Gil smiled. He said, “No, I was definitely not ‘going out’ with Emilia, as you call it. You can ask my wife if you’d like. That time I went to the flat and she was there, I gave her a ride south because I was on my way to a meeting in Jaffa. But other than that I never saw her outside the flat.”
“Did she tell you anything? About her situation? Maybe about a partner or family in Israel or Latvia? About other flats she cleaned?”
Gil thought for a moment.
Then he said that to the best of his memory Emilia hadn’t mentioned any other workplace or any relative or boyfriend, but that he was under the impression that she needed money desperately because she was sending everything she made to a partner or a lover, or maybe even a child, in Riga. But she might have been giving it to a boyfriend in Israel.
“Why do you think so? Did she hint at anything like that?”
“No, I don’t remember anything specific. It was my impression, from our brief talks and from her appearance, that she needed money urgently. Judging by the clothes she wore and the way she looked, I don’t think she spent the money she made on herself.”
When Inspector A. told him that Emilia had been caught stealing from the lady she worked for at the nursing home in Bat Yam, Gil looked astonished but then he smiled. He said on the one hand it surprised him, because he’d never heard a complaint from his mother and father about anything like that, but on the other hand he wasn’t all that shocked because he’d often thought it was a good thing he didn’t have anything valuable at the flat, and that she seemed so desperate that she’d be willing to do anything for money.
Inspector A. got the hint: “What do you mean, anything?”
Gil said he wasn’t sure but he thought that when he took her to the flat the first time she’d hinted that she was willing to do “more than cleaning” for him. He wasn’t positive that was what she was insinuating, and anyway he wasn’t interested, of course.
Inspector A. looked at him for a moment, then made a note. “Do you think her distress was so severe that she would have offered herself at the massage parlours or tried to pick up prostitution work on the street?”
Gil said he had no idea, but it was possible. He asked if Inspector A. thought that was why Emilia had committed suicide, because she’d been caught stealing and because of the financial distress, and Inspector A. nodded. “I assume it’s related,” he said, “but we still don’t have enough information about her from the Latvians. It looks like financial and emotional distress, loneliness, alienation, fear of being arrested because of the theft and also because of working illegally, maybe fear of being deported back to Riga. From what you’re telling me and from other testimonies, it’s also possible that she had significant debt, here or perhaps in Latvia, or that she was financing someone overseas and was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep doing that because she’d no longer be able to work. It’s very common with these women. I’m also not ruling out that she was so desperate she was willing to prostitute herself, which happens to a lot of women who come from there, and she couldn’t live with it. We come across a lot of these stories. Especially in that screwed-up area around the central bus station.”
When Gil left his office, Inspector A. called the Latvian consulate again to find out if there were any more details from the Riga police about Emilia, but there was no answer because it was Sunday. He was fairly certain that he understood the circumstances surrounding her suicide and just wanted to fill in some gaps so that the story of her death would be complete. He put the photograph of Emilia’s face into a plastic bag and straightened out the documents, because he didn’t like it when papers stuck out of the white cardboard file and their edges got crumpled. Then he put the file on the corner of his desk, on top of a pile of other folders, and that was the last work he did on the case.
5
Gil will continue to come to the café on Katznelson Street every morning, but she will not be there. He will wait for her, look up from his newspaper or phone every time he hears the door open, but the table where she sat will remain orphaned. Towards half past nine or quarter to ten, he will give up and go to work. On his way home, in the late afternoon, he will stop by the café again.
When a week has gone by since their date, he will decide not to keep waiting and that he will phone her from his office. It will be in the morning, shortly after the time they usually met at the café, and she will pick up immediately.
“Hello, Ella?” he will say, because he won’t be sure the number he called is really hers, and he will have trouble recognizing her voice from her first “hello.” She will not reply immediately but will pause for a moment, because she will recognize his voice. He will be trying to explain why he’s calling when she cuts him off and asks, “How did you get my number?” He will say that he heard her give it to someone on the phone and he couldn’t resist writing it down, and she will ask him not to call her and will say she has to hang up. He will say, “Can you at least explain why? Did I do something wrong?” and she will quickly answer that no, she can’t talk but she hasn’t been coming to the café because her nanny is sick and she’s home with the girls. She will urge him again not to call her and will promise to get back to him when she can.
He will not believe what she says about being home with the girls and the nanny’s illness. In the background there will be no crying or other babies’ voices, but phones ringing and noises that make him think she’s in a public space.
Her avoidance and the fact that she didn’t get back to him as promised will anger him and he will call her again that evening. A little after ten, when her husband should be home. She will not answer and he will wait more than ten rings to leave her a message, but there will be no voicemail and eventually he will hang up. The next morning, to his utter surprise, he will see her at the café, sitting in her spot in the corner of the deck still covered with glass. She will motion for him to go out for a smoke as soon he walks in, and when they stand next to each other on the sidewalk outside the door, she will whisper, “Are you mad? Why are you calling me when you know my husband’s home? Are you trying to kill me?”
