Michael Ohayon. For some reason her eyes had fixed on his neck; it was long and narrow, a blue vein winding its way above the clavicle, and it seemed to her that she could see the vein throbbing; she had noticed his hands, too, the fingers tapered, dark and graceful, exactly the way she liked them: they gave her gooseflesh, those fingers. She had to shake herself free of them and turn her face away. What would have happened had he known what she was thinking? But just at that moment he had not been looking at her, focusing instead on the toothpick he had just removed from between his lips; “I can’t manage with substitutes,” she’d heard him say to the other policeman, the one with the green eyes, who had slapped him on the arm and said, “You made an agreement? So stick to it. You wanted Yuval to stop smoking, right?
Well, you’ve got to sacrifice something. You’re the one who’s always telling me that being a parent means having to make sacrifices, that parenting is sacrifice.” And from this exchange she had understood that he was married and father to at least one kid, who was already old enough to smoke. Married. Everyone was married. All the good ones, anyway. Even the not-so-good ones. How was it that men, even if they were ugly or stupid, always had someone? They were never alone.
Plenty of times she’d seen them with beautiful, intelligent women, women with everything going for them, even if they themselves weren’t worth shit. What about her? How was it that she … Schreiber was interested, she knew he was interested; a few days earlier Aviva had whispered to her, over the sink in the second-floor bathroom,
“Hey, Natasha, haven’t you noticed that Schreiber is crazy about you?”
She had looked at her and chuckled. But Schreiber hadn’t said anything to her, in fact he was really shy. He tried to come off austere, abrasive … maybe it was because of Hefetz. Maybe because of Hefetz he didn’t dare to approach her in that way. But he’d known her first, before Hefetz. And if Hefetz needed something from her, never mind what, she planned to take advantage of it—she didn’t know how exactly, but …
Schreiber parked the van at the corner, at a spot from which they could see the four-story building, whose barred, curtainless windows overlooked the street. All the buildings on the street were semi-detached and built of Jerusalem stone gone gray and dingy; all were four stories high with one arched window on each floor. No shrub or flower added even a spot of color to the uninterrupted stone land-scape, the black shadows cast by the window grilles and the fences, or the wet pavement on the street.
“They don’t even have any trees around here,” she said to Schreiber.
“Naturally. Everybody knows the ultra-Orthodox don’t like green-ery, that nobody plants anything in their neighborhoods,” he muttered, as if he knew what she was thinking. He pulled the curtain on the rear window so that it parted slightly. The moment he looked up to the third-floor window the blinds snapped shut, as though someone had caught him spying.
“Check this out,” he said as he backed away from the parted curtains, wiping his bare and shaven head, which was already glistening with moisture. “I just get near them, and I break out in a sweat.”
Fishing around in his shirt pocket, he added, “It’s Hanukkah, mid-December, freezing cold, and I’m sweating.”
“Take a picture of the entrance,” Natasha requested. “Do me a favor, film it quickly.”
“Okay, okay,” he assured her, rooting about in the pockets of his safari vest.
“What are you looking for now?” she asked him impatiently.
“What’s so urgent in those pockets?”
“Found it,” Schreiber said as he pulled a small, light blue tin from one of the side pockets of his vest. “That’s what’s so urgent—”
“Not now,” she pleaded. “Later, when we’re finished. Come on, Schreiber.”
He sighed and returned the tin to his pocket. “How do you expect me to pass the time, and in this neighborhood no less? You know what it does to me to be here!” he scolded.
His father had died a few years earlier, and he had thought he would have an easier time of it then, that he would no longer have to mas-querade as a religious man. (“I had no doubts at all,” Schreiber would tell people who asked what kind of doubts about religion he had had that had caused him to stop wearing a skullcap and become secular.
“No doubts whatsoever, I simply became a heretic.”) Still, he wore the skullcap on visits to his aging mother in Bnei Brak; even his oldest brother, who lived with his family in their parents’ house, had no idea.
“Schreiber,” Natasha said, gazing into his hazel eyes, “I am so … I owe you so much, not just for this but —”
“Oh, come off it, Natasha,” he said, embarrassed.
He had never been capable of accepting her gratitude, even when he had picked her up from the doctor’s office on Palmach Street and brought her to his place in Gan Rehavia. She recalled the odor of mold and dampness in his basement apartment, only half a barred window rising up above street level, the neon light that stayed lit in one room all the time, the underpants and socks left hanging to dry on the building’s hot-water pipes, which ran through his flat.
He said, “If only you would tell me who it was that gave you this information—”
“I’ve already told you you’re not going to get it out of me, so don’t ask me a lot of questions,” she warned him. “I don’t reveal my sources.”
Schreiber inclined his head to the side and regarded her with amuse-ment. “Don’t I have rights as a partner?” he teased her. While speaking, he moved to the backseat of the van and positioned the camera lens in the parted curtain. Then he returned to the front seat and removed the tin again, this time extracting from it a pinch of reddish grass and a piece of rolling paper.
“Now?” Natasha protested. “Right now? Do you really have to?”
“What are you so worried about?” he asked dismissively. “Do you really think anyone’s going to show up? You’ve been had! Nobody’s around, nobody’s on his way here, all the blinds are shut, nothing.
What do you expect me to do with myself ? I’m not even allowed to listen to the radio, for crying out loud.” He leaned forward and wet the paper with saliva.
“Of course things are dead right now,” she argued, “because everyone’s at school or at work, but—”
“At their yeshivas,” he said irritably, correcting her. “They’re all in yeshiva while their wives are working. You don’t know what you’re talking about, you don’t have a clue how they live. Not a clue,” he said, and went to lie down on the backseat.
“My sources told me,” she began, with elaborate seriousness, imagining the woman she had spoken with by phone, who had a hoarse, unaccented voice; a child had been crying in the background. For some reason she was sorry her informant hadn’t been a man. In her mind’s eye she replaced her with a man with a French accent. Truth be told, she would have preferred it be a man, they were more reliable: it’s like they acted on some principle, not because of some personal vendetta. That’s just the way it was. She pictured a bearded man in a dark suit and hat, his head turned to the side whenever he spoke with her, because suddenly they were no longer conversing by phone—as had happened with the hoarse-voiced woman who had called her “my dear”—but rather in the hallway of the television station, on the stairs leading to the canteen. “My sources told me,” she said, imagining now the Frenchman, “specifically, that we’re talking early afternoon. They said not in the evening, because then everyone’s around—”
“Ah, your sources,” Schreiber said, exaggerating each word. He yawned. “What more can I say? There’s nothing I can say where sources are concerned.” He lit the thin cigarette, took a deep drag from it, coughed, and offered it to Natasha.
“Leave me alone,” she said angrily. “Just leave me alone.”
“Natasha,” he pleaded, “I’m so damned tired from last night, and you know how it is, I don’t feel so great when I get near them. I just, it’s something physical, medical, I don’t know, they … I just don’t feel well,” he tried explaining, waving the smoke away with his hand.
“Anyway, this joint is really weak. But without a little help, I wouldn’t be able—”
“Shhh. Shut up!” she hissed urgently under her breath, alarmed.
“Look over there and start filming. Fast, from the end of the street—”
Schreiber sat up and looked through the part in the curtains.
“You see,” Natasha said. “Take a look and stop telling me I’m making things up.”
