by Sayed Kashua
The lawyer took her appointment book out of the bag, a thin blue notebook embossed with the seal of the union of social workers in Israel, given to their members as an annual Rosh Hashanah present. He flipped it open, looking for a sample of her handwriting, hoping, in a dimly lit part of his brain, that he had only imagined the similarity. He reread the note and felt a sharp pain at the sight of the words, I waited for you, but you didn’t come . . . The appointment book was filled with telephone numbers, random notes, and what looked like patients’ names. He slid the book back into the attaché case and found a bunch of loose paper, notes that she had kept, most of them old. Why does she keep these things? he wondered, angered again at her disorder. He examined the notes, hoping to find something suspicious, a smoking gun. But what exactly did he think he’d discover? Another love letter? A doodle of an arrow-pierced heart with her and her lover’s names? Every sentence, every line, roused his suspicion, but he did not find any hard evidence in his wife’s briefcase. He then looked through the main compartment of her bag, where he found patient files and academic articles.
The lawyer decided to comb through her cell phone, too. First, he checked the in-box, where he found several unfamiliar names, and even though the names were mostly female, or at least listed as such, and the messages seemed benign, he wrote them down. The lawyer knew that he no longer had the privilege of assuming that everything was as it seemed. The note itself already proved how devious she was: she had neither addressed nor signed her proclamation of love. Only now did he realize that the woman he had always believed to be disorganized and blundering was actually a cautious and deliberate plotter who left no trail. By the time he went through her sent messages, the lawyer no longer expected to find any incriminating evidence, and, in fact, most of the messages he saw had been sent to him, undoubtedly because she had erased the rest, knowing that the day would come when her husband’s suspicions would be aroused.
The lawyer shut off her phone—which was listed under his name, for tax purposes—and decided to order an itemized bill from the phone company. He’d go over the statements, looking for long calls and unidentified numbers.
The act of investigation took the edge off the lawyer’s pain. Now that he was involved in the assembly of evidence, the betrayal was just another case, details that had to be amassed and marshaled to form a convincing argument, but that sense of relief faded when he opened a pocket in his wife’s briefcase and found her compact. He felt his jaw lock. She, who always ridiculed women who spent hours in front of the mirror, carried a compact to work. Just like the women he eyed during his daily commute, the ones who applied their makeup at red lights, and he thought of her flipping down the sun visor on the car he’d bought
for her, examining her face in the small mirror, pulling out her compact, pursing her lips, putting on lipstick, tousling her hair, consulting with the mirror again, and then painting her eyelashes, powdering her nose. The whore. The bitch.
Why didn’t she wear makeup at home? Why did she criticize those women and then do the exact same thing? At least they were open about their vanity. They did not hide their daily routines from their husbands. And it turned out that she, who complained mightily before every event that demanded makeup, hid a compact in her own bag, and not just any old compact, but one that he had bought for her several years earlier, because the lawyer liked women who wore makeup and had hoped that his wife would follow their example, arousing, in that way, his dwindling passion. And she, ever so cruelly, kept from him what she happily gave to others. He envisioned her in the bathroom at work, taking off her makeup before coming home to him, even though he was never around when she returned.
Again the lawyer was furious. Again he felt the same quickening of his heartbeat, the same desire to slit her throat, to tear open the veins of her neck. With trembling hands he lit another cigarette, trying to make order of his thoughts. After all, he had a plan, and an alternate plan. He was a criminal lawyer and though he had never handled any divorce cases, he knew the difference between Israeli family court and Sharia court. He knew that whoever filed first decided where the case would be held, and he knew, as did every Muslim man, that he would be better off in the Sharia courts, where a man, if he can prove his wife’s infidelity, can strip her of everything she has. What’s more, barring any unusual circumstances, the kids stay with the father. If he was able to prove to the judges that she had cheated on him, she’d never see her kids again. The letter he’d found was insufficient, but he’d find other evidence, incontrovertible, and as soon as he did, he’d rush to the Sharia court in east Jerusalem. In the meantime, she had to remain completely unaware. She could not have even the slightest sense of his suspicions, because if she realized what he was up to and filed first—in an Israeli family court—she’d get it all: alimony, the house, the kids.
