Limassol (8 page)

I spent a lot of time at home in those days. In the evening, I jogged around the neighborhood and did another few kilometers on the shoulder of the freeway. I ate the schnitzel and rice my mother-in-law made. I helped Sigi bathe the child. I read books before going to sleep.

“I have to give them an answer about Boston,” Sigi kept saying over and over.

I tried to get close to her, to calm down, to be gentle, but she only wanted to hear that we were going. Boston was waiting, Boston wouldn't wait. Finally I blew up and roared, on one damn night of a heat wave, that I wasn't going, I didn't give in.

 

A-frame wooden houses were built on the Caesarea dunes. They were too small to live in year round because they had only a lower floor and a triangular roof. In the seventies they were sold as vacation houses on the European model for wealthy city-dwellers from Tel Aviv and Haifa. But the really rich bought villas with swimming pools, a few kilometers from there, and the A-frames were abandoned in time and became deserted wooden skeletons. The sand slowly enveloped them.

The sea was stormy when I arrived. Waves came from afar and broke on the shore. I tripped on tangled fleshy leaves and gigantic ants' nests. Daphna had indicated the A-frame inspired by French summer houses she had bought with Ignats with ready cash when they returned to Israel. There was no sign on the door and an old bike missing a wheel stood outside. The wooden door was worm-eaten and my knocking wasn't answered. In the picture she showed me, the child was sitting in a plastic wading pool on a green lawn, which was now covered with sand.

In the territories, we have a method of getting people out of their holes, there are dogs and there are neighbors and there's tear gas, but here my means were limited and I had come alone. A person has to come out sometime to buy food, or drugs, or to get a breath of air, after all the guy isn't Anne Frank. But I didn't have the patience to wait for him all day. I walked behind the cottage and peeped through the screened window. He wasn't on the ground floor. I stepped up onto a board and it made a loud creak. I hoisted myself a little more, up to the windowsill on the second floor, I knew I'd regret it when I felt a twinge in my back; when I was about to roll inside, I heard a window open above my head. A few centimeters from me was a pale, very thin face, covered with a scraggly beard, the eyes laughing strangely. The hand was holding a big kitchen knife. “Stop!” I yelled, and he retreated a little. His torso was naked. “I won't hurt you,” I said, and he withdrew a little more.

“Get out of here,” he said in a childish voice, brandishing the knife in an unstable hand.

“I'm getting down now,” I said. “Open the door.”

“I'll cut you,” he said from above.

“You won't cut anybody here. Daphna sent me. I'm a friend,” I said from below, as in some kind of perverse serenade.

The door opened slowly, I heard him shuffle back, and he was no longer holding the knife. Inside, as expected, all kinds of things; dozens of books, and dishes had been tossed about, and the place reeked of sour milk.

“Who are you?” he stood in my way. His body was beautiful and long and very thin, and up close I could see in his eyes that he wasn't healthy.

I said I was a friend of Daphna's, that she sent a little money with me, and she wanted me to find out how he was. I gave him the five hundred I had taken out of the agents' petty cash. In Gaza, that sum could have supported a family for a month. Here it would barely be enough to buy him cocaine for one day. Nevertheless, the money softened him. He put it into his shorts' pocket and moved out of my way.

“Let's go outside,” I suggested. “There's a nice wind from the sea. It's a little musty here.”

“You can go out,” he said. “I'm not.” His eyes were red. He didn't look at me. His arms were full of holes and scars from shooting up. He noticed my look and pulled a dirty sweatshirt from some chair, and the long sleeves covered his arms.

“You're not a cop, are you?” he asked. “I saw you in the distance, when you came. You made a lot of noise. Except for mice, nobody comes here. It's just like a cop to be so clumsy.” He had a childish laugh, and when he laughed his eyes squinted and you could like him.

I promised him I wasn't a cop. I asked what he needed.

“I need money,” he said. “What you brought me is a joke.”

I cleared off a pile of clothes and God knows what else to sit on an old wooden chair. “That's enough for a nice shopping trip to the supermarket,” I said. “There are families who could live on that for a week.”

