by Sayed Kashua
“Good morning,” Oved chimed as the lawyer walked into the empty café.
“Good morning,” the lawyer said, sitting down at the bar.
“Coffee will be ready soon,” Oved said, and the lawyer nodded and looked over at Oved and the Arab worker as they got the café ready for the day. Oved pulled a tray of apple walnut strudels from the oven and slid in a tray of cheese bourekas in its place. The Arab worker transferred the strudels onto a glass tray and separated them with a spatula. “The machine will be up and running in a second,” Oved apologized and the lawyer said it was fine, he was not in a rush, and that he would wait if he wasn’t in the way.
“Not at all,” Oved said, “make yourself at home.”
The lawyer tried flipping through the weekend edition of the papers. He turned the pages and stared at the headlines, but made no attempt to try and understand what the articles were about, his eyes bouncing from picture to picture and from paper to paper.
“So, everything all right with you?” Oved asked, setting a cup of coffee in front of the lawyer.
“Sure, everything’s fine,” he sighed, making Oved laugh.
“You can smoke,” he said. “It’s fine so long as no one’s in yet.”
The lawyer’s phone rang and he pulled it out of his pants pocket and answered. Seeing that the call was from the graphologist’s office, he walked out of the café as he spoke. No, he told the graphologist, there was no need for an official report. Yes, the bill should be sent to the office as always. He knew there had been no need for an expert’s opinion, yet hearing the man tell him that the two notes were identical and surely from the same hand only intensified his pain. Up until then he had been able to tell himself that the whole thing was just a figment of his imagination.
He walked back into the café with a fallen face, and Oved, who noticed his expression, kept silent. The lawyer drank his coffee quietly while his thoughts bounced around inside his head. He put out his cigarette when he saw Sara, one of the elderly regulars, enter the café along with her Filipina caretaker, her constant companion.
The lawyer thanked Oved, paid his bill, and left the café. More than anything else he wanted to go home and kick his wife out of the house, drag her out by the hair as he’d seen them do time after time in Egyptian movies.
The bookstore was still closed but the lawyer could see the saleswoman straightening up around the register. He smoked another cigarette and waited for her to come to the door and flip the sign over. When she did, the lawyer nodded a greeting at the saleswoman, whom he’d never seen before. “Meirav’s not in today?” he asked, partly to show that he was a regular and partly so that she wouldn’t suspect him of anything, even though there was no reason for her to be suspicious.
“No,” she said, “she’s not working today.”
The lawyer went over to the area where he had found the novella. The books were still stacked on top of each other, unsorted, and the lawyer picked one up and winced when he saw the name, Yonatan, in the same spiky handwriting on the top left-hand corner of the page. He picked up another book and saw it again, Yonatan.
“Those just came in yesterday,” the saleswoman said. She walked over to him and pointed to four boxes on the floor in the corner of the store. “They only unpacked two of the boxes so far. I think there’s some great stuff in there. I’m going to unpack them and put them out today.”
“Can I look at them?” the lawyer asked.
“Sure,” the saleswoman said after a pause, “but I wouldn’t know what to charge if you wanted something.”
“You know what,” the saleswoman said, slicing open the boxes with a penknife, “look through them, and if you find something you like I’ll just call the owner and ask him how much I should sell it for.”
The lawyer bent over the first box and picked up a book, opening it slowly as though weighing its merits. He found the same name, in the same hand, on the same place in each of the books.
“There really are some great books in here,” the lawyer said without bothering to so much as read the titles. “They all from the same guy?”
“Yes,” she said, “it was a liquidation sale.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s when someone sells their whole collection.”
“Does that happen often?” the lawyer asked, trying to smile and leave the impression of someone faintly interested.
“Absolutely,” she said, happy to talk about the book business. “Most of the books in this store are from liquidation sales, usually heirs who have no interest in keeping all of someone’s books. They call the owner of the store and he comes to the house and gives them a price for the entire collection and then they decide if they want to sell the whole thing at once or not.”
“Wow. So what you’re saying is that I’m browsing through a dead man’s library?”
“No, no, not necessarily,” she said, giggling. “A lot of people also sell before a big move.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said, checking the name on yet another book, “so now I’m dying to know who all these books belonged to.”
“I don’t know,” the saleswoman said, shrugging. “They came in during Meirav’s shift.”
“Oh,” the lawyer said, disappointed. “There really are some amazing things here.” He was trying to set the groundwork for what would be a substantial purchase. He wasn’t sure how many he could buy without making her suspicious. He wanted to tell her that he would take the whole thing, to go ahead and call the owner and ask him his price for the whole lot of them. He figured there were around two hundred books here with Yonatan’s signature and he wanted them all. He was sure that a careful inspection would reveal more of his wife’s love letters and he felt scared and yet compelled to read every one of them. He burrowed through the books, pretended to sort them, flipping through the pages and looking for more notes. At random he chose the ones he would buy and set them down on the floor and placed the others back in the box. Then he looked at the titles. Most of the volumes were prose and the rest were about drawing and photography, filled with black-and-white photographs and coal drawings. The lawyer’s heart thumped. He did not want to leave any of Yonatan’s books in the store. At any moment someone could come in, buy them, find a note written in his wife’s hand, and throw it out, thinking nothing of it.
