Even before she opened the door, Ronit smelt the eggplant and knew that something had happened. If Ami was making his lasagna, something was wrong. Her husband had his own way of dealing with upsetting news: the day he was told about his father’s biopsy, he barricaded himself in the kitchen with six eggplants and made enough lasagna for a week. When the budget cuts began in his office, they ate eggplant lasagna for a month, until his boss called him in to inform him personally. Ronit hadn’t argued with him then. She knew he had to do something with his hands during times of stress or he went mad. The eggplants jiggled and shrank on the fire, pouring out their juices in the frying pan as Ami poured out his thoughts and fears, and God help anyone who interrupted him.
She walked quietly into the house, intending to slip into the study. She didn’t have to speak to him this very moment. She had 200 exam papers to mark. She took them out and was heading for the hallway when she heard Ami’s hoarse voice coming from behind her, “That detective called today.”
The 200 exam papers were suddenly very heavy. Ronit put them down on the dining-room table. She had never done that before, she was always afraid that something would be spilt on them.
“And? What did she want?”
“She wanted to set a date to give Nofar a lie-detector test.”
Ami came out of the kitchen into the dining room. Tomato-sauce stains covered the apron he wore, and had also stained the chequered shirt under it. He wiped his hands on a towel and looked silently at the pile of exam papers lying on the dining-room table. He had flour on his elbow and his eyebrows, which made his hair look whiter and his face look old.
“And? What did you tell her?”
“I told her it was scandalous to take a seventeen-year-old girl who went through something like that and hook her up to a polygraph machine. It would be a black mark against the police. Did they really decide to believe the word of that piece of shit?” His voice rose to a shout, as if he weren’t speaking to her but to that detective. A spray of tomato sauce dotted his right sleeve.
“And what did she say after you refused the lie-detector test?”
“She said they obviously can’t force us, and it’s entirely up to us. Then she babbled something about how she believed it would help shorten the trial, as if that was the reason.”
“You think she has a different reason?”
He hesitated. Now she saw clearly that it wasn’t only the flour on his eyebrows that made him look older.
“I have to turn the eggplants.”
He went into the kitchen and flipped the eggplants in the frying pan. She waited a long moment for him to come back and continue the conversation. Finally she realized that he had no intention of coming back. She picked up the exam papers and felt the wetness that had spread through the bottom part of the pile. The table wasn’t clean, maybe a coffee stain or spilt water. But whatever it was, the liquid had already seeped into the pages. She cursed quietly to herself, and whether he’d heard her or not, he looked up from the frying pan and said with his back to her, “They’re just covering their asses, they want to come to court with all the support they can get their hands on and they’re not thinking about Nofar at all. You know who they give lie-detector tests to? Criminals, not my daughter.”
It had been a coffee stain. The exam paper on the bottom of the pile was so wet that she couldn’t read what was written there. She would have to apologize to the student, explain what had happened and hope he wouldn’t complain to his parents. Or she could simply tell him he got a ninety, knowing that the mark would make him so happy that he would never ask to see the exam paper. She took a towel and tried to absorb the wetness. Her head began to pound.
43
LAVI DIDN’T THINK it was possible to regret something so much that your entire body hurt. He had a terrible taste in his mouth, which made him think that hopeless longing tastes like canned food that’s gone mouldy. That taste was the reason the boy almost stopped eating, and he quickly lost the little bit of flesh that covered his bones. Soon enough, his parents were going mad with worry. His father was sure it was because he’d been rejected by the elite combat unit. It never entered his mind that it was possible to be so sad because of a girl. His mother thought it was a crisis of adolescence and insisted that he go to a psychologist.
There were bags of green tea, white armchairs and a Magritte in the psychologist’s office. His mother waited outside as he sat down on one of the white armchairs and discovered that it was very comfortable, amazingly comfortable. He wondered whether all that whiteness caused the patients’ thoughts to become brighter, or the opposite, it made the dirt of life more conspicuous. A few moments later, it was already clear to him that the psychologist’s office made him uneasy. Everything was so clean and orderly, everything but him. He said nothing for five minutes, though he knew that every minute of his silence cost his mother ten whole shekels. On the way home she asked him how it was, and he said it was great.
During the day he sat and thought about Nofar, at night he lay in bed and thought about Nofar, and once a week his mother took him to the psychologist, where he was silent and thought about Nofar. On the way home his mother asked him how it was and he said it was great, and he continued to think about Nofar. Until, one day, his father took him to the psychologist. They had already reached the office, which was in a pricey neighbourhood, when his father asked, “Are you sure you want to go in to see her?” Lieutenant-Colonel Arieh Maimon had never spoken the word “psychologist” out loud. Lavi looked at his father, surprised, and Arieh Maimon said they could go the beach and exercise there instead. Lavi had never exercised on the beach. On the days before the combat-unit screening, whenever he left the house his father would say, “You’re going to exercise on the beach?” and never waited for a reply. Since Lavi had come home from the screening, his father had never stopped asking him if he was going to exercise on the beach, but now he suddenly reached over to the back seat and picked up the special running shoes he had bought him as a gift. Lavi didn’t want his father to see what a terrible runner he was, but he had even less desire to spend another fifty minutes on the psychologist’s white armchair. So they drove to the beach and ran on the sand. More accurately, Arieh Maimon ran and Lavi straggled along behind him. When they finished running, Lavi’s muscles hurt so much that, for a moment, the other pain about Nofar was pushed aside.
