Read Online Limassol by Yishai Sarid - Free Book Online

that now too. We were like a bad theater that puts on a show night after night after night.
    A strange expression appeared on the detainee’s face. His mouth opened a little, his head was stretched at an angle. It made you want to straighten it, put all the parts back in place.
    â€œSo what do you say, Ahmed, me and your wife spending the evening together? She likes to get it hard from behind?” I felt my bile rising, even though I had heard those words countless times. I could see the interrogator next to me changing places with Ahmed, and Ahmed threatening to screw the interrogator’s plump wife in the ass. The vision started disintegrating into pixels before my eyes, slivers of a picture, and then I heard the spit and felt it dripping thick on my face, toward my mouth, my fist went out automatically, and the next sound was the crushing of the front teeth of the detainee, Mr. Ahmed. He screamed.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” wailed the young man. His image was scattered in pieces before my eyes. “Now we’ve got to waste time filling out reports, and all those headaches. We were getting ahead with him fine, what came over you?”
    â€œCall the medic,” I said. “Then call Haim. Look, I was wounded too.” I showed him signs of blood on my knuckles.
    I thought of asking his pardon, but that wasn’t done. Not far from here they were already gathering up the limbs his little cousin had blown up. He didn’t stir any affection either, with his bloody mouth, his whining in pain, the ugly expression on his face. I went on with those thoughts until the medic came in along with Haim, poor Haim. Why did he have to move instead of sitting with his wife and children at the Sabbath table.
    We stood outside. The big square of the church was lighted as if they were making a film there. Armored jeeps kept bringing in detainees. “Now it’s official,” said Haim. “You don’t approach detainees anymore. You shouldn’t have come here today. I made a mistake when I put you in. Go to your wife now. Be gentle with her. We’ll find somebody good you can talk to. I’ve seen people destroyed in those cellars, I don’t want that to happen to you.”
    I stood before him and was silent. The fist was bleeding a little from the blow. I hit a manacled man. I couldn’t even gain any pleasure from the idea that I was fighting for my life. I wanted to go back to the room, release him, give him a fighting chance. Then I could kill him without any pangs of conscience.
    Now the streets around the square were silent and the alleys seemed to be presaging something bad. The enormous interchanges out of the city were deserted. I was banished from Jerusalem.
    I drove slowly down the turns to the Dead Sea, my hand festering and closed off from the world by a blinding headache. Alone on the road, in the middle of the night, they could easily shoot me, and in my state I wouldn’t even get to a gun. An enormous moon shone over the mountains toward the Jordan and lighted the valley. Boston, I thought, I won’t ever go to Boston, I won’t give up those pleasures. I stopped the car at the side of the road, at the broad opening of the wadi, I got out of the car and yelled my soul to the sky, and the desert birds I startled awake answered me with a shriek.
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    â€œI’m done for, ya habibi ,” Hani said to her on the phone. “I can’t sleep and can’t eat. Save me.”
    I came to her in the morning. Somebody was sitting in her house. A man with glasses, looked like a literary man, in corduroy pants and sandals.
    â€œThis is my livelihood,” she said. “Meet him.”
    Today she was full of self-confidence, wearing gray pants that suited her, a little make-up, arrogant.
    â€œWell then, I’ll go,” said the man, disappointed. “We’ll meet at the party on Thursday. The refreshments will certainly be good. They’re