Deadly Ties

by Aaron Ben-Shahar

  Estée did not sleep a wink, either. She spent the entire night daydreaming. First thing in the morning, she went over to the reception desk to meet Athos, but he wasn’t there.

  ‘Oh, here’s Maria’.

  “Good morning, did you have a pleasant night?” Maria then added, in that same congenial tone, “Your breakfast is ready.”

  “Simply wonderful. I’ll go grab something, but please tell me, where’s the guy from yesterday? He promised to give me an address in Thessaloniki.”

  “I don’t know,” answered Maria.

  “May I have his phone?”

  “I do not have it.”

  “So how do you get in touch with him?”

  “Well, I do not. I do not even know his name.”

  The look of disappointment on Estée’s eyes was plain as it was clear.

  “This address in Thessaloniki must be very important to you,” Maria added, “but I am sorry to disappoint you, I do not know anything about him. A student from Thessaloniki comes every now and then to stand in for me and my husband and take over our evening shift. He called me yesterday afternoon and said he had to return to Slovenia, some family urgency. I do hope everything is fine. He assured me everything was OK, and that he would send a friend of his to fill the shift, an Iranian fellow, a med student. He promised me he was a serious, responsible person. Well, I had no choice, so I agreed to the switch. I left this med student my key and went back to Thessaloniki with my husband. We had to attend my niece’s wedding. I never saw this guy, so I do not know who he is... He did leave me everything neat and tidy. He truly is responsible. If I manage to get hold of this student, I shall ask for his friend’s phone number. In the meantime, have something to eat. You seem like you could use a long espresso too.”

  Estée went down to the breakfast buffet, grabbed a large coffee with milk and went over to a pool chair facing the sea. A short while passed, and the phone rang.

  “We are running late. There was a traffic accident, and the road is blocked. We will let you know,” Claudia said sweetly, “but don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

  ‘Oh, that suits me just fine,’ Estée thought to herself. She went back to her room and got the good sleep she was in such need of. Three hours later, she awoke to the sound of her friends clamoring about her joyfully.

  “What happened, are you fine?”

  “Yes, some Iranian dude,” replied Claudia.

  “No, a Persian,” Celia corrected her. “He lost his mind, drove in the opposite direction and hit a few cars. It was so scary. I nearly fainted.”

  “How do you know he was a Persian?” wondered Estée.

  “A policeman who was at the scene of the accident passed between the cars and asked if there was anyone who spoke Farsi,” Celia explained.

  “Or Iranian,” Claudia stood her ground.

  “Ok…” Celia replied, “We’re here to have fun, not argue about an Iranian of Persian descent!” Let’s go, we’ve got one hour to get it together and hit the beach!”

  The bay was teaming. The girls just barely found a spot. Celia immediately took the top of her red bikini off, as Claudia and Estée kept theirs on.

  “You mermaids,” Celia sneered, laughing her head off.

  A few hours of idle chatter later, complete with several glasses of ouzo each and fantastic sights, Celia excused herself, said something about stuff she had to do and scurried off back to the hotel.

  ***

  Estée heard a knock at seven, only to find her two best friends all dolled up and smiling, lighting up the room as they walked in. Claudia, tall and slender, had a long white dress on. Estée noticed the Greek embroidery in gold and azure. ‘It really brings out her dark, lovely face and lovely, black, long wavy hair,’ she thought. Celia, short and bouncy, had this high-cut bright red top baring her belly. ‘It somehow matches her nose piercing and Havaianas flip flops.’ Estée also liked Celia’s rolled up bun, despite the messy way she wore it up.

  Estée wore a turquoise galabia that complimented her curvy figure. ‘Pity I didn’t have time to do my hair,’ she thought, while inspecting her friends’ hair.

  Celia and Claudia each took her by the hand and led her to the edge of the pool, where Maria was expecting them in her long blue dress; her husband, Nicholas, sporting a tiny mustache and tanned face, stood next to her in his white clothes. Both had a glass of ouzo each, same as always.

