The Missing File (11 page)

Avraham made notes on a sheet of paper like the one he had used on Wednesday evening. The day before he had looked for that particular sheet—with the terrible drawing he had unconsciously scribbled at the bottom—but could not find it. “Isn't it a difficult job—I mean, with a family and all?” he asked, hoping not to sound accusatory, and the father replied drily, “It's my profession.”

Should he ask him how much a chief engineering officer earns in a month? Avraham wondered. Five thousand? Ten thousand? Thirty thousand? He had no idea. And that's what he wanted to speak to him about—about things he didn't know. That was always the key.

“What did your wife think about it?” he asked. “How did you meet?” And Rafael Sharabi said, “She accepted it. She didn't really have a choice, did she?”

So there was something harsh concealed behind his soft roundness after all. The impatience of someone who wasn't used to being asked personal questions and having to answer them. He was accustomed to issuing orders on his boats in a brusque, professional tone—and probably at home too.

“And how did you meet?”

“Hannah served in the navy too. During the tough times, after the children were born, I tried to spend more time at home. As I said, thanks to that job, I can sometimes be at home for two weeks in a row without having to work.”

Was he surprised that the conversation was focused primarily on his work and his absence from home? Avraham hadn't intended to take it in that direction. He had a feeling the father wanted to speak about it. “How old were you when you got married?” he asked.

“How old? I was twenty-six and Hannah was twenty-one.”

He pictured them at the wedding. He could imagine the father in his twenties—thinner, with a slightly more upright posture, yet still round and soft in appearance, just as he was today, only less confident. He couldn't imagine Hannah as a twenty-one-year-old. It must have been in the early 1990s. “And when was Ofer born?” he asked.

“I was busy with my apprenticeship when we got married. I was doing the long routes then and was sometimes away from home for more than a month, so we waited. We decided to have Ofer only after I had qualified and got the job with Zim. He was born so small.”

“And how did he take it?”

“Who?”

“Ofer.”

“How did he take what?”

“The fact that you would often disappear.” Now Ofer's disappeared, just like you, Avraham thought, but didn't say it.

The father's hands were large and hairy, and he looked down at them as he placed them on Avraham's desk.

“It was hard for him when he was little,” he said. “One time I returned from a long trip and he didn't remember me. He insisted I wasn't his father and for several days called me ‘uncle.' But it was okay once he grew up. He helps Hannah a lot when I'm not around. He stays at home, helps around the house. We've been waiting for him to turn seventeen and get his driver's license. Hannah doesn't drive. But maybe it wasn't easy for him, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe we put too much on his shoulders, maybe he got fed up.” The father paused for a moment. “I grew up in a home with financial difficulties and went out to work at a very young age. I wanted my children to live well and to study, and Ofer was a good student. But we also expected a lot from him, to help around the house, to study hard. Maybe it was too much.”

He had yet to say a word about the sister.

“Would you say Ofer had a rough time at home?”

“I don't know, maybe it was hard for him. I thought it was natural. I hadn't thought about it in this way until he disappeared, and he never said anything. Before starting high school, he asked if he could go to the Naval Officers Academy. It's a boarding school in Acre. I wasn't opposed to the idea, but Hannah didn't want him to go. She wanted him at home.”

“Do you have clear rules at home about when and with whom he's allowed to go out?” Avraham cautiously asked, and the father said, “No, on the contrary. We were very flexible when it came to that. We encouraged him to go out at night, to do whatever he wanted with his friends. Hannah needs less help in the evenings, after the other children go to sleep. We just put too much responsibility on him. Especially when I wasn't there.”

Avraham was sure the father had no idea about Ofer's plans to go out to a movie that Friday night with a girl who liked him—perhaps his first such date.

And he was right.

“What about friends? Girls?” he asked, and the father said, “I don't think he went out with girls. But that's pretty natural, no? I was shy too at his age. I've always thought the army would do for Ofer what it did for me, open him up.”

