The Missing File (16 page)

Coffee and cake were served in the living room, where Avraham was asked about his first impressions of Brussels. He had had enough wine to admit he hadn't seen much of the city and hadn't been very taken with what he had managed to see. He told them he had hoped to see more the next day, but that Jean-Marc had had to cancel the guided tour and the meal at the mussels restaurant because a development in the murder investigation required him to work on Saturday.

“So perhaps we can take you on a tour,” Marianka said, looking at Jean-Marc's brother.

Guillaume had other plans.

“Never mind,” Avraham said. “I only have half a day anyway because I need to be at the airport in the afternoon.”

Marianka said that a lot could be seen in half a day.

She and Guillaume dropped him at his hotel.

T
he half a day in Brussels turned out to be so full that Avraham almost forgot about the investigation and Ofer and the bag that had been found in the Dumpster and was waiting for someone from forensics to take the time to look it over. He even almost forgot his empty days in the city, which now seemed very different.

He had waited for Marianka at the entrance to the hotel, having checked out of his room and left his suitcase at the reception desk. It was still dark and very cold outside. She wore the same jeans as the night before, with a black turtleneck this time, and had a striped beret resting at an angle on her head.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

She didn't look like a policewoman at all.

They walked down Avenue Brugmann, which this time led to a large square where the city spread out before them at sunrise. Marianka maintained a ferocious pace, and he had a hard time keeping up with her.

Standing in Poeller Square and taking in the view of the rooftops and church steeples painted in blue and orange, Avraham lit a cigarette and suggested they pause there a few minutes, but Marianka said that they had to keep going because they still had lots to see.

He wasn't sure if she was enjoying this little race or simply accompanying him out of a sense of duty.

To warm up for a while, they went into a small corner café in the area of the old city near police headquarters. “We have only fifteen minutes,” Marianka said.

Two elderly women behind a wooden counter greeted them with a
“Bonjour, les enfants,”
and Marianka kissed them both. The café's first customers of the day—elderly men, most of them with mustaches—were sitting around a few small tables. Avraham took off his coat and breathed in the aroma of the coffee. Sports journals were strewn across the tables.

The thing that subsequently surprised him after returning to Israel and recalling the morning with Marianka was that there had been no awkwardness. He asked and she told him that she had come to Brussels fourteen years ago, at the age of thirteen. This is how he learned that she was more than ten years younger than him. Her father wanted to leave Yugoslavia right after it broke up, but they were forced to wait a few years, until he found a permanent job, in Brussels. She applied for Belgian citizenship six years after arriving in the country, and her request was granted a few months later.

“Is your father a policeman too?” he asked, and she smiled and said, “Not exactly. He's a karate instructor.”

“Seriously? A karate instructor?”

“Yes. Why not? But he's also a teacher at a theological seminary in Liège. He's a unique man. You'd enjoy talking to him.”

“Does that mean he's a priest?” Avraham asked, and Marianka laughed.

“He can't be a priest. He's married and has children. He dreamed of becoming a priest, but then he met my mother and his plans changed.”

“And do you do karate too?”

“Of course I do; he trained me throughout my childhood.”

Marianka's smile made her face take on a childlike appearance, full of joy.

“Wasn't it difficult for you when you first got here?” Avraham asked.

“No. Why should it have been difficult?”

“Because you left friends and a home behind.”

“Not at all. My home is here. We go there every few years in the summer, and all I want to do is get back to Brussels. There's nothing there for me anymore.”

He asked if she was from Ljubljana, the only Slovenian city he could think of, and she told him she was born and raised in Koper, a port city on the Adriatic Sea.

It was an omen.

“I can't believe it,” he said. “Now I know where Koper is.”

“Why?” she asked. “What did you lose there?”

A sixteen-year-old boy, he wanted to say.

He told her about Ofer, that he had left home one morning to go to school but hadn't arrived and since then had been declared missing. He told her about the father who had returned home from a sea voyage, and about the place-name, Koper, which the father had mentioned in their talk, and which for him was the first sign that the picture was filling out with details. Not much had happened since—until Ofer's backpack had turned up two days earlier.

The fifteen minutes that Marianka had allotted for coffee had long since passed. She ordered another for each of them and said, “I don't think you'll find him in Koper. It doesn't get many tourists.”

“What's it like?” he asked, and she said, “It's a pretty but provincial sort of city. I mostly remember the port from my childhood. My father and I would take the dogs there on Sunday mornings.”

