ITHL News

Yishai Sarid’s remarkable literary thriller Limassol

        The hotel lobby was crowded with groups of heavyset people sprawled in armchairs speaking noisily, and children running every which way. It was like the commotion in a train station full of trains going nowhere. I gave my name at the reception desk and was handed the key card. Sigi carried the kid. We took the elevator up to the room, which was quiet and spacious and had a lovely view of the sea and the mountains, either the Moab or the Ammons, named after one of those peoples.
        The kid woke up when we got to the room, jumped on the big bed till he almost fell, asked me to swing him around like an airplane and laughed uproariously. He’s a happy kid, I said to myself, you mustn’t spoil that. Sigi took his toy cars out of the bag. We hadn’t been together like that for a long time. I wanted to lie down and rest, but the kid said he wanted to go to the pool.
        “Take him, Sigi said with a tired smile. “I’ll stay and rest.” She got him into his one-piece protective swimsuit that looked like a diver’s suit and slathered the exposed parts of his body with sunscreen. I tied his float wings onto his arms, then put on my own bathing suit and we went down to the pool barefoot. The noon sun was so strong that it burned away all thought, and whatever still threatened to bother me, I drowned in the pleasant, bright blue water. We had the pool almost all to ourselves because lunch had already begun in the dining room and the well-trained workers had already gone there. The kid hopped around on his skinny legs in the pool, spraying water in every direction, jumped on me so I’d hold him, broke away from me, asked me to throw him a ball, asked to see me dive and touch the bottom. I plunged into the water and burst out of it like a sea lion, to the sound of his loud laughter. It doesn’t get better than this, the blinding thought flashed through my mind, draw as much strength as you can from this moment.
        We went down to check out the sea up close. A man was floating on the water reading a book and two women were slowly covering themselves with mud in the hope of preserving their looks. The kid held my hand tightly and ran so we could see more and more, and I was pulled along behind him, back and forth, in the water and out, and in the distance, steam rose from the ground as if this were the beginning of creation, and the excited expression never left his face.
        We made it in time to eat what was left of lunch in the dining room. The other guests didn’t look so awful anymore – healthy, happy families focused on their children. The crowdedness didn’t bother me anymore either. The kid devoured a bowl of chicken and rice, and had ice cream for dessert. When I was drinking my coffee, he came and sat on my lap and his head fell onto me before I’d finished. I took him to the room and put him gently on the small children’s bed next to ours.
        I’d hoped that Sigi would surprise me in the shower like she used to once, but she was sound asleep and when I came out, I lay down quietly beside her and hugged her. The air conditioner was silent, the sheets were pleasant, and when the kid woke me up with his jumping, it was almost dark outside.
        “Good morning,” she greeted me with a smile. “We all needed that sleep.” I didn’t want to open my eyes. It was such a pleasant moment. But a bad, dark thought passed through me and I knew for sure that it would become reality. But I still tried to ignore it.
        Sigi bathed the kid and took a shower herself, and the three of us went down to the lobby all spick-and-span. Sigi wanted a cup of coffee, and then we looked for the Friday night festivities performed by the hotel entertainment staff for the children.
        “What’s bothering you?”
        On the lower level, the children sang a song welcoming in the Sabbath. Then a clown did magic tricks; he saw me standing in the back and tried to get me onto the small stage to be the victim of his stupid games. No thanks, I gestured, there’s no way I’ll be part of this.
        “Nothing,” I lied to Sigi. “We had a great time at the pool. The kid is really happy.”
        Sigi held my hand tightly and looked at me from close up. There was earsplitting noise in the background now. “He loves you very much,” her lips said.
        Right then, my beeper vibrated and I knew that the vacation was over. I read the message and decided not to say anything. They’d removed me from the interrogations anyway, so I’d try not to show any reaction in front of the kid.
        But I wasn’t the only one to get the news. Sigi saw people gathering in the lobby, pushing each other near the two couches, speaking tensely. Suddenly everyone looked sweaty, and she asked what had happened.
