The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

by D. A. Mishani

  Kobi hadn’t called since she left him in the apartment. And Mali hadn’t stopped thinking about the conversation with Harry and about Kobi’s plan to leave her with the girls and travel to Australia. Would something have changed if she had dared to speak to her father that evening? But what could she have said in front of the girls? That this time the collapse is too frightening? That Kobi is falling and that they’re falling together with him?

  Afterward, in the apartment, she found a letter on the dining room table, written on the back of an electric bill envelope. And even though it was two lines long and didn’t say much it gave rise to a bit of hope in her, because in it Kobi finally spoke. I’ll be back in the morning. Sorry about everything. Tomorrow I’ll explain to you what happened.

  The apartment wasn’t in disarray as she thought it would be when they returned to it, and Mali saw that Kobi tried straightening it up, especially the girls’ rooms. But Daniella, who never missed a thing, asked her, “Why did someone make a mess for me?” And Mali said, “I tried to arrange the closets but I wasn’t able to finish before work.” In their bedroom there were clothes and bedding scattered on the floor, but her clothes, which Kobi had removed from the closet, had been placed on the bed as if he had started to fold them and then gave up. The umbrella that she’d bought wasn’t discarded on the floor in the living room. He stood it up next to their bed as if he wanted Mali to see. Their luggage was in its place in the utility room on the roof, and when she saw it she was almost certain that Kobi hadn’t started packing for a trip when she surprised him around noon.

  She tried to get Daniella to bed without a shower but it took her time to fall asleep, and while Mali sat on her bed and caressed her thin arm they talked about Purim, and this conversation Mali wouldn’t ever forget. Daniella asked if she had to dress up and Mali said that she didn’t and then asked, “But why don’t you want to? Because we didn’t buy you a new costume? All your friends at day care will be dressing up,” and Daniella turned over in her bed and said to her, “Not because of that. Because I’m scared,” and a few days later, when Mali recalled her answer, it gave her the chills. That evening, of all times, no calming sounds came from outside: not the neighbors’ conversations and not the distant noise of buses running on the boulevard. Mali tried to smile when she asked, “Of what, my sweetie? Of costumes?” And Daniella was silent and after some time said, “Of princesses, mom.”

  Afterward Mali helped Noy with her homework in the living room, despite the late hour, and the math exercises relieved her because they caused her to think about other things. Maybe they weren’t yet disintegrating? Was that just another temporary fall? They’d had difficult periods since Eilat, and actually there were some like that even before then. They never spoke about a separation, but two years ago Mali did suggest to Kobi that they go to therapy, only this wasn’t a practical suggestion because there were things the two of them couldn’t say.

  When Noy asked to go to sleep, Mali ceased trying to extend the evening. She brought her to bed and when Noy asked her “Where’s Dad?” she said that he’d return in a bit because she was certain of this, despite the letter that he left. And until around midnight she was still hoping. She continued straightening up the house and tried Kobi one time on his phone and then went up to the roof as if there was a chance that he was hiding from her there. Harry lay in the utility room and next to him was a small puddle of vomit, and she filled the bowl with water and opened the door for him in order to air it out, but he didn’t want to leave.

  Only at midnight did she remove the key from the keyhole before changing clothes in the lit bedroom.

  This was a basic rule that Kobi was forbidden to break: it didn’t matter what was happening between them, he wouldn’t let her sleep alone. She lay in bed and tried thinking about the conversation with Daniella and about the pregnancy that she still hadn’t told anyone about, just not about the heavy hand. The fear was with her in the room despite the illuminated lights and the phone. She felt it there and didn’t close her eyes. She opened a window despite the cold wind, but the street was still silent and the fear didn’t leave. And her mistake was that she wanted to call Gila, because when she looked at the clock she saw that the time was almost one thirty. The same time. And then Mali could no longer control the fear, and it returned and placed its hand on her throat.

  That was her first trip alone since the girls were born, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go. Kobi encouraged her, because all branch managers were supposed to participate and on Thursday and Friday morning professional development sessions were being held for mortgage advisers and there’d even be an informal discussion with the board members. An opportunity not to be missed, he said. And he and the girls would have a good time at home.

