A Possibility of Violence
Page 12
OUT OF HABIT HE LOOKED IN on the children’s room. The beds were empty and the room cool. Perhaps because he was by himself, for the first time in a long while without Ezer and Shalom, he woke up with those thoughts of Jenny. And maybe it was because of the searching he did the night before, and the wedding pictures. He moved the transistor radio from the kitchen to the bathroom so he could listen to the Voice of Israel while he shaved, but the raised voices got mixed up in his thoughts with his own voice and he turned it off. When he got dressed in the bedroom he noticed the suitcase. And was that perhaps the reason Jenny was able to penetrate his thoughts? Everything was carried out according to plan. And from moment to moment it filled up with details. In the suitcase there was still room for the clothes that were drying on the line, and then the idea came to Chaim to buy Jenny a present.
He fried up the eggs and placed them on the windowsill, so they’d cool off, and left for the bakery. This time he didn’t drive quickly, and on Sokolov Street he slowed almost to a stop and could look into the windows of the travel agencies and the closed clothing stores. He didn’t know where Jenny bought clothes. He recalled that she once told him that they’re more expensive at the malls than in the city.
At the Brothers’ Bakery it was a morning like any other. The smell of baking dough rose from the ovens and the flour-covered floor. Chaim told the younger brother that he was going away for a few days with the boys and that he’d let them know when they were coming back so as to restart his daily order, and he was surprised by the ease with which the story flowed out of him. Exactly like it had gone last night, in the conversation with the teacher, he thought. The younger brother patted him on the shoulder and wished him a pleasant vacation, and Chaim wished him an easy fast on Yom Kippur.
On his way back home it was already daylight and the roads were no longer empty. This was exactly how he drove on the morning he hid her body. He returned home then and still didn’t know what he’d say to the boys, and he hadn’t thought about the police at all. He called his mother once the sandwiches were wrapped up and stacked one on top of the other in the crate. The children hadn’t woken up yet, and he saw before his eyes their sleeping faces, sunk into their thick pillows in the same room where he had grown up. His mother asked him immediately, “Did you call the teacher?” and he answered, “Everything’s okay, don’t keep worrying. How did they sleep?”
“Shalom had a hard time getting to sleep, but they didn’t wake up during the night. What did you say to her?”
“I told you already, everything’s okay. We had a good talk. Don’t keep thinking about it.”
She didn’t ask any more questions.
From the exhaustion in her voice he guessed that she hadn’t slept well, her thoughts turning her over in bed. He said, “Maybe call Adina and ask her to help with the kids,” and his mother said, “I already did. I think she’ll come by this evening, after work.”
PERHAPS HE SHOULD HAVE CALLED HIS mother last night after talking with the teacher to reassure her, but it had been late.
Chava Cohen didn’t answer him until eleven thirty. She hadn’t recognized his voice, and even when he told her his name she didn’t immediately remember.
At the start of the conversation she was impatient, just as she had been at daycare, but afterward she softened. She asked, “Did you just call me a few times?” and he said, “Yes. I’m sorry to bother you.” She asked him how he got her phone number, and he said from the daycare’s contact list. Afterward she asked what he wanted and he answered her directly, like he had decided. “I want to apologize for what happened. We’re celebrating a new year, so I wanted to wish you a good year and to start a new page.” She didn’t answer right away, and he listened to the sound of her breathing. Was she not certain it was him? She asked, “Why would you call me at this hour, Mr. Sara?” He responded, “As I told you, to ask for your forgiveness. And also to say that I have no tie to the suitcase with the bomb that they put by your daycare. I would never do a thing like that. If you knew me better, you’d know that’s not me.”
Again he heard her breathing. And in the background, voices from a distant television. She asked, “And you called only for that?” And he confirmed this and said, “Now we’re in the Days of Forgiveness, no?”
By then he already felt their conversation was going well. His anger with her dissipated while he spoke.
She asked him suddenly, “Did someone from the police question you about the suitcase?” and he said, “Yes, they called me in for questioning at the station today,” even though he wasn’t sure that this was what he should have said. She was silent again. Subsequently when she spoke her voice was more polite, less aggressive.
“Can you tell me what they asked?”
“If we had a dispute, and if you have disputes with other parents at the daycare.”
“And what did you say?”
“That what happened wasn’t a dispute, and that there aren’t any disputes at the daycare.”
“They didn’t ask you about people who worked at the daycare?”
He didn’t understand her question and said no.
“Are you sure? They didn’t ask anything about the assistant who worked for me last year?”
Afterward she asked additional questions about the police interrogation and he answered, emphasizing all the good things he’d said about her. She ended the conversation after wishing him a good year and he said he’d see her at the daycare, not the next day but rather after the holidays. Before this, she said to him the sentence he had hoped to hear: “I didn’t think that you had any connection to that suitcase, Mr. Sara. That suitcase has no connection to the daycare, either. But thanks for calling. And give little Shalom a kiss from me.”
