Read Online Limassol by Yishai Sarid - Free Book Online Page B

meant to make something anyway. Do you eat tomatoes and Bulgarian cheese?”
    She stood erect at the stove, cooked spaghetti in a big pot, deep in thought. I looked at her like a puppy. Then she mixed diced tomatoes with Bulgarian cheese and onion and horseradish, and poured the cold sauce on the cooked spaghetti, and put half a bottle of red wine and a pitcher of cold water on the table. “Eat,” she said. “Even people like you deserve to eat.”
    For six years I had been married to Sigi and never had we eaten so intimately. We drank the wine from little glasses, like people who have lived in an ancient village from time immemorial.
    â€œWhat do I have to do?” she asked at last. The dishes sat empty before us and so did the bottle of wine.
    â€œNothing,” I said. “Just go on working with me on the etrog dealer. A few times a week. I’ll call before I come, don’t worry. You’ll introduce me to your sick friend and say I’m a promising young writer. Or an idiot without any talent who’s trying to write, Mr. Livelihood, whatever you choose. I don’t care. Just don’t hate me.”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t I hate you?” she asked.
    â€œBecause my intentions are good.”
    â€œI don’t believe you.” A green spark of suspicion flickered in her eyes. “Do you intend to hurt my friend in some way?”
    â€œNo,” I answered. “I won’t hurt him. I promise you.”
    â€œSo what do you really want from me?”
    â€œI prefer not to get you involved in that,” I said honestly.
    â€œYou have to promise me you won’t hurt him,” she said quietly, her head bent, with the lost pride of someone who has already sold herself.
    â€œI promise.”
    But she asked me to put that in writing for her. They always want that in writing. Daphna took a sheet of paper from the white pile on the table, and put a pen in my hand. “Write. You promise not to hurt my friend Hani.”
    I wrote.
    And it wasn’t a lie, not completely.
    Daphna stood up, with the folded note in her hand. I followed every step until she was swallowed up by the entrance to the inner rooms. As long as she didn’t call somebody to consult now, that could destroy the whole deal. But she returned a moment later and stood close above my head.
    â€œAnd I want you to find my son, take care of him. Use force, if you have to. Be a man. Don’t cry with him.”
    â€œWhere is he?” I asked.
    â€œLook in the A-frame huts at the Caesarea shore.”
    We drank black coffee and she told me about her son. Then she brought me his childhood album, sat down close to me, and took out a few pictures of a teenage boy whose long hair covered his face, his eyes were extinguished. “I don’t have any recent pictures,” she said. “That’s not my fault. He doesn’t let himself be photographed.”
    I walked to the mall under city hall, my head spinning, and a heavy blossoming of bougainvillea in the courtyard stroked my head. I thought of her kitchen, her face that would never grow old. In my pocket I had two pictures of the son. I hurried to pick up my child from kindergarten.
    Â 
    Before I went to him, I went over the dossier again.
    A picture in pregnancy and a checked dress, early eighties, from the newspaper Davar . The pregnant young writer, at a reception for the aged, well-known Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer on a visit to Israel. Hard to believe how beautiful she was. No man with her. She’s holding a glass and a cigarette, laughing.
    â€œDid your beauty help you publish your first book at such an early age, I ask her, and she laughs and bares white teeth,” wrote whoever interviewed her for the supplement in Yediot Aharonot . You can be the intelligence officer for the woman’s paper, I said to myself, and left the room to look for signs of life. There, at the end of the corridor, where