43
Warshawski looked even older than he had the first time I saw him. This time it was only him and me, in a small café in a side street. ‘Not in the hospital,’ he’d insisted. Under his sparse white hair his scalp was pinkly visible. His beard was well trimmed but his eyes were full of defeat and–it took me a few minutes to comprehend this–full of fear. Professor Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski feared me. On the phone I’d told him that I knew all about Tamer and his wife and about Guetta and the money.
‘Do you want money?’ he’d asked.
‘I want to meet, and to hear the whole story.’
‘And after you hear the whole story?’
‘Then I’ll decide what to do.’
I ordered hot chocolate, he ordered tea. Outside the café window it was clear but cool. My hearing was almost back to normal. After several weeks of constant pain, the discomfort from the wounds to my calf, my thigh and my lower arm was beginning to subside. I spent a couple of weeks with Mother and Father, and when I came back to Tel Aviv, Dafdaf came and stayed in the flat along with my brother, who flew over from Maryland to be with me. Between them they dealt with every phone call or text or email from Noah’s Ark and Left and Right and all the rest of them. They said no to everything for me. Including Duchi.
‘Are you going to go to the police?’
I gave Warshawski my coldest stare. You could see the fear crawling all over him.
‘I don’t know. I want to hear the whole story.’
‘Who are you? Who are you acting for?’
If I wanted to know anything, I had to maintain his fear. I couldn’t say who I really was: it was the card I had to keep hidden.
‘We are whoever we are, and we work for whoever we work for. I can’t tell you who it is but let me give you some friendly advice: don’t mess with us. It won’t be worth your while.’
He asked for a cigarette. I raised my eyebrows in surprise but lit up for both of us. His hands were trembling. ‘I’m not supposed to smoke,’ he said. I waited.
‘I discovered my wife was having an affair. There were signs. Her skin had a glow to it. Dvora always said I had the eyesight of a hawk. I also have an extremely good memory.’ He exhaled smoke, with eyes lowered, the cigarette vibrating in his jolting fingers. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘What is the point of this? You won’t understand.’
‘So you realised your wife was having an affair.’
‘It was just…forget it, young man. My marriage was over before that. It was just the last straw. It hurt. This country…’ There was something very unsettling about Warshawski. I was beginning to wonder if it hadn’t been a mistake to come here without Bar. I felt out of my depth.
‘Tell me what happened with Dvora,’ I said.
‘One day I came home in the middle of the day. I never do, though I live near the hospital. It was a time when I was…I was tired. As I was arriving at our building, I saw him leaving. Dvora was at home. She was wearing a robe. She works at the shop at the Tel Aviv Museum. She doesn’t come back home just like that in the middle of a working day and put on a robe. She said she didn’t feel well, but I’m not a fool.’ Warshawski rubbed his eyes under his glasses. ‘I didn’t say anything. I turned around and walked out on her there and then. I saw him four or five days later in a hospital corridor. He was wearing a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t recognise him at first, but my memory got there in the end. The label on his chest said “Tomer”. All I could find out from the hospital was he was called Tomer and worked part time in physiotherapy. But something was niggling me. He was familiar from somewhere.’ Warshawski looked at me, enjoying his own sleuthing. ‘His brother’s greengrocer’s. America Fruit and Veg.’
‘What did Dvora tell you?’
‘Listen, you won’t understand. I told you, young man. You don’t want to hear the story of my life. It would take me a week. It would…’ He was groping for words. ‘Our marriage was already finished. It had happened before. If I hadn’t bumped into him in the hospital corridor, I wouldn’t even have…’
‘OK. I understand,’ I said, though I didn’t entirely. ‘Let’s not get into it. Go on.’
‘So I went to the greengrocer’s and it all fell into place. I told Amin there was a nurse in the hospital who looked a lot like him. He says it’s his brother. “Tamer.” “Tamer? Not Tomer?” “He calls himself Tomer in the hospital so there won’t be any problems, you understand?” I did. I got out of there and walked a few steps down the street before I flopped down on a bench. I wanted to throw up. I was ashamed. I was, I was…’ Warshawski raised his head and looked at me but I merely stared back at him. ‘This country…Listen, I don’t know your opinions. In the hospital I don’t dare say anything. There is a witch-hunt against anyone who dares to say that this country is falling into the abyss. That we need a strong leader, someone who knows how to get things done. Have you ever read Grey Wolf, the biography of Kemal Atatürk?’ I shook my head. ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘The, uh, the Turk.’
‘Read it, young man. The subtitle is “An Intimate Study of a Dictator”. I’ll tell you something else.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Read Mein Kampf. If you want, I have recordings of Hitler’s speeches I can lend you.’ I looked around me uncomfortably, but the café was almost empty. ‘I don’t need anyone to tell me about Hitler, but only a blind man could fail to see that what’s going on here is another Weimar. The humiliation, the shame, the betrayal of the people by weak governments, the left-wing control of the media, people escaping into sex, hedonism, anything, the fear…’ He fished another cigarette out of my pack.