The lawyer put out the cigarette. He took a piece of paper with his wife’s handwriting in Arabic and the incriminating note and placed them in his briefcase, clicking the combination lock shut. She can’t have the slightest indication, he thought, and immediately shoved the damned Kreutzer Sonata back into the briefcase, too. He padded out of the study and climbed the stairs, putting her phone back in its place and her bag by the foot of the bed. He listened to his son’s breathing and cast an involuntary glance at his wife, saw her sleeping on her side, her legs bare to the thigh, and felt a surge of passion that he had been sure he had long since lost.
ALARM
The lawyer left the house at five in the morning. He wasn’t sure if he wanted his wife to be aware of this or not, but still he slammed the door behind him. On the one hand, he’d already decided that he should act as though all was normal. On the other hand, he wanted to vent, to express his rage, for her to know just how much he hated her. Walking toward his car, he hoped that she had been jolted awake, that she was in the process of fumbling toward the door and would come chasing after him, wondering why he had decided to leave so early. That didn’t happen. Instead, he sat down in the cold driver’s seat, started the car, and pressed hard on the accelerator, hoping the growl of the engine would wake her. Maybe it did, and maybe she had decided it was best not to pursue him and not to ask too many questions. It was rare for him to go into the office on a Friday and rarer still for him to go in this early. Throughout the commute to work he waited for her call, eager to hear the tremor of worry in her voice, but his phone did not ring.
He parked in the usual spot. The lot was empty and the guard had not yet arrived. He walked down the steps to King George Street. A police car, lights flickering in silence, coasted down the empty street and a municipal sanitation crew picked up the stray garbage. Cartons of bread and boxes of vegetables were stacked against closed restaurant doors. Weekend editions of the papers, lashed into knee-high cubes, waited outside convenience stores. Milk crates were parked in front of cafés. The scene was pleasing to the lawyer, who walked down the street in a short-sleeved shirt holding a black leather attaché case in his right hand, the morning chill toying with the hair on his arms, and he shivered once in pleasure.
Friday was a day off at the office. Most of the businesses downtown worked a half day on Friday but the lawyer, whose clients were generally Arabs, decided to keep his office closed on the Muslim holy day, not least because on Fridays the security forces tightened the ring around Jerusalem, keeping worshippers from the West Bank away from the al-Aqsa Mosque, making it that much harder for his clients to sneak into the city. The old stone office building was dark and he turned on the light and went up the stairs to the first floor. A few seconds later he heard the alarm spring to life. For a moment he was nervous because he had no clear recollection of the code, but without thinking he punched in five digits and the alarm stopped. He flipped the lights on in the office and had the feeling that he was not alone. He walked toward the conference room, opened the door hesitantly, and peered in, looking at the oval hardwood table, the couches, and the lo
ng decorative rows of law books that were never opened.
The lawyer peeked into Tarik’s office and knocked on the bathroom door. Then, just to make sure, he looked inside. He unlocked his own office and scanned the room. He checked the windows to see if they had been broken and whether the security bars were still in place. Once he was sure that he was alone, he laid his briefcase on the table and went to make himself a cup of coffee. He had been in the same office for five years and even though it had never been broken into he was sure that the first burglary was imminent. The offices and businesses in the area were frequently burglarized, and he, as an outsider, was sure he was being targeted. He’d already had to replace the Hebrew, Arabic, and English brass sign outside the building several times because his name, and later Tarik’s, too, had been spray painted over, a thick black stripe through the Arabic.
It was five thirty. Why was she not calling? He was pretty sure that this was when his son started to wake up. Had she gotten up at all when he left the house or had she slept through the whole thing? She had been tired last night. The guests had left late and she, of course, had to put the dishes in the dishwasher, tidy up the living room, and mop the kitchen floor. She must be exhausted, the lawyer told himself, looking at his watch and deciding to give her a little more time.
