The Missing File (6 page)

4

H
e ended up being the last one who joined the search—and on his own, initially feeling an outsider among the other searchers, who wouldn't have been there had it not been for him.

He woke first. Elie was still asleep; Michal too. He peered out through the shutters of the balcony. It was the third day. All appeared quiet outside, with no signs of activity in the building or along the street. Two elderly men carrying blue-velvet prayer-shawl bags were walking along the pavement. Ze'ev was unaware of a synagogue nearby.

Saturdays belonged to Michal—or to him, in fact. They were her days for sleeping in, his days to get up for Elie. And every moment that the infant slept felt like a sweet, stolen one. He was a flurry of emotions. He had yet to digest what had happened to him over the past few days, what he had never imagined being able to do just an hour before doing it. Unfamiliar, contradictory feelings coursed through him with an intensity he had never before experienced. He was so filled with shame and pride that he felt he would explode.

Elie woke to the sounds of the kettle boiling and shaking—as he usually did. Ze'ev listened to his son's crying from the kitchen, where he prepared a bottle of warm milk for the boy and a cup of tea with a slice of lemon and brown sugar for himself. He lifted Elie out of his bed, and the infant looked at his father and around the room in surprise, still half asleep. They said good morning to the spotted furry dog, the wooden horse, the goldfish that swam back and forth in the tiny bowl. Ze'ev carried the small warm body to the living room, sat in the rocking chair, and fed him his bottle. The tea was left to get cold.

An hour or so later, he took Elie out for a walk in his stroller.

The city was deserted.

He followed their regular route, along Histadrut Street, holding back the urge to head immediately toward the dunes.

He had taken along his copy of
On Chesil Beach
in case Elie fell asleep in the stroller, but Elie didn't. And he wouldn't have read anyway. When they lived in Tel Aviv, before Elie was born, he would go out on Saturday mornings to a café, usually somewhere near the beach, with a book or a pen and notebook. Sacred hours—the only time almost when he wasn't a high school teacher, when he could still be anything else, anything he really wanted to be. Now he was different again, ever since Thursday. And again he was on the verge of writing, after a period of desolation of more than a year.

Michal was awake and dressed in her robe when they returned. She was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating a piece of toast with butter and plum jam. “How was the walk?” she asked, and then remembered and added, “Our neighbor was here earlier. They're organizing a group to help with the searches.”

How had he managed not to tell her? Nothing amazed or saddened him more than that. He had kept at least two secrets from her over the past few weeks. He hadn't planned to conceal the writing workshop and Michael Rosen. He simply hadn't told her the first time he went there—and the secret had grown since; it was impossible to speak about it now. And he certainly couldn't speak about the events of the past few days, not until he understood them himself. He felt he was keeping his very essence from her. Yesterday evening he had told her he was going to a certain place despite knowing that he was going somewhere else. And when he returned, his blood racing, she was asleep. He had undressed and got into bed, and she had turned over in her sleep and kissed him with her eyes closed.

“When was he here?” Ze'ev asked, and Michal said, “Fifteen minutes ago. I was in the middle of such a strange dream. I was dreaming we were on a luxury cruise ship heading for Istanbul. And suddenly I couldn't see you, and Elie and I were looking for you on the deck and starting to go from cabin to cabin inside the ship. And then I suddenly found my mother in one of the cabins . . . Now I don't know if we would have found you in the end.” She hugged him and nuzzled her face into his neck. “It must have something to do with what's going on.” She liked telling him her dreams.

Ze'ev nodded. “And where are they searching?” he asked, despite not needing to. He knew.

T
he area in which the search was taking place was relatively small, less than a square mile, and the police had divided it into two sections. The first, the northern section, covered the area between Golda Meir Street to the north and Menachem Begin Street to the south. It included the courtyards and parking lots of the occupied buildings, as well as the buildings still under construction. The second section was the extensive sandy area farther to the south, which was all dunes, and then more dunes—small hills of soft sand and dry bushes that stretched all the way to the next city.

