Limassol

by Yishai Sarid

  “Why shouldn’t I hate you?” she asked.

  “Because my intentions are good.”

  “I don’t believe you.” A green spark of suspicion flickered in her eyes. “Do you intend to hurt my friend in some way?”

  “No,” I answered. “I won’t hurt him. I promise you.”

  “So what do you really want from me?”

  “I prefer not to get you involved in that,” I said honestly.

  “You have to promise me you won’t hurt him,” she said quietly, her head bent, with the lost pride of someone who has already sold herself.

  “I promise.”

  But she asked me to put that in writing for her. They always want that in writing. Daphna took a sheet of paper from the white pile on the table, and put a pen in my hand. “Write. You promise not to hurt my friend Hani.”

  I wrote.

  And it wasn’t a lie, not completely.

  Daphna stood up, with the folded note in her hand. I followed every step until she was swallowed up by the entrance to the inner rooms. As long as she didn’t call somebody to consult now, that could destroy the whole deal. But she returned a moment later and stood close above my head.

  “And I want you to find my son, take care of him. Use force, if you have to. Be a man. Don’t cry with him.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Look in the A-frame huts at the Caesarea shore.”

  We drank black coffee and she told me about her son. Then she brought me his childhood album, sat down close to me, and took out a few pictures of a teenage boy whose long hair covered his face, his eyes were extinguished. “I don’t have any recent pictures,” she said. “That’s not my fault. He doesn’t let himself be photographed.”

  I walked to the mall under city hall, my head spinning, and a heavy blossoming of bougainvillea in the courtyard stroked my head. I thought of her kitchen, her face that would never grow old. In my pocket I had two pictures of the son. I hurried to pick up my child from kindergarten.

  Before I went to him, I went over the dossier again.

  A picture in pregnancy and a checked dress, early eighties, from the newspaper Davar. The pregnant young writer, at a reception for the aged, well-known Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer on a visit to Israel. Hard to believe how beautiful she was. No man with her. She’s holding a glass and a cigarette, laughing.

  “Did your beauty help you publish your first book at such an early age, I ask her, and she laughs and bares white teeth,” wrote whoever interviewed her for the supplement in Yediot Aharonot. You can be the intelligence officer for the woman’s paper, I said to myself, and left the room to look for signs of life. There, at the end of the corridor, where they’re busy with real things, it’s not comfortable for me to show my face now.

  Right after the army, she went to New York, worked in an art gallery, and there she wrote her first book. From a distance, things look clearer, she said to the interviewer in Yediot. Two years later, she returned to Israel and started studying literature at the university. Then came the excellent reviews, Dan Meron wrote warmly about her, a strong new female voice in Hebrew literature. After the book was translated into French, she went to Paris for a book tour, and stayed there a few months. Somewhere there was a recording of an interview with her on the French cultural television program, from the early days of video. She had studied French in high school, and her mother had also brought remnants of culture from Europe.

  In Paris, I read after lunch, she met Avital Ignats, grandson of the distinguished professor Martin Ignats, one of the founders of Hadassah Hospital and the medical union. At that time, Avital’s premiere film was screened at the cinematèques in Paris and Lyon. The film was set in a workers’ neighborhood in Haifa. In Israel, the film closed after two weeks, even though it was praised by the critics, who mocked the public that didn’t live up to expectations, accusing the audience of provincialism. The film had a foreign flavor, they wrote, lower Haifa looked almost like Naples, Gila Almagor looked like Anna Magnani. They met at an event organized by the Israeli cultural attaché, and moved in together in a garret on a side street on the Left Bank, near the Pantheon. Our reporter in Paris met with them and wrote about two successful young creators who attracted wide attention even abroad.

  Somebody passed by my office on the way to the bathroom and poked his nose in. Suddenly I had become the historian of old gossip columns. Vague childhood memories surfaced from reading, men who had disappeared, black and white television programs, Oprah Hazeh the singer from the Ha-Tikvah neighborhood, a new book by David Avidan. My mother, who was fond of culture, followed from our home what was going on in bohemian circles.

