by Y. I. Latz
Amazingly, his private phone number was listed on at least four of the guests’ cell phones. It was late on a Friday night. Everyone urged us to overcome our hesitations and call despite the hour.
Smadar dialed. Someone turned on the speakerphone feature on her phone so we could all listen in.
“Rescue Ralph” had a warm, courteous voice. He listened to her patiently. When she was done speaking, he said, “It sounds like a simple, easy case to me, but let me check with my people in Colombia first. It’s true, a bribe could help. It starts at $10,000, and from there, the sky is the limit. It depends on the case and on the demand. Who did you say last saw her?”
His answers cheered Smadar up considerably, as if our daughter had already been found and it was only a matter of time until she was back home with us. The guests were just as enthusiastic, patting each other on the back. New bottles of wine were uncorked and poured. They ignored me and my sour expression. No one likes a party pooper.
Another suggestion was raised and received with widespread approval. One of us, Smadar or myself, should leave for Colombia and supervise the process of the search from up close. The guests were thrilled with their own idea. They produced their calculators. They believed the flights, along with organizing the search and paying the bribe, could come to a hundred thousand dollars. This was quite a significant sum for a couple of small-time employees residing in a kibbutz.
Right there and then, and without consulting us, a fundraising campaign was organized on our behalf. It was late on a Friday night, but the goodwill of the guests could not be contained. Phones were produced, urgent messages were sent; some of them were personally acquainted with wealthy businesspeople, or were themselves wealthy.
All this took place above our heads. As if we were not involved in the matter. They sent looks of pity in our direction, while the gazes they exchanged among themselves were full of pride, as if they were saying, How good and generous we are. Thanks to our money, we’ll save the poor child of those pauper parents.
Finally, I burst out, “That’s enough! We don’t have any financial problems! We don’t need donations from anyone!”
Smadar looked at me in surprise.
I repeated myself. The second time, I spoke more aggressively. The looks directed at me grew sharper. Ultimately, they were good people with good intentions. I could read their minds. They interpreted my behavior as arrogant and ego-driven.
Our hosts, old friends with plenty of soul, tried to convince me. I wouldn’t hear it. Again and again they cited the minimum sum our expenses would come to, reminded me that we were employees of limited means living in a kibbutz, as well as of my hard work as a Navy cook and the meager wages it entailed, and the need to make sure we would not exhaust our savings.
Most of all, they emphasized, as if I had forgotten, “This is your daughter we’re talking about.”
But I stuck to my guns, yelling repeatedly, “We’ve got money, we’ve got money, we’ve got money.”
“Hey, big spender, do you have a hundred thousand dollars?” an elderly woman asked me in a metallic voice.
“Not just a hundred thousand, but a million, too!” I retorted. “Twice that, if necessary.”
“Your terrible British accent is back,” Smadar muttered at me. “What’s going on with you?!”
◊◊◊
Somehow or other, the evening came to an end. We went out into the night. We had a long way ahead of us. It was now or never. I was determined to take advantage of the nocturnal journey to do the only thing that worked for me right now.
Confess.
To put an end to the deceit.
We drove off. I clutched the steering wheel as hard as I could. We drove silently for quite a while, immersed in our own thoughts. The deeper I dug into my silence, the harder I found it to break it.
I began to count silently.
One. Two. Three.
I opened my mouth. A broken voice emerged. “Smadar. I wanted to tell you. The thing is. I’m sorry, but for a few weeks now I’m… At work. I was called in for a talk. Because of budget cuts.”
“Shush.” She silenced me and turned up the volume on the radio. “Remember?”
Our car was flooded with the warm, somewhat throaty voice of the lead singer for Pink Martini. She was singing our wedding song.
Una Notte a Napoli—
Despite the thrill that these melancholy notes evoked in my heart, I insisted on finishing what I had started. “I was called in for a conversation. They told me…”
But she placed a soft hand on my own, which was gripping the steering wheel. “Later,” she asked.
I grew silent. Joined her in listening. The song evoked sweet memories in me as well. I had not listened to it for so long that I nearly forgot it. When we first met, we had been addicted to it. We would listen to it on a 78-rpm record in the little room we had been given by the kibbutz. Every time it ended, she would send me barefoot from the bed to place the needle on the record again. And so on, many times a night.
The song accompanied me for years like a prayer. Burned on a CD that was always present in the sound system of my car. The first song I played as I left for work in the morning. The first song I heard as I departed in the evening on my long way home.
This had not been the case in the last few months. As if it had been erased from me.
Una Notte a Napoli—
“You forgot our song,” she berated me in a tone as soft as butter. “Lovers don’t forget their song.”
I bit my lip.
“Your accent came back again this evening,” she said once the song was over. “What happened?”
She moved her hand down my arm and along my fingers. A shiver went through me. She stroked my face with the back of her hand. I shivered once more.
