“No, I checked every single institution when he rst vanished. I hired a private detective, she checked every place like that. Resorts, rest homes, mental institutions, everything. And she stil checks them once a year. Besides, why wouldn’t this guy want to tel me something like that? He wouldn’t hide that sort of information. No, it’s something else.”
“What would you do if you got his address?”
“Knock on his door. And I wouldn’t move or eat until he came out. I’d go on strike. He’d have no choice but to relent.”
We didn’t say anything more after that. When we finished our meal he said, “I’l drive you home.”
“I want to walk. I like walking.”
“I’l come with you.”
“Al right.”
As we walked toward the sea, I had a fantasy of the city rising like a oating island and soaring away. I held Ra ’s arm for balance, but only for a few seconds, until the sensation passed.
“Looks habitable now,” Ra said as he entered my at. He sat down on the faded pink and green Turkish carpet. I made co ee and handed him the mug, then set led on the sofa closest to him, my legs curled under me. He said, “I nished my training one month before the uprising broke out. I spent the next two and a half years ghting the riots. Then I was released, and they gave me a big chunk of money. I didn’t go back to my parents. I rented a room and every night I went to a bar and drank until I couldn’t see straight and usual y I woke up with someone in my room and I couldn’t remember who she was or how she got there. Then the money ran out. I lay in bed and took my penknife and considered slashing my wrists, but I decided my penknife was too blunt. Basical y I didn’t have the courage to do it. I got out of bed and showered and went to the supermarket to buy a bot le of vodka—I gured I’d get drunk and then maybe I’d have more courage. But I didn’t have enough money for vodka, so I bought fruit juice. That’s when I met Graciela. I was having trouble holding the bot le of juice, it almost slipped from my hands, and she caught it. She was wel dressed and clean and orderly. I fol owed her home, to her clean orderly at
—she already had her own place, the one we stil live in. She played the piano for me, a piece by Erik Satie. I was in very bad shape, and that piece almost did me in. I stayed there, I didn’t leave. We decided to marry. Her parents were against it, they’d been hoping for someone with a bet er background, someone with money and a profession and fair skin. But they didn’t want her to be unhappy. They didn’t want anything to interfere with her music, and they were afraid that if they put up a big fuss she’d be upset. She started get ing migraines, and she couldn’t sleep. Other things started bothering her too. She’d always hated dirt, but her cleaning became obsessive. She felt sick if she saw dirt, and she couldn’t go out for long periods of time because she wouldn’t use public toilets, or even toilets in other people’s houses. She tried seeing a psychiatrist, but nothing came of it. She wouldn’t let me touch her when we fucked, she couldn’t bear to look at my cock or touch it, and I had to nd ways of get ing inside without touching any other part of her and without her having to see anything. After Naomi was born, even that stopped. I left her before I knew she was pregnant. Then I heard that she was pregnant—someone who had seen her on the street cal ed me and told me, and I came back. I didn’t trust her alone with Naomi. And I was right, she didn’t want to touch her, she carried her in a plastic carrier, she never held her or stroked her or touched her. She placed her on a pil ow when she wanted to give her a bot le. I suggested we divorce and I take the baby, but she was horri ed. She loves Naomi. She loves her, but she can’t touch her. I look after Naomi and Graciela plays the piano and gives recitals and concerts and we manage that way. I had a few one-nighters, but I stopped, it was pointless. We have an income from a fund her parents set up for her, and I also work at an after- school program with teens in distress, but there’s no money in that, our budget keeps get ing cut, we’re almost volunteers at this point. I can’t leave because the kids depend on me.
That’s my story, Dana.”
“Why? Why did you want to kil yourself?”
“The usual: guilt, remorse. You can get over kil ing people, there are ways to think about it. You can say it was self-defense, it was war, that’s what you’re trained to do in a war, you’re trained to think it’s me or them, and you’re defending your country, it’s your highest duty. So you can say, wel , I had no choice, and that’s what the interpretation was then, that’s how it looked and felt. You can say, I was at acked, I fought back. I didn’t think about whether we should be there in the rst place. That wasn’t something we thought about. But if you beat people up in front of their kids or watch your friends shoot someone’s bal s o , you can’t justify that sort of thing. And since you can’t justify it, you have to face that this is who you are, this is the sort of person you are. I didn’t think I could live with that in constant replay another it, you have to face that this is who you are, this is the sort of person you are. I didn’t think I could live with that in constant replay another forty or fifty years, day in, day out, night in, night out.”
“You real y shot someone’s bal s of ? I never heard that one before.”
“We caught some guy who’d just kil ed a couple of soldiers, and these two guys in my unit, who were friends of the soldiers who were kil ed, more or less lynched him. They started with his bal s. Coby was there, too.”
“Coby from the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“What about now? Are things in constant replay?”
“No, it’s dif erent now. I have perspective now about what was going on then, and I can do something about it.”
“Is your daughter waiting for you?”
“She’s probably in bed by now. She’s a very easy child. She never puts up a fuss about anything. It worries me, sometimes.”
I said, “I met my husband at a wedding, he was the singer— even though the band was just a hobby he had, a way of earning extra cash.
His real passion was architecture, and that’s what he was doing, designing houses and buildings. I was nineteen, in the army, and he was a lot older, ten years older than me, but we didn’t feel any sort of gap. We were like one person. We even had our own language that we invented. We had a name for each other, Daneli, we were both Daneli, we were almost one person. We told each other everything, and whenever he went out of the house he left me a note with a cartoon—he was very talented, his cartoons were so bril iant, and he did them in just two seconds. We couldn’t stay away from each other, we had sex every day, we invented things no one ever heard of or did before. He said he was going to move into my cunt. We laughed because he was very funny, he did imitations of people and he was wit y and cracked jokes al the time. Sometimes his humor was very dark,
