by Eshkol Nevo
“He’s broken, Daddy,” Ofri said. “He can’t stand up.”
“No such thing. Sure he can stand up.”
It made me crazy to see his head on her thigh. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up hard. I heard a cracking noise. Something inside him had cracked when I yanked him up. A bone or a joint. He fell back onto his knees, moaning with pain. I let go of his hand and let him collapse onto the mat. I asked Ofri, “What did he do to you?”
She looked away and didn’t answer. Maybe if she had answered me right then and there, it all would have been different. But she didn’t, she just looked away.
I persisted. “Answer me, Ofri, how did you even end up here?”
“We got lost,” she said. And was silent.
Herman continued to groan with pain. There was a damp spot—I suddenly noticed—on the crotch of his pants. I wasn’t sure whether it had been there before or had only just appeared. And his look—you know what? He had a horny gleam in his eyes. That’s what it was. A horny gleam that hadn’t completely died out yet.
My finger was still on the trigger. I felt like shooting him the way you shoot a sick horse. I swear to you.
“You got lost?” I asked Ofri.
“Yes. We were walking around the neighborhood and then Herman got broken and we didn’t know how to get back because we were so far away, so we kept walking and walking, and his feet hurt him really bad and he needed to pee, and right when he said he had to pee, I saw that we were on the road to the groves, so I told him there’s a place I know.”
“It was your idea to come to our hangout with him? Why?”
“Because I knew you’d come here looking for me,” Ofri said and hugged me. “I knew you’d find me, Daddy.”
Now she was crying too. Into my pants. It didn’t sound like she was crying with relief. No. There was something in the way she cried that first time that was too stifled to be tears of relief. I called Ayelet and told her I’d found them and needed someone to help me carry Herman because he seemed to have broken something and couldn’t walk. She asked, “How is she?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“What does that mean?”
“Are you sending me some people or not?”
It turns out that the police have a pretty standard drill for cases like that. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by them. Within a day, both Herman and Ofri were interviewed and had thorough physical examinations to—as the detective phrased it—“eliminate the possibility of sexual abuse.” Herman was questioned and checked out in the orthopedics department of Assaf Harofe hospital. They examined Ofri at the station, with a social worker present. They had what they believed was a fair assessment of the situation: He had done nothing to her that could be considered an attack. There had been physical contact between them. They had walked through the neighborhood hand in hand. He had asked her to kiss him on the cheek once. Then, when it got dark and they realized they were lost, he felt humiliated by his helplessness and cried, and she stroked his head and tried to calm him down. But that was all. There was no evidence of semen. No scratches. No bleeding. “I’m happy to say,” the detective told us, “that there are no grounds for continuing the investigation.”
But I wasn’t happy at all. I had a bad feeling. Already then, I had a bad feeling. Why in the world had he asked her for a kiss while they were outside, walking? I can understand on the staircase, but in the middle of the street? What happened, he couldn’t wait? And what about that glint I saw in his eyes in the grove? And all that wailing of his—a person doesn’t cry like that just because he’s lost. I don’t know. Something just didn’t jibe. But the detective sounded logical and Ayelet bought it, and for the first few days, Ofri acted normal, not like a girl who’d been traumatized, and I had no real evidence to the contrary. Just a feeling.
The symptoms began appearing two weeks later. Suddenly, the kid didn’t want to go to her after-school activities. Didn’t want to go to violin lessons, to comics class, to gymnastics. You drive her to a class and she just stays in the car. Won’t get out. “Why don’t you want to go, Ofri?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“But why don’t you want to?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
You let it go for the first week. The second week, you insist, almost drag her out of the car and put her in the comics class against her will. Fifteen minutes later, you get a call from the Arts Center secretary. “Your daughter won’t stop crying. It’s keeping the other children from concentrating. Come and get her.” You go to get her, hug her hard, and ask, “What happened, sweetie?” She freezes in your arms as if the touch of a man suddenly repulses her, as if she’s learned that the touch of a man can be dangerous, and says, “Nothing Daddy. I told you I didn’t want to go to the class and you made me.”
Her homeroom teacher calls Ayelet at work. You get a report on the conversation that night, only after you’ve made sure the girls are asleep. It seems that Ofri has stopped going outside at recess. She stays at her desk and reads books. She doesn’t answer her friends when they ask her to join them in a game. And her schoolwork is slipping. She made six mistakes on the last English dictation. That’s more mistakes than she’s made in all the English dictations they’ve had this year put together. You try to talk to her. Feel her out. She says that the girls in her class are babies. That she’s not interested in being with them at recess. That they do stupid things and talk about stupid things. You ask, What kind of stupid things do they do? She doesn’t answer. You say to her, Maybe you can spend every other recess with them. She doesn’t answer. In the morning, you see that her bed is wet. Her little sister has just been toilet trained—and Ofri’s wetting her bed. She’s not surprised. Not embarrassed. Doesn’t talk. Goes quietly to the bathroom, washes and dries herself, takes new underpants out of her drawer and puts them on. You tell yourself that it’s a onetime thing, but the next night it happens again.
