Some pages contained only one word. For example, mapah—tablecloth, or yetziah—exit, koma—floor, knesiyah—church. Other pages had whole lines in Hebrew, almost a conversation, and next to them what looked like their translation into a language Orna did not recognize:
“Can you meet this evening?”
“When can I meet you? I miss your smell, Emilia.”
“I think about you more and more.”
There were some names in the notebook too. The name Tadeusz was written several times very carefully, in wide, round letters. There was also Emilia, drawn in various sizes, and Nachum and Gil. Since Orna already knew a little about Emilia’s life, she could read the names like a story: “Adina” was the old lady Emilia had cared for, “Hava” was her daughter,” “Gil’ must have been the lawyer who had helped her and whose flat she’d cleaned. “Nachum” was the old man she took care of for two years when she first came to Israel. “Tadeusz” was the priest she used to talk with every Sunday, who had insisted when he was questioned that Emilia could not have committed suicide.
On one of the last pages in the notebook, Orna found her own first name.
7
She will tell him that it’s not realistic to just flit off overseas for a few days without any explanation. He will ask why, and she will say she can’t leave her husband alone with the girls for a whole weekend and there’s no one to help out. His mother is useless, and her parents are no longer alive. Besides, she will add, what reason could she give her husband for wanting to go? She can’t tell him she’s going away on her own to rest or let loose because it’s unlike her and her husband knows that. She can’t say she’s going with a friend because even if she had the courage to go with Gil, she wouldn’t tell any of her friends and ask them to lie for her. She’d be too scared of being found out.
She will tell Gil to drop it and he will. “We’ll have to make do with coffee and our correspondence,” she’ll email him, “even though I really would like to go away with you. You can’t imagine how long it’s been since I’ve had two days to myself.”
For a few days they will only email and meet at the café every morning and Gil will not propose anything beyond that, but after a while his emails will become seductive, pleading, bursting with desire. He will say that he sits in his office with clients and thinks about her, about things she told him that morning, and that if she asked him to, he would be willing to break up his marriage and leave his wife. Five minutes later he will send her another message that says, “I’m sorry, delete the last message. I know it’s not what you’re after and I didn’t mean to stress you out. I’m waiting for you patiently, you know exactly where, and if one day you want more than we have now (and we have a lot) I’ll still be there.”
April will arrive, the same month when the relationship between him and Orna had begun. There is a long school holiday over Passover, and Ella will explain that she won’t be at the café much because the girls will be at home and the nanny is taking time off. He will say that he won’t be there either because he’s going to Poland and Bulgaria for a few days.
The glass walls that sheltered the café deck since November will be removed, and now that the deck is exposed to the street, they will move into the little indoor space, where the air conditioning will run all day. Outside, the first spring heatwaves will hit, the blue air will be dry and sandy and fragrant with blossoms, and people will shed their coats and start wearing T-shirts again, but Ella will wear a windbreaker or a thin denim jacket, even when they go outside to smoke in the sun. In Riga, though, it will be the coldest April on record: at the beginning of the month there will be ten days of snow, and the river will still be almost completely frozen.
Gil will invite her to his flat, which will be empty but expected to start filling up with summer tourists in May, and she will refuse. He will no longer mention going away together, but when he tells her about his upcoming work trip she will be the one who wants to know more. “Are you going alone?” she will ask, and he’ll say, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I assume I’m not the only married woman you ask to go away with you, am I? You told me you’ve done it before.” She will smile and Gil will pause before saying softly, “Do you really think I’m seeing other women now?”
She will ask him not to be so sensitive. And she will apologize. And then she’ll ask, “But if we went away together, what would we do there? After all, you’re going for work.” Gil will explain that he’d be in meetings sometimes, but the rest of the time they could walk around and spend time in the hotel without being afraid someone might see them. They would be completely relaxed, in a way they cannot be in Israel.
“But how would we do it at this end? Would we take a cab to the airport together?”
“I would go a day or two ahead of you to get my work done, so we’d have time together, and you would join me. And we wouldn’t have to take the same flight. Do you know how many flights there are between Tel Aviv and Poland or Romania every day?”
She will listen to him seriously, as if now, after he has explained how the trip might proceed, she sees things differently. “And there?”
“There what?”
“There, would we stay in the same hotel? Same room? Is that how it’s usually done?”
He will ignore the last part of the question and tell her that it could be the same hotel but it could also be adjacent ones. There’s no shortage of hotels in Bucharest, or in Warsaw, and it’s all up to her. But why wouldn’t they stay in the same room? It’s not like anyone knows them there.
“Do you have pictures? I’m curious. Show me what these hotels look like,” she will say, and he will reply that he doesn’t have any pictures because he doesn’t take pictures on work trips and he doesn’t always stay in the same hotels, but he will promise to send her a link when he gets to work. “It’s a pity you’re so afraid of him,” he will comment, and she will not respond. When he asks, “What can he do to you, Ella? Tell me what he’ll do?” she will say, “Forget it. It’s not him, I guess.” Gil will ask, “Then who is it?” and she will say, “Please, Gil. Forget it.”