The lawyer decided to take ten books now and come back on Sunday for ten more. By then, though, the volumes would be dispersed throughout the store, sorted by language, topic, and name of the author.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The lawyer was hunched over his desk, boring into the ten books he had bought. He found nothing. Maybe the notes had stuck to the pages, he thought, and flipped through them again, more carefully, caressing each page with the palm of his hand, looking for little slips of paper.
His wife called in the middle of the day and the lawyer, hunting for evidence, answered her as he always did when he was immersed in a client’s case. “No, no,” he said in response to her questions, “I’m really busy right now and I won’t make it home for lunch. I don’t know when I’ll be back. No, not late. Okay, ’bye.”
Who is this Yonatan, the lawyer wondered, leaning back in his large leather chair, and why would she be writing to him in Arabic? The chances of a Jew knowing how to speak Arabic were slim, and the chances of him reading and writing the language were even slimmer. What’s more, there was not a single book in Arabic among those boxes. Yonatan was probably one of those Jews who chose to major in Arabic in high school so that he could get into a top intelligence unit in the army. But he knew it was still more likely that she would have written to him in Hebrew, since her Hebrew was perfect and there was no reason for her to make it difficult for him with her swirling, calligraphic Arabic. Unless, of course, it was part of their attraction, one of the games they played with each other, the lawyer thought
, and just like that the evidence before him became personal. Maybe Yonatan is one of those Jews who’s always saying he wants to learn Arabic, and his wife, Yonatan’s lover, had decided to teach it to him the hard way. If he wanted to understand the depths of her love, he’d have to learn her mother tongue. Maybe it was a sort of seduction. Maybe they both wanted to be loved by the proverbial Other. Just a few hours earlier, the lawyer had read that thrill seeking was one of the chief causes of infidelity.
For some reason the notion that his wife’s lover was Jewish was a relief to the lawyer. A lover from a different world, who would not talk behind their backs to anyone they might know—there was no doubt that this mitigated the crime of her betrayal. A Jew, especially an Ashkenazi Jew, would just be cheating, not trampling the lawyer’s honor. A Jewish lover seemed like his wife’s problem; an Arab lover was a disgrace. “He only stole from Jews”—that was a sentence he heard often in his line of work. That’s what relatives would say when trying to prove that the arrested man was moral, because the Jews had a different set of laws and it wasn’t really theft when the property belonged to them. It didn’t even mean that much to the Jews, they said, because they were covered, they had insurance, they had savings accounts. Stealing a car from a Jew was more of a loan or a return to the original owners than a real sin that demanded punishment.
But it was also possible that her lover was an Arab like him, one who frequented used bookstores, and that he, too, had bought a book that had been signed by the same Yonatan. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the Jew, Yonatan, had bought a used book with no name in it and he had signed his name into a book sold to the store by the Arab lover. After all, other than the one note he had found in The Kreutzer Sonata the lawyer had not seen any evidence of correspondence. This seemed like the most likely scenario. His wife had gone out of her way to tell him about The Kreutzer Sonata. Why that book? She didn’t care about literature at all. She had said that all of her classmates in the supplementary course about psychoanalytic theory were crazy about the book, but maybe she had just said that to cover up for a slip of the tongue. Maybe, the lawyer thought, The Kreutzer Sonata had just been a favorite of her lover’s. He regretted not knowing who she had studied with, whether there were other Arabs in the class or not. The details of her professional and academic life had never seemed interesting to him and, judging by the income they generated, they had seemed more like a game than a career, a hobby that he encouraged so that she would have other things in her life aside from the house and the kids. It had to be an Arab classmate, the lawyer decided, a classmate who had heard about the book and then sold it to the bookstore, where Yonatan bought it and took it home without knowing that it held an Arabic love letter between its pages. Maybe Yonatan took the little slip of paper with the hieroglyphic letters and used it as a bookmark.
And maybe the Arab was not a classmate but a professor, an intellectual who wooed his wife with his knowledge and the fraudulent sensitivity that is second nature to psychoanalysts. Perhaps part of the seduction had been his instructing her which books to read, putting The Kreutzer Sonata on his short list. But why would a professor, who certainly made an adequate salary, sell his book secondhand? Maybe it was a fellow student after all.
Ideally it would be a Jew, the lawyer thought again. Aside from the shame and the fear that his wife’s betrayal would become the topic of the day among his peers, the lawyer hated the fact that his wife was cheating on him with someone who read books. The ancient smell of the pages told him that while he had read The Kreutzer Sonata by chance, her lover, whomever he might be, had read it long before. The lover, who had seemed like a bloodthirsty wolf seeking nothing but the lawyer’s humiliation, now seemed bookish, bespectacled, sensitive, and gentle, the kind of man who listened carefully to the lawyer’s wife, understood her, supported her, embraced her. The lawyer no longer saw her in the middle of wild unabashed lovemaking. Instead she ran to her lover and took refuge in his arms while he stroked her back.