  “And now, for your surprise!” Maria announced.

  They followed Maria and Nicholas to the restaurant at the front of the hotel, right at the edge of the cliff, where the three young ladies were seated at a wide table, decorated by a bright white cloth strewn with small flowers. Other than that, the table was bare.

  Marveling at the bay, the three friends saw the moon lighting the waves and exchanging secrets with the mountain yonder. Proud Mount Athos watched over, taking the day in.

  Then, the whole commotion began. The light went on, tiny candles appeared on the table and a procession, led by Maria, followed by Nicholas and Ahmed, their faithful assistant from Afghanistan, sent out from the kitchen. They were carrying bowls of mussels of different sizes and seasonings and set them on the table along with select local white and red wines. Then, out came Margie, the chef, bestowing on them another lavish bowl of bright red moules marinière and white tzatziki.

  “A toast to your happy marriage!” Claudia and Celia greeted Estée.

  “May you have as many kids as there are mussels here!” Margie added, right before rushing back to her kitchen. Soon followed the most sumptuous dishes, taking even Celia aback, for all her expertise on the local cuisine, which quite naturally made her in charge of the culinary side of the celebrations.

  One by one, the kitchen sent over plates of fried scorpionfish, baked seabass, then shrimp and calamari in various forms, lobsters, oysters and crabs, followed by fresh anchovies and sardines and lakerda, brought all the way from Istanbul. Alongside came Greek delicacies such as local salads, zucchini and much more.

  “Let’s take a short pause,” Maria asked. “I would like to tell you about the dish Margie just sent over to our table, vine leaves filled with octopus pâté. This was prepared by the monks who live up in the mountain monastery. The monks pick the vine leaves right before dawn and catch the octopus at sundown. They are the only ones who know the secret of this dish, so we only serve it on special occasions.”

  Estée was delighted, ecstatic, even. ‘What do all these wonderful sights and scents have to do with me? How in the world could a simple girl from Haifa like me possibly have anything to do with Athos? What was that? The hand of fate? Divine intervention? Mere coincidence?’

  She helped herself to another glass of ouzo Claudia poured her and, setting aside her thoughts, rejoined the culinary orgy, now in full swing.

  It was approaching midnight when our three young ladies trotted, alcohol-saturated and sated, to their rooms. Come morning, Maria had to pound quite hard and long on their room doors to get them up and about. They hardly touched their sumptuous breakfast – a cup of black coffee each sufficed – before getting into Celia’s car and making their way back north, to Thessaloniki. At the airport right outside town, Estée and her friends embraced and kissed.

  “See you at the wedding,” they parted.

  ***

  The wedding took place about a month later at the main community hall of Avram’s village. It was a genuinely festive event. All the young folks, both the locals and Estée’s friends from the nearby town danced, delighted in the folk dances and sang national songs. At the height of the evening, two guest singers climbed onto the wooden platform that served as a stage, and, much to the crowd’s delight, swept the guests in a medley of Greek songs. They couldn’t get enough of Claudia and Celia and joined their Greek dances too.

  ***

  Three months after the wedding, Estée
recalled the date very accurately, she was sitting with Avram in their living room.

  “I went to the doctor today,” she told him.

  “How is he?”

  “He is fine. He told me I was pregnant.”

  “What a wife, what a wife!” Avram got up, excited, and gave her a loving kiss on the forehead. He then returned to the kibbutz receipts and went over the accounts.

  ***

  “I’m in labor,” Estée told her husband. “It started early. Take me to the hospital!”

  Avram sat by her side, genuinely attempting to help out and ease her pain. When the baby wasn’t emerging, he asked her permission to step out and return to his accounts. A devoted accountant for the Israeli labor movement, this was typical of him.

  The baby was delivered the moment Avram was out the door.