T
hree hours later, they had seen all there was to see in Brussels—the statue of the little boy urinating on the Dutch conqueror; the Mont des Arts, with its royal palaces that had been turned into museums; the huge statues of King Albert, on horseback, and his wife, Elizabeth, the two gazing at each other for all eternity from opposite sides of the road. Marianka presented Brussels to him with pride, as if the city belonged to her—and maybe it did. Avraham constantly asked to rest. In lieu of lunch they bought Belgian waffles, which they ate while walking so as to save time. Nevertheless, time moved on and grew short. They had less than two hours left.

Marianka had planned for the tour to end in the area of Avraham's hotel. They sat together on a bench in a small inner-city square surrounded by elegant old buildings, facing a dark square-shaped structure that looked like a ship. He insisted he could go no farther. It was Marianka's church. Only then did he learn that she lived not far from his hotel, in a small apartment with a roommate, a Foreign Ministry employee.

“Do you enjoy working for the police?” he asked.

Her childlike face appeared again.

“Not really. I never thought I'd end up a policewoman.”

“So what did you think you'd be?”

“A dancer—when I was a child. And then afterward, a doctor. I ended up in the police by chance.”

“How do you join the police by chance?”

“A newspaper ad—like any other job. My father saw it, cut it out, and said it would suit me. But I'm not sure I'll stay with it for much longer.”

Guillaume's name didn't come up in their conversation at all.

“What will you do?” Avraham asked.

“I could become a sports instructor. I studied physical education. Or maybe a nun,” she said, pointing at the church.

She then told him she was doing a motorcycle training course through the police and that if she was accepted into the traffic police's motorcycle unit she might stay on for a few more years.

“I bet you always wanted to be a policeman,” she said suddenly, and she was right.

“True. I don't remember it, but my parents have told me that when I was a child, I had a blue policeman's hat that I'd never take off. I insisted on wearing it to kindergarten. One day my mother threw it away without telling me. She was sick of it.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“Yes.”

“What do they do?”

“Fight,” he said with a laugh. “My father was a lawyer and my mother taught literature. They're both retired now.”

They had no choice but to get up and walk slowly in the direction of the hotel along a picturesque avenue at the entrance to which stood a statue of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. A young woman in spandex jogged past them with earbuds in her ears. Marianka told him that she would often sit on one of the benches along the avenue and listen to music.

“And what do you do when you're not a policeman?” she asked, and he said, “I'm a policeman then too.”

It made her laugh.

“Even on weekends? Don't you have any hobbies? Like karate perhaps?”

“No, my hobby seems to be being a policeman. Actually, I do have a secret hobby that very few know about.”

“I promise not to tell anyone. But, wait, I want to guess. You too have a collection of antique guns.”

“No. Who has a collection of antique guns?”

“Guillaume,” she said.

“No. I like to read crime novels, when I have the time, and watch crime movies and television series and prove the detectives wrong.”

She didn't understand. No one understood.

“Prove to whom?”

“To myself. With every crime novel I read, I conduct my own investigation and prove that the detective in the book is mistaken, or else deliberately misleads the readers, and that the true solution is not the one he presents.”

He was willing to swear that this was the case with every crime novel he'd ever read.

“So give me an example,” she said.

“Which detective novels do you like?” he asked. “Do you know Hercule Poirot, for example? Now that I think of it, he's Belgian. I read his first investigation a short while ago, Agatha Christie's first book, and discovered that he frames one of the characters who is completely innocent. It's called
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
.”

“What do you mean by ‘frames'?”

“Exactly that. Poirot is investigating the poisoning of a wealthy elderly woman. At the end of the book, he accuses her maidservant of the murder, but she is innocent. He's framed her, and I can prove it.”

“But why would he do that?” There was real astonishment in Marianka's eyes.

“He has any number of reasons to do that. But it's a very long story,” he replied.

He suddenly noticed a blue-white-and-red flag in the second-floor window of one of the beautiful buildings along the avenue. He approached the building and found the Slovenian Consulate.

“So your favorite avenue in Brussels is the one with the Slovenian Consulate, but, no, you don't miss it,” he said, and she smiled as she said, “It has nothing to do with that. It's just a really beautiful avenue. You should see it in December, before Christmas, all lit up.”

I almost wish I could, he thought.

T
hey waited outside the hotel for the taxi.

“We saw everything, didn't we?” he asked, and Marianka said, “Not at all. We could have seen lots more. It's a shame you had only half a day.”

“I know,” he said. “But thank you, anyway.”

Before he got into the taxi she gave him her card and asked him to e-mail her about how the search for Ofer turned out.

“If you find out that he's in Koper after all, I could be of help,” she said.

The taxi drove off.

Then Jean-Marc Karot called to say good-bye. “The investigation's over,” he said.

“What investigation?”

“Johanna Getz. That's why I couldn't come to get you today. We arrested the murderer this morning.”

Were the police in Belgium so much better? How did they do it so fast?

