Hatchet

by Israel Levy

  “I called your office. Someone named Yael gave me the address.”

  (“I got to hand it to him for showing initiative but what is up with Yael handing out my address like that! I’m going to kill her tomorrow at work!”)

  “I told her I wanted to send some flowers and she promised to keep it a secret,” he said as if reading her mind. They hugged and laughed and he pulled her closer. She could feel his firm body underneath his clothes. His tongue explored her mouth, clouding her senses.

  “Give me a tour of the place?”

  “Sure,” (“Good thing I had time to clean up”).

  She took his hand in hers. “This is the kitchen, this is the guest room, don’t mind the mess, here’s the bedroom, and this is the dining room and our table for this evening.” She recognized the wheels in his head turning as he checked out each room, just like she expected him to do, being an architect.

  “What’s this door?” he asked.

  “Well, aren’t you curious?” she opened the door to the pantry. “Happy?” he looked embarrassed for a moment but then quickly pulled her close to him. She pushed him away, “first we eat.”

  The intercom buzzer made him jump.

  “Why are you so on edge? It’s probably just the Chinese delivery guy.”

  And it was. She buzzed him in and a couple of minutes later went to open the door with the exact money ready, plus tip. The delivery guy still had his helmet on, looking like some kind of alien. She noticed him looking behind her shoulder into the living room and as she turned around she saw that Moshe wasn’t at the table. She wondered where he’d gone (“Probably just in the bathroom”), paid for the food and carried it to the kitchen.

  She took the takeaway out of the boxes and placed everything into proper dishes: two bowls of rice, two small plates for the eggrolls and two larger plates for the sweet and sour chicken and bamboo beef. At the center of the table, on top of the beautiful white tablecloth, was a heating device with two small candles underneath. She did not forget the chopsticks and as she finished setting the table Moshe emerged, not from the bathroom but from the bedroom to her surprise.

  “I was looking at that giant photo of you on the wall. You look great in black and white.”

  She led him to the table. “Oh, hold on,” she ran to the kitchen for a corkscrew. Moshe uncorked the wine and poured. They clinked glasses and made a toast.

  “Here’s to us,” she said.

  “To us, to freedom and to our oppressed people,” he answered with a smile, catching her by surprise.

  “Oppression does seem appropriate given the way things are going here… well, here’s to the memory of Che Guevara,” she raised her glass with a smile. He wanted to say something but then changed his mind and they both laughed (“Well, what could you expect from an evening with a South American?”) and started eating. She noticed his skill handling the chopsticks.

  “This wine is excellent. By the way, I don’t even know where you live.”

  He kept his eyes on his food. “I’m just moving in to a new rental apartment. My lease on the old place is over and it was a real dump anyway.”

  She asked where the new place was and suggested she come by and help with the interior design.

  “Sure, that sounds great. It’s on Reines, right next to the Dizengoff square. I’ll check with the landlord and see when we can go there, but in any case it’ll have to wait until after I get back from Europe.”

  She was starting to feel the wine weighing her down. The candles had gone out. She got up. “Leave everything,” she told him, “I’ll clean up tomorrow.”

  He got up as well and held her tightly. “Naomi, you’re one hell of a cook,” they both laughed and she pulled him into the bedroom, letting their clothes drop to the floor. The satin sheets slid over their bodies as they held each other, feeling as if under some greater power. Two people, still strangers to one another, finding refuge and escape from that Tel Aviv loneliness in one another’s arms.

  “There’s so much I want to tell you. I want you to know everything about me, to make you part of my world, but it’s too fast, too fast,” he whispered in her ear, making her shiver.

  “I promise I’ll tell you everything too, when the time is right,” (“If only I could share with him what I’ve been going through lately”) was all she said before giving in to the tremor that took over her body as he penetrated her and she enveloped him with her warm body.

  She was startled awake by a ringing telephone, and gently, without waking him, moved his arm that lay heavily on her chest, and picked up.

