by Sayed Kashua
The lawyer went to the bedroom door and practically put his ear to the wood in his attempt to hear what was going on. The key turned in the lock, the door creaked, and then he heard his wife.
“Good morning, Tarik, where’s the man of the hour?”
The lawyer was about to get up and greet her when he got his bearings back and sat down on the edge of the bed and shoved the extinguished cigarette between his lips, assuming a foul expression. Soon enough there were soft knocks on the bedroom door, followed by a gentle swiveling of the doorknob. His wife stood before him, smiling, and he could tell that she was going out of her way to keep the smile fixed on her face.
“Well, well,” she said to Tarik. “Here’s our man, all dressed and awake.”
The lawyer was silent, and Tarik, who stood somewhere in the hall, called out a “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Tarik,” the lawyer said, “could you do me a favor and get me a glass of water, please?”
His wife remained next to the door, fighting back tears, staring at her husband. How attractive she was now. He wanted to take her by the hand, pull her over to the bed, rip off her clothes, kiss her neck, feel her writhe beneath him on the hard futon. Don’t give in, he reminded himself, you have a plan and you have to stick to it. Don’t be weak; don’t let her control you. Don’t let her sad eyes trick you. Remember, he told himself, this is war and your adversary is a woman that you hardly even know.
His wife took the bottle of water and the two glasses from Tarik and smiled.
“Thank you,” she said. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“No, not at all,” Tarik said in a voice that was gruff with sleeplessness and the residue of alcohol. “I’m going to head out in a second. There’s a café around the corner. Boss, I know what you want. A cappuccino, right?” he asked from the hall, still not visible to the lawyer.
“Yes, two shots, please.”
“And for the lady?” Tarik asked, referring to her as he always did. If only he knew the kind of things this lady was capable of, the lawyer thought.
“No, nothing, thank you. We’ll be leaving soon anyway, won’t we?” she said, looking at her husband and waiting for an answer that did not come.
“Okay, so two cappuccinos it is,” Tarik said and headed out.
The lawyer’s wife put the bottle of water and the glasses at the foot of the futon. “Would you please tell me what all this is about?” she asked. The lawyer sent her a combative glance and then drank long and hard from the bottle. Let her wait. Then he set it back down on the floor and looked her in the face.
“Where are the kids?”
“With Nili.”
“What did you tell her? That your husband got drunk and that you went out looking for him?”
“No, don’t worry. I didn’t say a thing. That’s what you’re always worried about, what they’ll think, what the neighbors will say.”
“Yes,” the lawyer said, “that’s what I’m worried about. What they’ll say is precisely what worries me, so lower your voice, please, there are neighbors here, too.”
“Okay.”
“So what did you tell Nili?”
“Relax,” she said, her voice sharp and challenging. “I didn’t tell her anything. I told her something had come up in the village. That you’d gone home and that I was heading up after you.”
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t specify.”
“And she didn’t ask?”
“No, she didn’t ask. I’ve done a million favors for her over the years. So just relax, okay, no one knows anything. No one knows that you weren’t home last night and that you acted like a maniac.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. And I’d like an explanation, too. Because I won’t live like this, not a chance,” she said, and she burst into tears and shut the bedroom door, which until then had been half open.
“Enough, cut the crap,” the lawyer said as his wife mopped the tears from her face.
“You’re insane,” she said, her face recomposed and fresh. “You are totally insane.”
“Lower your voice,” the lawyer commanded.
“What did I ever do to you? What did I do? You know what?” she said, holding on to the door knob, “you can take all your little conspiracies and shove them.”
“You’re a liar and an adulterer,” he said, trying to score some points. But again he felt that she had gotten the better of him, and with ease. All she’d done was pretend to turn her back and he had lost his cool.
“What did you say?” she asked, letting go of the doorknob.
“I said you are a liar,” the lawyer said, retracting part of his earlier statement.
“Why, exactly, am I a liar?” she asked, even though she had heard the other charge, too.
“I think you know well enough yourself.”
“No, I don’t. Please be so kind as to point out where and when I lied.”
“Listen, my love,” he said, trying to sound as belittling as he could, “we both know you lied. So why don’t we stop with the games, okay?”
“What, when did I lie? You don’t believe me that I went out for coffee with Faten?” she said, pulling out her telephone. “Then go ahead and call her. Ask her yourself.”
“No,” the lawyer said, the blood pounding in his veins. “Not Faten. You know full well when you lied.” He ground his teeth and wasn’t able to keep in the scream. “Enough. I’m not a little kid. You lied to me and you know it.”
“What? The note?” she cried. “That’s what all this shit is about?” She sat down and put her head in her hands, and the lawyer knew from experience that a confession was on the way. The question and the crying were the classic precursors to disclosure.
