On the way down the corridor to my room I hear someone calling me—a man of my age, standing in his doorway in a white robe and leopard print socks and thick, hairy calves protruding in between. The belt of the robe dangles loosely at his waist. I deduce this must be the other foreigner.
He is holding a bottle of light yellow liquid in one hand and a toothbrush glass in the other and wants to invite me in for a drink.
“No, thank you,” I say, adding that I’m on my way to my room.
As soon as I say this, I realise it doesn’t sound like a sufficiently pressing errand because he says: “Are you in such a hurry? We could also play a round of chess. Do you know Tal’s attack strategy?”
He waves the bottle and takes one step down the narrow corridor, leaning one hand against the opposite wall, effectively blocking my path.
He says he heard a drill in the next room and has drawn the conclusion that I am working on the building.
I tell him I’m on vacation.
It delights him as if I’d hit the nail on the head.
He rephrases his question and wants to know who I’m working for.
I reflect on the question.
“No one. Myself,” I add.
“Who sent you? Williams?”
“No.”
“You must have some plan of action. Everyone has a plan. Business is all about focus.”
He lowers his voice and looks around. The corridor bends at the corner and for a moment I think I see a small being dashing past the end of the passageway, and that it’s naked, a little pale body that then vanishes in a flash, like a lizard fleeing the light.
“No one comes here without a mission. The best opportunities are now, the community is weak, lacks structure, and you can strike good deals. My friend is buying land and buildings.”
I can almost hear Mom’s voice: “War is a gold mine.”
The man stands in front of me, pours some liquid out of the bottle into the toothbrush glass, and empties it.
I slip past him.
“Ever since I was a kid I’ve longed to kill someone,” I hear him say behind me. “The only way to do that legally was to join the army. When I was nineteen years old, the dream came true.”
I’m expecting him to ask me if I’ve tried killing. I would then tell him that I’ve fished trout.
Instead he says:
“You’ve got to create a system that the enemy doesn’t understand. That’s warfare. That’s beauty. That’s how Tal thought, leading his team to victory by sacrificing one man after the next.”
MAY
The first thing I notice when I stick the key into the lock and open the door is the pool of water on the floor and, next to it, the boy sitting on a chair, wrapped in a towel with his toes dangling out. His mother is busy changing the bedclothes, the sheets are crumpled and the pillow lies on the floor. I notice that she has wet hair. My nine items have been rearranged on the table, in a straight line, like a train, one carriage after another. When the boy sees me, he covers his ears.
“I’m sorry” is the first thing the girl says. “After you fixed the pipes, this is the only shower that works. There is so little pressure in the water in our room. Just a few drops. I used the opportunity while you were away.”
By “our” she is clearly referring to herself and the boy.
She says the boy ran out of the shower, which explains the puddle on the floor. Adam had then crawled up on the bed.
So the boy’s name is Adam.
“He was so happy,” she says as she picks up the wet towels.
The boy observes us but still keeps his hands over his ears.
She apologises again and says she should have asked me for permission. I tell her not to worry and that I’ll take a look at the pipes in their room.
She says she actually intended to offer to switch rooms and move me to the other side of the corridor. In fact, she’s already getting the room ready.
“That way you don’t have to look down on the bullet-pocked street and you can have a view of the beach just like me and Adam.”
The only issue is the shower in the bathroom, but she was wondering if I could take a look at the pipes. “To see the problem” is how she puts it.
After leaving with the child in her arms, enveloped in a towel, and going up to their room on the floor above, she reappears again. I see she has wound her wet hair into some kind of bun and tied it with an elastic the way Waterlily does sometimes.
It doesn’t take me long to reassemble my earthly possessions—nine items—and I follow her into the new bedroom.
She has put clean sheets on the bed and opened the blinds and says that Fifi helped her move the desk in.
“I see you write,” she adds, carefully scrutinizing me.
I assume Fifi must be her brother and imagine she is referring to the diaries.
A forest landscape painting hangs over the bed, not unlike those that hang in the other bedroom and the lobby, green boughs, green shadows, and a greenish sky. I notice that in the middle of the painting there is a cluster of light and in the middle of the light stands a leopard.
I step closer to examine the painting.
“Yes, there is one painting in each bedroom,” she explains, positioning herself in front of the picture.
I sense they’ve all been painted by the same hand, since it transpires that they are all initialled with the letters “AD” in the bottom right-hand corner. She says she doesn’t know the identity of the artist but has heard that the theme
