37
‘What day does Elvis come?’
Elvis was our cleaner.
‘Tuesdays, remember?’ Duchi said. ‘Obviously Tuesdays. You used to know that sort…’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘What? Somewhere in the south of the city, maybe?’ she said. ‘Down where all the foreign workers live?’
‘I mean which country?’
‘Ah. I don’t know. Is it Ghana?’
‘Ghana…What bit of Africa’s that?’
‘I don’t know, Croc.’
‘Near to the Congo?’
‘Congo’s in the middle somewhere. I don’t know.’
‘Well, who were Ghana a colony of?’
‘I don’t know! Why are you asking me all these questions? Is this something to do with cleaning the flat?’
‘No,’ I said, a little absent-mindedly perhaps, a little inattentive, ‘it’s for work. I need someone who speaks French and Flemish in an African accent.’
This was what lit the fuse of our final row. It irritated her that I was thinking about work and not about home. Duchi used to hope that we could go back to how it had been before. But we never did, and for months we were on the verge, on the verge…and then came the attacks. She understood the gravity of what had happened to me; she gave me time and tried to help (she did help); she accepted the weekly trips to Jerusalem, the sleepless nights, the nervousness, the ruined concentration, the demotion, the drop in salary; she tolerated Bar BaraBush, the long silences, my generally vile behaviour towards her, the evenings with Bar, and the obsession with a comatose girl in Jerusalem…she tolerated all this because she thought it wasn’t ‘the real Croc’. She tried not to judge. It was Uri, of all people–the therapist who used to tell her to get rid of me–who had told her to be patient.
She contacted Ilan, who told her that I’d erected a defensive wall around myself which I was in denial about. Everyone close to me, especially her–he said–ought to give me as much warmth, understanding and positive reinforcement as they could. It was crucial to try to reproduce the conditions of my previous life, as far as it was possible. So she’d tried, though there were days when she’d had enough and hated my guts. And hating me made her feel guilty. Being absorbed in her work made her feel guiltier. With every passing day she hated herself and me more. She said that she had never been unhappier. I didn’t care about her, or anything at all! Not once–not once–since September 11th had we talked about the wedding or our relationship.
‘You don’t pay attention to me, you never ask me about my life, you don’t care how I feel, don’t do anything for the house, and I have lost hope, Croc,’ she said. ‘I have lost hope that things are ever going to change.’
‘What about all that fruit I bought the other day?’ I went to the fridge, took out the half of watermelon and held it out like an exhibit in court. ‘What’s this?’ She just carried on crying, as she had throughout her speech. ‘What the f*ck is this if not something for the house?’ She couldn’t answer. She shook her head.
‘What?’ I screamed. ‘I can’t hear you!’ I swivelled and threw the half-watermelon out of the open window. ‘Huh?’ Faintly, we heard the splatter of the watermelon three floors below.
She said, ‘I’m sorry, Croc. I’m so sorry. But I can’t. I’m going out of my mind!’ She was hardly able to speak, sucking in deep wet gulps of air. She said that she had really tried but she no longer believed things were going to change. I couldn’t function as part of a couple right now. I couldn’t deal with the responsibility and effort of a relationship.
‘Maybe a shock will help. You know. The shock of splitting up, it might help you…come back. And…and if that happens maybe we could see, but I just can’t be around you any more, Croc.’
I was surprised. Almost impressed. She once told me she’d never left any of her boyfriends, even the ones she’d wanted to. She was always too sorry for the other person to be able to go. But I didn’t remind her.
‘Is there someone else?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Is it Ilan?’
‘Oh God, no, no way. There’s nobody else, Croc, I swear. It’s got nothing to do with anybody else. Weren’t you listening to what I was just saying?’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ilan. ‘Goddammit. That f*cking mullet! And he’s going bald. And fat–I mean, you’re always telling me I look three months pregnant–he’s in his second trimester! And that ridiculous goatee! I thought you couldn’t stand facial hair. Bibi put you up to this, didn’t she? F*cking Bibi—’
‘Croc, stop it! Please, stop it! There’s nothing going on with Ilan or with anyone else! Why can’t you stick to the point?’
She burst out sobbing again and I stood and watched. I’m sure there was contempt on my face at that moment. That fat, bald, softly spoken snake: I couldn’t believe it. How low could you stoop? But I didn’t say anything. She lifted her face to the ceiling. It was all bent out of shape from crying.