‘Are you sure those cigarettes are good for you?’
He laughed. ‘I’m sure they’re not. Cheeky boy.’
I didn’t want to hear any of this. The fear seemed to be transferring itself from him to me. I could see it leaving his body, could feel it settling in mine.
‘I thought about going to Amin’s store at night and burning it down. I thought about the ways I could hurt Tamer himself. Poisonous rats were scurrying round my head, gnawing at me, making their plans. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with them. I have no problem with them selling me fruit and vegetables, as Amin does. But I remember one attack, in Jerusalem. I sat in front of the TV and I wanted someone to…You sit in front of the TV and you can’t understand this impotence. Screw what the world thinks. Screw everything. The Arabs are making fools of us. We must teach them a lesson.’ Warshawski was finding his voice. He wasn’t hesitant any more–his confession had begun to evolve into a speech.
He had still been a baby when his family emigrated from Poland to Israel at the end of the Second World War. He didn’t remember Europe but he remembered his childhood in Israel very clearly: Independence Day celebrations, the constant Arab attacks on Hadera. His father and mother were both in the Jewish underground, the IZL, during its heyday. In the quieter early sixties he was a radio operator in the army, serving at Zrifin Base. To see the first settlers celebrating Passover night in Hebron and then, months later, in the second settlement at Sebsastia had made him burst with pride. The nuclear medicine came naturally: a mother who wanted her son to be a doctor, a son too obedient or meek to oppose her. The degree, the apprenticeship, the wife, the kids. ‘Kids?’ I said. He nodded, and didn’t elaborate. He was a riddle. He had a straightforward, regular, respectable side, but he was detached from it. His real self seemed to be with Mein Kampf and the teaching of lessons to others.
He ordered another cup of tea from the waitress, and took another cigarette without asking. His fingers were still shaking–not fear, but an old man’s palsy. I reminded myself of the email Bar had sent me that morning: ‘Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski = the Arab did her’. It didn’t seem funny any more.
‘And Giora Guetta?’
‘I met him in Jerusalem. I went to teach a course in Hadassah. They’d installed a new system, a wonderful machine. Our department in Ichilov had already been using the same system for a year–we were the first to get it. So I was the leading expert in the country. It’s a Positron Emission Tomography system–it combines positron tomography with a particle accelerator. We were one of the first in the world to use it. A unique system, very complex–it gives a complete map of the body, its pathologies, its…never mind.’ He laughed, seeing the look on my face. ‘I had to travel to Jerusalem for three days, and I preferred to stay in the King David. Better than driving back and forth every day in that traffic. Guetta worked there as a security guard. I didn’t notice him the first day: you never notice the faces of security guards. But on my second morning, we got talking in the lobby. He was getting something from the drinks machine and he’d come up a shekel short, so I gave him one. It was a particularly warm day, at the end of the summer. Nearly a year ago, now. Guetta said, “I owe you one” and I waved my hand and said, “Come on, you don’t owe me a thing. Drink. Enjoy.” And then that evening I was thinking about it. Jerusalem always depresses me. And I’d been thinking about Dvora and this kid…’ He was remembering it. ‘When I came back from Hadassah the next day, I asked him if he’d like to join me for coffee in the lobby after his shift. He gave me a look. I had to tell him I wasn’t like that. “But,” I said, “I might have a job offer for you.”’
Warshawski took off his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt cuffs, coughing. I took a sip from my second hot chocolate. I felt pressure in my chest. I saw Guetta, beside me on the Little No. 5, showing me his Palm. I remembered Shuli’s hands clasped around her cup in the café near Montefiore’s wagon.
‘Are you all right, young man?’ said Warshawski. I ordered a glass of water while he waited for me.
‘Giora Guetta. He told me he had just left the army. The security-guard job was one of those Defence Ministry “preferred jobs”, where they give you a grant for six months. He was thinking what to do next, after he got the grant. He wanted to open a business, or be a computer programmer. I was interested in what he did in the army. Border Police. In Gaza. It sounded interesting. And then he told me they called him “The Killer”. That he’d engraved three Xs on his rifle barrel. He spent two years in Gaza. He saw a lot of disgusting stuff. He said, “If all those lefties could spend just one week in Gaza they’d change their minds by the third day.” It wasn’t only that the opportunity arose. It was more than that. I hadn’t come to Jerusalem and met this great kid by chance. You understand?’ I nodded weakly. ‘I said I had an offer for him that he would like a lot. A lot of money, but it would have to be a secret. We would meet to arrange it in Tel Aviv. “Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s not anything you haven’t done before.” Ha ha ha, et cetera. “But in return for your secrecy, and in return for this conversation, I am writing you a cheque for a thousand shekels. It doesn’t matter if you take the job or not. You can disappear if you want to. But you should know: there’s a lot more money.” Then I took his phone number and his email.’