“Who was it?” Avraham asked, and Jean-Marc said, “A neighbor. A different neighbor—not the landlord. A psychopath who lives on the first floor.”

“Why did he do it?”

“That's still unclear. Everything's unclear. His interrogation is still going on, but it was him, we have no doubt. He didn't even resist when we knocked on his door.”

Jean-Marc again apologized for not having spent much time with him during his stay in Brussels, and on his last day in particular. “You simply came during the wrong week,” he said.

10

H
e knew all along that Michal would find out sooner or later.

It happened on Thursday, when they were both home in the afternoon—exactly two weeks after the start of the investigation.

Ze'ev was working at his desk on the balcony. Just like on the day he had watched Avraham and his policemen through the half-open shutters. Michal was in the kitchen, feeding Elie, to the sounds of his favorite CD of children's songs, and then she laid him down in his bed for an afternoon nap.

The black notebook beckoned him, called him to open it. It was risky in the middle of the day. He reread the first three letters and the opening paragraph of the fourth he had written the night before. After her shower, Michal came over to the balcony and asked if he'd like to have some lunch with her; he said he'd make do with a sandwich at his desk because he didn't want to take a break from his work. Was he hinting at something? Was this the route he wanted their conversation to take?

He didn't feel quite ready to confess to her about joining the writing workshop, but he could not hide the birth of his writing for long. Not from Michal. She was there with him when all previous attempts had failed, when he was frustrated that he had no place and no time for writing, when he was scared that it would escape him, never to return. But what happened after he told her was inconceivable. One of the most terrible days of his life.

I
t was one of the very first things Ze'ev had told Michal when they first met. He was a graduate of the Hebrew University's Department of English Literature, and she had a degree in political science from Tel Aviv. Just like everyone else, they had met during their teaching diploma studies at the Kibbutzim College. Such a long time ago. They all used to ask one another if they really wanted to be schoolteachers, and everyone would say no. Except for her. She was twenty-seven at the time, and he was a year younger. Both were single, after being involved in more or less serious relationships. Ze'ev had told her that he wrote, or rather that he wanted to write, and Michal hadn't asked what, only said that it was wonderful, and that she hoped to read his stories one day. He was not sure then whether she was implying a long-term relationship or was simply expressing a general confidence in his ability to write and be published.

As Michal approached, he closed the notebook. She ran her fingers through his hair above his neck. He didn't turn around.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked, and he said, “No. Why?”

“I think there is. You've been working on something for a while now. Did you think I hadn't noticed?”

If he had responded to her question, his answer would have been a profoundly complex one. He thought she both noticed and didn't notice. He hoped she noticed, and hoped she didn't notice too. They once agreed that she would never ask if he was working on anything because it only rubbed salt in his wounds. Now, however, he could respond differently.

“It's very preliminary,” he said. “I'm not sure if I can talk about it yet.”

He was excited; she could feel it, and she was affected by it. “Just a moment,” she said. “Let me make myself a cup of coffee before you tell me. Should I get you one too?”

While Michal was in the kitchen, he decided to tell her everything. His desire overpowered his fear.

“Now I'm ready,” she said in a celebratory tone as she returned to the balcony. She sat down on the brown armchair and placed her mug on the wicker coffee table.

He turned in his chair to face her.

“Okay,” he said. “So, I've been going to this writing workshop for the past few weeks.”

She didn't appear shocked or uncomfortable.

“I hadn't planned on going, and I'm sorry I never told you about it. It all happened by chance. I was passing by the central library in Tel Aviv and saw this sign and went in to see what it was like. I hadn't planned on staying. The instructor is Michael Rosen, if you know the name. He's a young writer, quite well-known. And we've become friends. He was the main reason I stayed. I'm sorry I haven't told you until now.”

“Wait a minute—when did this all happen? How come I didn't know until now?” She really seemed happy.

“When I told you I was going to work at the library—on Sunday afternoons. That's where the workshop is. It wasn't really a lie.”

“Do you think I care? The main thing is that you are finally doing it. Is it helping? Do you feel something will come out of your being there?”

She could have reminded him of how he always put down writing workshops every time she had suggested he join one to get past his writer's block. She didn't.

“Yes. I know for sure something good is happening,” he said.

Michal was the only person who truly believed in him—even during the weeks or months when he stopped believing in himself, when out of sheer frustration and despair he ceased to dream of the moment he would read her a story he had written, a finished story, and watch her be swept up by its magic. Now he could do it, but he didn't know if this was a good place to start. The things he had written were hard to swallow, and Michal might struggle to read them.

