by Eshkol Nevo
The week after that, we left Ofri with the Wolfs twice. Both times it was because we had to take Yaeli to the hospital for tests. Both times, Ruth was home. Both times, when we got back, there was nothing unusual in the hug Ofri gave us. She still talked about the ways Herman was “broken,” how he put sugar instead of salt in the salami and eggs and tried to use the air conditioner remote to turn on the TV. Her eyes sparkled with happiness as she spoke. Herman, it seems, had managed to convince her that it was all a kind of game and she had an important part to play in it: to remind him about the correct order of things, to give him the right remote, to show him which plants he had to water, to tell him what day it was.
Ayelet said in English so that Ofri wouldn’t understand, “She’s so innocent. Smart and innocent.”
“Soon she won’t be innocent anymore,” I said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Ayelet, who’s no fool and saw right away that I was heading for that let’s-have-another-baby conversation, said, not in English this time, “Forget it, Arnon. Unless you’re the one who’s going to be pregnant.”
“English, baby, English,” I told her.
“Really Mommy,” Ofri said, “boys can’t be pregnant.”
“I’m not your girlfriend, Ofri,” Ayelet said, “so don’t talk to me in that tone.”
“What do you want from me,” Ofri asked. “Why are you always mad at me?”
Switching back into English, I said, “She’s right, you know.”
And Ayelet told me not to mix in.
It’s complicated between them, between Ofri and Ayelet. Always was. Maybe not the first year, when Ofri was nursing. But the minute she stopped and began talking, that tension between them started. One minute they were huggy-kissy best friends, and a minute later, they were swooping down on each other, claws bared. And the problem is that it has nothing to do with strength. Ofri’s strong, very strong, but she has no chance when Ayelet tears into her with all that Ayeletness of hers. She calls it boundaries. The child needs boundaries. But from the beginning, I felt that there’s more to it, that there’s a kind of meanness in the way she talks to her. A kind of sting that’s camouflaged really well with honey. What, for example? She can say to her, “Look at how many friends come to visit Yaeli. But you’re buried in bed all day with your books. Isn’t that a shame, honey?” Or: “Do you think that by tomorrow you can decide what to wear, pretty girl?” Or: “Earth to Ofri! Earth to Ofri! Are you even listening to what I’m saying?!” Even the pet names she gives her—astro, space girl, zippy lips—they’re really more critical than affectionate. And sometimes, when she comes home late from the office and Ofri does something smart-alecky that she doesn’t like, or is just off in her own world and doesn’t answer her, she can really lose it and say nasty things to the kid like: “I’m your mother, so I have to put up with you, I have no choice. Anyone else would just get up and leave if you acted like this with them.” Or—I swear she said it—“What did I do wrong to deserve a punishment like you?”
It isn’t just what she says. It’s also the tone. Biting. Merciless. Why are they like that? I don’t know. Ofri’s pace is slow, a little pensive. Sometimes she really doesn’t notice that someone’s talking to her. If you try to rush her, she deliberately slows down even more. And Ayelet’s the opposite, she’s quick. Has no patience for anyone who can’t keep up with her. And she has a mother who’s completely nuts. Maybe that has something to do with it. She beat Ayelet when she was little. And in Ramat Aviv, that upscale north Tel Aviv neighborhood, right? Not in any of those poor south Tel Aviv places. In elegant Ramat Aviv her mother used to beat her with belts and rulers. And there was no father there to separate them. It just goes to show you, by the way, that you can never know what goes on with people behind their reinforced metal doors.
Before Yaeli was born, Ayelet and I used to fight a lot about how to raise Ofri. She would say I was spoiling the kid. And I would say, spoiled? The kid’s perfect, an angel. After Yaeli came into the family picture, things were a little more balanced. A table stands better on four legs. But I still felt that it was crucial for me to be around to watch out for Ofri. To make sure Ayelet wasn’t too hard on her. Wouldn’t cause her the kind of damage that couldn’t be repaired later on.