  A picture of them in April 1980, shortly after they returned to Israel to film Ignats’s new movie. The two of them wearing white, in the background the masts of the port of Jaffa. You could smell her fresh scent from the yellowing paper, tanned legs in a mini skirt, clear smile. Soon her second book will be published, Avital directs an Israeli and international cast of actors on a set, wearing sunglasses, like Antonioni . . .

  “I see you’re deep into that,” Haim stood in the door and smiled.

  “Look what you’ve done to me,” I laughed. “You could have cut off my hand so I couldn’t hit anymore instead.”

  “There were ideas like that,” said Haim. “We got a letter from the association for citizen rights suggesting that, for you, we bring back the guillotine.”

  Haim sat down across from me, his body filling the little room, and said the matter was starting to get urgent, unpleasant information was coming in from army intelligence. “When will the father from Gaza come?” he asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Everything’s arranged with the hospital. Everything’s arranged with the lady.”

  “Everything went smoothly with her?” asked Haim. “What did she want?”

  “She wants me to save her son.”

  Haim tried to relieve his gimpy leg. “What’s with her son?”

  “All the big problems,” I said. “Drugs mainly. He owes a lot of money to criminals.”

  “How will you save him?” asked Haim.

  “No idea,” I said. “I’ve never seen a junkie who really managed to kick the habit.”

  “So why did you promise her?” the chair creaked beneath him.

  “When did we start making only those promises we can keep?” I asked him in amazement. “That was her condition. Otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed.”

  Haim looked at the pictures spread out on the desk. “Be careful not to get too close,” he said suddenly. His voice sounded as if it came from underground. “Keep your soul, your lust, out of it.”

  “You always say to work with the soul,” I told him. “That it’s impossible to carry out a mission when we’re remote. That the separation between body and soul is artificial, the invention of freethinkers.”

  “With the Arabs we don’t have a problem,” Haim stretched the bum leg out in front of him. “We’re so angry at them we don’t have any trouble being brutal. Look what happened to you. You’ll never forgive them for fucking up your illusion of peace. When you came to work here, you had a bumper sticker with white clouds in the blue sky and angels hovering among them. Every morning, I’d check in the parking lot to see if you had taken it off. Believe me, the morning I saw the bumper sticker had been peeled off I was awfully sorry for you. Look at her,” he pointed to the big black and white picture printed with the forgotten interview, “is she still so beautiful?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  Haim hesitated, and said he felt uneasy, that he had a bad feeling. “But I can’t replace you now,” he muttered to himself. “You’re the only one suited to this assignment. Did you call the advisor?” He meant the psychologist the service recommended to workers who went nuts.

  “I’ll call,” I promised.

  “You’ve got to meet him,” said Haim. “That’s what I promised them for not suspending you.” Haim stood up slowly and went
back to tend to his important matters.

  After the gorgeous picture of the pregnancy, Daphna appeared only at the edges of photos of others. The baby was born at the end of the glory years, when the media traces she left began to fade. To remain famous, you’ve got to work at it every single day, and to the credit of Daphna and Ignats, let it be said that they apparently stopped trying. I Googled them and found a few items about Avital Ignats, his return to religion; then he vanished. The two films he made could be gotten at any video store.

  I spent a lot of time at home in those days. In the evening, I jogged around the neighborhood and did another few kilometers on the shoulder of the freeway. I ate the schnitzel and rice my mother-in-law made. I helped Sigi bathe the child. I read books before going to sleep.

  “I have to give them an answer about Boston,” Sigi kept saying over and over.

  I tried to get close to her, to calm down, to be gentle, but she only wanted to hear that we were going. Boston was waiting, Boston wouldn’t wait. Finally I blew up and roared, on one damn night of a heat wave, that I wasn’t going, I didn’t give in.

