When the truck vanished from sight, he breathed a sigh of relief. For a long while, he stood in the middle of the street as if paralysed. He sometimes experienced such attacks of immobility. He stood somewhere unable and unwilling to move. In the adjacent all-night convenience store a small TV broadcast the morning talk show, and he suddenly recognized the face of the girl speaking to him. There she was, sitting on the designer couch, her sweet face remarkably serious. But the longer he watched her replying to the presenter’s questions, the more surprised he was by the change in her. Her freckles had disappeared under the make-up. Her entire appearance bespoke confidence. Where was the fragile young girl he had sworn to protect? That evening in the alley, she had been so helpless and sad. Now, as he looked at her on the TV screen in the convenience store, he could barely recognize her. When he saw her then, she was exactly like him, pathetic and invisible. And now everyone was looking at her, everyone was listening to her. He detected a jaded arrogance in her eyes, a look he hated so much in café customers. His affection for her grew cooler from minute to minute, and when the interview was over he grimaced with distaste and decided that first thing in the morning he would go to the police station.
19
LAVI AND NOFAR QUICKLY DISCOVERED that their secret wasn’t the only thing that bound them together. Their similarities were truly amazing: both hated olives. Both despised red peppers. Both knew that superstition was ridiculous, but they preferred to keep their distance from black cats, and both agreed that if they had cancer, they would try all the drugs in the world because there was nothing to be afraid of any more. When they talked about what they would take from their homes if they were burning down, they found their first difference: Lavi said he would go back inside to take his computer, while Nofar said she would go back for her notebook. “What notebook?” he asked, because with all due respect to homework, he wouldn’t run into any burning house to get school assignments. Blushing slightly, Nofar said, “My notebook,” and her embarrassment was downy and delicate, crying out to be stroked. Lavi sat down, too bashful to reach out, but he did try to soften his reply, saying that, for sure, if he had that kind of notebook he would certainly choose it over a computer. Hearing those words, Nofar’s eyes lit up as if it weren’t theoretical burning houses they were discussing, but a real fire that demanded an urgent decision.
There were other similarities: both knew the best thing to take to a desert island was a TV set. They both agreed that if a goldfish gave you three wishes, one of them would definitely be to fly. They had both been equally upset a year earlier, the day of their national composition exam, when they were asked to write about what they did on their last summer vacation. Their classmates wrote enthusiastically, bent over the pages, and Lavi and Nofar watched them surreptitiously. If only it were possible, the way it was in a maths test, to sneak a look at what the kid on your right was writing and copy the correct answer. Because what were they supposed to write? That they spent entire nights staring at princesses astride dragons? That they spent days watching a detective solve mysteries?
“So what did you do?” she asked.
“I decided to write as if I was Ido Tal.”
“Who’s Ido Tal?”
The first guy to have a motorcycle. The first to replace computerized breasts with real ones, and the first to tell everyone all about it, two months before the event actually took place. Everyone knew that Ido Tal lost his virginity in the ninth grade, which had made it much easier to actually lose it in the middle of the tenth grade. Ido Tal was the sort of person who doesn’t bother to uproot stray rumours that grow in their yards, on the contrary, they let them grow wild. That way, the rumours thrived, put down roots, blossomed and trailed around Ido Tal’s feet, lending him an air of importance and superiority. They raised him to the sky, because after everyone whispered that he was going to be a pilot, he had no choice but to be accepted into the pilot training course.
“And you answered the question of what you did last summer as if you were Ido Tal?”
Lavi shrugged. What choice did he have? He couldn’t fail the exam, and if he’d really tried to describe what he did over the summer vacation he would have had to hand in an empty page, with the enter icon in the middle of it.
“And what mark did you get?”
“Seventy.” It hadn’t surprised him, he knew he didn’t write very well. What did bother him was the way the teacher looked at him when she returned the composition to him, a slight wrinkle in her forehead. She often had that wrinkle when she looked at him. His composition teacher thought he was a pretty strange boy.
“But you really are a pretty strange boy.” He considered taking offence, but something in the way she said the word “strange” stopped him. As if it wasn’t a bad word. As if she had said, “You really do have brown eyes,” or “You really are one metre sixty.”
“Besides,” she added, “if there’s something strange, it’s those composition teachers who are always asking you what you did last summer. It just turns them on to hear who kissed whom.”
They laughed out loud, and a bit too much, because the words “turns them on” glowed in the alley like fireflies. She told him about her composition teacher, Sigal, who very clearly wanted be in high school herself. That’s why she wore those stupid tight jeans, and that’s why she always stayed during breaks and asked who was going out with whom. Once, when they were all complaining about homework, she said, “Someday you’re going to miss the homework and the age you are now.”
“Do you get it? To miss being seventeen? If I could press a button that would send me to any other age, I would’ve pressed it a long time ago. I don’t even care very much where it sends me.”
