The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  She remained lying on her side, feeling that something of Rafael was still inside her. But he was far away now, lying on Laila. His arm reached back and felt for Adela, and they both motioned for her to come closer. She did not. She pulled the sheet over her cool body and stared at the wall. Close to her, Laila swallowed a scream. Her lips clung to Rafael’s and made sucking sounds, and Adela plugged her ears with her fingers. When the kiss ended and their lips sought out other places, Adela turned to watch them with great attention and concentration. Her fingers hovered above their bodies for a moment, tracing an imaginary line in the air, and her lips made a very faint whistle that she thought only she could hear, but Laila turned and smiled at her, her face twisted in pain.

  Their two bodies moved together in the darkness. Adela thought about Laila and Rafael’s first meeting in Lebanon, even before she herself had met Rafael. Her breaths were heavy now, the sweat that had covered her chest and shoulders had evaporated, and she closed herself up and finally reached the barren, faraway places. But suddenly Laila screamed, as though someone had died in her arms, and Adela opened her eyes just in time to see Rafael pulling away quickly from Laila. He shifted his body onto Adela and gently spread her thighs, which the sheet had fallen off. He held her for one more moment, she felt him inside her again, and after a few breaths he let out a final, desperate sigh, and collapsed wearily.

  The room was quiet. Adela pushed Rafael off and he fell heavily on the mattress. Laila stared at the ceiling, her fingers mussing her damp black hair. Adela felt a pain between her legs and wanted to get up. Rafael lay on his stomach between the two women, one arm spread out on Adela’s body and the other on Laila’s thigh. His rapid breaths gradually slowed, until the only sounds in the room were the ticking clock and the curtain rustling against the open window.

  * * *

  They spent the next morning together as well, lying in bed in each other’s arms.

  At midday, Adela slipped away from the room and disappeared. After about an hour, Rafael went out to look for her. He searched in the café, in the garden, on the beach. He asked the newspaper seller if he’d seen her. No one knew where she was. Finally he decided to go back and wait for her in their room.

  She did not return until the early evening, and she looked distracted and secretive. They did not scold her or even confess to having been worried. Laila put her lips on Adela’s neck and kissed her. Then she looked into her eyes for a long time. Adela said to herself: Remember that face and that look. Her chest was crushed with pain but also with a certain relief. Rafael looked at his wife, opened his mouth to say something, but sighed and kept quiet. Afterward he lay down to rest, and the two women quietly left the room.

  They walked along the street. Adela’s steps were brisk, and Laila had trouble keeping up. Finally they found a stone bench hidden among cypress and pine trees. They sat down close together, with Laila’s hand on Adela’s lap. Adela took a small box out of her bag and gave it to Laila.

  “What is this?” Laila asked, although she knew.

  “It’s the blue diamond. I’m giving it to you.”

  “Do you want me to keep it for you?”

  “Yes.” There was a bitter taste in Adela’s mouth.

  “Until when?”

  “Until we meet again.”

  “All right,” Laila said after a pause.

  They kept sitting for a while, then got up and left. There was a stubborn silence between them all the way back to the hotel.

  When it was time for Laila and Suad to leave Aley, Laila was pregnant.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE RETURN

  1

  AMIRAM KADOSH SPENT MONTHS supervising the renovation plans for the building on Plonit Alley. After the internal walls were knocked down and the space redivided into new rooms, it would be time for the interior design: Damascene rugs on the floors, as long as the decorator confirmed that they matched the hotel’s “décor language”; a white grand piano set out in the lobby; rocking chairs in some rooms and in others ornate leather armchairs. All the rooms would have shelves with design and art books in English, French, and Russian.

  Kadosh had studied the reports that appeared regularly in the financial sections of the newspapers about the flourishing boutique hotel scene in Tel Aviv. He was informed that there were four or five such hotels in the city, with no fewer than seven new ones in the works. He learned that it was easier and cheaper to convert an existing structure into a hotel than to build one from the ground up. The hotel owners interviewed in the articles said that opening a boutique hotel required an investment of a few million dollars, which they estimated would be recouped within fifteen or twenty years, perhaps less. (“God willing, and Ahmadinejad also,” said one of the hoteliers, “we’ll be ahead of schedule.”)

  “The main idea,” Amiram Kadosh told anyone who would listen, “is to build customized units that are each different. The guests have to feel like they’re spending a few days in someone else’s home. It should feel like a real apartment, not a hotel. A home away from home.” He was optimistic about the project: “The location is ideal, a ten-minute walk from the beach, five minutes from Dizengoff Center, close to the trendy streets like Shenkin and Rothschild. It’s the beating heart of Tel Aviv, but it’s also a quiet alleyway with a village feel. The building is from the early 1930s, and it represents the epitome of Tel Aviv architecture.”

  He went on to describe the luxurious wall hangings, the art in the rooms, the exhibition space in the lobby, the flat-screen televisions, the flower arrangements that would be replaced daily, the urban landscape viewed from the windows, the mirrors flown in especially from New York and Tokyo, the bar and restaurant and, of course, the jewelry shop.

  He had a plan, Amiram Kadosh.

