The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

by D. A. Mishani

  She tried not to think about what happened yesterday, but since the morning hours her fury with Kobi had grown more and more intense. Had he stayed alone on the roof all night? When she woke up, a bit after six, he wasn’t next to her. She had a feeling he wasn’t home, and when she passed through the apartment she discovered she was right. On the roof, next to the white plastic chair, she saw his empty coffee mug. “The Best Dad in the World.” She didn’t look for the gun, but it’s possible that it was no longer on the table in the utility room when she passed through it on her way downstairs. The door to the entrance again wasn’t locked.

  She didn’t know if she should look for him. And she didn’t call him, because he didn’t answer her even once yesterday. Before waking the girls she had a shower, and when she was getting dressed in the bedroom she heard the door to the apartment opening. A moment before this, when she stood facing the large mirror and watched herself while buttoning her shirt, she again felt that she was looking at another woman, like yesterday, and she closed the closet door. Kobi was in the kitchen. He stood before the table reading the paper.

  For a moment she had hope: perhaps during the night he decided it was premature to give up and was searching for work in the want ads? There couldn’t have been another reason, since Kobi never before went down to buy a paper in the morning. When she stopped behind him and said good morning, without touching him, she saw that he was reading an article about the murder that occurred in Holon. And that her “good morning” frightened him. He folded up the newspaper and left the kitchen with it after giving her a dry good-morning greeting in return. She didn’t read newspapers at home, either, but on the table in the kitchen there remained an issue of Israel Today and she opened it. In the first few pages there were only articles about the storm damage and pictures of flooded streets and snow in the Golan mountains. The article about the murder appeared on page sixteen, and in the center of it there was a picture of an old woman. Her name was Leah Yeger, and it seemed to Mali that she had encountered the name before, but she didn’t recognize the face that peered out at her from the newspaper.

  The woman was sixty years old and was murdered in her apartment on Krause Street in the afternoon hours. Her daughter found the body when she came to visit. And a gag order had been placed on the remaining details of the investigation.

  Mali prepared coffee just for herself and bowls of Corn Flakes for the girls. Kobi pretended to be sleeping, and when she entered the bedroom again she behaved as if he wasn’t there or as if the two of them were ghosts. The girls didn’t ask about him, as if the fact that there were days when they had no father went without saying. Before they left she nevertheless said aloud, “You remember that I’m working this afternoon and that you’re picking up today?” without checking that he was awake.

  Afterward there were the errands.

  This was her free morning, and she was forced to begin it at the post office. She waited more than twenty minutes in line before paying their property tax and the water and electric bills, which like always during the winter months had grown despite efforts to cut back. In front of her in line was a clerk from a law firm who was sending dozens of certified letters. The storm had weakened, but from time to time rain continued to fall. Before ten, when the stores at the mall opened, she went to Electronics in order to check prices on a dryer, but again had second thoughts at the last moment, because soon warmer days would be coming and it would be possible to manage without it. The nausea didn’t go away, and Mali hoped that it was tied to the pregnancy and not to the fear. She put off the call to the doctor.

  Even on regular days most of the errands fell on her, but in periods like this the load was unbearable. Kobi didn’t take the girls to day care or to school and didn’t pick them up, even though he was at home most of the time. He grew quiet and disappeared, and even when he spoke it wasn’t in order to offer her help. The clothes piled up in the laundry basket, the dishes in the sink, the refrigerator was emptied out a couple of days after she returned from shopping. And the apartment transformed from a place of refuge to a hostile environment. Kobi almost never went out, except for boxing, and his silent presence at home paralyzed everyone: her, the girls. Everyone moved more slowly, spoke quietly. Even the dog was dying without making a sound.

  “Mali, is that you? I can barely hear you.”

  When she heard Harry Bengtson’s voice she immediately felt that she was liable to burst out in tears, and she choked them back as she straightened herself in the chair and took out a bag of brown sugar from the copper dish. She said to him in English, “I hear you, Harry. Do you hear me? I’m not at home, I am in a café.” The waitress placed a mug with a latte before her and asked by moving her lips if she wanted something to eat, and Mali signaled no with her head. She assumed that Harry called in order to wish them a belated mazel tov on the anniversary, but this was a strange assumption since he hadn’t done that before and it was possible that he didn’t know when it fell. It seemed to her that he was a bit drunk, as he had been more than once when calling. “Is everything okay with Jacob?” he asked her in English. “I’m trying to get hold of him but can’t. His damn phone is always turned off. Why the hell does he have a phone if he has it off all the time?”

  Harry was the only one that still insisted on using Kobi’s full name, the sound of it catching her a little off guard each time. His voice was coarse and deep and hadn’t changed at all over the years. The first time they met she hadn’t understood a single word he’d said.