  A-frame wooden houses were built on the Caesarea dunes. They were too small to live in year round because they had only a lower floor and a triangular roof. In the seventies they were sold as vacation houses on the European model for wealthy city-dwellers from Tel Aviv and Haifa. But the really rich bought villas with swimming pools, a few kilometers from there, and the A-frames were abandoned in time and became deserted wooden skeletons. The sand slowly enveloped them.

  The sea was stormy when I arrived. Waves came from afar and broke on the shore. I tripped on tangled fleshy leaves and gigantic ants’ nests. Daphna had indicated the A-frame inspired by French summer houses she had bought with Ignats with ready cash when they returned to Israel. There was no sign on the door and an old bike missing a wheel stood outside. The wooden door was worm-eaten and my knocking wasn’t answered. In the picture she showed me, the child was sitting in a plastic wading pool on a green lawn, which was now covered with sand.

  In the territories, we have a method of getting people out of their holes, there are dogs and there are neighbors and there’s tear gas, but here my means were limited and I had come alone. A person has to come out sometime to buy food, or drugs, or to get a breath of air, after all the guy isn’t Anne Frank. But I didn’t have the patience to wait for him all day. I walked behind the cottage and peeped through the screened window. He wasn’t on the ground floor. I stepped up onto a board and it made a loud creak. I hoisted myself a little more, up to the windowsill on the second floor, I knew I’d regret it when I felt a twinge in my back; when I was about to roll inside, I heard a window open above my head. A few centimeters from me was a pale, very thin face, covered with a scraggly beard, the eyes laughing strangely. The hand was holding a big kitchen knife. “Stop!” I yelled, and he retreated a little. His torso was naked. “I won’t hurt you,” I said, and he withdrew a little more.

  “Get out of here,” he said in a childish voice, brandishing the knife in an unstable hand.

  “I’m getting down now,” I said. “Open the door.”

  “I’ll cut you,” he said from above.

  “You won’t cut anybody here. Daphna sent me. I’m a friend,” I said from below, as in some kind of perverse serenade.

  The door opened slowly, I heard him shuffle back, and he was no longer holding the knife. Inside, as expected, all kinds of things; dozens of books, and dishes had been tossed about, and the place reeked of sour milk.

  “Who are you?” he stood in my way. His body was beautiful and long and very thin, and up close I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t healthy.

  I said I was a friend of Daphna’s, that she sent a little money with me, and she wanted me to find out how he was. I gave him the five hundred I had taken out of the agents’ petty cash. In Gaza, that sum could have supported a family for a month. Here it would barely be enough to buy him cocaine for one day. Nevertheless, the money softened him. He put it into his shorts’ pocket and moved out of my way.

  “Let’s go outside,” I suggested. “There’s a nice wind from the sea. It’s a little musty here.”

  “You can go out,” he said. “I’m not.” His eyes were red. He didn’t look at me. His arms were full of holes and scars from shooting up. He noticed my look and pulled a dirty sweatshirt from some chair, and the long sleeves covered his arms.

  “You’re not a cop, are you?” he asked. “I saw you in the distance, when you came. You made a lot of noise. Except for mice, nobody comes here. It’s just like a cop to be so clumsy.” He had a childish laugh, and when he laughed his eyes squinted and you could like him.

  I promised him I wasn’t a cop. I asked what he needed.

  “I need money,” he said. “What you brought me is a joke.”

  I cleared off a pile of clothes and God knows what else to sit on an old wooden chair. “That’s enough for a nice shopping trip to the supermarket,” I said. “There are families who could live on that for a week.”

  Yotam Ignats laughed until he almost choked. “Mother always finds strange people,” he said. “She’s great at that. Creatures from the moon. You don’t look like a cop, I know cops. I’ll bet you’re some lousy actor mother sleeps with, who comes to put on an act for me. She’s got no money for private investigators so she sends me fakes. I know because I took everything she had, my poor mother. You passed my audition, congratulations.” He clapped his hands and stamped his feet and split his sides laughing.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said.