That will be the last time they meet before his trip, and he will email her one picture while he’s away: the old city of Warsaw in the evening hours, full of tourists and white horse-drawn carriages on the square outside a restored red palace. She will send back a message that he will notice was sent at 3 A.M.: “I think I’ve found the perfect excuse to go away for two days. The paper, Gil! I have to do research for my seminar paper! Isn’t it genius?”
When he gets back he will think something has happened to her, as if she’s made up her mind to conquer her fear even though she hasn’t completely got over it and is not completely at peace with her decision. They will not be able to meet in the café because it will still be the school holidays. Instead, they will meet for the first time at night, in Yarkon Park. She will tell her husband she has to get some fresh air after being stuck at home with the girls all day, and he will tell Ruthi that he’s going to the gym. They will walk along the river, at a safe distance from the streetlamps along its banks, and they will look for a secluded bench, but most of them will be taken. She will let him kiss her and touch her again, and when he lets go of her hand she will keep holding his. They will eat a bar of Belgian chocolate that he bought her at the airport because he thought she’d prefer a consumable gift, and she will tell him that she explained to her husband that while she was writing her seminar paper she’d come across a key document in the archives in Poland and she had to see it because it might be an important discovery. Her husband had suggested they all go together—he could take some time off and the girls could go, too, maybe in the summer, or earlier, on Shavuot holiday—but she’d insisted she had to go alone: she’d be working the whole time and it would be a quick trip. “I haven’t told him I’m definitely going yet, but I think he’s okay with it.”
They will
only be able to spend an hour at the park, at the end of which she will tell him she’s almost positive she wants to go.
“But how did you suddenly decide? What happened?” he will ask, and when she says, “I can’t keep living in fear. I have nothing to be afraid of,” he will put his arm around her shoulder and say, “Finally.”
They will agree that Gil will find out when his next work trip is and let her know. The next day, he will write that he has to be in Bucharest the following week for just over twenty-four hours, and after that they can stay on for two or three days in Warsaw or Krakow. She will write back: “Next week? Isn’t that too soon? That’s a little stressful for me. Can’t you put it off?” He will answer that he can postpone his meetings for a few days if she promises to come with him.
She will not give him a final answer that day, and the next day she will not be at the café, and when Gil waits for her there he will think something might have happened, maybe even that her husband has found their correspondence. But when he gets to the office he will find two emails from her. The first will say: “I’m coming. Weekend after next. We can leave on the thirtieth of April and come back on Sunday. But I don’t know how often I’ll come to the café until then and if it’s a good idea for us to correspond.” In the second email, which he will accidentally read first, she will write her full name in English and her passport number, and that same day he will book tickets for them both.
8
The handsome young detective had no objection to transferring Emilia’s suicide case to Orna Ben-Hamo. He couldn’t understand what she saw in it, and anyway he was busy with a series of intentional acts of sabotage on construction sites. He secretly regretted caving in to the pressure applied by HR to join Tel Aviv South Precinct instead of insisting on being assigned to one of the national investigation units, as he’d wanted and as his father thought he should be. Every time he drove his red Renault Clio Turbo into the building’s underground parking early in the morning, he thought about the moment when he would go home in the evening.
Orna was summoned to speak with Commander Ilana Liss, who oversaw the Tel Aviv District’s Investigation and Intelligence Branch, on the third floor of the police building on Salameh Street. She tried to explain to Commander Liss why she was not convinced that Emilia had committed suicide, as Inspector A. had presumed: “We have the testimony of the priest, who was the closest person to her. He told us plainly that he didn’t think she committed suicide. She was a devout Catholic, and apparently suicide is a transgression for them. Secondly, she was just about to go to Riga, either on holiday or on a trip that she wasn’t going to come back from, we’re not exactly sure. Why would she kill herself here a few days before that? It doesn’t make sense. And there are also all sorts of toxicology reports that can’t be done now, like those for date-rape drugs, but the fact that they weren’t done at the time is very strange.”
Commander Liss asked if Orna minded if she smoked. She was already deep into her cancer treatments and these were her last few weeks on the job, although she didn’t yet know that. Orna nodded and said, “Maybe I’ll even bum one off you.” They had hardly worked together before, because Commander Liss had been appointed to her position less than a year ago, after overseeing investigations and intelligence at Ayalon Precinct, and a few months after that Orna had gone on maternity leave. This meant that she could not read the expressions of the woman who was supposed to decide if it was worth pursuing the case. Orna added, “But most important are the findings. Or rather, what we didn’t find on the night she supposedly committed suicide. I don’t understand how Inspector A. could have determined that she committed suicide outside, in the yard of a building near the central bus station, two hundred metres from our station, when no one saw her do it or saw her before. We know she left the nursing home in Bat Yam that morning, so all day long and all night she walked around that area and not a single camera picked her up? No one noticed a woman in such an unstable state? Besides, have you ever seen anyone commit suicide by covering their own head with a plastic bag?”
