Authors: Edeet Ravel
“You asked me for advice, but I didn’t have all the facts, so I couldn’t decide. You’re acting like it’s no big deal that we’re here,” I said. “You’re acting like it’s okay that you’re here with
me at this restaurant and it doesn’t matter and no one cares and so what?”
“It does matter. It matters a lot. And it’s okay, for me. I can’t speak for you.”
“It isn’t okay. I love my husband.”
“You can love more than one person,” he said.
“No, no you can’t. That’s not love. Love means that the person you love is enough for you, and you don’t want or need anyone else and no one else interests you.”
“Love means you are completely helpless and there’s nothing you can do about it except duck or plunge. But you can’t change it, you can’t change the way you feel.”
“You’re making things worse, letting this happen between us. You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“There are some things even I can’t control. I’d like to control my appearance in your dreams, for example, but I can’t.”
“You could have stayed away from me.”
“You could have stayed away from me, Dana. What did you find out about Daniel?”
“I met a guy in Intelligence. Just by chance, on the beach. And when he heard about Daniel he said all he had to do was look him up on his special computer and he’d be able to tell me where he was really living. Not his fake address, the real one. I didn’t think he’d find anything, but he seemed so sure. He told me to call him today at six in the evening. But when I called he said he couldn’t tell me anything and I’d just have to forget Daniel. But he didn’t say he didn’t have the address. He
did
have it, but for some reason he couldn’t tell me. I don’t understand it. On the beach he said I had a right to know. But now that he has the information, he’s changed his mind. So he must have found out something he didn’t expect. But what?”
“That’s strange. It’s strange that Daniel managed to hide in
the first place. Such a small country, surely someone would find out and tell you.”
“No one knows what he looks like now. And he probably uses another name. Maybe he never goes out. Maybe he’s in an attic somewhere, and someone brings him food and whatever he needs. Maybe a friend of his is hiding him, the one who used to leave those notes on the door. I’ve thought of everything. I even thought he might be living in a tent somewhere in the desert. Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel.”
“Do you think what that Intelligence guy found out is that Daniel is living with another woman?”
“No, I asked him that. He said Daniel is alive and he lives alone. And that’s all he would tell me. He’s the sort of person who can’t lie. You know the type?”
“Yes. They’re rare enough. Well, maybe he’s in some sort of institution?”
“No, I checked every single institution when he first vanished. I hired a private detective, she checked every place like that. Resorts, rest homes, mental institutions, everything. And she still checks them once a year. Besides, why wouldn’t this guy want to tell me something like that? He wouldn’t hide that sort of information. No, it’s something else.”
“What would you do if you got his address?”
“Knock on his door. And I wouldn’t move or eat until he came out. I’d go on strike. He’d have no choice but to relent.”
We didn’t say anything more after that. When we finished our meal he said, “I’ll drive you home.”
“I want to walk. I like walking.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“All right.”
As we walked toward the sea, I had a fantasy of the city rising like a floating island and soaring away. I held Rafi’s arm for balance, but only for a few seconds, until the sensation passed.
