Limassol (2 page)

For the time being, this was a side job for me and I couldn't give it too much time. Every day, I interrogated detainees, as on an assembly line. I devoted all my attention to them. I talked with them, touched them, breathed stifling air with them—and I didn't look at the clock. Sometimes I stayed at night because there were major arrests and the stench of a terrorist attack was in the air. I tried to talk with Sigi twice a day on the phone. She gave me brief reports about the child. When I expressed interest in what was happening with her, I got only fleeting answers. She knew my mind was somewhere else, that I wasn't really listening. I got home at weird hours, dead tired. Sigi would be sleeping or pretending to be. Early in the morning, while I was still sleeping, if I had even come home, she took the child to kindergarten and went straight to work from there.

I asked them to bring me the last tapes. I had gotten written summaries of all the conversations, but I liked to hear the speech of the target myself, to get close to him, to try to understand the human being. An older woman with a white braid, who looked like a librarian, brought me the tapes. She just sat herself down across from me. I usually worked with Arab prisoners and used monitors in Arabic; I wasn't familiar with her internal branch.

“Interrogators usually don't want to hear the conversations themselves,” she said.

“I guess I'm different,” I replied.

“I hope you won't give them to anyone,” she said with a stern expression.

I raised my head from the papers of the night's interrogation. A guy from Shechem had disappeared from home three days ago, and his father insisted in the interrogation that he didn't know where he was. “Excuse me?” I stared at her.

“Maybe that was unnecessary,” she tried to explain. “But working with Jews is different, altogether different. I took the liberty of saying that because this is the first time you've worked with our desk. Leaks are a great risk. You can't know who knows that woman. Maybe somebody lived near her, maybe somebody was in the army with her, we can't know. So we're much stricter about procedures.”

“Completely unnecessary,” I said. “I didn't start working here yesterday, and I won't be taking the tapes anywhere.”

“She sounds like a terrific woman,” she muttered. “I once read her book. Not bad. At any rate,” and she stood up, “I'm sure you'll be nice to her. Everything is here in the bag. Give it back to us when you're done.”

I won't put her on a curved chair with her hands tied behind her, if that's what you mean, I thought. Nor will I put a bag smelling of shit over her head.

Late at night, after a whole day of meetings and evaluations of the attack that took place right under our noses, I dropped the tape in the recorder and listened with earphones. The conversations were continuous and brief. I could jump from one conversation to another, like songs on a CD.

The first conversation was with a certain publisher; they called to ask what was happening with the book she was editing. It's trash for servant girls, she said, and every page was torture for her. Finally she asked about her check, the publisher said there was a problem with an outstanding debt and a garnishment order on the money owed her, she had to take care of that so she could get the money. “What's going on, Daphna?” asked the editor in chief. “How did all those debts get created?” “Drop it,” she told him. “You can't help anyway.”

Then she talked to a lawyer, who was impatient with her and not very pleasant, and kept saying he was very busy. She pleaded with him, was aggressive, asked when the trial was. The lawyer said they hadn't yet gotten the review of the probation service, that Yotam hadn't made it to a meeting with them. “That's very bad,” he stressed. “The probation service is his only hope. You know he's on probation—that judge will toss him in jail without batting an eyelid. I don't think your son is built for jail. They'll eat him alive there. You've got to talk to him, he needs to go to the probation officer, make a good impression, agree to go into a drug rehab program. Otherwise, neither I nor anybody else can help him. Now I've got to go, people are waiting for me.”

My ears were burning. I still had to go to the Russian Compound that night to meet some interrogation subjects myself, I didn't see when I'd have a chance to get home. Nevertheless, I played the next conversation.

The man from Gaza spoke good Hebrew. In the conversation with him, Daphna was another woman, completely different: not desperate like the one who talked with the lawyer, not impatient and bitter as in the conversation with the publisher. “How do you feel?” she asked him with concern and warmth. “Still so much pain?”

