After a while, she remarked that the water in the bowl I'd brought her had gotten cold. I fetched her a towel to dry her feet. After she'd put on her socks and shoes, she asked me if I might help her to tidy the place up. I turned the chairs over on the tables and swept and mopped the floor while she washed, dried, and put away the dishes. We worked in companionable silence and had the place clean and ready for tomorrow's business in a little over thirty minutes.
"I still have some accounts I want to go over," Greta said. "Come. I'll see you out."
At the door I turned to her and gazed into her compassionate blue eyes that stared right back at me. I wanted to say something, maybe thank her for taking the time to listen to me ramble, and was forming the words in my mind, when she held up a hand. "It's all right, Adam. You go on home now. Sleep tight."
We said goodnight and I stepped out onto Allenby Street. The street was deserted, all the shops and restaurants and cafés closed for the night. Darkness blanketed doorways and storefronts where light from streetlamps failed to reach. A solitary car cruised by, its engine humming. Then it made the turn onto Sheinkin Street and was gone, leaving an empty road behind.
Hardly anyone owned a car in Israel. Only the very rich could afford one. Even during the day, privately owned cars were a distinct minority of the vehicles in Tel Aviv. Most of the traffic consisted of trucks and buses and government-issued cars, such as police cruisers and army vehicles. Horse-drawn wagons were not an uncommon sight. At this time of night, traffic was almost nonexistent.
I drew a long breath. The heat of the day had broken and a nice breeze was blowing from the south, freshening the air. I began walking north toward my apartment and was in the process of extracting a cigarette from its pack when I caught a fast movement from the corner of my eye. A large shadow had detached itself from the darkness pooling in a recessed doorway and was hurtling across the two meters that separated it from me. It swallowed the distance in one quick bite. In the split second before it was upon me, my mind registered that it was a man, very tall and broad, and that one of his huge hands was bunched into a fist that was flying at my head. I didn't have time to duck or sidestep or bring up my hands to block his blow. All I managed to do was turn my head a little, so that instead of on the mouth, his blow caught me behind the ear.
It was like being hit with a hammer. A supernova of hot white pain burst in my head, and all sense of solidity drained from my body. My knees gave way and I crashed sideways against a lamppost. Then I melted to the pavement.
And then everything went dark.
25
I must have been out for no more than a couple of seconds, because when I came to, I was still lying on that same strip of sidewalk on Allenby Street, and my assailant was standing over me. He grunted something I couldn't make out and leaned down. One of his hands curled itself into my hair, pulling hard, making my scalp scream. His other hand grabbed a fistful of my shirt. The son of a bitch was as strong as an elephant. He easily dragged me along the sidewalk, into the recessed doorway where he had waited to ambush me.
He hurled me against the door. My head banged painfully against the wood, making me feel like my brain was being rattled inside my skull. The side of my head throbbed where he had hit me, and my ribs hurt where I had banged them against the lamppost. I thought about crying for help, but worried that Greta would hear and come out to investigate. What could she do against this man? He would crush her like a bug.
I could hear him breathing fast and heavy above me. Then, through eyes that were sending me blurry, unfocused images, I caught him shifting his weight and saw his foot rushing toward me. I could do nothing to defend myself. My arms were limp and useless. I couldn't even brace myself for the kick before his foot drilled itself into my stomach. I let out a choked grunt and folded in half, retching violently. Bile rose to the base of my throat, clawing to get out. Breathless and in agony, an incongruous, panicked thought shrieked in my mind. Don't throw up. Mustn't waste food. Who knows when you'll eat again. The shock and pain had transported me back to Auschwitz, where starvation was the norm.
"You been filling my wife's head with poison, you little shit. Telling her all sorts of lies about me and Esther Kantor." He had a rough voice, hard and merciless. I could make out his outline. Elena was right, Alon Davidson was not a man you were likely to mistake for another. Massive, both in height and width—though exactly how tall I could not determine from where I lay. He shifted his feet, the soles of his shoes scuffing against the pavement. Then he kicked me again, in the lower stomach, right where one of the bullets I'd taken in the war had left a scar. All the air went out of my body. I couldn't draw breath and my vision turned dark.
He said, "I'm going to make you hurt." Then came a click and the smell of sea salt and fish close to my nostrils, followed by the awareness that he had crouched down beside me. He grabbed my hair again, pulling my head up, and if my eyes were open, they weren't sending my brain any signals, because all I saw was black. I knew that pain was coming, bad pain, like the time a sadistic prison guard in Auschwitz had whipped me a few dozen times and I thought I would die from agony.
I tried bracing myself for the pain, for that was the only thing you could do when you were helpless and about to be hurt. You could suffer through it with as much dignity as you could muster so that later, if there was a later, you could stare at yourself in the mirror and not drown in shame and self-loathing.
So I told myself to be ready, to take it without shaming myself, that there would be a day of reckoning, of revenge. There had to be. I wasn't about to die in the street like a dog, not after all I'd survived. But another voice, a nasty voice I barely recognized as my own, whispered that I knew full well that people die anywhere, anytime. Even good people. That death has no order or reason. It simply takes what it wants when it wants.
I caught a glint of something slicing through the veil of darkness in my eyes—a knife?—then came the sound of running footfalls, and Davidson turned and muttered, "What the—" and he let go of my head so it dropped to the pavement, sending a new stab of pain through my skull.
Now came the sounds of thuds and smacks and grunts. Heavy breathing. Shuffling feet. A metallic clattering sound and then a deep smack closely followed by a groan of pain. Fighting. Someone was getting hurt and it wasn't me. I tried to make my eyes see, to scatter the film of blackness that had descended across my vision like a theater screen. Instead I felt myself drowning in a pool of unawareness as consciousness slipped away.
26
The sensation of something cool and wet on my head coaxed me back from unconsciousness. My eyes cracked open to slits, and I tried to orient myself. I was slumped in a chair and someone was working a wet cloth over the spot where Davidson had first hit me.
It was Greta, her face inches from mine, one of her hands cupping my chin, the other holding a large white cloth. On the table was a bowl filled with water. The water held a reddish tinge. Greta dipped the cloth in the water and used it to clean the wound behind my ear. Then she set the cloth aside and uncapped a small bottle filled with a purplish liquid. A stringent medicinal scent wafted from the bottle. Greta moistened a dry corner of the cloth with the liquid and dabbed my wound with it. It stung quite a bit. Then she dropped the cloth on the table, capped the bottle, and proceeded to put two large plasters across the gash. We were in the café, at my table. The same ceiling light that she'd kept on during our conversation earlier that night shone on her face. She looked more worried than I'd ever seen her.