Two She-Bears (13 page)
Authors: Meir Shalev
THE SHOT
The birds fell silent all at once, as if clearing the air for the thunderous gunshot. The blast echoed in the wadi and quickly died out. Despite the proximity of the target and the speed of the bullet, the avenger could sense the interval between the bang of the percussion cap and the hitting of the target.
The tall, beefy young man screamed and staggered, circling in place. The tail of his jacket fluttered for a moment as he fell. From the way he collapsed, the avenger concluded that he had hit him precisely where he had wanted, in his right knee, to render him helpless, racked with fear and agonizing pain but fully conscious.
For a moment the wounded man lay on his back, then dragged himself sideways, trying to wriggle behind a thornbush that was not big enough to hide him and whose name he did not know. He took a pistol from his pack and peeked out, looking around. There was no one to be seen. He waited a bit, terrified and hesitant, immobile.
Open skies and the rising sun washed over him. A pleasant, sweetish odor of fading flowers assaulted his nostrils. Fear filled his heart. The rocks, the bushes, the landscape were all foreign to him. He knew how to function in the city and the street, among houses and cars, not in the wadi, the woods, the open fieldâplaces whose rules he did not know and whose signs he could not read and whose language he did not speak. He now surveyed the slope across the wadi with sun-blinded eyes, aware that someone was watching him through the same gunsight he used to shoot him, knowing what was in store and awaiting it with dread.
A few minutes went by, and then the wounded man saw a man of medium height, holding a rifle waist high, heading toward him. The sun rising behind the man sketched a muscular, faceless silhouette.
When he was thirty meters away the man stopped and shouted, “Put the gun in the pack.”
In his condition, at this range, with that weapon, he had no chance of effectively returning fire, certainly not at an enemy armed with a rifle who had already proved his sharpshooting ability.
He put the pistol back in the pack and waited, groaning with fear and pain.
“Close the pack,” the man said.
The wounded man closed the pack.
“Throw it toward me.”
The wounded man clutched the pack. The man drew closer and moved sideways, so that the sun was no longer behind him. The silhouette turned into a man with chestnut hair that shone in the sunlight, his face empty of expression and his eyes bright, his skin astonishingly, eerily white. He was dressed in old work clothes: a blue cotton shirt and worn-out khaki pants. His shoes were wrapped in strange coverings, like thick towels.
He came closer, leaned over, and picked up the pack. The wounded man held tight to the strap. The man said nothing, and as the wounded man pulled the pack toward him, he slammed the rifle barrel into his shredded knee.
The wounded man screamed, let go of the pack, and rolled over.
The man said, “Don't scream. You don't want anyone to hear and come over.”
And added, “Remember you're here because of a murder. I'm not yet.”
He took the pack and asked, “What were you looking for under the tree? What were you sent to find?”
“Nothing. I'm just taking a hike,” moaned the wounded man.
“With those shoes and clothes and that pack you don't look to me like a hiker. What are you looking for at this hour?”
“Just hiking. I told you.”
“Maybe this?” the man asked, and took out a gold cigarette lighter from his pocket.
The wounded man did not reply.
The man sat down on a big chairlike rock, near the trunk of the carob tree, and flicked on the lighter.
“It even works,” he said. “Is it yours?”
The wounded man did not reply.
“I cleaned it up a bit. It was all muddy. Then I saw the initials on the back.”
The wounded man did not reply.
The man opened the pack he had taken from him, took out a wallet, examined the driver's license.
“No. These aren't your initials. These are someone else's initials. Someone else forgot the lighter here and sent you to get it.”
The wounded man said, “I'm just hiking. I don't know nothing about a lighter.”
“You don't know nothing about double negatives, you moron. You're just a punk who can't even speak properly.”
He got up from the rock. “So whose lighter is it?” he asked again. “And for whom is it so important that it not be found here?”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
The man drew closer and said, “This time scream quietly. For your own good. Remember what I told you before. You are here because of a murder and I am not yet.”
Again he hit his knee with the rifle barrel. The wounded man screamed into the palm of his hand. His screams ended in sobbing. His whole body shook. Sweat flooded his forehead and dripped onto his face.
“Whose lighter is it?”
“You don't know who you're dealing with. You won't see the sun come up tomorrow.”
He tried crawling backward, twisting and wheezing, spraying saliva with grunts of rage and terror. The avenger picked up his cell phone, which had fallen when he was shot, and examined the names on the speed-dialing list.
“Here he is,” he said, “who else could come before mother and dad and before Adi? And what's a girl with a nice name like Adi doing with a piece of crap like you?”
The wounded man said nothing.
“So who killed the old man who was here yesterday? You or he?”
The wounded man did not reply.
“I'll describe him, to refresh your memory. An old man, white hair, wearing work clothes exactly like mine. He didn't carry a gun, just a walking stick and a backpack, and had a hearing aid in his ear and a patch over one eye.”
“Nobody killed him. He slipped here and fell and broke his head on a rock. I swear by all that's holy.”