‘Say something,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Something,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’ A dozen things were going through my head but what I remember above all is the feeling of enormous relief.
In the end, it turned out that Elvis was a lot of help. He’s a Nigerian, so he didn’t know Flemish or French, but he had a Congolese friend called Clinton who spoke both. The Belgians had given me a list of names and Clinton came into Time’s Arrow one day and read them out for several hours. He was delighted with the five hundred shekels he got in cash and found us a Chinese guy and a Vietnamese girl from his neighbourhood in South Tel Aviv, and once they were done I only had one accent left to test. I’d left it to the end because I thought it’d be pretty easy to find an Arabic speaker in Kafr Qasim. Maybe even someone from the park itself.
‘Didn’t work out too well the last time you were hanging out with Arabs,’ Guy smirked at our weekly meeting. Guy’s a hard-line religious nationalist. ‘Check whoever it is with seven eyes. ID, everything, I don’t have to tell you, do I?’
Duchi moved out the day after the row with the help of Voovi and her father, who took me aside to tell me how sorry he was. He couldn’t understand what was going on with his daughter lately. Ilan didn’t dare show his face, luckily for him.
Bar decided it would be a good idea to turn the flat into the Guetta investigation headquarters (they were surely missing us in Bar BaraBush) and we spent hours on the sofa, with the TV on mute and the air-con thundering away, going over possible leads.
Tamer Sarsur. America Fruit and Veg, Be’eri.
Physiotherapy. Don’t mix with the brother.
We hadn’t made any progress with the greengrocer’s, so we decided to focus on ‘physiotherapy’. It took us a whole evening, on the Internet, going through reference books and the Yellow Pages, checking all the physiotherapists around Be’eri Street and Yehuda Maccabi Street, where the meeting between Warshawski and Guetta took place. The next day Bar called every name on our list and asked whether the name Giora Guetta meant anything to them. One said it sounded familiar, but he couldn’t find it in the client records. It was only when Bar returned to America Fruit and Veg that it hit him. So obvious that he actually slapped himself on the forehead. Right in front of him, crowned with its helipad, was the colossal glass cliff of the Ichilov Hospital. It had to have a physiotherapy department.
He neatened himself up, straightened his baseball cap, and wandered the hospital corridors until he found the physiotherapy department on the ground floor of the main building. The department had a reception desk and, farther down the corridor, a waiting room. It was a little after 9.30 in the morning–in a minute he would have to return to his car and drive to work. He couldn’t see the physiotherapists from the waiting room, and besides, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Another dead end. A physiotherapist’s head appeared and called: ‘Mor Shimon.’ No one answered. Two minutes later the physiotherapist’s head returned: ‘Mor Shimon!’
‘Sorry, I was miles away,’ Bar said. ‘That’s me.’
Three years earlier he’d twisted his knee on a skiing trip and had been in physiotherapy for several months: pretending he’d had a relapse would be easy enough, he thought.
‘No it’s not,’ said the physiotherapist, ‘I know who Mor Shimon is.’
Humiliated, Bar shuffled off, exaggerating his old limp. But when he passed reception, with its list of physiotherapists on the wall, one of the names caught his attention. Tomer Sarsur. No, he wasn’t in today, the receptionist told him. He’d be back tomorrow morning.
We went early. It was my first visit to a hospital since the last time in Hadassah and memories of Shuli were trying to shove their way into my mind. Bar led the way to the physiotherapy department, where we were surprised to encounter the Arabic guy from America Fruit and Veg in a nurse’s uniform.
‘Ahalan–America Fruit and Veg! What’re you doing here?’ said Bar.
‘That’s Amin,’ Tomer Sarsur said. On his chest was a tag with his name, and in smaller letters below, ‘Physiotherapy’. ‘I’m his brother. I work here.’
‘It’s amazing…!’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘why don’t you ask me for a kilo of tomatoes so we can get it over with? Then go and ask Amin for a back rub. It was funny the first thousand times.’
‘No, no, it’s just amazing how similar you look. Are you twins?’
‘No, we’re not. Are you here for physiotherapy? Which one of you? What’s the therapist’s name?’
There was an embarrassing pause. Bar was the first to come to his senses. ‘Listen, do you know a guy called Giora Guetta?’
