No matter what, he’d be the laughingstock of his peers and his village. Even if he killed her. He winced at the thought of being ridiculed behind his back. He imagined his friends, including the ones who had been over for dinner, smirking at him, the fancy lawyer laid low. He saw the man to whom his wife had written the note, imagined him sitting with his buddies and regaling them with the tales. Oh, God, what had she done? The bitch. She’d trampled him. Made him a character in one of those stories he was constantly hearing from his clients, about naive husbands who let their wives run rampant. Again he saw clusters of men convulsing with laughter. The lowlife that his wife had taken to bed was sitting with his buddies and telling, precisely, what she had been like, detailing all the things she had done to him, things that far exceeded what the lawyer had thought his wife was capable. It was clear that the fornicator did not hold his newest conquest in high esteem. Or did he? Maybe they were in love? Maybe they planned to live together? How old was the guy anyway? Did he know him? And how long had this been going on?
The lawyer left the bedroom. Once a coward, always a coward he thought. He put the knife back in the kitchen drawer and went to his daughter. She’d tossed off her blanket but he didn’t cover her. It wasn’t cold. It was hot. Stifling. Sweat beaded up over his body.
He went downstairs, looked for the note in the bed, and didn’t find it. He searched furiously through the folds in the blanket. For a second he entertained the notion that he had been mistaken, that he had imagined the whole thing, that fatigue had authored the note. He flipped through the book again, thinking that perhaps he had tucked it back where he had found it, but it wasn’t there.
Then he saw it beside the bed. He picked it up, wedged it deep inside the pages of the book, and took the evidence to his study. He eased the door closed behind him, lit a cigarette, and tried to organize his thoughts. He took a long drag, then exhaled slowly. He might be a coward, but a chump was something he had never been. And he definitely did not plan on being her chump. Who the hell did she think she was? He didn’t even know her. That had to be the basis of his plan, that he did not know her. In the end he would kill her, that much was clear. Maybe not with his own hands, because he had no intention of paying the price for her crimes, but he would bring about her death, of that there was no doubt. At the end of the day, the husband was not responsible for the wife’s honor. Her family members—father, brothers, cousins — were the keepers of the family’s honor; it was their blood, and it was on them alone that the dishonor would rest if they did not take it upon themselves to obliterate it. Not on him, not by any means.
He shivered, put out the cigarette, and opened the book. There was something he wanted to check. Up on the top left-hand side of the contents page he found it again, written in a thin delicate hand, in blue ink, the name: Yonatan.
PART TWO. ELECTRIC RADIATOR
Yonatan is dead. I buried him last Thursday. I paid two Arab teenagers to carry the coffin. Aside from me, no one else came to the funeral. No one was invited. He was a twenty-eight-year-old man, just like me.
“He could die at any moment”—that’s what I was told when I first laid eyes on him. That was six years ago. I had just graduated from Hebrew University with a degree in social work and gotten a job at the east Jerusalem bureau for outpatient substance abuse treatment run by the Ministry of Social Affairs. I knew the place well; it was where I’d done my internship during my final year of school.
I was twenty-two years old and had spent the last three years living in the student dorms. After graduation, I managed to stay on for three more months, but in late October, when the new students started to arrive, I was forced to find someplace else to live. I took a number off a notice that had been posted outside the dorms — seeking third roommate, it said in Arabic — and called from a public phone.
That evening I turned my keys in to the dorm monitor and made my way to the Nusseibah housing projects, in Beit Hanina row 3, building 1, apartment 2.
“You’re right on time,” Wassim said. “I have to go to work. I got a friend to cover me until six. I’m leaving you a key, but make your own copy, okay? My shift’s over at nine and I’ll be home by nine thirty, so if you have to go out or anything leave me the key in the electrical cabinet downstairs.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay,” he said. “Welcome.”
The sun was setting and it was freezing in the apartment. I’d come with all my belongings. They were stuffed into three bags: one backpack, which had been used for school and then for work, and two identical gym bags with the emblem of the German national soccer team. They were the bags my mother had bought for me when I first left home.
In the bedroom, a neon light flickered continuously without ever coming to life. There was a damp, moldy smell, but I didn’t dare open the window. I buttoned my coat all the way up and tucked my head into the collar. It seemed like it was colder inside than out, and winter was just beginning.
The metal-framed bed groaned when I put my bags on it. Wassim had made sure there was a mattress for me, just as he’d promised over the phone, but it was smaller than the frame of the bed and it was very thin, the kind Arabs use for divans. I switched on the hot water heater outside the shower. The toilet looked as though someone had tried to clean it but it was still dirty and the water at the bottom of the bowl was black. I made a note to myself: get sodium chloride. From our phone conversation I had learned that Wassim lived in the apartment with his cousin Majdi, that they were both from Jat, that Wassim was a special-ed teacher, and that Majdi was in the middle of his internship at a law office. What kind of special-ed classes was Wassim teaching at this hour, I wondered.
There was a small heater in the living room, the kind with a screen and two electric coils. As soon as I plugged it in the lights in the apartment dimmed. The heater made a sizzling sound. I brought the heater with me and sat down on the wicker couch. The coils burned a pale yellow and I had to practically sit on top of it to feel any heat. I put my hands in front of the metal screen, which was blackened with dust and charred pita. The coffeepot on the table was flanked by two dirty glasses and the contents were cold. In the dorms at least there were radiators.
I did not call my mother. I’ll talk to her tomorrow, I thought. That was the longest the conversation could be put off. And anyway there was no phone in the house, and for all I knew no pay phones at all in Beit Hanina. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll call her from work.
Once I’d warmed up a bit, I went into my room and started to unpack my clothes. I didn’t have much, and most of what I had was dirty. It had been more than three weeks since I’d last been home and if I didn’t go back over the coming weekend, I’d have to find a laundry. There had to be one somewhere in the neighborhood.
I put the clothes in the closet without sorting them and went back to the electric heater. Once I’d warmed up, I returned to the room and unpacked my kitchenware: one plate, one cup, a tablespoon, a teaspoon, a fork, a knife, and a frying pan. I set it all out on the plastic table in the bedroom. Then I took out my sheets and the heavy comforter that my mother had insisted on buying for me. I hoped it would get me through the first night in the apartment. The next day, I decided, I’d buy an electric radiator. Call Mom, then buy radiator.