HE STARTED HIS ROUNDS AT WORK early that day, before eleven, although business was always slow at this time of year. He wanted to get back home before one and continue with his plan.
Most of the work was at the Ministry of the Interior building. In the large hall where they renew passports and issue identity cards, the line was short, because of the holidays. He moved on to the small hall of the visas department, where most of the work took place. Dozens of foreigners and their spouses or employers crowded in line without knowing when the clerk would call them. Some of them had been standing there without food since 7:00 a.m.
Chaim himself had gone there for the first time with Jenny, to extend her visa, which had expired before they got married, when she lost her job.
Luckily for him, he didn’t have to wait in line. They were received by the clerk immediately upon their arrival, because Ilan, his cousin, worked there. Jenny by chance saw Marisol, the Filipino woman whom they’d met before the wedding in Cyprus, and got excited. Her husband, a plumber, was much younger than Chaim and already twice divorced. They still planned on traveling to South America and were trying to extend Marisol’s visa, but the Ministry of the Interior was creating difficulties, because they were skeptical of their marriage’s credibility, despite the pictures from Larnaca. Jenny urged Chaim to say something to his cousin on their behalf, and he did. He wasn’t selling his food there then, not until five years later, when the high-tech firm he was catering hot lunches for closed and a second company canceled its commitment for budgetary reasons, and after two months without work the idea of selling there occurred to him, or, actually, to his mother. She spoke to Ilan, and together they arranged the matter. Since then his cousin was promoted and appointed director of the Department of Population Registration. Chaim knocked on the closed door to his office and didn’t get an answer, and one of the clerks told him that he was on vacation until after Yom Kippur. Chaim told the clerk that he too was going away for a few days, and she said, “How nice. With Jenny and the kids?” He said yes and smiled.
After work he returned home and took an afternoon nap, and at three thirty he walked downtown.
HE BOUGHT THE AIRLINE TICKETS AT the Magic Tours travel agency in Holon’s Weitzman Square at four thirty.
He said, “My wife is there. I’m traveling to her with the children.”
Next to him an older couple booked a guided group tour of Spain and Italy. Chaim was prepared for the next questions as well.
“It’s good that you say that two of the travelers are children. What ages?”
“The older one is seven and the other is three.”
“So that’s almost full price,” the agent said, and Chaim imagined the moment in which he’d present Ezer and Shalom with the tickets. He planned to do this only the day before their trip. Maybe he’d first show them the packed suitcase and ask, “Can you guess where we’re going tomorrow?” He assumed that they’d know the answer, but if they didn’t, he’d say to them, “We’re going to visit Mom.” The agent apologized for the computer’s slowness and added, “Not a lot of Israelis are traveling to the Philippines right now. Not during this season—it’s hot there like here, but with a lot more rain,” and he thought that he’d better pack umbrellas.
Ezer and Shalom would bound down the stairway from the plane and he would have to stop them from running through the airport to find Jenny. They would stand outside the airport, in the rain, under their little umbrellas, and wait. And they’d have no one other than him. They were already used to being disappointed by her, and this would be the last, and final, such disappointment.
The search results appeared on the computer screen and the agent said, “I have a flight after Yom Kippur. Sunday evening. With a stop in Hong Kong. Departing from Tel Aviv on El Al at 9:00 p.m. and landing in Manila with Cathay Pacific at 6:40.” Chaim immediately asked, “You don’t have anything before Yom Kippur?” and the agent brought her face close to the screen and tapped the keyboard again with the same one finger of her left hand. She shook her head no, but then said, “There’s a flight right before Yom Kippur. With Korean Air, via Seoul. Leaves Tel Aviv on Friday and lands in Manila on Saturday. Also in the morning. With a six-hour layover in Seoul. But the tickets are more expensive and you’ll be in the air on the holiday.”
Chaim didn’t want to wait. He asked, “Are you sure you don’t have anything before that? Tomorrow or the next day?” She shook her head.
That was the flight.
She asked, “Three tickets, yes?” and he said, suddenly, “On the way there, yes. But on the way back we’ll need four. My wife will be coming back with us.”
He didn’t know Jenny’s passport number but the agent had no need for it. She only wanted to know how her name was spelled in English. “Jenny. Jenny Sara,” he said.
“Do you know if on her passport it says Jenny or Jennifer?”
He didn’t know.
“I’d better write Jennifer. With two n’s and one f. I don’t think there will be a problem with that.”
Only when she asked him about the hotel room in Manila did he falter. She thought that they’d have no need for a hotel, but he explained that Jenny had been living in Israel for many years, and that she had no relatives in Manila, and no apartment to stay in there. He didn’t take into account that they would need a hotel for so long and was suddenly busy calculating the cost of the room. When she found them an inexpensive hotel, she said, “So, a room for four, or two rooms?” And he said to her, without thinking, “For three. Why four? Me and the two children.”
She observed him with a look full of amazement from behind her glasses. “And what about your wife?”
