STRUDEL
The lawyer walked along King George Street as it came slowly to life. The buses whooshed past with greater regularity, but were still half-full. The sidewalks were crowded with people, though mostly those belonging to the lower class: construction workers, sanitation workers, dishwashers, security guards, and saleswomen. “What’s up?” a security guard asked him near a bus stop, and the lawyer, who knew that the security guards checked the Hebrew of passersby, and who always answered crisply and with a generous smile, now merely nodded, but that, too, sufficed. The guard did not ask to see his papers.
The lawyer knew that the bookstore would probably be closed at this hour, but still decided to try his luck. He stood before the locked door and read the store’s hours. Looking at his watch, seeing that the store would open in fifteen minutes, he decided not to go back to the office but to get a cup of coffee and then return to the bookstore.
“Good morning,” Oved chimed as the lawyer walked into the empty café.
“Good morning,” the lawyer said, sitting down at the bar.
“Coffee will be ready soon,” Oved said, and the lawyer nodded and looked over at Oved and the Arab worker as they got the café ready for the day. Oved pulled a tray of apple walnut strudels from the oven and slid in a tray of cheese bourekas in its place. The Arab worker transferred the strudels onto a glass tray and separated them with a spatula. “The machine will be up and running in a second,” Oved apologized and the lawyer said it was fine, he was not in a rush, and that he would wait if he wasn’t in the way.
“Not at all,” Oved said, “make yourself at home.”
The lawyer tried flipping through the weekend edition of the papers. He turned the pages and stared at the headlines, but made no attempt to try and understand what the articles were about, his eyes bouncing from picture to picture and from paper to paper.
“So, everything all right with you?” Oved asked, setting a cup of coffee in front of the lawyer.
“Sure, everything’s fine,” he sighed, making Oved laugh.
“You can smoke,” he said. “It’s fine so long as no one’s in yet.”
The lawyer’s phone rang and he pulled it out of his pants pocket and answered. Seeing that the call was from the graphologist’s office, he walked out of the café as he spoke. No, he told the graphologist, there was no need for an official report. Yes, the bill should be sent to the office as always. He knew there had been no need for an expert’s opinion, yet hearing the man tell him that the two notes were identical and surely from the same hand only intensified his pain. Up until then he had been able to tell himself that the whole thing was just a figment of his imagination.
He walked back into the café with a fallen face, and Oved, who noticed his expression, kept silent. The lawyer drank his coffee quietly while his thoughts bounced around inside his head. He put out his cigarette when he saw Sara, one of the elderly regulars, enter the café along with her Filipina caretaker, her constant companion.
The lawyer thanked Oved, paid his bill, and left the café. More than anything else he wanted to go home and kick his wife out of the house, drag her out by the hair as he’d seen them do time after time in Egyptian movies.
The bookstore was still closed but the lawyer could see the saleswoman straightening up around the register. He smoked another cigarette and waited for her to come to the door and flip the sign over. When she did, the lawyer nodded a greeting at the saleswoman, whom he’d never seen before. “Meirav’s not in today?” he asked, partly to show that he was a regular and partly so that she wouldn’t suspect him of anything, even though there was no reason for her to be suspicious.
“No,” she said, “she’s not working today.”
The lawyer went over to the area where he had found the novella. The books were still stacked on top of each other, unsorted, and the lawyer picked one up and winced when he saw the name, Yonatan, in the same spiky handwriting on the top left-hand corner of the page. He picked up another book and saw it again, Yonatan.
“Those just came in yesterday,” the saleswoman said. She walked over to him and pointed to four boxes on the floor in the corner of the store. “They only unpacked two of the boxes so far. I think there’s some great stuff in there. I’m going to unpack them and put them out today.”
“Can I look at them?” the lawyer asked.
“Sure,” the saleswoman said after a pause, “but I wouldn’t know what to charge if you wanted something.”
“You know what,” the saleswoman said, slicing open the boxes with a penknife, “look through them, and if you find something you like I’ll just call the owner and ask him how much I should sell it for.”
The lawyer bent over the first box and picked up a book, opening it slowly as though weighing its merits. He found the same name, in the same hand, on the same place in each of the books.
“There really are some great books in here,” the lawyer said without bothering to so much as read the titles. “They all from the same guy?”
“Yes,” she said, “it was a liquidation sale.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s when someone sells their whole collection.”
“Does that happen often?” the lawyer asked, trying to smile and leave the impression of someone faintly interested.
“Absolutely,” she said, happy to talk about the book business. “Most of the books in this store are from liquidation sales, usually heirs who have no interest in keeping all of someone’s books. They call the owner of the store and he comes to the house and gives them a price for the entire collection and then they decide if they want to sell the whole thing at once or not.”
“Wow. So what you’re saying is that I’m browsing through a dead man’s library?”
“No, no, not necessarily,” she said, giggling. “A lot of people also sell before a big move.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said, checking the name on yet another book, “so now I’m dying to know who all these books belonged to.”
“I don’t know,” the saleswoman said, shrugging. “They came in during Meirav’s shift.”
“Oh,” the lawyer said, disappointed. “There really are some amazing things here.” He was trying to set the groundwork for what would be a substantial purchase. He wasn’t sure how many he could buy without making her suspicious. He wanted to tell her that he would take the whole thing, to go ahead and call the owner and ask him his price for the whole lot of them. He figured there were around two hundred books here with Yonatan’s signature and he wanted them all. He was sure that a careful inspection would reveal more of his wife’s love letters and he felt scared and yet compelled to read every one of them. He burrowed through the books, pretended to sort them, flipping through the pages and looking for more notes. At random he chose the ones he would buy and set them down on the floor and placed the others back in the box. Then he looked at the titles. Most of the volumes were prose and the rest were about drawing and photography, filled with black-and-white photographs and coal drawings. The lawyer’s heart thumped. He did not want to leave any of Yonatan’s books in the store. At any moment someone could come in, buy them, find a note written in his wife’s hand, and throw it out, thinking nothing of it.