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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2018 by D. A. Mishani
First published in Hebrew by Achuzat Bayit
First publication 2020 by Europa Editions
Translation by Jessica Cohen
Original Title: Shalosh
Translation copyright © 2020 by Jessica Cohen
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover image: Adriaen Coorte, Three peaches on a stone ledge with a painted Lady Butterfly (1693-1695)
© The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
ISBN 9781609456108
D.A. Mishani
THREE
Translated from the Hebrew
by Jessica Cohen
THREE
For Sarah Mishani, my father’s mother,
and for Sarah Mishani, my daughter
‘For the Son of man shall be delivered into
the hands of men.’
—LUKE 9:44
‘For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives,
but to save them.’
—LUKE 9:56
ONE
1
They met on a dating site for divorced singles. His profile was unexciting, which was exactly why she wrote to him. Forty-two years old, divorced once, lives in a Tel Aviv suburb. Not “Excited to swallow life whole” or “On a self-discovery journey I’d like you to join me on.” Two kids, five foot eight, college educated, self-employed, financially stable. Political opinions: none. Some other items were left incomplete too. Three pictures, one old and two that seemed slightly newer, all of which showed something reassuring about his face, nothing too special. He was not overweight.
Eran, her son, had started therapy, and his therapist said it would be good for Eran to see that she was not just grieving, but starting to move on with her life. She tried to get the two of them back into a routine: supper at seven, shower, one TV show, and then they both got their bags ready for the morning. At half past eight or quarter to nine, Eran would be in bed and she’d read him a story, even though he could read on his own, because it wasn’t a good time to stop. After that she’d sit at the computer desk in the corner of the living room, reviewing profiles and reading messages, even though she knew she wasn’t going to write back to any man who contacted her. She preferred initiating contact herself. It was late March, but in the evening she wore a jumper, and sometimes it was raining lightly when she got into bed alone.
She sent him a message—“I’d be happy to get to know you”—and he answered two days later: “Let’s do it. How?”
They had an online chat.
“What school do you teach at? Primary? Secondary?”
“Secondary.”
“Can you say which one?”
“I’d rather not give details for now. It’s in Holon.”
She was cautious, he was revealing. The items left blank on his profile were filled out as their conversations progressed. He liked to ride his bike, mostly on Saturdays, in Yarkon Park. “After neglecting my body for years, I’ve started going to the gym too. Delightful.” She didn’t think you could tell from the pictures. He was a lawyer—“Not one of those sharks, just an independent lawyer, with my own little firm”—and most of his work involved verifying eligibility and submitting applications for Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian citizenship for Israelis with roots in those countries. He got into the field after working for a few years in the legal department of an employment agency that brought foreign workers to Israel from Eastern Europe, and that’s how he built up contacts in the various departments of interiors. “Would you happen to need a Polish passport?” he asked, and she wrote back: “No chance, my parents are from Libya. Do you have contacts with Gaddafi?”
Her friends at the school warned her against internet chats. They said you couldn’t believe what people said about themselves. But he didn’t say anything unusual about himself. On the contrary: it was as if he were trying to sound ordinary. After corresponding for a few days he asked, “Are we going to meet eventually?” and Orna wrote, “Yes, eventually.”
Thursday evening, half past nine. Early April.
He said she should decide where to meet, and she chose a café by Ha’Bima Square in central Tel Aviv. Three days earlier she’d met with Eran’s therapist and had mostly talked about herself. The therapist had hinted that Orna might want to get some therapy too, and she’d laughed. She’d apologized for talking too much and explained that she couldn’t afford therapy. She was only able to pay for Eran’s sessions thanks to her mum.
The therapist advised her not to keep her first date a secret, but also not to make a big deal out of it. It was best not to ask her mum to babysit or have Eran sleep over with her, because she’d be more anxious than the two of them and would tell Eran more than he should know. She should try to get the same babysitter they’d used when Mum and Dad used to go out together. If Eran asked who she was going out with, Orna could say, “A friend.” If he asked who the friend was, she could say he was a new friend whom Eran didn’t know yet. His name was Gil.
Tel Aviv was crowded. The traffic jams started at the Shalom exit from Ayalon Highway and continued along Ibn Gavirol Street, and the new underground car park they’d built at the cultural centre was full. Gil had sent her his phone number that morning on chat, and she texted him to say she was running late. She drove back to the car park on Kaplan Street, left her car there and walked to Ha’Bima Square alongside groups of partiers, men with tattoos and beards, pretty girls and young couples with babies. Maybe she should have suggested a different place. Her outfit—white cropped trousers, matching white blouse, thin white jacket—made her feel old, or worse: like an old woman trying to look young. But the first thing Gil said helped her feel less alien:
“What are we actually doing here? I feel so old.”
It was much stranger than she’d expected, to suddenly start going out with men.
When she got there he stood up and shook her hand as though they were at a business meeting. He ordered a latte, so instead of wine she got non-alcoholic hot cider with a cinnamon stick. He wasn’t thin, but you could tell he worked out. And he was dressed more casually than she was: jeans, blue shirt, white trainers. He took upon himself the role of the more experienced party, because he’d been on quite a few of these dates.