He opened his briefcase, took out The Kreutzer Sonata, and felt another stab of pain. He felt like an idiot waiting for her call, thinking that if only he heard some worry in her voice then everything would be all right. Nothing would be all right. Nothing would be as it was. His hand trembled as it held the note written by his wife. He reminded himself that he had to remain calm, to give her no indication, but he didn’t know how he could do it. How would he temper his rage, stifle the urge to harm her, and still plot her ruination? Because that is precisely what she had done to him, ruined his world. He had to be calm and collected, and he reminded himself that he had always been a reserved and calculating individual, the kind of strategist who plotted his each and every move.
The lawyer considered himself someone who was always prepared for the worst. He was prepared for the death of his parents, even though both were in good health. At first, as a child, the notion that they might die was awful, unbearable, until, with time, the expectation of their deaths became somewhat more tolerable and, perhaps once he became a father, even inconsequential. The lawyer went so far as to envision losing his children, preparing himself for that eventuality, too. He imagined what would happen if one of his children was struck by disease, or SIDS, or an accident at school. The thought of enduring such a thing was particularly gruesome, rather like his childhood thoughts about the loss of his parents, but he knew he had to be prepared. Of course, he had devoted some thought to the death of his wife as well, and to be perfectly honest that thought was not as painful as the other ones, the wound was of a far more tolerable variety, the kind that can be overcome, but when he screened those images in his mind, there was no escaping the image of his children weeping for their lost mother, and so, at this stage, when the loss of either parent would be a debilitating blow to the children, he hoped that they would both retain their health. That said, he had an unformed feeling, from somewhere deep inside, that once his children reached an age where the loss of their parents would not be that awful, he would consider the loss of his wife to be a desirable eventuality. Even when their relationship seemed solid he would occasionally, perhaps before sleep, imagine a brighter future without her. And now, for the first time, he was shaken by the understanding that she apparently felt likewise. Before sleep, she, too, longed for the death of her husband.
How had it come to pass that he, who prepared himself for every scenario, had not even considered the possibility that his wife might cheat on him? He’d heard innumerable stories about infidelity but had always thought that such behavior was the domain of a certain kind of woman and that it could only happen to men who were nothing like him. How naive and idiotic. The lawyer was sorry he had not heeded the advice of his sister, who had actually introduced him to his future wife, though not intentionally. He recalled how his sister had then tried to do everything in her power to scare him off, but he, like a fool, cast it all aside. Not so much because he felt an unwavering love for the woman who was to be his wife but because he was committed to the idea of marrying a woman that in no way reminded him of his sister or his mother or the rest of his highly conservative family. The lawyer wanted something different, and he thought he was smarter than everyone else.
His parents would never have sent their daughter to study at the university in Jerusalem, to sleep in the dorms without the knowledge that he, her brother, who had just finished his internship at the time, was around and could be the muhram, the first-degree relative that could safeguard and vouch for her honor. “She’s studying along with her brother in Jerusalem,” his mother would always say to relatives and neighbors. The lawyer’s sister had been wearing the hijab since high school and she wore it all through her bachelor’s degree in education. It was patently clear that she would go back to the village as soon as she graduated, and try to secure a teaching position.
During those days the lawyer would visit his sister at least once a week but he never met her roommate because his sister believed that he, an unrelated male, should not be allowed to spend time in the company of her female roommate. The lawyer first met the roommate, the woman who would be his wife, on a night when she had gone to a student party and was not supposed to be back before midnight. The lawyer had accepted his sister’s invitation to come by the dorm room with two mixed-grill sandwiches, which she loved, but the roommate came home early, just before ten. He recalled the moment: a thin girl with curly hair and a sad look in her eyes. He recalled the elegant black dress, the way it accentuated her body. He got up to leave as soon as she came in but his sister was compelled to show that she was not spending time with random men, and so, with little enthusiasm, she introduced them. “This is my brother,” she had said, before he left the room.
