this sphere, and not just because his marriage to Yuval’s mother had failed; since the time of his divorce, eighteen years earlier, he had found no woman he wanted to spend his life with. Not that he had not fallen in love. He had, in fact, and more than once. But somehow it was always with the “wrong” women, love always involved some insurmountable obstacle—an objective one—
like the two women who were already married.
The telephone rang, and although it was nearly two in the morning, the ringing did not disturb him. He was happy to be summoned, since he could not sleep. “The torment you’re experiencing has nothing to do with having quit smoking; after two or three weeks your body has weaned itself.” This was what Emmanuel Shorer, his close friend and boss, had told him. It was Emmanuel who had taken responsibility for serving as a father figure to Michael fifteen years earlier and had brought him to work for the police when he was desperate for money due to Nira’s demands for alimony (and thus had in an instant, at a crucial moment, prevented him from completing his doctoral thesis on the relations between masters and apprentices in the guilds of the Middle Ages, and from entering academic life). “Your suffering is psychological. Believe me, I’ve been there, I know what you’re going through,” Shorer had reminded him. “Do you prefer to wait until it’s too late for you? Until you get a heart attack, like I did? Isn’t shortness of breath enough for you?” And yesterday, when Michael had returned to work after two weeks of vacation during which he had spent most of his time flat on his back at home, Balilty, the intelligence officer who fancied himself Michael’s close friend, had looked him over. “Having a rough time, are you?” he had asked. “Terrible,” Michael had confessed, without—for once—censoring his words, and proceeded to tell him about his difficulties concentrating and his insomnia.
“It’s all in your head,” Balilty had said, as expected. “Your body is clean, but that’s what happens with psychological addiction.”
“Well, what about the mind? Doesn’t that count for something?”
Michael had teased. “Isn’t what we feel reality?”
If one more person said something to him about psychology, the soul, and the ethereal nature of emotional addiction … He had been smoking nonstop since the age of seventeen, more than thirty years, at least twenty or thirty cigarettes a day; he was incapable of imagining himself without smoking. Were it not for his pact with Yuval, that together they would quit (Yuval himself had begun smoking at sixteen; how was it possible to stop your teenage son from making the same mistakes you had?), he never would have managed it. A few times he had been tempted; there were cigarettes in the house, he had not thrown them out. All he had to do was enter the kitchen and, without looking, stick his hand into the back of the bottom drawer.
“What’s the big deal?” a faint, deep voice full of intelligence and secret echoes whispered seductively. “Just one, your last.” But that seductive voice was ignoring the next cigarette. “Not even a single puff,” Balilty had warned him. “I’m talking from experience. How many times did I quit before I really quit? That one cigarette isn’t the problem. It’s the next one after it. Because what’s the point of smoking one cigarette if
there isn’t another one to follow? There’s no point in smoking just one.
A cigarette is simply one drag that leads to the next. A cigarette is the next cigarette. And that way you find yourself right back where you started in no time.” He had inclined his head and gazed peculiarly at Michael, then he had smiled and added, “Just don’t get fat. It’s easy to substitute food for cigs, and that special look of yours could be ruined.
If you get fat, the girls won’t chase after you so much. Then again,” he said, thinking aloud, “you … you don’t use artificial sweetener for sugar and you don’t drink instant coffee in place of Turkish coffee.
What I mean is, you’re not the type for substitutes. Maybe you could smoke an after-dinner cigar in another year or two, cigars aren’t dangerous because you don’t inhale into your lungs.”
Well, he was not eating more and had not gained weight, perhaps because he could not fall asleep and had started walking at night. At first it was around the neighborhood, and later it was longer distances; once he had walked all the way to the village of Aminadav, where a night watchman had had to rescue him from a band of wild dogs.
It was the investigations officer who had been summoned to Natasha’s apartment by Schreiber who phoned Michael at two o’clock in the morning. “I figured you’d be interested in this because I understand from Zamira that you’re dealing with two cases from Israel Television.”
