Liar

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  The father ate his breakfast bent over the op-ed pages. Then he moved on to the world weather forecast. Arieh Maimon was not someone who vacationed abroad. He was too occupied with his businesses. Perhaps that was why he loved the world forecast so much: all the continents were squeezed onto a small newspaper page, and one glance was enough to know that it was snowing on the Eiffel Tower now, and that the people walking on the streets of Tokyo were dripping with sweat. The ritual ended at 7:30 in the morning. Arieh Maimon folded the newspaper with precision, the same precision he demanded his soldiers use when folding their blankets for inspection. He showered, shaved, kissed his wife’s cheek on precisely the same spot every morning – and went out. The walls breathed a sigh of relief and stood at ease. His wife also seemed relieved. And Lavi stayed in bed a while longer because he hoped that maybe, miraculously, he would manage to fall back asleep. In the end he gave up, dressed and went out of his room. His mother looked up from her mobile phone and asked where he was going.

  “To the ice-cream parlour.”

  “First thing in the morning? That’s not healthy!”

  While his mother changed lovers with impressive frequency, she was totally faithful to her balanced diet. Twelve years earlier a popular dietician had devised a nutritional plan for her, and she had not deviated from it since, not even at moments of crisis. She was convinced that there was nothing like wheatgerm juice to give people the strength to face their day. She said that to her husband and her son at every opportunity, but they stayed with their respective coffee and chocolate milk, and she, through some sort of woman’s intuition, understood that their united front against her was the only place they could bond, and let them tease her about her juices to their hearts’ content. Now she mumbled something about sugar and empty calories, but Lavi shrugged and said he was going anyway.

  He was overjoyed to see her behind the counter. She was wearing a pretty green blouse, and her breasts moved shyly as she bent to pick up a paper napkin left on the floor. If only he knew the torment she had endured that morning until she found that shirt. She had tossed the entire contents of her wardrobe onto her bed, a rainbow of cotton and tricot. Pink accentuated her pimples. She’d worn blue to work the day before, purple to the interview. The yellow one made her look pale. The white one was transparent. If she didn’t make up her mind soon she’d miss the bus, but she still couldn’t decide. Finally she remembered Maya’s green blouse. The one she had never dared to try on. The neckline had always looked too deep to her. The style too unique. It was the sort of blouse that cried out to people on the street, “Look at me! Aren’t I stunning!” Yes, it was stunning, and though a stunning blouse needed a stunning girl to wear it, that morning Nofar summoned the courage to ask her sister for it.

  She thought about him all the way to the city, and never stopped to wonder why all the songs blaring out of the loudspeaker on the bus sounded so wonderful. Even the chatter between songs, which usually bored her, sounded remarkably musical that morning. When the bus finally reached its destination she hopped off, strode across the street and took her place behind the counter. During the entire two hours she waited for him to come, the passers-by outside were quite beautiful, the songs coming from the loudspeaker were quite good, and her chores were quite effortless. If someone had told Lavi that he had the power to do such great things – make passers-by beautiful, improve the quality of songs and turn floor-washing into a pleasant pastime – he would not have believed it. Just as Nofar would have burst out laughing if someone had told her she had the power to keep a boy awake at night. But it was precisely that shyness of theirs, that inability to imagine how much they affected each other, that made the highly anticipated encounter such a fiasco. Nofar looked away from a customer and saw Lavi, and instead of saying, “I thought about you all night,” or at least “Hi,” or “How are you?” she found herself reciting, in her usual tone, “And what can I get for you?”

  The roaring lion that had leapt down the stairs earlier could not utter a sound now. The ice-cream server, who had spoken so well in front of the cameras, looked at the black eyes of the boy standing in front of her and was rendered totally speechless. Like the time she had been walking down the main street and suddenly discovered that her wallet had been stolen, except that now it was her words that had been taken, leaving her not a single sentence to utter. Just as she had looked at the shop windows then, she looked now at all the things she could have said to him, had she been capable of speaking.

