At home, he’d had a simple plan: join one of the circles and take his guitar out of its case. But now, in the square, all the circles seemed to be for members only. Since he couldn’t summon up the courage to join any of them, he remained standing. Finally, when his legs began to hurt, he stretched out on the paving stones, alone and defeated. But before long he was surrounded by a group of girls, and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they sat down beside him, still humming a song they’d carried with them from another circle. Avishai Milner needed nothing more than that: he immediately took out his guitar and accompanied their singing, and followed them into their next song. Then, bit by bit, he took control, and even before one song ended, he was leading them into the next one, song joining song in a gradual, emotional ascent until the members of other circles began to feel that something special was happening in that circle, and every minute someone else joined its ranks. What had begun as a slow trickle became a massive upsurge, teenage boys and girls went to sit in Avishai Milner’s circle, and just as he was thinking that nothing in the world could be better than this, the first TV camera turned on, its white light flooding his face, and he understood that the best was still to come.
But even national mourning must eventually come to an end. Genuine sorrow has an expiration date. Avishai Milner went back to the square the following week and the week after that, sang many songs, some of them his own, and there’s no telling how much longer he would have continued if the day hadn’t come when he realized that he was alone. Fresh grief, like fresh grass—how long can it last in such a hot country? The teenagers returned to their lives. Only pigeons and a homeless man who claimed that the banks were to blame for everything remained in the square.
The candles in the square were extinguished, but the flame that had been ignited in Avishai Milner’s heart could not be put out. It burned even now, in the darkness of his jail cell. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to penetrate the flesh of the world like a thorn, that fire had begun to blaze inside him when he was a teenager in the square and it continued when he auditioned for talent shows, when he made his first album, when his second album flopped, when he appeared in a series of breakfast-cereal commercials, and when he was finally reduced to doing humiliating birthday-party gigs. Even in jail he never stopped planning his triumphant comeback for even a moment. Planning, or perhaps hallucinating. Because whenever he took a brief break from writing the headlines for his next interview, a clear image of the tongueless girl rose before him, and the more he told himself that those thoughts were only mad fantasies of revenge better left behind when the lock was opened and he was released on bail, the more deeply the image became embedded in his heart: one tongueless girl.
And in fact, why does no one take the trouble to point out the first lie? How eager we are to honor the first word, the first day of the first grade, the first kiss. Each of those is like the planting of a flag in a foreign land: see how far I’ve come. But we do not usually celebrate the first lie. Nonetheless, we can point to that moment—the first time it occurred to the girl that deceit is perhaps preferable to truth.
For example, on the way home from ballet class. Four girls who lived on the same street—it was only natural that they should go home together. It was expected that living on the same street would cause them to bond, and so it did, but only for three of them. Because even if all the mathematical permutations of the number four were applicable to the girls, for Nofar the calculations always had the same results—three there, one here. Perhaps to balance the slanted equation a bit, she added another one who wasn’t there to the one who was.
His name was Yoni and it wasn’t that he was nonexistent. That is to say, there was such a Yoni in the world, her mother’s friend’s son. She had met him twice, perhaps three times. Their mothers had chatted over coffee while they fidgeted awkwardly over their glasses of Coke. There was nothing about those boring encounters to support the stories she told her friends later at the community center. She extracted the little she could from the encounters—his freckles, his slightly hooked nose, his love for Dungeons and Dragons—and the rest, having no choice, she made up.
And then came that night. She sat beside her mother in the front seat. In the back, three little girls crowded together, their school bags on their laps, their ballet costumes dangling from them like pink tongues. Her mother asked how the class was, and after they said it was great, a strange silence filled the car. Netta spoke first. In a syrupy voice, she asked Nofar about Yoni. How long had they been friends, what did they do together? Nofar’s tongue felt heavy in her mouth. An hour earlier, at the community center, she would have replied easily enough. But here, with her mother holding the wheel, a witness, blood flooded her face and her temples pounded. It felt as if the entire car could hear her swallow her saliva. She replied quickly, praying that her mother was concentrating on something else. The shopping list, let’s say, or some task she had to do at work. But then Michal spoke, continuing to ask, and something about the wooden way she uttered the words made it clear to Nofar that they had planned this.
Michal recited a question that had been formulated in advance, like a fisherman spreading a net that had been woven earlier. How had she and Yoni met? Where did they see each other? Nofar replied slowly, carefully. Trying not to contradict what she’d told them at the community center. Trying not to say anything that would cause her mother to look away from the road. She didn’t know what frightened her more—the girls ambushing her from the back seat or her mother’s silence in the driver’s seat. Ronit’s fingers wound around the wheel in a movement that boded ill. A traitorous traffic light lengthened the ride another few minutes, and Nofar saw the fingers begin to drum on the wheel. Drum drum pause, drum drum pause. As if this was a message her mother wanted to send her. A long silence from the back seat, hands squeezing each other, small shoves. Until Yael opened her mouth. “So is he really your boyfriend?”