  “Yes, he’s okay,” Mali answered him in English. “It could be the battery died. Did you try calling him at home?” She didn’t know the last time Kobi had spoken with his father or what he had told him, and she imagined that he hadn’t told him a thing. Not about the firings and not about the loans and definitely not about the failed job interview. A few years ago she discovered that most of the things Kobi told his father about their lives were complete lies, even though Harry could have helped them if he had known the truth. Kobi decided not to say a word about Eilat to him, either, and she had no reason to object to this. She heard him ask, “Do you know why he tried calling me yesterday? I didn’t hear the phone and he left me a strange message. He said something about . . . Were you with him when he called me, Mali? Are you there?” When she answered him she lowered her voice because the man with the glasses continued to stare at her without hiding behind the newspaper. She said, “I’m here, Harry. I’m in a café. And I wasn’t with him when he called. He didn’t say what he wanted?” She did think it strange that Kobi called his father yesterday. They spoke on the phone three or four times a year, no more. Even when they went to visit him for the first time, Kobi didn’t let him know that he was bringing Mali with him.

  Harry was silent, as if he didn’t hear her, and because she was scared that he’d hang up before managing to tell her what Kobi said, she raised her voice when she asked him again, “Harry? He didn’t tell you what he wants?” And he said, “Mali, I’m still here.”

  The spontaneous trip to Australia changed their lives.

  Kobi and Mali had broken up while they were in the army, since it was hard keeping in touch long-distance and because Mali wanted to try out new relationships. In the first months of the relationship between them, at school, she was in love with Kobi, but his isolation already scared her back then. Gila received a draft exemption, worked in Tel Aviv, and switched boyfriends every two weeks. And the fact that Mali was stationed at an intelligence base in Shomron, full of men, created nonstop friction between her and Kobi. They mainly spent the weekend breaks arguing. He interrogated her about her relationships with the commanding officers and about the people she shared a room with. When he called the base and she wasn’t in the office, he got furious even once she explained to him that she had gone out for a run. She hesitated for weeks before telling him that she wanted to break up—and she knew why. Kobi simply refused to accept the breakup. He continued to call and write long letters. One Shabbat when
she remained at the base he even went to visit her parents and asked them to persuade her to give him another chance. But then he suddenly broke off contact, and for years they didn’t see each other, not even by chance. Mali heard stories about him from friends they had in common and sometimes he called on her birthday or the holidays, and they held a polite conversation, without revealing to each other what was really happening to them in their lives, in order not to cause any pain. And she was strict about not calling him, even when she wanted to, so as not to give him any hope.

  When they met one morning, by chance, in line at a health clinic—she had gone there because she had the flu, and he had some tests that were supposed to be done two days earlier—she didn’t think that they’d start going out again, because she had just been through a painful breakup with a guy who she met during her studies at a business college and who everyone thought she would marry. Kobi suggested that they meet up that evening for a drink and she agreed, and two days later they went to a movie. She was already a bank teller and still lived in her parents’ apartment, and Kobi rented a studio apartment close by. She told him openly how she discovered that her ex-boyfriend was cheating on her, but didn’t mention his name even once. Kobi said he was about to start working for Mossad after being accepted into a training course for agents, and that he first planned to travel to his father in Australia for a few weeks, and suddenly asked her if she wanted to join him.

  How many times had she thought about that moment since then?

  She wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but because of the breakup and since she hadn’t gone on the gap-year trip that everyone went on after the army, in the end she told him yes. Yet it wasn’t only those reasons but something in him as well—or perhaps in them actually. When they sat next to each other in the dark of the movie theater and his leg accidently touched her thigh, she recalled his soft, smooth body and the careful movements of his hands on hers. She decided she would be spontaneous, at least once in her life, and her parents supported her decision, perhaps because they feared she would wind up alone. Even her father didn’t oppose her traveling with Kobi and asked only if she’d be sleeping with him in the same room.

  What she knew about his father before they met was that he was a professor of botany, and thus she was surprised when she saw him. He was sixty years old then, maybe sixty-one. A large tan man with a white beard and a red bandanna wrapped around his head who waited shirtless for them in the house’s yard, watering the plants and feeding his two giant black dogs, Cerebus and Aortos. With no suit and no glasses. Only his clear eyes were Kobi’s eyes exactly.

  On their first day there he drank half a bottle of whiskey, after finishing a bottle of red wine during the meal, and despite this wasn’t drunk when he took them around the farm, which was located in the heart of a valley called Valley of the Giants, and a forest with the tallest trees she had ever seen in her life. Afterward, when they sat in the yard and Kobi went in to shower, Harry admitted that he didn’t know that Jacob would come with a girlfriend and asked her how long they’d been going out. She told him that they met in high school and broke up and met again just a few weeks earlier, by chance. When Harry asked her, “Did you two come to tell me you’re getting married?” she laughed because this hadn’t occurred to her until that very moment. She said to him, “For now no,” and Harry’s face was serious when he said, “Fantastic. So do you think something might happen between us or am I too old for you?”