“Looks habitable now,” Rafi said as he entered my flat. He sat down on the faded pink and green Turkish carpet. I made coffee and handed him the mug, then settled on the sofa closest to him, my legs curled under me. He said, “I finished my training one month before the uprising broke out. I spent the next two and a half years fighting the riots. Then I was released, and they gave me a big chunk of money. I didn’t go back to my parents. I rented a room and every night I went to a bar and drank until I couldn’t see straight and usually I woke up with someone in my room and I couldn’t remember who she was or how she got there. Then the money ran out. I lay in bed and took my penknife and considered slashing my wrists, but I decided my penknife was too blunt. Basically I didn’t have the courage to do it. I got out of bed and showered and went to the supermarket to buy a bottle of vodka—I figured I’d get drunk and then maybe I’d have more courage. But I didn’t have enough money for vodka, so I bought fruit juice. That’s when I met Graciela. I was having trouble holding the bottle of juice, it almost slipped from my hands, and she caught it. She was well dressed and clean and orderly. I followed her home, to her clean orderly flat—she already had her own place, the one we still live in. She played the piano for me, a piece by Erik Satie. I was in very bad shape, and that piece almost did me in. I stayed there, I didn’t leave. We decided to marry. Her parents were against it, they’d been hoping for someone with a better background, someone with money and a profession and fair skin. But they didn’t want her to be unhappy. They didn’t want anything to interfere with her music, and they were afraid that if they put up a big fuss she’d be upset. She started getting migraines, and she couldn’t sleep. Other things started bothering her too. She’d always hated dirt, but her cleaning became obsessive. She felt sick if she saw dirt, and she couldn’t go out for long periods of time because she wouldn’t use public toilets,
or even toilets in other people’s houses. She tried seeing a psychiatrist, but nothing came of it. She wouldn’t let me touch her when we fucked, she couldn’t bear to look at my cock or touch it, and I had to find ways of getting inside without touching any other part of her and without her having to see anything. After Naomi was born, even that stopped. I left her before I knew she was pregnant. Then I heard that she was pregnant—someone who had seen her on the street called me and told me, and I came back. I didn’t trust her alone with Naomi. And I was right, she didn’t want to touch her, she carried her in a plastic carrier, she never held her or stroked her or touched her. She placed her on a pillow when she wanted to give her a bottle. I suggested we divorce and I take the baby, but she was horrified. She loves Naomi. She loves her, but she can’t touch her. I look after Naomi and Graciela plays the piano and gives recitals and concerts and we manage that way. I had a few one-nighters, but I stopped, it was pointless. We have an income from a fund her parents set up for her, and I also work at an after-school program with teens in distress, but there’s no money in that, our budget keeps getting cut, we’re almost volunteers at this point. I can’t leave because the kids depend on me. That’s my story, Dana.”
“Why? Why did you want to kill yourself?”
“The usual: guilt, remorse. You can get over killing people, there are ways to think about it. You can say it was self-defense, it was war, that’s what you’re trained to do in a war, you’re trained to think it’s me or them, and you’re defending your country, it’s your highest duty. So you can say, well, I had no choice, and that’s what the interpretation was then, that’s how it looked and felt. You can say, I was attacked, I fought back. I didn’t think about whether we should be there in the first place. That wasn’t something we thought about. But if you beat people up in front of their kids or watch your friends shoot
someone’s balls off, you can’t justify that sort of thing. And since you can’t justify it, you have to face that this is who you are, this is the sort of person you are. I didn’t think I could live with that in constant replay another forty or fifty years, day in, day out, night in, night out.”
“You really shot someone’s balls off? I never heard that one before.”
“We caught some guy who’d just killed a couple of soldiers, and these two guys in my unit, who were friends of the soldiers who were killed, more or less lynched him. They started with his balls. Coby was there, too.”
“Coby from the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“What about now? Are things in constant replay?”
“No, it’s different now. I have perspective now about what was going on then, and I can do something about it.”
“Is your daughter waiting for you?”
“She’s probably in bed by now. She’s a very easy child. She never puts up a fuss about anything. It worries me, sometimes.”
