Three

by D. A. Mishani

  The bell she hung on the window does not move, but Emilia can hear its music. Her eyes shut and open and shut again, and she sees that Nachum is also in the bedroom and his green eyes are looking at her while she falls asleep. She wants to tell him something but she can’t, because a weakness takes over her and her voice disappears from her mouth. She thinks he wants to tell her something, too, but he cannot move his lips either.

  When Emilia wakes up at one o’clock, on the night between Saturday and Sunday, her plastic bag is covering her face, and when she tries to inhale she can taste the plastic in her mouth. She feels Gil’s fingers pressing on both her knees, pinning them to the bed, preventing her from getting up, but Emilia doesn’t want to get up, it’s only the body that wants to. Her panic from the lack of air increases, yet somehow she also grows calmer.

  Gil sits next to her. He watches Emilia as the air runs out of the bag.

  Nachum is there, too, his eyes wide open, and Emilia realizes that Nachum was not trying to guide her to Gil, but to warn her.

  Emilia’s eyes are open, but inside she is shutting them. And all at once she knows everything that happened and also everything that is going to happen, as if it were a story told to her before the final sleep.

  THREE

  1

  He will meet the third woman at the café in Givatayim where he once sat with you, Orna. She will come to the café every morning shortly after eight, and she will always sit at the same table in the corner of the patio that is glassed in for winter. He will come to the café half an hour after she gets there, at first not every morning but once or twice a week, on his way to the office.

  Their first conversation will evolve this way: she will be sitting alone at her laptop, focused on her work but watching everyone who goes in and out. About once an hour she will get up and go outside to smoke and make a phone call, and on one of the mornings he will follow her out and ask for a cigarette. She will hand him a Winston Light from an almost empty white pack and he will light it for himself with her lighter. She will keep looking at her phone as he apologizes and says he hardly smokes, so he doesn’t have his own, and she will say that she should stop, too, but maybe it’s not the right time because she just took it up. He will laugh. He will say he’d like to ask her something, and she will put her phone in her coat pocket and tell him that’s fine. Only then will she look up at him. He will ask, “What are you working on so seriously in there every morning?” Then, to be polite, she will ask him what he does.

  When they go back into the café he will hold out his hand and introduce himself. “I’m Gil, by the way,” he’ll say, and she’ll reply, “Nice to meet you, I’m Ella.”

  From that day on he will stop by almost every morning. His face is smooth and he smells of cologne and wears a different shirt every day. His hair is a little sparser than you both remember, but still fair and quite full. He will park in the car park nearby and walk to the café. The second time he follows her out and asks for a cigarette, their conversation will be longer. The first thing that will bring them together is the topic of the thesis she is trying to write, even though—she will tell him—she doesn’t think she’s ever going to finish it, not at her age. “What are you writing about?” he will ask, and she will answer, “Forget it, you don’t really want to know.”

  She is writing about the Łódź Ghetto. Yes, about “the Holocaust.” Actually about one single building in the Łódź Ghetto between 1941 and 1944, and the lives of the people who lived there during those years. Dozens of residents, dozens of completely different stories, dozens of deaths, each more tragic than the other. And she’s thirty-seven, not an age when you’re supposed to be writing university papers. She is older than most of the professors and looks like all the other students’ mothers.

  Gil will seem surprised by her topic, because she doesn’t look like that’s where she’s from, and she will laugh and call him a racist, but then she’ll say that actually she isn’t—is it so obvious? She will explain that her interest in the topic began during her army service, when she taught history to soldiers in the Education Corps, and then went on to study Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. After that she worked at the Museum of the Diaspora for a few years, as a guide for tourist groups.

  “And now?” he will ask. “Now I mostly have babies,” she will say, puffing her cigarette smoke away from him. Her last one was born ten months ago, and so as not to go crazy she signed up for an MA and hired a nanny who watches the baby at home, every morning and one afternoon a week, but it’s not really helping. “Not helping because you still don’t have enough time for your studies?” Gil will ask, and she will say, “Not helping because I’m still going crazy. And I don’t really know why I’m even doing this.”

  She also has two older girls, four and a half and six, and taking care of the three of them drives her mad. Those few hours in the morning and the full day at university are her salvation, but they’re not enough to maintain her sanity. Without the SSRIs and without taking up smoking again, after almost seven years without a cigarette since she first got pregnant—she will say as she lights another Winston Light—she wouldn’t make it. Her husband is a career soldier, he does research, and he doesn’t get home until after nine. “I’m not sure he even knows we had another baby,” she will say, taking out her phone to show him pictures of the girls. “Don’t get me wrong, I love all three of them, they’re real sweethearts,” she will add, “but this is not how I imagined my life ten years ago. But why am I even sharing all this with you? It’s all to avoid going back to work, I suppose.”

  And this time it will be clear right from the start that they’re both married.

  Gil will have a thin wedding ring that he will not take off before entering the café and will not try to hide from her, and she will talk about her husband a lot.

