The Liar

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  The rhymed eulogy had already ended. Now the girls on the stage sang a sad song in two-part harmony. Liron Kahanoff threw back her shoulders and pushed out her breasts, exactly as she had seen it done on a talent show. Nofar wanted to search for Lavi in the audience but forced herself to look at the horizon and think about sad things, just as Liron had told her she should. As the music rose from the stage, Lavi was surprised to see that the sister in the audience was looking at him as intently as he was looking at her. While he was still stealing glances at her, Maya’s eyes scanned his face. One sad song was followed by another sad song, but Lavi and Maya were totally unaware of that. Maya’s eyes examined Lavi’s face in minute detail, slowly, deliberately, making no effort to hide what she was doing. She saw immediately that he was not from their school, and the way he was looking at her and at the same time staring at the girl onstage gave rise to a strong suspicion in her mind.

  Many boys pursued Maya. Handsome, robust boys. Lavi Maimon couldn’t compare to even the most pathetic among them. He was scrawny. His face was gaunt. His appearance totally lacked the charisma that can endow even the skinniest boys with some measure of attractiveness. Nonetheless, Lavi Maimon had something that made him remarkably appealing. Unbearably appealing, in fact. He held the beating heart of her big sister in his charmless hands.

  But right now, the national anthem. Everyone stood waiting for the blue-haired boy onstage to tune his guitar. Nofar looked around at the faces in the audience. There was her father, studying his mobile phone. There was her mother. As the first guitar notes rang out, Nofar broke into a charming, off-key version of the well-known words.

  As she sang, she searched for Lavi’s face. For a moment she was afraid he hadn’t come, but then she saw him, at the far end of the schoolyard. He was facing in her direction, but she couldn’t catch his eye. He was entirely focused on a different spot, close to where she stood. She tried to understand what had drawn his attention so strongly. She scanned the area close to the stage.

  Liron Kahanoff, who was standing under the picture of the assassinated prime minister, looked at her in surprise. In the first row, the teacher suddenly tensed. And Nofar did not even notice herself ceasing to sing. The anthem, which had frozen in her mouth, was the last thing she cared about at the moment. She saw him looking at Maya. She saw Maya looking at him. With the utmost clarity, she saw what was going to happen. He was being added to her sister’s league of admirers. The battle was lost even before it had begun. Her defeated body shook. Her chest shriveled. Like a birthday candle stuck indifferently into a cake by a waiter, catching fire for a moment and immediately going out.

  From where he stood, Lavi could sense the change in Nofar and railed against himself. You idiot, you asshole, you moron. Nofar was onstage and her sister was in the audience, yet everyone was looking at her sister. Damn it, even you are looking at her sister. Did you think Nofar wouldn’t notice? He had to hide his eyes from her. It would be futile to tell her later that everything was fine, because the image of her younger sister still danced in his eyes.

  People often prefer to deny what is right before their eyes, especially if they can continue to hold on to what is in their hearts. Nofar wanted to believe that everything was all right, and such a desire can bend reality. As they reached the second verse of the national anthem, she pulled herself together and joined the singer beside her, her voice clear and confident, so clear and confident that everyone assumed it had all been planned in advance. Lavi forced himself to look away from the younger sister and look only at the sister onstage. Nofar sang the anthem with sad eyes and trembling lips. A brief thought about that terrible moment when she looked at Lavi and Maya was enough to bring tears to her eyes. The teacher nodded in satisfaction—the schools chancellor had received his due portion of tears. The ceremony had been a success.

  Moving lithely, Maya made her way through the audience in the schoolyard. The closer she came to Lavi, the less distorted, the more impressive the boy looked. Lavi was so intent on trying to correct the injustice he had done to Nofar that he didn’t sense Maya approaching him. Nofar now disappeared into the wings with the rest of the performers, and he wanted to hurry over to her and tell her how beautifully she had sung. At first, he didn’t feel the hand touching his arm. Then he straightened up all at once, as if he had been struck by lightning.