“Usually you talk about the divorce,” he said, “swap war stories. A bit like in reserve duty. It’s pretty depressing but I’m willing to go first.”
She said, “No, anything but that,” but she was curious to hear. Talking about it herself was out of the question; everything was still bleeding and unprocessed, sometimes not real at all. Even while she was on the date, she sometimes had the feeling that all this was not happening and that it was Ronen sitting there with her. Gil said he had two daughters, both in secondary school: Noa and Hadass. His ex-wife had initiated the divorce, and at first he’d resisted, probably not out of love but out of fear.
Unlike what had happened between her and Ronen, Gil and his wife had had a lengthy separation process. When his wife brought up the idea, he’d managed to persuade her to try to repair the relationship. Then there was a brief period of marriage therapy, and in the end he acquiesced. To the best of his knowledge she hadn’t cheated on him, and she didn’t have a boyfriend now either. She’d just stopped loving him, she’d
lost interest, wanted to try something new, not give up on life, all sorts of things that he hadn’t understood at the time, or hadn’t wanted to understand; but today he understood more. All in all the change had made everyone’s lives better. The girls’ too. The divorce was easy, perhaps because they were both lawyers and money wasn’t tight. His ex-wife stayed in their flat in Givatayim, and with the money they got from the sale of a rental flat they owned in Haifa, he bought a four-room flat not far away. He was recounting all this not for the first time, that much was clear, and his tone was so mollified that it made Orna feel just how wounded she was. Precisely because she thought her and Ronen’s story was so different—but perhaps it wasn’t? The lines Gil had said drily—“Try something new”, “Not give up on life”—exploded inside her like little grenades.
Gil didn’t see any of this, or at least she hoped he didn’t. When he asked, “And how was it for you?” Orna said, “Different. I have—We have a nine-year-old boy, and he took it really hard. But I’d rather not talk about that now.”
After that she wasn’t there any more. Gil talked about his work, told her about quick business trips to Warsaw and Bucharest, tried to take an interest in her life and did not press her when she resisted. Time passed slowly. Ha’Bima Square filled up at quarter past ten, when the plays ended, and then emptied out. At twenty to eleven Gil ordered a Coke Zero and asked if she wanted something to eat, but she didn’t even get another cider because she was hoping the date would end.
A little after eleven he said, “Shall we?” and she said, “Yes, we should, it’s really late.”
“I’d be up for keeping our chat going, if you feel like it. And you also have my number,” he said by way of goodbye.
She wanted to phone the babysitter on her way to the car to ask if Eran was asleep yet, but she couldn’t because she felt she might burst into tears.
2
A week later, she sent him a message.
“Gil, are you still there?”
“You mean here? Apparently forever.”
She apologized for their date, explaining that she probably wasn’t ready yet. He must have had a dismal time with her.
He wrote back: “Not at all. And I completely understand because I’ve been there myself. No hard feelings at all. Maybe some other time.”
At school it was end of term, and in the evenings she had exams to mark. She finished reading Eran The Prince and the Pauper and started The Last of the Mohicans, precisely because they were stories that had nothing to do with anything in their lives; they weren’t about a boy coping with divorce but tales of distant times and places. She started tutoring pupils from other schools in the afternoons, so she wouldn’t have to ask her mother for money beyond what she already borrowed for Eran’s therapy. She gave four to six tutoring sessions a week and charged a hundred shekels an hour, which could amount to two thousand shekels a month, in cash. In summer the tutoring would end, but she’d signed up to mark matriculation exams so she’d have another source of income.
Friends from school, especially those who weren’t close to her, tried to find out if she was ready to be set up. Quite a few men in their circles were starting their second rounds, and although most of them were the dregs, there were a few real catches. Orna rejected the offers. There were no more than a couple of new profiles a week on the site, and she kept coming across the same faces and the same lines trying to conceal the loneliness behind pretty words: “Unwilling to compromise on anything less than true love,” “Looking for a partner for my life’s journey,” “An unconventional man, the real deal, no lies and no masks.” They were all phoney, or not thin enough, or too young, aged twenty-eight or thirty, and Orna couldn’t understand what they were doing there, just as she wasn’t sure why she herself flipped through the site every few days without any real intention. When she wrote to Gil to suggest they go on another date, it was not really premeditated, just a spur-of-the-moment decision, although the thought had crossed her mind a few times.
He answered in a few hours: “Happy to, but only if it’s not out of pity.”
Orna sent a smiley face, followed by: “Is self-pity okay?”
Passover came and went. It was a sad Seder, the first after the divorce. Just her and Eran, her mother, and her brother and his family at their home in Karkur. As always, far too much food and unintentionally painful conversation. No one mentioned Ronen. Eran clung to her the whole evening, didn’t play with his cousins or join in to search for the Afikoman. The next day, on the holiday morning, she woke up a few minutes before six. The sky was heavy with rainclouds and it was unexpectedly cold. Their winter clothes were already stored on the top shelves of the wardrobe. She had no idea how they would get through the whole school holiday.
