by Yishai Sarid
“Who is Azariya?” I asked.
Suddenly a sober and focused look pierced the junkie’s mask. “Hey, you’re not one of Mother’s poets,” he said. “They’re all stupid wimps. Maybe you really are a private detective, but they’re pretty miserable too. You’re from someplace else, wonder where mother found you. You’ve got to watch out for my mother. Run away from her as long as you can.”
He was darker than she was, but looked very much like her with his height and long limbs. How come she didn’t come and take the needles out of his veins, sit with him day and night and make sure he didn’t hurt himself?
“Nukhi Azariya, that’s the man who’s chasing me,” he said. “He thinks I stole a kilo of stuff from him. Fine white powder, like baking powder for making challahs in the synagogue. I’m not taking the blame for it. He’s demanding fifty thousand dollars. Great guy, an officer in the Golani Brigade, BA in management from the Open University, high class person. Very good man. I’m waiting for him to find me here and destroy me.”
“Where can I find him?” I asked.
“At home, I think,” he said. Now he was talking feverishly and quickly, as if some fire had been lit in him. “He’s a homebody. Before we fell out, I used to go to his house a lot. He loves culture. I’m the only one who could talk with him. He’s surrounded by all sorts of underground apes, very low class people. I brought him books. Here, Yotam, buy some books for yourself, but also buy me something good. Only serious things. Aristotle, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, all that. He really enjoyed them, that Nukhi. Extraordinary guy, as Mother likes to say. A very intelligent man. He’s also got a terrific wife, a Dutch woman. He found her when he set up the network in Amsterdam. The most sensitive woman I’ve ever seen. She’s crazy about him, about Nukhi Azariya. He’s got an enormous farm in a village. And horses. Jeeps. And he’s searching for me.”
I knew the village he was talking about, not far from Rehovoth.
“I’m rotting here,” said Yotam and blew his nose. “I’m like one of those crabs that hide in the sand. I can’t go back to the city. Every street is full of his people, you can’t move an inch without them getting onto you.”
I promised I’d go talk to Nukhi Azariya for him. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “From the state of the refrigerator, it looks like you haven’t eaten in months.”
His eyes were blinded by the bare bulb hanging overhead. Now he stumbled again, as if the air had gone out of him, and almost blended with the filthy bed. We sought one another from afar, my eyes were also red and tired, and we were silent.
“I’ll bring you food,” I said at last, and went downstairs. I drove to the mall, filled a cart with groceries, and added a pack of cigarettes. When I returned, he was lying in the dark upstairs. I made sure he was breathing, put the things in the small refrigerator, wrote my number on a sheet of paper for him to call if he wanted. I hoped I had fulfilled my obligation with that fellow.
“How’s the patient from Gaza?”
The head of the ward met me early in the morning before rounds. A weary doctor on night duty in green scrubs came out of the office, having made his report on those who had died during the night.
“Very sick,” said the head of the ward. “He won’t last longer than a month or two. We can only ease his pain, not cure him. If he had come six months ago, maybe we could have done something for him. Now it’s too late.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Pancreatic cancer. A fatal tumor and very painful. The last thing you want to get.”
“We need to keep him alive at least for another month,” I said.
The head of the ward chuckled. He was a good-looking man, with harsh blue eyes. “Maybe you should have let him in before, that could have helped.”
I sought an excuse. “That doesn’t depend on me,” I said.
“So who does it depend on?” he asked quietly, as if he were amused. “I thought you were lords of life and death.”
“I’m just . . . ”
“A little cog,” the head of the ward completed my sentence and sighed.
He put on his white lab coat and prepared for rounds.
“Without us, he would have died,” I tried to persuade him. His sympathy was important to me. “Nobody would have let him in. He was dying in Gaza. We’re not to blame for the situation they brought on themselves. I’m not to blame that their leaders stole all the billions we gave them. They could have built a nice hospital with that.”
“That’s debatable,” said the doctor, as he stood before a small mirror on the wall and adjusted the knot in his silk tie. “What do you want from us?”
“Doctor . . . ”
“He doesn’t look like somebody who could drag a bomb around on himself,” said the doctor. “I heard he’s a poet. What can he give you?”
“Not a bad poet, by the way,” I said. “If you like, I’ll bring you his book. He translated himself into Hebrew.”
