“Mommy. Mommy, “he said sadly, “why are you saying that there’s no Daddy? You’ll stay here and Daddy and me will go to Palestine and afterwards we’ll send you a ticket and you can come with Moshe, Isaac, Ephraim, Hannah and Esther.
Edna was surprised that Nahum was able to name each of his siblings correctly. That is what caught her attention. She could not bear the situation.
Helpless, or full of pity, or angry and impatient, she spoke slowly, loudly and very clearly, “Nahum, we have been here, in Palestine, in Israel, for more than forty years.”
She thought for a moment and then continued, “You are talking to a photograph. Look, Nahum, it’s a photograph. If you don’t stop this, I’m going to take it down. Do you hear me?
Nahum ignored her. “Daddy,” he said, “Daddy, come on, let’s go.”
Without further hesitation, Edna moved a chair close to the wall, stood on it and removed the photograph. She stepped off the chair, raised the photograph above her head, turned it back to front, clasped it to her chest and said, “See? It’s only a photograph. Your father is dead. You were talking to a photograph of him, Nahum.”
She meant well. She wanted to show her respect for the memory of her late father-in-law. She wanted to show her respect for Nahum. But he screamed, frightening her with his hysterical outcry, “Daddy! Daddy? Where’s my daddy?”
He tried to grab the photograph. She struggled with him. He fought back, screaming, “Daddy! Come on, Daddy! Let’s go! I want Daddy!”
Now all she wanted was to soothe him. “Alright. Alright. Calm down,” she pleaded. “Stand here. I’m going to bring your Daddy to you.”
Edna did not expect him to comply, but he stood obediently where she told him to stand and waited. She went quickly to the chair and restored the heavy photograph to its place on the wall. Then she stepped down and took a few places backwards and, without giving Nahum the chance to say anything, she looked up at the portrait and said, “Daddy, you and Nahum will go to Palestine and I will come later.”
She was silent for a moment before she added, choking on her tears, “I will come later, with Moshe, Isaac, Ephraim, Hannah and Esther.”
Still crying, she turned to her husband and said tenderly, “Come to me. Come to me, my Nahum. Come and say goodbye to Mommy before you go. Come, my Nahum.”
He came, looking at her with deep sorrow and compassion.
“Mommy, why are you crying? Daddy and I will send you a ticket from Palestine. Why are you crying, Mommy? Don’t cry.”
She caressed him and he lowered his eyelids like a small child. Speaking through her tears, she replied, “I’m crying, my child, because you are going on a long journey. A very long journey. And you’ll never come back to me. You’re going far away, to an unknown country .A place of no return. That’s why I’m crying, my Nahum. I’m crying, my Nahum, because I’ll never see the Nahum that was mine, the Nahum I knew. My Nahum has already set out on that journey, before I could prepare myself, before I could say goodbye. Without preparing me for his departure. I didn’t say goodbye to my Nahum. Nobody prepared me. That’s why I’m crying my child, my poor child.”
Nahum looked at her with understanding eyes and said, “Don’t cry, mother. Daddy, me and Daddy, will send a ticket from Palestine for you and Moshe and Isaac and Hannah and Esther.”
39.
The rows of ceramic tiles on the walls of the spacious bathroom were laid in nuances of earth tones, ending in a strip of green stone. An expensive ornate crystal mirror covered the whole facing wall. Taps in the style of ancient Rome glinted gold above the white washbasin. The clear glass walls of the large shower cubicle in the corner of the room emphasized matching gold taps.
Shuni lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one, which he flushed down the gold-handled toilet. He studied his face approvingly in the mirror, inhaled cigarette smoke deep into his lungs and held it there for some time before slowly exhaling perfect smoke rings at the mirror. Glancing now and then at his face through the haze of smoke, he straightened the knot of his brightly-colored tie. Then he moved the tie aside so he could admire his red shirt.
Until embarking on his new life, Shuni had not realized how well he looked in red, how well it went with his blond hair. He flipped his second cigarette into the toilet bowl and admired the powerful gush of water that flushed it out of sight at the touch of his hand.
He stroked the red shirt, winked at his reflection in the mirror and whispered, “From now on red’s the color! You look great in red!”
He sprayed his mouth with breath freshener to get rid of the tobacco odor, turned out the light and closed the bathroom door on his way out. Suddenly, he spun his heel, went back into the bathroom, turned on the light and had a last look at his red shirt and the shining crest of his blond hair before going through to his office.
He sat at his desk – which, like the rest of the decor was contemporary Italian in shades of mahogany – and spoke into the intercom.
“Nitoosh,” he purred, “would you please send in my next patient.”
“Certainly,” Nitza purred back.
Shuni waited, drumming with his fingers on the desk top. Over the past year, things had moved even faster than usual. He thought of Sheila and muttered, as if she were in the room with him, “You thought it would be easy to catch me, Sheila. What a joke!”
He got to know her when he was selling his apartment, that is, the apartment of his solitary old neighbor. When the old man died, Shuni noticed that nobody but one or two neighbors attended the funeral. Acting fast, he advertised the four-room apartment for sale at the bargain price of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. It was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Shuni had no trouble breaking into the apartment; he simply climbed down the drainpipe that led from the roof to the ground and entered through the unlocked balcony door. He rummaged through one or two drawers and found a bunch of keys and a file full of documents. Then he locked the balcony door and left through the front entrance.