“Where did you even find that thing?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Who gave it to you? Who’s the bastard who gave it to you? You think I even remember that I once wrote that? I recognize my handwriting but I really don’t remember writing it. What is it? It’s my handwriting, I recognize it, but what is it? Where did you find it? That’s what this whole thing is about? A note that I must have written a million years ago? Where did it come from?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” the lawyer groaned. “Why do you care how I got it or who gave it to me? You lied to me, that’s what matters.”
“How did I lie to you? You think I remembered that thing? I spent the entire night trying to remember what it was, when it was from.”
“And?”
“And I remember.” Her mouth was twisted into a sneer. “And you know what? If that’s what interests you, if this is the kind of thing that makes you act the way you did, then I’m the asshole for living with you for all these years.” She wiped at her tears. “Do whatever the hell you want,” she said, throwing open the door.
The lawyer jumped off the futon and grabbed her arm. “Where are you going?”
“I can’t live like this.”
“What will you do?”
“If this is what you think of me, I’ll do whatever you want, okay? You want me to go back to my parents? You want to separate? Whatever you want. Whatever you say.”
“So,” the lawyer said, tightening his grip on her arm as she tried to wriggle free and leave, “you’re using this as an alibi to go and run off with him.”
“With who?” she yelled. “You maniac, with who?”
“Lower your voice, please.”
“No.”
“Are these the kinds of power games you play with him, too? Does he like these kinds of games?” The lawyer envisioned them together, his wife moaning with the kind of pleasure he had never inspired, and on top of her this man, smiling with the slyest of smiles.
“You’re crazy,” she cr
ied, her body slumping, no longer straining to get free. “You think I even remember what he looks like?”
“You remember, you remember,” he said softly, as though speaking to a little girl. He took her hands and lowered them from her face. He smiled at her, while his hands held on to hers and lowered them to her waist and suddenly he wanted to hug her, but instead of hugging her he raised his right hand and, had he not heard Tarik come in, would have smacked her across the face, sending her flying onto the bed. That was the language she understood, just like in her Egyptian melodramas, he thought, breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling, the thumping bass of the previous night pounding in his ears.
TWO CARS
Samah was not surprised to hear the lawyer on the phone on a Saturday.
“Good morning,” she said over her squealing kids and the high-pitched sounds of the cartoons. Once every few weeks the lawyer would call her on a Saturday with a favor, asking that she look into something, so long as it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, and she, so long as none of her boys were sick and she had not gone out on a family outing, always had time to do the lawyer a favor.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said, and his voice wavered when he realized that he was including her in a matter of grave importance. “All I know is that he’s an Arab-Israeli, around twenty-eight years old. I need to get ahold of him, put him on the stand. He’s a social worker. Here’s the telephone number of the head of social services in east Jerusalem. According to the information I have, he worked at their substance abuse outpatient clinic six or seven years ago and then just disappeared. I know this is not very specific information, but for now it’s all I have. All I need is his name, unless, of course, you can also find where he works. That’s it. Nothing else.”
He read Samah the number for the head of social services, whom he knew personally, and then said, “By the way, Samah, if they ask who it’s for, say it’s for a law firm but don’t say which one. Say it has to do with an inheritance and that we can’t find a current address, okay? Thank you, and I’m really sorry to bother you with this, it’s just that it’s urgent, and please send regards to your husband.”
The lawyer snapped open his desk drawer, looking for something that would help his headache, sure that he’d find some kind of aspirin. His head throbbed, but he had preferred to go to the office rather than the house. “I have some work that I need to take care of,” he had told his wife, even though she had not asked for an explanation.
He got up to make himself a glass of Turkish coffee in the kitchenette and drank some water, in little sips, so that it would be readily accepted by his body, not big gulps that could be shocking to the system, as he’d read online. He heaped two tall teaspoons of finely ground coffee into a glass, poured steaming water over them, and stirred. Although the lawyer had read online that coffee only exacerbated a hangover, he knew he needed to be alert, to take care of business and to avoid mistakes. Over the past two days, he’d certainly made his share.
“I don’t remember his name,” his wife had said about the guy to whom she’d written the note. This, of course, was a lie. She’d told him the whole story and the lawyer had felt that while she described this man whose name she supposedly didn’t remember, there was compassion, even love, in her voice.
The lawyer sipped the coffee, scalding his tongue, and sat down in his chair. Again he wondered about the appearance of the man with whom he had shared his wife. Because even if she had been telling the truth and the man was really just a colleague, a downtrodden kid who had never so much as touched her—even if all that was true, the lawyer knew that love had blossomed between them. What an idiot he had been. He never even considered the possibility that his wife might have loved someone else before him, and now he wasn’t even sure if she’d ever loved him at all.
“What’s the big deal about the note? What did I say—that I’d had a nice evening and that he should call? That’s it,” his wife had said, after they’d supposedly made up, a reconciliation that began as soon as Tarik returned to the apartment. The lawyer had come to his senses, apologized, and said he believed her, and she had apologized too, saying again that she had forgotten that she’d ever written that note. She said that the whole thing had happened many years before, while she interned at the outpatient clinic. She’d written the note to another social worker, perhaps the strangest person she’d ever met.
