Three

by D. A. Mishani

  Outside the arrivals hall everyone was smoking, and the taxi smelled of cigarette smoke. Even though she’d brought a denim jacket, she was cold. The cab driver looked Arab, didn’t glance at her or try to talk with her the whole ride, and when they stopped at lights he texted on the phone attached to the windshield. They passed auto shops and gangs of stray dogs, which she’d read were common around Bucharest now. She remembered the night drives from airports to hotels in her early twenties, when she was a flight attendant, in particular one in Kiev, with two other attendants and a completely drunk driver who ran red lights the whole way, drove almost a hundred kilometres an hour inside the city and refused to let them get out. The gloomy landscapes viewed from the taxi window were unfamiliar, even though she had travelled from the airport to central Bucharest a few times, more than a decade ago. Perhaps they’d taken a different route back then. She asked herself, of course, what she was doing here. First she imagined the driver letting her off in the abandoned industrial area, near the dogs. Then, when they drove into town, she feared there would be no reservation in her name at the hotel and no rooms available. But the streets started to look familiar, perhaps because she vaguely remembered the place or perhaps because it looked like any European city, with branches of Zara and Nike and Starbucks, clean streets, tourists. They stopped outside a Parisian-looking building. Hotel Trianon, three stars. She didn’t think she’d ever been there.

  The front-desk clerk, who had one blue glass eye and spoke excellent English, found the reservation immediately and said, “You’ll be with us for two nights, correct?” She asked for Orna’s credit card and Orna realized the room had been booked but not paid for. She was pleased about this because she’d decided on the flight that she would not let Gil pay for anything. The clerk gave her a keycard and drew blue lines under the name of the Wi-Fi network, the password and the hours breakfast was served, which were printed on the little cardboard envelope she put the key in. When Orna asked which room Gil Hamtzani was in, the clerk could not find his name in the computer. “When is he supposed to arrive?” she asked, and Orna said, “I think he’s been here for a few days.” His name was not in the reservation system under either of the spellings they tried, and Orna said, “Never mind, I must have been wrong.” She assumed he was staying in a different hotel for now, perhaps his usual one, where he didn’t want to be seen with her, and she suddenly hoped she would manage to avoid seeing him for her entire stay.

  The hotel room was much more elegant than she’d expected. There was a large bed with a maroon bedspread on ivory sheets. Very clean blue carpeting, and a dark wooden desk that was antique, or at least antique-looking. Two lamps above the bed and a lighting strip on the ceiling lit up the room in a soft golden hue, and she pulled open the blue curtains and looked out on to a quiet street named Coba˘lcescu. She put her little suitcase on the bed and opened it, the way she always did as soon as she checked into a hotel room, and then went back to look at the tree-lined street.

  When she logged on to the Wi-Fi network she had a WhatsApp message from Sophie: “Send pictures!” She wondered whether to take a picture of the room. So many lies she’d had to tell everyone before going away. Sophie, Eran, her mother, who was supposed to get back from Europe the next day. She told them she’d found a cheap deal for three days but not that Gil would be there and that he’d paid for her ticket. She was going alone, to clear her head and get some rest, and mostly to get away from the empty house and from everything that was happening with Ronen and Eran. Sophie thought it was an excellent idea. She was only sorry she couldn’t join Orna, because Itzik had sprained a muscle on their hike and couldn’t be alone with the kids. Orna sent her a photo of the room and one of the quiet street, framed by the open blue curtains, and Sophie immediately responded with a picture of a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

  Maybe she had done the right thing.

  She wouldn’t wait for Gil. In fact, she would make every effort to avoid him. The fact that he’d bought her the ticket could be ignored—she could think about that as compensation, or simply pay him back in Israel. She knew the ticket hadn’t been cheap, a little over 450 euros, but still she decided she would pay him back in full, and the decision liberated her. She remembered that she used to know how to find her way around foreign or semi-foreign cities with her eyes closed and with no map. A sense of direction based on a natural attraction to beauty—that was how she used to think of it. It had been honed over dozens of one-night stays in cities all over the world, always leading her to the most attractive streets, the most charming squares and the loveliest cafés. Now, with Google Maps and the Bucharest tourist app, it should be much easier, but she decided not to use them. Without planning a route, she left the hotel, turned right, then right again, and found herself on a main road that she felt she should stay on, and after three or four minutes she realized she was correct and that she was approaching the old city.

  It was five o’clock and the sky was cloudy and leaden, as if it were getting dark. She remembered Bucharest being dirtier and poorer, and was surprised to see hotels with grand casinos and signs in Hebrew asking guests to deposit their passports at the front desk. At first she didn’t take pictures because she preferred to photograph things with her eyes and her memory, or in fact with her soul, as Ronen used to say. But when she remembered that line of his she took her phone out and snapped pictures to show Eran when she got home. She didn’t look for a fine-dining restaurant but for street food, as she always used to on her short trips—not just to save money, but also because they served the simplest, tastiest dishes. She found a stall selling rolled pastries filled with soft cheese, a sort of Romanian version of the Georgian khinkali or bourekas from back home.

