I remembered that sentence well, even though it had never been relevant to me. I never felt like I was biting anyone’s finger; it was only my finger in my adversary’s mouth and I never thought there was any chance that he would cry out before me. I never fought back. I just tried to deflect the blows as best I could and then run away. Just like my mother, who ran away, too, years before I ever had to, and who explained that she had done it because of me, for me, because she didn’t want me to suffer, to feel unwanted and alienated. Later she told me that she didn’t run away so much as sneak me away, just as she did again in the middle of the school year in elementary school when she heard that I was being picked on, this time smuggling me into a Jewish school in Petach Tikva, using every last one of her connections with the teachers union. I went to that school for two years and I liked it a whole lot better. No one told me that my father had murdered anybody or that I was the son of a collaborator. The kids simply did not speak to me and I did not speak to them. I was good in school, though, and soon enough I learned the language, learned to speak like them, and even started writing better than most of them.
When Mom made me go back to Jaljulia for junior high, I started to cry, but she said it wasn’t up to her, that the school guidance counselor had said that I wasn’t getting along in Petach Tikva, that it was not the right place for me. In junior high and in high school I was no longer beaten up, because my mother was a teacher at the school and she kept a close eye on me. Twice a day at least she would come into class and ask how I was doing. That’s when I started to keep my distance from her and today I regret that I can’t so much as imagine a hug from her.
Five minutes after I arrived at the office, the images of the revolution started to fade. I remembered that it was Leila’s day to come into the office and that she would be in soon. I left the room, locked the door, told the janitor that I wasn’t feeling well, and asked him to tell Walid that I had gone to the doctor. I punched my card and left. That evening I left for Scout Street half an hour early. I got off the bus near the courthouse and walked in the dark to the empty office, holding an envelope and a printed letter. The text was short. Beneath the date and the subject I had written, I quit, and beneath that I had scribbled my signature. I knew that no one would come looking for me. I pushed the envelope into Walid’s mailbox.
In my box I saw a small piece of paper. It said, I waited for you, but you didn’t come. I hope everything’s all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?
PART THREE. VANITY CASE
The lawyer put out his cigarette, opened the study door, and crept up the stairs. His wife’s cell phone was charging on a table in the living room. The lawyer went into the bedroom where his wife and son slept. Out of habit, he held his breath, listening for the sounds of his son’s respiration. By the foot of the bed he found his wife’s leather attaché case, the one he had bought her for her twenty-seventh birthday. Of course, it was on the floor. She always peeled off her clothes, kicked off her shoes, and dumped her bag on the floor, a habit that the lawyer had attributed to carelessness or the permanent frenzy of a woman returning from work to a house full of children. Now, though, as he lifted the bag, he realized that her behavior, the scattering of her belongings despite his protestations, was a sort of revolt, a statement, a piece of writing on the wall that any clear-eyed person would’ve understood.
The lawyer went back downstairs, cradling his wife’s attaché case and her telephone. There was no chance that she would wake up at night, and even if she did she’d never look for her bag or her phone. She was a woman who constantly misplaced her things, running around the house looking for her bag only to remember that she had left it in the car, or worse, at work. The telephone was even more elusive and on most mornings she had to hunt it down by calling it from the landline.
The lawyer took her appointment book out of the bag, a thin blue notebook embossed with the seal of the union of social workers in Israel, given to their members as an annual Rosh Hashanah present. He flipped it open, looking for a sample of her handwriting, hoping, in a dimly lit part of his brain, that he had only imagined the similarity. He reread the note and felt a sharp pain at the sight of the words, I waited for you, but you didn’t come. . The appointment book was filled with telephone numbers, random notes, and what looked like patients’ names. He slid the book back into the attaché case and found a bunch of loose paper, notes that she had kept, most of them old. Why does she keep these things? he wondered, angered again at her disorder. He examined the notes, hoping to find something suspicious, a smoking gun. But what exactly did he think he’d discover? Another love letter? A doodle of an arrow-pierced heart with her and her lover’s names? Every sentence, every line, roused his suspicion, but he did not find any hard evidence in his wife’s briefcase. He then looked through the main compartment of her bag, where he found patient files and academic articles.
The lawyer decided to comb through her cell phone, too. First, he checked the in-box, where he found several unfamiliar names, and even though the names were mostly female, or at least listed as such, and the messages seemed benign, he wrote them down. The lawyer knew that he no longer had the privilege of assuming that everything was as it seemed. The note itself already proved how devious she was: she had neither addressed nor signed her proclamation of love. Only now did he realize that the woman he had always believed to be disorganized and blundering was actually a cautious and deliberate plotter who left no trail. By the time he went through her sent messages, the lawyer no longer expected to find any incriminating evidence, and, in fact, most of the messages he saw had been sent to him, undoubtedly because she had erased the rest, knowing that the day would come when her husband’s suspicions would be aroused.
The lawyer shut off her phone — which was listed under his name, for tax purposes — and decided to order an itemized bill from the phone company. He’d go over the statements, looking for long calls and unidentified numbers.
The act of investigation took the edge off the lawyer’s pain. Now that he was involved in the assembly of evidence, the betrayal was just another case, details that had to be amassed and marshaled to form a convincing argument, but that sense of relief faded when he opened a pocket in his wife’s briefcase and found her compact. He felt his jaw lock. She, who always ridiculed women who spent hours in front of the mirror, carried a compact to work. Just like the women he eyed during his daily commute, the ones who applied their makeup at red lights, and he thought of her flipping down the sun visor on the car he’d bought
for her, examining her face in the small mirror, pulling out her compact, pursing her lips, putting on lipstick, tousling her hair, consulting with the mirror again, and then painting her eyelashes, powdering her nose. The whore. The bitch.
Why didn’t she wear makeup at home? Why did she criticize those women and then do the exact same thing? At least they were open about their vanity. They did not hide their daily routines from their husbands. And it turned out that she, who complained mightily before every event that demanded makeup, hid a compact in her own bag, and not just any old compact, but one that he had bought for her several years earlier, because the lawyer liked women who wore makeup and had hoped that his wife would follow their example, arousing, in that way, his dwindling passion. And she, ever so cruelly, kept from him what she happily gave to others. He envisioned her in the bathroom at work, taking off her makeup before coming home to him, even though he was never around when she returned.