I told Warshawski not to leave and went to the toilet. I stood and watched my stream flow down the smooth white wall and I thought about myself, how I was in a café on a weekday morning with a Hitler-reading Polish Jew who had hired a young guy to murder his wife’s lover, and I was here because the young guy’s girlfriend, with whom I’d fallen in love–a love that had somehow led to her death–had asked me to find out what her boyfriend was doing on the morning of his death by suicide bomber on the minibus on which I’d happened to be travelling. Adultery, murder, terrorist attacks: nothing surprising about it. It happened all the time. The surprising thing, I saw, was me. It was so strange that there should be somebody who linked these people. Even stranger that it should be me: that it was me at this moment in this café toilet.
‘We met,’ Warshawski continued with a certain relish when I returned, ‘in Tel Aviv at the Coffee Bean in Yehuda Maccabi Street–as you know very well, young man. I told him everything he needed to know about Tamer and offered him thirty thousand shekels, with ten thousand as down payment. He didn’t even ask for time to think. It was like that. I gave him Tamer’s details and he entered them into his little electronic notebook. We agreed on the time. We shook hands. I was scared. But Guetta was perfect. You know? Young but experienced. Enthusiastic but reliable. Not involved in the criminal world. He didn’t look like a killer should. He was really up for it. He had already killed and thirty thousand shekels was a fortune for him. He said there was no problem getting hold of a gun. An impressive kid. Confident. Handsome. Knew what he wanted. A real Jew.’
Now that I knew what Guetta had been doing, what did I feel? Nothing. I looked at the Polish professor, and felt nothing at all. How much time had Bar and I spent on this ‘investigation’? And now it was solved and so what? I asked for the bill and insisted on paying. They brought our coats and we went out into the chill. ‘In fact, I’d changed my mind even before I heard that Guetta had been killed,’ Warshawski insisted to me as we walked down the boulevard. ‘I tried to call him but the line was dead. I left a message. I wrote him an email. When I read in the newspaper that the Arabs had killed him, I felt responsible. I was ashamed. But my first thought was that I’d made a terrible mistake. Like in Jerusalem, when I thought I had to do it. Sometimes life gives you these clues. You think you see a pattern, you understand? Afterwards I thought about him. Another young life lost, because of this damned country. This defeatist country.’
I was thinking about what I was going to do now. Where did I take this from here? Warshawski was on automatic, letting everything out, and I didn’t stop him. ‘Dvora and I are still together, somehow. She confessed to it one evening. I pretended that I didn’t know. I’d already forgiven her in my heart. She hurt me. I hated her, but I’d had my revenge–without her knowing.’ It was as if a weight had been lifted from his heart. He couldn’t stop talking. ‘I didn’t tell her anything. A day or two after the bombing I got a phone call from Guetta’s girlfriend; wanting to know what he had been doing in Tel Aviv. I turned the phone off and put it out with the garbage. The next day I changed my number.’
‘Listen,’ I said, almost apologetically. ‘I’ve got to make a move.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I turned and walked away down King David Boulevard. I walked all the way home. A weekday afternoon. Guy had said he would call me if he needed help at Time’s Arrow. I didn’t get a call. I went into the bedroom at home and fetched my cheque out of the drawer: the way things were going I might have to cash it. I sat on the sofa and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the energy to do anything about Warshawski. I thought about telling Almaz everything, but gave up on the idea. What was the difference? Guetta was dead. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer. What good would it do anyone if Warshawski lost his job or went to jail now? I honestly didn’t care any longer. I had done my bit. I looked around at the vacant white walls. I breathed deeply; closed my eyes. Unconsciously, I ran my finger over the scar on my forehead. I thought about Shuli. The moment we switched places and we touched, how she wanted to look out on to the street, her smile. Then I was thinking about Duchi and a dull general pain set in. The phone rang again and I answered it. It was my brother.
We picked Dafdaf up from work in his hire car and sped up to Jerusalem.
We met Mother at the entrance.
The doctors said it was a relatively minor heart attack.
Father lay in pyjamas on his hospital bed. He was pale, and there was a breathing tube in his nose. He looked at me. I held his cold hand and burst out crying. I couldn’t stop. I had to go out into the corridor. In the corridor I saw a nurse sitting on a bench crying too. A Russian girl. She looked up at me as if to ask me to stop, or as if to offer me consolation, or ask it for herself, but I couldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop crying.
About the Author
ASSAF GAVRON is a writer and translator. He grew up in Jerusalem, studied in London and Vancouver, and now lives in Tel Aviv. In Israel, he has published four novels, a short story collection, and a collection of falafel reviews.
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