“I doubt I’ll get to it, I’m very busy,” said the head of the ward, and opened the door on the way to morning rounds. “But maybe my wife will want it. She’s interested in poetry.”
“Can he get out of here on his own, Doctor?” I asked. That, indeed, was the important thing.
“We’ll tranquilize him for a few days, numb his pains, maybe then he can get out for a few weeks, until the end comes. We’ll give him a lot of morphine. I hope you don’t intend to put him in your cellars, that’s not a treatment I’d recommend for him in his condition.”
I swallowed his comments in silence, I needed his cooperation. In other places, they would have put the distinguished doctor in his place immediately. “Can I see him now?” I asked.
“He’s sedated, we’re doing tests on him,” answered the doctor and hurried forward. “Tomorrow or the day after, he’ll wake up. By the way, he had a visitor today who seemed quite close to him. A beautiful woman. Now if you’ll allow me . . . ”
I watched him through the window overlooking the ICU. On both sides of him lay elderly and shriveled up patients, their eyes shut and tubes stuck into orifices. They looked completely dead. I really wanted to do them a favor and remove them from that suffering. Hani lay among them, very thin; his face was tormented, but he still looked alive. You’ll recover, I said to him in my heart. Don’t fade again, I need you.
Sigi announced that she was going to Boston in two weeks. The director of the company demanded an immediate answer from her. It’s really an opportunity that won’t come again, she explained. The child had to start a new kindergarten there, and she wanted to give him enough time to get adjusted.
“I can’t go in two weeks,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked. “They won’t give you a year off?”
“I’m in the middle of things,” I said. “I’m not playing games.”
We were sitting in the kitchen. Sigi made a little snack—it was always something little with her—and the child was asleep in bed. Everything’s in your hands, I said to myself, this can still be saved. But the blood began rising to my head, I couldn’t control it. I was awfully mad at her for taking the child, for demanding I leave, for her silence, for not pleading.
“Maybe you’ll leave the child here,” I suggested. “You go.”
“And who will take care of him? You’ll take him to work with you?”
I watched her cutting vegetables for salad in straight, even lines, biting her lips, and I felt a heavy weariness come over me, like sudden inebriation, though I hadn’t had anything to drink. I no longer had the strength to say anything.
She brought the bowl and two plates and two slices of bread to the table, sat down, and started crying. “I don’t want to go without you, but I have no choice. For a long time now, you haven’t been with us. You’re in a bad movie.”
I looked at her as if from a distance. Nothing penetrated me. “Stop it, you don’t have to cry.” A fleeting stroke of her hair, more than that I couldn’t give her.
“You fight everybody,” she went on crying
. “There isn’t one person in the world you can call friend. They all disappeared. Didn’t you notice?”
That’s more or less true, I said to myself. But what choice does a person have in this world?
“Are you ready at long last to talk to me?” she said.
I had an attack of hysterical laughter. Sigi looked at me with wide-open eyes, scared, and then vanished into her room. Suddenly I was scared, but I stayed alone at the table until the bleats of laughter turned into a choking cough. I had trouble breathing. I stood under scalding hot water in the shower to calm down—everything was shrouded in steam, I had made a private Turkish bath for myself—and I tried to look at everything from a distance. My eyes closed, thinking died down, I barely got out of there. I was on the verge of fainting. Late at night, I went into the room to appease Sigi, who lay for hours with her eyes open and looked into the dark.
“That’s why we don’t have any more children,” she said. “You can’t make children under such awful pressure, nature doesn’t allow them to come into such a life,” and then I said ugly things to her that I regretted as soon as they came out of my mouth.
I slept on the sofa in the living room and all night long I walked again and again across a bridge suspended over the road leading to the Temple Mount, with its mosques, between knives and hateful looks, and when I came to wash my face in a small fountain studded with turquoise, under a blinding sun, hands were laid on me and I knew they would now slice me to pieces.
Daphna wanted to meet with me urgently, she suggested a coffee shop not far from her house.
The doctor gave me a verbal update: my man was slowly being weaned off the respirator; tomorrow or the day after, he’d be able to talk.
