Three Floors Up

by Eshkol Nevo

  “What a beautiful dress,” he said when I got into the car. And he bent down to kiss my hand.

  I pulled it away before he could and said firmly, “I want to make it clear that the fact that I’m going to Tel Aviv with you doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to any deal or part thereof!”

  He smiled that annoying smile of his and said, “I never thought otherwise.” A moment later: “There’s an almond croissant in a bag on the backseat, if you’d like it.”

  I said, “Please stop the car.”

  He kept driving.

  “Stop the car immediately!” I demanded. And this time I spoke in the tone I used in court instead of banging my gavel.

  It worked. He pulled over. It’s possible that his thin arms even trembled a bit.

  I interrogated him: “How did you know that I like almond croissants?”

  In a perfectly innocent voice, he said, “I had no idea. It happened to be the last one in the bakery.”

  “Pu-rely by chance,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes, purely by chance.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “But it happens to be the truth, Devora. Can I keep driving?”

  The apartment he found for me was wonderful. Top floor. With an elevator. A quiet street. Close to Rothschild Boulevard. No parking spot. But I didn’t have a car anyway. Three clean, large rooms. A living room, bedroom, and a room for a young guest.

  “Young guest?”

  “It’s a project I’m promoting now,” he explained. “To revive an arrangement that was once common—to have poor young people stay in the apartments of older people who live alone. It’s good for both sides. The differences in lifestyles aren’t as great as they were in previous generations, and it’s possible to agree on a few dos and don’ts that will make living together easier.”

  “Such as, for example?”

  “We’re still working on it. Mor, the girl with the braids who brought you to me, and your humble servant, are setting up an Internet site that will match up the people from both age groups. That will lay the foundations for that natural alliance. Mor told me how much you’ve helped the protesters, so I thought you might be interested in being the first to implement the idea—and become the inspiration for others.” I didn’t say anything, and he quickly added, “It’s not a condition for buying this apartment, God forbid.”

  “To tell the truth, I like the idea…”

  And I think that was the moment I allowed myself to relax slightly.

  I was vigilant, Michael. I was constantly vigilant. After all, both you and I have sent smooth-tongued, nattily dressed scoundrels to prison after they exploited their victims’ naïveté in all sorts of scams. I don’t remember the specific details of every single case, but I remember the principle very well: even when the scammer was sent to prison, the victims never regained their money. Or their self-respect.

  I didn’t forget that for a moment as we walked around the apartment.

  Right, left, trepidation, left, right, suspicion. That was the rhythm of my steps as I walked beside Avner Ashdot. And yet, when he told me about his young guest initiative, I had to admit that my inner scale tipped in his favor. I thought, A man who comes up with an idea like that cannot be essentially bad. Nevertheless, I said to myself, he’s still withholding the secret of our crossing paths. Why? What does he have to hide?

  We went up to his apartment. To discuss details. He offered me wine. I asked for water. And then the same thing happened again: instead of getting down to business, he chose to shift the conversation to a different subject.

  He told me that the apartment we were in was the one he had shared with the wife he had separated from, the wife whose death had made him a widower. He hurried to explain: “It sounds strange, separated and widowed, but that’s how it happened.” He and Nira had been married twenty-five years. Loving, but not always happy. His work, the many trips that sometimes kept him away for months, took a toll on their married life. Travelers become accustomed to the freedom they have when they’re away and the ones remaining behind become used to managing alone. And when they are back in each other’s arms, it’s difficult for them to re-establish their shared rhythm. Sometimes it would take a week before they relearned how to be flexible with one another, and then a call would come that sent him abroad once again.

  Nevertheless, they didn’t separate. Their love did not fade, despite everything. And they had their Maya to raise together. She wasn’t an easy child, Maya. They had to move her from one school to another very often. Something had gone wrong in her relationship to the world. An ongoing misunderstanding, chronic, heartbreaking.

  “That sort of demanding child can drive parents apart,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “But she can also strengthen the bond between them, and that’s what happened to me and Nira.”

  But it was then, after they had survived all the difficult years and their Maya was studying agriculture at the Weizmann Institute, having finally found her place in the world—it was then that Nira left.

  Avner Ashdot sipped his wine. There was a struggle taking place in his expression, particularly around his lips: His mouth wanted to open, but his teeth clamped down on the flesh and prevented it.

  I waited expectantly for the outcome of the battle. But even if he stopped now, he had already been extremely frank. He didn’t belong to this generation, which revealed its secrets to one and all in the middle of Rothschild Boulevard. He was from our generation, which had a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign stuck to its chest.

  And yet, to my surprise, he began speaking again. “They gave me a retirement party,” he said. “People don’t understand why the defense budget is so large—they should go to one of those parties. Tens of thousands of shekels spent on one evening. Singers, catering, imported liquor.”

  I clucked in agreement. “Yes, scandalous.”

