Her face was small, guileless; a pair of thick-lensed
glasses sat atop an overturned leather notebook on her bed near a large oblong box of chocolates, two cardboard cartons, and a few newspaper clippings. “Please,” she said, offering him the box of chocolates, “help yourself.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Danny Benizri muttered, his eyes on the chair sitting in the corner, under the window. “May I?” he asked. He had not gotten where he had in life by being overly sensitive or hesitant. Without waiting for an answer, he dragged the chair close to her bed, ignoring the frightened way she moved her legs as if to edge away from him. Something about the anxious look she had cast his way, her pouting lips that gave her a pampered look, made him want to touch her. He could have brushed her hand as one would a friend’s, or placed it warmly, intimately, on her knee, on her shoulder, on her arm, but instead he trusted his intuition and laid it on the edge of the bed.
“Please,” he said obsequiously, “I’m at your service. I understand you have no way of getting home, so here I am.”
“No, that’s not necessary,” she said, taken aback. “I’ll have them call me a cab.”
“A government minister does not ride in taxicabs,” Benizri said aggressively, never lifting his eyes from her face. “Hasn’t enough happened to you already?”
“I can’t accept a ride from you,” she said. He watched as her fingers toyed nervously with the edge of the sheet. There was no evidence at all of the power people associated with her; he himself had always thought of her as the essence of aggression, precisely because, he claimed, she was a woman and felt the need to prove herself. It was strange to think that this woman in the pale blue flannel robe with a white flower embroidered on the collar, the woman who was now holding her robe closed with one hand and sweeping up her unruly curls with the other, was the same woman who aroused such animosity in the Hulit factory workers; even at police headquarters that morning one of Shimshi’s friends had spat when someone mentioned her name, and she had, on more than one occasion, raised his own ire by what he perceived as her indifference, her arrogance, her smugness.
He was tempted to tell her that in person she seemed completely different, but instead he asked why she could not accept a ride from him.
“You’ve already—”
“I understand there’s no one available to take you home,” he said, touching his knee to hers.
“No, not at the moment. My husband is only due back in the country tomorrow.”
“How can that be?” Benizri asked with calculated sanctimonious-ness. “You’re in the hospital, and he’s … abroad? Didn’t someone let him know?”
She winced with displeasure. “He’s a businessman, he’s got business overseas, things that were set up way in advance. He left the day before yesterday, before this …”
Benizri wanted to ask about children, or how it was that no friends were at her bedside, but something held him back. “Why won’t you take a ride with me?” he asked, cocking his head. “That way, you’ll be safe: if you get kidnapped, I’ll already be there.”
She smiled wanly, but he took it as acquiescence.
“I’ll wait outside until you’re dressed, okay?”
She gave a vague nod, and Benizri went out into the hallway. This time he did not dare stand near the curtain at the window to her room.
Fifteen minutes later, as he stood waiting, a nurse appeared walking briskly and carrying a bag. She entered the minister’s room while Benizri positioned himself close enough to hear her explaining about the inhaler and what the minister should do in case of emergency, if she should have trouble breathing. He was anxious for the nurse to depart.
“May I?” he asked, nearly running into her.
The nurse glanced at him, a look of recognition in her eyes. “Aren’t you—”
“Yes, I am,” he confirmed quickly. “May I come in?”
“She’s ready to check out,” the nurse said, a wrinkle of surprise forming between her brows. “Is she expecting you?”
Benizri nodded and knocked on the door, heard the feeble affirmation, and entered.
Everything went smoothly until they got stuck in a traffic jam on the road leading up from Ein Kerem. A long row of cars stretched out in
front of them, and the road was blocked by a police van, an ambulance, and curious onlookers who had stopped at the bend in the narrow road to peer at the overturned truck, which looked like the carcass of a large animal, and the car that lay crushed next to it. Benizri shut the engine off, and the minister sighed. He paid only partial attention to the comment she was making about the number of traffic casualties in the state of Israel and the aggressiveness of Israeli drivers, their vul-garity, their impatience, their lack of manners, and all the rest. Until then they had spoken with pleasant reserve. He still had not dared to raise the matter he had come to discuss with her. Now he pointed at the road ahead, noting that it was not fit for car travel, could in no way support all the traffic. “The problem is not the personality of the drivers,” he said, igniting the engine, “it’s that the government does not take care of infrastructure, the state of the roads, which is something you know about only too well from your cabinet meetings: no Israeli government is prepared to invest in programs that will only come to fruition after its term. No government is going to improve roads that the next government will reap the praises for. That’s the guiding principle of Israeli politics: politicians take care of their own egos, they take care to get reelected, but they won’t go out of their way to bring about real change because then their successors will get the credit.”
The minister’s lips curled in displeasure as Benizri spoke. When he paused, he noticed that she was about to say something but had decided against it. “What?” he asked defiantly. “Isn’t everything I just said true?”
“Of course not,” she answered angrily. “What do you think? That I don’t care what happens in this country?” Now she was enraged. “Do I look like someone who spends all her time looking out for the hypo-critical interests of politicians? Do you think I’m a cynic?”
Benizri licked his lips and looked sideways at her profile, noting the beautiful line of her lips and the light blush that had risen in her cheeks, breaching her pallor. “No,” he answered slyly, weighing his next move. “No, you don’t seem like a cynic to me. On the contrary, you come across as a person of principle. Someone whose humanity is accessible,” he added, falling silent for a moment, hoping his words would sink in, go to work on her. Watching her hands lying idly in her lap he said, “That’s why I want to speak to you about Shimshi and his friends.”
“What is there to say?” she sputtered, her hands now clasped.
“Those hooligans are going to sit in jail.”
“They’re not hooligans,” Benizri said, turning the wheel to allow an ambulance to pass on its way to the emergency room. The police van moved off to the side of the road, and the cars in front of them and facing them began to move. “They’re just a bunch of desperate men, and you know that.”
“What?!” she exclaimed, alert. “Desperate? Very nice! Then every desperate person should kidnap a government minister and threaten his life, and people will say he’s just an unfortunate guy!”
“Listen, Timnah,” he said, daring to use her first name. “Do you mind if I call you Timnah?” Without waiting for a response he hastened to add, “When everything’s said and done, you and I … we have … I thought that because of what happened to us, together, I could approach you and tell you … ask you … ask you to withdraw your charges against them, because I know you’re not one of those people who … Look, in the end it all worked out, and you’re not a vengeful person, so I was thinking … I’m asking—”
The snort that escaped her lips contained surprise and anger and astonishment. Then she fell silent, the windshield wipers squeaking on the glass due to the light rain, and they made their way slowly along the narrow, pitted road, the car lurching forward, then speeding as traffic cleared and the minister, frightened, wrapped her hand around her neck, her thin gold wedding band glittering. After a while, she said dryly, “You are absolutely nuts,” adding in an even voice that there was no way of withdrawing the charges. “It’s in the hands of the prosecu-tor’s office now, not mine,” she concluded. “Kidnapping and the intent to kill are criminal offenses, there is no arguing that.” She added that even if the matter were hers to decide (which it was not), she would not retract her claim against the Hulit workers because that would encourage the anarchy already rampant everywhere, where might makes right; it was inconceivable that if people wanted to achieve something, they had to resort to physical strength.
As they passed the enormous monster-sculpture in a playground on
the road leading to Kiryat Yovel, Benizri said, “You haven’t considered the fact that they’ve been trying to