I was a few minutes late because of the parking, because I didn’t want to attract attention and park on the sidewalk. The place was almost full. What do they live on, all those people who sit here in the middle of the morning? I asked myself. They’re all dressed sharp, as if they were in Milan. She was wearing a dress and had sunglasses on, and for the first time I saw her legs, which I could only imagine before, and they were long and beautiful. We sat outside, on the spacious balcony; the air flowed pleasantly from the sea, and the street looked calm and quiet, as if a disaster was waiting to happen.
“How are you?” she smiled from behind dark glasses.
I ordered café au lait and cake. Daphna finished a tall glass of iced coffee. A delivery boy in the uniform of a mineral water company came along the street and gave her a piercing look. We’re indescribably exposed here, I said to myself. But who are we hiding from? And who knows me? None of my regular clients will suddenly pass by in north Tel Aviv in the middle of the morning.
“Yotam called,” she said. “He told me you came to him. He said you’re strange. That you looked like you were in disguise. Hard to fool him . . . ”
“I tried to help, I bought him food,” I said. “He’s in an awful state. If my son were in such a state, I’d put him in a locked room and detox him, no matter how much he screamed.”
“You’re preaching morality to me?” she asked quietly and crossed her legs.
I drank the coffee. She asked how old my child was. I didn’t want to let her into my personal life. “Four,” I blurted out in torment.
Somebody called to her and she waved to him briefly. Then she took a deep breath, and said: “Something was wrong with him from the start. He didn’t stop crying, I didn’t sleep for months because of him. I walked around the streets like a zombie, with him in a buggy, at dawn, in the middle of a heat wave, in the afternoon . . . afterward, people asked how I stopped writing. They didn’t find any problem with him. Only one doctor who seemed smarter than the others said the child was very sensitive, there are children like that, everything makes him cry. I took that as a dreadful prophecy. He told me to be harsh with him, to give him a Spartan education, not to go to him at night when he cried, not to hold him too much, I wanted to save him, so that’s what I did . . . ”
What a shame for the child, I thought, I recalled her glowing pictures, she should have hugged him all the time.
“And that doctor was, of course, a criminal, but at that time, it sounded right. He gave me as an example the children of aristocrats in England, those little lords, and the kibbutz where all their children come out as fighter pilots or commandos. I wanted him to be strong and solid, not a poet . . . I was so stupid. Finally he stopped crying. Nobody went to him. How much I want to hold him today, hug him.”
“Where was the father?” I asked. I had the impression she was continually greeting people, that the whole coffee shop revolved around her with secret hints. I felt uncomfortable with that.
“The father . . . ” Her fingers slowly roved from the plank at one end of the little table to the other. “If you mean Ignats, he really wasn’t with us. For two years he sat on a chaise longue on the balcony, smoked, read passionately, looked at the sky, let himself go, wrote notes and didn’t let anyone see them. After the second film failed, he had a serious breakdown. By the time the child was born, he was under the influence of his Tsaddik. He did everything thoroughly, from inside, strongly, not to make an impression, absolutely not. Afterward, we stopped seeing him. He was swallowed up in some alley in Jerusalem. When I gave birth, he came to the hospital for ten minutes and disappeared. You must know, after all, you know everything.”
“He never came back?” I asked.
“He came back at the end,” she said. “After the child grew up. He came broken, came to get food and a place to sleep. He knocked on my door instead of going to the soup kitchen. No teeth, rotten inside, sick, when I caught him sending Yotam to buy him drugs, I threw him out. Afterward, he wound up in Germany, they wrote about him in the paper that he was rehabilitated, that he was making a film on the Holocaust, that the Germans were subsidizing him, that he got married there, oh . . . ”
Daphna took off her sunglasses and looked into my eyes. Hers were wet. “I must seem absolutely nuts,” she said.
I thought of myself, and my wife who was leaving me and taking the child next week, and about the things I do in my life, and I shook my head, no. For a moment, I forgot what I wanted from her, and where I was supposed to lead the conversation, and she fell silent too. We were just sitting on a hot day on the balcony of a café. Wild basil grew in a planter next to us. I’d gladly drink a shot of whiskey now and end the day before it started.
An acquaintance of hers passed by us, stopped to say hello, Daphna introduced me by my first name, and said we were working on something together for the internet.
“Why did you have to say that?” I asked after the friend had gone off.