  To set himself apart from all the other boutique hotels popping up in the city, he knew he needed something unique. He thought and thought, and finally found it: jewelry. He would retain the jewelry shop on the ground floor of the hotel, but it wouldn’t be Menashe Salomon’s shop — not that claustrophobic little space with the elderly fixture of a jeweler, the very mention of whose name aroused unpleasant feelings in Kadosh. No. That shop would have to be destroyed and a replacement built from scratch. A new beginning. Kadosh suffered from no pangs of conscience on this point. Had Menashe Salomon invented the concept of an artisan’s workshop that was also a store? Of course not. Would he not be adequately compensated for vacating the premises? He would. Probably.

  Either way, his plan was ambitious: He was going to display a large diamond in the shop window, but not just any diamond. A famous one. Perhaps one that had belonged to a Japanese emperor or the queen of England or some glorious sultan. People would come from all over the world to see his diamond. They would make pilgrimages from New York and Moscow and Tokyo. It would be the first boutique hotel in the world that tourists came especially to see.

  But the day before the renovations began, when he was perched on a ladder to reach the top shelf of the closet in his apartment, Amiram Kadosh felt a sharp pain in his chest. He’d been suffering from various aches and pains for days but had assumed it was from the stress. He lay down in bed, and the pain spread to his shoulders and neck. His head felt dizzy. He thought his left arm was starting to hurt, too, and he was sweating — from pain or panic. The sweat, in any case, was real, and it felt unpleasant. He opened the drawer next to his bed with his right hand and took out a box of aspirin, chewed one tablet, as he had once read one should do, and phoned his daughter.

  Ayelet said she was calling an ambulance immediately, and a few minutes later she arrived at her father’s home in a taxi. She met the paramedics outside the building and led them to the apartment. They found Kadosh lying in bed, groaning. A minute later they carried him out on a stretcher, and on the way to the hospital Ayelet held her father’s hand and called her brother.

  Honi rushed to the hospital and found Ayelet standing alone in the hallway while a doctor examined Kadosh behind a
curtain. They felt their mother’s absence now more than they ever had before. They had to do everything on their own: talk to the doctors, make decisions, sign papers, and wait. At night, after a cardiac catheterization, they sat next to their father in his hospital room. Every so often Kadosh opened his eyes and looked silently at his children. He was clearly distressed to find himself in a strange white bed, in a place that did not obey the rules of day and night. His fingers were warm, as always, and he squeezed his daughter’s hand even when he seemed to be asleep. They spent the night that way. A week later, he was sent home.

  A few days after the discharge, Ayelet managed to persuade Kadosh to see a renowned Arab cardiologist who treated patients with hypnosis. There was a very long waiting list to see this doctor, but Ayelet sweet-talked one of his secretaries, who was a regular at the Shack, and managed to get him an appointment. Kadosh told his daughter he didn’t believe in all that stuff, but eventually he gave in to her nagging.

  The cardiologist seemed to work miracles on the stubborn Kadosh, and he soon began to get better. After a few weeks, for the first time in his life, he bought a gym membership. Upon Ayelet’s advice, he postponed the renovations at the building until he was fully recovered. One day at the gym, Kadosh met a psychologist, originally from Montevideo, who was roughly his age and was also a recent widow. They started going out, and after a while they adopted the custom of walking along the beach almost every evening, from the defunct Dolphinarium nightclub all the way south to Andromeda’s Rock, and on to the newly revived Jaffa port. They surveyed the construction progress on the boardwalk, which was being extended as far south as Bat Yam. Then they climbed the steps to the Maronite neighborhood and wandered among the glorious houses on Ha’Tzedef and Ha’Shachaf Streets. Finally, they strolled down Sha’arei Nikanor Street to Yefet Street, and back to their car up north.

  While they wandered around Jaffa, Kadosh started to think about buying a house there. He liked the neighborhood, and felt comfortable there, and he knew Ayelet and Honi would be happy if he had a house in Jaffa by the sea. He told no one of this plan, not even his new girlfriend.

  Every day, he visited Ayelet at the Shack and revived himself with a nourishing smoothie. One afternoon, he became an accidental witness to a conversation between Ayelet and Honi. It was in the early afternoon, and not a single customer was at the Shack at the time. The two siblings sat chatting on barstools, with their backs to the doorway. Before Ayelet noticed her father and turned to greet him, Kadosh had time to overhear a few things that sounded very strange to him.

  His children were discussing a young Arab man whom they called ‘diamond20.’ Honi told his sister he had met this diamond20 online. From the snatches he overheard, Kadosh learned about a night that his son and diamond20 had spent together, and about a certain blue diamond.

  “What language did you talk to him in?” Ayelet asked. “Does he even speak English?”

  “Better than you do,” Honi answered in a slightly insulted tone.

  Kadosh felt awkward and wanted to leave, but he pulled himself together and was suddenly overcome by an inexplicable sense of closeness to his son, for perhaps the first time since he’d been born.

  When Honi noticed his father, he looked down and seemed very embarrassed. But something about Kadosh, perhaps the change that had occurred in him since the heart attack and the new girlfriend — whose presence in his life softened his usual toughness — encouraged Honi to talk with his father for the first time since childhood without feeling alienated. He glanced at his sister and briefly considered letting Kadosh in on his experience of the past few days. But he didn’t dare.