The babysitter was busy with school exams, so she was only free on Tuesday, but that worked for Orna. A quiet evening, with fewer partiers on the street. Gil wrote, “I have another date on Tuesday, but if it’s the only day you can do next week, I’ll cancel.” Instead of making her happy, his honesty disgusted her, and she thought of backing out. I’m on the meat market, she thought. I’m part of the meat market.
Maybe there was no way around it.
“Can we not meet in Tel Aviv this time?” she asked, and he replied, “Of course. Wherever you’d like. Yafo? Givatayim? The marina in Herzliya?”
“Isn’t Givatayim too close for you?” She thought about his grown daughters, who might walk by the café. About his ex-wife.
“Very close. But honestly, I don’t mind where we meet. They’ve opened some nice places near me on Katznelson Street, but I can get anywhere.”
She didn’t feel anxious before the second time, and that was strange. As if she were going to have coffee with a friend from work, or as if Gil really were “a friend,” as she told Eran.
She dressed casually and put on hardly any make-up, perhaps to send him the message that she wasn’t playing by the usual meatmarket rules. He wore athletic clothes again, with the same jeans and the same white trainers, but this time a white shirt. She thought he looked slightly thinner, while most men in Israel gained weight on Passover. They kissed on the cheek when she walked into the café, late again because she’d had trouble finding parking, and the kiss was friendly, befitting a couple who’d met more than twice. Gil smelled of a cologne she didn’t recognize and immediately liked. A very sweet, chocolatey aroma, which one couldn’t help wanting to smell again.
She tried to be less melancholy this time, more talkative, mostly after it occurred to her that Gil might regret giving up his other date for her. Still, she stuck to the role of the interviewer who doesn’t say much about herself—and Gil agreed to be interviewed again.
“So, do you go on a lot of these dates?” she asked, and he answered, “Fewer than I used to, but yes, quite a lot. I don’t have much else to do in the evenings.”
“And nothing ever comes of it?”
“Usually not.”
Most of the time, he said, the women didn’t write or call after the first date. A few did try to keep things going but he ignored them. Only rarely did it progress to a second date, and there’d been a total of three times when it had gone beyond that. Three times in over two years. That depressed Orna briefly, as though what Gil was saying offered a glimpse into her own future, but she perked herself up. Less melancholy, more talkative. This time she wasn’t sinking. She felt able to be more relaxed and happy, maybe in part because she’d ordered alcoholic cider this time. The café, which Gil said he often went to in the mornings on his way to the office, was full of young people again, but this time it didn’t bother Orna as much, and even helped. As did the fact that Gil had some red wine.
“Went beyond that—you mean sex?” she asked, surprised by her own brashness.
Gil smiled. “Sex too. It evolved into something that lasted more than two or three dates, to a sort of beginning of something posing as a relatio
nship.”
“And why didn’t it work out?”
“I guess they didn’t fall in love with me and I didn’t fall in love either, and somehow nothing happened. It faded.”
He tried to avoid talking about the divorce, maybe because he sensed that was what had ruined their last date, but Orna was more confident now in her ability to tolerate the memories, which did indeed come up when he started to talk. She insisted on asking him about his ex-wife and daughters, to prove that she could, that something in her really was getting stronger, as Eran’s therapist said it would, even if she couldn’t completely feel it herself yet.
After the cider she ordered a glass of Merlot, and then Gil got another glass of wine, even though he’d finished his first one long ago—as if he’d been awaiting confirmation that she wasn’t about to flee, that it wasn’t presumptuous of him to order a second glass. On the way home in the car, she thought that what she liked about him on this date might not have actually been about him, but about picking up where they’d left off last time. By now she recognized the way he lowered his voice when he asked a question he feared might be too personal, the way he ran his fingers through his fair hair and smiled before he answered a question he found embarrassing, the disappointment in his eyes when he thought something he’d said had pained her and made her shut down, and his joy when he talked about his girls, Noa and Hadass.
His divorce agreement had given them shared custody, but he’d felt from the start that it wasn’t easy for the girls, that they preferred to spend the week in the home they’d grown up in, in their own rooms, and so he didn’t insist, even though he’d put a lot of money into their new rooms. At some point he gave each of the girls their own key to his flat and told them to come whenever they wanted to, without asking first or knocking. In the first three months they hardly came, and always texted him first, but it had gradually changed. He would come home from work in the early evening and find them in his kitchen or living room, doing homework or watching TV. Mostly it was Noa, the older one. His flat was less than a ten-minute walk from their house. His ex-wife didn’t mind, and one could say that his home had become their refuge, or perhaps a place where they could practise what it would be like to have their own home one day. They came three or four times a week now, studied for their exams undisturbed, cooked dinner, tidied up on their own, and two weeks ago there’d been another important development: Noa had a boyfriend, and she’d asked him to sleep over for the first time, not at his ex-wife’s but in her new room at Gil’s place. She’d be seventeen in a month, and he and his ex were considering buying her a car together. He would pay for most of it because, after all, his finances were much more stable.
Three Page 1