He will be wearing jeans and a blue shirt that morning, exactly the same clothes he wore to his first date with you, Orna, at Ha’Bima Square, and she will be wearing a light but not thin windbreaker, zipped up to her neck, and will not unzip it even though the morning clouds will scatter and the day will warm up. Gil will explain that he didn’t understand why she’d stopped coming and he had to know. He thought they’d had a good date. She’d left him feeling that this was something they shouldn’t miss out on. She will shush him and whisper, “Are you seriously talking about these things right here out loud?!” At the smokers’ table outside the café there will be a tall, unshaven man in black Adidas sweatpants talking on his phone, and the looks he throws at them will trouble both of them. They will move away and stand near the window of a still-shut real-estate office, and after she lights herself a cigarette and takes a drag she will tell him in her usual voice, but curtly, that she felt the same way. The day after their lunch her nanny really had been sick, as she’d told him, and she’d had to stay at home with the little one for two days, and it was those two days that had made her start thinking about what she’d done and she’d grown anxious. She’d decided not to go back to the café for a while and had gone somewhere else, hoping it would all fade away.
They will stand with their backs to the street, both reflected in the window, between the square for-sale signs with photographs of empty properties. When Gil tries to touch her hand again, as he had in Jaffa, she will put her hand into her coat pocket and hiss, “What’s the matter with you? Are you an idiot?”
“I know it’s irrational,” she will tell him later, “but I sit there at home and I have the feeling my husband knows. I’m sure he knows. I feel like he’s looking at me differently. And then I look at my girls and I panic, do you understand? I don’t think you c
an understand because your girls are older. I imagine what happens when he finds out and how everything falls apart in front of my eyes. And then I also think about you and about our morning cigarettes and our talks and our meeting in Jaffa and I want it, you know, I really want it, and I tell myself I haven’t done anything wrong, goddammit, I haven’t done anything, all I did was talk to someone who finally took an interest in my work and my life, so what am I panicking about, why am I frightened by myself and by him, can you explain that to me?”
When they go back inside they will each sit in their spot, but threads of looks and a wordless conversation will connect the two tables. Gil will text her: “Don’t give up on me, Ella,” and will watch her expression as she reads his message and smiles. She will write back, “Please don’t send me messages. Definitely not this kind. You can email if you want. I’m deleting your number and blocking it!” When he texts, “What’s your email address?” she will write back, “Just send me yours.”
A few minutes later he will get a blank email from [email protected] and will immediately write back from his phone: “So are we meeting tomorrow or tonight?” She will smile when she reads it and send back a reply a few minutes later: “Not today or tomorrow. By the way, do you know I haven’t written a word all week because of you? And I have a seminar paper due! (I can’t believe I’m writing that, at my age.)”
For a few days they will keep emailing back and forth in the café, from two nearby tables, like kids in class passing notes back and forth without the teacher seeing. Gil will write to her during the day from his office too. He will ask if she was able to write that morning, how the seminar paper’s going and what it’s about, how her afternoon with the girls was and if she misses him. He will offer to get them a room for the morning at a hotel in Tel Aviv. When she writes, “You’re not serious, are you? How about getting us a room right outside my husband’s office?” he will suggest other places.
He will ask if she’s told anyone about him, and she will say there’s nothing to tell, and that even if there was she wouldn’t do that. He will write that he told his older daughter, Noa, about her when she came home from the army at the weekend, which will not be true, because even with her he won’t be able to resist lying sometimes.
And it’ll be in one of those emails that he will first suggest the idea of them going overseas together.
6
The investigation into Emilia’s death was forgotten, even though the case was still officially open. Shortly after questioning Gil, Inspector A. left his position at Tel Aviv South Precinct, at his request, and began a new promotion track in Sharon Precinct, which he believed would make him a station commander by the age of forty-five. In the induction meeting with his replacement, a good-looking detective still in his twenties, whose eyes looked vacant and emotionless, Inspector A. summed up the case as follows: “Definite suicide of a foreign worker with no relatives in Israel. All questioning was completed, the case awaits answers to questions I sent the Riga police via the Latvian consulate, but apparently their staff is even slower than ours. As far as I’m concerned, when the answers arrive the case can be closed for good.”
Time passed quickly, even if not your time, which never changes at all.
Babies were born, sick and elderly people died, among them Adina. She died at the nursing home, in the bed where Emilia had sat stroking her arm, watched over by her new caregiver, a Filipina named Rosie Christine. A few weeks later, when Hava went to the police station on Ha’Masger Street with a cardboard box containing Emilia’s belongings, the desk sergeant did not know where to send her. The young detective overseeing the case was out, so she asked Hava to wait for the duty officer.
Hava put Emilia’s box down by her feet and waited her turn. There was a cooking show on the television screen on the wall, and since the wait was much longer than she’d expected, she considered giving up on the whole thing and leaving. She thought this was unnecessary anyway, and Meir had agreed, but the man ahead of her, who had come to report the theft of gas canisters from his back garden, gave up his spot in despair and left, so the queue grew shorter.
