The Missing File (10 page)

“Who decides what is good or bad?”

“I do.”

Ze'ev laughed, but Michael remained stern-faced, as if there hadn't been a hint of humor in his reply.

“How in fact did you begin writing?” Ze'ev asked, and Michael said, “I don't even remember. I do remember myself writing as a child in elementary school—sitting in class, not listening to a word the teacher was saying, and writing poems.”

Ze'ev hated that sort of answer when it appeared in newspaper interviews with writers. He hadn't allowed himself to miss a word the teachers said, and the thing he remembered best from elementary school was his fear that the teacher would call on him with a question.

Michael turned the radio down. “Since when have you been writing?” he asked. “I somehow got the impression that you're not a workshop kind of person, that you know pretty well what and how you want to write.”

Ze'ev was stunned by Michael's words. Had he managed to deceive him, to hide the truth from him, or had Michael, with his sensitivity, perceived something that Ze'ev wasn't able to discern in himself, seen in him an inner truth whose existence he was too frightened to believe in?

“I don't write at all. Who told you I write?” Ze'ev asked jokingly, in an effort to conceal his emotions. “Truth be told, I joined the workshop purely by chance. I hadn't planned on it. I was passing by the library, saw the notice, and decided to come in—not to learn how to write, but more to see what it's all about and what others write about. I wasn't sure about staying but was very impressed by what you said in the first lesson and got the sense that I'd have something to learn from you. And I think I have learned something already; I can feel it coming.”

Z
e'ev was on the verge of confessing at that point in their conversation. But then Michael seemed embarrassed, perhaps unsure about how to take the compliment, and silence fell again. They had reached the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, and Michael's red eyes were peering through the window. “This is a pretty good neighborhood,” he said. “I'm thinking about moving here. The rent here is a lot lower than in our area,” and Ze'ev immediately blurted, “Yeah, prices in Tel Aviv are crazy.”

The intimate moment passed.

“We're thinking about moving too,” Ze'ev continued. “Our landlord wants to raise the rent, and we need a larger apartment in any case—with a room for the kid. It's tough these days to rent an apartment in Tel Aviv on the salary of two teachers.”

“Where will you move to?”

“Holon, perhaps. Although we're a little hesitant to do so. It would be very hard for us to leave Tel Aviv—for me, at least.”

“I'd move to Holon,” Michael said. “It seems like the right place.”

“The right place?” Ze'ev asked, surprised.

“The right place to live and write in. I'm sick of writing about Tel Aviv. I think I'm looking for a way to write more simply, and perhaps to write simply, one needs to live a simple life among simple people. I'm sick of overly sophisticated literature. But I'm not sure, maybe it's naive of me to talk like this.”

It was Ze'ev's turn to feel Michael's sting. “You really do hate literature, don't you?” he said.

“No, no. Oh God, I get the sense I have been horribly misunderstood today. Perhaps I came in feeling on edge and that's what you've picked up on. I'm going to have to correct that impression at the next meeting. I'm simply trying to help you to free yourselves from worrying about what is literature and what isn't, and to express what you have inside you in your writing. The most powerful text ever written—in my opinion, at least—wasn't composed as a literary text. Do you know Kafka's
Letter to His Father
?”

Ze'ev was afraid to admit he had never read the letter, and even more so to claim he had read it and then get caught in a lie. Had Michael asked him the question because he had already placed him in the category of those simple people who lived simple lives? He could have said something nonspecific, like “I read it ages ago; I don't remember it word for word”—but decided to say he hadn't.

“Okay, that's excellent,” Michael said, “I'll bring it to class next time—just an excerpt, though, because it's pretty long. And there's even a new translation. It's a letter Kafka wrote to his father in 1920, I believe; or it might've been 1919. Anyway, it was written a few years before he died, and his father never received it. Think about it: one of the greatest literary texts in history wasn't composed as a piece of literature but as a letter intended for a single reader, who never even read it. It blows me away every time I think about it. That's how I'd like to write, as if my text is addressed to a single specific reader whom I wish to terrify. It begins with the words ‘You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you.' Wonderful, isn't it?”