‘Guetta? Has he been treated here?’
‘Uh…we don’t know.’
‘Never heard of him. Why should I know him? Who are you, anyway?’
‘Just friends of his. We had an idea that you might know him.’
He studied us curiously. ‘Sorry I can’t help. Now, excuse me but I’m going to work.’ He turned and walked away. I stuck my hands in my trouser pockets, and Bar passed an anxious hand over his ginger stubble. If that was Tomer Sarsur, then who was Tamer? We crossed the street to America Fruit and Veg.
Not quite twins but close enough: the same nose, long-lashed black eyes, the same lopsided smile. Amin was in a good mood. It was a hot, quiet morning without many customers and he was happy to talk. Tomer, he explained, was actually Tamer: he’d changed his name to the Israeli to spare his patients the anxiety of dealing with his Arabic name. Everyone thought they were twins, and confused them when they were out together, or when Tamer covered for Amin in the store so he could visit their sick mother. She was dead now, Amin said, but when she’d been ill he’d spent a lot of time with her. Maybe he was compensating for Tamer, who had cut all contact with the family back in Kafr Qasim. The brothers had been living together in a flat on Weizmann Street for four years. But no, he said, he’d never heard of Giora Guetta–and he looked as if he was telling the truth.
We’d found Tamer Sarsur, and we understood ‘don’t mix with the brother’, but we hadn’t found Warshawski, and couldn’t see what connected him and Sarsur. We were stuck. I suggested that we involve Almaz but Bar claimed he would just laugh at our little investigation. So the days began to pass with nothing much happening and Bar stopped coming over in the evenings and it hit me as if for the first time that I was on my own. I wondered where Duchi was and what she was up to. I missed her. One morning I received a cheque from Itzik for five thousand shekels, with a cheery note thanking me for my help: I stuffed it in the back of a drawer and found the wedding ring I’d never given her and sat staring at the wall of the flat for a long time, remembering the way she would laugh and call me an idiot whenever I did something funny. I came to see how much I still loved her; how much I’d lost. I called Muku, but he was busy. Gadgid didn’t have time either. I went to Bar BaraBush and had a Cannibal but there were too many pretty girls there, and it depressed me to be alone with a hamburger. I called Uzi Bracha, my fellow laboratory mouse from therapy, who told me that Naama–beautiful but unshutuppable Naama–had asked about me. She’d broken up with her boyfriend, the mountain climber. So I called her, but the conversation just reminded me of her miserable state of mind, and my own, and everyone’s in that group. It was too depressing. We both said we ought to meet up, but I didn’t call again and neither did she.
And then one evening at work (I’d started staying longer again, because there was nothing to do at home and pretty much everyone else had already left for the day) Bar called in a state of high excitement and told me he had something I might like to look at.
A standard Hotmail screen. ‘Well–Hotmail. So what?’
‘Look whose it is,’ said Bar, and I followed his finger to the corner of the screen: [email protected].
‘How the hell?’
Bar smiled with satisfaction. ‘Just luck. I had a bit of time, so I started messing about with it. Actually, I’m an idiot–I tried weeks ago, but with one “t” instead of two. I was trying a few combinations of his name and password today and…what do you think it was?’
‘Shuli?’
‘What else?’
‘How come we didn’t think of this earlier?’
‘That’s exactly what I said.’
I sat down next to him, shaking my head. We may have been a pair of idiots but Bar was also a bit of a genius. ‘Well?’ I asked eventually. My heart was racing. ‘Anything interesting there?’
‘Emails from Binyamin Warshawski. One before the attack, setting the details of the meeting. The other the morning after, asking Giora where he’s gone and why he’s not answering the phone. It says he’s beginning to worry and tells him to get in touch urgently. Says he hopes Giora’s not planning on disappearing with the money.’
‘Disappearing with the money?’ I stared at Bar.
‘That’s all. Nothing interesting in the other emails. Even these two don’t tell us that much…’ He removed his cap and scratched his dome. ‘But at least we know who Binyamin Warshawski is now.’ He showed me the details at the foot of the email:
Prof. Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski
Nuclear Medicine Department
Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre
And below that, the address, phone number, fax number.
‘What’s the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre?’
‘Wake up, Croc,’ he said. ‘It’s Ichilov.’