by Y. I. Latz
A sudden noise startled me. I started the car and took off before even disconnecting. Coffee splashed on my pants. Luckily, it was already cold.
◊◊◊
Smadar was hysterical.
Twelve days had gone by and nothing had changed.
She called me from the city of Medellín in Colombia four or five times a day.
In contrast to the assessments of the “experts,” Colombian authorities insisted on disciplining Neta to the full extent of the law by prosecuting her. They refused to end the affair with the payment of a fine or deportation.
A trial date was set: in four months’ time. Neta’s passport was confiscated, and she was prohibited from leaving the country. The authorities did accommodate her in one regard: she was allowed to reside at a local guesthouse, under conditions of house arrest, and even this was only after I deposited one hundred thousand dollars in bail through a local attorney.
Knowledgeable kibbutz members claimed that such extreme measures were not employed even in regard to professional drug dealers, or backpackers caught with “commercial quantities” of drugs.
Neta’s army friends came up with an idea: to rescue her with a helicopter and smuggle her across the border, to adjacent Panama or Venezuela.
No idea, however surreal, was summarily dismissed. The estimated cost of this operation was two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the “helicopter initiative” in itself, not including “unexpected” bribes and the cost of flying her friends there, as well as the one hundred thousand in bail, which would be lost.
All in all, six hundred thousand.
“Do something!” both of them wailed at me over the phone.
I tried to calm them down as much as possible.
I had no soothing statements left.
I screened the next calls from them.
I came to a decision to move on to the next, critical stage of my plan.
Taking my enemies down with me.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Intifada at My Personal Service
“About my Neta.”
We were in Shin’s apartment in the staff housing units at the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus. We were about to leave for a fancy restaurant.
I was in love. Tormented. Off balance. Torn between opposing forces. Caught in a whirlpool the likes of which I had not experienced since taking my first steps with girls.
Shin greeted my inner turmoil with equanimity. She was probably used to her tumultuous effect on her numerous suitors.
She gussied up in front of me. The taut skin of her face seemed even tauter than usual, highlighting her slanted eyes. Her slim body was encased in a form-fitting purple dress with a high slit along the thigh, emphasizing her elongated figure.
I tracked her with a mixture of wonder and resentment.
Where did she think she was living—
An elegant dress like that was appropriate for Boston or New York high society, from which she had come, rather than fundamentalist, Levantine Jerusalem.
Our conversation was difficult, far from being romantic.
“About my Neta.”
“It’s not as simple as you think,” she repeated sweetly with her nightingale voice. “I need more of the same from you.”
“I don’t have it!” I called out passionately.
She was not impressed. A cold-fish Korean. “Make an effort. It’s in your best interest, too. What you’re asking for is not that simple to accomplish. More material would help me convince the necessary parties.”
“But I don’t have it!”
“I don’t understand. Doesn’t your daughter’s freedom justify the effort?”
She barricaded herself in the bathroom for last-minute adjustments.
I waited for her in the tiny kitchen.
On the table between us was a book I had just brought her as a gift.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
My favorite author.
I’d mentioned him quite a few times during our meetings. I didn’t believe her when she admitted she’d never read him. She was a professor, after all, wasn’t she? I made a point of promising her I’d get her a copy the first chance I got.
On that day, I fulfilled my promise.
She responded with a burst of laughter.
“You still don’t understand that I don’t read books that aren’t related to my work?”
I added a gushing dedication to the book, and pasted in three red hearts.
As I sat there, I read the dedication curiously, as if it hadn’t been written by me. “Love. Your body. The best. Me. You. Soulmates. A thousand kisses. With love.”
No less—
“With love.”
That wasn’t the only gift I bought her. A few minutes earlier, I’d also given her “the real thing”: a pair of gold earrings and a gold necklace for her neck. They were enclosed in a gray cardboard gift bag with two rope-like handles, with the name of the store at its center, embossed in shiny, gold-colored letters.
I was holding the empty bag in my hand.
H. Stern—
My face assumed a sour expression. I’d never bought my wife such an expensive gift.
◊◊◊
As she got ready in the bathroom, I roamed through the little apartment.
Her laptop was open on the kitchen table. I heard the tone indicating an incoming message.
Something took hold of me. Maybe it was the icon announcing the message: a skull with two crossbones, like a pirate flag.
I clicked Enter. The message opened.
I panicked—
I hadn’t expected it to.
It was written in gibberish.
I panicked even more—
I knew what that meant.
I had seen gibberish of this kind before.
The message was encrypted.
Shin leaped at me. I hadn’t felt her approach. She closed the laptop with a thud. “Now you’ve crossed the line!” she said angrily.