        “The guy they were after exploded,” I said. “In Jerusalem. A few minutes ago. Near a synagogue.”
        In the lobby, the ritual began: outbursts of rage, looks of sorrow, phone calls to relatives who might have been at the place of the disaster. Coarse men and overly made-up women said we should blow them up, how long can we let them get away with it. None of that interested me. Soon I’d have to sit down to Friday night dinner with them, hear someone say the blessings, put a napkin on my head because I didn’t have a yarmulke, then eat soup and noodles and fish in sauce. I couldn’t stay there any longer. I had left the battle out of weakness; I had to strengthen myself and go back.
        “I have to go,” I said. “I can’t stay here now.”
        “Where’s Daddy going?” the kid asked.
        “To work,” Sigi replied wearily. “Maybe you should take us home,” she said quietly. “There’s no point to this now anyway.”
        “Stay, I’ll come back,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll have time to go to the pool again.”
        I went up to the room to change. I can’t wear shorts and sandals when interrogating someone. Back in the lobby, the lamentations around us continued, but you could sense the brisk movement towards the dining room.
        Sigi asked me to at least eat dinner with them. I sat at the table impatiently. Someone at the main table said Kiddush and everyone stood up. It was crowded and very hot, as if the air conditioners had stopped working and all the heat of the desert had infiltrated the room. We had to stand on a long line to get food. The kid felt my restlessness and became cranky, whining that he was hungry, but he couldn’t find anything he liked and spilled a glass of juice on himself.
        “Go,” Sigi told me, “go already. Your being here is no help.”
        I drove back to Jerusalem alone. Beyond the area of the hotels, there was only a black, deep sky filled with stars. A fox ran across the road and I braked to avoid hitting it. The soldier at the checkpoint was standing in the middle of the road holding his rifle at a 60 degree angle. He raised his hand, palm out, in a signal for me to stop. “It’s okay, I came through here this morning with my wife and kid,” I assured him.
        “Where are they?” he asked, sticking his head into the car as if I’d killed them and stuffed them in the trunk.
        “Back at the hotel. I was called to work urgently in Jerusalem,” I said.
        “Where do you work that they call you on Friday night?” the nosy reservist asked, as if we had all the time in the world.
        “The Security Services,” I said.
        For some reason, he thought that was funny. “So maybe you’ll bring me something to eat when you come back, whaddya say?”
        “No problem, bro, just let me through now.”
        I drove up from the desert on the empty road and reached the city, which was very quiet. Ultra-Orthodox men in their Sabbath coats strolled along with their children, ancient pine trees swayed in the evening breeze. The walls of the Old City were beautifully lit up for the non-existent tourists. Silhouettes of border patrol soldiers wandered darkly in the streets. All around was the odd serenity of a silent city. The explosion had been far from here, on the other side of the city.
        I showed my papers to the guard at the gate to the Russian Compound. An army vehicle expelled two handcuffed detainees, their heads covered, who were pushed roughly into the door of the building. I walked through the corridors, all filled with the tumult that follows a terrorist attack, walkie-talkies spluttering and eyeless people being pushed roughly and monitors flickering new bits of information. I was glad to be there, I felt comfortable in that tumult.
        Haim was standing behind his Formica desk in his Sabbath clothes, giving orders. When he saw me, he stopped. “What are you doing here? I told you to go for a rest.”
        “I came from the Dead Sea,” I said. “I can’t just sit on my ass.”
        “You shouldn’t have left your wife.” Haim gave me a tired look.
        “I’m already here,” I said.
        “They took me away in the middle of the spicy fish,” Haim grumbled. “There’s an awful lot of pressure here. The Chief asked me to come and take charge of things myself. So why did you come?”
        “I want to interrogate,” I said. One of the young guys looked at us curiously.