  “You’re Nofar’s boyfriend.” She didn’t ask him. She told him. Her entire bearing in the schoolyard seemed to be saying I am here. Look at me. Lavi glanced at the kindly-grandfather face of the assassinated prime minister. What would he do in this situation? On the stage, the teacher turned off the eternal flame. In another minute Nofar would come out of the wings.

  “I have to go.”

  “I heard the two of you talking on the phone when we were in the president’s residence.”

  “I really have to go.” Before Maya could respond, he took off almost in a run, and it wasn’t clear whether he was hurrying to reach the sister in the wings or hurrying to flee the sister in the schoolyard.

  He arrived at the same moment Nofar emerged and immediately told her how wonderful she had been, and she thanked him excitedly. Wordlessly, they agreed not to mention the existence of her little sister. And since Maya wasn’t mentioned, Nofar could tell herself that the look she had seen was nothing more than a random meeting of eyes. She insisted on attributing the shadow darkening Lavi’s eyes to the change in the weather.

  27

  On the morning of the memorial day for the assassinated prime minister, Avishai Milner sat on the bank of the polluted river and prayed to the river gods to capsize a kayak for him. Preferably with a young female kayaker, but in his situation he was ready to compromise. He’d even take a senior citizen. He’d leap bravely into the polluted sludge and give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to even the filthiest mouth.

  Since his discharge from the hospital after a very brief stay, people had been looking at him strangely. Repulsion mixed with pity. Avishai Milner found it unpleasant. Also unpleasant were the endless phone calls from his parents. He knew: he had to find himself a new plan, a way to tilt the scales in his favor. He decided to head for the river.

  On weekdays the river was deserted, except for serious rowers hefting their oars with the utmost concentration. Only people sitting on the toilet or rowing strenuously have that sort of totally self-involved expression. Several years earlier, people had been shocked when a canoe capsized and no one leaped into the water to rescue the canoeist. On land, people are allowed to abandon each other to their hearts’ content. A person can drown in his sorrow in the middle of the street and no one is expected to offer assistance. But on the river, it’s another story. The man who finally jumped in was crowned a hero. His name was on everyone’s lips for several days.

  Avishai Milner waited a long time for a kayak to capsize. To no avail. They all sailed smoothly past him. No female kayaker thrashed around in the water. The totally focused expression on the faces of the rowers seemed to ridicule him. Since being released on bail, Avishai Milner saw ridicule everywhere, even in the posters of the little lost dogs displayed on trees around the city.

  A group of children made its way to the dock, and Avishai Milner tensed. A tired teacher, her voice hoarse, reminded the students to board the boats carefully in groups of four. None of them looked in his direction, none of them recognized Avishai Milner, and, under the present circumstances, he was forced to admit that it was for the best. While the children were snapping pictures of each other on the riverbank, Avishai Milner studied them carefully. He picked one out easily: he hung back, the other children hit him on the head in an unmistakable way, not with affection, and so unobtrusively that a too-busy or too-indifferent teacher would not notice. Surreptitiously, Avishai Milner walked toward the boy. Two other boys now snatched his hat from his head, giving Avishai Milner the opportunity to study him well: thin, short, runny nose. Any one of those things alone was reason enough. Because he was too thin, too short, a
nd his nose ran too much. Because something in his existence grated on the other boys’ nerves, and they were already twitchy from the constant agitation of childhood.

  There were other short, skinny children there, yet only that boy’s hat flew into the river to the sound of his feeble protest. The boy who had chucked the hat into the water shouted, “Oops!” He looked over at the teacher and, seeing that she had no intention of getting involved, allowed himself to laugh out loud. The hat landed in the middle of the polluted river. All the children watched it to see whether it would sink or continue to float. For several seconds the hat was carried along on the current, and then sank. The children looked back at the dock, curious to see if the boy would cry. He didn’t. He only looked at the river. After all the others had turned away, he remained focused intently on the water, as if the power of his gaze could split the river in two and expose the muddy bottom where his hat lay among the fluttering fish, green ferns, and snack wrappers.