The lid closed forcefully on my fingers. I let out a yelp of pain, pushing Shin away instinctively. She lost her balance, stepped on the hem of her long dress and almost tripped.
Her elbow hit the table.
She, too, let out a cry of pain.
She raised her hand and slapped me hard.
It was a professional slap by an experienced slapper.
I was stunned.
I grabbed my cheek.
It was burning.
Shin refused to apologize.
A loud argument broke out between us. It was a continuation of the bitter argument we had conducted in more subtle tones several minutes earlier.
I repeatedly insisted that she fulfill her part of the “agreement,” and claimed that in light of all the sensitive information I had provided her, she should call her friend at the American Embassy in Bogota and urge her to act more decisively in order to free us from the nightmare that had descended on us all.
She, in contrast, repeatedly demanded that I give her more material, and even threatened that if I betrayed her trust again—she considered peeking at her computer downright blasphemous—our relationship would end immediately.
She was breathing heavily.
My eyes opened wide. I hadn’t even noticed.
The earrings I had just given her were inserted in her ears—
And the gold necklace was around her neck—
At that exact moment, two things happened simultaneously.
The first: she placed her hand on the fly of my pants.
The second: she peered at her cell phone, which had begun thrumming softly. Her face instantly assumed a frown. Rioting in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood in East Jerusalem. “Are you coming?” she called out.
I felt weak. My he
ad was spinning. These shifting scenes were too swift for someone like me.
“Just a quick peek and then I’m all yours,” she called out to me, already linking her arm with mine. “Let’s get going.”
◊◊◊
A moment later, we were in her jeep. “I’ll drive this time,” I said. She debated briefly, then handed me the key.
The burning Arab neighborhood was close to her campus apartment. Thick smoke was rising from tires the young militants had ignited.
“Go right, go left,” she guided me expertly in a metallic tone. During the few months she had been living in Jerusalem, she had gotten to know every alley, including in the Arab parts of the city.
My aggravation increased.
She teased me. “You’re scared.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Look at your hands.”
“What about them?”
She took hold of them. “They’re shaking.”
I pushed her hands away angrily.
She wouldn’t let it go—
“Your heart. Let me feel it.” Her hand fumbled under my shirt while I maneuvered between the dark alleys that seemed ominous to me. “You hear that?”
I tensed. “What?”
“How it’s galloping.” She demonstrated jokingly. “Tick-tick-tock, tick-tick-tock.”
I tried unsuccessfully to dislodge her fluttering hand from my chest. Driving down a twisty road in a jeep required the use of two hands.
“What do you think they’ll do to us?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The Palestinians.”
“When?”
“When they catch us.”
“No one’s going to catch us.”
“My hero. That’s the way I like you!”
She instructed me to veer off the main thoroughfare and choose a narrow alley, claiming she knew the way and the alley was a shortcut.
A shortcut to where, I should have asked.
I didn’t—
I also should have objected to her instruction to leave the main road. Who veers off the main road in a hostile Arab neighborhood currently on fire?
I didn’t do that, either.
I was in thrall to the magic touch of her fingers. They were fluttering on my body under my clothes.
My horniness was sky-high.
Things got complicated. We arrived at an especially steep and narrow alley with houses on both sides, and a motorcycle parked at the entrance to one of them. I couldn’t go on. Our jeep was too wide.
I stopped.
“Go!” she ordered me, her lips pursed.
“But—”
“Go, go!” she screamed, and when she saw me debating, her left foot shot out toward the gas pedal on which my foot was resting.
Her high heel drilled into my shoe. The impact of the surprise and the pain made me press down on the pedal. The jeep lurched forward, ramming into the motorcycle, which flew into the air and came apart as if it were made of paper.
“Woooooo!” Shin screamed, raising her clenched fist in the air.
I was agitated.
We reached Al Mansuriyah Street, which climbs from the Old City up to the peak of Mt. Scopus. Masked militants were huddling all along it, holding torches and PLO7 flags and screaming as loudly as they could. Those screams made my blood run cold.
They did not have a similar effect on Shin’s blood—
“Stop!” she commanded me. “Turn off the lights!”
I obeyed.
I parked the jeep next to the wall of the house on our right, stilled the engine and turned off the lights.
We sat in darkness. The masked rioters did not notice us. I tried to stabilize my breathing.
She was right—
I was scared.
I shook off the bad thoughts.
“About my Neta,” I said.
It was a ridiculous thing to say in our current situation.
She didn’t react. Her gaze was fixed on the actions of the masked militants.
“About my Neta,” I repeated. More than I was worried about my daughter’s fate, I simply had nothing else to say under the circumstances.
This time she responded. Her voice was low, almost a whisper.
“I’ve already told you and I’ll tell you again. To keep the fire burning, you have to keep adding more tinder. What you’ve given me was burned up long ago. I need more fresh tinder from you.”