Yotam Ignats laughed until he almost choked. “Mother always finds strange people,” he said. “She's great at that. Creatures from the moon. You don't look like a cop, I know cops. I'll bet you're some lousy actor mother sleeps with, who comes to put on an act for me. She's got no money for private investigators so she sends me fakes. I know because I took everything she had, my poor mother. You passed my audition, congratulations.” He clapped his hands and stamped his feet and split his sides laughing.

“You're in a good mood,” I said.

“I bought some good stuff.” He crossed his legs and folded up in himself, as if he were freezing. “I met a rich girl, we bought stuff for rich people. For a week I've been living on the leftovers. But it's running out, unfortunately, and I don't think she'll want to see me again. In the end, we had a scene, like in the movies.”

He was talking defiantly, in a clear voice in his mother's good language, as if he had been waiting a long time for somebody he could talk to. But my responses didn't interest him, he spoke to hear the sound of his own voice.

I picked up one of the books lying on the floor, something by Jung on Job, in English. “Interesting?” I asked.

“It's my father's, all of it. He left it here,” said Yotam in a childish voice. “He lived here after he ran away from us, in the sand, like a cave man. Until he went up to Jerusalem and from there he went down into the grave. The books turned his mind to mush. I only have fun with them, killing time. I don't believe in anything people write. Did you read that Jung, hear of him? Probably not . . . ”

I asked if he wanted me to help him clean up a little. The smell was becoming unbearable, the little sink was full of old dishes, covered with mold. The tail of at least one mouse passed in front of my eyes. “If you want to, clean up,” he said. “I'm not going to get mixed up in that. I'm going upstairs now, with your permission, all of a sudden, I don't feel so good. You disturbed me in the middle. I need to sleep a little. Thanks anyway for the money, just tell her to bring more, or else she'll have to buy me a tombstone soon, and I heard there's a shortage of marble. She's got to give me more. As far as I'm concerned, she can sell the apartment, the building is falling apart anyway. Let her come live here, at the sea, the air here is excellent. I'll go away, I want to go to Cuba, that's what I should do. Just lock up . . . ”

Yotam went up the creaking stairs, finally breaking away from the conversation. What did they do to him to put him in such a state? I asked myself. I went to the filthy kitchen corner and hesitated a moment. But I promised her to take care of him. I checked whether there was running water in the faucet, and I started washing the dishes, trying not to breathe through my nose; there was weeks of mold on them and cockroaches and filth. I crushed the living insects one by one with a heavy frying pan, then I filled the sink with water and soap and soaked the dishes in it. I recalled something written by some Buddhist sage about how much he enjoyed washing dishes, blessing the dishes and the moment. High waves broke before my eyes in the small window. I'd be willing to open that rotten wooden house to them, for them to wash away all the filth. I stood at the sink a long time. When I finished, I felt dizzy and sat down on a chair, I picked up the Jung book, leafed through it a little, my eyes grew heavy, and a slumber descended on me. When I woke up, it was dark in the cottage and still as the grave. I was scared.

I checked to see if my gun was in its place—I didn't know what that junkie was capable of—and went up to see what was going on with him. He was lying on a mattress covered with a filthy, bloodstained sheet, reading. “Hey,” he started. “You're still here? You didn't go?”

“I cleaned up your filth downstairs.”

“Fantastic,” he turned his face to me as he lay there. “You want to do my laundry too? I don't have even one clean tie . . . ”

I bent over him and thrust my head into his face. “I'm here only because of your mother, you little shit”—the Buddhist monk didn't last very long—“and now I'll start educating you. I'll clean this hole of every grain of stuff and I'll lock you inside until you clean up. Look at you with all those punctures, in the filth.” He groped for the knife left under the window. I stepped on his hand, trying not to hurt him too much.

“What is wrong with you?” I yelled. “What are you going through?”

Now he laughed non-stop, and the laughter gradually turned into the wailing of a wounded animal. “Do you know how many people Mother sent to help me? Do you know how many psychiatrists, neurologists, philosophers, jerks, have been here? Poor Mother, God almighty, how many professors she had to sleep with to make them agree to make a house call to me . . . Oh, you make me laugh, you make me cry. Have you got a little bit of stuff by chance?”