Sheila, a tall young divorcée with auburn hair and good posture, was the first person to answer the advertisement. She arrived alone and, after a quick inspection, informed Shuni that she wanted to buy the apartment.
“You can meet my lawyer on Monday and he can go over the papers and draw up a contract,” she said.
In answer to Shuni’s questions, she said she had immigrated to Israel from the USA about ten years earlier. As for her financial situation, she told him not to worry – he would receive most of the payment within a week.
“I think you don’t quite understand,” he said pleasantly, “I’m being pressured by quite a few eager buyers and I’ll sell to whoever can pay me in cash today. The reason I’m selling so cheap is that I need the money immediately. I’ve found another apartment at a bargain price and I’ll lose it if I don’t pay cash for it today.”
“I understand,” she said sympathetically. Determined not to lose such a bargain, she thought for a moment and came up with the suggestion that she would give him a check to be cashed as soon as her lawyer had examined the papers and drawn up the contract.
“You’re making sense,” he said kindly, ‘but you still don’t understand. The owners of the apartment that I want to buy are demanding payment in cash today, or else the deal is off.”
“How much do they want to close the deal?” she asked, more determined than ever that this bargain would not slip through her fingers.
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“No problem,” she said, “just give me some papers to show ownership and we’ll sign an interim agreement and then I’ll get the money for you.”
Shuni was prepared for this request. In addition to the documents he discovered in the apartment, he had a forged identity card in the name of Meir Cohen, the deceased owner. The price of the forgery was negligible. In no time at all, Shu
ni and Sheila had signed their memo. ‘Meir Cohen’ was amenable to all suggestions regarding the document, including Sheila’s main condition, which was that Shuni – ‘Meir Cohen’ – would have nothing to do with the actual wording of the memo. That same Thursday afternoon, she handed him fifty thousand dollars in hard cash. He very kindly agreed to let her into the apartment on Saturday,”…to have a quick look around,” as she put it.
He sold the apartment twice again, the next day. One of the buyers was an immigrant couple who paid thirty thousand dollars in cash to ‘Meir Cohen.’ The other was a sharp-witted real estate agent who bargained hard until he succeeded in getting a discount and agreed to pay in cash in return for the apartment keys and immediate occupation. The real estate agent was a resourceful man; he called his lawyer and the contract was signed in Meir Cohen’s apartment the same day, on payment of the reduced price of one hundred thousand dollars in cash, in spite of his lawyer’s energetic protests. The lawyer made ‘Meir Cohen’ sign a power of attorney and insisted on being given the keys to the apartment there and then. ‘Meir Cohen’ handed over the keys and said he would move in with his parents that evening.
Like all the other unsuspecting buyers, they arranged to meet him at the Real Estate Registry Office early Monday morning to sign a document forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than the registered purchaser. Heaven forbid. And so, early on the said morning, all three purchasers turned up to register the property. When the scam was discovered, they were advised to go to the police. Shuni did not wait to see how things turned out. He moved to Haifa with one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in his wallet. Nor was he at the police station when the old man’s son emerged from nowhere and declared that he was the legal heir to the property and that, with all due sympathy for their plight, he had no intention of selling.
One morning, when Shuni was enjoying a visit to a big department store, wearing his red shirt with a colorful tie to match, he saw Sheila and she saw him. She yelled, “That’s him!” and grabbed the arm of the store detective. “He stole fifty thousand dollars from me.” she shouted, pulling the wide-eyed detective towards Shuni, “stop him before he gets away!”
Shuni made for the nearest exist, but Sheila was there ahead of him, with the bewildered detective in tow. “That’s him!” Thief! He stole my money!”
Thinking fast, Shuni said, “What have I done? I’ve never seen this woman in my life! Who are you? What are you shouting for?”
Sheila did not give up. “Ask him for his identity card,” she said triumphantly. “You’ll see. His name is Meir Cohen!”
The detective held out his hand. “Your identity card, sir.”
“What have I done?”
“You heard what this lady said, didn’t you?”
Shuni changed his tone. Sounding furious, he said “What? Do you take her seriously? She’s obviously nuts. Listen how she’s screaming. Does she look normal to you? Do I look like a thief?”
Sheila, red-faced, shouted wildly, “Don’t listen to him. Don’t believe a word he says. He’s a crook. This man’s a swindler. He stole fifty thousand dollars from me!”
The detective didn’t bother to ask where, how or why the man in the red shirt had stolen from her. He became very businesslike and authoritative. Maybe the growing crowd around them influenced his demeanor.
He said, “Your identity card, please!”
Shuni took out his wallet and produced the identity card, saying, “I want your name and number. I intend to file a complaint.”
The detective replied that he had no objection to giving all his particulars. Shuni sensed a note of apology in the man’s voice. Meanwhile, Sheila stood blocking the exit with her tense body. When Shuni gave the detective his identity card, she leaned over to see it for herself.
