Limassol (13 page)

I waited downstairs in the lobby for two and a half hours, watching the elevator, deep in thoughts that weren't positive, until Nukhi emerged washed and energetic and surrounded by his thugs. He didn't forget me, walked over to me, dressed elegantly, and suggested we have a late lunch together. “Not here,” he said. “I don't touch hotel food.” I knew he had a tail all the time, and that now I, too, was part of his police dossier.

What are you doing, dammit? I said to myself, shoved into the black Hummer and looking through slits at the city, like a member of a marine patrol in Baghdad. We went down the slope of the boardwalk, and parked on one of the streets connecting the sea and the Carmel Market. Sigi and I had lived in this area when we were students, we filled a plastic shopping bag in the market every Friday, we felt the tomatoes and chose the freshest arugula. In the afternoon, we went down to the shore, barefoot. Oh, damn the day we moved out of Tel Aviv. One of Azariya's guards set foot on the sidewalk and checked the area, Azariya got out after him, like the king of the world. They ordered me to stay put in the car a few more minutes while they frisked me.

We went into a neglected courtyard full of weeds, walked on a path of worn, rough tiles of one of the little houses still left of Keren Ha-Temanim. On the crumbling wall was a small sign indicating a health center. The man simply can't go from one whore house to another, I said to myself. But as soon as we went inside, I understood that I was wrong, there was a wonderful smell of soap and cleanliness there, and under our feet was a colorful and smooth mosaic, and everything looked well-tended and spick and span. An elderly woman in a white smock with a nice foreign smile greeted us, maybe a Turkish woman, maybe Yugoslavian. Nukhi tossed her a hello in a language I didn't recognize, and then said in English that I was coming in with him. She showed us the way to the inside rooms. “I come here once a week,” said Nukhi Azariya. “To get clean down to my bones, to open my pores, it purifies the soul. We're the only ones here, don't worry. They close the place for me. Now we strip.”

He quickly got out of his clothes. He had a compact and muscular body, maybe a trace too fat, and a healthy prick. I remained clothed. “I'm not talking with you like that, when you're dressed,” he said, and covered his loins with a big white towel.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

He laughed. “You're a real coward, come on already.”

Nukhi Azariya and I sat next to one another in a wet Turkish bath, sweating down to our bones, in steam and in a dim light. Smells of lilac all around, stringed instruments playing softly in the background, an oud or a bouzouki. An invisible hand brought in a tray with lemonade and cut, ripe, very sweet fruit.

“Drink,” he said. “You've got to keep drinking.”

“I didn't know there was such a place in Israel,” I said.

He had the face of a wild animal, open, calm. His jaw dropped like that of a lion before assailing its prey. I could have put a bullet in him without batting an eyelid, but at the moment I needed something from him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I introduced myself as much as I could. He looked at every movement of my face, I was going through his internal lie detector.

“You know I was an officer in the Golani Brigade?” he asked slowly and poured cold water on his head. “We'd go with your guys to meetings. We went to Lebanon in your Mercedes. There I learned everything I know. I made the first contacts there. The army was a good school for me. I believe you. You don't look like a cop.”

The body emptied its liquids and I put them back, drinking and eating slices of watermelon.

“Sometimes I bring the girls from the hotel here,” said Nukhi Azariya. “But today I gave them up for you. This is my day to spoil myself. One day a week for me. What do we live for if not that. Ten years I worked day and night, I put myself in danger, to get to this. Now I can rest a little.”

With all the background I had gathered on him, I would have been fully justified if I had attacked him and slammed his head against the beautiful tiles that were rough to the touch. Instead, I was feeling great, like a man among men and even my prick started standing up under the towel.

“Join me here whenever you want,” he said. “You've got carte blanche. The next time, we'll bring the girls.”

“Why are you offering me this?” I asked, and poured cold water on my head.

“Because I identify people by their face, and you've got a special look,” said Nukhi Azariya who leaned on the wall across from me, gleaming with liquids. “You don't want money from me. You don't want a bribe. You look like a person who isn't capable of betraying, I admire people like you.”