  “You get tipsy at those events, not enough to be drunk, but enough to loosen tongues. It happened toward the end of the evening. A few of the guests had gone. And then Gadi Tessler came up to me, and in front of Nira, blurted out, ‘How come you didn’t invite that Swedish guy’s family? What’s his name again? Holstrom?’ And he laughed loudly and slapped me on the back. Then, pretending his hand was a gun, aimed it at his own forehead, shot, then started laughing again. When he’d gone, Nira asked, ‘What was that all about?’ I said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ ”

  Avner Ashdot poured himself more wine. Slowly. Swirled the liquid in his glass without bringing it to his lips and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want a drink too?”

  I said, “Come on, finish the story!”

  He swooped down on my “come on” as if it were a treasure: “Ah! You see, Devora, that’s exactly the problem with secrets. If you don’t know about them, they don’t bother you in the slightest. But the minute you get a whiff of one, you have to know it all.”

  “So did you tell her?”

  “The commander of the cadet course told us in our first lesson, ‘I’m warning you before you even start, the profession you’re about to learn here is the loneliest one in the world. And the temptation to share the burden placed on your shoulders with someone close to you will be enormous. But every time you want to reveal secret information to them, remind yourselves what happened to Bruno Schmidt.’ ”

  “Bruno Schmidt?”

  “A CIA agent. In East Germany. His wife told her friend something he told her. Unfortunately that friend was, by chance or not by chance, a Stasi agent. Schmidt and his wife rotted in separate prisons for twenty years and weren’t released until the wall fell.”

  “So…Nira…She just accepted your silence all those years? She didn’t object?”

  “It was a different time. Today men place a camera in front of them and blabber about their private lives, but then? Men didn’t talk so much. Men went out on missions and came back, and the women didn’t ask questions. That’s how it was.”

  “Even so, I find it ha
rd to believe that she never asked…”

  “Maybe she felt more comfortable that way. In any case, suddenly, after twenty-five years, she wanted to know everything. Not wanted—demanded. I had no choice. Do you understand?”

  “You could have stayed silent,” I said.

  Avner Ashdot put his wineglass on the table. His hand, I noticed, shook slightly. It occurred to me that this might be the first time he was telling this story to someone. I wondered what I had done to deserve that honor.

  He smiled more with sadness than happiness and said, “You clearly didn’t know Nira. It was very hard to say no to her. That’s why she was such a good school principal. And to tell the truth, it was also hard for me to resist the temptation to confess and be purified. To be purified by the confession. So I said to myself, one story, that’s all. But after she heard the story of Holstrom, which had been a real disaster, a terrible mistake in identification, she demanded to hear the rest of the stories. I talked and talked the whole night, and she listened and listened, new wrinkles forming on her forehead. In the morning, she acted normally. I figured that everything was still okay. But that night, she slept at Maya’s place, and a week later, she came to get her things.”

  Avner Ashdot emptied his glass of wine in one sharp gulp and said, “ ‘I don’t know who you are anymore.’ That’s what she said before she left—‘I don’t know who you are at all.’ ”

  And then, Michael, while I was talking with Avner Ashdot, a wave of longing for you passed through me.

  Since you left, I’ve felt ripples of longing for you that come and go. But sometimes something happens in the world and the ripples only come and don’t go, accumulating into a large wave. Throughout that conversation about lies and secrets, I felt that it wasn’t only to Nira that Avner Ashdot hadn’t told everything. He hadn’t told it to me either, and that made me suddenly feel a fierce yearning for the truth that had always been between us. It hadn’t always been paradise with you, Michael. I will never stop resenting you for what happened with Adar. But even that was out in the open. We didn’t always talk about it, but it was out in the open. And I don’t understand how it’s possible to live differently, how it’s possible to live with someone for twenty-five years without knowing what they do at work.

  If anyone were to ask me what love is, I would say, The knowledge that, in a world of lies, there is one person who is totally honest with you and with whom you are totally honest, and there is truth between you, even if it isn’t always spoken.

  Avner Ashdot didn’t sense the longing that flooded me. He was in the middle of his monologue. And from his tone, I could tell that he was coming to the point he wanted to emphasize.

  “And then,” he said, “she incited Maya against me. She went and told her all of my sins in great detail, and ever since, the girl has been estranged from me. Her mother reconciled with me before she died. During the last months of her illness, I never left her bedside. But my daughter still won’t forgive me. We see each other, yes, but there is a Berlin wall between us, and she’s my child, the girl I cherished and looked after for more than twenty years—”

  “Except for when you traveled,” I felt obliged to be accurate.

  “Yes, that’s also what Maya said. That I was never really there for her. That she could never rely on me completely. That she didn’t need a father who told her stories, but a father who was with her. Who would simply be with her.”

  I thought, The girl is right. But then I thought, It doesn’t matter who’s right. This is not a court here. And you are not being asked to judge.

  Avner Ashdot said, “So now I’m there for her. And I do things for her. Even this young guest project is actually for her. So she knows that her father can do good things too. It’s terrible when there’s a rift between you and your child. We shouldn’t just accept it.”