I’ll tell you something that might sound screwed up to you. After Tavlina made it big, I had offers from Spain and Germany to go and design restaurants there. You wouldn’t believe what kind of emails they sent me. “We admire your no-bullshit style of creativity.” “The atmosphere you create makes people want to order the whole menu.” I’ll show them to you sometime. In any case, I turned them down. Even though it was an opportunity to go out on my own again. And a hell of a professional challenge. The real reason I said no—not the reason I gave Ayelet—was that in order to design restaurants in Europe, you have to stay there for long periods of time. And I didn’t see myself leaving those two cats alone for so long. Do you see? I always felt a kind of special responsibility for Ofri. And that just makes what happened even worse.
Hey, tell me, is it okay to dump all this on you? You’re sure? How are you anyway? I didn’t even ask. I saw you on the best-seller list. How much do you make on every book? Is that all? They’re fucking you, take it from me. You want me “to continue the story”? For you, everything’s a story, eh? It’s just too bad that for me, it’s real life.
Forget it. Where were we? On Mondays, I have a double spinning class. It starts at seven, but you have to get there a littler earlier if you want a specific bicycle. Oh, you never did spinning? Okay, so you have good genes. In our family, all the men are overweight. So I have no choice. I have to take care of myself. The exercise bikes in our spinning class are arranged in a semicircle opposite the instructor. Numbered. I like number four. The farthest away from the air conditioner. Every Monday Ayelet takes Yaeli to Tel Aviv for a special yoga class for kids with respiratory problems, and they come home right afterward so I can leave for spinning at six-thirty.
That day, they got stuck in traffic. Ayelet called from the car to say they’d be a little late. I told her take Ayalon South. But she said she was already on Geha. That pissed me off. I always tell her to take Ayalon because there are fewer traffic jams, but she always insists on Geha. Because she’s used to it. I could already see myself getting to class at the last second and ending up with bike number nineteen or twenty, which are behind a post. You can’t even see the instructor from there. Do you get the picture? I wish I could tell you that I went to Herman and Ruth’s because there was an emergency at work, or I had chest pains and needed to get myself to the hospital. But the truth is, that was the whole story: which bike would I ride in spinning class.
Ruth was at the conservatory. I asked Herman when she was coming back and he said he didn’t know. I calculated: if I leave now, Ayelet will be home in ten or fifteen minutes at the most. What could possibly happen in fifteen minutes? In the meantime, Ruth would definitely be back. She usually gets home from work at six-thirty. And old people don’t like to deviate from their routines. That way, Ayelet wouldn’t even know I left Ofri alone with Herman. And even if she did, so what, let her take Ayalon next time.
Ofri, of course, was in heaven. I explained to her that it was only for a few minutes, that Mommy would be home soon. But she was already riding on Herman’s back, and he was shouting Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter (the German version of giddyap) and wasn’t really listening to me. I wanted to warn him, but didn’t know how I could phrase a warning without offending him, without his realizing that I didn’t trust him. So I didn’t say anything. I texted Ayelet: “Ofri’s with Herman and Ruth.” I changed clothes and left. I’m not sure it would’ve helped if I’d said anything to him. Even if I’d said, “In your condition, you shouldn’t go out of the house with her,” chances are that he would have answered, “Yah!” and forgotten it a minute later.
I keep my cell phone muted during spinning class. You can’t hear anything anyway with the loudspeakers blasting.
So it wasn’t until the end of the double lesson that I saw that I had four unanswered calls. But I still thought that Ayelet just got stuck out of the house without her keys or something, and kept walking toward the showers. Next time she should listen to me and take Ayalon. That’s what I was thinking. Let her learn her lesson. I took my time under the shower, do you see? I washed my hair. Raised the temperature higher and higher until it was almost burning my skin. You like to do that too? And here I thought it was my own private perversion. I didn’t look at my phone again until after I’d toweled off. There were already twelve unanswered calls. I called Ayelet. And a few seconds later, I was on my way home.
