Limassol

I
sat in the car a few more minutes to look at the old picture of her and listen to the end of “Here Comes the Sun.” You rarely hear Harrison on the radio, and there aren't many morning songs as good as that one. It's important for me to know the face of a person before I meet them for the first time, so as not to be surprised. She was very beautiful in the picture, hair pulled back in a bun, a wise forehead, smiling at an Arab at some meeting of progressives.

A morning in late July. There was an urban calm of summer vacation in the street. Cats foraging for food in garbage cans, two friends striding to the sea on the tree-lined boulevard, carefree laughter, surfboards under their arm. I live on the third floor, she said on the phone. The mailboxes were covered with layers of stickers, young tenants who came and went and names in Latin letters of people who were no longer alive. The building was rundown and the plaster was peeling. The high narrow windows in the staircase, as in an abandoned monastery, were opaque with dirt. Daphna opened the door barefoot, her hair in a bun, her eyes sharp. That's what I picked up at first glance.

“I'm on the phone,” she said. “Come in.” I heard the end of a conversation, a brief laugh, a few matter-of-fact words. “I've got to get off now, somebody's waiting for me.” I peeped into the living room: two comfortable sofas from the seventies, a big window opening onto the crest of a ficus tree, a small television, interesting works on the walls I didn't have time to examine. The apartment faced the internal courtyard, and was flooded with light. For some reason, I had expected a dark place.

“Come in here, we'll sit in the kitchen,” she called.

On the round table was a stack of paper, a bowl of peaches, a handmade colorful cloth. A radio was playing classical music softly in the background, maybe Chopin, maybe somebody I didn't know.

“Why did you come?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly young.

“I was told you could help me write, you were recommended,” I said. “I want to learn how to write.”

“That's important to you? You're willing to invest time in that?” she asked quietly, with a restrained smile, and sat down on the chair with one leg folded under her. Now I saw that she was wearing baggy cloth pants.

“Yes, that's why I came.”

“You don't work? What do you live on?” she questioned me, and her face was now strong and her look was focused, almost masculine.

“I worked long enough,” I said. “Now I want to write. That's what's most important to me.” I stuck to my script. I simply couldn't deviate from it now.

“Some people come to me to do the work for them,” she said, and put her hands on the table, next to one another. The fingernails were short and clean. “I don't do that. If you want to publish, you'll have to work hard. I won't write for you.”

On the sill of the barred kitchen window were pots of herbs. Years of rain and sea spray had cut cracks in the walls; the ceiling was peeling, too.

She asked where I worked, and crossed her legs.

“For thirteen years, I was the director of an investment company,” I said. “They were great years in the market. But I left. Maybe someday I'll go back to it. I've got enough money. Now I'm in a period of creativity. Ever since I was a little boy, I've dreamed of writing a book.” I didn't believe such things were coming out of my mouth. Choose a role, I said to myself, decide who you are.

“You've chosen a strange subject for an investment advisor. How did you decide on it?” she asked.

“Look, I studied history at the university,” I answered. “Until I had to drop out to earn a living. By chance I came on this article, about an
etrog
dealer in ancient times, and the story stuck with me. I checked the sources and found it in all kinds of forms both in the Talmud and in Hellenistic writings. My imagination is constantly wandering off in his direction.”

Her hands were suntanned and narrow, and adorned with thin gold rings, and her eyes were very deep-set; it was hard for me to look into them without feeling embarrassed. She had a long, thin neck with delicate lines, but that didn't bother me, didn't bother me at all. According to the papers, she was seven years older than me. When she went into the army, I was going into fifth grade.

“That's only an outline,” she said. “You're at an early stage.”

“I'm not in a hurry,” I said.

“Your manuscript won't be going to the printer tomorrow,” she said. “Tell me what you expect. I don't want awful disappointments. Neither of us could stand that,” she laughed. “More people hang themselves because of lack of talent than because of disappointed love.”

“Don't worry,” I laughed too. “With brokers, it's more common to jump off roofs. I won't hang myself. I just want to write a good book. I'm not a child, and I've got patience. I'm a long distance swimmer.”

“I also swim.” She shook herself and smiled again. I had managed to draw her out. “Where do you swim?” she asked, interested.

I told her that as a child, I used to swim in the pool at the Weizmann Institute, I took fifth place in the Israeli youth competition for the five hundred meter crawl. I wasn't an outstanding swimmer, but I did have stamina. We had practice three or four times a week and I never missed one. Most people get bored being alone underwater hour after hour, but I enjoyed the solitude.

“I swim a few times a week,” said Daphna. “Two kilometers each time, sometimes with fins, sometimes with a float on my legs.”

We exchanged data on distances, pools, styles of swimming. I now understood where her quiet vigor came from. I've always liked serious swimmers.

She asked where I was from.

“Rehovoth,” I answered. “Father a professor of agronomy, mother a teacher. The standard story.”

“There is no standard story,” she said. “From that sentence alone, you could write a thousand novels. I'm sure you've got something to tell.”

Now I blushed, and she saw that and laughed. Watch out, I said to myself, she's a lot smarter than you.

“How do you want to start?” she asked. A bird perched, singing in the kitchen window, on top of one of the plants.

“You tell me.”

“Maybe we'll talk a little about your hero,” she suggested.

“I wrote everything I know about him,” I said. “He's a Jewish trader who travels, after the destruction of the Temple, to an island in Greece to bring back
etrogs
to the land of Israel.”

“You know him?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “I grew up with him long before I started writing. There was a time when I traveled abroad a lot on business, and he came with me. Sometimes I myself was an
etrog
dealer. I checked every version of the story in the library. I also investigated the island. I was there last year. If there is paradise, it's in Naxos. And they still grow
etrogs
there.”