He told her he went to the seashore that afternoon, somebody drove him. There are families who live on the shore in tents all summer, he said, because it's too stifling in the camps. Whole clans, the women dressed as in Saudi Arabia, go into the water with all their clothes on. He tried to get away from them all a bit, but it was very crowded. Not even the sea helped him anymore.

“Come here, we'll go down to the beach on Gordon Street,” laughed Daphna, trying to cheer him up. “You remember how we'd go into the water at night, when you'd teach us the songs of Abd El-Wahab?”

“I want to come,” said the man from Gaza. “I miss you, Daphna. Have you got any news about my case?”

“I don't know who to talk to anymore,” said Daphna. “I sent letters to everyone I could, I don't know anybody anymore. Once there was somebody in the army that I knew, but he was discharged. I called Shimon Peres's office, they promised to give me an answer. I'm willing to move heaven and earth for you, Hani. I don't know how. It's not like it used to be. Is it my imagination or did it used to be better?”

“It was always shit,” he laughed, and he went on in a slow and precise Hebrew. “But at least we could laugh. Today they can shoot you like a dog, let you rot . . . Oh, it hurts,
ya'lan . . .
I'm sorry I curse, Daphna, it hurts too much.”

“Don't you have something for the pain?” she asked.

“There's nothing they can give me. The situation is really bad. Can't sleep at night for the pain. I tried hashish, but it didn't help, just brings bad thoughts, and alcohol is forbidden. I'm waiting for the end now, Daphna. This isn't a life.”

“My thoughts are with you,” said Daphna quietly. “And I'll get you out of there, don't worry. I'll do whatever it takes. Call me in a few days.”

I invested too much time in those literary conversations, suddenly I noticed that it was awfully late. I ran down to the parking lot and dashed onto the freeway toward Jerusalem. My cell phone was full of messages, they called me to come urgently, in the air there was a sense that things were spinning out of control: somebody with a belt of standard explosives and nails was walking around in the area, on lighted streets, in front of cafes, looking for a place with action to set it off, in a crowd of living flesh he would turn into dead flesh, and we couldn't find him.

After I passed Latrun, there was an enormous traffic jam, apparently there had been an accident. I put the blue siren on top of the car and drove up onto the shoulder, the cops at the wreck of the vehicles looked at me and waved me on with their flashlights. I dashed down the slope of Motsa. I opened the window because the heat of the Coastal Plain had dissipated and was replaced by the wind of Jerusalem. The square was empty when I got there, but the spires of the Russian Church were lighted beautifully for the tourists who didn't come. In front of the area of the police station marked off with barbed wire, I got out of the car a moment, called home, asked Sigi to talk with the child. “He fell asleep a long time ago,” she said. “Where are you? When are you coming home?”

I went into the human pens to spend the night.

 

I tried to persuade Haim to take me off that side job. He was one of the last holdouts of his generation in the service—almost fifty years old, one leg crushed in a screwed-up mission in Lebanon, a workaholic. When I first met him, he didn't wear a
kippa
, even though he always was observant. In recent years he was wearing a black
kippa
again.

“You can put anybody on that file,” I said. “Take somebody from the Jewish branch, take somebody from the girls, I don't have time for those literature lessons. I'm running around like a maniac, I haven't taken a shower in two days, I smell worse than the detainees. Do me a favor, Haim, take me off it.”

Haim growled that I was the only one who could do that job. Her story is complicated and only I could connect with her background; he couldn't send any of the butchers to her, not even a girl. Besides, I write well. He likes to read the reports of my interrogations, I don't write endless platitudes like the others. And I shouldn't forget that, in my job interview, I told them I was taking a course in creative writing. “It couldn't have sounded worse if you had said you shoot heroin,” laughed Haim. “I barely convinced them to accept you. They didn't want such bohemians. They were afraid you were a spy from the press. Aren't you sorry sometimes you didn't become a writer?”

I told Haim to leave me alone.

