And what happened to the friend?
They abducted him.
Who abducted him?
The enemy.
Why?
He’s being held as a hostage? She guesses again.
Do I enter the belly of the mountain alone?
Yes.
Where are the other two? He asks in excitement.
Standing guard outside, she states with growing confidence.
Who decides that I’m going in?
You volunteer.
I announce that I’m volunteering?
No, she says. You say to them: You keep guard outside, I’m going in.
Do they argue with me?
No, she states confidently. You’re the foxhound of the team.
Am I afraid?
No, you don’t feel anything.
How’s that possible?
You’re a leg-man. The brain and heart are neutralized. Only the legs work.
And the hostage?
What about him?
He knows I’m coming?
He’s waiting for you, she says.
What makes him wait for me precisely?
He’s a guts-man, she says as they emerge from the shower, and she rubs his body with a fresh soft towel.
That’s right, he says and takes the big towel from her and starts to dry her body.
Oh, she sighs at the touch of his hands, your hands are so good.
How do you know that he’s a guts-man? he demands an explanation.
He’s the closest to you in the team, she states with absolute confidence again.
How do you know?! This is driving him crazy.
That’s why you volunteered. And the others didn’t argue with you.
Go on! he prompts her.
He prays to you.
I’m on my way.
In the dark.
I have an eye that sees.
The infrared?
Aha.
He doesn’t see you.
No.
But he feels the heat.
So I’m close.
You’re close.
Should I go on?
Yes.
Or rest for a minute?
Go on!
How does that feel?
Hot!
And now?
Hotter!
Am I getting close?
Yes!
Hey!
What?
Slowly! She shouts in a whisper and clings to him, trembling all over.
Suddenly, beyond the bend, the tunnel opens up like a funnel into a large alcove, and all at once he finds himself face to face with a man sitting on a rock. A pair of eyes glittering opposite him in the greenish light of the infrared binoculars attached to his eyes. The man stands up, presumably feeling the heat of the glow directed onto his face, and he raises a submachine gun, with a large flashlight mounted under its barrel. His thumb gropes for the switch of the flashlight above the magazine housing. Time almost stands still. Tenths of a second last as long as minutes. The brain is paralyzed. The heart is empty. The guts are silent. Only the legs act. The left leg, which is his springing leg, bends and pushes off powerfully from the ground, his body rises and describes an arc in the air, and his right leg bends backwards and flies forward in a kick that hits the barrel of the submachine gun. A burst of bullets sprays the roof of the tunnel, and he goes on walking on air—like in the dreams when he leaps into the air and moves his legs and floats above the houses of the village and the orchards and the cypress trees and pine forests of the Judean hills—and his left leg completes the move and hits the man in the stomach with all its power, accompanied by a roar that empties the air from his lungs:
The scream of an animal in the jungle bursts from her depths.
Melissa! He holds her and shakes her violently.
Melissa! He grips her shoulders and raises her to him.
And another cry. He cups her head gently in his hands, and she hangs onto his shoulders like a drowning woman, digs into the flesh with her nails, trembling all over, her foot stamping the air in search of a grip, and he reaches back with his left hand and seizes hold of her foot, and her toes spread out and curl round the five fingers of his hand, which twine between them, and she pushes her foot hard against his hand and whispers, don’t move, don’t move, it’s so good, I want it to last forever, and they remain clasped in their embrace until evening falls, crossing together the unbearable moment when the body can no longer contain the soul—
I knew you were a killer, she says to him when her soul returns from the void. I knew the minute you came through the glass door from the street and I turned round and read you.
How did you know? he asks her and strokes her head which is resting on his chest.
I saw the eye in the middle of your forehead.
Where exactly? he asks.
She turns her head, peers at him through her weeping slits, which are now shooting sparks like cat’s eyes lit up in the dark, and touches her finger to the center of his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
Here, she says, can you feel that you have an eye over here?
Yes, he laughs, of course I can.
I’m not joking, she says, I’m deadly serious.