And just then, the first words appeared. And the idea, which still, that afternoon, had yet to express itself, like a baby learning to speak, suddenly came together in lucid sentences that needed only to be put down on the page.

T
he hours that followed were very different from those just before and after the call to the police on Friday. This time, there was no panic or confusion in his actions. He acted with a sense of inner peace. There wasn't a hint of the fear that had gripped him yesterday afternoon, and that hadn't completely abated when he woke in the small hours of the morning and sat in the living room, enveloped in silence. Everything felt right, just as he had imagined the writing would be.

Ze'ev didn't drive straight home after dropping Michael off. He called Michal to ask if it would be okay if he were a little late. He told her he wanted to catch a movie, and only then remembered the English film he had seen that morning and thought he would be able to tell her about it without lying. He found a window seat at a café in Masaryk Square and ordered a cup of herbal tea.

And there, in his black notebook, the first words were written, as if on their own:

Father and Mother,

I know you've been looking for me for a few days now, but I suggest you stop looking because you won't find me, and neither will the police, not even with tracker dogs.

The notices you posted in the streets say I disappeared on Wednesday morning, but all three of us know that isn't true. We all know that I disappeared long before then, without you even noticing, because you didn't pay attention, and that I didn't disappear in a single day either, but it was a gradual process of disappearing, at the end of which you thought I was still at home only because you never even tried to look.

I ask myself why are you looking for me now? Why now have you gone to the police? Why didn't you do so in the months and years in which the writing was on the wall? I used to think it's because you were too caught up with yourselves and your lives, but that was a passing, childish thought, because I realized that the real reason was simply that it was hard for you to get close. Because all people are scared of truly seeing what others go through, and what your child goes through, in particular—especially when he is different, different from you, someone you can't understand, a strange bird.

I know this letter will cause you pain, but maybe I want you to hurt like I did. You could have prevented it but you didn't. You remembered me when it was too late.

You must be asking yourselves where I am now and where am I writing from—and I can only say that I am writing from somewhere far away, somewhere all good.

No longer yours,

Ofer

Ze'ev sat at the café and read through the letter several times. He wasn't filled with a sense of joy or satisfaction, only hunger for precision, hunger to find the right words and to erase the wrong ones. He added and deleted sentences, weeding out anything in the letter that a boy of Ofer's age wouldn't write, anything that wouldn't ring true as Ofer's voice.

“How are you feeling?” Michal asked him when he returned home.

“Great,” he replied.

They sat together in the living room and Michal cut up a melon, the first of the summer.

He told her about the English film, and she told him about her day at school and the evening with Elie, who had been crankier than usual and hadn't stopped whimpering and looking for his father. At half past eleven Michal said she was going to sleep and asked if he was coming to bed. “Not yet,” he said. “I think I want to write something.” He smiled, and Michal looked at him in surprise.

“It's about time,” she said.

Ze'ev sat down at the desk on the enclosed balcony, but only after peeking into the bedroom to make sure Michal was asleep did he remove from his bag the surgical gloves he had bought at a drugstore on the way home, and also a sheet of blank paper from a new ream for the printer. He slowly copied the text he had written at the café, rounding and spacing his usually dense and sharp-edged script. He left out the words “
in which the writing was on the wall
,” because they seemed too clichéd, and also the expression “
a strange bird
,” which Ofer surely wouldn't have been familiar with. He added “
To be continued
” at the bottom of the letter, underneath “
Ofer
,” and then folded the page using a ruler and slipped it into a medium-size brown envelope.

When he came in earlier, Ze'ev had noticed that Michal had already emptied their mailbox, and now he went to the letter basket in the kitchen to fish out an unopened electricity bill. In his other hand, he carried a garbage bag—a good explanation for the gloves, if anyone happened to see and ask, which of course no one did. He put the bill into their mailbox and then took it out again, in the same movement stuffing the brown envelope into the Sharabis' mailbox.

The edge of the envelope jutted out. It couldn't be missed.

He removed the gloves and put them into the garbage bag, which he then threw into the large communal bin. He then went back to the balcony and sat down at the desk again. The shutters were open and the computer was on. Strangely, he remained at ease. The sharp anticipation he felt was both his and not his, all at the same time.