  They will start to say good morning to each other when he gets to the café and she is already there and he asks her for a cigarette for the third and fourth times, and after that she will beckon to him every time she goes out to smoke. On rainy days they will huddle under the shelter of a nearby bodega and on cold days they will stand on the sidewalk near the café door to get some of the warmth from the kerosene heater inside. If it’s a nice day they will sit at the round table set out for smokers, and they will enjoy the sunshine. February will be dry, and early on in the month there will be warm days in which summer is folded like stamens in a flower. He will offer to buy her a pack of cigarettes or pay for her coffee because she can’t keep financing his new habit, and she will say: on the contrary, she feels guilty because it’s her fault he’s smoking more.

  And to her he will not lie. He will tell her that he has two daughters, one doing her army service at the Air Force training base, the other finishing high school soon, and that his wife is also a lawyer. He will not say Ruthi’s name but he will also not claim that they are divorced or getting divorced. When she asks, “How is it that she never comes here with you?” he will explain that she leaves for work before he does, and that her office is in central Tel Aviv. His Eastern European connections will continue to be a common denominator. He will say that his father was born in Austria and his mother in Poland, not in Łódź but in a little town near Warsaw named Grójec. They both died recently: his father, Nachum, died almost three years ago and his mother, Esther, at the end of summer, after Rosh Hashanah.

  He will tell her more about his work and she will take an interest: what sort of people apply for Romanian or Polish or Bulgarian citizenship, and why? How did he end up doing that kind of work? He will explain that in the mid-nineties he worked for an employment agency and built up good contacts when they were bringing over a lot of cheap labour to Israel—mostly women—from Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Communist Bloc, and after that he opened his own firm. At first, when the Eastern European countries had just entered the EU, he mostly worked on passport applications, because Israelis love being
able to stand in the EU lines at airports around Europe. But now most of his work is on real-estate investments. Israelis are buying more and more property in Eastern Europe, as if they’re planning to go back there en masse one day, and since they don’t trust the local lawyers, his business is booming. He also has three of his own profitable properties in Eastern Europe, and he’s currently exploring partnerships in two big projects, which is why he travels a lot, sometimes twice a month, and he’s hired three lawyers to work for him, one here, one in Romania and one in Poland.

  “Sounds busy and flourishing, unlike my life,” she will say. When he remarks, “Let’s not exaggerate. The fact is, I still have time to come here for coffee with you every morning,” she will look at him and smile. She will say, “So that’s what you’re saying? That you come here to have coffee with me?”

  When he asks why she chose her thesis topic, she will reply, “I honestly don’t know any more. I used to be ambitious. And I felt that the people who died there were asking me not to forget.”

  2

  Emilia’s body was found early on a Sunday morning near the old central bus station in south Tel Aviv. The report filed by Sergeant Kareem Nasri, the patrol officer who found her, said this: “Deceased female in her forties. Short hair, dressed in grey trousers and T-shirt. Lying in stairwell of building on Ha’Galil Street. Head covered with plastic bag.” No identifying papers or other documents were found on her, and so for several days she remained unidentified.

  Since there were no signs of violence on Emilia, the initial assumption was suicide. An autopsy determined the cause of death as suffocation. “She did not have sexual intercourse in the hours preceding her death and there were virtually no traces of food in her stomach.” The report also stated that the woman was likely not Israeli, based on the type of crowns in her teeth; her clothing labels matched this assumption. The time of death was estimated as early in the night between Saturday and Sunday.

  For a few days the investigation focused on scanning the area where Emilia was found, questioning local residents and comparing the report findings to missing-person cases. There were few cameras in the area, and none had recorded Emilia in the hours before her death. Police officers showed her picture to business owners and residents in nearby streets, but no one recognized her. Searches of gardens and rubbish bins found no items or papers that might have belonged to her.

  Emilia was labelled “anonymous” in the police reports, and one conjecture offered but quickly rejected was that she’d been smuggled into Israel to work in prostitution, perhaps without her consent. But none of the women at known prostitution houses in the neighbourhood recognized Emilia, and her physical condition also contradicted this hypothesis. Emilia was malnourished, but she had not been using drugs and showed no signs of abuse.

  The identification was made more than a week later.

  A complaint was filed at Ayalon Precinct in Bat Yam against a foreign caregiver who had stolen money and abused the elderly woman she cared for in a nursing home, before vanishing. Perhaps she’d fled the country. The couple who filed the complaint, Meir and Hava Yashar, gave the on-duty investigator the caregiver’s name and description, and a few days later someone at the precinct connected the dots. The Yashars were called to the police station on Ha’Masger Street to look at the photograph of the anonymous deceased woman, and they immediately identified her: Emilia Nodyeves, a Latvian citizen, forty-six years old. She had cared for Adina Denino since the end of January and lived in her flat at the nursing home in Bat Yam since 1 March. She’d entered Israel legally more than two years prior, through the mediation of an employment agency, and her visa and work permit were in order.

  When the Yashars were asked when they’d last seen Emilia, they said Saturday morning—several hours before her estimated time of death. They said they’d suspected Emilia was stealing money from the lady she cared for and had installed hidden cameras that had confirmed their suspicions. On Saturday they’d surprised her by showing her the footage. They had not threatened her, only asked her to give back the money. They might have also warned her that they would go to the police, they said.