  On Thursday morning she and her coworkers took off from Tel Aviv airfield and before ten got their rooms at the Royal Club Hotel on the beach. She was lucky because she got room 723, with a balcony looking out on the sea.

  The first day was long and ended with a dinner in the hotel’s dining room, after which she went out with her close friend Aviva and a few friends from other branches to a pub on the beach called Zorro. After this, when she was asked about it, she didn’t remember if there was a man at the pub who was staring at her. During the lectures that day and also the next morning she sat in one of the last rows in the conference hall, next to Eran Amrami from the Jerusalem branch, who worked with her at the Holon branch until two years ago. At the end of the second day, before Shabbat began, a celebratory meal was held in the events hall. Prizes were awarded to the outstanding employees, and speeches were given by board members. Those who kept Shabbat went up to their rooms, and everyone else continued to the dance party in the hotel’s discotheque, which was open to outside visitors. They received vouchers for drinks at the bar, and Mali drank two glasses of white wine. When she was asked at the police station if she felt that someone was looking at her during the party, she didn’t know what to answer. Most of the people at the discotheque were bank employees, some of whom she knew well and some of whom almost not at all, but there were others as well, tourists perhaps, though on that weekend at the beginning of March the hotel was not at full capacity. And there were also waiters and maids and janitors, men and women, but she didn’t remember anyone in particular, and everyone was interrogated. During the police investigation it became clear that a Swiss tourist, a forty-three-year-old man, was staying at the hotel, who left suddenly in the early hours of the morning, and the police asked her to look at the pictures of him that were taken from security videos, but she couldn’t say if that was him because the cameras were old and the pictures blurry. There were no cameras in the hotel hallways, in order to maintain the guests’ privacy, but the lobby and parking lot were under camera surveillance, and Mali spent hours looking at tapes, with no results. At the entrance to the hotel there was of course a security guard, but because the restaurants and the discotheque were open to visitors it was impossible to truly know who was coming and going, but based on text messages, and also from Aviva’s testimony, Mali went up to her room before one in the morning.

  Was he already in the room? Did he enter it when she was at the discotheque and lied in wait for her in the bathroom? Or maybe on the small balcony, hiding behind the heavy purple curtain? She didn’t check if the door to the balcony was locked before she lay down to sleep, and the female detective from the Eilat police who gathered her testimony thought that this was because she was drunk, but back then she simply wasn’t a person who checked if doors were locked.

  Perhaps you said to someone something inviting that you didn’t intend to say? You met someone at the club and it may be that you don’t remember? How can you be sure that you went up to the room alone or that you didn’t arrange with someone to meet him in the room if you drank?

  But she wasn’t drunk, not to the point of forgetting, and this was evident from the text messages that she sent to Kobi before laying down to sleep: I wasn’t outstand
ing this year. No employee-of-the-year award and no bonus. Are you already sleeping? Kobi sent her a message immediately: There’s no such thing, to me you’re always outstanding. We miss you. I’m watching a movie in bed. She turned on the television in order to see what he was watching.

  Did you go to the bathroom before you fell asleep? And you didn’t wash your face? You went to bed without removing your makeup? The policewoman asked her so many questions. And the next day there were indeed remnants of makeup on her face.

  On the television an episode of Friends was being broadcast that she’d seen countless times, and she watched it as she got into bed, in warm pajama pants and a long-sleeve shirt and not in the clothes that she wore to the party. And a short time after this she fell asleep, apparently, because the next thing she remembered was the hand.

  It came from out of the darkness and crushed her throat.

  Did she wake up a moment before she felt the weight of his hand on her neck and then the second hand on her mouth, only because it cut the air off, or because of its smell? The smell she remembered. A smell of beer and a smell of a body she didn’t know and a smell of sweaty cotton and a smell of soap. Mali recounted it to the detective, but she lost her patience and said that the smell wouldn’t help, that they needed a description of his facial features or physical build, but she couldn’t supply the detective with this due to the dark and because the assailant wore a ski mask over his face. He wore jeans, of this Mali was certain, and it seemed to her that his left shoulder was lower, or drooping, as if he had a curvature in his back. Through his weight she felt that he was thin and narrow.