The chances of seeing anyone entering or leaving the building at that time of the night were slim, but he was too keyed up to go to sleep. Was this similar to the feeling of a young writer waiting to see his first story appear in the morning newspaper? It suddenly dawned on Ze'ev that someone from the building could go downstairs to the mailboxes and remove the letter without him seeing. He grabbed the keys to his bike and went down to look for something in the compartment under the seat. The envelope was in its place.

He surfed the Internet for a while, and ate the rest of the melon. Moments before turning off the computer, he heard a car pull up outside the building. The front passenger door opened, as well as the trunk, and a man stepped out.

It was Ofer's father.

Ze'ev watched as the father removed a small suitcase from the trunk and then went around to the driver to shake his hand through the open car window. Carrying the suitcase, he then walked up the path to the building and disappeared into the stairwell.

It was 1:30 a.m.

7

I
n hindsight, that was the day the investigation altered course.

It hadn't dawned on him at the time. A number of days went by before he realized that the case was moving in a direction he had never imagined it would take—and by then he was already in Brussels.

Nevertheless, when he returned home, Monday evening, on foot, following the same path that linked Fichman Street to Kiryat Sharet, Avraham realized that Ofer was no longer a complete mystery to him. He could see Ofer's face as it appeared in the photographs he was given, he could sense the sound of his voice, he could imagine his thoughts.

I
t was 7:30 a.m. when he spoke by phone with Ofer's father, who had landed at the airport after midnight, and asked him to come in for an interview. He then called Ze'ev Avni, the neighbor he had put off calling the day before. He had missed him by just a few minutes. Avni's wife told him that he had already left for work, and she passed on her husband's cell phone number. He tried calling but got no reply—as the wife had expected. She had told him that her husband was teaching for a few consecutive periods and would be able to take a call only during one of the short breaks between the lessons. Avraham didn't leave a message.

In the meantime he returned to the Kintiev case; he wanted to close it before sending it off to the district prosecutor. The day before, because the team meeting had left him paralyzed, and because Ilana had instructed him to focus on the missing-persons case, he had suspended the remainder of the Kintiev investigation; it wasn't that urgent, anyway. On Wednesday, the prosecutor would file charges and request that Kintiev be remanded to custody until the end of the proceedings against him. He continued with his summaries of the statements and the rest of the evidence. The more he read the transcripts of the talks with Kintiev, the stranger they appeared. He decided to dedicate a separate section of his summary to Kintiev's confessions regarding crimes that were not part of the case, the arson and the story about his attempt to electrocute an elderly family member in order to get control of her money, adding a note that this material should be passed on to the relevant Northern District police station for further investigation. Avraham's attention was particularly drawn to an odd expression that Kintiev had repeated over and over again: “If you're my friend.”

“If you're my friend, I speak to you.” “If you're my friend, I help you end the investigation.” “If you're my friend, I tell you things you don't know.”

Avraham had responded to these odd statements only once. “Yes, I'm your friend,” he had said, and Kintiev had laughed out loud, responding, “If you're my friend, you let me go now and I come to your house.”

He tried calling Ze'ev Avni again at 10:45 a.m.—and again got his voice mail.

E
liyahu Ma'alul called when Ofer's father was already sitting in his office.

“Can it wait an hour or two?” he asked Ma'alul.

“It's better if it doesn't.”

Apologizing to Ofer's father, Avraham left the room.

As they had agreed, Ma'alul had returned that morning to the school to speak with Ofer's classmates and teachers. He had asked to use the guidance counselor's room and questioned the students in her presence. He thought it might make them feel less insecure and encourage them to talk. “Certain students are more fearful of the familiar and very tangible authority of school figures than they are of the abstract authority of the police,” he explained.

Ma'alul was breathing heavily, as if he were speaking while walking briskly. “You've got it wrong, Avi,” he said. “He didn't run away, and he didn't kill himself. I'm sure of it now.”

When they had spoken the previous evening to prepare for the day's course of action, Avraham had again tried to explain to him why he believed that Ofer's disappearance had in all likelihood been voluntary.