  Slowly, Avishai Milner approached the group of children crowded together on the dock. The sun was high in the sky. No one paid attention to him. Life preservers were being handed out in the middle of the group, and the teacher begged the students to put them on quickly. That boy still wasn’t wearing his. If that rejected child fell into the water now and was rescued by a courageous passerby, would he not receive all the accolades that sort of near-tragedy called for?

  “Sir! Watch out for the children!”

  The teacher’s voice was shrill and frightened as she pulled him back quickly. “You almost knocked over Noam!”

  He stammered, “Sorry.” Saw her shocked expression as she looked at him. She knew him from somewhere. He could feel her eyes on him as he turned around and walked away. He began to run.

  28

  Lavi Maimon has a girlfriend. The rumor spread through the class slowly—he wasn’t important enough for them to hurry to tell each other. The ones who mentioned it did so with a raised eyebrow, somewhat surprised: “Did you hear, even Lavi Maimon has a girlfriend already.” And so the rumor spread from one to the other, slowly, like a local train, dawdling at every station. Until one morning Ido Tal stood at his desk and said, “So let’s have a look at her.” As Lavi was still wondering who he was talking about, Ido Tal added, “Your girlfriend. A babe? A pig?”

  They had been in the same class since the first grade. Teachers call that being classmates, even though they clearly weren’t mates. But they weren’t enemies either. Ido never hit or cursed Lavi. He had never taken an interest in him. Until now. Lavi knew that Ido was interested because he rubbed his stubble in the same way that Lieutenant Colonel Arieh Maimon did when he was concentrating on what an analyst on TV was saying. The sort of thing that men with stubble do that Lavi, with his almost completely smooth chin, could only dream about. Ido kept rubbing his stubble with one hand, then put the other hand on Lavi’s shoulder and said, “So? Babe or pig?”

  Lavi didn’t know how to reply. He didn’t want to think about Nofar as a babe or a pig. Nofar was Nofar. But the boy in front of him stared at him with hungry eyes. They’d already had twelve years of school together, and Ido Tal had never looked at him that way: as if Lavi had something that Ido did not. So he said yes, he had a girlfriend. And when Ido said, “Show me a picture,” he said he didn’t have one, even though he did. He had snapped a candid photo of Nofar at work a short time after they met. He had come to the ice-cream parlor when she was busy with customers and he decided to wait outside. He watched her through the glass door as she plowed the fields of chocolate and vanilla. How pretty she looked then, bending over the counter, skillfully balancing three scoops of different flavors on a single cone. Impulsively, he had pulled out his phone and taken her picture. He had planned to show it to her later, but was embarrassed. At night, as she hurried to catch the last bus home from the alley, he watched from his room. Sometimes he sneaked a glance at the picture during particularly boring classes. Perhaps that was how the rumor that ended with Ido Tal had begun. One way or the other, he was sure he wouldn’t show the picture. He had no desire to hear whether Ido Tal thought Nofar was a babe or a pig.

  But he knew what Ido Tal would say if he saw the picture, and that knowledge began to poison his thoughts, as if the boys in his class were sitting in his head, constantly saying things about her, rating every part of her body. He was offended for her, he offended himself, and maybe that was why, the following day, when Ido Tal sat down beside him and said, “Bro, at least describe her,” Lavi said, “She’s beautiful. Really beautiful.”

  The number of eyes looking at him increased because it was one thing if Lavi Maimon had a girlfriend, and something else if he had a really beautiful girlfriend. His heart hammering with cowardly fear, he repeated to himself that, for him, she really was beautiful, but the more the boys demanded to hear what she looked like, the more stressed he became, until he blurted out a remarkably accurate but totally incredible description. It was precise and painfully faithful to a certain face. But not Nofar’s face. And not Nofar’s body. There were, of course, similarities—after all, as children they were almost identical. The color of their eyes. The shape of their lips. But where their bodies were concerned, Lavi abandoned his girlfriend and described another. Even if his listeners had no way of knowing, Lavi himself knew quite well: instead of singing the praises of his girlfriend, he was describing her sister.

