by Elik Katzav
I make another round in the car. All the streets in this neighborhood are named after gemstones: Ruby Lane, Diamond Street, Turquoise Road and so on. The main idea was to imbue the development projects with prestige to appeal to the middle-class families who come here in search of apartments. And it has worked, too. Even if you don’t pay attention, it works on your subconscious. The people who live here have little to do with the struggles of day-to-day existence. They don’t really know what it’s like to fight for another buck or go to sleep on an empty stomach when you lose that fight. Only a mile or two away, you’ve got people who have no idea where they’re gonna be sleeping tonight.
I could have made it and gotten my own apartment here, or in a place like this, had I only acquiesced to bend the truth a bit. Maybe I would have, in three or four years’ time. Maybe even with a wife or a girlfriend of my own. But now, all I do is serve the people who live like this.
I leave the car at this nice big green park. Just as well. My rundown Subaru sticks out like a sore thumb anyway. Might as well make the rest of the way on foot.
I arrive at the address Michal gave me and ring the intercom of their penthouse apartment. Michal answers the intercom after a few seconds and buzzes me in.
The entrance to their building’s lobby is completely covered with marble, which brings the temperature a few degrees down. It’s night-time by now, but this being August in Israel, the heat doesn’t go away. Even without the sun, it still lingers.
I do not hang around for the elevator, and instead climb up the three and a half stories all the way to the top floor. After my leg injury and long rehabilitation, I am glad of any opportunity to stretch my legs.
I knock on their door. Yonatan opens it. Looks like they had arrived about ten minutes earlier and are still in the process of making the place look more presentable.
He shows me to the living room, where Michal is already sitting.
“Sorry for the mess,” she says.
I look around. This entire apartment is so squeaky clean it’s as though the cleaning lady just left.
I manage a smile.
- That’s fine.
I guess what Michal said was this generic thing people like her are conditioned to say whenever an unexpected guest shows up, even when the place couldn’t be more tidy.
When you enter the living room, you cannot help but see a statue of a tree running all across the wall, with the family members’ portraits hanging from each branch. I walk over to get a closer look.
“This was my idea, the family tree,” Michal says. “Nowadays, people take pictures of anything at any time, but these images never leave our PC or phone, so I’ve decided to choose a different pic every few months, print it, and add it to our tree. Idan made a face at first,” she smiles briefly, “but he got into it and stayed with it.”
I go over the tree, at the base of which they have hung their wedding photo. Right after that, there’s a pic of Idan as a small baby. The tree climbs further and further up, with additional family photos woven in. Here’s Idan, aged seven, receiving his belt at karate; a birthday party; another pic from Purim. The tree is riddled with pictures featuring their entire lives.
This sure does strike a chord. I am saddened to see what a real family is supposed to look like, or at least the idea of how they live.
As a boy growing up without knowing who his biological parents were, I spent my entire life ‘in transit,’ always on the move. My lot was one foster family after another. I left a boarding school in the north of Israel to live with some family in Jerusalem. I was a kind of gypsy. This was my way of referring to it jokingly when I shared my past with people. I was a carefree drifter.
But then came my time to join the army at eighteen. The Israel Defense Forces is a real melting pot. I got to make friends, find new brothers. You might say that from everything I had experienced, I learned exactly how I do not want my children, if and when I were to have any, to live. I look at the family tree. This is how they are supposed to live: they should have a loving, supporting, close-knit family.
Yonatan returns from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.
- Thanks.
I set it on the coffee table.
- I would like to see Idan’s room before I have my coffee.
“Sure,” Yonatan nods. “Come along,” he says, directing me towards the apartment’s inner rooms. On the way, he gives me the guided tour they must give anyone who happens to drop by. “That’s the master bedroom,” followed by, “these here are the toilet and shower,” and so on. Idan’s room is at the end of the corridor. The room whose door is shut.
The door bears a sign, “Idan’s room.” He made it at in shop class at school. Right below the sign, there’s a No Entrance sticker.
I open the door, turn the light on. and enter.
The room is what you would expect a sixteen-year-old boy’s room to look like. Blue walls, a large blue beanbag cushion in one corner and a bed along the other wall under a window. This bed is wider than a regular junior bed. The sheets are still ruffled, as though Idan had just woken up and was about to return. The drawn curtains are blue as well. The curtain rod has a dream catcher attached to it.
Michal is standing by the door.
“Like I said, she says apologetically, “I didn’t touch a thing.”
Piles of all sorts of clothes, mostly jeans and shirts, are all over the bed. Several pairs of sneakers on the floor, next to an untold number of white socks. There’s also a dresser with a PC screen and a chair next to it on the other side of the room, right below a bookcase. There’s a TV on top of a stand on the opposite side of the room, complete with a cable TV box, a Sony PlayStation console, and discs scattered around the TV.
I walk over to the items of clothing and begin to rifle through the pockets, in search of bus tickets or anything that could give me a clue as to the last time Idan arrived at that location wearing those clothes.