  The other questions they asked her Mali didn’t understand, either. Not the questions about her family and about her relationship with Kobi and why he wasn’t with her in the hotel, and not the question about whether the rapist was violent. At the hospital they clearly saw signs of the ties around her elbows and ankles, and there was also the small cut he made on her neck, at the beginning, with a knife that seemed to her to have been a regular knife, for cutting vegetables, maybe not in order to truly injure her but rather so she’d understand that she was in life-threatening danger. When the policewoman insisted on asking again if he was violent throughout the time of the rape, Mali didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t remove the knife from her neck for even a second, but there were moments in which he wasn’t violent, or at least not only violent, perhaps mainly the moments in which she closed her eyes. The time at which everything occurred was known as well because right at the beginning she heard another ding from her cell phone, another text, which she only afterward saw was sent by Kobi: The movie’s over. Are you asleep?

  It was sent at 1:44 and she remembered that immediately after she heard the ding she again tried to plea with the assailant that he stop, but she didn’t succeed because of the cloth that he wrapped around her mouth, but nevertheless she didn’t stop trying to say to him, “Stop. Please stop. I’m begging you. I have two little girls. I have two little girls. I have two little girls.”

  Was he able to understand her at all? For some reason she thought about her father and Gila and especially about the girls, not about Kobi. “I have two little girls” was a sentence she grasped on to like a drowning person to a life preserver. She imagined her father looking at her and imagined herself running quickly when everything was over, running like she once ran, in high school, for miles without stopping. And there was also a moment when she did see Kobi in the room, and he was smiling at her as if he were trying to calm her. But when she wanted to call to him for help, he disappeared.

  In the end the assailant removed the ropes that he had tied around her hands and legs as well as the scarf that covered her mouth. He again placed his hand over her mouth as he said to her through the ski mask, in English, “I’m coming back. If you try to scream I’ll murder you,” and she heard him enter the bathroom and the faucet coming on. She couldn’t see a thing from the bed because the door to the bathroom was in the hallway, right next to the entrance to the room, and because of the darkness. So she waited. The television was still on, because she remembered that she heard a commercial. The policewoman didn’t understand why Mali didn’t scream at that moment or flee from the room, and Mali tried to explain to her that she didn’t know he was no longer there. She didn’t hear the door to the room closing because of the television and the running water, and only after a long time, perhaps an hour, did she dare to get up.

  The bathroom was empty, and the faucet was on.

  Her impulse was to call Kobi. Her phone was still next to the bed. But she first took off her pajamas and put on the clothes she wore that evening and went out into the illuminated hallway, and unlike what she thought, she didn’t run but instead walked slowly along the length of the hallway and went down a floor in the elevator, where she saw for the first time in the mirror her face and the cut bleeding on her neck.

  It wasn’t her.

  And the time was almost three when she knocked on Aviva’s door, room 606.

  The next morning Kobi was already there and she remembered him standing in the doorway at the hospital. She didn’t cry even one time before she saw him, but when he hugged her, without saying a word, the crying burst forth, wild and uncontrollable, and Kobi held her in his arms until the policewoman and doctor entered the room and asked him to leave. He refused and demanded to stay with her even when the policewoman insisted, and only when Mali asked him to go did he agree.

  Mali got up from her bed because it was clear she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. And walking relaxed her somehow. Her hands and legs weren’t tied together. And the living room was lit. She peeked through the blinds at the street with no traffic. Only parked cars. The cell phone was clenched in her fist. Suddenly she thought about his car. She hadn’t seen it since yesterday, and where could Kobi have gone without it? Her anger at Kobi came and went, but it was mixed up with a desire for him to return so that she wouldn’t be alone. She checked that the door was locked before entering the girls’ rooms. The windows in their rooms were shuttered, and from the stairwell, too, only silence came.

