I allowed a truck to pass us, and after it receded into the distance I dropped my hand from the wheel and took hold of his hand. With only my left hand on the wheel, I needed to concentrate even more on the traffic, now I leaned forward, but I didn’t take back my right hand, and Oded linked his fingers in mine.
“They won’t find him,” I said.
“Alive? Not a chance. In this weather no one hikes in the desert, except perhaps for a couple of yeshiva boys who decide to get lost in the wadis. Even the army has cancelled their maneuvers. No, in this weather there isn’t a chance.”
“But they’ll find a body.”
“That’s doubtful too. I don’t know what will be left of him.”
“Maybe the dogs will eat him?”
“Maybe.”
“A wild beast,” I persevered, and my voice sounded like that of a child listening to a bedtime story. “A wild beast will eat him.”
“Maybe in winter, with the floods, the bones will be washed into the Dead Sea, that’s possible.”
I thought about bones and the sea, and I didn’t want him to die slowly. I hoped he would died quickly, as quickly as possible, for him to be dead already and for the wild beast to hurry up and pick the bones clean.
“You understand that it’s not about the book or the possibility that he would have sued me for attacking him,” I said, because it was very important for him to understand, and in the new time that was opening up, he could understand everything.
“It isn’t relevant. .”
“No it isn’t. Not at all. It’s got nothing to do with anything like that; with anything else he was liable to do. It has to do with cleaning. Erasing. Think simply. We erased, that’s all. Now I’m clean. Free. It’s erased.”
Oded raised our linked hands, and put them on my thigh. For a few minutes we drove like this in silence, and then he said in a thick but slightly more normal voice: “So do you think that you’ll start wearing dresses again?”
“I — what? What did you say?”
“Nothing, just that it’s already summer and you haven’t worn any of your sexy summer dresses yet. It just came into my head. I’m allowed. Stop it, don’t laugh. .”
The house was amazingly close, and as soon as we entered the dazzling lights of the city its presence became very concrete: first we have to look for a parking spot, maybe I’ll let Oded direct me, at this hour the street is full of revelers going out on the town, and the Defender really isn’t suitable for the city. The key to the front door is in my pocket, it isn’t hot inside the house, inside the house it’s pleasant, and this time we have no bags and parcels to carry in.
But then, when the car was already rolling as if of its own accord down the familiar path, when the miraculous everyday actions were only a few minutes away, an idea came to me, and when it became clear I realized that I had to postpone — if only for a little while — the miracle.
“Elinor, what exactly are we doing?”
The same cunning antic spirit that had taken me many years before to the gynecologist in Hahovshim Street, now took me in the direction of the Hyatt. Back then, at the doctor’s, the spirit betrayed me and abandoned me and I failed: like a sheep I gave in and mounted the stirrup chair when he told me to. This time, sitting high next to my husband in the Defender, I knew that I wouldn’t fall down, that the spirit wouldn’t desert me, and that one more thing remained to be done.
I drove right up to the hotel entrance and stopped.
“Let’s wait a bit. It won’t take long.”
We waited more than a bit. I almost gave up on the ingenious present with which I intended to surprise my husband: in another minute I would have answered his questions that grew more and more stressed, I was close to surrendering to the impatient drumming of his fingers on the seat — when the security guard came up to us. He looked exactly as he was supposed to look and said exactly the words he was supposed to say: “Excuse me, ma’am, you can’t stand here.”
Before Oded was the player, now I could play too, I wasn’t going to leave him alone in the game. Jerusalem’s a small town, Oded had left the Cinematheque with Not-man. There was a good chance that someone who knew him had seen them leave together and that he would remember. It was my turn to look after him. My turn to look after both of us, and according to the rules we both needed an alibi.
Conscious as a wayward girl of my husband’s fascinated gaze, I said to the security guard: “Sorry, we just let someone off here, one of your guests. He’s supposed to call me from his room and tell me if he’s coming down to give us something. It will only take a second.”
The security guard stood his ground, and I stood mine with all the exhibitionism of an insistent drunk: “Come on, show a little flexibility, we’re in a hurry, we’re late already, we’re not blocking anyone’s way here. He’ll call in a minute, be nice, do me this favor. .” And I carried on as long as I could, debating with him face to face about my right to stand there, and when I was convinced that the conversation was etched in his memory I gave up gracefully. “Oh all right, we’ll move. In any case it’s taking him too long,” I threw demonstratively at Oded, and started the engine.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” said my comrade, prodded into muscling in on the act. “In the movies the immediate suspect is always the last one to be seen with the victim. But if we’re already doing it, then tell me what he was supposed to be bringing us from his room.”
“I have no idea.” My scene was concluded, I felt that it was perfect, the wind had gone out of my sails and I had no desire to go on with the game.
“‘I have no idea’ doesn’t cut it, it’s not good enough,” boasted Oded in his commando voice. “How about for example a chapter or a synopsis of his book? Let’s say that’s what he was supposed to be bringing us: the synopsis of Pol Pot, First Person.”
“You weren’t listening. There is no first person of Pol Pot.”
“Too much literature for me. I told you the first time we met: I hardly managed to get eighty for literature in my finals. You can’t accuse me of failing to come clean. How about turning down the air-conditioning? It’s freezing in here.”
“My Mistake,” I said in a tired voice.
“What?”
“That’s what he was supposed to bring us from his room: that article of his, ‘My Mistake.’ He said that he would check to see if he had a copy. In the end he didn’t come down.”
“‘My Mistake’ is good. And in the end he didn’t come down and he didn’t call. Just so you know: tomorrow my father isn’t in the office, so my plan was to tell Hodaya to call the hotel and leave a message that I was looking for him and ask him to get back to me. I’m just wondering whether it would be best to do it tomorrow or to wait one more day.”
“It makes no difference. In any case he isn’t going to get back to you.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“Because what was never there can’t come back. It’s as simple as that.”
“Right.”
We reached the street next to the house. In the end it was me who maneuvered the Defender into the parking spot. We parked close to the house and went on sitting in the car, like when the boys were still living with us and we would stay in the car to conclude our business.
“So we attended the lecture and met him and gave him a lift to the hotel,” Oded insisted on getting things straight. “He said he would call us and for some reason he didn’t come back. Didn’t it seem a little strange to us, weren’t we worried by him disappearing like that?”