I burst out, “I told you about our submarines in India. That’s tinder?! Do you know what I did for you? Huh? Do you know what they call what I did for you? Do you know what they’ll do to me if they catch me?!”
An acrid smell of burned rubber began to infiltrate the jeep.
We cracked the power windows open.
She turned to me in the darkness inside the jeep.
Of all conceivable possibilities, this was the least probable—
Her hand felt for my pants, opened the zipper, and dove in.
As her fingers fluttered where they fluttered and did what they did, she whispered to me,
The entire time, her fingers continued to strum me, working at a precise intensity.
Pressing and releasing—
For a moment, I forgot all this pleasure was taking place in the middle of burning East Jerusalem.
She continued whispering in my ear. “India?! Why India, for God’s sake?! That doesn’t make sense, even in an illogical country like yours. Why should your nuclear submarine set out for India, taunting the Iranians? You need more trouble than you already have? You can’t wait to set the whole world on fire? The Middle East isn’t enough for you, and you also have to aggravate India’s greatest enemy, Pakistan?”
Every time I felt that this was it, and I had reached the ultimate peak, her fingers increased their rhythm, as if reading my mind.
She went on. “Don’t be mad at me, sweetie. When you sold me that story, I was really planning on tearing you a new one. I really hate to be played for a fool. But I held off. I let them decide. I passed your surreal Indian tale on to them in its entirety. I added in a thousand and one disclaimers. Their positive reaction caught me by surprise.”
This was almost too much—
I had never seen such a contrast in any movie: hostile, bare-chested militants in masks outside, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails, while inside, I was experiencing unimaginable terror and pleasure simultaneously.
She continued, as if she were in a world of her own. “You get it? They ate up your story without a moment’s hesitation. Not only did they eat it up, but they asked for more. There’s no going back. Did I or did I not warn you that I’m a dangerous woman? Did I or did I not warn you to pick up your feet and run the hell away from me while you still could? Did I or did I not warn you that you’re getting swept up in a cruel world whose rules an innocent like you would never figure out, and more importantly, a world you’d never be able to escape?”
A chilly wave rolled through me.
I lost my ardor.
I went cold instantly. I jerked her hand out of my pants with a violent gesture.
“What’s wrong?” she wondered.
“I want us to stop,” I said decisively.
Even in the darkness of the jeep, I saw a crease form at the center of her forehead.
“Impossible,” she said. “They want me to keep on milking you for information.”
“No!”
“I’m sorry. You’re in their pocket now. It’s all documented. I suggest you don’t mess with them.”
“Let’s go back! We’ll drive to your computer! We’ll erase everything! From your phone, too! Please!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please!” I begged.
“You have to understand, and not get mad. I’m only doing m
y job.”
“But what is your job? Aren’t you a Harvard professor?” I asked idiotically.
She paused for a bit. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the CIA…”
◊◊◊
A police squad car, its blue lights flashing and its sirens deafening, passed us by, driving wildly. It slowed and braked about sixty feet in front of us. It was standing in the middle of a narrow alley, its rear end turned toward us. The siren was silenced, while the blue lights continued to flash soundlessly.
We tracked it with our eyes, holding our breath.
Amazingly, this excited Shin even more. She leaned in over my pants. The soft touch of her tongue made it clear to me that my zipper had been undone and her mouth was open. And indeed, within moments, she swallowed me whole. The pleasure spreading through my body indicated that I had just entered the gates of heaven.
◊◊◊
Life in heaven was brief. The squad car’s taillights exposed us, and the rioters found us.
Their reaction was swift.
We became sitting ducks at a shooting range.
Rocks and construction blocks began to land on the roof and hood of the jeep. They were hurled at us and at the roof of the squad car from the tops of the houses behind the stone walls on both sides of the narrow alley. As they hit the jeep, they produced sounds resembling explosions.
The squad car took off.
The barrage of stones was accompanied by bloodcurdling calls emitted by dozens of throats simultaneously, as if they were Indians in the Wild West.
The intimate quiet that had prevailed in the jeep until a few moments ago became a hellish commotion.
Several stones made their way inside through the open front windows and hit us.
Next, some masked militants appeared right in front of us in the narrow alley and began to advance toward us.
They formed a single line, walking sedately, shoulder to shoulder, as if heading a parade.
Shin screamed—
“Go! Go! Go!”
I didn’t do as she asked.
“Go” meant running them over with the wheels of the heavy jeep.
I couldn’t press down on the gas.
Shin tried to open her door. The door wouldn’t open. The jeep was right next to the wall on her side. She turned toward me and tried to move me so she could escape through my door. But I was sitting there, paralyzed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.