  Over the next few days he kept telling himself that, in fact, nothing had happened. After all, Ido Tal and Nofar would never meet. The only place they came across each other was in his head, every such encounter ending with Ido’s sneer and Nofar’s wounded look, in an endless circle that made his head spin. And when your head is spinning, your body becomes clumsy. After two days he barged into a teacher, causing a Coke to spill on her blouse. She was still reprimanding him loudly when Ido Tal came to his aid: “It’s not his fault that he bumps into things—he’s in love.” A raucous cry from the back of the room. Giggling from the first row. Lavi felt the warmth rise to his cheeks. He knew he was blushing, and as usual, that knowledge caused him to blush more.

  He didn’t miss the teacher’s surprised look. She never would have guessed that someone like him could have a girlfriend. The commotion in the classroom had already begun to subside when Ido Tal leaned forward, smiling that mischievous smile of his that even teachers fell victim to, and demanded, “Maybe you should ask him for a picture? He won’t show us one!” Cries of agreement from the class. They all wanted to see. Better-looking, more impressive boys than Lavi were suddenly staring at him because how could he have a girlfriend when they didn’t? Even those who, on a normal day, wouldn’t talk to Lavi except to ask for a shekel for the cafeteria were curious now. The teacher glanced at her watch, saw that several precious minutes had been lost, and although she had less patience for II Kings than for the students themselves, she was still a teacher, the responsible adult, so ya’allah, sit down, he’ll show it to you at lunch.

  He hoped they’d forget all about it by lunch, but the Bible lesson fanned the flame of their baser instincts. The bell had only just rung, but he already felt Ido Tal’s hand on his shoulder. “So?”

  “She…she doesn’t like to have her picture taken.” The skepticism in Ido Tal’s green eyes glittered like a dagger drawn from its sheath. These days, you won’t find a teenager who doesn’t like to be photographed. Unless we’re talking about awfully unattractive people, and the girl—so they were promised!—was super-attractive. Lavi felt a toad hopping up his throat, hop after hop, one more and it would hop right out, smooth and green, another fabricated story about the beauty who refused to be photographed.

  He hated himself more with every word, and with every word he knew there was no going back, he could never tell them the truth now. He thought about the way she laughed. Her laugh was round and orange, like apricots. And if you listened carefully and cut it in half, you’d really find a hard pit there. He wanted to leave the classroom now and text her to come to the alley
right away, and when she did finally arrive and offer to bring them both ice cream, he would say, “No ice cream, I want the apricots of your laugh.” Anything but to be here in the classroom facing Ido, still dubious, still demanding, until he put an end to the discussion: “So tell her that the guys in your class won’t take no for an answer. Tell her that without a selfie of you two, we don’t believe she exists.”

  That evening, Ido Tal made him a member of the group. Not the WhatsApp group for class, the one their teacher had started at the beginning of the year that included everyone. The second group, the one no one talked about but everyone knew existed. Even those who weren’t members heard the sniggers that suddenly rose from nowhere in the middle of the lesson, saw how the members of that group hurried to put their hands in their pockets. Lavi wasn’t sure whether it was Ido who had founded the group, but it became clear when Ido added him. It was also clear why. And what would happen if he didn’t deliver.

  The next day, his heart pounding, he told her he’d like to visit her at home. Nofar looked at him in surprise. Until then she had been sure that he, like her, didn’t want a reason to leave the alley and venture into the outside world. There, with the laundry dripping on them and the bugs racing around under them, they had known moments of pure joy. The alley was a dump, there was no doubting that, but it was their dump.