  Lavi Maimon could not bring himself to ask Nofar Shalev to be his girlfriend. She might say no. But a person lacking the courage to ask might very well discover that he has the courage to demand. The weakness expressed in a request is well hidden in a demand: when you ask someone for something, you are putting yourself in their hands, but when you demand something from them, you are crushing them in your own hands. Lavi, realizing he was unable to ask the girl for what he truly wanted, walked straight up to the counter and demanded that she meet him in the alley in exactly one hour.

  “Or else I’ll tell all.”

  Fifty-nine minutes began to tick by. Nofar looked at the clock and blushed. She had no idea what the boy would ask her for there, behind the refuse bins, in the wasteland between the fuel tanks and the toilet shed. The possibilities filled her head. He could demand money. Or a yearly supply of ice cream under the counter. He could… her eyes widened in terror – he could demand her! She had already seen a similar case in one of her series. That had ended in murder, she didn’t remember exactly whose, either the man doing the blackmailing or the woman being blackmailed. Anyway, it turned out later that the coffin was empty and the murdered man – or maybe the murdered woman – was still alive. Lavi Maimon wasn’t the least bit like the people in the series, but if he’d been brave enough to walk into the ice-cream parlour and blackmail her in the light of day, there was no telling what else he was capable of doing. That “no telling” stirred Nofar’s imagination, blurred her vision. Customers came and went, and she served them, but her mind was somewhere else, in a thousand different places. Her thoughts, like pizza-delivery boys on their motorbikes, reached the most remote streets.

  At 11:30 she left the counter and the cash register for a moment and hurried to the adjacent shop for a quick look in the mirror. The red-haired saleswoman was delighted to see her. The sales clerk with the soft eyes cried, “We saw you on TV!” and told Nofar she had nothing stuck between her teeth and complimented her on her ponytail. She had to be back in the ice-cream parlour in a few seconds, it was almost 11:45. Her knees were trembling and her throat dry, as they had been in the studio yesterday, only a hundred times worse. What if he demanded that she kiss him? What if he demanded that she fondle him? The poor girl was on the verge of tears, her breathing was laboured and the customers who knew her story whispered to each other: after all she’s been through, it’s only natural for her to be upset. She tried to remember what the girls in her class said when they gossiped in the bathroom. Last year she’d heard one of them complain about the salty taste as her girlfriends giggled. If that was true, she had to be prepared for the saltiness. To be on the safe side, she took a bottle of Coke out of the drinks fridge. On second thought she shoved a moist cleaning rag into her trouser pocket. The girls had said it was sticky, and she had quite a bit of experience with sticky things, after all, she’d spent the summer in the ice-cream parlour. But the saltiness worried her. She was afraid she wouldn’t like the taste. She was afraid he’d be insulted. But more than anything, she was afraid he would discover her secret, would realize that this was her first time tasting, touching, living beyond the boundaries of her own body.

  She spent the minutes fearing and dreading, and undoubtedly, if time were a more merciful master, it would have delayed its movement a bit. But the clock is an old bureaucrat, a grumpy clerk unwilling to deviate in the slightest from its routine – and so it happened that 12:00 arrived exactly at 12:00. Not a moment later.

  On the fourth
floor, Lavi sat on the windowsill, wanting to die. If he didn’t jump then, it was only because he felt bad for the girl, who would have to watch his pathetic body slam onto the ground. He had no need to look at his watch. He knew that 12:00 had already come and gone. The second hand was beating in his heart. He should have gone down to the alley a while ago but he couldn’t move. For a brief time after he left the ice-cream parlour he tasted the pleasure of the meeting in his mind, like a child licking an ice-cream cone. But before ten minutes had passed his limbs began to tremble with anxiety, as if the child had been forced to eat an entire carton of ice cream – there is a limit to the amount of sugar a body can digest. Lavi’s mother looked at his face and said, “I told you not to eat ice cream in the morning.” What could he tell her? That his tongue was choking him, not because of what it had tasted, but because of what it still might taste? Not knowing what to say, he was silent, and his mother was about to suggest making him a glass of wheatgerm juice when he turned his back on her and ran down the stairs.