  At eight o’clock she wanted to go back to her room to Skype with Eran before he went to bed. She stopped at a souvenir shop in the old city and bought him a traditional wooden sword, a colourful flute and a white T-shirt with a picture of Dracula, which she wasn’t sure she would give him because it was a little scary. As she approached the hotel, she spotted Gil waiting outside. He looked tense, standing there in a grey suit she’d never seen him wearing in Israel, looking around. “You’re full of surprises, even abroad,” she said. He said he was sorry, his work meetings had taken much longer than he’d expected, and he was happy she’d found the hotel. He asked how her room was.

  “The room’s nice,” she said. “Aren’t you staying in this hotel after all?”

  As far as she was concerned, this trip was already over and had not been in vain after all: all she’d needed was the flight and checking into the hotel and the short walk around the streets of Bucharest, which had proved to her that her sense of direction wasn’t lost and, she could still find her way around. Now she was ready to fly home without even spending the night, just like she used to do.

  Gil said he hadn’t been at this hotel before but a local lawyer friend had recommended it. He was staying on the other side of town, closer to the government offices where he had most of his meetings. He wanted to find out if she liked her room before he got one for himself, and he was wondering if she wanted him to get a separate room or if she preferred that they sleep in the same room. She said, “How do you usually do things with the girls you bring here?” But then she felt angry at herself for allowing him to spoil her mood.

  Gil didn’t smile this time. She said she’d rather he get his own room and that she wanted to pay him back for the flight. The whole thing about the hotel on the other side of town was absurd, and now she didn’t believe his stories about what he was doing in Bucharest either. She realized she knew nothing about his work, and assumed he was probably connected to the casinos with Hebrew signs that she’d seen. Why would a lawyer have to go to Bucharest so often to get Romanian passports for Israelis? Anyway, she could no longer be bothered with the hide-and-seek games and his lies, and she wanted to talk to Eran. She made up her mind not to see Gil any more.

 
He asked if she wanted to go out for something to eat, and she said she had to go up to her room to make a phone call and that he should probably call his wife. She said perhaps they could meet later if she wasn’t too tired, although she knew she was going to crawl into bed and simply fall asleep. When she walked into the hotel and realized he wasn’t following her in, she asked, “Oh, is that so no one sees us going in together? But no one knows you here, do they?” Gil replied, “Orna, could you stop? I’m coming in soon. A courier is supposed to drop off some documents for me.” But she had the feeling he realized she’d lost interest and would simply wait for her to disappear into the hotel and then vanish from her life. He didn’t even have a suitcase. And she knew that when they got back to Israel she would have the strength, this time, to cut off this morbid relationship once and for all.

  Despite the way she’d teased him, she felt no real insult or anger at his lies, not even a sense of self-loathing. There was a slight fear, because she realized she knew much less about him than she’d thought. But she felt free, not just of Gil, and more confident in her ability to get along on her own, to cope with whatever life threw at her. She could even handle Eran’s request to spend more time with Ronen or to go to live with him and his new family in Nepal. She would simply tell him: No, you can’t move to Nepal because you are my son, and no one will take better care of you than I will. Because I’m not giving you up and you know you can’t give me up, and even if you don’t know that now, you’ll understand it when you’re older.

  She called Eran on Skype as soon as she got into her room. When Ronen answered, he said, “You look good, Orna. Are you having fun? How’s Bucharest?” She replied, “Wild. How’s Eran?”

  He was still in the shower because they’d just got back from the pool. Ronen said he’d be out in a minute, and even though she didn’t ask, she knew with certainty that Eran was showering with Julia and that Ruth was helping them both wash. A few minutes later they appeared on the screen together: Julia, wearing nothing but a pair of orange panties, stood opposite the camera, then Eran ran over behind her, wrapped in a white towel with his straight brown hair sopping wet.

  She asked Ronen to leave her alone with Eran and he took Julia by the hand and left the room. “How are you, my love? I miss you so much,” she said. And he answered, “I’m fine, Mum. Where are you?”

  She told him again that she’d taken a Boeing 737 with two engines to the capital of a country called Romania, and that she was in her hotel room after walking around the city and eating a delicious dinner and buying him presents. “Do you want to see my room?” But Eran wanted to see the gifts, and when she took the wooden sword and the T-shirt out of the black plastic bag and held them up for him, she thought he looked pleased. “Ran-Ran, do you still feel good with Dad?”

  “Yes. Have you decided if I can stay for more than five days?”

  “I’ve decided that you can’t, my boy. I miss you too much, and I won’t manage for more than five days without you. But Dad will come to visit us lots more before they leave.”

  That was how it always was between then.

  Short conversations, without many words.

  What was important was all the rest—communicating with their eyes, or with their bodies getting closer and farther away from each other, like on that evening in the dark sea that had swept them apart and back together. Eran nodded and she could see that he wasn’t angry about her refusal. Perhaps it even made him happy. “You don’t want to tell me more about your day right now, do you? Are you too tired?” she asked.

  “It was fun at the pool. We’re having schnitzel for dinner.”