Ze'ev went there on foot. It took them a while to decide that he would go alone and Michal would stay with Elie, and then he had hung back at the apartment for a little longer. He changed his clothes and shoes, looked for the keys to the motorbike, then decided to do without it, and wondered if he should take along his wallet or only some cash. Would anyone ask him for his ID card?

He wasn't familiar with the neighborhood he came to, and walked a few dozen yards before seeing something that looked to be part of a search operation. An empty police car parked alongside a brown trailer, the sales office for the residential development that was going up there. He could see familiar faces in the distance, faces he recognized from the street on which he lived. Among them was the neighbor who had been at his apartment that morning to tell them about the search. His heart was pounding with excitement. He decided not to take the black notebook out of his bag. It would be best to remember and make notes only when he got home. This wasn't how he had pictured the search for Ofer the night before. There were no uniformed police to be seen anywhere, and Avraham wasn't there.

Ze'ev's random encounter with Avraham on the stairs yesterday afternoon was probably what gave him the whole idea in the first place. Avraham wasn't in uniform last night, so perhaps now too he should be looking for him among the people in civilian dress, he thought to himself. The fact that he knew the name of the officer who appeared to be in charge of the investigation surprised him, although the explanation was a simple one. Avraham had been at his apartment on Thursday evening. He had sat in the kitchen with his wife and child, in his chair. And then they had passed each other on the stairs the next day.

T
he neighbor who had come to notify them about the searches was standing with a small group of people who were talking among themselves. They all knew one another. Ze'ev wondered if he should introduce himself to anyone. Were the police keeping a record of who was participating in the search? Were they dividing people into groups with specific tasks or could he simply join the search and wander around the area? He approached the neighbor and they shook hands.

“Have you been here for long?” Ze'ev asked, and the neighbor said, “An hour, hour and a half.”

They had never exchanged more than a few words. The neighbor, who owned a building supply store, was a few years older than him. He drove a white Toyota Corolla, and he and his wife had two children. A short while after Ze'ev and Michal's move to Holon, the neighbor had knocked on their door to ask if the scooter standing in the building's parking lot was his. He had asked Ze'ev if he could please park it elsewhere, as it was blocking the path to the garbage room. Since then, Ze'ev had parked his motorbike opposite the building, on the pavement. Now there seemed to be an air of unfamiliarity and embarrassment between them—but closeness too, almost a brotherhood. He could still feel the dry sensation of the neighbor's palm on his own skin.

“Where are the searches actually taking place?” Ze'ev asked.

“They told us to look here, in the neighborhood,” the neighbor replied. “The police are searching the dunes at the back.”

That's where he'd probably find Avraham, who, the previous evening, hadn't even stopped for a moment on the stairs to greet him—or to apologize for not returning on Thursday night to finish off their conversation as he had said he would. When Ze'ev realized that Avraham hadn't recognized him and simply continued up the stairs, he too pretended not to notice the person who had just rushed past him.

“And do we know what to look for?”

“They didn't say. Things that appear suspicious, I imagine. Clothes. Bags.”

Ze'ev had no control over the tremor he felt deep inside, but he showed no signs of it as he spoke. “The question is, why here of all places? Do you know if the police received specific information about the area in which the searches are taking place?”

“I've no idea,” the neighbor replied. “It's what the family asked for.”

He could see a group of teenagers a short distance from them, a few of Ofer's classmates probably. One was kneeling down and looking under the cars that were parked along the street. Ze'ev wondered if any of the teachers from Ofer's school were there.

“Is there anything I can do? Perhaps I could join you?” Ze'ev asked, and the neighbor said, “We're waiting for them to open. They've asked the contractor to open the construction sites in the neighborhood.”

Ze'ev stuck close to the neighbor until he felt sufficiently at ease to go off on his own. Logic told him that someone from the family was managing the volunteers, but he couldn't see any of the family members. Ofer's mother was certainly nowhere in sight. Had the police chosen not to update her about the information they had received and the decision to begin a search in the area? There weren't many women there, and he was pleased Michal had decided not to join him.