  They claimed Emilia had promised to give the money back that same day, then she’d left the nursing home and hadn’t been heard of since. They knew she had been planning a trip overseas in a few days and so had asked her to leave her passport with them. Two days after she disappeared they got in touch with the employment agency, but no one there had any idea where Emilia was. The Yashars thought she had somehow managed to leave the country without her passport and they had come to terms with the loss of money. They’d filed the complaint only because they realized they had to in order to demand compensation from the agency for the damages caused by Emilia.

  When asked if they had anything else that belonged to Emilia Nodyeves, other than her passport, they said no, just some clothes that were still on the shelves in Adina’s bedroom and a few toiletries in the bathroom.

  After the identification of the body and the Yashars’ testimony, the case was virtually clear to the police investigators. The Yashars’ story had reinforced the assumption that Emilia had committed suicide, and enabled the investigators to outline the hours preceding her death. She’d left the nursing home in the morning, after her confrontation with Meir and Hava, unable to leave Israel because her passport had been confiscated. She was afraid to go back to the home in case they took her to the police, and she spent the whole day wandering alone in search of a way out. She had nowhere to sleep. They weren’t sure why or how she’d gone from Bat Yam all the way to Neveh Sha’anan in south Tel Aviv, or if she had social or other connections there, but by night-time her desperation had apparently increased and she had decided to take her own life. One theory was that she’d gone to south Tel Aviv to look for work in the local prostitution houses to make some money, but perhaps she’d changed her mind at the last minute.

  The first detective put in charge of the case was Inspector A., an investigation officer at Tel Aviv South Precinct. Aged forty-one, married with six children, a former border patrol officer, resident of Yehud. He was a tall, thin man with a slow and measured demeanour and tired eyes. He was convinced that Emilia had suffocated herself out of despair and fear, but since he was a thorough investigator and prided himself on always filing meticulous reports, he wanted to tie up the loose ends regarding Emilia’s final day: How was it possible that no one had seen her around the central bus station in the hours before her suicide? After all, there was even a police station not far from there.

  Inspector A. called the Yashars in for another interview, to get a more complete picture of what had happened that Saturday morning at the nursing home. He did not view them as suspects, but he did think they might not be disclosing everything about what had transpired. At his request, they brought a flash drive with footage of Emilia opening Adina’s wardrobe and removing jewellery and money. He watched it several times and asked them to let him keep it. In the original complaint they’d filed, they’d also claimed Emilia had abused Adina, but the footage from the hidden camera contained no evidence of this and in their second interview they retracted their accusation.

  Their testimony depicted a lonely woman with no relatives or friends in Israel. The Yashars knew she had previously worked as a caregiver in north Tel Aviv, and that she’d lived for a few weeks in a rented flat in Bat Yam before moving into the home. She worked six days a week and had requested and received Sundays off, so that she could run errands and go to church. She had recently asked for a few days’ leave to travel to Riga, and only in retrospect had they realized that she must have been planning to leave Israel and not return. Inspector A. asked if it was possible that Adina knew any more details about her, but they told him she was in a very disoriented state.

  One morning, almost a month after the body was found, Inspector A. went directly from the synagogue in Yehud where he said prayers every morning to the nursing home i
n Bat Yam, where he questioned employees, both Israeli and foreign, who added no significant information about the circumstances surrounding Emilia’s death. No one knew much about her; she’d been reclusive and withdrawn. A Filipina worker named Jenny told him she’d seen Emilia at the church in Jaffa, and another worker named Carol, whom Inspector A. thought looked very masculine despite her long hair, said she’d recently seen Emilia leave the home in the evenings, dressed for a date. Carol couldn’t say who Emilia was meeting and if she had an intimate relationship with a man or a woman. None of them came to her funeral, which was held in Israel because no one in Latvia asked for the body, and none of them had since come across anyone in the nursing home asking about Emilia or wondering how she was.

  Inspector A. was planning to go to his office, but he decided to stop at the church in Jaffa, following the testimonies of the Filipina worker and the Yashars. It was a Sunday, and he got there just before one o’clock, after a quick and overpriced lunch in a beachside café. He entered the church without removing the yarmulke from his head, even though when he’d visited Notre-Dame in Paris with his wife once, he’d taken it off in the large square outside the cathedral. A priest led Inspector A. to a small room behind the colourful, bright prayer hall and asked him to wait. The priest thought he recognized Emilia from the photograph Inspector A. showed him. He returned with three other priests, one of whom identified Emilia definitively and said he’d known her well. His name was Tadeusz, and he was the first person who seemed grief-stricken to learn of Emilia’s death.

  They sat down at a table in the little room, and Tadeusz told Inspector A. that he used to sit with Emilia right at that very table almost every Sunday for a talk. He said she’d started coming to Mass three or four months ago and had approached him after prayers one day and asked to talk. She needed advice, someone to talk to, and they’d had some very intimate conversations.