The bedroom was neat, the bed made. White sheet, light-yellow summer blanket. One thin pillow. The window was closed and the room was stuffy. I opened the window. The fresh air felt good.
A newspaper was folded on the nightstand. It was Ujkelet, an Israeli Hungarian-language paper. I preferred the Hebrew papers. I could have gone through life without reading a single additional word in Hungarian. In the nightstand's drawer was a pair of reading glasses, a pen, a handkerchief, a packet of Dubek cigarettes, and two boxes of matches. No identification papers, no money—those were in police headquarters, waiting for a nonexistent next of kin to collect them.
The closet was tall and narrow and made of reddish wood. The clothes were neatly folded or hung. I went through the pockets of the pants and jackets. In one jacket pocket I found some theater stubs and a receipt from a drugstore. In a pants pocket I found a folded grocery list. Before shutting the closet, I tapped on its bottom to make sure it didn't have a false bottom like I had installed in mine. I didn't expect to find one, and didn't.
The grocery list held no surprises. Mostly regular items, many of them rationed: milk, bread, jam, butter, eggs. The list was in Hebrew and I focused my attention on the alephs and lameds, the two letters that had distinct shapes in Kaplon's suicide note. They looked identical. Both the grocery list and the suicide note had been written by the same hand.
The icebox in the kitchen was empty. The ice had all melted. I assumed that Mrs. Greenberg had thrown all the food away, knowing it would soon go bad. One cabinet held mismatched glasses and saucers and cups and plates. In another I found a half-full bottle of brandy, a box of sugar, a packet of coffee, an assortment of teabags, and some canned goods. At the end of the counter was a single pan and pot. A solitary glass stood in the sink. The two drawers underneath the sink contained nothing but cutlery and utensils. The service closet housed a broom, a mop, a bucket, and cleaning fluid. On the kitchen table were a saltshaker, a napkin holder, and a single teaspoon.
By the balcony's door was a music stand. Two stools, the kind you see in bars, huddled next to it, flush against the wall. A stack of music covered one stool. Brahms, Strauss, Mozart, Handel. Even in music one could not escape Germans and Austrians.
The other stool was crowned by a violin case. I flicked the latches open. A violin nestled within, all elegant curves and lines. There was some discoloration in the wood. Not the instrument a world-renowned violinist would use. I ran my fingertips over the wood. It was smooth and felt weirdly alive. I recalled the beauty produced by this instrument, the emotions it evoked in the crowd at Café Budapest. I stopped myself from thrumming the strings. Let the last sounds I heard this instrument make be Kaplon's.
I stepped out onto the balcony. It didn't offer much of a view: a slice of Bograshov Street, the side of the next-door building, a bird's-eye view of the yard below. The iron railing was spotted orange with rust. It had baked in the morning sun and was warm to the touch. There was no chair on the balcony. It didn't seem like Kaplon made much use of it.
I returned to the living room. It carried the faint scent of blood. It had a sofa, a worn and comfortable-looking armchair, a coffee table, and a squat dresser topped by a radio. I switched the radio on. Chamber music. I switched it off. The dresser had three drawers. In the bottom one I found a coil of violin strings, a replacement bow, and a box of rosin to run over the bow. In the middle drawer were additional music books. More dead Germans. I could tell what Kaplon loved to play by how thumbed the books were. In the top drawer I discovered a stack of blank paper; a few pens and pencils; strips of stamps, the top one half-used; and a stringed bunch of envelopes. There were no letters, though, other than some bills and official correspondence from the City of Tel Aviv. Two shelves laden with books hung on the wall to the right of the radio. I went through them. Some novels, some political books, a Bible, a short volume on the construction of violins. Nothing was hidden in the books.
A medium-sized, brown leather suitcase that had seen better days lay next to the sofa. I flicked the lid open. Shoelaces, combs, shoe polish and brushes, safety pins, soap cloaked in cheap wrapping paper, and an assortment of other small items. Apparently, this was how Kaplon made his living, apart from his performances at Café Budapest. He spent his days lugging around this battered suitcase, hawking his cheap merchandise, scraping a living one sale at a time.
The police report said that Kaplon was found on a rug in the living room. The rug was gone. The bare floor beneath had been washed. It looked sterile and cold. Had the police taken the rug as evidence? Based on the hurried and uncaring manner in which the report had been written, probably not. Either they threw it away, or Mrs. Greenberg did. Probably the latter, as she would have had to clean up the blood. It didn't matter one way or the other. The rug was probably soaked through with blood and was useless anyway.
I knocked on the other two doors on Kaplon's floor. The one labeled Ayalon wasn't answered, but the one labeled Levi was. Mrs. Levi was in her mid-thirties, skinny, angular-faced, with short curly brown hair. I asked her about Kaplon, and she muttered some vague words about how awful it was, and could you believe it, and you never would have guessed it by looking at him, and so on. I nodded in all the right places and agreed with her that it was a terrible thing.
"I heard it was a horrible sight," she said breathlessly. "His body, I mean. Blood everywhere."
Her eyes glinted with eager anticipation. She was hoping I had some morbid details to share with her. I'd met her kind before, the kind that secretly relished the scandals and tragedies of others. This was an opportunity too good to be missed. Just think of all the attention she'd receive from her friends when she reported the bloody death of her neighbor. With enough nuggets of gory information, she could milk this story for weeks.
I hid my distaste and steered the conversation back toward the living Yosef Kaplon. She said she hadn't known him well. They would say good morning when they saw each other on the stairs or landing, or good evening if it was later in the day. Little more than that. He'd seemed like a nice man, she said, but he had never made any serious effort at befriending her. She didn't say it, but I got the impression that she'd made no such effort either. The only thing that bothered her was the music. It was lovely, she supposed, but she didn't care for it. Always seemed too loud to her. She was driven to send her husband to complain about it a few times. She had no idea if any of the other neighbors were friendly with him, but if she had to venture a guess, she'd say they weren't. That wasn't to say that Kaplon was unsociable. If that was the impression she gave me, then she was eager to set me straight, especially now that the poor man was dead. One morning, she recalled, her husband had found he was out of razor blades, and he remembered that Kaplon sold them. He said Kaplon had been very nice, even though it appeared her husband had woken him up. The razors were not of the best quality, but it got her husband shaved for work, which was what mattered.
"There was one time I recall," she said, her finger held to her lips in reminiscence, "walking by his door and hearing him weeping. Weeping and muttering."