“He was a slob,” Michal says. “Every time he would take his clothes off, he would throw them on the chair,” she points at the chair in front of the PC and bookcase. “Whenever he used the PC, he would pick up the entire pile and throw it back on the bed, until I would cave and add it to the pile of laundry. And then he would complain they were still clean, that all they needed was airing out before he wore them again,” she says with a hint of a smile.
Walking towards the PC tower, I can see it is still attached to the screen. Its back is open, exposing its contents.
“I connected it back together when the police sent it back,” Yonatan says upon entering the room. They both appear to prefer standing in the doorway, as though not to disrupt the way it was left.
“The police told us the PC itself was of no help to them since it was formatted. Besides, I had assumed Idan would be back in a few days’ time, so it’s best he doesn’t get angry at me for taking his PC apart,” Yonatan adds.
I examine the papers on the desk. School books and booklets and folded newspapers. The dresser drawers are packed with papers, quizzes, tests, pens, and more stationary all over the place. The bottom drawer is full of tiny cars.
“That was his collection,” says Yonatan. “We collected them together when he was younger. He loved driving them across the mat. He would follow the pattern, using it as a road. Once he got older, he decided to hang on to them. Every once in a while, when I looked in on him, I noticed he was taking the cars out and playing with them while watching TV or just sitting and looking out the window, kinda daydreaming as he was spinning the wheels between his fingers.”
“He felt very strongly about his collection,” Michal says. “Before he kept it in this drawer, it used to fill the shelf, dozens of cars. One day, when his buddies from school came over, they teased him for playing with toy cars. That very evening, he picked them all up and put them away in this drawer, but still, he wouldn’t part with these ca
rs, the collection he shared with his dad,” she’s wiping her tears. However nice to reminisce about, these memories are making her upset right now.
I put the tiny car back in the drawer, shut it, and sit on Idan’s swivel chair. As I turn, I grab the TV’s remote from the dresser, where it’s laying among the notebooks and books, and turn towards the TV set.
One click, and the TV comes to life.
- What did Idan like to watch?
“You know,” Yonatan replies, “whatever boys like to watch: action, sci-fi, cars, tech-”
- How about the History Channel?
“No,” he retorts, “we added the History Channel for me. I do not believe Idan ever watched it.”
- Funny you should say that. Look at the list of programs he recorded.
I use the remote to highlight their titles on the screen.
In addition to Flash, Agents of Shield, and Top Gear, in line with what Yonatan mentioned, we are suddenly seeing program titles that are hardly what you would expect the average sixteen-year-old boy would watch: a historic journey to a different Israel; talk shows; another history documentary on the rise of Christianity and the decline of other religions; an episode on ancient Egypt; a news piece about the Khan Museum in Ashkelon and an ad from some election campaign dating back six years ago. Certainly not something you would think a teenager would watch. Not only that, he’d also taped several programs.
- Did he follow politics in any way?
Michal and Yonatan are looking at me like a Martian.
“We had no idea he was watching this stuff,” Michal says, and adds, “could be part of his school work. I really don’t know,” she sounds pensive.
- I’d appreciate if you could check with his teachers whether he had any assignments relating to these topics.
I make a note of the titles and hand the list to Michal.
- It will allow us to treat this as part of his regular school work.
“I will look into tomorrow,” Michal nods in agreement. “I will also ask about these recorded shows you found. They too could be related to school; perhaps this museum at Ashkelon they mentioned in the program was part of his history lesson or field trip, I don’t know,” she says quietly as she lowers her head.
- Unless you have any objection, I’ll take the cable TiVo with me. I don’t know why he saved those programs, but in case it’s relevant, it might help me figure out what he was thinking about.
“Sure,” says Yonatan. “Take whatever you think might be of use to you.”
The pile of stuff by the door for me to take now consists of the PC, the TiVo and the two newspapers I found on the dresser.
- Did you by any chance monitor the websites he was on?
“We sure did, when he was younger, to safeguard him from meeting people who take advantage of kids online. The internet is crawling with people we need to keep away from our children,” Yonatan is leaning against the doorframe. He seems to age an entire decade as he says this.
“Anyway,” he stands up again, “that was two years ago, more even, when I realized Idan was old enough to figure out who he was interacting with online, so I trusted him. Besides, it’s nearly impossible to monitor his activity during the online games he plays and chats on.”
He tilts his head. “So I had confidence in him. When he was online, he was with his friends the whole time, practically. It was like when I was his age, my friends and I would hang out by the bleachers and tease each other, mostly. So for Idan and his buddies, the internet was their virtual bleachers.”
“On the one hand,” Michal says abruptly, still looking down, “you do your best to protect him from everything out there and you’re always worried about the outside world, but-” her voice is on the verge of cracking. “On the other hand, you are constantly anxious about everything he is up to on his PC, under your own roof, so you can’t even feel safe in your own home.”
- I see.
I am suddenly reminded of all those cases of missing children we handled at the Counter Cult Squad.