The lawyer, unable to remember the last time he’d felt tears on his cheeks, cried himself to sleep on his desk.
TUNA SANDWICH
He woke up to the sound of the phone. The office was dark and it took him a few moments to figure out where he was. He turned on the reading lamp above his desk, looked at the clock on the wall, and saw that it was already after six.
“I don’t believe it,” his wife said, when he answered the phone. “Are you still at work?”
“I fell asleep,” he said. “I still have some more work to do.”
“It’s Friday. The kids have been asking for you all day. Enough with the work, you’re killing yourself.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said. “I’ll be home soon.”
“Soon doesn’t matter,” she said, “I’m late. I’m going to send the kids over to Nili’s, all right?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick them up if I get home before you. How long do you think you’re going to be at Diana’s?”
“No more than an hour,” she said. “I’ll call and see where you are when I’m done there, okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said, recalling that since the previous night’s dinner he hadn’t had a thing besides coffee.
He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then washed his hands and face. He went back to his office and, in addition to The Kreutzer Sonata and his wife’s note, he chose two of the new books and shoved them in his briefcase. The other eight he put in a drawer and locked it. He shut off the light, turned on the alarm, locked the office, and left the building.
The lawyer knew where Diana lived. If his wife was really going to leave the kids with Nili, the gynecologist’s wife, then it would take her half an hour to get to Diana’s place in Sheikh Jarrah. He walked down to the Nahalat Shiv’a pedestrian mall, to the only café that he knew would be open on the eve of Shabbat. The downtown area was filled with freshly showered young men and women in festive Shabbat clothes walking toward the Great Synagogue on King George Street. The men had trimmed beards and wore white shirts and knitted yarmulkes; the girls wore their hair up, with skirts that fell below the knee. The lawyer thought they looked provocative for religious girls. He was jealous of these teenagers on their way to Shabbat prayers, noticing the bashful, virginal glances that the girls cast in the direction of the young men, all of whom seemed to be bursting with self-confidence. He thought of the guys all the girls wanted and of the ones they didn’t, the ones who knew they’d have to make do with the leftovers, the ones who knew they’d have to bank on their parents’ wealth, or their education—or, more likely, the fact that all of the best guys were already spoken for—in order to find love, start a family, build a home. The lawyer had never felt as repulsive as he did at that minute. He dragged his feet along in shame and hoped that none of the passersby noticed him. He had nothing but disdain for himself and his dwindling conviction that his success—his car and his salary—made him desirable. For years he had considered his wife lucky because she got to share her life with him, could reap the fruits of his sharp mind and his uncompromising diligence. But now he disdained himself to such an extent that for a moment he was even able to understand her betrayal. She, he remembered, was one of the more desirable girls, and he shivered at the thought that she might still be.
The café was empty. The lawyer sat outside and ordered a tuna sandwich and a cappuccino. Soft Israeli music flowed from the army radio station. The lawyer smoked, sipped his coffee, and, even though he wasn’t hungry, he ate fast and wondered if he should get himself an additional sandwich. He looked at his watch again and again, but couldn’t have said what time it was. He was checking only to see how much time he had left.
He paid, leaving a generous tip for the young waiter, and walked back up to King George Street, surprised by the silence that the sabba
th brought. The only crack in the quiet was the clicking sound at the crosswalks, the signal for the blind. The lawyer’s stride fell into rhythm with the clicking sound, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. He looked at his watch again and although he thought he might still be early, he set off for the eastern part of the city, driving smoothly and without music, as though trying to avoid desecrating the sabbath.
In the eastern part of the city, Friday at dusk is the busiest time of the week. But as the eastern part of the city would shut down, the west would come to life, the neon lights beckoning the secular partiers, mostly soldiers on weekend leave.
The lawyer drove slowly, quietly, his heart racing as he entered the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and turned onto Diana’s street, looking for his wife’s blue car. Maybe I’m early, he thought, trying to console himself in advance, in case he didn’t find her car in front of the new mother’s house. The street was lined with parked cars on either side and the lawyer drove slowly, swiveling his head left and right, searching. Not finding it, he decided to call his wife and ask her where she was. If she said she was at her friend’s house, then he would know for certain that his suspicious were correct. He continued to ease the car down the street as he tapped the buttons on his phone. The lawyer imagined how she would lie, looking at the screen of her cell phone, shushing her lover, inhaling, and answering him in the most casual way.
Before she even answered the phone he saw a blue car turning onto the road.
“Hello,” he heard his wife say as he punched the gas.
“Hey,” he said, “are you there yet?”
“I’m just looking for parking,” she said. “The baby bawled when I left. Where are you?”
“I’m on my way home,” the lawyer said, relieved. “I just wanted to let you know. Five minutes and I’ll be there.”
“Great,” she said. “Get the kids. At least the baby. He broke my heart. I almost didn’t go, he was crying so hard.”