  All this was so different from her parents’ house and from the life she knew up to then, and in fact afterward as well. And not only because of the large house and the barks of the dogs at night and the dense forests she went out to run in each morning, but also since Harry Bengtson was different from her father, who was short in stature and quiet and wouldn’t think of saying things like that to someone. Harry staring directly at her was embarrassing, but she tried to smile, and Harry himself smiled and said, “I’m kidding. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to him, even though I love dark-complected women. I’ve caused Jacob enough harm. And it appears to me that he feels good around you.”

  Kobi returned, and Harry became silent and then rose from his seat and wrapped his arms around his son’s shoulders. “How long haven’t I seen you, boy?” he asked, and it seemed to her that Kobi blushed and flinched while at the same time a smile of joy lit up his face as he was embraced by his father.

  Mali didn’t stop looking at the two of them during the four weeks they spent in Australia. In his father’s presence Kobi was shy and restrained, and Mali imagined that this is exactly how he was as a five- or eight- or ten-year-old boy, before he became a teen and decided to go to Israel by himself. Next to his father his shyness stuck out, as well as his gentleness. The hesitation struck when he stretched out his hand to caress her one evening, when just the two of them were on the hammock in the yard, as if after years he were asking permission to touch her. She moved her head closer to his hand because she was waiting for him to touch her. Something in Kobi’s body, in contrast to the bodies of other men who had touched her, was always close by and right and simple. And she saw that he had changed since high school, that he had lost self-confidence and walked like someone who was afraid to fall, but she thought that this would actually help him to not get hurt. They barely spoke about his father, but it seemed to her that Kobi admired Harry at the same time that something in his father scared him. During the week, Harry stayed in a small apartment by the university, and Mali and Kobi rented a car and traveled, so they didn’t spend much time with him, but from the conversations she did have with Harry it became clear to her that he knew almost nothing about his son. Kobi hadn’t told him what he dared to tell her when they met again: that his dream of getting accepted into an elite unit vanished when he fell during testing and that he hadn’t been accepted into an officers’ course and that after being released he began studying business management “in order to make the first million before the age of twenty-five,” but he was kicked out of school because he was accused, unjustly, of cheating on one of the tests.

  They spoke about his mother only once, when Mali saw her picture hanging up in his childhood room for the first time. Kobi told her that she had spoken Hebrew with him since he was a baby, mainly so she wouldn’t forget the language herself. She had been a poet and had hoped to teach literature at one of the colleges in Perth but never found work before dying of cancer that wasn’t diagnosed in time. Mali recalled the stories that were told about Kobi when he had arrived in Holon, about how his mother had gone crazy and killed herself after his father hospitalized her in a mental institution. She asked Kobi if he left Australia because his mother died, and he said no, that he left because he couldn’t stand the women who replaced her in his father’s bed. “But I also wanted to be a commando, remember? And I heard that the most beautiful women in the world are in Israel.”

  Inexplicably, it was actually when they returned from Australia that it became clear to her that at some point they’d get married.

  And since then they had seen Harry Bengtson three times in all.

  Two years after the visit to the farm he appeared at their wedding, even though he announced that there was no chance he’d come. He brought with him an Aboriginal woman, about their age, by the name of Lawanda, who was stocky and tall and didn’t speak a word the entire time she was in Israel. Three years after this he called one evening and said that he would be arriving the next week in order to see the granddaughter who had been born to him. And the last time, four years ago, when they traveled with the girls and spent the summer with him. And she did know that since Harry had a heart attack Kobi had been calling him more, but she didn’t know that he called him yesterday. Nor what message he left with him.

  Her sister, Gila, still hadn’t arrived at the café yet, and the man with the glasses wasn’t at his table, but his scarf was on the chair he had been sitting in. Mali again said to Harry, “I’m not at home right now, but did you try calling him there? I th
ink he’s at home,” and Harry coughed and asked, “Are you sure he’s okay? Because on the phone he didn’t sound so good to me.”

  Mali said, “I don’t know what you mean, Harry. What did he say on the message?” And then for the first time she heard about Kobi’s plan to leave.

  “He said something about coming for a visit. Next week or even before then. Do you know anything about this, Mali? And why not have all of you come?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Tried to remember if Kobi had spoken about a trip to Australia. They couldn’t travel together because she hadn’t asked for a vacation from work and the girls didn’t have a break from school until Passover, either, and in any case they didn’t have money for the plane tickets. And ever since Eilat Kobi hadn’t left her alone in the apartment for even one night. She said, “I don’t think we can come, Harry. Maybe he meant that we’ll come in the summer?” But Harry responded, “He said next week. Do you think he’ll come? And he cried on the message, Mali. Do you know why he was crying?”

  The crying that she had been choking back since yesterday morning stood in her throat, but she succeeded in controlling it. She rested the phone for a moment on her knees so that Harry wouldn’t hear. Afterward she said, “Harry, I can’t hear you. I’ll go back home and call you from there, okay?” And he said, “But don’t forget to call, Mali. I’m worried about him.” This was the first time she’d heard Harry speak about him like that.