About a week after the symptoms started, I said to Ayelet, “The child is falling apart right in front of our eyes and we’re not doing a thing.”
We were in bed, in the dark, open eyes focused on the ceiling, and in a small voice I’ve never heard her use before, Ayelet said, “I don’t know what to do, Arnon, I’ve never felt so helpless.”
I asked whether she’d noticed the look that Ofri has now.
“Her look? What about it?”
I couldn’t tell for sure whether she was pretending or she really hadn’t noticed, so I said, “She doesn’t have that innocent look anymore. Listen to me, something happened in the grove that she isn’t telling us. When I found them, I don’t know, there was something in the way Herman acted.”
“But the police—” Ayelet said in that new small voice.
I interrupted her. “The police are interested in closing cases, not opening them.”
We called a psychologist. Ayelet’s friend recommended her. You know what I think of psychologists, but when you’re at your wits’ end, you’re ready to try anything. We went to her office, on a moshav. A small stone house in the backyard of a pricey private home. Separate entrance. To be discreet. A custom-designed door. And everything inside was upmarket too: the leather couch, the desk, the chairs. Each one cost about the same as our house did. Ayelet immediately launched into a how-lovely-it-is-here speech. When she meets people for the first time, she always compliments them.
The psychologist thanked her and asked us, “What brings you here?” When we finished, she said coolly, “I suggest a seven-session model. Two with you. Two with you and the child. Two alone with the child. And the seventh session, a summary of the process.”
At the seventh session, she declared, “I don’t think it would be right to look for a single factor to explain what Ofri is going through. There is a combination of factors here. A younger sister was born, school demands have increased, the gap in maturity between her and the other children is taking its toll in social terms. And there was, of cou
rse, the unfortunate incident with the neighbor, which definitely…”
Ayelet nodded in agreement. It seemed to me that I even saw the beginning of a smile on her lips. Not a smile of happiness. A smile of relief. After all, it was easier to live with “a combination of factors,” right? You know what, maybe that’s what pissed me off. That smile of Ayelet’s. Or maybe it was the way the psychologist phrased it, “the unfortunate incident.” Professional terminology. Cold. Or maybe it was the thought that we were paying five hundred shekels an hour for that bullshit. Five hundred shekels! No wonder she could afford couches like that. So I cut off that whole combination of factors in the middle and asked her right out, “Did Ofri tell you or didn’t she? What did she say?”
Ayelet put her hand on my thigh as if I were a kid and said, “Arnon, let Nirit finish.”
I shoved her hand away and started yelling at the psychologist. “I want to know if she told you what happened in the citrus grove. Because we, or at least I, haven’t been sleeping for two months because of that question, and the way I see the dynamic here, you can talk to us about the combining factors for an hour and then say you’re sorry, but our time is up.”
The psychologist said, “I suggest that we all calm down—”
I slammed my hand down on the desk. “I don’t want to calm down. I’m the client here and I demand to know if there’s something you know and I don’t.”
The psychologist straightened her red scarf around her neck. She always wore colorful scarves, even though it was summer. I felt like grabbing the ends of the scarf and strangling her. She went on, “I’m not hiding anything from you, Arnon. The little I managed to get out of Ofri is quite similar to what she told the police. They got lost. It was dark. She took him to the groves because she was sure you would look for her there.”
“Did she tell you that he asked her for a kiss on the way?”
“She didn’t volunteer any more details. She didn’t answer when I asked her for some. At our last session, I asked her to draw a picture of her family. Here, you can see what she drew. A girl leaning against her father, and her mother and sister standing close to them. There are none of the characteristics that indicate trauma of the sort you are afraid of. So it is my impression that nothing of a sexual nature transpired in the grove. I qualify it as an ‘impression,’ because in cases like this, there is a chance that what happened was so traumatic that it has been very deeply repressed and we still haven’t been able to reach it.”
“Still? That means you believe you’ll reach it,” Ayelet asked.
The psychologist played with the fringes of her scarf and said she didn’t know.
I tried to make the point clear: “So what you’re saying is that there’s a chance we’ll never know what happened there? That we’ll never be sure?”
The slight nod of her chin that came before the word was enough for me. I stood up from her fucking couch, walked out, and slammed the door. Hard. I hoped it would make an ugly crack. Ayelet ran after me and caught up to me in the gravel parking area. “What do you think you’re doing, Arnon, have you gone crazy?” I told her that I wanted answers, not a load of crap, and that I was going to the only person who could give them to me.
Maybe if Ayelet had come with me to see Herman, what happened later wouldn’t have happened. But she didn’t come. Because she felt uncomfortable about the psychologist. Do you get it? We pay five hundred shekels an hour and we’re the ones who should feel uncomfortable?
She said, “Come on, let’s at least finish the session, Arnon.”
And I said, “Are you coming with me or not?”
“No. Just because you’ve lost it doesn’t mean I have to lose it too.”