“Three mistakes,” said the avenger. “First, you have no idea what's holy. Second, he didn't fall and break his head on a rock. Somebody picked up the stone from the ground and hit him on the head. Third, how do you even know he died from a blow to the head and not from something else?”
“He fell,” whispered the wounded man. “It was an old man with a stick, with no sense of balance, can't hear, and can't see in one eye. He fell and broke his head on a rock. We were here and right away we took off. We were just hiking. We didn't want to get in trouble.”
“Yesterday you went hiking here and today too? A lover of nature and the land, very nice.”
The avenger bent down, picked up a rock the size of a large grapefruit, stood tall over the wounded man. “You are wrong,” he said, “he came here when you were here, and you killed him with a rock just like this,” he said, and hit the wounded man on the side of his head, a light and painful blow, “but a lot harder. And then you put the rock under his head as if he had fallen on it, but you are idiots and put it upside down. This way, you piece of shit,” and raised his hand.
The wounded man tried to get up, his face contorted with pain and supplication, his mouth widened for a scream, but the avenger smashed his temple with the rock, this time with his full strength. He knelt alongside the body, lifted it into a sitting position, stripped it of the coat, and wrapped the head with it, lest he be stained by the blood. He clutched the dead body, and despite its size and weight he stood up as easily as someone carrying a baby.
He carried the body to the wadi below the carob tree, took it into an adjacent cave, threw it and the rock into an ancient cistern in the bowels of the cave, then climbed down into it. The carcass of a goat lay there. The man dragged it aside, covered the body with rocks from the cistern floor, laid the goat on top, climbed out of the hole, took a last look at the cistern, and exited the cave, returning to the carob tree. He sat down on a rock that resembled a large chair and waited.
A few minutes later the dead man's cell phone rang.
The avenger put the phone to his ear and said nothing.
“You're making me wait,” said the voice on the phone. “I told you, I don't like waiting.”
“Sorry.”
“You found it?”
“No.”
“Who is this? You sound different.”
“It's me.”
“Very good. You have learned not to mention names. You looked carefully?”
“Yes.”
“Who is this? Why are you talking like that?”
“Because I'm dead.”
“You're in a mood for jokes?”
“You won't believe what happened. Somebody came here, found it before I did, waited for me here, and killed me. Bashed my head with a rock.”
“What's going on? Who are you?”
“A rock to the head. Exactly like we killed the old man yesterday. He killed me and threw me beside our goat in the pit.”
“You found it or you didn't? This is no time for jokes.”
“I am lying here in the pit covered with stones, my brains are pouring out and my mouth is full of dirt and blood, our goat is on top of me and it's starting to stink, so what do I have left? Only jokes.”
“I see. Who killed you?”
“Some guy. I don't know his name.”
“Did the two of you talk before he killed you?”
“Sure. We had a lovely conversation.”
“What did you say, bottom line?”
“Bottom line, he left you what you forgot here.”
“What do you mean âhere'? Where exactly?”
“You'll have to look for it. He also found the rock we hit the old man with.”
“How did he find it?”
“He also said that we were idiots, that we put it upside down, I didn't exactly understand what he meant. I think you better get over here quickly before he tells the police and they'll come and find my phone and your lighter.”
The avenger hung up, hoisted the dead man's pack on his shoulder, went back, and hid in the hideout in the mastic tree, ate the two remaining granola bars, crossed them off the list in his pocket, drank water, and rested. Half an hour later he drank more coffee from the thermos, looked at the wadi, at the big carob, at the big thronelike rock beside its trunk, at the dark mouth of the cave in the adjacent gully. He had time. He had plans and an objective. He waited.
How would you describe your family in relation to this moshava?
An abnormal family.
That's interesting. Other people here also define their families as unusual and different.
That's because they're bored. They tell stories, make things up, want to be special. Not me. I would just as soon not be abnormal. This also proves I'm telling the truth. People don't make up stories like these about themselves. Someone who tells them is apparently telling the truth.
But not the whole truth.
No. Not the whole truth.
Especially about your grandfather. You're not telling me everything about him.
No. Or about Eitan. I told you, I write. The terrible stories about the terrible things that were done by the terrible men I love, and in fact, the terrible things that I would do if I were a hundred percent male.
And what did you mean by the word “abnormal”?
Most of the families here are clans of cyclamens. That's how my grandfather described families where the children stay close to their parents, as opposed to our family, which is a family of ragworts, flying off to distant places. Grandpa Ze'ev and his brothers left the family home in the Lower Galilee. My father and his brother fled this house as fast as they could. Our mother left Dovik and me with Grandpa and moved to the United States. Eitan left me and the world, but he came back; Neta died before his time and won't come back. I'm not into the World to Come and the Immortality of the Soul, and you won't hear me saying “he went up to heaven,” “watching over us from on high,” and all that garbage. Death is earth and dirt, not sky. Neta is buried in the earth, and after twelve years there's nothing left of him. There's nothing left of anyone. Nothing of a little boy, just little tiny bones, like a bird's.