A dear woman.
I came to a decision—
It was a spontaneous decision, without an ounce of forethought.
That’s it! I would confess! Now! Immediately! Everything! Not just about being laid off, but about all my lies.
Everything!
I’d lived a whole life behind her back.
No more—
Go on! If I continued to suppress the secrets inside me, I would explode. My blood pressure was already sky-high. If only my heart wouldn’t give out before I finished.
A few hundred yards before the yellow streetlights at Golani Junction, I tried again.
“Smadar… The thing is… For a few weeks now I’ve… I was called in for a talk… Because of the budget cuts…”
Budget cuts here, budget cuts there. Even a child would have understood what I was trying to say.
But she didn’t respond.
As if she didn’t hear.
Her eyes were gazing ahead.
A floppy-eared dog—
We both noticed him at the same time. He seemed confused. Walking on the road between the speeding cars.
“Stop! Quick! Look!” she called out in excitement.
Although I saw what she saw, I was in no big hurry to stop.
“Stop!!” she roared. “Are you blind??”
I slowed down.
I knew—
I had missed this opportunity as well.
◊◊◊
A traffic accident. At first glance, nothing terrible seemed to have happened. At some distance from the dog, two cars were parked side by side in a strange position. The hood of one of them had warped and risen somewhat, while the other car had displaced two of its side doors, which appeared to be on the verge of detaching.
The passengers were still inside. They were moving, and seemed generally okay.
Two men were standing by the cars, talking passionately on their phones. Smadar hurried to disengage her seat belt, quickly put on the shoes she had taken off, and once she saw that I wasn’t
braking as rapidly as she wanted me to, opened the door while we were still in motion, about to leap out.
“Go get him before he gets run over!” she commanded me.
The dog was standing still in a distant opposite lane, looking confused.
He appeared to have hurt his legs. Only his head was moving back and forth. He was illuminated by the beams of the cars passing by with a whistle and by the pale yellow lights of the roadway illumination suspended far above us.
“What are you waiting for?!” my wife urged me.
Six lanes of traffic separated me from the dog. Every time a car passed by him, he raised his head. It wouldn’t take much for him to get run over.
I ran across the lanes.
I got to him.
I couldn’t find him in the place where I had last seen him.
I was surprised.
I spotted him. He was standing some distance away from me, next to one of the crushed cars.
An elderly woman was trapped in the seat next to the driver. Her window was warped, the glass shattered. Her head was tossed back on her shoulder, her forehead bleeding. She looked at me and at what I was doing. Outside her crushed door, the dog stood, wagging his tail.
Looking at her.
Her eyes smiled back at him. It was a weary look. Then her gaze shifted to me. There was a smile and gratitude there.
From afar, I heard the wail of an approaching ambulance. A moment later it stopped, with a screech of brakes, by the wrecked cars.
I gathered up the dog in both arms and carried him to our car. Smadar was waiting for me there, her arms extended. She took him in as if he were a baby, stroking him affectionately.
“They only have collars like that in the States, and only rich, dog-crazy people use them,” she noted authoritatively. “I wonder which of the injured people he belongs to. I hope the owner gets better, but I’d love to keep him.”
◊◊◊
The next day was Saturday.
Our Neta and the jungles of Colombia were thrust aside. They were overshadowed by the rumor of my “act of heroism” the night before. It spread quickly through the kibbutz. I became the hero of the day. Our house was flooded with kibbutz members. All of them wanted to hear how I had risked my life for a dog, who, in the meantime, was recuperating at the vet’s house. Smadar never grew tired of telling the story again and again.
At noon, the newscast on one of the TV stations opened with a story on last night’s accident. Dark-lit images recorded by a security camera flashed across the screen. It took several seconds before we realized they had captured me and what I had done.
It turned out that one of the people injured had died of her wounds. She was an American diplomat working as a cultural attaché in Tel Aviv. The embassy’s driver, a young Israeli who had been driving the car, had sustained minor injuries. The injuries of the couple who had been sitting in the other vehicle had been even less substantial.
I hoped the woman who had died was not the woman I’d seen. I consoled myself that her injuries hadn’t seemed severe. She had been elderly, and hadn’t looked like an American diplomat.
There I was on the screen—
The security cameras had intercepted me leaping between the speeding cars in an attempt to save the dog.
My face wasn’t clearly seen. Neither had my identity been revealed.
The images were broadcast twice. As they ended, the news anchor criticized the drivers who had not stopped to help the wounded victims, or even slowed down to allow me to reach the dog safely. She called them “ugly Israelis” and “insensitive Israelis.”
In contrast, my actions were praised wholeheartedly. “Thanks to the dedication and kindness of people like the ‘Anonymous Angel,’ there’s still hope for our people,” the news anchor declared dramatically.