How can I explain what a person feels at a time like that? Remember that first time on reserve duty when Ehrlich drove the jeep into that alleyway in Hebron by mistake? Remember when the concrete blocks started raining down on us? And that moron couldn’t put the vehicle into reverse? Take that and multiply it by ten. By a hundred. A thousand. In Hebron, I was pretty calm. I had the feeling we’d get out in one piece. Most of the time, I’m calm under pressure. But here—I’ll tell you the truth—I lost it completely. I yelled at myself while I was driving. Smashed my fists against the wheel.
Maybe the difference is that in Hebron, I was only responsible for myself. And here I was responsible for my little girl. I knew I screwed up. It was so clear that I screwed up that Ayelet didn’t even waste time accusing me. The minute I got out of the car, she filled me in on the situation: The entire building was out searching, and there was also a police car on the way. They were combing our neighborhood. And the adjacent neighborhood too. I said, “I’ll kill him if he did something to her, I’ll just kill him.” Ayelet said, “We still don’t know what happened, maybe they just got lost.” But I saw in her eyes that she was also thinking about the kisses and the Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter. I asked if anyone was searching the citrus groves, and Ayelet said no, they hadn’t thought that far ahead. So I said, “I’ll go there and take my gun.”
“Why a gun?” she said.
“If he touched a hair on her head, that’s the end of him.”
When Ofri was in kindergarten, there was a kid there who hassled her. Saar Ashkenazi. She’d come home every day with stories. Saar Ashkenazi said this to her, Saar Ashkenzazi did that to her. Ayelet spoke to the teacher, who said she hadn’t noticed anything special and that at that age, they still can’t always tell the difference between reality and imagination.
Our daughter could always tell the difference. And that was exactly what I said to Ayelet. Our daughter can tell the difference. So one day after I left Ofri in kindergarten, I waited behind a bush for the children to come out into the yard. At first, everything was fine. Ofri played with her friends and I felt pretty stupid. A forty-year-old man hiding behind a bush at nine in the morning. But then a boy approached them. From behind. I mean, Ofri had her back to him, And that little shit just yanked down her pants. And ran away. Then, from a few meters away, he laughed and said that everyone could see her underpants.
You know me. I’m not a violent person. During the Intifada, I used to stay in the kitchen to avoid going out on patrol, remember? But believe me, if you had seen someone pull down your Jonathan’s pants, you’d react just like I did. It’s a biological instinct. Out of our control.
What did I do to the kid? Exactly what had to be done. I climbed the nursery school fence, grabbed him, pushed him up against the wall and told him that if he ever touched Ofri again, I’d take him apart.
That evening, his mother called and said, “You started up with the wrong family.” Turns out that Saar Ashkenazi’s father is the protection king of the area. The police have been trying to nail him for years, without any luck. You don’t believe there’s a protection racket in the suburbs? Start believing.
To make a long story short, his wife told me on the phone that her husband, Asi, was out of the country, “checking out business opportunities,” but when he got back and heard what I did to Saar—expect pain. Those were her exact words. Expect pain.
So I bought a gun and put it in a drawer. I put the magazine in a different drawer, then locked both of them with a key. I said to myself that if he shows up at my cave, that Asi, I’ll have something to protect my cubs with.
A week later, an item in the papers said that Asi Ashkenazi had been arrested in Larnaka and was going to be tried and given a long prison sentence for drug trafficking. Saar Ashkenazi and his mother disappeared from the kindergarten right after that. The teacher didn’t know where they’d gone. Or she didn’t want to say. I think she breathed a sigh of relief too. And I—I kept the gun.
I only took it out of the drawer once after that—when we went hiking in Wadi Kelt. Arabs had killed two hikers there a few years ago, so I thought it was wise to be on the safe side. Ayelet said she really didn’t like the idea, but her tone could have meant that she didn’t like it in ideological terms, but did like it in practical terms. The night we came back from the trip, after the girls fell into bed and I went into the shower to wash all that desert dust off me, she undressed, pulled open the shower curtain, and said, “Is that a gun, or are you just happy to see me?”
Do you get it? Even strong women like Ayelet are looking for someone to protect them. It’s a biological instinct.