  “Are you writing in your notebook, like you promised? So you can read me everything when we meet?”

  He hadn’t written anything yet.

  Then she asked him to blow her a kiss through the computer and she caught it and he pressed the button that made her vanish from the screen.

  At four minutes to nine there was a knock on the door. She was still dressed, even though she knew for sure that she would not go out to eat but would shower and put on her pyjamas and go to bed. Gil had called eight or nine times, and she’d ignored his calls, hoping he would stop, but something in his numerous attempts and the fact that he didn’t hang up even after ten rings bothered her and made her think he wasn’t going to give up on dinner.

  She opened the door without knowing it was Gil, and he marched in and put his soft hand over her mouth. He shut the door behind him and pushed her to the bed before she realized what was happening, with a strength she’d never before felt in him. He knocked her on to the bed so that her face was crushed in the pillow and her mouth was blocked, then he pulled her arms behind her back and put his knee on her hands. She felt him tying her wrists with fabric, and after her hands were secured he tied a towel around her mouth.

  Orna fought him with her legs and back, tried to push him off and kick him with her heels, but he dug his knee deeper into her back until she thought her spine was going to break, and he pushed her face harder into the pillow until she could feel the air running out. In the seconds that passed before she lost consciousness, she thought he wanted to hurt her: it wasn’t possible that he was trying to kill her, even though that was how it seemed. The pain in her back was unbearable. She shouted, “What are you doing, Gil?!” but her voice went unheard.

  When she came to, her hands were still tied and her mouth gagged, and she was lying on the bed in the same position. Her back hurt. She wasn’t sure how much time had gone by, but the room was almost completely dark, as if several hours had passed. Was it the middle of the night? Gil noticed her moving and turned to her, and she saw that he was sitting on the bed next to her, holding her phone. The TV threw off colourful lights into the black space of the room.

  She still didn’t understand what he wanted, and he said to her quietly, “What’s the code for your phone?” as if he’d forgotten that he’d gagged her with a towel. When she tried to roll over and lie on her arms and her aching back, he turned her back on to her stomach and said, “Please signal to me with your fingers.”

  And that was all he said.

  After that, for the next few minutes, he did not say a word and did not make a sound. He did some things on her phone that she could not see, but in the light coming from the screen she noticed that he had rubber gloves on. And she realized he was going to try to kill her. He must be deleting the messages he’d sent her, as if the murder itself had already been committed and all that was left for him to do now was cover his tracks. But she was still alive. She tried to move around on the bed and roll off it, and he got up and dug his knee into the middle of her back again while he kept working on the phone.

  These are not my final moments, she thought. This is not the end. She also thought: I will not see Eran again. Is this why he brought me to Romania? Was it all part of a plan? Isn’t anyone going to catch him? She knew he would only be caught if she could stay alive, because she hadn’t told anyone they were in touch, hadn’t mentioned him to anyone for months, and no one knew she’d come here to see him. But he’d booked her plane ticket and that had to be on record somewhere, and he’d also booked the hotel, unless he’d planned all this ahead of time and had made the reservations under fictitious names. She remembered that she’d left the curtains open, as she always did, so that the view would be in her sight at all times, but she saw he’d drawn them shut. She thought about the front-desk clerk with the glass eye, who’d looked for “Gil Hamtzani’ a few hours ago in the hotel computer. Would she remember his name tomorrow? But tomorrow was not the end.

  And then, during one of her attempts to turn around and fall off the bed, Orna saw the white cord and she realized.

  No one would catch him.

  It was a long, white electrical cable, at the end of which was a block with three sockets. A loop had been tied on the other end, and she realized he was going to kill her with that c
able and stage her death as a suicide. He was going to tighten the loop around her neck and hang the cable from the curtain rod or some other place near the ceiling. And disappear. Leave the room under cover of darkness and go back to his room, if he had one, or leave the hotel, if he was staying somewhere else. Fly back to Israel without knowing anything about the woman he’d never met who had committed suicide in a hotel room in Bucharest, a woman whose murderer no one would look for, because the Romanian police would declare it a suicide, and her relatives would also accept that she might have committed suicide because of her grief over Ronen and Eran. And it would work out well for Ronen, because now Eran would be his and no one would put obstacles in his path when he wanted to take him to Nepal. Was he sending goodbye messages in her name from her phone now? Perhaps he was writing a farewell note from her to Eran? Eran, Eran, Eran—only Eran.

  She did not stop talking in her head, even though no one could hear her.

  And Gil had still not said a word.

  He got up and put her phone down on the desk, then came closer and put the pillow over her head again. The air would run out again. She wanted to think only of Eran, Eran, Eran, but she saw him with Julia, who looked back at her the way she had from the computer screen, wearing the orange panties.

  This couldn’t be the end.

  No one would ever catch him.

  But I didn’t commit suicide, I would never leave you. Someone must know that. Someone knows. That is not my farewell letter. You know. You. You. You.

  Perhaps it is not the end after all.

  How could it be that I’m dying and Eran’s body is so far away from mine?