When Hava went in to see the duty officer, who that morning happened to be Chief Inspector Orna Ben-Hamo, she put the box on the chair next to the one she sat down in and explained why she was there. She said that her mother had died—Orna expressed her condolences—and when the family had emptied out her flat they’d found the box with Emilia’s things under a plastic chair on the balcony. Hava had contacted Emilia’s employment agency to ask if she had relatives in Latvia to whom she should send the box, but they told her it would be best if she took it to the police. The belongings were not valuable but Hava thought that if Emilia had any relatives they would like to have them.
“Do you know what’s inside? Did you look?” Orna asked.
“Yes, because we wanted to make sure everything in there really was hers and that there was nothing of Mother’s that she’d taken. At first we didn’t even know who the box belonged to.”
“Can you tell me what it contains?” Orna asked, even though the box was right there.
“Like I said, not much. Some clothes, notebooks, a few bits of homeware. I thought her family might want to have her clothes and the booklets.”
Chief Inspector Orna Ben-Hamo pulled out the summary of the Emilia Nodyeves investigation and read through it quickly to figure out what this was about. She told Hava, “I’ll give the box to the investigator in charge of the case and he’ll decide what to do with it, all right? We don’t deliver boxes overseas, but if the investigator decides he doesn’t need it, he might contact you with the address of a relative there and you can send it yourself.”
Before she left, Hava asked if the police knew anything more about the circumstances surrounding Emilia’s suicide, but Chief Inspector Ben-Hamo said she was not authorized to answer.
In the afternoon, when Orna finished her shift, she put Emilia’s box in her office so that she could give it to the young detective the next morning. It was three o’clock, and she called her mother to find out how the girls were doing and let her know she’d be home in half an hour, if the traffic wasn’t bad. Then she called her husband, but he wasn’t available.
She made herself a cup of instant coffee with one teaspoon of brown sugar and grabbed two stale lemon wafers from the kitchenette because that’s all there was. She stretched out her time alone in the office a while longer before going back to the girls. She had only returned to work the week before, after a four-month maternity leave, and was still readjusting to the station, the office, the uniform and the long stretches of sitting with citizens to hear their complaints. She wasn’t supposed to be the duty officer that morning, but was called in at the last minute to replace an officer who’d torn his calf muscle running and couldn’t come to work. The last case she’d worked before giving birth had to do with several similar incidents of identity theft used to open bank accounts, but it was transferred to a national unit while she was on leave, and she didn’t even know if there’d been any new developments in it.
She glanced in Emilia’s box, out of curiosity. She had a cardboard box, too, where she kept documents and certificates from secondary school and college, and even a plastic bag with love letters from old boyfriends. It was stored on the top shelf of the utility cupboard outside the bathroom, next to the gas masks. From reading the file, she’d understood that there probably wouldn’t be anyone to send Emilia’s belongings to, because no relatives had been located overseas. The open questions that Inspector A. had added to the file interested her, and she wasn’t sure why he’d summed it up as a closed case: Who was she sending money to in Latvia? Why was she planning to go to Riga if she was so afraid of being sent back there?
In Emilia’s box there were a few T-shirts, mostly grey, a book that looked like the Bible in Russian, a thin white curtain folded up like a prayer shawl, a towel, a green tablecloth and a glass va
se. There were also a couple of pamphlets, old newspapers and one notebook, which was what Hava had called “the booklets.”
Orna did not open the notebook because she was in a hurry to pick up Roni from nursery school and Naomi from school, and take over from her mother, who’d been with the baby, Danielle, since early morning.
In the afternoon the four of them went to the little neighbourhood park, and Roni almost got bitten by a dog that wasn’t on its lead. Before she fell asleep that night, Orna thought about Emilia’s dead face from the photograph in the file, and when she woke up in the middle of the night to feed Danielle she remembered the box. In the morning, before sending it on, she opened it again, without quite knowing why.
On the first page of the notebook were all the characters of the Hebrew alphabet, handwritten in one long column, and next to them in a different colour were the Latin characters that made the corresponding sounds. On the second page were lists of words: first the Hebrew, then a Latin transliteration, and finally the meaning.
The handwriting was an older man’s or woman’s, not a native Hebrew speaker, and the letters trembled on the page. Not all the words were easy to make out, but because they were simple, Orna was able to read them after some effort: “אבא—ABA—father”; “אמא—IMA—mother”; םימ—MAYIM—water”; סוכ—KOS—glass”; “לכוא—OCHEL—food”; “הפורת—TRUFA—medicine.”
After a few pages full of columns, there were some blank pages, and then the handwriting changed and so did the type of words. Instead of the neat columns there were single words, only in Hebrew, written in pencil, in large handwriting that drew the letters as pictures rather than writing them, the way her daughter Naomi did; she had started school in September.
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