Shuni was now standing close to the exit. The detective asked, “Are you Shuni Adir?”
“None other,” Shuni replied, adding, “You can see for yourself that my name is not Meir Cohen, as she claims. And now, may I have my identity card?”
“You seem to be confusing him with somebody else, madam,” the detective said to Sheila, showing her the identity card. “See for yourself, this is not Meir Cohen.”
The detective returned the card and Shuni made his exit with a bow to the crowd. Once outside, he walked quickly away from the place, with Sheila’s shouts ringing in his ears.
“That’s him! I tell you, that’s the man! Don’t let him get away! He stole fifty thousand dollars from me…”
He turned the corner and broke into a run and kept on running until he was sure he had left the screaming woman far behind him. He came to an unfamiliar square and sat on a bench under a tree. His knees ached from the forced run. He noticed a kiosk nearby and went to buy a cold drink. As he searched his pockets for small change, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw a man he did not know, with Sheila standing behind him. The wind was ruffling her auburn hair, which was the same color as the dark flush that suffused her face. She was panting with the effort of the chase.
“That’s him! That’s him!” Sheila shouted, “Don’t let him get away! Don’t let him fool you!”
Shuni did not hesitate – leaving the bewildered owner of the kiosk with the drink in his outstretched hand, he broke into a run. Still thirsty and exhausted, he darted through the traffic on a busy street and jumped onto a bus as it was closing its doors and pulling away from the stop. With a deep sigh of relief, he looked back in time to see Sheila and the man standing helplessly as he slipped through their fingers again.
“They thought they’d catch me. She thinks I’m an idiot. They won’t catch me so easily!” Shuni said to nobody in particular.
From then on, he became wary of auburn-haired women with American accents. It was not unusual for him to buzz Nitza on the intercom in the elegant North Tel Aviv office and ask her if there were any ladies of that description among the patients waiting to see him.
Still drumming his fingers on the desktop, he was wondering why the next patient was taking so long to appear, when a nervous, middle-aged man appeared in the doorway and asked, “Is it here?”
Shuni did not answer. He nodded towards the chair on the other side of the desk and, when the man was seated, lowered his eyes and held out the palm of his right hand.
“What?” said the man.
Shuni flicked his fingers of his outstretched hand.
“Give? Give what?” the man asked.
Shuni remained silently looking down at his desk, while he repeated the gesture.
“Cigarettes? You want me to give you my cigarettes?”
“Correct,” said Shuni.
The man took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and placed it on the desk. Without raising his head, Shuni continued to hold out his palm and flick his fingers.
“Now what?” the man asked, making an effort to understand what more was required of him. Then he understood, “Ah,” he said “you want me to give you my lighter!”
“Very good,” said Shuni when the man dropped the lighter next to the cigarettes on the desk. Then, with a profoundly sympathetic expression, he asked, “How long have you been smoking?”
“For more than fifteen years.”
“How many a day?”
“More than twenty,” said the man, lowering his head as though he was admitting to a shameful act.
“That’s a lot. Really a lot,” said Shuni, immediately going on to the next question, “Do you honestly want to give up smoking?”
The answer was obvious to both of them and the man replied, “Of course!”
“I see,” said Shuni in a deep, serious voice. Then he remembered to ask, “What’s your name?”
“Moshe,” he said, scanning the framed diplomas in several languages on the wall behind Shuni. “What are those degrees?”
“I have an MA in
psychology from the USA and I studied self-control in the Far East.”
Moshe’s eyes gave no indication of the value he placed on the framed diplomas.
“Give me your hand, please,” Shuni commanded and, grabbing Moshe’s hand before he had a chance to respond, he dropped a stone wrapped in tinfoil into Moshe’s hand and forced it closed.
“When the stone starts to feel hot, shout.”
“Are you saying that my hand will get hot from the stone?” Moshe sounded doubtful.
“Wait and see for yourself,” Shuni said in a bored voice.
Moshe didn’t have long to wait; the stone immediately became very hot and he dropped it.
“How did you do that?” Moshe asked, amazed by the burning sensation in his hand.
Shuni ignored his reaction, but his face became serious and almost sorrowful as he stared into Moshe’s eyes and asked, “Do you really and truly want to give up your addiction to tobacco?”
“Oh, of course!” Moshe exclaimed, nursing his burning hand. “What haven’t I tried? A special diet, yoga, a weeklong course with the League for the Prevention of Lung Diseases, meditation… what not?”
Something reminded Shuni to ask, “Have you paid my fee to my secretary?”
“What a question!” Moshe replied, deeply offended.
Shuni went into action. He rose from behind the mahogany desk and went over to a wheelchair at the other end of the room. Moshe noticed that the wheels were fixed to a treadmill.
“Sit!” Shuni commanded.
Hesitating a little, Moshe sat in the chair. Before he was properly settled, Shuni pinned him to the chair with a wide safety belt and covered his ears with large red earphones.
“Keep your eyes shut, pay close attention to what the girl is about to say and don’t let go of the arms of the chair!” Shuni instructed.
A gentle voice came through the earphones, “You’re on a beach. You’re calm. You’re storing positive energy.”
Until Sweet Death Arrives Page 17