I said, “I met my husband at a wedding, he was the singer— even though the band was just a hobby he had, a way of earning extra cash. His real passion was architecture, and that’s what he was doing, designing houses and buildings. I was nineteen, in the army, and he was a lot older, ten years older than me, but we didn’t feel any sort of gap. We were like one person. We even had our own language that we invented. We had a name for each other, Daneli, we were both Daneli, we were almost one person. We told each other everything, and whenever he went out of the house he left me a note with a cartoon—he was very talented, his cartoons were so brilliant, and he did them in just two seconds. We couldn’t stay away from each other, we had sex every day, we invented things no one ever heard of or
did before. He said he was going to move into my cunt. We laughed because he was very funny, he did imitations of people and he was witty and cracked jokes all the time. Sometimes his humor was very dark, and we fought because I didn’t like it. I thought there were some things you shouldn’t laugh about, but now I think he was right and I was wrong, but he was older than me, and he knew more about life. We used to go out and everyone would smile at us. We’d wear matching clothes and I was a female version of him and he was a male version of me. I wore sexy clothes, sexier than people wore in those days. After the accident, at the hospital, they wouldn’t let me see him, but I thought it was temporary, so I didn’t insist. They told me he didn’t want visitors and that he was in a lot of pain and on a lot of drugs and that we should give him time. So we did, we gave him time. Now of course I really regret doing that, I should have gone in right away, every day, until it became natural for him. And then they told me he was much better, he was out of danger, they said he was very lucky and there was no infection or internal damage. They said I could see him the next morning and I went out to get him a present, I bought a silk dressing gown, wine-colored with a black collar. But that night he vanished from the hospital. I got there and they said he’d escaped. They were very upset. He hadn’t filled in the forms, he just sneaked out. He sent me a letter a few weeks later. And in the letter he said that it was over between us, and he was going to start a new life, a different life—he didn’t know yet how or what it would be, but that I had to find a way to forget him because he was no longer the same person, the person I had known was no longer him.”
“What about his family?”
“They were upset, but for them, for his parents and sister, the main thing was that he was alive. They didn’t understand me, and I was angry so I stopped visiting them. Maybe I was
just jealous that they had a consolation I didn’t have. He didn’t even leave me a child. If only I had got pregnant! I tried, we tried, and I did get pregnant once, but I had a miscarriage in my sixth month. Maybe something went wrong when I miscarried. After that we kept trying but nothing happened.”
“How long were you together?”
“Seven years and two months. We had a cat, but she died last year.”
“When did you get pregnant?”
“When I was twenty-two.”
“You were nineteen when you married?”
“Yes.”
“If it took you three or four years the first time, even though you had sex every day, you aren’t infertile, it probably just takes you longer.”
“Not every day, we did something every day, but he didn’t always come inside me, there were other things we liked. But you’re right, in the middle of the month we always tried.”
“Maybe that was your mistake. My mother always told me the magic number was ten, ten days after your period starts, she said that was the fertile day, not the middle. She has to be an expert, she had nine kids.”
“Nine …”
“Two died at birth, but she did have nine.”
“Which were you?”
“Second. What will you do about Daniel?”
“I just have to find someone else in Intelligence. At least now I know that the army knows where he is—all I have to do is find someone who will tell me. Such a fluke! This could really be it; this could finally be the key. After so many dead ends. Do you know anyone I could ask?”
“No, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone.”
“I just don’t understand it. Why aren’t they telling me? Do
they want to protect me, or him, or themselves? It doesn’t make sense.”
“My guess is they want to protect you from something, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
“You know, now that I think back to that secretary who spent a lot of time trying to get the information for me, I think she also saw what this guy Aaron saw. I remember she was reading the screen, and I was sure she’d finally found something, but then she shook her head. But I remember wondering what she’d read, why it had taken her so long. She wasn’t even supposed to be going into those files—she was doing it because she hated her boss, I think, and also she wanted to help me. But then when she found the information, she changed her mind.”
“Maybe he’s more handicapped than you think.”
“But he was fine when he left the hospital.”
“Maybe something happened to him afterward.”
“No, it can’t be that, that wouldn’t stop them from telling me. It’s something else. This is so crazy! But I’m excited, too. I think I’m getting close; I mean, if I just find the right person now, I’ll know. I’ll know! I might be seeing Daniel soon. I might be seeing him in a few days, even. I can hardly believe it. This is the first real lead I’ve had!”
He looked at me and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You look like Joan of Arc.”
“Well, imagine. Imagine. I’ve been waiting eleven years. I’ve been waiting eleven years for a lead. Such a fluke. Such a fluke that I met this guy. He was trying to pick me up.”