  Ayelet went behind the counter to make her father’s regular smoothie. She served him the drink and kissed him on his warm forehead. After a few moments of silence, Honi plucked up the courage to come out to his father: He told him, quite simply, that he was attracted to men. Privately, Kadosh wondered if Honi had told his mother when she was alive, but decided he had not. She would have told him. He stirred his smoothie and calmly took a few sips, but his eyes were burning. Although he still felt this new closeness to his son, as if out of habit he blamed himself for what he had just heard. He thought back to all the drama classes and flute classes they’d sent Honi to, and wondered if he should regret not having insisted on something more masculine, like soccer. His thoughts kept wandering, and now he felt a certain embarrassment when he remembered Honi’s attraction to the family’s Damascus stories, which contained neither heroism nor courage nor a firm grip on reality. He asked himself where he’d gone wrong. And he knew the answer: He’d always been wrong. The fragments he’d picked up from Honi’s story came back to torture his thoughts at night. Who was this man, diamond20?

  2

  The apartment was immersed in the darkness of dusk. Outside, the days were growing shorter. Achlama — the kitten I’d adopted a few days earlier — stood on the table holding up a hesitant paw and gauged my mood. I smiled at her, but she hopped off the table and leapt onto the two bodies sprawled on the sofa. Honi opened his eyes, which were bleary from his siesta.

  “Do you think we’re crazy, Honi?” I whispered.

  “Crazy? Why?” He watched Achlama getting tangled up in the blanket.

  “I don’t know. Don’t you care what people say about us?”

  “Not really. But ask Fareed. Actually, don’t, he’s sleeping like a baby.”

  “It’s been two hours already. Don’t you think we should wake him?”

  “You do it.”

  “I don’t have the heart to.”

  “Well, he worked hard today…”

  “Look at him sleeping. See how he folds his wrists, just like a cat,” I observed. “Speaking of which, how’s your dad?”

  Honi sat up straight and started playing with his hair. “Seems like he’s completely recovered. A new man. Did I tell you he went to a hypnotist? Some Arab cardiologist. Anyway, I know I shouldn’t say this, but if you ask me, this whole heart attack did him a world of good. You know what they say about this kind of thing: It’s an opportunity to turn over a new leaf in life.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, and get this — Kadosh is moving to Jaffa! He just told me yesterday.”

  “Why’s he moving to Jaffa?

  “I don’t know. He’s got this thing about the port. It’s all because of his new girlfriend, you know, the therapist. He wants to buy a house on Sha’arei Nikanor.”

  “So Fareed and Kadosh will be neighbors. How convenient.”

  “Yes, exactly. And that’s not all. I’m not sure how to tell you this…I think my dad overheard a conversation I had with Ayelet.”

  “A conversation about what?”

  “About us.”

  “What do you mean, us?”

  “Us. The three of us.”

  “Wait a minute, you told Ayelet?!”

  “Tomi, you know I don’t keep secrets from my sister.”

  “What can I tell you, Hanan…You’re something else.”

  “Well, it’s not like your family, where everything’s all a big secret.”

  “What do you expect? My parents were in the security service. They met when they were working for the Shabak.”

  “The forces of darkness.”

  “Exactly. You come from warm people, Honi. Everyone in your family is always in each other’s business. Still, I can’t believe you told Ayelet about us!”

  “Calm down, Tom, it’s not a big deal, she’s cool. But what if Kadosh heard everything?”

  “He’d never understand this, don’t worry, he’s too limited.”

  “Hey, don’t talk like that about my dad!”

  “Excuse me, honey. I forgot that you’re not allowed to criticize first-degree relatives with you people.” I gestured at Fareed. “Is he waking up?”

  “No, just grinding his teeth.” Honi picked up Fareed’s cigarettes from the table. “What do you think’s going to happen to him?” He lit a cigarette. “How is this
whole Israel chapter going to end?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Give it a try.”

  “God knows, Honi. So what do you say, what about my uncle? Is your dad going to let him go back after the renovations?”

  “That’s not the point now, Tomi. You can’t change the subject every time I bring up this guy who came into our lives.”

  “I’m not changing the subject. I mean, it’s all connected.”

  “You sure as hell are changing it. Every time you have trouble dealing with something, you reroute the conversation to my sensitive spots. It’s time to grow up.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration, Honi. May I just remind you that when I was shaving, you were still playing with Transformers.”

  “I’m sure you mean Biker Mice from Mars.”

  “Whatever, honey. Now come over and give me a kiss, here.”

  “Seriously, do you really think this story is going to come to an end?” Honi crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “I don’t know. I think Fareed’s done everything he came here for: He saw Jaffa, he went into his grandparents’ house, he even reenacted his grandmother’s love life!”

  “That’s awesome, but what about us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s going to happen with us after he leaves?”

  “Our lives will go on,” I said. “Just like they did before we met diamond20.”

  “I find that difficult to imagine. I know it’s hardly been two weeks since we met him, but it all happened so fast that I can’t even think about ourselves without him.”