Okay, this time the camera is unmistakably broken. Gali looks like a little girl standing in the middle of the living room after breaking a bowl of candy, just standing there with her knees shaking, blinking into the light.
“What happened then, Sheila?” she asks with the same babyish voice. “What really happened that night? I want to know.”
And even though I want to tell her, yearn to tell her!, I know the moment I do, she’ll turn against me and hate me forever, because with all due respect to special relationships and the whole “friends are the family we choose” modern hogwash, friends are not family, and friends of your mother’s are certainly not family – only your family is family, only your family is forever, and if for some reason you choose not to have one, there’s a good chance you’ll end up alone. Got that, Witchiepoo?
Gali’s eyes bore into my face, and her expression turns icy.
“I understand you’re not going to tell me,” she says.
“Not yet.”
“Then when? When it’s too late?” Her words linger in the air.
Don’t you get it? It’s already too late.
“I have a friend who knows someone in the Mossad; he can probably help you with the picture,” she says, her voice surprisingly stringent. “I’ll help you, but just remember that you won’t help me.”
She bends over and starts picking up the camera pieces. She does this slowly, shard after shard, like a little girl trying to put a broken doll back together, then turns and leaves without looking back or saying goodbye.
Sitting at the computer, I’m focusing so hard on googling the painting, who knew there were so many dead witches under the water?, that I don’t hear my phone ringing, and only upon the caller’s second attempt, do I notice it and answer impatiently.
It takes some time to realize that the blurry, bizarre déjà vu is from the gravelly, matter-of-fact female voice asking my name and requesting I come to the police station – exactly the voice I imagined hearing before that first phone call from Micha.
“When do you want me to come?” I ask.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Then why didn’t Micha say anything to me? I already saw him today.” While the words pour out of me, I wonder whether the reason Micha didn’t say anything is because he is no longer on my side, and maybe never was.
“Who?” the gravelly voice asks, bewildered.
“Micha, Micha—” It takes me a moment to recall his last name, and the dense silence on the end of the line doesn’t help. “Yarden. Micha Yarden.”
“Amiram Yarden?” she asks.
“No. Micha, your detective,” I reply. Very slowly.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
The words reach me as if through thick fog, and not as a poetic expression of mystery, but actual fog, the kind that fills your skull and chest and makes it hard to breathe.
I sit down in my stained armchair, and from within this fog that continues to billow inside me, I hear the gravelly voice repeat and insist, “I don’t know who you’re talking about, we don’t have a detective named Micha Yarden here.”
She repeats it one last time, and this time her voice is tinted with sorrow, as if apologizing for being the bearer of this answer.
23
THE PERSON LOOKING BACK at me in the mirror at the police station is pale and dishevelled. The village fool! The village idiot!
The police officer sent to escort me is regarding me with a suspicious leer, but I can’t pull myself away from the mirror. The face reflected in it is that of a magic-less witch. Little witch, little witch cheated and tricked!
“Shall we?” the officer asks, her tiny mouth working a piece of gum. “They’re waiting for us upstairs.”
But I can’t move. On each side of the mirror stands a large glass cabinet crammed with golden trophies. I wonder how and why they were awarded all these trophies, for all the mounting corpses? For impersonation?
Since that phone call I’ve been walking inside a thick cloud, a thousand drowned witches floating inside me, a thousand questions screaming in my head. Who is he? Who is he? Who is this man? Who’s this baby? Who?
Dina’s voice is panting in my ear, I told you you’re an idiot, a vindicated voice, but there’s something else lurking inside it, something I should have recognized a long time ago.
Micha’s face flits before me, a face that has undergone multiple changes in a surprisingly short period of time: the boyish, trusting face, dimple appearing through delicate stubble; the face of the man who leaned in for a kiss; the indifferent, uncaring face from our last meeting; and hovering above those faces, the one that stared at me at night. A stony face with empty eyes.
But he knew! Knew everything, every detail of the investigation, don’t think about it!, he knew about events that were to take place, even knew about Debby and Saul, knew what no one could have known unless he was a police detective, but maybe… don’t think about it!
For one wild moment I wonder whether I imagined it all, whether Micha was just a figment of my imagination, someone who existed only within the walls of my apartment, and your bedroom. This is what it feels like when the rug is pulled out from under you. A river is running below me, and my pockets are heavy with rocks.
You failed the test. Next witch! And she better not be a sucker like you!
I shuffle down the narrow corridor with the bubblegum-smacking officer bouncing behind me, talking on the phone in a high-pitched squeak. She definitely isn’t the gravel-voiced cop who called me. I have no idea who you’re talking about. Who is he? Who? Beware of that man-child, that’s exactly the type who ends up taking a chainsaw to their mummy.
I remember
