“Your name’s Amir,” he said sharply in Arabic.
“What?” I said, trying to stick to Hebrew. “Who the hell are you? What do you want from me?”
“I know who you are,” he went on in Arabic. “I visited with your mother in Jaljulia yesterday. I wonder what she’ll think when she discovers that her only son is dead.”
I stood before the lawyer, said nothing, and watched as he produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“You smoke?” he asked in Arabic.
I nodded and took a cigarette.
“Tfadal,” be my guest, I said, and motioned him into the house, looking to see if anyone had witnessed our conversation. “You can smoke in here.”
He lit my cigarette and kept his unlit, clenched between his lips.
“Who are you?” I asked when he was seated on the couch. I had taken Ruchaleh’s usual spot and was feeling uncomfortable.
The lawyer’s gaze flitted around the room, taking in the books. “You know what,” he said, “I’ve always dreamed of having this kind of book collection. You want to sell it?”
“They’re not mine,” I said, trying to force him to get to the point, to stop gloating.
“And what about this one,” he said, knocking on the table where he’d set down The Kreutzer Sonata. “Is this one yours?”
“Please,” I said, “just tell me who you are and what you want.”
“Like I said, I’m a lawyer, but I’m here not as a lawyer but as Leila’s husband.” He stopped and looked me right in the face.
“Who’s Leila?” I asked, furrowing my brow, and I could tell immediately that he was relieved. His muscles seemed to slacken and he leaned back and lit his cigarette.
“You once worked at the outpatient clinic in east Jerusalem, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well then,” he said, flattening the note out on the table, “the whole thing started with this.”
I looked at the note, written in a very feminine and beautiful hand. “What is it? Where’s it from? That was in the book?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said. “That was in the book.”
“Okay,” I said, picking up the note, “what does that have to do with me?”
“She wrote it to you, did she not?”
“Who?”
“Leila, my wife.”
“Who’s Leila?” I said again, insisting that I did not remember.
“She worked with you at the outpatient clinic in Wadi Joz. You remember?”
“No, I don’t remember anyone by the name of Leila who worked there,” I said, traveling back to those days, to the clinic, to Wadi Joz, to the social worker I was supposed to be. “It was all boys there if I remember correctly, no?”
“There was a Leila there, too. She was an intern.”
“Ohhh,” I said, surprised, even though the lawyer did not seem convinced. “Yes, yes, I remember. You’re right. Wow, Leila. A student, right? We even once did a house call together in the Old City. How is she?”
“She’s well,” the lawyer said. “The question is how are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That means that I’m glad you were able to jump-start your memory and now I am going to need you to answer a few questions before I leave.”
“What kind of questions?” I asked.
“Questions like how did this note, written in my wife’s hand, which you claim not to remember, wind up between the pages of one of your books. And also, if you would, please enlighten me as to when all of this happened.” There was something firm and resolved in the lawyer’s look, something that showed me how distraught he was. He was sure I’d had a relationship with his wife and I knew I had to tell him the truth — otherwise everything I’d accomplished would go down the drain and I’d find myself answering the questions of real investigators, incriminating not only myself but those dear to me.
I took a deep breath and started to tell the story.
I don’t remember the note or how it made it into that book, but I do remember the book well. It’s one of the first books I read here, at Yonatan’s place.
“When did you leave the clinic?” the lawyer asked.
“Over seven years ago. And I didn’t leave, I fled.”
“Do you have an exact date?” the lawyer asked.
“No, not exact, but I’m pretty sure it was in January, seven years ago.” I could tell that the date I provided set him at ease, apparently because it added up with his own arithmetic.
“You have to believe me that I really don’t know a thing about your wife. At the time I was struggling with a few different things. I didn’t know if she was married and I didn’t care. I was in a very different place then, you see.”
“No, I don’t see,” the lawyer said, without even mentioning whether they were married at the time.
“I don’t know what this note is about. I don’t even remember it. I don’t even know if she wrote it to me or it just ended up in my book. Maybe she wanted to thank me for the house call. I really don’t know. All I remember is that one day I left them a resignation letter and I fled the office. I ran away from everything. Maybe this note was in the incoming-mail box, maybe it was on the table, maybe I just shoved it into my bag by accident.”
The lawyer began moving around in his seat, looking anxious. “What about the party? Or do you not remember that, either?”
“I’m not exactly sure what you want to know or why you want to know it. What party?”
“I want to know everything, Amir,” he growled. “And you want to know why? Because I found this note, which, as far as I’m concerned, is a love letter written by my wife, in a book that belonged to someone by the name of Yonatan. I want to know who this Yonatan is and how he’s connected to my wife and to you. Where is he, Amir?”
He was not going to leave without the whole story. He’d stay until he heard the whole thing. And the truth is I already started to feel myself wanting to tell. I wanted to tell someone everything that I had been through during these past years — the lies, the impersonations. To tell all, from the day I graduated and arrived at the house on Scout Street. All the things I couldn’t tell my mother or Noa or anyone else in the world. And maybe I also felt that he would understand.
I fought back the sob welling up inside me, took a deep breath, and started from the beginning.
“Yonatan’s dead,” I said. “I buried him a week ago.”
EPILOGUE
The lawyer looked at his watch and saw that it was already five thirty. He left the office and walked down the stairs and out to King George Street. Would he make it to the bookstore today? It had been several weeks since he’d last been. The lawyer wavered for a moment and then decided not to take any chances and headed back to the parking lot. He didn’t want to be late for the Thursday salon and dinner. This evening, he was pretty sure, they were going to meet at the accountant’s house, or was it the civil lawyer’s turn? He could not remember what they were to discuss, only that the gynecologist’s wife had festively announced the topic at their last meeting. No harm done; his wife probably knew. Of course she knew. Soon she would call to remind him to get a good bottle of red wine and some fine chocolate for the hosts’ kids.
Not that the lawyer lacked reading material. He still hadn’t even had the chance to read through all of Yonatan’s books. Truth be told, he hadn’t read any of them aside from The Kreutzer Sonata. He praised the novella, told Tarik, Samah, and the rest of his Arab friends that it was “an amazing work of art,” knowing full well that there was no chance in hell that they’d read it. His next book was Life: A User’s Manual—a thick and impressive tome by some French author whose name the lawyer had forgotten, and even though he was never really able to focus or follow the plot, he forced himself to read a few lines before sleep, mostly because, from what he’d learned on the back cover, the Frenchman who’d written the book was so important that he’d had a planet named in his honor.