Apparently my face gave me away because Nukhi laughed. “Of course you can betray, don't insult me, everybody betrays when they have to. All those wise men who talk about the Holocaust, see what they'd do when a Jewish friend came to hide in their house. The decent law-abiding citizen would give him away at once, for fear he'd be caught. Only the criminal, somebody who doesn't give a damn about the law, might hide him. Maybe . . . ”

The invisible hand put down a bowl of little kebabs with pine nuts, and very cold beer brewed by monks in Belgium from an ancient recipe. From one moment to the next, it got better. I forgot my whole agenda. I drank the beer calmly and ate the meat with my hands. And when the bowl was empty, he lay on the bare floor, took off the towel and asked: “What do you want from me, my friend?”

“I want you to let Yotam Ignats back into the city,” I said.

“Yotam Ignats,” he smiled with his eyes shut. “A really interesting guy. I met him in New York. Very educated and brilliant. A pleasure to talk with him. At first, he looked down on me until I started spoiling him. He was bought, too, like everybody else. Did he explain the source of his obligation?”

“He lost a package for you,” I said. My head was now heavy from all the food and drink, not to mention the steam.

“That's the problem with junkies,” said Nukhi Azariya. “You can't believe a word they say. Look at my arms, smooth as a baby's. Check my nostrils, everything there is also fine. The minute you start to stab yourself, when you've crossed that boundary of the body, everything's broken. Truth and lies no longer have any meaning. He's lying, you know. There was no package.”

“Nukhi, I won't get into that . . . ,” I cut him off.

“No, my brother, it's important to me that you know the guy is lying. There was no package. I gave him a lot of money to make a short film, I believed him. I thought we were friends, he charmed me. I gave him a hundred thousand dollars to finish his creation. And he went and wasted the whole thing on drugs. Very fast. Within about three months, nothing was left. I asked him, ‘Yotam, sweetheart, what's with the film, have you shot something yet?' The guy is very talented, I believed him. I wanted to do something nice with my money. But he put the whole thing into his veins and up his nose. And even now, that arrogant kid is still trying to bring me down.”

I wanted to get up and go, wash off all that moisture, but I hadn't yet finished my business here.

“Come.” Nukhi Azariya got up off the wet floor, and walked with manly steps to the door of the sauna. There it was dark and too hot, as if we had gone from the paradise of kebabs and watermelon to hell. I went in behind him and he closed the door. We sat on a wooden bench and my pulse was racing.

“You don't feel good here?” he asked.

“It's too hot for the Land of Israel,” I said. “Maybe it's good for Scandinavia.”

“It's good, believe me, you've got to clean out everything from inside,” and suddenly I thought that the person who should be here with him was Haim, because the two of them were big on issues of internal cleanliness.

“Listen, Nukhi,” I said and moved a little closer to him; might as well go for it, hairy thigh next to hairy thigh. “I'm dealing with a very sensitive issue, impossible to go into detail now, but I'm asking you to let Yotam back into the city. That jerk doesn't interest me, I think of him exactly as you do. He's a total waste. But it has to do with the lives of other people. You must understand that . . . ”

Now it was really hard for me to breathe . . .

Nukhi put his hand on me and asked: “Is it important for security?”

“Yes, Nukhi,” I coughed. My breathing dried up as if we were on Mars. “It's very important for security. I wouldn't have come to bother you with nonsense.”

His totem face remained opaque, he sat with slack limbs in his corner, poured water on his head, which brought up a mask of steam, until he said: “Someday I'll also need help. You'll come help me when I do? You won't forget me?”

I promised him on my word of honor, on my children I swore to him.

After we showered, we ate sorbet at a little table the pleasant Turkish woman set up for us. I felt a lot better than when I entered.

We drank coffee and Nukhi Azariya told me he was expanding his business: now he was dealing a lot in real estate investments abroad, mainly in Romania and Moldova, he knew important people there who were seeking security advice. “If you decide to resign and make a lot of money, come to me,” he said. What can I say? The attentions of that piece of shit flattered me. “Of course I'll remember this,” I muttered. I was fond of him. The man was resourceful and had a natural intelligence. You could do business with him.