She begins talking obsessively, like a person who has just been confronted by death. He lets her get it off her chest without interrupting the stream of words.
The great majority of people look at the world through two eyes located on the two sides of their faces, she says, leading to a lax, diffuse view of the world. This gaze, which I call ‘the human gaze’ because I haven’t yet found a more accurate name for it, is a gaze which skims over things and doesn’t penetrate them. It can be compared to diffuse lighting. The first time I noticed this characteristic of the human gaze was when I went to work as a sales assistant at a big branch of H & M. I liked to stand to one side and observe the customers coming in to survey the clothes. You can see the women, yes, mainly the women, taking in the whole store with one superficial glance, and then going through the hangers, flipping through them with their fingers and skimming over them with their eyes in a half-interested half-bored gaze, not seeing what they’re seeing. I would watch them at the moment when they lost interest and went out into the street again, and went on seeing the street too with the same vague, unfocused gaze with which they looked at the clothes in the shop. And then I discovered that in the subway too, and even in the cinema and the theatre, people don’t really look at what they are apparently seeing. Afterwards I worked for a while as a waitress in a big restaurant selling Asian food, and I checked to see if my discovery was valid there too, and I have to say that the same thing happened in restaurants too. People don’t really see what they’re eating. They order their dishes, and as soon as they identify in a general way that they have received their noodles with seafood, or whatever, they don’t really look at the food in front of them. And then I saw that they don’t actually look at their companions either, or at least they don’t actually see them. Otherwise how can you explain the fact that so many women are prepared to spend their lives with creatures as lacking in charm as the vast majority of men in the world. And vice versa. I remember that couples would come into
the restaurant, sit down, and I would bring them the menu, and in the first tenth of a second that I encountered their eyes or their faces, I would say to myself: What a revolting mug, how come she doesn’t see what I see, how come she doesn’t get up and run for her life at this very minute. Or those women who are incapable of seeing beauty in anything, because they look at the world with a gaze that is disgusted by the very materiality of all material, beginning with the paper that the menu is printed on, and the fork that they pick up with loathing as if it was a toilet brush, and ending with the delicious dish of fresh shrimps and calamari, glistening in their delicate coating of melted butter and garlic, and bringing a look of such disgust to their faces that it seems as if they are about to throw up on the table, and they pick up the toilet brush with lame fingers and touch the horrible thing floating on the plate in front of them with horror, and the man sitting opposite this woman looks at her with a lifeless look that doesn’t see anything. Because if that man had a third eye in the middle of his forehead he would stab her with his steak knife and get up and get out of there. But there are very few executioners in this world, and you are one of them, she concludes.
How do you know? he demands.
I only have to look at you, she says, it’s written on your forehead. The gaze of your two eyes combines into a single laser beam, which measures distances to the thousandth of a millimeter.
There’s no such thing.
Yes there is, she says. Maybe you don’t know, but that’s what you do. You measure distances all the time. You simply can’t do anything else. It’s self-evident: it’s not enough that you’re a killer, you’re also the leg-man to beat all legmen, and the combination of the two is lethal.
And you saw all this the minute I walked into the store to buy a suit? he asks.
Yes, she confirms. I saw that and a lot more as well.
What else did you see? he asks curiously.
I saw that you don’t love any of the gifts that nature gave you.
What do I have that anyone could love? he laughs.
All of you, she says.
Really! he protests. In a minute you’ll say that it’s possible to love my fingers?
Why not? she takes his hand in her delicate hand.
There you are! he says. Look at my fingers.
What’s wrong with your fingers?
They’re German Bockwurst, not fingers, he says.
Let me taste, she says and puts a finger in her mouth and licks it with her warm moist tongue and grunts in pleasure.
Look, he insists, my fingers are almost the same size.
Of course, she says, are you surprised? It’s the hand of a murderer. She strokes his hand with provocative sensuality.