“Did you come up with anything?” he asked.

“Not exactly . . . Actually, you know what? Maybe I did. On Friday evening, two days after his disappearance, Ofer had a date to see a movie with some girl. And as far as I've learned, this did not happen very often. Maybe never. A friend by the name of Yaniv Nesher told me. They're in the same class, and I believe he's Ofer's closest friend—although I don't know how much he really knows. On Sunday, three days before his disappearance, Ofer told him he was supposed to be going to a movie Friday evening with a girl he had met through him.”

Avraham would hear the word “movie” later that day again—in a different context, and from someone else. He'd recall the movie that Ofer was planning to see on Friday evening and would make a connection between the two movies, between the two conversations.

“What do you mean by ‘through him'?” he asked, and Ma'alul explained: “Through his sister. Ofer was at the friend's house, to exchange some computer games, or maybe to play some, and the friend has a sister a year younger than them. The sister had a friend over, and she liked Ofer. Ofer was informed of this and got her number. Looks like it took him a while, but he called her last week. Never mind, the details don't matter. What's important is that they made a date to see a movie last Friday, two days after he disappeared.”

Don't matter? The details mattered, and how! The information didn't appear earth-shattering, but it did show a different Ofer from the one he had been told about over the past few days, the one who never left the house, the one who didn't discuss his life with anyone. All of a sudden, he's visiting friends, he's planning to go out to a movie, he's caught someone's fancy. Avraham hadn't thought anyone liked him at all.

“And did you speak to her?” he asked.

“No, she goes to Kiryat Sharet High School; I'm on my way there. Besides all this, I didn't know they had a handicapped daughter.”

“Who has?” Avraham asked, wondering what Ma'alul was talking about.

“Ofer's parents. The friend told me that Ofer has a sister with Down's syndrome.”

Avraham had had no idea, and couldn't decide whether to admit as much to Ma'alul. He had been telling himself since Friday that he was trying to hear a story and “get to know the characters,” yet five days of investigating had gone by and he was completely unaware of that detail, which certainly must have been of significance in Ofer's life.

“I didn't know she had Down's syndrome. I haven't seen her,” Avraham said. “The brother and sister have been at the grandparents' since Wednesday or Thursday. That explains why the mother couldn't cope by herself with the children while the investigation was going on.”

“It also explains Ofer's introversion,” Ma'alul responded. “The friend said that he has never been to Ofer's home. Ofer never invited him over, and that must have something to do with the sister.”

Avraham hadn't gone into the sister's room when he was at the Sharabi home—neither on Thursday nor on Friday. The door to that room was closed and he had felt that Hannah Sharabi wanted to keep it that way. He hadn't been in the master bedroom, either. He suddenly recalled the foolish thought he'd entertained that first evening, on his way home, after the mother's visit to the police station—the age difference between the children. Two years after Ofer was born, Hannah Sharabi had a daughter with Down's syndrome. After that, she and her husband didn't want another child—for almost ten years.

He thought for a moment and then asked, “But what does that give us?”

“Some sort of direction, right? Maybe the girl Ofer was supposed to go out with has a boyfriend who wasn't happy about it all? And it's seeming more and more unlikely to me that he ran away. Does it make sense for him to decide to run away two days before he has a date with a girl for maybe the first time in his life? And who knows, maybe he said something to the girl. Perhaps he has been in contact with her since Wednesday. She may be the one person we have been looking for, the person whom Ofer has contacted and whom we have yet to come across.”

“Why wouldn't she tell anyone about it?”

“Look, Avi, I really don't know. I'm on my way to see her now. I'll update you after I've spoken to her.”

Five days, and he didn't know—not about the girl Ofer had been in touch with, not about the sister. Bringing Ma'alul into the investigation was undoubtedly the right decision. He felt a burning desire to return to his office and get everything he possibly could out of the father about Ofer and his life, even if their conversation went on late into the night.

R
afael Sharabi was nothing like what Avraham had expected. His stature, his tone of voice, his choice of words. Perhaps because he knew he was a sailor and a member of a workers' union, he had been expecting a heavyset man, tough and loud. He had expected him to speak harshly, to complain about the delay in opening the investigation, to threaten. If he had understood Ilana's hints correctly, a little pressure from Rafael Sharabi and the case would be handed over to a special investigation team under a higher-ranking officer, or to the Central Unit.