Lavi almost told her that he wouldn’t want to be sent anywhere else. He would choose to stay right here, where they were now: squeezed together on the second step in the alley, his back pressing uncomfortably against the third step, his hands sweating in the pockets of his sweatshirt from the mere possibility. But he didn’t say anything, and when Nofar asked him what he would choose, a time machine that sent him into the future or one that returned him to whatever time he wanted, he didn’t say, “I want to stay here.” Instead he said, “To the future. That’s where the best weapons are.” She said that was a stupid answer, and he said he would forgive her only because she was a girl, and girls don’t understand anything. Then she did the most wonderful thing she ever could have done: she hit him. Not really, nothing that actually hurt. She struck him the way girls in her grade always hit the good-looking boys when they annoyed them, a blow – a giggle – a blow, and he defended himself the way she had seen those boys defend themselves: he grabbed her hands so she couldn’t keep hitting him, felt her wrist twisting to get free of his grasp, felt her hair dance on his nose and chin as she swung her head from side to side in a show of anger. He felt it for another moment, and then released her suddenly, letting her tickle and hit him with her lovely, broad hands on his chest, which was about to burst.
20
A SHORT TIME AFTER NOFAR had begun visiting the alley, her parents began to complain about not seeing her in the evenings. In truth, the days had become an annoyance that Nofar had to endure in order to finally reach the evening, when she went out into the alley. Only the embarrassment cast a shadow on the sweetness of the meetings: every time Nofar came into the ice-cream parlour, her body concealed another obstacle. There was the day she couldn’t stop trembling. The suspense and the excitement tortured her poor limbs, causing them to move constantly, as one thought tormented her – how strange she must appear to him. She was so preoccupied with that strangeness that she didn’t notice that Lavi himself was trembling. It’s amazing how two people can meet without really seeing each other at all, and if geometry does not recognize that two parallel lines can intersect, it’s only because mathematicians do not visit enough alleys. When her limbs finally stopped shaking, her underarms began perspiring. No matter how much she sprayed them at home, the moment she s
aw him, two semicircles began smiling on her sleeves, and it was so embarrassing that she didn’t dare move her arms, afraid he might see the humiliating stains. But worst of all was that dampness between her legs. She was terrified that she had wet herself. When she returned home she bent over to smell her briefs. She didn’t smell anything, and, despite her relief, she was only more confused. She didn’t want to ask her mother, she wanted to ask Maya but didn’t dare. She typed “dampness on briefs” on her computer and with a single click was bombarded by such terrifying pictures that she didn’t touch her computer for two days. The answer was hidden there, she had no doubt about it, but the thought of searching for it again depressed her. She kept thinking about the only line she had managed to read: “Touching yourself in order to know what feels good.” But she didn’t entirely know where to touch, she was too embarrassed, and perhaps that was why no time seemed right, because during the day the house was filled with activity and noise, and in the evening someone in the family might open her door at any moment, and, yes, she could lock it, but she might as well hang out a sign that said, “Something is going on here!”
Until one evening, on an impulse, she went up to the roof. A few years had passed since she and Maya used to go up there together at night with mattresses and, lying on their backs, looked at the moon and talked about things she no longer remembered, but which at the time were the most important things in the world. Now Maya did her important things with her girlfriends. Nofar put her mattress on the dark roof. From that hidden corner you couldn’t see the neighbours’ apartments or the glow of the street lights. Here there was only one glowing moon, dripping silver milk. She lay on her back, her body stretched out on the mattress as her hands wandered over the rough sheets of tar paper. She lifted her nightgown, the one that had oranges printed on it. After a moment’s hesitation, she took off the high-waist cotton briefs her mother bought in the supermarket in packages of ten. A gust of cold wind reminded her that summer was over, but she didn’t give up on her moon tan, and abandoned her body to the blind eyes of a million stars. She closed her eyes because, though no one was there, it was embarrassing. She breathed deeply. The night air was fresh and good. And as she breathed, Lavi came to her. His smell, his lovely breath on her neck. Now her hands left the sheets of tar paper and moved between her thighs, wandering, probing. She searched for a long time, first awkwardly, a sad, restrained groping, the thought of returning home constantly in her mind, and then she let herself go. She moved her fingers rhythmically and what had been a groping question became an answer, became I know, I know me, and the moon smiled its approval as her cheeks reddened and blood flooded her lips and the lips between her thighs. The scene was so beautiful that two clouds hurried to conceal it, covering the eyes of the moon so it could no longer see the girl pleasuring herself, to keep it from being tempted to leave its place and descend to the roof right then and there.
On the roof, the autumn breeze blew down from the clouds. Nofar felt a slight chill, gave a slight smile, stood up and went home.
21
DETECTIVE DORIT CAME to her office every morning at exactly 8:25. She was never late – law and order do not abide lateness. She was never early – law and order are not served by hastiness. In the city, where crimes pile up, sweaty and damp, where the sun itself incites you to sin, there is nothing like the restrained coolness of the clock to restore a bit of order. Detective Dorit had the bad luck to be born in a Mediterranean country: her exemplary preciseness, which would certainly have been highly valued in a more Northern European climate, earned her the ridicule of her colleagues. Dorit noticed it – as a police detective, she had a good eye for detail – but continued to come to the office at precisely 8:25. The second hand on her wrist was as indifferent as the wheels of justice themselves, attentive to the facts and only the facts.