Smadar and her friends were utterly won over. She stroked my hand. The phone was constantly ringing and the door didn’t close for a second.
Once the chaos subsided in the afternoon hours, Smadar embarked on a series of phone calls in an attempt to establish the identity of the dog’s owner. She left messages, which included her phone numbers, at emergency clinics in the area where the accident occurred, as well as with the person on call at the American Embassy.
“My instincts tell me,” she said, “that the collar indicates he belonged to the dead diplomat.”
I tried to protest.
“Time will tell.”
A short time later, she was contacted by an employee from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, an American with a prominent southern accent. His deep voice emerged from the phone receiver and filled the house. He told us that the dog belonged to the cultural attaché who had died in the accident.
He had a request for us. Since the American diplomat had been living alone in Israel, and at the moment, there was no one to take the dog under their wing, would we agree to hold on to the dog for a bit longer, until a solution was found and he could be flown to the diplomat’s relatives in the States?
“Of course,” Smadar answered generously, already gathering some bones from the grilled chicken we had just eaten in the kitchen, and rushing out to the vet’s house.
I was overcome with fatigue.
I knew what this meant—
My confession would have to wait some more.
Chapter Fourteen
A Cache of Cash or a Can of Worms
The next day. Sunday morning.
I woke up after a night full of bad dreams. Eighteen hours left before my pointless trip to Kenya. Would I have to leave just because I was getting tangled up in my lies and still hadn’t told my wife that my work for the submarine fleet had been terminated?
In the living room, I found my suitcase packed, with my clothes meticulously folded inside, including ties, shirts, handkerchiefs, a formal jacket and underwear.
When did she have time to iron all this?
I still hadn’t given up hope.
I waited eagerly for her to wake up.
I had to put an end to the pretense. I’d been laid off. What was the big deal?
The ring of the phone preempted me. It was her cell phone ringing. I grabbed it before it could wake her up, hearing a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. In American-accented English, she introduced herself as an American TV reporter representing an international news network in Israel. She told me she had gotten my number from the American Embassy.
“Well? Okay? And?” I rushed her, suspicious.
“The thing is,” she said, “that the diplomat who died is considered an eminent poet in our country, and is known for the loving poems she dedicated to her dog. His name is Johnson.”
“Yes? And…?” I repeated, increasingly impatient.
The TV reporter resumed speaking directly to Smadar, who in the meantime had woken up and grabbed her phone away from me.
The more the unsolicited call lengthened, the more agitated I grew. Smadar transferred the call to speakerphone, and I had to listen to all of it.
The reporter explained that due to the poems, Johnson the dog had become a celebrity, and a recurring guest on American talk shows. She expressed her admiration for the way I had acted to save the wounded Johnson from being run over.
The bottom line: she asked to come to our home at the kibbutz the next day and interview us about what we had done. She was undeterred by the significant distance between Tel Aviv and our kibbutz in the north.
“No, no, no!” I reacted in fright, signaling to Smadar with vigorous gestures.
“Yes, we’d love to,” Smadar answered her sweetly, turning her back to my protests.
“I’m sorry,” she told me once she ended the call. “With this anti-Israeli sentiment in the States right now, it’s important that a story like ours be told over there, too. I want every one of those Americans who are so ful
l of themselves to know that a Jew doesn’t abandon anyone who’s injured on the road, even when the victim is a dog.”
◊◊◊
Last night before my trip.
I sat alone in the rocking chair on the lawn in front of our house.
Tormented—
Beaten down—
There was not a single bad thought that didn’t go through my mind.
Smadar emerged from the bedroom, her hair disheveled. “Are you excited about your trip to Africa?” she asked.
I had no air, no energy left inside me. It was not the right time to open myself up to her and deal with her reactions.
“No. Yes. No,” I decided to reply half-heartedly.
She laughed. “Great decisive answer.”
“I’m sorry.”
She was obviously preoccupied by a completely different issue. “I’m very troubled by this disconnect from our Neta.”
“I am too.”
“I thought of something. I don’t know if it will help.”
“What?”
“We won’t be able to find out anything from Israel. It’s a waste of our time, of all the money we’re spending on useless international phone calls, and of all that aggravation. The guests at the dinner party at Nahalal are right. One of us has to fly down there ourselves.”
I tensed up.
She continued. “You’re too busy, and they won’t let you leave your submarines. Which leaves us with the other option. I’ll fly down there myself.”
“That’s a great idea!”
“I’ve already checked out the costs. Not a hundred thousand dollars, like our friends determined. Not initially, anyway. But pretty expensive. It’s $1,400 just for the flight. The hotel costs at least sixty to seventy dollars a night. And who knows how many nights I’m going to have to be there. And here’s the main thing—everyone I talk to tells me that without bribing a cop or some bureaucrat, I won’t get any answers or help.”