“You really could have been a writer,” he flattered me now. “You've got a discerning eye. The good ones really do use common sense, not force. That takes self-confidence, letting yourself be sensitive, not being swept up in bestiality. Looking at a human being, putting yourself into his head, not putting the bomb in him right away.”

I tried to recall the series of detainees from recent days that I had interrogated, and no face was etched in my mind. “I'm losing that, Haim,” I said. “I'm also turning into a butcher. I don't have time anymore to be sophisticated with them. You've got to work with force from the first moment. They don't understand you when you're sensitive. They also follow the rules of the game, expect humiliation, beating, pants full of shit, so they'll be justified in talking. They hate us anyway, and they want to earn our hatred honestly. There's too much in the pipeline, there's never a lull. No time for conversations into the night, to give him a cigarette, to hear about his grandfather who escaped on a donkey in the Nakba to arrive slowly to his brother who blew himself up. Elegance is dead, Haim, it's not like it was in your day.”

Haim looked at me and seemed a little scared. I didn't usually talk a lot. “You need rest,” he said to me distantly. “When was the last time you were home? When did you spend an evening with your wife?”

“Stop it, Haim,” I said. “You're talking fantasies. I can't stop the race now, Haim, I don't have to tell you that. Even when I'm home, my mind is down there.”

“You've got to rest sometimes,” said Haim, with a worried look I had never seen before. “Clean your head, think of other things. At least on the Sabbath. And the holidays are coming. Forbidden to mix prayers with foreign thoughts, forbidden to talk about money. That's why I returned to God. In time, you'll discover the greatness in that. Be with your wife. Sit at the table with her. Have another kid, later you'll be sorry you waited too long. Take a load off your shoulders, nothing will get away from you. And don't beat up anybody. That will destroy you.”

Haim's look stayed with me for long hours and many days afterward, but that very evening, as I was getting ready to go home in time to give the child a bath, my cell phone began running hot with more reports about the guy who disappeared, wearing his nice belt, like a bridegroom on his wedding day. I immediately went where I had to go and at dawn I was hoarse from shouting. That night I wasn't sensitive or elegant with anybody.

 

I got to the second meeting on time, shaved and clean, wearing Bermuda shorts, looking like someone who'd struck it rich in high tech and taken early retirement. I was slightly excited. Going up the stairs, I was gasping. I expected to sit at the table in the cool kitchen, with the smell of rosemary, spin out a conversation about my imaginary text, talk with a cultured and terrific person.

But this time, the apartment was dark, the blinds were closed, she opened the door in a robe as if I had woken her up, her hair was a mess.

“I'm sorry, maybe I got the time mixed up,” I muttered awkwardly at the door.

“No, come in,” she said with a nod. “Just give me a minute to get myself together. You can sit in the living room. I'll open the window a little.”

A bit of light came into the room and she hurried to the inner rooms of the apartment. On the wall was a big print of a Tumarkin, a woman standing in a circle of stones of a sheikh's grave, with a sketch of a cathedral above it. Maybe that's Daphna herself in the picture, twenty years ago. A few minutes later, she came out wearing jeans and a long faded cotton shirt that hid the lines of her body. She was pale and looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes. I looked for signs of blows and didn't find any.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, there was a little action,” she chuckled. “Uninvited guests came. Sorry about the welcome, I was sleeping a little before you came. Now I'm fine.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

Suddenly she looked small and vulnerable, in need of protection. “A few more minutes, OK?” she asked. I heard her walking around the inside rooms and the kitchen, feverishly gathering things and throwing them, opening windows to let in air, destroying evidence of what had happened.

When she came back, her face was more composed and her hair was tied back.

“You're sure . . . ”

“Everything's fine,” she insisted and furtively changed the props. “Come on, let's talk about your book.” She filled the kettle. “I thought about you a little. The subject you've chosen really is interesting, maybe something can be built from it. I hope I didn't discourage you too much. I think we left your man on the ship on the way to the island, right?”