The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything
Page 23
Her two hands were on the table, and when he placed his hands on them this time she didn’t pull them away. He didn’t understand how she knew that he started smoking again, and Marianka said, “You don’t need to be a detective for that, Avi. There wasn’t just a bloodstain on your sweater.”
Avraham asked her, “So if it gets too hard for you, will you really leave?” and she said, “Probably. Even though I don’t know to where.”
“Can I join you?”
“If you’re not in the middle of an investigation.”
Outside the café the chairs were already stacked up in a pile, but Avraham wasn’t yet ready to leave. Marianka suggested that they smoke a cigarette in the square.
“It’s true that I don’t want to think that I’m a chapter in your life,” he said to her when they sat on a bench, and Marianka asked him, “Why? What’s so bad about that?”
“Because I want to be the whole book. Until the happy ending. Or until the bitter end.”
“And you might be. But that’s what’s beautiful about books, no? That you can’t know in advance how they’ll end.”
“In a detective novel you actually always know,” he said.
The guilty one is caught. The innocent continue on with their lives.
“But our lives aren’t a detective novel, Avi,” she told him. “And besides, you explained to me that it’s always possible to prove that the detective is wrong, so maybe even a detective novel doesn’t really end. Do you remember you told me that the day we met? On our first walk together in Brussels? Would you have believed it if I said to you that a year later we’d be living together?”
He recalled this conversation at the café the last time that he waited in front of the building where Mazal and Yaakov Bengtson lived, a few weeks later, on the last day of March.
He saw Mazal Bengtson a few times before then, mainly when she went out alone to run in the evening, but he didn’t dare approach and didn’t know exactly what to ask. That same day Esty Vahaba told him that Bengtson returned to work and asked her father to vacate the apartment and leave her alone with the girls, and Avraham thought that this would be a chance to go up to her and knock on the door without any advance notice. He parked his car and remained in front of the building almost half an hour, and as he had done a few times in the weeks that had passed, he took advantage of the time in order to call Ilana Lis, and this time someone actually answered. But it was her husband who answered the phone instead of her and informed him that Ilana wouldn’t be able to talk soon, and when he asked Avraham if he wanted to leave a message, he said it wasn’t necessary.
The time was six o’clock and evening hadn’t yet fallen because the days were getting longer.
And it was only when he turned on the car and intended to drive off that he saw her. Mazal Bengtson exited the stairwell with the two girls and crossed the street with them, not very far from him. One of the girls held the leash of the white dog that he saw back then in the apartment. Did they notice him? And was he wrong when it seemed to him that her stomach curved out under the short shirt that she wore? He turned off the car and then remembered the things that Marianka said to him in the café, and waited for them to walk away before turning it on and leaving.
His thoughts and imagination were occupied by cases that he neglected during the murder investigation and cases that had been opened since then, but the picture of Leah Yeger was still on his desk, among them, for a few more days in April, and the heavy blue coat that he wore on the day when the investigation opened and on the morning when he greeted Mazal Bengtson at the station remained on the door, unused, because the storm was a receding memory, and spring flooded his office with light.
Epilogue
After he fell asleep she left the bedroom and went to the study to call her parents. She hoped that her mother would answer, but when she heard her father’s voice she was glad. For a few seconds they were silent, and then Marianka said to him, “I called in order to apologize. That we said good-bye like that.” And he said, “That’s okay. We forgive you. And we tried calling you a few times since then.” When she asked him if she woke him up and he said no, she suddenly felt how much she missed listening to herself speak their language, her language, and how life in English draws strange words out of her mouth.
“I’m sorry if we were—” he said, and she cut him off and said to him, “Yes. I know. You were.”
There was in her a flood of love and anger and longing that had been stopped up in the last days that passed wordlessly, and the conversation with Avi in the café freed her up all at once. She didn’t know what her father was able to hear of all this in her voice, because he was never able to hear anything. He said, “But I truly don’t understand what’s keeping you there, Marianka. He—” and Marianka again interrupted his words and said, “Nothing’s keeping me here. And if something’s keeping me it’s not him. And what do you know about him? Did you try to get to know him when you were here? From the first moment that you heard about him you were frightened that he would take me from you, like you were always afraid when I met someone.”
She spoke much too loudly, but Avi was sound asleep. He fell asleep immediately after getting into bed, and she could still hear his deep breaths that as the night progressed would turn into snoring. Her father was silent and this made her happy because it meant he was listening, but also saddened her because she hoped they would talk some more. She apologized for interrupting, and he said that they’re thinking about what’s best for her, and he didn’t even once say that he simply misses her. When he asked if the murder investigation had ended and she said yes, her father said, “So perhaps now you two will come to visit us?” And when she went out to the street afterward she thought about the two of them in Brussels, walking in the snow that perhaps would fall, because there the winter wasn’t over. She sat for a moment or two opposite the computer in the study, considered writing an e-mail, or something else, a letter to Avi perhaps, or even a detective story, why not, but she was too worked up to write, and for the first time since arriving she went out alone at night as she had done when she was a girl in Koper and afterward in Brussels.
The blast of cold that she was expecting when she went out to the street didn’t come. The dry, dusty air cast a strange foreignness upon her. The streets of Holon were empty and most of the buildings dark, and Marianka didn’t in fact know where she was going. Nor if all this wasn’t a mistake—or the start of an adventure.
About the Author
D. A. Mishani is an Israeli crime writer, translator, and literary scholar who specializes in the history of detective fiction. His detective series featuring police inspector Avraham Avraham was first published in Hebrew in 2011 and has been translated into fifteen languages. The first novel in the series, The Missing File, was short-listed for the 2013 CWA International Dagger Award, and won the Martin Beck Award for the best-translated crime novel and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. His second novel, A Possibility of Violence, won the prestigious Bernstein Award for best Hebrew novel.
He lives with his wife and two children in Tel Aviv.
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Also by D. A. Mishani
A Possibility of Violence
The Missing File
Copyright
the man who wanted to know everything. Copyright © 2016 by Dror Mishani. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Originally published as Ha-ish sheratsah leda’at hakol in Israel in 20
15 by Achuzat Bayit.
Translation copyright 2016 by Todd Hasak-Lowy.
First Harper Perennial paperback published 2016.
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780062447913
ISBN 978–0–06–244790–6
16 17 18 19 20 rrd 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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