Exactly at the spot where her upper ribs were—that’s where she felt it. As if someone had opened the door of the bathroom stall when she was inside, on the toilet, and now everyone was standing there watching. Netta. Michal. Yael. And her mother, which was apparently the worst. Her mother, who might or might not have been looking, her expression at the moment gave away nothing. Even the drumming stopped for a moment. She had no message to pass on to her daughter; and if there is anything worse than a mother witnessing her daughter’s humiliation, it is a mother who refuses to be a witness, turns her glance away as if it has nothing to do with her, like drivers passing the scene of an accident and slowing down at first, then stepping on the gas.
That night Nofar swore she would never lie again. And the truth is that since then, there had been only little white lies, just crumbs. And so Nofar moved deeper into that forest, from one small lie to another, until she finally reached her gingerbread house, the ice-cream parlor where she was both prisoner and guard.
16
One might think that after that first kiss in the alley, Nofar and Lavi would kiss again. But for some reason, things went differently. When they met again, they were barely able to utter a sound. No word seemed good enough to speak. The miracle of their meeting felt so fragile to them that they feared a wrong move would destroy it. And so they sat, holding in the words they dared not speak. Fortunately, Nofar finally reminded Lavi that she was in his hands, whispered in his ear that if he revealed the secret, she was lost. That reminder of his power filled him with renewed energy—they were no longer embarrassed teenagers, but a blackmailer and his victim.
And indeed, there was some improvement over the next few days. Here and there, hands reached out to grope. There were clumsy mini-caresses, the unforgettable feel of her hand on his thigh, his trembling fingers brushing against her breasts. Of course, it was all as if by accident, in silence, both barely breathing, their hands supposedly not their hands. But no real kiss had reoccurred since the first one. Perhaps they had used up all their courage for that one and th
ere was not enough left for another. The days passed, each beginning with perhaps today and ending with perhaps tomorrow, expectation as warm and fresh as the bread unloaded at dawn at the supermarket and thrown away, moldy and hard, in the evening. In the alley, crude awkwardness. The laundry that had dripped rain on them the afternoon of their first kiss had long since dried. One day it was removed as surely as it had been hung, a hand reached out from the balcony and plucked the items one by one. As Lavi and Nofar watched from below, embarrassed, the circle of life in the apartment above them continued smoothly on its track while theirs remained frozen and clumsy.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to kiss him: Nofar was so immersed in thoughts about the boy that even a stranger, glancing at her face, would immediately blush. The same was true for Lavi—his mouth was busy reliving the precise details of that kiss, and when he wasn’t kissing her in the past, in his memory, he was kissing her in the future, imagining every possible kiss to come. Since the number of possible future kisses was very large, he could do nothing but kiss the girl. And so he spent his days kissing, not only the pillow on his bed—that’s for beginners—but also his pen during English class, the gum he chewed, and the sabich sandwich he ate on his way home, anything that came into contact with his mouth tasted of her.
One evening, the alley cats took pity on them. They gave a full performance in front of them, wailing and meowing to show them that, here, this is how it’s done. But watching the copulating cats only increased Nofar’s and Lavi’s embarrassment. “Idiot, why don’t you do something?” he said to himself. “Jerk, why are you sitting here like a dope?” she said to herself. First, they ridiculed themselves, until soon enough they believed that everyone was ridiculing them, especially the laundry that was once again hanging on the line, dripping silent gray drops on them. The women’s briefs looked truly monstrous to Lavi, a giant lace sail that hid the sun. When he finally looked away from the hanging underwear to the yard, he found that Nofar had moved closer and was now sitting a millimeter from his nose. He could feel her breath. He could almost hear the rustle of her eyelashes. Do it, the cats’ whiskers vibrated. Do it, the laundry on the line pleaded.
Right then, the sound of a phone ringing split the air, so cheery it was painful. The producer of a morning program asked Nofar if she wanted to do an interview the following day. Lavi listened as the producer told her that she would share the taxi to the studio with a famous actor. And it was the thought of her in the taxi, totally forgetting him, the handsome actor probably sitting beside her in the back seat, their knees touching—it was that thought that finally opened his mouth. He reminded her that she was in his hands, that he knew what needed to remain in the dark. And the moment he mentioned the secret, there was no longer any choice, hands reached out, lips met, and a collective sigh of relief rose from all the residents of the alley: the pair of cats, the hanging laundry, the skinny boy, and the hesitant girl.
17
Two radio shows. A human-interest story in the weekend supplement. A six-minute interview on a red couch on a nightly talk show. As they spoke to “the girl who dared to scream,” they bent their heads slightly in a gesture that became an emblem of sympathy and compassion. The viewers at home were glued to the sweet face on the screen the way cling wrap adheres to a sliced watermelon. They all pointed out that she was a very brave girl. In the neighborhood, people said hello to her. The sales clerk in the grocery store said she was proud of her. Without her knowledge, her name came up at a meeting of a lingerie company. Perhaps they would make her their next spokeswoman. That would undoubtedly echo in the public consciousness—the power of women, the spirit of youth, realistic body sizes. In the end the CEO went with an alternative option, an actress who had just returned from filming abroad.