On the days that followed, his father took him to run almost every evening. He also taught him some hand-to-hand combat techniques. Whenever they practised the moves, Lavi ended up lying face down on the sand, with Arieh Maimon standing over him. Lavi didn’t care about lying with his face in the sand. He only hoped that at some point, the taste of sand would be able to cover the taste of canned food gone mouldy.
44
BEFORE DAWN, Ronit felt it again: many years had passed since her pregnancies, but still, in that twilight moment between sleep and wakefulness, they sometimes returned suddenly – small movements in her stomach, elves tickling her from inside. As if she once again had a baby girl there. If she remained in bed for another brief moment and breathed slowly, the feeling disappeared. It hadn’t really been there from the beginning, that shadow of longing. Ronit would get up to face her day, and although her body contained all the necessary parts, something was missing. Every now and then her briefs surprised her with thick red stains. Though they disturbed her daily routine, nonetheless it was better than their absence. Perhaps that was why she still sometimes dreamt about that fullness: nine months during which you aren’t alone for even a minute, you are more than the sum of everything you are. Perhaps it was a shame she hadn’t understood then that, from the first moment, she had to begin to separate. First the girl in her womb would kick, then she would emerge, then crawl, walk, run, and in the end she would tear herself out of this house just as she had torn herself out of that womb.
She tossed and turned in bed, telling herself that everything was fine. But if everything was fine, why had that dete
ctive called to ask for a lie detector test? Maybe she should talk to Nofar. Since that night, she was very careful around her daughter. She didn’t want to hurt her again. As it was, Nofar hadn’t spoken to Maya since that business with the notebook. Ronit was used to the stormy arguments between her daughters, the shouts and slammed doors, but this silence was new. She had never intervened in their fights, and now, as well, she waited for time to heal their relationship. But the silence only deepened, and Ronit began to miss the old fights. Nofar’s shouts when she discovered that Maya had lost her purple fountain pen, for example. They screamed at each other until Ronit feared their ear drums would be damaged. Maya said Nofar was making too much of it, it was only a pen, and Nofar swore that she would never ever forgive her, and two hours later they were making grilled cheese sandwiches together.
Awake in bed, Ronit thought about the notebook that had started it all. Jennifer, Josh, Amy – those ridiculous names made her smile. With so many hours in front of those American shows, it was no wonder Nofar wrote about a football team and its cheerleaders. What a shame it was that, because of the notebook, her daughters weren’t speaking now, and how fortunate that it was only a story, a harmless bit of fiction, a product of the imagination of a young girl who had a gift for writing.
She closed her eyes, determined to fall back to sleep. The noise of a refuse-collection truck came through the window. She would have to get up in an hour. She turned over on the mattress once again. Her muscles ached from sleeplessness and housework. She hadn’t stopped cleaning since the detective’s call. As if she had a Rottweiler in her head – every time she wanted to take a break and think, it barked and drove her back to another chore. She had already folded all the laundry that needed folding, and all the laundry that didn’t. If she watered the plants one more time, the poor things might drown. She had to stop for a moment, even if her mind demanded otherwise. But that was actually why she had to stop. To check carefully: who was barking here and why? But she kept on cleaning, and when she wasn’t cleaning she marked exam papers, and when she finished marking exam papers she went to bed, where Ami was sleeping and she was awake. The refuse-collection truck drove off, and in the ensuing silence Ronit’s thoughts once again wandered to the notebook. It was only a story, she told herself, only a story. But on the other hand, she thought as she tossed and turned, a story can contain a kernel of reality as well. Sometimes fiction is written in the ink of truth.
Suddenly she stiffened. Under the large blanket her body was covered in a cold sweat. Beside her, Ami persisted in sleeping, not waking even when Ronit whispered in alarm, “the pen”. Because she understood all at once what had been bothering her, what had caused her to toss and turn all night. Purple ink and black ink. The fountain pen and a regular pen. She closed her eyes and tried to recreate the sight of those pages. Had there been two different colours in the notebook? That night, she had read the pages in the weak light of the small living-room lamp, and it had been difficult to see the differences. Yet she was almost convinced: the colour of the confession was purple and all the rest was written in black ink. And if the purple fountain pen had been lost many weeks before, then the words written in purple ink – that emotional, first-person confession – had been written earlier. They stood alone. And the other words, the other, reassuring ones, the Jennifer-Josh-Amy story that came before and after the confession, were written only later. Her daughter had added them after the fact.
To her surprise, Ronit found that she was really surprised. The realization hadn’t landed on her out of the blue, but had set down on shoulders that had been waiting for it for many days. It had been placed on her like a white veil after a long engagement, or the opposite, like a mourning veil after a fatal illness. It was remarkable how much a woman can know without knowing she knows it.