  Would it have been different if her attacker had been caught? During the first weeks, Mali didn’t want to know a thing about the investigation. She didn’t recognize herself, like during that first instant facing the mirror in the elevator. She didn’t understand who the woman was who couldn’t overcome the panic attacks that froze her in unexpected moments or couldn’t choke back the uncontrollable outbursts of crying. And in moments of silence she thought only about the girls, about what they were seeing.

  Kobi was wonderful then, better even than she could have imagined. She was still on leave and they were eating lunch together at home when he informed her that he quit his work. It wasn’t a perfect job; he never thought before this that he would be a security guard at clubs and construction sites, but the pay was reasonable and the work in shifts left him two and sometimes three open mornings a week on which he could continue looking for another job, or maybe even return to school. When she asked him not to rush to leave, he revealed to her that he had demanded not to do any more evening shifts but that the man in charge of his region wasn’t willing to hear it. They fell into a fight that almost ended in blows, and in the end Kobi quit. He didn’t tell the man responsible for the area why he didn’t want to do evening shifts, of course, because he didn’t tell anyone what had happened to her in Eilat. Not even friends. And certainly not the girls. Mali didn’t know what to tell them when she returned from Eilat, but Kobi was adamant that they couldn’t tell them a thing, and in the end they said that Mommy was sick with the flu and needed to rest, and Daniella and Noy stayed another two days with her parents. She still didn’t feel that she was back to herself when they returned home, and in the first weeks she had crying and panic attacks that she couldn’t control and hated herself for this, and Kobi took the care of them entirely onto himself. And despite her efforts to hide it, it seemed to Mali that Daniella, who was less than th
ree then, actually felt something. She stopped crying, as if she had matured all at once, and also cuddled with Mali much more and invented the affection game that the two of them had played since: Mali lies on the sofa in the living room, mainly in the afternoon, and Daniella strokes her hair for a long time, speaks in a whisper, and sings lullabies to her as if her mother were the baby daughter, and Mali pretends to be asleep.

  At the bank they knew everything, because of the circumstances of the assault and the extended leave she received, but no one spoke to her about this, other than Aviva. And Mali never spoke to her parents about what happened, either; she could only speak about it with Gila. Contact with the Eilat police dwindled, and every time Kobi called them in order to find out if there was anything new, they told him that the investigation was ongoing. Only in May, two months after the rape, did she think for the first time that the assailant was still free, and this sent her trembling. So they began sleeping with the lights on and locking the door even when they were home. In July she was urgently called to Eilat in order to participate in a lineup, even though she repeated to them that she hadn’t seen the attacker’s face, and among the black men who were placed before her at the station she didn’t see any with a drooping left shoulder. Because he spoke in English, the police were certain that the assailant was a foreign worker or an illegal refugee or perhaps the Swiss tourist, but she thought that the English could have also been a deceptive move and the detective agreed that this was a possibility. They tried calming her, telling her that her room in the hotel was chosen randomly because there was easy access to its balcony from the emergency staircase, and that fingerprints as well as two cigarette butts were found on it, the assailant apparently remained there during the time he was waiting. And only a year and a half after the rape did a different detective from the Eilat police call her and admit that the investigation was stuck. Then they were inclined to think that the assailant was the Swiss tourist and they managed to locate the cabdriver who took him from Eilat to Ben Gurion Airport, and the driver said that the passenger didn’t utter a word during the four-hour trip. But the man was questioned by the Swiss police and denied any ties to the attack and said that he returned to Switzerland because he received a message that his mother was sick, and the Swiss police believed him and refused to continue investigating. The pictures of the Swiss man that the detective sent her through e-mail in order for her to look at them another time didn’t help: he wore jeans in them, but his face could barely be seen and the deformity in his body wasn’t detectable. Most terrible of all was that a year and a half later she was no longer certain that she remembered things well, not the clothes he wore that evening, and not even his smell, which she thought would never dissipate. Only the face of the woman she saw in the mirror remained.