Nofar wasn’t disappointed—she hadn’t known she was a candidate. And in any case, the center of her world was that neighborhood, that school. In the months that had passed since Shir dumped her, she had tried to leave for school to arrive just in time for the bell, to avoid those embarrassing moments alone in the schoolyard, focused on her phone and looking busy. Now, arriving at school in the morning was pure, unadulterated pleasure. Everyone came over to her, asked how she was. I saw you on TV. My mother says you’re a hero. Tell me what it’s like in the studios. Did you see anyone famous? And she (blushing slightly, her breathing somewhat accelerated, a bit embarrassed by the attention) said yes, she did see famous people. She told them about her conversation with the news anchor who came up to her in the corridor after the show and bought her a Coke in the studio cafeteria, where they were joined by lots of actors from the programs they all watched on Friday nights and other programs. She had thought they would be snobs, but they were really very nice. Her fascinated classmates, their eyes wide, asked So what’s he like in real life? And she replied confidently: Fatter. Skinnier. Better looking. Kind of ugly. She hoped she wasn’t confusing her answers with the ones she had given yesterday, or the ones she would give tomorrow.
Finally, Shir came over to her. It was on the day of her second morning program. Nofar knew that Shir would talk to her after that. She had slept over at Shir’s house enough times to know that everyone there watched that program in the morning. Shir and her brothers ate their cornflakes while watching that program, shouted “Did anyone see my shoes?” while watching it, and demanded to be driven to school while watching it because it was too late to walk. And so it was, on the day of that program Shir waited for Nofar at the entrance to school and said, “You were fantastic on the show!” When the bell rang, they walked to class together, and when they arrived, Shir simply sat down next to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For nine years it really had been the most natural thing in the world, until that morning at the end of last year when Nofar arrived in class and discovered that Shir had moved to another seat. Now Shir sat down beside her again, and that would have made her happy if she hadn’t been afraid Shir would sense the truth. Because if someone knew her well enough to know, it was Shir.
But maybe the most truly frightening thing was that Shir didn’t sense it, not the next day or two days later. All that time Nofar waited for Shir to give her that piercing look, but it didn’t come. Because after Shir came back to sit next to her, everything was as it had been before, but not really.
When she lied, her body perspired differently. Instead of that stickiness in her armpits, there was a dampness between her shoulder blades, the sort that appears after running. The smell was different as well. Not the usual embarrassing sourness mixed with deodorant spray. Actually, there was hardly any smell, but her shirt stayed wet for hours. The sweat of the unspoken words dripped down her back. The saliva she swallowed tasted different on her tongue. And why was everything suddenly sharper? Smells. Sounds. Boys’ voices. Maybe the danger was making her senses more acute. After all, everything could turn upside down in an instant.
One day, she would open the classroom door and everyone would look accusingly at her. One day, she would go into the school bathroom and find new graffiti on the wall, “Nofar Shalev is a liar” written in huge letters. But the days passed, and every time she walked into class she was greeted by sympathetic faces. She found nasty new graffiti in the bathroom every morning, but none of it had anything to do with her. And still she was afraid. Children always find out. Perhaps, like whales, they possess a kind of sonar that calculates the distance between the story and the facts. The word liar is whispered, then spoken, then shouted across the yard. In the end, it is hung around the child’s neck, like a collar.
18
At first, the deaf-mute decided not to say anything to anyone. In the morning he wandered through the cafés holding a cardboard sign that said “I Am a Deaf-Mute.” The people of the city quickly raised the newspapers they were reading, the pages creating a screen between reading eyes and begging eyes that allowed the deaf-mute comfortably to scan the headlines: “Famous Singer Accused of Attempted Rape of Minor.” There were pictu
res as well: the familiar face of the man he had seen, the sweet face of the girl. In the days that had passed since the event, the deaf-mute had begun to feel undue affection for that fragile young girl. He defended her constantly with his silence, like a noble knight defending a lady completely unaware of his existence.
The deaf-mute had indeed sworn an emotional oath to protect the girl’s secret, but emotional oaths are no different from cottage cheese and eggs—they too have a sell-by date. At first, the excitement of the story warmed his nights and spiced his days. But gradually the secret began to make his skin itch. He wandered back and forth through the city, saw hundreds of people every day, and though every such encounter was another opportunity to lean forward and whisper, he persisted in holding his tongue.
But he soon discovered that secrets were not meant to be kept. On the contrary: they were meant to be whispered from mouth to ear, an expression of guilty excitement on your face. The deaf-mute controlled himself for one day. He controlled himself for two days. But even as the days piled up on his back and the weight became too great, he continued to struggle, barely able to keep his mouth closed. In the end, on an evening not very different from those that had preceded it, he was unable to go on. He let the person walking toward him pass by, and then ran in the direction of the green garbage bin—he couldn’t keep the secret in for another minute—lifted the plastic cover and exhaled into it: “It didn’t happen!”
The Liar Page 9