“Did he talk about the army?”

“He wanted to join the navy, and I encouraged him—although I wouldn't want him to be a sailor after his military service. I can't tell you how proud it made me to see him study, do his homework, work on the computer. He taught me how to surf the Internet.”

T
hey spoke in his office for four hours—from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. And as the time passed, Avraham became aware of just how important their conversation was to him. After Hannah Sharabi's lengthy silences, he felt almost grateful to her husband for talking about himself and his family.

At 1:30 p.m., he went out to order them each a tray of food from the cafeteria, along with two cups of coffee, and he smoked a cigarette in the parking lot while waiting for lunch to arrive. His cell phone rang. It was Ze'ev Avni. He didn't recall leaving his number with the neighbor. Avraham asked if he could come into the station for an additional interview the following morning, and Avni replied that he had to be at home with his son then and invited Avraham to come to the apartment. Avraham hesitated but then suggested that Avni come to the station that afternoon, at around five. Avni agreed, asked how he would find him, and then said, “Okay, so, see you at five,” as if they were friends arranging to meet for coffee.

Eliyahu Ma'alul's cell phone was switched off. Perhaps he was busy speaking to the girl from Kiryat Sharet High School. Reluctantly, Avraham also called Shrapstein, who wasn't in his office. He finally answered after ten rings and said he was “exploring an interesting direction.” Unlike Ma'alul, Shrapstein hadn't called to update him, though Avraham was certain he had called Ilana.

“What ‘direction'?” Avraham asked.

“It's not clear yet; I'll update you if I get anything concrete,” Shrapstein replied. “In a nutshell, a resident of the neighborhood who has a history of sex crimes and violence involving youths is out on parole. It's mostly harassment, but you know how these things escalate. For now, I'm collecting information, and we may bring him in to the station for questioning. Do you want to participate in the interrogation when he comes in?”

Of course he wanted to. What a question.

He considered calling Ilana, but decided to wait until he'd finished his meeting with the father. Shrapstein had again managed to irritate him, but overall he felt better. The investigation was moving forward, even if the direction it was taking remained unclear. The story was filling out with detail. The chronicle of Ofer's life was no longer a blank page. It had a wedding in it, at some point in the early 1990s, and a young father who had completed a course to become a chief engineering officer and was away from home for long periods; it had a sister with Down's syndrome whom the family was too ashamed to mention; it had shipping lines that carried thousands of containers to ports in Cyprus and Koper. Owing to his father's absences and the condition of his sister, Ofer was given a heavy load to carry, but the responsibility he was forced to assume wasn't the kind that strengthened—on the contrary, perhaps. He was not asked to step into his father's shoes during the absences. He was just asked to help. Outside the home, there was a friend called Yaniv Nesher, there were computer games, and a girl who liked Ofer. There was a date to see a movie. And there was the wish to leave home and live at a boarding school, to join the navy. The sea had become an inescapable backdrop to the story. Not the beach, with which Avraham was familiar, just like everyone else, and where he'd go sometimes on a Saturday in the summer, without removing his shirt. This was a different kind of sea, a sea that was also a place of work, a sea that was a distance between father and son, wife and husband. He wanted to look again at the photographs of Ofer that he had in his office, though not in the presence of the father.

As he put out his second cigarette, Ze'ev Avni called again, asking if he needed to bring with him to the interview any form of identification or other documents. Avraham told him to bring his identity card, to which Avni replied, “My ID card is old and not up-to-date. I haven't amended my residential address—it still says I live in Tel Aviv. Is that okay?”

Avraham said it was fine and hung up, already beginning to regret the time he was going to waste in the company of the teacher. Perhaps he could dump Avni on Shrapstein? He smiled. It was an excellent idea.

F
or the last hour, they spoke mostly about Tuesday. He asked Rafael Sharabi to reconstruct the twenty-four hours prior to Ofer's disappearance, and to try to remember anything unusual.