- That is why kids today grow up so much faster, they are smarter and think they know better than everyone. They are exposed to information, which they evaluate within split seconds, accepting or rejecting it. They’ve got the intelligence and the info. What they’re missing is the wisdom to use this knowledge. You see, that sort of acumen comes only with age. According to the way you two have been describing Idan, he had this kind of wisdom. Moreover, he had the backing of a loving family, which gave him the confidence to grow into a confident young man.
Michal is bowing her head, supported by Yonatan, leaning on his chest as she sobs softly.
- It doesn’t look like he ran away from home because he wasn’t treated well here.
I pause for a second and continue.
- Quite the opposite, in fact. He seems very self-assured about everything he does, including the phone calls, when you managed to get through. It looks like he was at least trying to do something on his own. I am thinking this might be something he wanted to succeed in all by himself, without your assistance. This is his first time venturing out of the nest. He wants to handle something as an adult. Why did he turn his cell phone off? I cannot answer this for now, but I guarantee you we will be able to ask him these questions once we find him, because, in my opinion, when he is done with what he wanted to accomplish, he will make sure we find him.
I pull my phone out and flick the camera on. It’s always best to get pictures of the room, so that another set of eyes would be able to have a look and maybe notice something I am not seeing at the moment. I take a panoramic shot of the room, moving slowly in order to capture the entire room frame by frame. With today’s tech, you can merge all these pictures into one 3D image which would enable the viewer to see the entire room like they are standing right in the middle, zoom in on objects, look left and right and move around just like you were there.
I take another look around the room, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Chances are I’ll have to come here again and have another look by daylight.
The things I collected is waiting on the floor. I pick them up and head for the living room.
I lay these things by the door and turn to Yonatan.
- We can have our coffee together now.
Michal rushes over to another room and returns with a brown cardboard folder containing the police case file.
I open it. The first page is covered almost entirely by a picture of Idan. A teenager aged nearly sixteen according to the file, he’s smiling, a bit self conscious. His eyes convey wisdom. He has fair skin and dark, curly hair. He doesn’t strike me as particularly athletic. He’s wearing a black tee with an inscription of some band I’ve never heard of.
Over coffee, the Ben Yehudas tell me Idan’s life story.
It sounds like a run-of-the-mill tale about a boy growing up in a loving family. An only child like his father, and his father before him. They loved to travel. When they were younger, they went abroad quite a bit. Idan was into computers from a very young age. His school friends are the same kids he meets online after school. At my request, Michal gives me a list of Idan’s closest friends, complete with their cell phone numbers.
Other than that, seeing as Idan wasn’t really into social activities like parties and so on, he never had a girlfriend. This struck me as one of the aspects Michal and Yonatan were less keen on in their son’s world, but they never pressured him, hoping he’d come out of his shell and computer stuff and hang out in the real world more, go out with his friends and maybe meet a girl. They knew forcing the issue would be of no use so they waited for things to unfold on their own over time.
As with any other parents I’ve gotten to know, they too would have liked Idan to pay more attention to his studies and less to games, but his grades were high even without him making an effort, so this was another issue they didn
’t pester him about and let him decide on his own when to study.
It’s getting to be nearly ten o’clock. I excuse myself and explain I have another appointment to keep. I collect the PC and the other stuff from the hall and say my goodbyes, not before telling the both of them I shall keep them posted about any developments.
I return to the car, place the PC on the passenger seat and head back to Tel Aviv.
I hope Rose is still awake, waiting up for me.
Chapter 3
The music on my CD plays. Michael is singing “You Are Not Alone.” I pick up my cell phone and call Rose.
Bat Sheva Avidan, or Rose Quartz as she calls herself nowadays, was my foster brother’s girlfriend at the time he asked her to help me out with my rehabilitation when I got let go from the force.
However unconventional her methods may have seemed, her yoga helped get my body back in shape after what happened at Nazareth. Not only did she help with my physical recovery, she also tried to help me cope mentally with what I’ve experienced, but she doesn’t get it, she can’t comprehend what I actually went through.
Not that this ever stopped her from trying.
True, she sure does love her mantras, dropping chock loads of fortune cookie lines all through the conversation, but underneath it all, she really believes in her own ability to be of help, to heal, and she’s the only person about whom I can truly say she can heal both body and soul.
Oh, and she’s a hacker too, or at least used to be, back when she still answered to the name Bat Sheva Avidan. She wasn’t just a hacker, but one of those you read about in the papers. She was part of that group which, according to the reports, hacked the CIA in just under twelve hours. She was a radical and a borderline criminal back when she was still a girl, aged fifteen. She vented her rage over her parents’ divorce, in which unraveled her father’s infidelity towards her mom by uncovering his texts and voicemails, through hacking into the servers of a major cellular carrier. She sifted through the data she collected and published a long list of text messages between numerous married men and their lovers. This prank alone resulted in dozens if not hundreds of divorce cases, not to mention all those people who lost their job for not preventing her hack to begin with.