  He spoke in a tone of finality and sipped his wine, looking into the glass. And then, all at once, he raised his glance and looked hard at me. I tried to extricate myself from the trap of those eyes, and his words echoed in my mind—“It’s terrible when there’s a rift between you and your child. We shouldn’t just accept it”—and I thought, no, it can’t be that he…

  The thought that he knew about Adar was so chilling, Michael, that I immediately had to change the subject to something more concrete, so I asked, “So what do we agree about the apartment, Mr. Ashdot?” But I couldn’t control the quaver in my voice.

  Avner Ashdot took a piece of paper and a pen out of his pocket and said, as he filled the paper with numbers, “Let’s see. I’ll buy your apartment. With the money you receive, you’ll buy the great apartment I just showed you, and with the difference, you’ll redo the bathroom to look like mine.”

  He handed me the paper. I held it in my hand without looking at it and said, “I want to make it clear that the young guest matter is crucial to me.”

  “It’s crucial for me too, and as soon as you sign the lease, we’ll start looking for a suitable candidate.”

  “The young people on the boulevard,” I explained, “they have fired my imagination. I want to help them any way I can.”

  “I take that completely for granted, Devora.”

  I couldn’t decide whether his tone was admiring or disdaining, so I gave him back the paper and said, “I assume you’ll want an agent’s fee?”

  “No,” he said and smiled.

  “No?”

  “No. Instead of a fee, I want to ask you for something.”

  (To be honest, I thought his request would be of a sexual nature. The lingering kisses on my hand. The compliment when I got into the car. His attempts to get me to drink wine. The quick glances at the neckline of my dress. The extreme frankness. Everything pointed in that direction. And I was already preparing a firm refusal. Not that I wasn’t interested in some physical contact. The long, warm hug with Hani had left me yearning for it. But I didn’t like or accept the idea that sex would be part of a business deal.)

  Avner Ashdot stood up and began pacing the room. Slowly. In measured steps. He went to the window and opened it slightly like someone who plans to light a cigarette and exhale the smoke through the crack. His right hand moved very briefly toward his shirt pocket, as if he were about to take out a pack of cigarettes, but came away empty.

  I suddenly remembered that Adar did the same thing after he’d stopped smoking.

  Finally, he said, “I want you to drive somewhere with me.”

  He was still facing the street.

  “Drive?”

  “Let’s call it an excursion.”

  He turned around to look at me.

  “But where to?”

  “I can’t tell you, that’s part of it.”

  “And how long will this excursion take, may I ask?”

  “What with all the new roads, less than three hours.”

  “When do we leave?”

  He looked at his watch. “Now.”

  I also looked at my watch and said, “I can’t. I have an appointment with the protest activists this afternoon. They’re waiting for me.”

  “Then tomorrow at the latest.”

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “It’s urgent, Devora, believe me.”

  “I need to think about it.”

  “Okay. But don’t take too long.”

  “You know something?” I smiled. “I think best in the bathroom.”

  During the entire conversation with Avner Ashdot, my body seemed drawn toward the bathroom. If a camera had been documenting my responses, it would not have captured it. My eyes didn’t move. My knees didn’t turn. It was an internal shifting of my body, concealed but adamant, toward the thing that would give it pleasure.

  And yet I was quite surprised by the words that came out of my mouth.

  But Avner Ashdot did not look surprised. He looked as if my request was the most normal one in the world, the natural result of everything that had been said in our conversation so far.

  He said, “
Gladly. There are fresh towels on the rack.”

  I remembered the velvety feel of his towels very well.

  I’ve had so few moments of undiluted pleasure since you left, Michael. You have to understand. Can you understand?

  This is me talking to you. Your Devora. Still.

  But that kind of death, the death of a spouse…you have to understand. Can you understand?

  It changes something in you. It can’t leave you unchanged. Do you understand?

  Every time I had to give up something in my life and remain in the cage, I consoled myself: Never mind, there will be other opportunities.

  And that kind of death—do you understand?

  It makes you think that perhaps there won’t be. Other opportunities, I mean. To do what you want to do. And that changes something in you. Sharpens something. You have to understand, Michael. Can you?

  The buttons and the water pressure that increased and decreased at my command, the cosmetics and bath oils and natural soaps, the scented candles—I lit two of them—and the colored lights and the soft towels—all of that made me forget the sad fact: I hadn’t taken a change of clothes with me this time either.

  But Avner Ashdot didn’t forget. When the sound of running water stopped, he assumed that I’d finished and asked from the other side of the door, “Do you need clothes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Open the door a crack. I put some of Nira’s clothes in a bag for you. You can choose what fits you. You’re about the same size.”

  I thought, Okay, I’ve had it. This is sick. I was about to say in a no-nonsense tone: Never mind, I’ll manage.

  But he beat me to it. “I have only one request, Devora. If you can, after you get dressed, walk straight from the bathroom to the front door. I’ll wait in my study. Nira’s clothes on another woman…I…It’s too soon for me.”

  And that’s what I did. I dried my hair and combed it and put on a green dress of hers that fit me perfectly. After one last look in the mirror, I opened the bathroom door and walked straight to the front door.