  “What a beautiful boy!” the midwife called out. She picked it up and held it in front of Estée.

  ‘He has such long fingers. He has such brown skin,’ Estée immediately noticed.

  She watched him and knew. Oh yes, she knew all too well when she looked at him.

  Chapter Two

  The tractor, which was as old as its faded red, was dragging the flat cart. Normally, it was used to carry animal feed to the pens, but now, it was carrying Avram Fiddlemann’s coffin.

  A banged-up Toyota kept its distance behind the tractor. Bonnie, the deceased’s son, was driving, along with his mother and younger sister in the back seat. He pulled up near the village synagogue at the end of the main street. Four men placed the coffin down and laid it on iron slabs which normally served to carry the milk containers.

  The synagogue was built about a century earlier, along with the dozen houses erected by the village founders, who had collected large, black galilee rocks and stones from the surrounding hill. The synagogue had survived, thanks to having been declared a building meant for preservation by the village committee. Two additional original buildings had also remained intact, having been turned into storage houses over the years.

  The funeral was set for six o’clock, right between the end of field work and milking the cows. Every village member attended. Some of them had enough time to change into clean clothes, sporting their Sunday best, and others simply put on their blue-collar work shirts, kept clean and neat in the closet especially for this occasion. Everyone wore open sandals with leather straps about their ankles.

  Those among the villagers, who could not hurry home in time, came straight from the field, still in their muddy, sweaty, faded work clothes, a blue or khaki kova tembel, similar to a bucket hat, over their heads to protect them from the unrelenting sun. In addition, they had quintessential work boots on, to protect them from snakes and scorpions.

  A few among the womenfolk put on short shorts, exposing their tanned legs. The more elegant of them had on long dresses that hid their figures. Vera, the mythological village chief, a woman of no age, came straight from the village HQ in the satin and cotton tunic she was always wearing.

  “When does she ever manage to get it cleaned?” One villager asked her fellow villager.

  “If ever…,” her friend replied.

  Vera produced a piece of paper from her bosom and began reading it out in her confident, commanding voice.

  “Dear Estée, Bonnie and Michal, all of us, the members of Moshav Tel Broshim, are grieving over the sudden death of our friend Avram.”

  “We have not forgotten that only five years and two months ago, Avram closed down his cow shed, but we hold to his credit the memory of his late father, Feibel, who was a founding member of our moshav.”

  “We also recall that only four years ago, three years and eight months ago, if you allow me to be absolutely accurate here, Feibel let his plot run completely dry and went to work for the farming cooperative, but then again, it is to his credit that he helped the village secure a loan from the cooperative when our barn caught fire…”

  The cows’ moos in the distance reminded Vera to keep it brief.

  “On behalf of myself and the entire village, I offer you our condolences. We hope you shall find solace in the thriving valley. Long live the People of Israel!”

  Four men lifted Avram’s coffin and circled the synagogue en route to the adjacent graveyard. It was right next to a grapefruit orchard the villagers had planted many years before. The first settlers, a merry band of optimistic young pioneers, had not considered death and had never planned to have a cemetery. It had not occurred to them to allow for one within their village.

  Nevertheless, as reality had unfolded, they were in for a rude awakening. One day, Yodel, one of the founding pioneers, lifted a bale of hay and a snake that was lurking there bit him. Yodel was rushed over by a horse-drawn cart all the way to the Scottish Hospital in Tiberias, but the bumpy road only hastened the venom’s spread throughout his body, and so he died on arrival.

  The villagers convened urgently and voted that, on the grounds of efficiency and saving time, the cemetery they were to have would be situated close to the synagogue. They had to pull out three grapefruit trees to make room for the village’s first grave.

  Additional grapefruit trees had to be pulled out over the years. Fever, the odd clashes with the nearby Arab villagers, Israel’s wars and the toll of the passage of time had all claimed their dues, and additional graves had to be prepared, much at the expense of the grapefruit orchard. The graveyard expanded northwards as its membership increased.