“I was preparing for a trip, so I was home for most of the day,” the father said. He woke at 6:00 a.m., and then woke the boys. His wife woke their sister. Still no mention of the disability, as if the sister were a normal child. She gets picked up for school at 7:30 a.m. At this point, Avraham was writing down every word.

“Did Ofer go down to the grocery store?”

“I think so. He goes down every morning. But I don't remember. Is it important?”

He then drove the younger son to kindergarten. Ofer left for school as usual, on foot. He didn't know what Hannah had done.

After his stop at the kindergarten, the father had errands to run; he was at the bank, and then drove into Jaffa to renew the license on the car. After he returned home, they went shopping in the industrial area. He had something to eat while they were out. Ofer was the first of the children to return home—at some point before 2:00 p.m., but the father wasn't sure, as he was napping at the time. He thought Ofer usually ate lunch alone, as his brother and sister returned home later. Perhaps he sometimes ate with Hannah. He couldn't remember seeing him after he woke from his afternoon nap, but was sure that Ofer had stayed at home, just as the mother had said. He was probably doing homework or preparing for an exam in his room. Rafael Sharabi was in the bedroom, beginning to pack his bag for the trip, with the help of his wife. He hadn't heard Ofer talking to anyone over the phone. The younger son returned at 4:00 p.m., driven home by the mother of another child from the kindergarten. The daughter got home after 5:00 p.m.

Avraham couldn't hold back anymore. “So late?” he asked. “Where does she go to school?”

“What? She's at a special school,” the father quietly responded, looking Avraham in the eyes.

“Why?”

“She has a mental disability. It's a good school, with a long school day and lots of help.”

Now that the father had told him about her, Avraham felt he had nothing more to ask, as if all he had wanted was for them to stop denying her existence. “So she lives at home, then, not in an institution?” he asked nevertheless.

“No, Hannah wouldn't have that. She barely agreed to send her to school. She wanted her to stay at home and to look after her herself. That's how things were until she was seven. That's why she gave up her job. She used to teach kindergarten.”

“And how did Ofer take it?”

“I thought we should consider a boarding school for her—for the sake of the other children. No, it wasn't easy for him. But he helped out a lot—both Hannah and his sister. It was more difficult when he was little. He was ashamed, and would tell everyone at school that he was an only child. This was before his brother was born. But in recent years he's been really good to her.”

Avraham put down his pen and thought about the silent mother. She had left her job to stay at home with the daughter in order to protect her from any harm out in the world, and inside the home from the father, who wanted to send her to an institution—because of the children, or in other words, for the boys.

“What's her name?” he asked, and the father quietly said, “Ofer was the first to learn sign language, because she has a severe hearing problem. It's part of her condition. Her name's Danit.”

Avraham picked up his pen again, and they returned to that Tuesday. The family had eaten at around 7:00 p.m.—everyone together. The father bathed the younger son and put him to bed. Ofer was watching TV in the living room. The wife helped Danit bathe herself and get into bed. Ofer went back to his room after his brother had fallen asleep, presumably to play on the computer, with the volume turned down. The father didn't think he had seen him writing e-mails and hadn't noticed if he surfed the Internet, so wouldn't know which sites he may have visited. He didn't hear him talk on the phone. At 9:30 p.m., he and the wife had gone out, like they did before every trip. They went to meet some friends, another couple, at a café in the center of town. He had no idea what Ofer did that evening, and only remembered that when they returned home, relatively early, 11:00 p.m. maybe, he was asleep. There was nothing unusual about that; he thought that was the time Ofer normally went to bed.

“Did you have a fight that evening?” Avraham asked.

“Who?”

“You and your wife—or perhaps between the two of you and Ofer.”

“Not that I recall. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Not that I remember. Things are a little tense sometimes before I go away, but I don't recall an argument before the last trip.”

“And the next day?”