(Zamira, the division coordinator, knew everything that was going on, since all written material—work schedules, transfers of materials and files—passed through her hands and was under her authority. She was a large woman of forty with especially thick legs who nonetheless insisted on wearing short, narrow skirts topped with billowy blouses, her short blond ponytail swishing from side to side. She always gave preferential treatment to Michael and told him of her woes with men, and especially about the problems she was having with her teenage son.) “We’re not talking about tire-slashing like they did to the television crew van when it was parked next to the home of Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, it’s like—well, truth is,” the investigations officer concluded, “it’s totally fucking insane.
I’ve never seen anything like it. We didn’t touch a thing, you’ll see it for yourself; even when we didn’t think it was connected to anything else, well, if you understand what I mean … I don’t think it’s connected, but after two deaths, well, just in case …”
The rain had let up, but a strong wind was blowing. Puddles sparkled on the empty roads, and in the darkness the huge bulldozers that stood in front of the new luxury development being built across from Sha’arei Zedek Hospital looked like enormous, silent beasts. He rolled down the windows of his car and breathed the clean air and the scent of rain and wet earth deeply into his lungs. For a moment, Jerusalem smelled like the garden of his childhood home, the smell of steam rising from wet earth and the smell of darkness that did not threaten but in fact had a calming effect. It seemed possible to believe this was a normal city whose inhabitants were comfortably tucked into their beds and sleeping as if protected from all evil. Because the streets were empty apart from two police vans at the Valley of the Cross and the occasional sauntering taxi in search of customers, he made it in seven minutes, and parked his car where the officer had told him, on Nissim Bachar Street near the Mahane Yehuda farmers’ market, facing the stairway that leads to the steep and winding Beersheva Street, which is off limits to traffic. (“There is a way of getting your car in,”
the investigations officer had told him. “Jerusalemites know it, but it’ll take me longer to explain it to you than for you to park and walk the distance on foot.” Even after living in Jerusalem for thirty years and having completed his high school education at a boarding school there, Michael was still not considered a true Jerusalemite.) He took the narrow stairs two at a time until he reached the floodlight that had been placed in front of the white metal door and found himself facing the head of a sheep hanging from the door frame, swaying in the wind and dripping blood in a heavy stream. The sheep’s round, brown eyes stared straight ahead with a look of trust and innocence.
“I’m Yossi Cohen, don’t you remember me?” the investigations officer said to Michael, sounding offended. “We met at Balilty’s son’s bar mitzvah.” With one hand he pinched the wet fur collar of his army jacket together. “He’s here,” the man said into the transmitter he held in his other hand. Returning to Michael, he said, “It’s a good thing you came down here. I’m going crazy with so much to do. I woke Balilty up, too.
You won’t believe it, I’ve still got to file an eye-rep with the IIO.”
“What? What was that?” Schreiber had sidled up to them and had overheard the policeman. “Was that Hebrew?”
“Yes, it was,” the officer responded impatiently. “I said I have to file an eyewitness report with the Intelligence and Investigations Office.”
To Michael he said, “Our friend Balilty is on his way here now. As soon as he heard you’d be here, he wanted to come too. Should be arriving in a few minutes,” he added, pleased.
“Aren’t you people going to take this down?” Michael asked, indicating the bloody sheep’s head hanging from a rope and casting black shadows that danced all around them, even on the dark puddle of slowly dripping blood gathering under the dangling sheep’s head.
“In a little while. I didn’t want to take it down until … the forensics people will be here soon. There was a note attached,” the officer said as he handed a piece of cardboard to Michael. Michael examined the drawing of a skull with the words YOUR END IS NEAR printed in red ink in large, distorted capital letters. “Better that Balilty should see this too,” the officer said. “If he’s on his way anyway, then he may as well see this. But you can wait inside; I’ll wait for them here. Outside.”