“We need a cover, don’t we?” she laughed and her laugh scared me. “We’re plotting something. Didn’t you ever read Macbeth?”
“Why did you call me?” I asked. Our sitting in public, on the balcony, in front of the whole city, had suddenly turned scandalous. I had to bring things between us back on track.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said frankly. “I was with Hani at the hospital. I saw how nicely they’re treating him there. They said the cancer had spread and there’s no chance he’ll be cured. At least he won’t suffer too much, they’re filling him with morphine there. I hope they’ll let him out for a few days. It’s been several years since Hani was last in Tel Aviv.”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“Do you record all our conversations?” she asked quietly and leaned over to me. Her hair grazed my cheek for a split second.
“Stop,” I asked.
“He was walking around here in the late seventies,” said Daphna. “I don’t even remember how he came. He was part of the group. The only Arab we knew who wasn’t a garbage man or an intelligence officer. He was an attraction. And charming. A very sensitive and special person. There were times when he lived in our house, especially after Avital left. He helped me take care of Yotam. It’s awfully hard to see him like that. You want to tell me what you
want from him? He’s on his last legs, how can he help you?”
From inside the café, through the window pane, somebody was looking at us. He was very slowly drinking a beer and looking at us non-stop. “Do you know that man?”
“I know him,” she said and both of us suddenly became uneasy and the air around us was blazing hot. “As I know most people here. I was born here. This is my neighborhood. I have barely left it, through all my metamorphoses.”
The man stopped looking at us. Next time we wouldn’t meet in such an exposed place. I asked for the check.
“I want to help him,” I said. “Believe me.”
“Suddenly that Arab touches your heart more than the others?” her laugh lit up the table for a split second, even swept me up. We laughed so hard people around looked at us.
“For some reason, I trust you,” she said quickly. I got up and followed her dress in the line of shade of the street. “And I’m not sure that’s good for you. I see something hidden in you. Eyes of a poet, the etrog dealer, you’re not a simple person. Yotam also thought there was something strange about you. Interesting what Hani will think of you. I won’t let you touch him, you hear?”
Her face revolved around me all day. I held onto the line of her raised cheek to recall her. And began yearning for her.
I finally had to meet with the advisor. “If you don’t go to him,” said Haim, “they’ll never let you back into interrogations.”
The advisor was a tall, athletic man with gray hair, who greeted me in sandals in his clinic at Kibbutz Shefayim. From the lawn outside wafted an afternoon calm, the distant voices of children. The glow of the setting sun fell through treetops heavy with foliage. I would have preferred to talk with a woman. Quietly, without much introduction, he asked me to tell him about the work, the pressures, what happened. I gave him as precise a description as I could.
“What did you feel?” he asked.
I recalled the last look of the fat man who choked, who knew his end was near, how I respected him for not talking. “I wasn’t mad at him,” I said to the therapist. “I understood him. It was something mechanical, to get the secret out of him, the way you get a tumor out of somebody. With pliers, with a white hot blade, hanging by the feet so the secret will fall out of his head. We hated the Inquisition, but they knew how to get the job done. They simply extracted the confession as a dentist takes out a rotten tooth.” I knew those words wouldn’t help me get back to the job, but it relieved me a little to get them out. “How do they expect you to stop a suicide bomber,” I said to him. An orange sun poured in through the screened window. “Reason alone doesn’t work. Reason has no place in their work, and it has no place in ours. We are two tribes of gorillas hitting one another. Like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, only our sticks are more advanced. We use spy satellites to smell the belch from the mouth of some guy in Jenin after his meal of hummus with beans and onions. In the end, it comes down to pain, skin, nerves, the stinking bag, the hands in cuffs that bite into the flesh. To keep you from having to use that, they have to be deathly afraid of what you’re liable to do to them. But they’re not scared enough. They’ve heard about all the kinds of torture we can’t employ. So now and then you’ve got to do something out of the ordinary, brutal, so the rumor will spread. I had no problem with the second one, the greasy-haired pimp, the one whose teeth I knocked out. I had no respect for him. Because of people like him, they’re losing. But the first one, the fat one, he was a strong man. He didn’t care if he died. He was not going to fold or to betray. He knew he had to gain time, another few hours, until his little brother blew himself up. He wanted to die with him. They build monuments to people like that.”