  “Noomik!” she heard her mother’s voice on the other end, crying frantically. “Noomik you’re alive!”

  The harsh transition from her tranquil, post sex slumber to the turmoil in her mother’s voice made her head pound.

  “Mom, what happened?”

  “You don’t know? Didn’t you hear about the bombing? I was sure you were there too, I know you go there a lot, I thought that…”

  She jumped up. “Mom, pull yourself together. I haven’t heard anything. What happened?”

  “There was an attack at that pub you always go to, the Victoria. They said on the TV there were people wounded and dead, and the images they’re showing, oh my god. Noomik, I was so worried, I thought something might have happened to you.”

  (“Oh no!”) the thought went quickly through her head. Shuli, she might have gone there without her. She saw Moshe’s eyes open. He looked at her, still groggy and wanted to know what was going on.

  “Mom, calm down, everything’s all right,” she said. She promised she’d be there first thing in the morning and hung up, rushing to turn on the TV. First images of the scene flashed across the screen.

  “Naomi, is something wrong?”

  She came back to the bedroom. “There was a suicide bombing at the Victoria. I’m worried about my sister.”

  “A bombing? What? Fuck. And what was your sister doing there?” he sounded surprised. “Didn’t you call off the night out? We said you would.”

  “I did, but she might have gone anyway. I can’t believe how lucky we didn’t go, just imagine what could have happened.”

  She looked at him, struggling to make sense of the expression on his face. She found herself surprisingly cross with his restrained reaction but had no time to follow that line of thought. She threw on whatever clothes she could grab. “Hold on, let me see if I can reach her.”

  She called Shuli’s cell but there was no answer. Then she tried her home number.

  “Hello?” Shira, Shuli’s elder, picked up.

  “Hi, Shira. Is your mom home?”

  “No, we’re with our babysitter. Mom’s out,” Naomi’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Okay, Shira. Go to sleep. Good night.”

  She turned to Moshe, panicked. “I have to go. You can stay or you can come with me if you want. Shuli’s out and there’s a good chance she was at the Victoria. I have to go to the hospital to look for her. Do you want to come with me?”

  “No, no, you go. I hate hospital and can’t stand the sight of blood, I’ll just get in your way. I’ll stay here if that’s alright with you. Let me know if everything’s okay and if there’s anything I can do.”

  She was already on her way out when she called back to him, letting him know where she kept her spare key. She couldn’t bring herself to wait for the elevator and rushed down the stairs, three at a time, arriving at her yellow B.M.W in no time (“You idiot, of course he knew yellow was your favorite color just by looking at your car.”) She stormed onto the road, barely missing the delivery guy (“People still get Chinese food at this time of night?”), and raced to the hospital.

  She was stopped at a police roadblock two streets away from the hospital. Two police cars with their lights flashing stopped all traffic as ambulances raced to and from the hospital.
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br />   “My sister’s been hurt, I think she’s here,” she cried at the officer who didn’t even try to listen to what she was saying and just kept shouting at her to vacate the place at once and stay out of the way of the ambulances. She turned to a side street, parking on the sidewalk (“Let them tow it”) and sprinted through the neighborhood yards to get around the block. When she got to the hospital she found the E.R. in total mayhem, littered with mangled, injured people lying on gurneys, some crying in pain, others silent, their eyes stretched in horror.

  “Doctor, doctor, I’m losing him!” she heard a nurse cry out and saw a doctor rush to her aid. More and more people arrived in search of relatives and loved ones.

  She could see, on the other side of the E.R., a nurse pulling a sheet over someone who had passed, and two sobbing young girls walking away, clutching each other, trying to find refuge from the horrible things they’d witnessed in their encounter with death.

  There was a pungent smell in the air, the scent of human blood. She saw a nurse running to an arriving ambulance and grabbed her. “Where can I see a list of casualties?”