        “Come here,” Haim said, hurried out from behind the desk and hugged me. He was a full head shorter than me. We stood in the corridor among convoys of detainees who kept being pushed inside. “This is not good,” Haim said. “I don’t want you to interrogate today.”
        “Haim, don’t do this to me,” I said. “I know you need me. I have to fix what I messed up. You’re leaving me alone with my thoughts. Don’t retire me at the age of forty. You know there’s no way back from that.”
        “You feel okay?” he asked me. We were standing so close that I could feel his breath mixing with mine. It smelled pleasantly of the Sabbath.
        “I’ll be fine, Haim,” I said. “Something went wrong. You know it wasn’t my fault.”
        Haim looked up at me. He had good, warm eyes, like a Turkish singer. “We’ve brought two of his relatives here,” he said. “Both were in touch with him these last few days, the little shit. The web is full of a video of him with a Kalatchnikov, the flag and a farewell speech. I know that synagogue. I have friends who pray there. He put on fringes and pants and looked like a nice boy from a good family. It makes me crazy that he was right here under our noses for three days and we didn’t catch him. Those guys, the ones who sent him, they’re no amateurs. They know what they’re doing.”
        “Who do you want me to take in with me?” I asked.
        We were in Jerusalem, so the interrogation rooms had more character. The ceilings were high and the walls covered with nicely chiseled stones. Haim had again given me one of the young guys, who had a shaved head and oily skin. Before they brought in the detainee, we planned how the interrogation would go and what roles each of us would play; this time, I would try to work by the book, even though the book never gets results.
        The detainee sitting in front of me was completely different from the one I’d killed. Fashionably trimmed beard, tight-fitting clothes, shiny gelled hair. I didn’t like him; he looked like a pimp. From the way he was listening to my conversation with the young guy, I could tell right away that he understood Hebrew. I looked at the file. In the ‘90s, when he was a teenager, he had served two months for illegal assembly, but he’d been off the radar ever since.
        “We’ve been looking for you,” the young guy said in Hebrew.
        “What for,” the detainee asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
        A piercing scream came from the interrogation room on the other side of the thick stone wall and our detainee squirmed awkwardly in his chair. For the time being, only his legs were chained.
        “You know Marwan?” the young guy asked.
        “Which Marwan?”
        “Exploding-into-a-million-pieces Marwan, Marwan with the fringes,” the young guy said. The way he was moving back and forth in front of the detainee was making me nervous too.
        “I won’t say no,” the detainee answered. For a minute, I thought the work with him would be easy, maybe I could go back to Sigi and the kid.
        “Where do you know him from?”
        “He’s my uncle’s son,” the detainee said. “I know him from the village.”
        “But you haven’t lived in the village for years,” the young guy said, “and he’s a lot younger than you. What’s your business with him?”
        “No business,” the detainee answered. His head shifted back and forth, following the young guy’s movement, and he was so jumpy that his eyes were rolling. “We saw each other at weddings.”
        “That was one hell of a wedding you made today,” the young guy said. Then he waited a moment, as if he were handing the interrogation over to me.
        I didn’t say anything. So far, he’d been doing well, why spoil it.
        “When did you talk to him the last time?” the young guy asked.
        “I really don’t know, maybe a month, two months ago.”
        “And if I tell you that you spoke to him day before yesterday?” the young guy said and came close to the seated detainee, almost brushing his face with his belt buckle.
        “That’s wrong,” the detainee answered, and began to play the game with us.
        The young guy grabbed him by the collar until we heard a ripping sound, and hoisted him up slightly with one hand. He was a strong kid. “I’ll fuck you up,” he said, “if you don’t tell me the truth right now.”
        The detainee coughed, his hands twitched and he said, “Really, that’s the truth,” and muttered something in Arabic.
        The young guy looked at me again, but I was sitting and watching as if I were in a theater. I couldn’t put myself there. He opened the door and asked the soldier waiting behind it to cuff the detainee’s hands behind his back. It’s happening again, I said to myself.

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