45
THE GIRLS’ MOTHER ARRANGED to meet with the police detective. Maya heard her talking on the phone. “Dorit?” she said, “this is Ronit Shalev. Nofar’s mother.” She was standing in the kitchen and Maya had just come home from school. The delicious smell of chicken schnitzel and the popping sound of hot oil filled the house, and their mother was standing between the frying pan and the counter, her back to Maya, saying into the phone, “Will you be at the station tomorrow morning? Can we meet? I need to show you something.” A moment later she hung up, and Maya said to herself that maybe she’d been talking to a different Dorit altogether, but she knew: her mother’s stance told her. She stood next to the frying pan hugging herself very tightly, as if she were trying to keep herself from falling.
Maya left the house quietly, stood on the street for ten minutes and then went into the apartment again, saying loudly, “I’m back!” During those ten minutes on the street she hadn’t texted, hadn’t surfed the Internet and hadn’t sent any likes for anything. She had simply stood on the street as she had never stood there before. After going into the house and calling out, “I’m back!” she walked quickly to her room. Several minutes later her mother came to ask whether she wanted schnitzel, and Maya said she wasn’t hungry. When her mother left, Maya tried to call Nofar. She sent text after text that Nofar didn’t read. To keep herself from climbing the walls, she turned on the TV. She watched three cooking shows and six reruns. Five hours later, when the front door finally opened, she was in the middle of watching a talent show. An attractive transgender woman was trilling a familiar pop song. Maya hurried out to Nofar, but her older sister passed her on the way to her room without speaking.
“Mom found out.”
Nofar froze in the hallway. Maya stood in front of her, speaking in an urgent whisper, after all, their mother might come back at any moment. The words flew out of Maya’s mouth like a flock of pigeons, maybe her sister would finally forgive her for what she’d done. When she finished speaking she looked into her big sister’s eyes. She was sure she would cry, but Nofar’s eyes were as dry as the pavements at the end of August.
“Thank you.”
Before Maya could say anything else, Nofar had already gone into her room and closed the door. She stood inside and knew: it wasn’t her lie that was being revealed now, it was her mother’s. Her mother had pretended that love was an ocean, and Nofar never guessed how small and enclosed that ocean was, a fish tank in a corner of the living room, and as long as Nofar kept swimming in circles of the right diameter, the water was calm and the love too deep to be fathomed.
As the younger sister stood in the hallway considering what to do now, Nofar’s door opened again and she rushed out. Maya heard the front door open and close, and except for the applause of the audience at the talent show, the apartment was silent.
Nofar hurried to the roof, taking the steps at a run. The iron door squeaked slightly when she opened it. In the adjacent building TV sets flickered like fireflies, and the only thing separating the two buildings was twenty metres of emptiness, an abyss five floors deep. A clamour of commercials came from the apartment across from her. It was evening, the air smelt of meatballs and omelettes and pasta, and shouts of all sorts came from the apartments, come to the table, he took it from me, and with all that noise, no one heard the quiet steps moving across the roof.
Nofar stood close to the water tank and looked down. There were people everywhere. Watching TV, eating, showering. And no one in the buildings across from her had the slightest idea that there was a girl on the roof holding a lighter in one hand and a notebook in the other. Here, in the darkness, no one would see the fire. And if there were no notebook, her mother wouldn’t have anything to show Detective Dorit tomorrow. There would be no hard evidence, as they called it on TV. She put the notebook down on the roof. She flicked on the lighter. Reddish light flickered on her fingertips as she moved the flame towards the pages, and in that reddish light she suddenly saw her mother’s face.
The lighter dropped out of her hand and rolled across the roof. Nofar didn’t dare pick it up. She still held the notebook in her other hand. Despite the darkness, she felt her mother’
s eyes fasten onto the bound pages, and she cringed. Her mother knew what was written in that notebook. Her mother knew what she had done. In a moment she would come over and grab the notebook. Maybe she would slap her as well. She definitely looked capable of it, and Nofar knew she deserved it.
But her mother didn’t move. She stood where she was and looked at her. In some way that was worse than a slap, standing there and waiting for her to say something. Innumerable stars glittered in the sky above them, and innumerable lights were turned on in the buildings around them, but nonetheless the roof was immersed in darkness that was its alone. Nofar felt her knees tremble and knew that if her mother didn’t take the notebook from her now, she would give it to her herself. To remain standing there, facing that expression, was more than she could bear. She began to walk forward when her mother suddenly said, in a voice that in no way resembled her normal one, “Pick it up.”
It took a moment for Nofar to understand what she meant. The words floated above the building without joining together in a logical sentence. Then her mother pointed to where the lighter had fallen, and Nofar saw it at her feet, black and shiny. She bent down to pick it up, but when it was in her hand once again, she didn’t stand up. From that height, the roof looked much larger. From that height, her mother looked huge.
“Now light it.”
With a trembling hand, Nofar lit it again. The flame was redder and hotter, illuminating and darkening the roof at one and the same time. Nofar looked at her mother. It might have been the interplay of flame and shadow that made her face seem so strange. Like someone else’s mother. Ronit gazed at her daughter’s tormented expression, at the notebook, at the roof of the five-storey building, and said, “Now finish what you started.”
Liar Page 21