“What does he look like. What does he think about, what motivates him? What does he eat for breakfast, your
etrog
dealer?” Daphna shot a volley of questions. She kept her youth—in the small space between her teeth, her supple movements, her quick speech.

How did I wind up in this game, I thought. I should have told another story from the start. But there was no other story.

“He's a survivor,” I said. “He doesn't think too much. An awful catastrophe happened, and he's just trying to go on with life in his small corner, to bring
etrogs
to
sukkot
. He's a practical man.”

“There is no human being who doesn't think too much,” she decreed. “You put him on a ship for a two-week trip, and I guarantee you his head is bursting with thoughts. We think a lot more than we act.”

I didn't agree with her on that. There are people who keep busy all the time so they won't have to think.

She got up to make coffee. In her kitchen there was nothing new: the stove was old fashioned, the oven was like the one in my grandmother's house in Rehovoth, the refrigerator was an old brand from the sixties. But everything was clean and the light was soft, as if it came from outside through a filter.

“You probably drink coffee with milk,” she said. “But I don't have any.”

“No,” I laughed. “I drink it black.”

“You don't look like a banker,” she said with her back to me. “Something doesn't fit about you. How many sugars?”

We talked some more about my man, who now sailed from Asia Minor to the island. I described the structure of sailboats at that time, all the details I had checked carefully before I came. She helped me with the ideas.

“Is he married?” she asked. “Does he love somebody?”

“He's thirty-five years old,” I answered. “In those days, there were no thirty-five-year-old bachelors. He's got a wife and a lot of children. But he feels good on a trip. The Land of Israel is in an awful condition when he sails off.”

“Does he miss his wife very much or does he look at other women on the way?” she laughed.

“Damn! I knew something was missing, got to have sex to sell the book. Maybe I'll put him in bed with a streetwalker in the port of Smyrna before he sails.”

“No, no,” she laughed and waved her hand in protest. “Don't do that, and definitely don't call her a streetwalker.”

I made notes of our conversation on a yellow tablet I thought looked literary. I promised to rewrite the beginning of the story before the next meeting.

I got up and left a hundred shekels on the table, as we had agreed on the phone. She walked me to the door and when I was on my way out, she said quietly: “I don't promise anything. I can't promise the book will be published. You may be paying me for nothing, since nothing may come of this.”

“That's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned. I told you, I'm a big boy.”

“I don't want you to be disappointed,” she said again. “There are things I can't promise.”

“That's all right, Daphna,” I called her by name for the first time. We agreed to meet again in a week.

 

When I got back to the office, I made a short internal email report, and Haim called immediately and told me to come to him. I walked to his office at the end of the corridor, waving to anyone I saw in the offices along the way. As usual, Haim was slumped over, buried behind the computer and the papers.

“How did it go?” he asked. His face was unshaved because of some religious fast.

“Like a private lesson,” I said. “She ripped my story to shreds. I don't think I'll make it.”

“You've got to,” said Haim with a crooked smile. “Your story really is thin, I told you. I don't know where you got it.
Etrogs
were grown in the Land of Israel, they never had to send anyone to Greece for that.”

Once again I showed him the Talmud and he dismissed it. “That's what happens when laymen study Talmud,” he said. “They take the soul out of it and leave only the facts. Come study with me once a week and you'll understand the principle.” He asked when we'd pull the man out of Gaza.

“Next week,” I said. “Maybe another two weeks. After I'm with her the next time. If she agrees to cooperate with us.”

“You think she'll agree?” Haim raised his reddened eyes to me.

“I think she has no choice,” I said.

“Keep me updated. We're not the only ones in the loop, you know. I want to know every detail.”

 

In her dossier I found old newspaper clippings, good reviews of her first book in the literary supplements, tepid ones for her second book, a picture in the weekend magazine, a girl of twenty-two or -three in a short skirt, eating watermelon next to Dan Ben-Amotz on a veranda in the old city of Jaffa, with big eyeglasses, and beneath it a caption from the gossip page.

There were also undercover pictures taken from a distance with zoom lenses, and they always looked like preparations for clashes: a Jewish-Arab gathering in Nazareth in 1981, a demonstration against the establishment of a settlement in Samaria. She appeared in pictures of four or five such events, but only in one, breathtaking, did the lens focus on her and she appeared in the center of the picture with eyes wide open, illuminated, standing on a narrow road and talking with an old Arab against the background of an olive grove, holding a sign in Hebrew and Arabic. Somebody had been sloppy because no place or date was written anywhere on the picture. In none of the pictures did she look angry, even when people were shouting all around, even when her mouth was open to shout. She was a statistic. Until I started dealing with the issue, she didn't have her own dossier, they had to collect the documents for me from files of other, more important people.

Her first book was about her childhood in Tel Aviv, near the sea, not far from the Carmel Market, a Bulgarian father who was a construction worker and a mother who came alone from Europe after the War. When they gave birth to her the two of them were older and had experienced suffering, but nevertheless, it was a book sparkling with
joie
de
vivre
. For example, it contained a wonderful chapter about the sea, how her father held her in his arms and went into the water with her the first time. The book came out in 1978, when she was all of twenty-three, and received wonderful reviews that talked about a new and surprising female voice in Hebrew literature, who slaughtered holy cows without sacrificing compassion. I had to look for it in the university library, because there was no trace of it in the bookstores.

The second book was published about two years later, a love story about a young woman and a married man. Apparently it was dreary and too pretentious, it was brought out by a minor publisher and the critics didn't especially like it. I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, not even in the libraries. After that, she didn't publish anything else, but she edited quite a few books and did translations from English. At a certain period, she taught literature in high school.