Neta's room, by the way, was not turned into a museum. I don't keep his bed the way it was and the little clothes in the closet and the teddy bear on the pillow. A short time after he died it became Eitan's room, and not because Eitan wanted to sleep in his dead son's bed but because he didn't want to, or was afraid to, sleep with me. Whatever. I'm not big on memorials. I keep only a few small mementos, mainly his drawings from kindergarten and his unfinished notebook from first grade with the first few letters of the alphabet and a few of his costumes. All of which, by the way, I would have saved even if Neta were still alive.
I remember: He had all sorts of costumes. I don't call it masquerading because it wasn't only that. It was a blend of my talent for mimicry and Eitan's for camouflage, and his own creativity. Here was this child-man, solid, simple, strong, good hands. But every so often he would start to wrap himself in scarves and rags, even hold them together with safety pins, with a real and surprising flair for design. Sometimes he would explain: I'm a magician, I'm a king, I'm a daddy. One day he announced, “I'm dressing up as someone not from here.” And once he asked us to give him black cloth for his birthday because he wanted to dress up as the Angel of Death. That scared me. I admit it. I said to Eitan, “That's enough. I will not go along with this game.” I was alarmed: He's not that kind of child. Where does he get ideas like that?
Whatever. I kept some of these costumes, and I gave his everyday clothes to the social welfare department of the regional council and to two friends with sons his age. Dalia said to me at the time, she makes me crazy, that woman, “Why don't you give me Neta's clothes? Maybe I'll have a son someday?”
“For that very reason,” I told her. “Precisely because you might have a son one day.”
“I don't understand,” she said.
And I, in my diaphragm brain, answered her, It's okay, I didn't expect you to understand. And out loud I added, “Believe me, Dalia, you don't need sons. You started out with daughters, keep it that way. It's better.” And I smiled at her. “Girls are also much more symbolic.”
Again I sense that I'm smiling. Sometimes I smile but don't feel the smile. Sometimes I feel a smile, but I'm not smiling. Whatever. Let's go back to Neta's clothes that I gave to the social welfare department. One day, two years after he died, I saw a little Russian boy on our street wearing his pants. I recognized them immediately because there were two colorful patches on the knees, one shaped like a heart and the other like an eye, which I had sewn on by hand. He and his mother were standing in the street by the notice board and speaking Russian. I saw them, and you know what, Varda, I didn't faint or run away, nor did I go over to them. I just stood and looked at them, at the mother and son, and suddenly she gave me a look, took his hand, and the two of them walked off, away from me, and disappeared around the corner. Maybe she picked up something from my look; maybe she'd heard stories and knew who I was or just looked at me the way women sometimes look at me. I think I already told you that women look at me no less than men do. Not because I'm any great beauty, I'm not, but apparently they see that I'm very pleased with the way I look. That's one of my weapons. The drink that puts me to sleep at night is my secret weapon, and my looks are my unconventional weapon. That's just fine and it gives me strength, all the more so at my age. If I were really beautiful, it would be even better, but I can also make do with what I have. Every year I teach the story of David and Goliath, and every year I tell the students that David's beauty was his weapon no less than his brains and courage and his sling and stone. Goliath, that ugly idiot, showed up with armor, shield, sword, and spear. The biblical word for shield,
tsinah,
also means “coldness.” Nice word. As if people's coldness defends them against others. And David came with his beautyâhis face, the beautiful eyes, like a woman who goes into the street armed with her beauty: “A thousand shall fall at her left, ten thousand at her right.” Male enemies turn to stone; female enemies melt.
That's what defeated Goliath: that he suddenly realized that this boy didn't have the strength or courage of a man, which he could have overcome without any problem, but rather the frightening confidence of a beautiful woman, like the radiance of the angels who came to Sodom and struck everyone there with blindness. And I remember, I don't know why, that prior to our wedding Eitan and I drove to Ben-Gurion Airport to fetch my mother, who had deigned to attend. There were automatic doors at the entrance to the terminal, and we were from the least-automated moshava you can imagine, so I said to him, “You see these innovations, Eitan? No need to go to America; America is already here. In the moshava people don't open doors for one another because of things that happened back in the British Mandate, and here doors open on their own for everyoneâcome on in.”
“No innovations, Ruta,” he said, “these are totally ordinary doors. But when
you
arrive they open by themselves. When you arriveâall doors open.”
He was a romantic, I already told you, and I was then newly pregnant with Neta, with all the beauty of a first pregnancyâI had filled out a bit, I no longer looked so skinny. I remember: Once he said to me, “Twenty minutes after fertilization you put on seven hundred grams. Ten grams the weight of the embryo, ten grams weight you gained, and the other six hundred eighty are your added beauty.”
He exaggerated slightly, of course, but I really did have the radiance of a first pregnancy. If only Neta could have stayed inside me forever. Nothing would have happened to him, and I would have stayed radiant forever.
Whatever. The doors opened; Eitan picked me up in his arms and groanedâ“You're so heavy, who knew your beauty weighed so much”âand carried me into the terminal and said, “How do you like the new house I built you? In a minute everyone will fly away and we'll be alone.”