So I got into the car and drove to the hospital. I knew that Herman wasn’t in orthopedics anymore, that they’d transferred him to internal medicine. But I didn’t know much more than that. If I was out of onions that week, I didn’t make shakshuka. And they didn’t knock on our door either. Their car wasn’t in their spot most of the day, so I figured they were at the hospital. That Ruth was there with him. Ayelet bumped into her once at the entrance to the building—both were coming home from work at the same time—and Ruth told her that when he was in orthopedics, he suddenly came down with all the ailments of old age at once, so they had to transfer him to another department.
I asked Ayelet if Ruth had said she was sorry.
“Just the opposite.”
“What do you mean, just the opposite?”
“From what I could tell, she’s angry at us.”
“What does she have to be angry about?”
“She says that you’re the reason Herman was admitted to orthopedics. She says you pulled him by the arm in the grove. Is that true?”
“He couldn’t get up.”
“Did you pull him or didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“So from her standpoint, you and you alone are the cause of all his troubles.”
“Did she say anything about the money we owe her?” I asked.
“No, but we really have to pay them.”
That pissed me off. “You pay them if you want. They won’t see a shekel from me.”
I bought a large bouquet of flowers in the shopping center next door to the hospital. I said to myself, I’ll come in peace. That’s the only way Ruth will let me stay alone in the room with him. At the department desk, they sent me to room number 14. An old Arab man was lying in the first bed in room 14. He looked at me as if I were a soldier breaking into his house. I kept walking. I pushed aside the curtain and saw Herman and Ruth. He was lying in bed with his eyes closed, a tube stuck in his nose. She was sitting next to his bed, reading Yakinton to him. That’s the German-Hebrew magazine the yekkim get in their mailbox once a week. On the small table beside his bed was a plate of thin, neatly cut slices of her marble cake. They both looked much older than I remembered. Her beautiful hair suddenly looked thin, as if half had fallen out. She looked up from the newspaper and said, “You.” I handed her the bouquet. She said, “Thank you.” But there was no thank you in her voice. I asked her how he was and she said, “Very bad.” I asked what was wrong with him and she said, “Everything. Delirium, clogged arteries, a tumor in his colon. The doctors here say that it’s been a long time since they saw such an assortment of medical problems in one person.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? She was silent too. That sometimes happens when two people have too much to say.
The old Arab moaned. Herman opened his eyes and looked back and forth from Ruth to me, lingering more on me than on her. Then he looked away from me and stared straight ahead. At the wall. As if the World Cup final game was being screened on it.
I said to Ruth, “I forgot, the nurse asked me to tell you that you have to go to the office. There’s a form you have to fill out.”
She gave me a look. So I said in the nicest tone I could muster, “Don’t worry, I’ll stay with him.”
When she left, I closed the curtain around the bed. I waited until I heard the door to the room open and then close. So as not to waste time, I quickly bent over Herman, grabbed his chin and moved him to the left so I could look him in the eye, and said, “Now, Mr. Herman Wolf, you tell me exactly what happened in the citrus grove.” He didn’t answer. I pulled out his feeding tube and asked again, this time closer to his face: “What did you do to my daughter, Herman?”
He still didn’t answer, but something in his expression changed. A spark flashed inside the grayness.
I play the idiot so I don’t have to answer your questions. That’s what the spark said to me.
And that’s why I couldn’t restrain myself.
I grabbed him by the throat with both hands and started pressing down from two directions. I said, “If you don’t tell me now, I’ll kill you.”
My mistake was that I left both his hands free. I could have choked him with one hand and pinned his old hands to the bed with the other. After a few seconds he would ha
ve broken down and talked. I’m positive. But he reached out and pressed the panic button. I didn’t even notice him doing it. I didn’t hear the buzz. But suddenly someone put an arm around my chest and pulled my shoulders back, and someone else grabbed me from the front. There were elbows and fists and shouting and kicking. I fought like a lion, I’m telling you, but male nurses kept swarming into the room, and in the end, they pinned me to the filthy hospital floor, and one of them sat on my back and said in a Russian accent that the police were on their way and I should do myself a favor and stay quiet.
Ayelet came that night to get me released from custody. She came straight from work in her lawyer’s clothes, and for a second, for a fraction of a second, when she came in, I wasn’t sure whether that was my wife or a beautiful stranger I was paying to represent me. I pressed up against her for a tight hug. I wanted to feel her prominent hip bone. To know it was her. And she let me. Without speaking. She gave me that.
When we left the police station, she said, “You’re very lucky. Ruth decided not to file a complaint. And without a complaint, the police can’t do anything to you.”
I was quiet until we reached the door of the station. The truth is that I was still in shock about being arrested. Tell me, in which of your books do you have a description of someone who was put in jail? The last one? That’s it, I remembered something. Don’t be offended, but anyone can see that you don’t have the slightest idea what it means to be in jail. It’s like a really hard slap in the face. What does that mean? I always thought that the world was divided into two kinds of people: normal ones and criminals. That you’re either one or the other. There’s no in between. But when you’re lying on a smelly mattress in a cell, staring at the ceiling, at the things people who were there before you wrote on the wall, you realize that it’s only a matter of how much pressure is put on you and about what. Everyone has a small criminal inside him that can come to life at any time, you understand?