Ilana Liss put her lit cigarette in the ashtray. In her twenty-five years on the police force she’d seen every possible death, every imaginable form of cruelty—to oneself and to others. But she didn’t want to say that to Orna, whose enthusiasm somehow reminded her of herself fifteen or twenty years ago, when she was taking her first steps in the Jerusalem district. She was living with her husband in an old stone house with a garden at the time, in a village outside the city, surrounded by pine trees that gave off a sharp smell of life every time it rained.
Inspector A. had thought all that was left to do on the Emilia Nodyeves case was to patiently await answers from the Riga police and then close the case, but Orna wasn’t willing to give up. “What did you tell me on the phone about the box someone brought in? I didn’t follow,” Ilana said.
“I’m not so sure about the box, but there’s something there I want to look into. It’s one of the leads I’m pursuing at this point.” She told Ilana that in Emilia Nodyeves’s notebook, which she’d found in the box, there was something apparently written in Emilia’s handwriting, relating to the suicide of another woman, a resident of Holon named Orna Azran, who was found dead in a hotel room in Romania four years ago. “It looks like a newspaper story that she copied, I’m not sure why.”
“What do you mean, copied?”
“She seems to have copied down all sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“Sentences, fragments from all kinds of places. I’m not entirely sure where they’re from.”
There was one piece that appeared repeatedly in the notebook that Orna was, in fact, sure about, but she didn’t want to mention it to Ilana. It was the story Emilia had copied down several times from the church brochure, which was also in her box, about a woman named Tabitha or Tsivia who’d died in Jaffa and was resurrected. Orna preferred to keep that from Ilana because she was afraid it might reinforce Ilana’s assumption that Emilia had been distraught and perhaps had even committed suicide because she thought she would be resurrected.
“Are we sure this notebook belongs to her?”
“Yes. That’s how it seems. It looks like a notebook for studying Hebrew that she made or someone made for her. The story about the suicide of this Israeli woman is one of two passages she copied from a newspaper, and I’m not sure how she did that, because based on what I found out, Orna Azran’s suicide and that story’s publication in the paper happened before Emilia Nodyeves came to Israel.”
Ilana Liss put out her cigarette and got up to open the window and air the room. Every movement was hard, especially sitting down in the black executive chair, where three soft cushions had been placed on the leather seat. She tried to hide her pain. “But why do you think this casts doubt on the Latvian woman’s suicide? That’s what I don’t understand. It’s the opposite, isn’t it? She found a newspaper somewhere and read a story about an Israeli woman who committed suicide in a foreign country, and that’s what provoked her thoughts of committing suicide here, no?”
“That’s what I thought at first, too, Ilana. And maybe you’re right and that’s what happened. But I checked out the Orna Azran story and I found that it was also an unusual suicide, by strangulation, but with an electric cable. And in her case, too, everyone who knew the woman said there was no chance she’d committed suicide and insisted it was murder, just like the priest in Emilia’s case. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Two women, where everyone who knows them says there’s no chance they killed themselves, and the personal diary of one of them contains the other one’s name and story, even though they don’t seem to have known each other? And she also had the name and address of a hotel in Romania in her notebook—granted, it’s not the same hotel where Orna Azran committed suicide, but still, it’s strange, isn’t it?”
Ilana Liss’s mobile phone vibrated on the desk and she glanced at it and hissed something, t
hen turned it over. “It sounds like it could be a coincidence,” she said. “This suicide in Romania, is it something we investigated?”
“No, it wasn’t investigated in Israel at all. The woman’s relatives asked us to investigate because they refused to accept the Romanians’ findings, but they were told the case was examined by the Bucharest police and was closed.”
A flash of pain ran through Ilana’s back and she straightened up. Then she told Orna, “I have no problem if you want to take the case and decide when and how to close it, but I don’t really understand how you’re going to investigate that Bucharest suicide from here.”
The first stage was to demand all the details known to the Romanian police about Orna Azran’s death and get the file translated into Hebrew. She found a translator, a native of Czernowitz who lived in Haifa, and after talking to him on the phone she was sure it would be weeks until he sent her the file: he was seventy-eight years old and wanted the documents faxed to him because he didn’t do well with computers. But by noon the next day he’d already faxed her back the translation. Orna asked her mother to stay with the girls for an extra two hours and came home after six. She read the materials twice over and immediately started making phone calls.
For the time being, she was unable to speak with the Romanian witnesses, most of whom were hotel employees at the Trianon, where Orna had been found. But she did manage to talk to the Israeli witnesses, Orna’s friends and relatives. The next day she sat at her desk opposite a short, thin man with long hair tied back in a ponytail, and if not for his facial expressions and smell, you might not have recognized him as Ronen, because of the intervening years and how grey his hair had gone. She asked if he was Orna’s husband and he accidentally said yes, then clarified that he was her ex-husband. When she asked when they’d divorced and why he was named as her husband in the Romanian police files, Ronen said they’d divorced a year before the murder, but he might have introduced himself to the Romanian police as her husband to pressure them and so “They would know that Orna wasn’t alone, that she had family behind her who wouldn’t let them neglect the case.”
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