  “I bought some good stuff.” He crossed his legs and folded up in himself, as if he were freezing. “I met a rich girl, we bought stuff for rich people. For a week I’ve been living on the leftovers. But it’s running out, unfortunately, and I don’t think she’ll want to see me again. In the end, we had a scene, like in the movies.”

  He was talking defiantly, in a clear voice in his mother’s good language, as if he had been waiting a long time for somebody he could talk to. But my responses didn’t interest him, he spoke to hear the sound of his own voice.

  I picked up one of the books lying on the floor, something by Jung on Job, in English. “Interesting?” I asked.

  “It’s my father’s, all of it. He left it here,” said Yotam in a childish voice. “He lived here after he ran away from us, in the sand, like a cave man. Until he went up to Jerusalem and from there he went down into the grave. The books turned his mind to mush. I only have fun with them, killing time. I don’t believe in anything people write. Did you read that Jung, hear of him? Probably not . . . ”

  I asked if he wanted me to help him clean up a little. The smell was becoming unbearable, the little sink was full of old dishes, covered with mold. The tail of at least one mouse passed in front of my eyes. “If you want to, clean up,” he said. “I’m not going to get mixed up in that. I’m going upstairs now, with your permission, all of a sudden, I don’t feel so good. You disturbed me in the middle. I need to sleep a little. Thanks anyway for the money, just tell her to bring more, or else she’ll have to buy me a tombstone soon, and I heard there’s a shortage of marble. She’s got to give me more. As far as I’m concerned, she can sell the apartment, the building is falling apart anyway. Let her come live here, at the sea, the air here is excellent. I’ll go away, I want to go to Cuba, that’s what I should do. Just lock up . . . ”

  Yotam went up the creaking stairs, finally breaking away from the conversation. What did they do to him to put him in such a state? I asked myself. I went to the filthy kitchen corner and hesitated a moment. But I promised her to take care of him. I checked whether there was running water in the faucet, and I started washing the dishes, trying not to breathe through my nose; there was weeks of mold on them and cockroaches and filth. I crushed the living insects one by one with a heavy frying pan, then I filled the sink with water and soap and soaked the dishes in it. I recalled something written by some Buddhist sage about how much h
e enjoyed washing dishes, blessing the dishes and the moment. High waves broke before my eyes in the small window. I’d be willing to open that rotten wooden house to them, for them to wash away all the filth. I stood at the sink a long time. When I finished, I felt dizzy and sat down on a chair, I picked up the Jung book, leafed through it a little, my eyes grew heavy, and a slumber descended on me. When I woke up, it was dark in the cottage and still as the grave. I was scared.

  I checked to see if my gun was in its place—I didn’t know what that junkie was capable of—and went up to see what was going on with him. He was lying on a mattress covered with a filthy, bloodstained sheet, reading. “Hey,” he started. “You’re still here? You didn’t go?”

  “I cleaned up your filth downstairs.”

  “Fantastic,” he turned his face to me as he lay there. “You want to do my laundry too? I don’t have even one clean tie . . . ”

  I bent over him and thrust my head into his face. “I’m here only because of your mother, you little shit”—the Buddhist monk didn’t last very long—“and now I’ll start educating you. I’ll clean this hole of every grain of stuff and I’ll lock you inside until you clean up. Look at you with all those punctures, in the filth.” He groped for the knife left under the window. I stepped on his hand, trying not to hurt him too much.

  “What is wrong with you?” I yelled. “What are you going through?”

  Now he laughed non-stop, and the laughter gradually turned into the wailing of a wounded animal. “Do you know how many people Mother sent to help me? Do you know how many psychiatrists, neurologists, philosophers, jerks, have been here? Poor Mother, God almighty, how many professors she had to sleep with to make them agree to make a house call to me . . . Oh, you make me laugh, you make me cry. Have you got a little bit of stuff by chance?”

  Yotam lay with his arms spread to the sides, pale, thin as a skeleton, punctured. “Shoot me,” he said. “I saw your gun. Nobody will know, mother will think Azariya whacked me, do it already . . . ”