A Possibility of Violence (27 page)

Her name was still inscribed on the mailbox.

And no lights were on in the rest of the rooms in the second-floor apartment.

Avraham stood next to the doorway to the building until he realized that Marianka would see him if she suddenly arrived, and he retreated to the abandoned garden in the middle of the square. He smoked a cigarette under the protection of the darkness and the bare trees. A neighbor whose face was familiar to him walked through the garden with his dog, and the dog barked at Avraham as if it remembered him. From time to time he looked up at the dark window. But the cold grew sharper and deepened, piercing his thin jacket like a knife, and at ten thirty he decided to go back to the hotel. On his way there, he was overcome by hunger and stopped at Le Prétexte, and the waitress smiled at him and asked how he was doing, and he managed to answer her with the few French phrases he had learned over the summer. He ate pasta with seafood in a bland cream sauce and watched the chess game two loud old men were engaged in at the table across from him.

He was still quite familiar with Marianka's schedule, and the next day, at seven in the morning, he again hid in the garden across from her building.

His heart pounded powerfully when he saw the door open on the other side of the parked cars and his Marianka exit the building in a dark tracksuit and running shoes. She looked around and didn't notice him, warmed her hands with her breath, and then started on her established run, in the direction of Rue de Lausanne, and disappeared. Following the plan he had conceived in advance, he waited in a café through whose window he would be able see her upon her return.

But he didn't see her return.

And when he went back to the square, at nine fifteen, the window of her room was open.

The windowsill was decorated with the small cyclamen plant that he'd bought for her a few weeks before he went away.

And each and every one of her movements, when she came out again, before ten, was completely familiar to him.

The quick, springy gait. The leather bag hanging from her shoulder.

Even when they walked together, he remembered, he always lagged slightly behind her.

He raised the collar of his jacket and wound the blue scarf around his mouth and nose and followed her at a safe distance so that she wouldn't spot him. As he expected, she stopped in the small Polish store, in which he bought her, every morning before she woke up, dark rye bread, and afterward she walked quickly down Rue de la Victoire, toward the market. While she waited at the crosswalk for the light to change there was a moment when she turned around suddenly and might have caught sight of him, but he managed to hide behind a recycling can. She passed by the stands of fresh meat and stopped to buy fruits and vegetables, and he too paused in front of the stands and looked at the cheeses like any other customer. The market filled up and it grew difficult to keep Marianka in his line of sight without getting too close to her, and then she suddenly disappeared. He increased his pace and turned into streets he didn't know, because he thought she may have turned down one of them. He didn't have a map and didn't know the neighborhood he had wandered into, and even though it seemed to him that each turn would lead him back to the market, he was actually walking farther and farther away.

Rain began to fall, and he walked without an umbrella down a street that went on and on in who-knows-what direction. Suddenly he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around.

Marianka was as wet as he was.

She asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he said, “I came for a visit.”

“And you didn't say anything?”

“I didn't know if you'd want to meet.”

He hadn't expected to see her from such a short distance, and up close her face surprised him. She asked him, “Were you following me?” and he answered, “I wanted to see you,” and in truth that was all he wanted.

“And you weren't going to let me know that you're here? You didn't think I'd see you when you've been walking behind me since this morning?”

Really, his only plan had been to look at her from a distance.

 

AFTERWARD THEY WALKED DOWN THE STREET
in silence. She in front of him and he a bit behind, as usual.

Marianka asked him if he remembered where the shower was and how to turn on the faucet, and under the stream of hot water he heard her open the bathroom door and lay dry clothes on the stool. The white undershirt was his. It had been forgotten in the dryer. She went into the bathroom after him, and he waited in the kitchen. On the dining table were two mugs of boiling-hot tea and a bowl of sugar. His wet pants were drying on the radiator, which gave off a pleasant warmth. And the photo of the two of them, from the summer, in Bruges, was still on the refrigerator. Marianka sat down across from him with her hair short, wet, and dark, and said to him, “I know that I have to explain to you what's happened, but tell me first how you're doing,” and he said, “Fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Why not?

“How did the bomb case end?”

When they last spoke it was still an investigation into a fake bomb inside a suitcase that had been placed next to a daycare. And Chaim Sara was merely a witness then. She didn't know that Chava Cohen had been assaulted, or that it turned out that the witness had murdered his wife and planned to murder his two children. He told her everything: about the suspicions stirred in him, and Ilana Lis's opposition to detaining Sara for questioning, and the ticking of the clock and the urgent communications with Anselmo Garbo and the arrest at the airport and the boy's ambiguous testimony and Sara's confession and the re-creation of the crime in his apartment. Did he explain everything at length because it was easier than to talk about himself? Perhaps he hoped that, like the time before, Marianka would say something that would open his eyes and clarify for him what he didn't understand.

But this time she said nothing.

And when he told her that thanks to his uncovering the murder and saving the children he was decorated for his service and promoted to police superintendent, Marianka got up from her chair, said to him, “Wait a sec,” and disappeared into the bedroom. She returned with a small package wrapped in gold paper, which he began to remove gently, so as not to tear it.

“What is it?” he asked, and she said, “A present. For you. Open it already.”

He opened the wooden case and was surprised.

“A pipe?”

“I passed by the store one day and saw it in the window and thought about you and your detectives. You don't like it?”

He really didn't know anything about how to smoke a pipe.

But he was happy because she had thought about him one day.

And he heard the rustle of the tobacco burning in Garbo's pipe during the conversation in which he informed him that Jennifer Salazar had been found.

Could he smoke a pipe, like Garbo?

He pictured himself on the steps of the station, blowing sweet smoke rings into the gray Holon sky.