  Now with dozens of gravestones, the cemetery was well-kept, cultivated and spacious, as the graves were, after all, still few and far between. Three of its sides were delineated by a row of cypresses, lending further calm and respectability to the place.

  “I would die to die in such a place,” one of the few non-villagers who attended Avram’s funeral told his friend.

  Avram’s freshly dug grave was situated at the edge of the cemetery, not far from two recently dug out grapefruit trees. Bonnie stood over his father’s grave in his sandals and slightly oversized khaki pants and old gray t-shirt, for he was forewarned he would have to tear his shirt, as was the old Jewish custom for mourning one’s immediate relation. Bonnie’s sister and mother were still in shock over Avram’s sudden death. Estée, Avram’s widow, Bonnie’s and Michal’s mother, stared blankly. She had not yet uttered a single sound since she walked into her husband’s study the night before and found him slouching on his desk, bereft of life.

  The regional rabbi stepped forward, keeping his reverential albeit disapproving distance from Vera, the village chief. When the rabbi saw that Bonnie had no yarmulke on, he took his own off and gently rested it on Bonnie’s head. After the ceremonious tearing of the clothes, the rabbi placed a plastic laminated cardboard with the Jewish prayer for the dead in Bonnie’s hand and beckoned him to recite the Kaddish.

  The coffin was soon thereafter lowered into the ground, and each villager covered it with earth. A wreath of sunflowers locally picked in advance by the village women was laid over the fresh grave. Several doctors and nurses from the regional clinic, adjacent to Bonnie’s veterinary practice, laid a wreath they had purchased on their way to their colleague’s funeral.

  “May we never have to dig more grapefruit trees out,” the villagers greeted one another as they dispersed.

  Chapter Three

  Bonnie was sitting in the middle of the modest living room in his parents’ house, surrounded by ten of his late father’s friends, men in their sixties and seventies, whom he had asked to come one evening during shiva, the customary Jewish week of mourning, so that he might share intimate memories of his dad with them.

  The guests, country folk weary from a life spent toiling away in the sun, all came over after yet another working day out, each in his field, cow shed or orchard. Customarily, they took their cold showers at the end of their hard work, put their clean shorts and sandals on, grabbed a spotless t-shirt, an
d off they went to pay their respects.

  “I know that were I able to consult with dad whom to have over to mourn him, he would have picked each of you. He always told me how he admired his fellow villager friends and envied them for sticking with farming, contrary to him, how they never let their aching backs, white hair and kids who abandoned farming, to keep them away from the field, not for one day.”

  “Whereas we,” retorted one of the guests, “always envied Avram. We always thought that he, with his shining car, nice clothes and easy, cushy job uptown would eventually bury us all, but look what happened…”

  “No, don’t get me wrong,” countered Bonnie, “not a day went by without my father telling me how he longed to get back behind his tractor, to milk the cows, get the eggs and get up before dawn and pick the avocados.”

  “Such a shame,” Avram’s friends told Bonnie in reply, “but we needed among us someone from the big city to give us the latest gossip, the real deal…”

  The newly widowed Estée walked in carrying a tray with tea and snacks. “I’m sure that would never have happened had he continued working on the farm.” Teary-eyed, she handed each guest his teacup, added two spoons of sugar each and retired to her room.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you all,” Bonnie began, “but before I tell you about it, please try and tell me what you make of this: ‘the purchase of an item of clothing recalls the value of the toil it took to obtain it,’” he read out of a cardboard sheet he was holding.

  His father’s friends look at each other. They had no clue.

  “Let me give you another clue,” Bonnie added with a touch of mystery. “In what context was the following said: ‘clothes for work’?”

  “Quit joking,” Shaikeh, one of Avram’s friends, cut Bonnie off. “We came to talk about your father, our pal, and you’re giving us this quiz…”