Yotam lay with his arms spread to the sides, pale, thin as a skeleton, punctured. “Shoot me,” he said. “I saw your gun. Nobody will know, mother will think Azariya whacked me, do it already . . . ”

“Who is Azariya?” I asked.

Suddenly a sober and focused look pierced the junkie's mask. “Hey, you're not one of Mother's poets,” he said. “They're all stupid wimps. Maybe you really are a private detective, but they're pretty miserable too. You're from someplace else, wonder where mother found you. You've got to watch out for my mother. Run away from her as long as you can.”

He was darker than she was, but looked very much like her with his height and long limbs. How come she didn't come and take the needles out of his veins, sit with him day and night and make sure he didn't hurt himself?

“Nukhi Azariya, that's the man who's chasing me,” he said. “He thinks I stole a kilo of stuff from him. Fine white powder, like baking powder for making challahs in the synagogue. I'm not taking the blame for it. He's demanding fifty thousand dollars. Great guy, an officer in the Golani Brigade, BA in management from the Open University, high class person. Very good man. I'm waiting for him to find me here and destroy me.”

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

“At home, I think,” he said. Now he was talking feverishly and quickly, as if some fire had been lit in him. “He's a homebody. Before we fell out, I used to go to his house a lot. He loves culture. I'm the only one who could talk with him. He's surrounded by all sorts of underground apes, very low class people. I brought him books. Here, Yotam, buy some books for yourself, but also buy me something good. Only serious things. Aristotle, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, all that. He really enjoyed them, that Nukhi. Extraordinary guy, as Mother likes to say. A very intelligent man. He's also got a terrific wife, a Dutch woman. He found her when he set up the network in Amsterdam. The most sensitive woman I've ever seen. She's crazy about him, about Nukhi Azariya. He's got an enormous farm in a village. And horses. Jeeps. And he's searching for me.”

I knew the village he was talking about, not far from Rehovoth.

“I'm rotting here,” said Yotam and blew his nose. “I'm like one of those crabs that hide in the sand. I can't go back to the city. Every street is full of his people, you can't move an inch without them getting onto you.”

I promised I'd go talk to Nukhi Azariya for him. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “From the state of the refrigerator, it looks like you haven't eaten in months.”

His eyes were blinded by the bare bulb hanging overhead. Now he stumbled again, as if the air had gone out of him, and almost blended with the filthy bed. We sought one another from afar, my eyes were also red and tired, and we were silent.

“I'll bring you food,” I said at last, and went downstairs. I drove to the mall, filled a cart with groceries, and added a pack of cigarettes. When I returned, he was lying in the dark upstairs. I made sure he was breathing, put the things in the small refrigerator, wrote my number on a sheet of paper for him to call if he wanted. I hoped I had fulfilled my obligation with that fellow.

 

“How's the patient from Gaza?”

The head of the ward met me early in the morning before rounds. A weary doctor on night duty in green scrubs came out of the office, having made his report on those who had died during the night.

“Very sick,” said the head of the ward. “He won't last longer than a month or two. We can only ease his pain, not cure him. If he had come six months ago, maybe we could have done something for him. Now it's too late.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“Pancreatic cancer. A fatal tumor and very painful. The last thing you want to get.”

“We need to keep him alive at least for another month,” I said.

The head of the ward chuckled. He was a good-looking man, with harsh blue eyes. “Maybe you should have let him in before, that could have helped.”

I sought an excuse. “That doesn't depend on me,” I said.

“So who does it depend on?” he asked quietly, as if he were amused. “I thought you were lords of life and death.”

“I'm just . . . ”

“A little cog,” the head of the ward completed my sentence and sighed.

He put on his white lab coat and prepared for rounds.

“Without us, he would have died,” I tried to persuade him. His sympathy was important to me. “Nobody would have let him in. He was dying in Gaza. We're not to blame for the situation they brought on themselves. I'm not to blame that their leaders stole all the billions we gave them. They could have built a nice hospital with that.”