When she reached the office at 8:25, Detective Dorit had already spent two hours with her children. She woke them at six every morning and delivered them to three different schools, reminding each one what was expected of them. She warned her son, a primary-school pupil, against being tempted into Internet bullying. She warned her middle-school son about the long-term damage of all drugs. She described to her daughter, a high-school student, the horrors of the delivery room. And so her children stepped out of the car terrified to the depths of their tender souls, and it was no wonder that they sought immediate relief – the first by bullying children in the schoolyard, the second by smoking aromatic cigarettes near the middle-school fence, and the third with a quick bit of lovemaking with the boy who lived across the street from the high school.
Sometimes the trip to the city centre took less time than expected. Detective Dorit had ten full minutes before she had to be in her office, so she decided to take a short walk in the street, to look at people and wonder which of them were likely to arrive at the police station as criminals and which as victims. On the corner, a deaf-mute beggar had taken his post and was muttering incomprehensible things to himself. None of the passers-by noticed the contradiction between the emotional muttering and the “I AM A DEAF-MUTE” sign, but Dorit wasn’t just a passer-by, she was a detective, and that contradiction caught her attention.
“It didn’t happen! It didn’t happen!” The words burst rapidly out of the deaf-mute’s mouth as they do from the mouths of criminals confessing after a gruelling interrogation. If she had been in her office, Dorit would certainly have asked, “What didn’t happen?” and would relentlessly demand names, times and places. But it was 8:21, she only had four minutes before she had to begin work, so she didn’t ask and didn’t investigate. The deaf-mute looked at the detective standing in front of him in her spiffy uniform. All the words he hadn’t spoken leapt around in his stomach like an army of frogs. “It didn’t happen,” he said, and, looking her right in the eye, repeated, “It didn’t happen!” The sentence hopped around his mouth like the croaking of a frog in a swamp and Detective Dorit glanced calmly at him because what business did people have with frogs, what business did a detective hurrying off to work have with a beggar standing on the corner? And so, at 8:24, Detective Dorit turned back to the police station on the main street, and the deaf-mute remained standing on the corner, croaking, “It didn’t happen!” to all the passers-by.
Days passed. The deaf-mute kept coming almost daily and kept croaking, even though the new habit decreased his income significantly. People walked more quickly as they passed him. No one listened. Nonetheless, the deaf-mute’s words continued to echo in Detective Dorit’s mind. Whenever she came to the office early, she went to the street corner to watch him. Sometimes he didn’t say anything, maintaining his muteness, but other times he muttered constantly, swaying where he stood like that blind soothsayer: “It didn’t happen! It didn’t happen!” And even added in a whisper, “She’s lying!” Dorit the Detective watched him with concern. One day, contrary to her usual behaviour, she took five shekels out of her purse. She was sure that now he would say more, but the deaf-mute muttered, “Little pigs on the beach!” Then he closed his mouth. If that blue-uniformed bitch thought she could buy the truth from him for the ridiculous price of five shekels, she was absolutely wrong. He too had self-respect.
But it was the deaf-mute’s renewed silence that disturbed Dorit even more. At 8:25 she went to her office, and this time the thoughts accompanied her over the threshold. Those words, “It didn’t happen!”, “She’s lying!” sat down on the interrogation table and waited for her to examine them.
22
THE DAYS ACCUMULATED, as did the gifts at Lavi’s door. A fleece shirt. Thermal gloves. A tactical flashlight. A green balaclava. His father’s I-have-a-secret expression, which at first had thrilled him, now became tormenting and oppressive. Lavi was careful not to say anything to add fuel to the combat-unit story, hoping it would dissipate on its own. He didn’t add – nor did he refute – and that was enough to cause Arieh Maimon’s chest to swell with pride. He considered his son’s silence to be honourable
and evidence of his ability to keep a secret, two qualities he valued in himself as well. Nor did the arrogance of that silence escape his notice – since the boy didn’t know whether he would pass the tests, he didn’t tell anyone about it so that there would be no witness if he should fail. But in his youth, Arieh Maimon did not talk about his screening for entrance into the elite combat unit either, and for precisely the same reason. He didn’t want to be the recipient of sympathy steeped in gloating if he, heaven forbid, failed. That similarity between him and his son moved him, and Lavi, well aware of his father’s emotional reaction, began to worry. He pinned his hopes on the time that would pass and erode the story. He did not yet understand that the longer he kept silent, the more he nourished his father’s dreams.
And so the internal clock of the lie continued to mark time in Lavi. The hands showed the minutes, which turned into hours, which turned into days. He wondered whether the hands would move that way for ever, whether the time to speak the truth would never come. After all, more lies remain undiscovered than are revealed. Harmless little lies absorbed into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from the truth. Time kneads all of them into a single lump of dough, and does it matter what really happened and what didn’t?
One morning, as he was sadly chewing the protein omelette, his father offered to drive him the following Sunday.
“And if you need a note for school, just say the word. Or does the army send you one?”
Liar Page 10