“He was like a kid. And everyone took advantage of him. He was totally helpless,” she said, and the lawyer had a hard time bottling up the rage that the description evoked.
So it wasn’t a tough guy, a skirt chaser, but a sensitive guy, the kind who may well have read all the books that the lawyer had acquired at the used bookstore. But why Yonatan? the lawyer wondered. Why would an Arab sign the name Yonatan in all of his books?
“What was I supposed to think?” the lawyer had forced himself to say with a smile. He knew that temporary reconciliation was the only way to avoid defeat.
“Out of nowhere I find this letter, which I could tell you wrote, and I asked myself how is it possible that Leila, the person closest to me in the world, wrote this? I spent an entire day trying to find an explanation and when I couldn’t, I was hoping that you would give me one, but when you lied, I let the worst of my imagination run wild. As you can tell, I went out drinking, got terribly drunk, wanted to die. All because of a note you wrote a million years ago. Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, and then without waiting for an answer he asked again, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
His wife laughed when he told her about the book. “Can you believe it?” he said and pulled out The Kreutzer Sonata. “Here I am putting the kids to bed, waiting for you to come home from your friend’s house, and I take out this book that I got at the used bookstore and the next thing I know I’m reading a love letter. At first I thought you had written it and put it in my book so I’d find it. But then . . . I mean, how did you expect me to act? You should be happy all I did was throw your clothes out of the closet. I was thinking about burning them.”
His wife laughed, seemingly convinced. “I don’t believe it,” she said, turning the book over like someone examining a piece of evidence for the first time. “How did the note wind up in here?” and her question seemed genuine to the lawyer. “Well,” she said, “he was the strangest guy I ever met. He just disappeared one day. Everyone laughed at him, poor thing.” And that phrase, and the way she said it, only sharpened the sadness in the lawyer’s chest. “I guess you’ve always had a thing for strange people,” he said, giving her shoulders a squeeze.
They both thanked Tarik, and the lawyer apologized for the imposition and promised to make it up to him. Then he and his wife went out to their cars. She was going to pick up the kids and he said he was going home to shower.
“I don’t want the kids to see me like this. Did they ask about me?” he questioned her before getting into his car.
“I told them you were at work,” she said.
“Listen, wait, hold on just a second . . . shut up, will you,” he heard Samah yell at her kids.
“Okay, I’m shutting up,” the lawyer said, and Samah laughed. “Hold on, I’m moving to the bedroom, I can’t get a word in here.”
“Okay, let’s hear it,” the lawyer said when she got back on the line.
“The name I got is Amir Lahab, that’s him.”
“You sure?” The lawyer wrote the name down on a piece of paper. Amir Lahab; he mumbled the name to himself and then lit a cigarette and tossed the lighter onto the desk. “Who gave you his name? The head of social services?”
“Yeah, I called him and he told me right away. He just burst out laughing as soon as I told him that I was looking for a guy who had worked there and then disappeared. ‘There’s a blast from the past,’ he said, laughing the whole time. Turns out that this Amir worked under him and that he’d been Amir’s superviso
r during his internship. He made a good impression, apparently, and was a good kid, a little weird, but he did his job well and he kept to himself. He started working there right after he graduated. Worked for a few months and then one day he left a resignation letter and disappeared.”
“Disappeared? But that was many years ago.”
“Right. Several years ago,” Samah said. “That’s what the guy said. He said he hopes I’m able to find him and that after he left his job they looked for him for a while but he never turned up. He told me to send regards if I found him.”
“And then?”
“And then I asked if, by any chance, he had an old address or something and he said he’d look in his file and he found an address in Jaljulia, an old telephone number, and an ID number.”
“Oh, really? What’s his ID number?” the lawyer asked, practically leaping out of his chair.
“I wrote it down in the kitchen. I’ll text it to you in a second.”
“Great, Samah, thank you so much,” the lawyer said. “And please apologize again to your husband. Tell him I’ve got some cigars here with his name on them.”
So that’s his name, Amir Lahab. The man his wife had been with—and who knew what they had done—on the night that he, the lawyer, had fallen in love with her. He recalled how she had surprised him and his sister when she came home early from the student party. She had probably been out dancing with Amir Lahab, the lawyer thought, remembering her black dress and the expression on her face when she came back to the dorm. Her face had looked sad, and he, the idiot, had loved her all the more for it. Later that night he had been unable to fall asleep. He kept seeing her at the entrance to the room, in that dress, radiant, and all he could think of was how he could make her his. She, too, probably hadn’t been able to sleep that night, but not on account of him. Probably all she could think about was Amir Lahab and the wild night she had had with him, which led to the letter, which was not a letter you write to just any old colleague—of that the lawyer was certain. It was a love letter. He disappeared, she had told him, she wrote him that note and he disappeared. She swore she hadn’t seen him since and that she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.