“Sorry about that,” Avraham said. “It was an update from an investigator in the field.”

“Anything new?” the father asked.

“Nothing for now,” Avraham replied, shaking his head. “We'll see a little later.”

There was something soft about the father's build and facial features. Almost feminine. He was a chubby man, in his midforties. Short, curly hair, silvery-black. He was only an inch or two taller than Avraham. There was gray stubble on his round face, as if he were in mourning. Avraham recalled the appearance of the apartment on the first day of the investigation: family members and friends, soda bottles and plates of snacks on the living room table. The father was on a ship bound for Trieste.

Rafael Sharabi didn't threaten, and he didn't say a word about the delay in the start of the investigation. He quietly and patiently listened as Avraham brought him up to speed, then offered any help that would be needed. Colleagues from work had offered to help too, as well as other family members. Had his wife not told him about the delay? Perhaps she had been afraid that he would have thought it was her fault, but he didn't look like a husband to be feared. When they first sat down in his office, after introducing themselves and shaking hands, Avraham had said that it must have been difficult for him to have been so far away, without the option of returning home immediately. “Yes, it was. But what could I do? I returned the moment we docked at the port,” Rafael Sharabi replied, as if he had been accused of something.

A
vraham thought about the sea—whether it was calm or stormy, whether the sailors spent the entire voyage belowdecks or whether they would go up on deck for a breath of fresh air when they had some free time, whether the sea itself was a presence in the lives of the sailors or if the ship was simply a regular workplace, an office tower of sorts that one never stepped out of. “The toughest part of the investigation for me so far is the sense that I don't know enough about Ofer,” he said. “That's really the help I need right now. It was difficult for your wife, and I understand that. But I'm having trouble building up a profile, and this complicates the process of establishing a line of inquiry, especially when we don't have any physical evidence.”

The father nodded and remained silent. He may have still been far away at sea or struggling with the feeling that he hadn't been at home when they needed him.

“I understand you are absent from home for long periods,” Avraham continued. “Can you explain to me how that works? How long are you away for? How often do you travel?”

“I usually do short routes—Cyprus, Turkey—trips of a few days. Once every few months I do longer runs, like Koper or Trieste. I spend at least a few days at home after each trip, sometimes up to two weeks. Every now and then there's ship maintenance work to do at the port.”

Where's Koper? Avraham wondered to himself. Probably a port city on the Mediterranean or some other sea. Every time he came across an unfamiliar detail during an investigation, he felt he was on the right track. He was stepping outside of himself, going beyond his knowledge. And unlike the mother, the father appeared willing to talk, willing to open the door for him—even if, for the moment, it was just a ship's door. When Avraham visited their apartment on Thursday and on Friday, the mother had accompanied him to Ofer's room; she had opened closets and drawers with him, and had sat down beside him on Ofer's bed, and yet he sensed her unwillingness to allow him into their home.

“What's your job title?” Avraham asked.

“Chief engineering officer.”

“Is that a senior position?”

“Senior? I don't know. It's a position you reach after twenty years on the job.”

“And how did you get into this line of work?”

Rafael Sharabi looked at him in surprise, as if the answer was obvious. “I served in the navy. After my discharge, I did a course in mechanical engineering at the Naval Training Institute in Acre, and went to work for Zim from there.”

“So you're in command of the ship? Are you the captain?” Avraham asked. He was not certain that a ship even had a captain.

“No, the chief engineering officer is responsible only for the mechanical operation of the ship. A captain needs to go through a professional training course. He's responsible for the entire ship, including the logistics of the cargo delivery, the loading and unloading.”

“What type of ships do you work on?”

“Mostly medium-range ships because I don't do the long routes anymore. Small or medium-size feeder ships.”

“What are those?”

“Oh, you asked as if you were familiar with them,” Rafael apologized. “It's a size class of container ships. Not the biggest. Ships that carry between a thousand and three thousand standard-size containers.”