After the contractor arrived, six or seven of them, all men, walked through the huge concrete building shell. They maneuvered their way over sloping segments of cast concrete to which wooden beams had been attached with nails. The smell of damp filled the air. Wet sand and stone. Making their way between iron poles and over broken bricks, someone behind him said, “Careful, guys, we're not insured for this.” Ze'ev's shoes and the cuffs of his trousers were rimmed with dust.

He was sent to the sixth floor out of the nine that had been built so far. The neighbor went onto the fifth floor and Ze'ev made his way up alone, one floor higher, pausing at the entrance to an immense maze of walls.

The completed building would have three apartments on each floor; at this stage, however, they were still wide open, joined to a single expanse without any doors—only tall and wide openings in bare brick walls through which one could see more rooms with more openings in the walls and other rooms. He recalled climbing up the stairs of his apartment building on Thursday, when it all began. The open doors. And he found himself in the same room over and over again.

It would have been easy to get the wrong impression and think that he was engrossed in the task of searching, but Ze'ev was the only man on the construction site who knew they wouldn't find anything in the empty rooms. A few pairs of old work shoes were arranged in a row under a wide window in a very large room. Hanging on a strand of wire that seemed to be growing out of the bricks like a piece of ivy was a plastic supermarket bag filled with empty tins of canned food. Half a loaf of stale bread and an almost-full bottle of Coke lay on the sandy floor. The stench and rags in another of the rooms seemed to indicate that this was the workmen's toilet.

Ze'ev stopped looking. He was sure of himself now. He walked over to a north-facing window and stood there, looking out over the city, the sparse traffic on the roads, the handful of volunteers downstairs, below him. He could see the back of the building where he lived, and also the police station, not too far from there. He then found a south-facing window that overlooked the dunes. From up on the sixth floor, the blue figures of the policemen appeared tiny. A few of them were leading what seemed to be miniature dogs on leashes.

A
woman dressed in tailored black slacks, a light-colored silk blouse, and shiny shoes that were not suited to searching through dunes stood with her back to the street in conversation with Avraham. Ze'ev waited a short distance from them, pretending to be searching. The woman looked to be in her forties and was a head taller than Avraham. A senior commander who had stopped by in the area for a short while to oversee the searches on her way to a family lunch perhaps? Had she been a volunteer or family member who had joined the search, she would have been wearing more comfortable clothes, and different shoes surely.

Ze'ev was almost certain that he hadn't mentioned the name of Inspector Avi Avraham when he made the call to the police. He had intended initially to ask to speak to him—that had been the objective of the call. But then he changed his mind. Amid the storm of thoughts that raged through his mind last night, there was a moment when he suddenly fixed on the idea that the officer's full name must be Avraham Avraham. And with that thought, the policeman's entire world opened up to him, as if he had caught a glimpse of the man's bedroom. But although he had prepared for it well, repeatedly rehearsing in his mind the brief things he wanted to say in their conversation, he was thrown off upon hearing the young female voice that answered his call—and he almost hung up. He recovered somewhat, and then said things he hadn't intended to say, hanging up frightened and agitated by the words that had come out of his mouth.

The conversation between Inspector Avraham and the women in the silk blouse dragged on. Ze'ev couldn't see any police tape or anything else to indicate that the area had been cordoned off. He was again astounded by the lack of proper order, and made a note to himself that this was a detail of some significance. He had freely entered an area in which a police search was taking place. No one had taken any notice of him. There were no more than five or six uniformed policemen there, apart from Avraham, with a number of people in civilian dress walking around among them. Some may have been policemen and others volunteers like him. Two of the policemen were maneuvering a black device that looked like a vacuum cleaner or metal detector across the sand. There was an air of amateurism and disorder about the entire scene. Ze'ev recalled a French film he had seen at the Cinematheque a few years earlier. Hundreds of policemen were searching through a forest for an escaped criminal. They were standing alongside one another in a long line, their hands linked, and moving forward as a single entity so as not to miss a single piece of ground.