You know, he confesses, when I was a boy I couldn’t stand the fact that my fingers were the same length. I would look at my rectangular hand, and sometimes I would be tempted to take my mother’s chopper and chop off a bit of my pinkie.
Now I understand where circumcision comes from, she says. You Jews are incapable of accepting yourselves the way God created you: you have to improve on his work.
I hated my fingers so much that I used to keep them in my pockets all the time, he says. And if I had to take them out, I would immediately make them into a fist to hide my shame. That’s what got me into trouble with fighting.
Why shame? She doesn’t understand.
Walking round in the world with hands like these is like walking around naked, he says.
Is it bad to walk around naked?
With legs like mine?
We’re already spoken about legs, she says. What else don’t you like about yourself?
This Mongolian skull, skewered on a cucumber.
You call this a cucumber? She strokes his neck. This is the neck of a Belgian horse, of a ox, it’s a tree trunk!
You should have seen the neck I received from nature, he laughs. You know how many hours of working out, lifting weights and stretching springs with my head have been invested in this neck?
What kind of a child were you? she asks.
Can’t you see what kind of a child this man was?
Not this man—you, she stresses. What kind of a child were
you
.
The kind of child—he begins, but she interrupts him:
No, don’t talk about him. Talk about yourself. Say: I was a child …
Perhaps there’s a child buried in me, he says.
Why is it so hard for you to talk about the child you were?
Why is it hard for me? he reflects aloud. Because there’s nothing left in me of that lost child. I close my eyes and I can’t even see him.
Take your time, she says. We’re not in a hurry.
There’s no chance that this man will succeed in meeting the child he was.
You’re talking about yourself in the third person again, she says.
I’m not talking about myself, he says. I’m talking about some man and some child I have no connection with, and they have no connection with each other either.
Good, she compromises, who’s further away from you now, the man or the child?
The child, he says.
So tell me about him.
Why are you so interested in him? he asks.
I’ll tell you when the time comes. Now we’re talking about the child. Tell me about the child.
The child was drawn more to the company of women than of men. He liked attaching himself to his mother’s friends who came and sat on the porch to knit and gossip. The child played on the floor next to them and breathed in the smells that came from them. The child liked these smells. A strange mixture of sweat, talcum powder, scented soap and eau de cologne. This intoxicating mixture was accompanied by another smell, whose origins the child could not identify. A smell which definitely distinguished them from the men, who exuded only sweat, cigarette smoke and crude soap. At the end of summer this smell also came from the guava trees.
The child liked to listen to the women, who talked about fabrics and pregnancies and concentration camps and illnesses and troubles and medicines and cunning recipes for making chopped liver from eggplants and apple compote from courgettes, and whispered about a neighbor who didn’t cook for her husband, and another neighbor whose husband waited on her like a queen while she spent all day lying on the sofa in a dressing gown applying hot and cold compresses to her forehead and reading journals, and a third neighbor whose husband beat her at night.
The men’s conversations, on the other hand, the child found very boring. He discovered that the men used only a few words, and repeated them in short sentences, which
were spoken in monotonous, uninteresting tones, and they only talked about pipes and irrigation systems, and fertilizer and politics and exterminating pests. But the women used many words, and threaded them into endless chains when they talked about what they went through in the camps, how they made little dolls from bread they chewed up and didn’t eat, and how they gathered at night round the lavatory seat that served them as a stage and put on plays by candlelight in their miniature puppet theatre for the rest of the women prisoners, and from there they went on simply and naturally to gossip about a man and a woman who had been seen together too often lately, and not only had they been seen together, but he had even been seen going into her house when her husband wasn’t at home, a second woman would interrupt the first, and he sits there for hours, a third would add, and the first would giggle and say who knows if all he does is sit, and a fourth would remark that tea and cookies wasn’t all she gave him, and the conversation would heat up, and the voices would merge with each other, and stifled laughter would punctuate the speech which was sometimes loud as the chorus of birds in the morning and sometimes soft as the wind whispering in the dry fields at the end of summer—