So I took the gun and the magazine and started running toward the groves. You were at my place once, right? How could you not remember? A barbecue on Independence Day? Two years ago? That’s it. So when you go out of the building, there’s a path that leads to the synagogue, and after the synagogue there’s a path that takes you to the groves in three to four minutes. For ten years already they’ve been talking about cutting down the trees and building a neighborhood for young families there, but I have yet to see a single bulldozer.
When Ofri was little, in fact, from the time she started walking, I used to take her there. If there were oranges or grapefruits on the trees, we’d pick ourselves a few, peel them, and eat them. If not, we’d just hang out. Someone had spread a mat on the ground in the middle of the third row of trees and put two old armchairs and a bamboo table on it, the kind you buy in the Druse markets. Probably some high school senior who went there with the guys to smoke a narghile before they went into the army. It’s really beautiful in the groves at dusk. The sun sinks between the leaves and there’s a breeze coming off the sea. I used to sit in one of the armchairs with Ofri, sometimes I’d tell her a story, sometimes she’d tell me one, and sometimes we’d just sit quietly and listen to the birds. I swear, I was never as relaxed as I was on those walks with Ofri. Even after Yaeli was born, I made sure to go to the groves with Ofri at least once a week. Listen, I’m an older sibling too. I know what a bummer it is when a little brother is born. Especially after seven years of being king of the world. It might sound funny to you, but to this day, somewhere inside me I’m still a little angry at my brother Mickey for stealing away my good life. So I said to myself that Ofri should have at least one hour a week when she can still be Daddy’s princess. It didn’t matter what we did during that hour, the main thing was to be together. Just the two of us. This last year, for instance, she started taking books with her to our hangout. Can you see it? She’s sitting on the mat reading Little Women. I’m making orange juice with a juicer I bring from home. And then we drink it together from paper cups left over from her birthday party. Who needs more than that?
So I ran to the grove. To our hangout. Ayelet stayed home with Yaeli to man the phone and Ruth led a police team to places in the neighborhood where Herman liked to go. But I had a gut feeling. And I ran with it. It was dark already. The streetlamps lit the entrance to the groves, but when I was inside, walking down the rows of trees, I couldn’t see a thing. A branch scratched me. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding. Only later, at home, did I see it. I kept running. My nose filled with the smell of rot. All the fruit that the Thai workers hadn’t picked in time was lying on the ground, attracting flies and worms.
When I reached the t
hird row, I already knew they were there. I didn’t see them, but I could feel it. I can’t explain it to you. Maybe my nose picked up traces of the smell of Ofri’s shampoo. Maybe it was just a kind of connection between father and child that lets you feel when your child is close to you even if you can’t see him. I loaded the magazine, cocked the gun, and put my finger on the trigger. I had a picture in my mind—the minute I walked into the groves, I had a picture in my mind and I knew that if it was the true picture, I was really going to shoot, and Herman would get a bullet in the temple. Not in the back, so that the bullet, God forbid, wouldn’t pass through his body into hers. I’d approach from the side, press the gun against his temple, and pull the trigger.
First I heard crying. A few seconds before I saw them, I heard crying. Even in a group of a hundred crying children, a parent can pick out the sound of his child’s crying. So I realized right away that it wasn’t Ofri crying. And I didn’t understand what was going on. He’d abducted another little girl too? I kept my finger on the trigger and moved forward slowly. More cautiously. Even in a group of a hundred walking parents, a child can pick out the sound of his parents’ footsteps. Then, as I was sneaking forward, I heard Ofri’s voice very close to me, saying, “Daddy?” She sounded normal. Not hysterical. So I said, “Yes, honey, I’m here.” I took another few steps, pushed away the last few branches that were concealing me, and saw them. They were on the mat. Ofri was sitting with her little legs stretched forward, and Herman’s large white head was resting on her thigh. His tie had drooped to the side, onto her knee, and he was crying. Sobbing. And between one sob and the next, he raised his gray eyes to look at me and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
It was weird. He said he was sorry, but the glint in his eye was something else, not the least bit sorry.
I told him to stand up.
He kept crying. And didn’t move. I thought that he was crying like someone who’d done something he shouldn’t have done. So I pointed the gun at him and said, “Get up, or I don’t know what I’ll do to you.”