  The nurse pointed to the front desk without even looking at her. There were dozens of people huddled there, calling out the names of the family members. A civilian volunteer wearing a name tag announced that a complete list of the injured would be posted shortly, following confirmation with the other hospitals in the area. Suddenly, a woman wearing a dressing gown and slippers burst into a bitter cry.

  “My son, they murdered my son! Eldad, Eldad, this can’t be true, this can’t be true!”

  She lost consciousness and collapsed to the floor and several people rushed to her aid, lifting her on to a bed that stood in the hallway near the front desk.

  Naomi leaned against the wall, trying not to get in the way of the flow of oncoming gurneys. She noticed her hands were shaking. The chaos all around her made her more and more anxious and horrible images of her sister flashed before her eyes (“What about the children? How will I break this to my mother? Shuli, Shuli, please God don’t let anything happen to her”). Her eyes filled with tears when all of a sudden she heard a voice crying, “Wait, wait! That’s my sister! Naomi, Naomi!”

  She turned and saw Shuli, lying on a gurney, being wheeled into the emergency room, her face covered in blood and soot, her lips swollen. All of the tension she had been under broke at once and Naomi threw herself at her sister in tears.

  “You’re alive, you’re alive!” she cried. “What happened?” she asked, unable to stop her tears.

  “Not now, miss. You can help take her in if you want, just watch her I.V.”

  Naomi held the I.V. in one hand and pushed the gurney towards the E.R., passing next to stretchers covered in sheets.

  Shuli’s entire body was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Noomik, you have no idea what it was like. We were just sitting there, having a drink, and all of a sudden, it was like the whole world exploded. It was deadly quiet for a second and then everyone was screaming and crying. There was so much noise. Oh Noomik,” she was overcome by sobs and simply held her sister close, bloodying her clothes.

  “It’s OK, Shuli. You’re OK.”

  “You don’t understand,” Shuli went on struggling to catch her breath. “I was talking to Eldad, the bartender. Then, when the lights came back on I saw him sprawled on the bar with a piece of metal stuck in his head, and he was dead. We had been talking a second earlier and just like that, he was gone. What’s happening to us, Noomik?”

  Little by little the E.R. grew quieter and the silence was only broken by the sound of moans emanating from this bed or that. The sedatives administered were doing their job. Shuli could not calm down though. She kept bursting into tears then going quiet again.

  “We’ll up the dosage of her sedatives so that she can get some sleep,” said the doctor, and adjusted her I.V.

  “Don’t tell Mom, Noomik. You’ll need to talk to the kids, they’re with the babysitter, Noomik, the kids…” she dozed off halfway through her sentence, her face contorted as if she was taking the horrors she’d seen with her into her dreams. She’d open her eyes in terror every now and again, then doze back off, crying in her sleep.

  Naomi sat by Shuli’s side, holding her hand.

  It was early morning, the E.R. now a bit calmer, when she realized she hadn’t called her mother and remembered Moshe was still at her house. She did not want to leave the E.R. She stepped out for a few minutes to call the babysitter. She picked up, her voice sleepy.

  “Naomi? Hi, what time is it? I don’t think Shuli came home last night. What should I do?”

  “Shuli won’t be coming home today, but I’ll be in a little later.”

  “Why? Well, ok, but don’t be too long, I have to get to school later.”

  “OK.”

  She returned to her seat by Shuli’s side.

  She woke up and found herself half sitting, half lying on the edge of Shuli’s bed, her sister in a deep sleep under the influence of the sedatives. A blurry-eyed doctor came in to check her sister’s pulse and I.V.

  “Excuse me, doctor, I’m her sister. Could you tell me how she’s doing?” her eyes were brimming with tears that threatened to overflow, fearing his answer.

  “We can safely say she’s out of the woods. Her injuries were pretty minor in comparison, but she’ll have to undergo rehabilitation. She’ll probably be in the hospital for a long while, but you should be happy. She’s alive and should recover fully.”

  Her tears finally burst forth.