The lawyer, a native of the Triangle, had always wanted to wed a girl from the Galilee. The Galileans tended to think of themselves as superior to the natives of the Triangle, and the lawyer tended to agree with them. He had been painfully aware of his crude country accent and upon arrival at the university in Jerusalem he adopted the more refined, less threatening accent of the Galileans. They seemed more enlightened, more educated, better dressed, better off, the products of superior schools.
The lawyer had known that it was high time he got married. He had just passed the bar and was working at the public defender’s office, where he had done his internship, and was planning his next move: the opening of his own practice in east Jerusalem. He knew that he should get married or at the very least engaged before starting out on his own. The east Jerusalemites did not trust bachelors. They were considered less serious, less trustworthy, and, more importantly, completely off-limits to any Arab woman. Even for the purposes of business, no Arab woman would step foot in a bachelor’s office. There’d be too much gossip. And women, he’d learned during his internship, were a slice of the market that he could not afford to lose—not so much as clients, but as the wives, mothers, and sisters of prisoners who sought his counsel. Palestinian families often sent a woman to Jerusalem to find a lawyer: they had a far better chance of getting through the checkpoints without the proper paperwork.
He liked her immediately. She was beautiful, he recalled, and now an unbidden thought set in: perhaps most people would still consider her to be so. The lawyer remembered how angry his sister had been when he called her the next day and asked whether her roommate had a boyfriend. She stammered and said, “Brother, she’s not for you. She’s not like us.” She had no idea that that was exactly what he was looking for, someone not like us. He learned from his sister that the roommate was not in a relationship, at least not one she knew of. No boys came to visit the roommate in the dorm, but his sister made clear that it was po
ssible that none came because of the restrictions that she, his sister, imposed. She went on to say that this girl wore short sleeves and tight jeans, that she went to parties and cafés, and each word only spurred the lawyer on further.
The lawyer was bashful. He was nearly twenty-five at the time and had never had a girlfriend. He had been attracted to many of the Arab students while in school, but he never struck up a conversation, making due with heartache and wistful thoughts before bed. The lawyer had no sense of how he looked. No one had ever told him if he looked good or bad and he himself was not a good judge. He always felt that different mirrors, on different days, provided different perspectives. Photographs didn’t help, either. Like the mirrors, they showed something different each time. Sometimes he felt he looked good, but most of the time he was sure he looked bad. He was not too skinny or too fat. He felt his body was average, normal, not muscular—after all he never worked out—but not flabby, either. His height was average and he wished he was a bit taller, and his skin, like everyone in his family, was light, at least for an Arab. He liked being light-skinned but, much like with his height, he wished he was a bit lighter-skinned, and he would have been happy to have blond hair, or at least chestnut-colored.
Either way, he wasn’t very much preoccupied with his looks: the lawyer knew that his profession, and his success in that profession, would determine who he would marry. He did not have much money and he had bought a used Fiat Punto with the little money he did have, but having graduated at the top of his class, from the best law school in the land, his potential earning power was unquestioned.
One week after their chance encounter, the lawyer went back to the Mount Scopus dorms. It was the middle of the afternoon and the lawyer knew that his sister didn’t get out of class until six. He knocked on her door and no one answered. He decided to wait and walked around among the buildings. Within minutes he saw the roommate walking alone from the bus stop to the dorms. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with some kind of flower design on the front. There was a bag slung over her shoulder and it hung down to her knees. Her hair was long and curly and she was small, about five foot four, which was exactly what he liked. In those clothes, as opposed to the semiformal dress, she looked boyish. He saw her go into the building and decided to smoke a cigarette before going up to knock on her door. While smoking, he rehearsed his lines and tried to imagine her responses. They started out as charming and then got increasingly more barbed. He almost called the whole thing off but in the end he ground out the cigarette and bounded up the stairs with his heart racing.