  Nofar stood in the alley and bit her nails, a disgusting old habit that, unsurprisingly, had reappeared now. She stood there waiting for five full minutes. She had already used the time to sniff her armpits. Thank God, her deodorant was still doing its job. She undid her ponytail. Redid it again. Undid it again. She certainly would have tied and untied her hair a dozen more times if she hadn’t suddenly heard the sound of footsteps behind her. It was Lavi Maimon, almost wetting his pants, his fear so great that it drove away all desire. How sad that he was unable to ask simply if she was willing. Instead, he was forced to demand, to grab the girl by the shoulders and kiss her.

  A lively fish, wet and fluttering, in her mouth, sailing along her gums, its fins brushing against her teeth, paddling up and down and in circles, a pink, sweet-water fish, tickling the inside of Nofar’s mouth. So this is what it’s like to kiss, so different from what she had imagined, because over the years she had seen thousands of kisses on the TV screen, but no one learns how to swim through a correspondence course and no one can experience a kiss taking place on a screen. Only now, with the boy’s tongue in her mouth, with her tongue in his mouth, did she learn how strange it is, how wet it is. Perhaps that is the magic of such a moment: that throughout it they think about nothing else. Not about kisses they’ve seen on TV, not about their classmates’ groping. Other people’s lives – better, worthier, more exciting lives – no longer preoccupy them. Above them, on the second floor, a woman was hanging laundry. The socks dripped, and Nofar, her eyes closed, could almost believe it was raining. Beside the refuse bins, the pair of alley cats watched the drawn-out kiss in boredom. In the time it was taking, they could have finished copulating at least once.

  When Nofar returned to the ice-cream parlour it was buzzing with waiting customers. Most of them nodded patiently. Some who didn’t make the connection between the girl behind the counter and the subject of the latest media frenzy burst into loud complaint. Nofar apologized distractedly. She scooped coffee-cardamom ice cream into the cone of a customer who had asked for chocolate mint. She gave 100 shekels in change to someone who had handed her a fifty-shekel note. Six hours later she left the ice-cream parlour and stood at the bus stop. Two buses passed her by before she remembered to board one. And if her mother hadn’t said anything at dinner, she might have forgotten that tomorrow was the first day of her last year of school.

  9

  THE FIRST DAY OF HER LAST YEAR of school arrived. For the entire vacation, Nofar had feared that day. In previous years she had told herself that if nothing happened this school year, it would definitely happen next year: next year she would have a boyfriend. Next year she would skip classes to be with a happy-go-lucky crew of friends. But now there would be no “next year” at school. During the long summer-vacation nights she had lain on her bed watching teenage dramas. She saw lives full to bursting point, sweet nectar dripped from the girls’ laughter and the boys leant over them to lick it up. The boys who walked in the school corridors weren’t as handsome as those on the screen, but they too – she had no doubt – lived in the same hidden world whose doors were locked to her. If she didn’t find the key this last year of school, she would never enter it.

  On the first day of her last school year Nofar arrived at school at five minutes to eight. Groups of boys were gathered in the front courtyard. She just wanted to walk over to one of them. That’s what Maya always did. That’s what Shir finally managed to do. But she was neither Maya nor Shir, so she leant on the fence and buried herself in her phone, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

  “Are you okay?”

  Maya stopped beside her, her schoolbag over her shoulder. Only an hour ago they had tried on clothes together, but as usual, when they reached school, Maya was surrounded by her girlfriends and Nofar walked the last few metres of the pedestrian crossing alone. Now Maya had come back to stand next to her and Nofar nodded quickly, yes she was fine, and she was somewhat surprised when Maya leant over and gave her a long hug, the longest she had ever given her in or around school. A moment later Maya turned around and went inside, while Nofar remained standing in the yard. Again, she focused intently on her phone.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Michal and Liron arriving together. Instinctively, she recoiled until her back was pressed against the fence. Right before vacation began, during their last gym class, they had both made fun of how she looked in tights. Their voices dripping with venomous sweetness, a praline with a sharp knife inside it, they said: “Poor thing. You need to work on your thighs.” What they hadn’t said out loud, they whispered. Though she hadn’t heard, she shrivelled with humiliation, for that is the nature of whispers: it’s not the content that matters, but the choice to lower voices. When the whispers during gym class became too painful, Nofar mumbled an excuse and escaped to the lavatory, where she sat on the toilet, hands over her ears, curled up like those dust balls the cleaner sweeps up at the end of the day.

