"What was he saying?"
"I don't know. He was speaking some foreign language. But I do recall him saying one word over and over again. 'Anya, anya, anya.' I don't know what it means, do you?"
I shook my head, thinking, Mother. In Hungarian, anya means mother.
"Anyway, he was weeping like a small child. A grown man. Can you imagine that? How embarrassing."
"Wednesday night," I asked, clenching my fists by my sides. "Did you hear him when he got home?"
"No. I went to bed at nine. I usually do. With the children, I get very tired, very early. The heat doesn't help, either. I'm not a deep sleeper, so he probably made little noise. Just ended his life quietly. It's very sad."
I tried the doors on the second floor, but neither was answered. I could always come back after work hours if I decided I needed to speak with more neighbors.
I descended the stairs to the ground floor and was about to knock on Mrs. Greenberg's door when I noticed the mailboxes. Two keys hung from the key ring Mrs. Greenberg had given me. The large one had opened Yosef Kaplon's apartment. I tried the smaller one on the mailbox labeled with Kaplon's name. There was a single envelope within. I looked at the return address. It had been sent by a man called Meir Abramo, and he lived in Jerusalem.
I considered my options. I could give the letter to the police. They would probably lose it or toss it in the trash. I could give it to Mrs. Greenberg, but she'd just grumble. I could leave it in the mailbox and it would be cleared out whenever the police allowed Mrs. Greenberg to rent Kaplon's apartment to a new tenant. Or I could keep it. I might learn something, and even if I didn't, I would inform Meir Abramo that Kaplon was dead.
Opening the envelope right then and there seemed wrong. I tucked it in my pocket. I would get to it soon enough.
Mrs. Greenberg was still wearing that frown on her face when she opened the door.
"Find everything you need?"
Her tone was a sneering one, but I pretended not to notice it.
"Everything there was to find," I said.
She held out a thick-fingered hand for the keys, but I held them back.
"Just a few questions about the deceased, Mrs. Greenberg."
She huffed. "I don't have all day. I must get back to my cooking."
"It won't take long. I promise. Just trying to fill some gaps in what I know about him. Did he have any regular visitors? A woman, perhaps?"
"None that I ever saw. If he had a friend in the world, he didn't come here."
"On Wednesday night, did you hear him return?"
She nodded. "I was tossing and turning because of my hip, and I heard footsteps in the hall. I think it was him. He came home very late, between midnight and one. Wednesdays he played at some club. Don't ask me the name. I don't like those places. Too much alcohol. It's not right."
I nodded, as if in agreement. What I was thinking about was the time. Between midnight and one meant that Kaplon had probably come home directly after our conversation in Café Budapest.
"You say he lived here for close to a year. What sort of tenant was he?"
"If you'd asked me that question last week, I would have said he was a good one. He paid on time, kept things clean, and apart from playing that violin, made no noise. The violin had me worried for a while. I don't like noise, you see. But he agreed to practice only during the morning hours, never when most people are home. And he played with the windows closed, which helped." Her face pinched. "But now I realize how wrong I was about him."
"In what way?"
"He always seemed polite and respectful, and I treated him with kindness. So why did he have to go and kill himself in my building? You know how that apartment smelled? How hard it was to clean? I had to hire a cleaning girl to wash away all the blood. Paid her out of my own pocket, too. The police didn't help. They wouldn't even let me have a bit of the money he had with him when he died to pay for it. And the apartment still smells of blood. I'll probably have to bring the girl here again."
Her lips made a thin, unforgiving line in her birdlike face. "You know what my mistake was? I should never have rented him the apartment. I was warned at the time. A friend of mine told me, 'Watch out for those people, Zelda. They're not right in the head. What they went through there in Europe, it made a mess of their minds.' I should have listened to her. But I have a soft heart and I felt sorry for him. And now this happened. She was right. Crazy, the lot of them. Crazy."
7
I left Mrs. Greenberg's building and walked east on Bograshov Street. My throat was dry and my lips felt chapped. A fledgling headache was brewing in my left temple. It was another blistering, humid day, and I adjusted the brim of my hat to shield my eyes from the harsh sun. I turned left onto Pinsker Street and kept on it till it ended at Moghrabi Square.
Fifty meters before the square, I began to hear a booming tenor voice singing in Italian. The beautiful, manly voice stretched and looped and twisted the words in a way no man should have been able to. The singer was surprisingly short in stature, with black hair that was thinning on top, a barrel of a chest, and muscular, tanned arms. He was dressed in spotless white clothes and cap. A metal drum-shaped sausage heater hung on a strap around his shoulders. Back in Germany, before he came to Israel, he used to be an opera singer. As opera-singing positions were hard to come by in Israel, he took to selling frankfurters and claimed Moghrabi Square as his fiefdom. He was well known throughout Tel Aviv for his habit of launching into one aria after another while hawking his sausages. You could hear his booming voice from hundreds of meters away, provided traffic was light. I stood for a while, listening to him sing, as he stuck a sausage into a bun, lathered it with mustard and handed it to a customer. His sausages were very good, and I normally had one when I passed by him, but my talk with Mrs. Greenberg had deprived me of my appetite. I would eat later, I decided. At Greta's.
From Moghrabi Square I turned onto Allenby Street and marched, hands in pockets, till I reached Greta's Café. The place was almost full. Greta had been right—all the regulars were present, their expulsion of the day before forgiven. One or two of them gave me wary looks. I guessed they were worried that I'd have another episode, which might lead to their removal from the café that day as well.
I said hello to a bustling Greta. She gave me a cold bottle of orange soda and a smile and promised to bring me soup. I reached over the bar to where Greta kept my chessboard and pieces, then went to claim my table, which was unoccupied.
I placed the chessboard on the table but did not set the pieces yet. I took out the letter I'd removed from Yosef Kaplon's mailbox. I studied the envelope, but there was nothing special about it. I felt a momentary pang of impropriety. Was it right for me to open this? Before I could decide on a definite answer, I slid a forefinger under the flap and tore the envelope open. Inside was a single page folded in half.
The outer side was blank. I unfolded the letter and turned it over. It was written in Hebrew and the date at the top was August 18, ten days ago. I pressed my lips, shook my head—either the mail service had been extremely slow, or the letter had been waiting patiently in Kaplon's mailbox since the day he died.
I read the letter twice and ended up disappointed. I had been hoping for insight into Kaplon's frame of mind at the time of his suicide. The letter offered nothing of the kind. It didn't expose any secret facet of his life. It told more about the sender of the letter, Meir Abramo, than it did about its recipient.
In the letter, Abramo discussed a play he had seen in Jerusalem—he had found the experience satisfying, but admitted that his imperfect Hebrew made it difficult to follow the rapid dialog on stage. He wrote a little about the fear of war breaking out once more in Jerusalem, now a divided city. He lamented the drudgery of his work as a men's clothes salesman, though he expressed gratitude at being employed. "With so many good men looking for work and more arriving in Israel every week, I should count my job as a blessing," he wrote. "But, Yosef, each night I dream of the day in which I can pursue my passion and earn a living by it." What that passion was could not be determined from the letter, but Kaplon surely knew of it.