  “Thank you doctor, thank you,” she gazed lovingly at her sister.

  A hand on her shoulder startled her.

  “Why don’t you go home, we’ll take it from here,” she heard the nurse say softly, her blood-shot eyes revealing how long she’d been working without any sleep.

  “Your sister’s been sedated and won’t wake up any time soon. It’s OK, you need to take care of yourself too.”

  The bright light of day hurt her eyes as she left the emergency room. The ambulances were standing in their spots quietly and a heavy silence filled the air. She turned to the exit, passing by a weeping family which had just emerged from the morgue, and walked faster, trying to remember where she had left her car. It was in the same place, two wheels on the sidewalk. She was relieved it hadn’t been towed and as she held out her keys she noticed for the first time that her hands were covered in dry blood. She checked her clothes and saw that they were also blood stained. (“I can’t go see Mom like this. I’ll go home and clean up first.”)

  The city was beginning to wake up to meet the day following the horror. Piles of newspapers stood stacked in front of kiosks, bread and milk delivery trucks parked outside grocery stores, people in sportswear jogged or cycled towards the park, motorized sweepers cleaned the street (“God, it’s as if nothing’s happened. Everyone just goes on with their lives and for us, the families of victims, everything has changed. It’s like a parallel universe”).

  Her apartment was empty, no sign of Moshe. She thought about how he wasn’t there for her at the hospital and shrugged, trying to brush aside the sense of resentment (“It’s understandable, after all, I could have called and asked him to come if I wanted to”). She looked for a note he might have left her but found nothing. He had even made the bed so that it looked like it hadn’t been slept in.

  Taking a shower made her feel much better. She opened a window and let the wind dry her hair. She checked her watch. It was 8:15. Yael would probably be in by now. She called the office.

  “Yael, it’s Naomi.

  “Naomi! We were worried about you! Did you hear about the Victoria?”

  “Yes, Yael, unfortunately I did. My sister Shuli was there at the time of the attack.” She heard Yael let out a cry on the other end of the line.

  “Oh my god, Naomi! Is she OK?”

  “She
’s been hurt but she’ll be alright. Can you let everyone know I’ll be late today?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Take as much time as you need, we’ll manage. Call if there’s anything I can do for you, promise?”

  “Yes, yes, Yael, thanks. I have to hang up. I’m going to see my mom.”

  She drove by the Victoria on her way to her mother’s house. It looked like a demolition site. The pub’s entire façade had been crushed and the destruction inside was visible. The place was surrounded by water puddles (“The firefighters probably hosed the place down”) and she saw the Disaster Victim Identification workers, wearing white coveralls and gloves, some scattered as far as the porches of the surrounding houses. There were leftover bandages and tourniquets strewn on the road, testament to what had happened there mere hours before.

  She had the car radio on Galei Tzahal:“Last night’s terror attack at the Victoria pub took the lives of twenty two individuals. Twenty others were injured. The attack was perpetrated by a suicide bomber.” The playlist, as always after this sort of event, was comprised of sad Israeli songs. She arrived at her mother’s house, parked the car, took a few deep breaths, approached the door and rang the intercom.

  “Who’s there?” she heard her mother’s voice, still sleepy.

  “It’s Naomi, Mom. Open up.” She pushed the door at the sound of the buzzer, took the elevator and opened the door using her key. “You can stop buzzing, Mom, I’m here.”

  “Oh, right,” her mother let go of the buzzer.

  “Noomik, what time is it? Why are you here so early? You can’t imagine how scared I was last night when I saw everything on the TV.”

  “Mom, 8:30 isn’t early. Sit down, let’s have some coffee.”

  Her mom looked at her, puzzled (“Coffee, Noomik, this time of morning, with me…?”).

  “Noomik, is there something you want to tell me? What is it? Something happened, I can see it in your eyes, a mother can tell. Do you want a piece of toast maybe?”

  She avoided her mother’s gaze, searching for the right words.