  A teenage girl who runs off to the farthest cubicle – what does she want? Not to be seen. An injured animal alone, hidden. No one there to smell the blood. But at the same time, a wish for the opposite burns inside her: for someone to comfort her. After all, the lavatory is the true heart of a school. That’s where the truants hide to wait for the best time to slip away, listening intently for the sound of teachers entering classrooms. Where teenage girls rid themselves of extra calories straight into the toilet. Where Mayan Speiser went down on Amitai Zabari one evening at the end of an extended school day, and where Inbar Shaked didn’t go down on Tamir Cochavi, even if the creep said she did. But most of all, a lavatory cubicle is a refuge for tear-filled eyes. Where girls can wipe away their tears and think about what to say. It’s where especially tortured souls can cut flesh with a box-cutter, the sharp, clear pain kind enough to dull what preceded it. During the last gym class in eleventh grade, Nofar had sat in a locked lavatory cubicle and waited for Shir to come looking for her. At first she had hidden only so that someone would find her. The minutes passed. The bell rang. And Nofar sat on the toilet-seat lid, praying that no one would come and see her crying, despairing when she realized that, in fact, no one was coming.

  “Hey, I saw you on TV yesterday.”

  In the two days that had passed since she saw her in the ice-cream parlour, Shir had managed to get a haircut. Her forehead was still covered with curls, but the back of her neck was exposed, and it was pretty. Now she ran her fingers along that nape, clearly not yet accustomed to it, and asked what it was like to be in front of the cameras. “Is it true that the presenters only wear their suit jackets for the camera, and all they have on under them are boxers?” Nofar said no. Shir looked disappointed. Nofar tried to think quickly of something else she could tell her so their conversation would continue, but with her new haircut Shir suddenly looked like someone else, as if the Shir that Nofar had known for ten years had simply vanished, been replaced by a new girl. Moran and Yotam were waiting for Shir at the far en
d of the schoolyard, and a moment later, when Nofar could find nothing to say, Shir said goodbye and joined them. The three of them nodded to Nofar and went inside, together, and Nofar thought – as always – about all the clever, interesting things she could have told them and didn’t. Idiot. She had stood there like a golem. And her head was already filling up with malicious whispers, not only about what she hadn’t said, but also about the way she stood and the way she dressed, about her big backside and her pimply face. But, fortunately, she suddenly heard a different kind of whisper, the boy’s whisper in her ear,

  Be here tomorrow at six. Or I’ll tell all.

  Those were the last words he’d said to her yesterday. They were with her when she rode home on the bus after her shift. They were with her when she brushed her teeth before going to bed. They were with her when she woke up in the morning long before the alarm. And even though her head, as usual, was filled with whispers of self-loathing, she nevertheless heard another voice, the voice of Lavi Maimon as he blackmailed her. He was putting the squeeze on her, and she had the feeling that it wasn’t just a metaphorical squeeze he wanted. And thinking about that made her smile. Smiles have a way of catching a person’s eye, like a red balloon gliding in the sky and drawing the glances of people below. A girl with cropped hair and a tattoo on her leg came up to Nofar and said, “That’s some smile you have.” Luckily, they immediately found a trendier subject to discuss: the girl’s new tattoo. She told Nofar that she hadn’t been able to decide on just the right one, and Nofar quickly assured her that the one she had chosen was perfect for her, but what exactly was it? Cropped Hair stuck out her chest proudly and replied, “Anarchy, in Japanese.”