He apologized and said he’d gotten confused, and she said, “The price is the same in any case. It’s a standard family room with a couch that opens into a double bed and two small children’s beds.” Also, when he paid her cash, in two-hundred-shekel notes that he removed from an envelope, she looked at him amazed.
ON HIS WAY BACK HOME, ON foot, before evening, it seemed to Chaim that someone was following him. He lingered at a corner. Didn’t cross the street even when the light for pedestrians changed to green. The woman who passed by him with a baby stroller was taller and thinner than Jenny. Maybe the fear rose up in him again because of the mistakes he’d made at the travel agency. At the clothing store he made no mistakes. He slowed down the pace of his walking. Tried to think different thoughts. The woman with the baby stroller continued walking until she disappeared from his sight.
He thought that in the past twenty-four hours he had spoken to more people than he spoke to in a normal week of his life. There was the good talk he had had with Chava Cohen at night, and the conversation with the young security guard at the entrance to the Tax Authority building, and the exchanges with the clerk at the Ministry of the Interior. In the afternoon he talked about their trip twice, to the Russian agent at the travel agency and to the saleswoman at the clothing store Bella Donna. He recalled what Jenny used to say to him: “People can only talk to you in your sleep.” But even when he spoke, she didn’t listen. Sometimes he would turn to her in the evening and she would ignore him, focused on the glowing television, or rereading old letters from her sister. As if she hadn’t forgiven him for having the children, as she hadn’t forgiven them. And even on the day he came back from work and saw the welts on Shalom’s face, he tried to convince her to speak with the teacher, but she wouldn’t listen. He remembered that Ezer looked at him, and when he noticed his gaze, the boy took off, walked to the living room, as if he were ashamed of his defeated father. That was their last conversation. The saleswoman in the clothing store said to him, when she examined the picture of the children, “Such beautiful boys. And how much the two of them look like you,” as if Jenny’s death intensified the resemblance between them and brought them closer to him. He had entered Bella Donna after going past all the clothing stores on Sokolov Street because only there did he see clothes that looked to him like the clothes Jenny wore. The saleswoman first scrutinized him with a reserved look, perhaps because men rarely visited the store and perhaps because he hesitated for a moment at the entrance, opposite the display window, before going inside. In the entrance to the store, on the right side, were thin colorful dresses, short tricot shirts, and buttoned shirts on hangers. Inside the store were evening dresses and suits.
Chaim told the saleswoman that he wanted to buy a gift for his wife and presented her with the picture Marisol took in Cyprus: Jenny in a white dress and he in a suit just moments before entering the mayor’s office. “That’s a picture from a few years ago, but she looks the same, in terms of sizes,” he explained, and the saleswoman said, “Terrific. I think size thirty-eight will do it,” and suddenly he didn’t understand why he had brought a picture that he himself was in to the store, or a picture at all. Jenny wouldn’t wear the clothes anyway.
“What does she usually like?” the saleswoman asked, and Chaim said, “She wears colorful clothes.”
“And is this a birthday present?”
“No. I’m traveling to go see her with the children. She’s in the Philippines and we’re flying to her on Friday for a vacation and then we’re all coming back together. We’ll surprise her with the gift.”
“How nice. So let’s see, do you want something more for the evening or something for everyday?”
After thinking it over, he said, “Maybe we should get one of each.” He hadn’t thought about it earlier, but it was an excellent idea. The presents will be from the children: one outfit will be from Ezer and the other from Shalom.
On the counter the saleswoman placed two dresses and two shirts and three pairs of pants. She put the dresses and the shirts against her body so he c
ould see. She was younger than Jenny and thinner, but the difference between them wasn’t great. She asked him how many years they’d been married and Chaim answered over eight, and she laughed and said, “And you still buy her presents! I should be so lucky.”
In the end he bought a purple silk shirt and white jeans and she wrapped them separately in festive wrapping paper.
When he went to place the black shopping bag in the suitcase in the bedroom it seemed to him that someone had opened it in his absence. The children’s clothes weren’t organized like he remembered organizing them, stacked on top of each other like the sandwiches in the crate. Also the door to the bedroom closet was open, and he couldn’t remember if he had closed it the day before, after his search.
He went from room to room and listened.
The window in the children’s room was open and he closed it. Did he open it himself before going out? It was also possible that he had gotten up during his afternoon nap and done this. And yet he felt that someone was in the house, or had been until a few minutes earlier. He tried to recall if the key turned once or twice in the lock before the door opened. Afterward he looked at the street and didn’t see a woman who looked like her. Like this morning, Jenny penetrated his thoughts, and he removed her from there. And maybe it was natural that she hadn’t disappeared entirely, and wouldn’t disappear until they went. On Friday they’d get on the plane to Manila with a stopover in Seoul. For Ezer and Shalom this would be their first time on a plane. They’d sleep another night in the room he grew up in at his mother’s house before he got them. And only on Thursday would he tell them about the trip and include them in the preparations.