the present, there would be no past.
The seven days of mourning had ended almost four weeks earlier, but Itamar still had barely gone back to work. In the first two weeks, predatory camera crews made it impossible for him to leave the house, and once a reporter somehow got hold of his cell phone number, he couldn’t answer his phone either. The kidnappers’ first video, eighteen precious seconds of Josie in her own clothing reading from a crumpled page, had been sent to Itamar. Despite the kidnappers’ warnings, he had contacted the CIA. He had even called a friend of his father’s who had retired from the Mossad. He was convinced that this was the mistake that led to the silent and somewhat blurry video that went viral on the internet four days later, in which his wife was hanged from a ceiling pipe in an otherwise featureless room.
He wallowed in the details: how her arms and legs were bound with packing tape over strange brown clothes that weren’t hers (he could not stop imagining her stripping off her own clothes; he could not stop his nausea when he imagined who else might have stripped her), the dark brown pipe where they had tied the rope (was it clay, or rusted metal?), the shadows against the mottled brown walls (was there some kind of stone bench in the room, or maybe a countertop? from some angles it seemed so), and most of all, the single lucid close-up image of her face before the black plastic bag was pulled over her head. He would pause the video there, though the pause would make her face distort slightly. Her right cheek was colored by an enormous purple bruise, and dark blood crusted on her upper lip. Her long black hair was wet (was it water, or sweat, or something else? sweat, he decided on the tenth viewing), and pasted in clumps across her forehead. But what horrified him were her eyes. Her eyes had always entranced him, because unlike the eyes of nearly everyone he had known in his life, hers never seemed to be serious. She would tell him about a program virus, or about a company loss, or about her father’s abandonment, or about her mother’s decline into premature dementia, but regardless of how solemn she was or tried to be, her eyes invariably gleamed as though anticipating the punchline of a hilarious joke. When he first met her he found it unnerving. “Can’t you be serious about anything?” he would demand. “I am serious,” she would insist. “Deadly serious!” And there it was in her eyes: the joke. Later he understood that she was sincere. She simply saw everything as though it were happening in a room she hadn’t entered; for her, even personal catastrophes were merely opportunities, challenging puzzles to solve. Soon he himself became one of her happy puzzles, eager for the vindication in her open eyes as they made love: the punchline, the solution. In the video, the lighting in the room made the pupils of her eyes into two dark round mirrors, showing twin miniature silhouettes of the cell phone camera recording her. She was sexless, lifeless, already dead. He wished he could unsee it, wished unseeing were possible. While attempting to unsee it, he watched it four thousand times.
For Judith, once was enough. It was she who told him to stop watching, and to change his phone number. She was astounded to discover that he listened to her. And then Judith understood what she could do.
SHE SAW IT FIRST during the shiva, the rather arbitrary seven days of mourning which took place not after any funeral, but after various news outlets had acknowledged the execution video and announced to the world that Josephine Ashkenazi, software genius and female digital business pioneer (“the first woman …” they always said, as though she were Eve), was officially dead. Judith had known very little, before then, about Itamar; she hadn’t known that he and Josie had lived out parallel childhoods on opposite sides of the world, that they were so oddly, extraordinarily the same.
“Itamar, he is a chess winner,” Itamar’s father told Judith during those seven days, in his stilted English. “In the city of Be’er Sheva, Itamar is champion!”
“Was,” Itamar muttered. He was slouched on an armchair whose cushions had been removed, his feet in sweat socks. “In 1995. Who cares?” Judith noticed how he winced.
“1995!” his father bellowed. His father’s accent was heavy, endearing, with a refreshing disregard for the past tense. Judith had begun to like him. “In Be’er Sheva, half the people are already from Russia in 1995. To beat Soviet people in chess is only for a genius!”
“Josie used to win chess championships too,” Judith said, hoping to smooth the cringe from Itamar’s face. “She was only eight the first time she won.” For the first time, she was amazed to discover, she felt proud of her sister—as though her sister’s death had freed her to regard her without envy. It was unexpected, liberating.
“In high school, before the army even, Itamar uncovered a blood glue,” Itamar’s father proclaimed, with proud irrelevance. “He has patents, only seventeen years old!”
“‘Discovered,’ not ‘uncovered,’” Itamar muttered.
“What’s ‘blood glue’?” Judith asked.
Itamar’s father laughed. “Glue made of blood!”
Judith wished she knew Hebrew; it occurred to her that if she did, she would have liked this man even more. “Huh?”
“He means a biocoagulant,” Itamar sighed. “For sutures. It was just an improvement on an existing product. It really wasn’t such a big deal.”
Judith sat back in her seat. After years of studied boredom at Josie’s many discoveries, she was awash with a beautiful feeling: genuine awe, astonishment at the sheer power that trembled in certain human minds.
“I never think Itamar can find another genius,” his father continued. “I always think for a woman to be a genius like him is impossible. I don’t even believe she is a woman when I meet her. I say, ‘Itamar, you idiot, you bring home a man wearing a dress!’”
“Abba, maspik,” Itamar pleaded. His voice was weak, tired.
“I know the Egyptians will kill her,” his father said. “Only a pharaoh can stop them from killing her. They want to kill me in ’73, but they still have Sadat then. With their pharaoh, they cannot kill people except with special arrangements. But now they have no more pharaoh, so how can they not kill her?”
“Abba, maspik,” Itamar snapped. Even Judith understood him: Enough.
Later, after his father had fallen asleep elsewhere in the house, Itamar spoke to Judith as if speaking through her—rambling blindly, his voice spilling like water over the edge of a cliff.
“When she first came to our office I thought she was Israeli,” he said. It was dark by the
n, the horrifying early darkness of a late autumn afternoon. The other visitors had already left; Tali had been sequestered with a babysitter in her bedroom, coloring. In the living room Itamar and Judith were alone, remembering Judith’s sister.
“She shook my hand and told me her name was Josephine,” Itamar recalled, “and then she immediately demanded to see what we could do, how our programs worked, why they were better than hers. I thought it had to be a nickname, that her real name must have been Yosefa or Yaara or Yael, because there was no way any American could speak Hebrew like that, or dress like that, or act like that, like a platoon commander.” Judith marveled: everything she had loathed about her sister was exactly what had made her sister’s husband fall in love.
Their first date, he told Judith, was at the ruins of Caesarea, the archeological site north of Tel Aviv, where ancient rabbis had been tortured and executed by the Romans nineteen centuries earlier in a giant stone stadium on the beach. He had been there on school trips; it had not occurred to him that it could be romantic. He had laughed when she suggested it. When they stood in the middle of the ruins of the hippodrome, he made a joke of it, intoning lines from the story’s traditional retelling in his fifth-grade teacher’s imperious voice: “‘The Romans tried the rabbis for their ancestors’ crime of selling Joseph into Egypt, and sentenced them all to death. They wrapped Rabbi Hananya ben Tradyon in a Torah scroll and burned him alive. As the scroll burned around him, Rabbi Hananya called out, ‘The parchment is burning, but the letters are flying free!’
“We all had to repeat that part,” he had said to Josie, as they stood in the cool breeze from the water. “‘The letters are flying free.’ I hated that! I just thought, the guy died, it was terrible, so why are we repeating it again and again? Why can’t we just let him be dead?” And then Josie had surprised him.