Nukhi stayed there to continue his day of treatments, and I was tossed out to the vistas of the market. In the west, the sun was dying out in the purple sea behind some paddleball players. He's right, I said to myself; got to rest, eat better, enjoy screwing, soon it's over.

 

The house was empty now. Four rooms of solitude. I went into the child's room, sat on the little bed. He took the cars and Spiderman and all the rest with him. I longed to hear his voice. I turned the CD player on; inside was a disk of lullabies that Sigi had sung to him at bedtime. He's a good child, I thought, a curious and smart child. I didn't talk with him and didn't listen to him and didn't devote any attention to him. I miss you, Papa, I want you to come home on time, I miss you, he'd say childishly on the phone, and I didn't understand that somebody could really love me like that. Until he stopped.

What could I do alone in an empty house, except drink the rest of a bottle of whiskey I once bought from the duty free shop, a liquid that remained forever like every good poison, take a book from the shelf and put it back, I could no longer believe the stories somebody makes up, turn on the television and burn out my brain in front of it, eat with my hands from the refrigerator, shower until my skin turned red, look at myself in the mirror—I never was handsome—look for pictures in an album, close it in sorrow, drink some more? I almost went to the interrogation installation to volunteer for night duty. And they won't let me do that now, either.

The
etrog
man suddenly talked to me. He lived in a room he rented from some Greek locals in a village in the mountains. They had strange rites that fascinated him. They made statues and painted murals. The ground was fertile and life was calm. The air was clean of the nervousness and bitterness of the Jews. He waited in the village until the
etrogs
were almost ripe. Below, in the harbor, the ship waited to take him back with the cargo to the Land of Israel. He thought of sending it on its way, cutting off his return route. Everything there looked like the Garden of Eden: the groves, the sky, the springs, the clean people who wore scarlet shirts. In the Land of Israel, there was desolation and destruction, as if an atomic bomb had fallen . . . My eyes shut from the whiskey in the middle of writing. I wanted to bring Daphna some new pages that were nicely written, but the letters blurred. I thought of my child and the other children we didn't have. The people on the shore of Gaza, not far from here, have ten or twelve children and support them on nothing, on a little white flour for pitas, give birth to so many of them and without fear despite the shortage. A father of ten children sits across from me, who am I to interrogate him at all? He's got a whole tribe to educate and feed and house. Other faces passed before my mind's eye, scared and grimacing with pain and sneering and laughing contemptuously and dead. Take the handcuffs off them, sit across from them, release the guards behind the door, endanger yourself, be a man, stop this nightmare . . .

I lay down in bed. I found a quiet tune on the radio. Instead of calming, the whiskey made me aggressive and restless. My heart was pounding. I got up and checked the medicine cabinet to see if Sigi had left something behind, sometimes she takes a little pill, but everything was empty as after a search. I could go for a run now, kill myself on the road, calm the raging body, if I weren't lying poured out and drunk on the bed.

Shortly before midnight, I called Daphna. I tried not to sound drunk. I told her that Yotam could come back to the city, I talked with the man, he promised not to hurt him. “What are you doing up at this hour, Daphna?”

“You sound funny. Have you been drinking?”

“A little,” I said. There was no reason to lie. “My wife and child went abroad. I'm left alone.”

“I couldn't fall asleep either,” she said. “I'm rereading Hani's stories. He's sleeping here on the sofa next to me.”

“Yotam can come back,” I brandished again the spoils I had brought her. “I talked with Nukhi Azariya. He won't touch him.”

“I don't know what Yotam will do in the city,” said Daphna. “He doesn't have any anchor here.”

“That's what you wanted, isn't it?” I said in the dark.

“I know,” she said. “You fulfill your obligations. You're obedient. That's fine.”

We agreed I'd come the next day. I also picked up Hani's thin book. I turned on the reading lamp next to the bed. Fishermen come back from the sea with a few flounder in their net, the vegetable market, the sand in the alleys, bright-eyed children. Sad, little stories, almost without a plot, lacking energy. The book remained open on my chest when I fell asleep.