He said, “I like it very much. I'm just not sure how to use it,” and Marianka said, “I'll teach you. It's one of the smells I most like. My father smoked a pipe, it's the smell I remember from home. I guess I should have also bought some tobacco.”

Something between them had opened up, and Marianka smiled for the first time when Avraham put the pipe in his mouth and bit it with his teeth. He wasn't about to question her anymore, and only then did she offer, “I didn't come because I was afraid,” and Avraham asked, “Of what?”

“Of leaving this apartment, and of my work with the police, and of traveling to you without knowing what would happen to us. Losing my whole life again—like what happened to me when we left Slovenia and came here. But mainly afraid of discovering in a few months, or years, that it was a mistake. To give up everything I have and go far from my family to live in a strange country, and then discover that I stopped loving you. Or that you stopped loving me. That you cheated on me with your secretary because you were tired of me. Isn't that what always happens? I love you now, and maybe you love me, and our summer together was the most wonderful time I can remember, but everything comes to an end. And I can't allow myself to lose everything again like that.”

Avraham smiled, because all he'd heard were the words “I love you now.”

He said quietly, “That won't happen to us.”

“How can you know?”

He removed the pipe from his mouth and exhaled an imaginary cloud of smoke into the kitchen.

“It's elementary, my dear. I simply know.”

“But don't detectives always get it wrong, according to your theory?” she whispered, and he said, “Not this time. And besides, I don't have a secretary,” but Marianka didn't laugh. She said, “Avi, I need to tell you something, to make things easier on myself. This is the real reason I couldn't speak with you anymore. I didn't want to lie.”

Had he known, even before she told him, and hidden it from himself?

“I had an affair with another man. Brief. It lasted a few days and was over. I couldn't have spoken with you as if nothing had happened and hidden it from you, and I couldn't tell you, either. I think I did it in order to prove to myself that I couldn't come to you. That we didn't have a chance. And I succeeded. Are you listening to me, Avi? Are you still here?”

He set the pipe down on the table.

“Who was it?” he asked, and she whispered, “It's not important.”

It was important, but he didn't insist on knowing his name.

“Where did you meet?”

“At a family event. But let it go, Avi, please. It doesn't matter.”

“A family event?”

“Yes. He's a very distant relative. He lives in Slovenia and was here for a visit.”

He wanted her to say more, and he also didn't want her to say another thing.

He recalled the questions that he had asked Sara about his wife in the interrogation room at the station, on the night he confessed to murder. Marianka lay on the bed in the bedroom, the bed that was his bed for three months in the summer, and a man he didn't know and whose face he couldn't picture slowly opened the buttons of her blouse, from her collar to the button at her navel, and touched her pale shoulder. It was during this time that he was preparing the apartment for her arrival. That he ran after suitcases, and down hospital hallways, always thinking he wanted to go home and call her.

“Did he sleep with you here?” he asked, and she said, “Yes.”

“How many times?”

“I don't remember. And I'm sorry that it hurts you so much.”

“You don't remember if he slept here one night? Or a week? Or a month?” His voice nearly broke, and Marianka said, “Don't interrogate me, Avi. Please. I'm trying to explain to you that it was just an excuse. It won't help if you know.”

He hadn't looked at her until then, and when he looked he saw despair in her gaze. A pain he recognized, even though he'd never seen it in her eyes before. His wet pants were still drying on the radiator, but he needed to get up and leave. And suddenly he couldn't understand why he had come at all. What did he expect would happen if he stood under her window, or followed after her in the street? Would he have returned to Holon without speaking to her if she hadn't noticed him? And why didn't he get out of there immediately?

Someone knocked on the door and didn't stop, and Marianka peeked through the peephole but didn't open up. He said to her, “You can open it,” and she said, “I don't want to. It's the neighbor.” The rain beat against the window, and from outside the rattle of workers dismantling equipment in the street could be heard. Finally evening fell and the kitchen grew dark. They barely spoke until his phone rang, a bit after seven. And afterward he thought that this was the reason he stayed, as if he knew that this call would come and he wanted to answer it next to her.

Marianka looked at him while he spoke, and she understood that something had happened.

He got up from his chair and walked away, then returned to the kitchen and asked her for a pen and paper. His hand shook while he wrote.

Her eyes didn't leave him, and when he hung up, she asked, “Who was that?”

He said, “Eliyahu Ma'alul. He called from the station.”

Ma'alul's voice also shook when they spoke. He said to him, “Avi, I'm here with Chaim Sara's lawyer at the station.”

“Did something happen?” Marianka asked, and he nodded.

She didn't recognize the name Chaim Sara, because before this he hadn't mentioned the murderer by name.

“His letter was found. The letter that he wrote to the children in his wife's name.”

He hadn't told her about the letter that Sara insisted he had written and hidden in the suitcase, which was supposed to prove that he didn't intend on harming his sons in Manila but instead was going simply to stage a sort of farewell from their mother, and which had disappeared with no explanation.

“So how did they find it now?” she asked, and he answered, “His son returned it. The older son. His name is Ezer. He says that he stole it from the suitcase the night before the trip and kept it with him until now. This morning he mentioned it to the grandmother, or the lawyer, and the lawyer contacted Ma'alul and presented the letter to him. We still need to verify that it's Sara's handwriting and try to confirm when it was written, but Ma'alul believes the child.”

“And what does this mean?”

“I don't know yet. But maybe that he didn't plan on killing them there, like I thought. That he was almost charged with the attempted murder of the children because of me, and that this is what the children have heard since he was arrested.”

Marianka looked at the foreign letters he had jotted down and asked, “And that's the letter?” He nodded and stared at the words in front of him.