The second letter contained Ofer's most piercing lines—in Ze'ev's eyes, at least. It was written after the long conversation with Avraham, in the office, and inspired by the insights born there. Ofer analyzed his parents' fear of him, of his otherness. He tried to explain the root of it, to himself and to them. The letter ended with the harsh sentence:
“For years, you tried to starve me, to deny me what I needed; you wanted to crush me so that my life would be no better than yours, so that the wretchedness of your lives would not be reflected, like by a distorted mirror, in mine
.
”
He had again signed the letter:
“No longer yours. Ofer
.
”
And underneath, he had written,
“To be continued?”

In its style, the second letter was more sophisticated than the previous one. He repeated expressions that appeared in the first letter, along with grammatical constructions he had identified when rereading it, so as to maintain a credible and consistent voice for Ofer. He also included expressions he had picked up in the classroom or at recess and had copied down in his notebook at the end of each school day. He had learned, too, to use his elbows and arms so as not to touch the blank sheet of paper with his fingers when transcribing the final version. He had bought a different envelope, and hadn't discarded the surgical gloves in the building's trash bin, but rather had stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans and later dumped them in a bin near his school. The letter had remained in the mailbox for two days before disappearing.

Michal looked at him excitedly, expectantly.

“Well, what do you write there?”

“Just a moment, let me explain.”

She was impatient. “Does the instructor give you assignments? How does it work?”

“In principle, yes. Michael gives the students a writing exercise on a particular subject, and they bring their work to class and discuss it. But that's not what I'm doing. I've simply come up with my own idea—from outside the workshop, though maybe inspired by it—and I am working on something longer and more serious.”

Michal smiled at him, as if it was clear to her that he wouldn't be wasting his time on routine writing exercises.

“So, can the author kindly tell me what it is that he is writing about?”

“I'm not sure,” Ze'ev replied.

His indecision was sincere; it wasn't a means to pique her curiosity. He hadn't been able to see the reactions of his previous readers—not of Ofer's parents, and not of the police—and could only imagine. But he'd be able to see Michal's face while she read.

“It's up to you,” she said. “I'd really love to read it. And maybe we should celebrate in some way.”

“Celebrate? There's nothing to celebrate just yet. First you'd have to read it and tell me if you like it.”

Should he give it to her or not?

He placed the open notebook on the desk in front of her. Her excitement had won him over.

“I haven't typed it up on the computer yet,” he said. “It's all in the notebook for the meantime. Right now there are three letters, or three chapters.”

“Ah, okay, it's a story in letters,” she said and began reading.

E
lie was sleeping soundly, but Ze'ev could feel his son's slumber weighing heavily on him. More than anything else, he feared Elie would wake crying and that Michal would have to stop reading to go see to him, or that he'd have to get up for the boy and would not be there to see her reactions. He followed her eyes as they moved from one word on to another, not missing a single expression on her face. If Elie were to wake, they wouldn't be able to discuss the text right then and there, and would have to wait until the evening. By then, the excitement would have waned.

The third letter was the longest—and the most complex, he thought, because it was reflexive and referred to the process of reading the previous ones and to the possibility that whoever had received them may be questioning the identity and credibility of the author. Like the first two, the third letter opened with “
Father and Mother
,” which Ofer then followed up with a series of direct questions relating to the previous correspondence.

Where did you read the two letters I sent you? In my room? In the living room? And what thoughts went through your mind when you read them? Did you tell yourselves that it isn't me, that it can't be me, in order to protect yourselves from what was written in them? Did you try to convince yourselves that someone else wrote them in my name so that you wouldn't have to deal with the pain in what I was trying to say? And what did you do with them after you read them? Did you destroy them so that you would never again have to read those words that you don't want to hear? But I will never stop writing.

Wearing a pair of thin leather gloves he bought at an automotive supply store, he had placed the third letter in the mailbox in the middle of the day, quite brazenly.

Ze'ev tried to guess Michal's thoughts as she read. She looked solemn. At one point, she was unable to make out the words “
when I was buried
,” and asked him to help her, and there was also a moment when she lifted her head from the page and gave him an odd look. “What?” he asked, and her eyes returned to the black notebook.

After she had finished, she just said, “What is this?” and Ze'ev asked, “What do you mean?”

“Are these our Ofer's letters? Ofer our neighbor?”

He knew she'd be a perfect reader—precisely because Ofer's disappearance and the fruitless search for him had seeped deep into her thoughts and her dreams.

“Yes,” he said, “they're letters he writes to his parents, explaining what's happened.”

She didn't respond. He waited a moment before asking, “What do you think?”

She still didn't say a word about the letters themselves, neither their content nor their style. “What do you mean by ‘explaining what's happened'? How do you know what has happened?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I'm trying to imagine. That's the whole point—I'm trying to see things from his perspective and to understand what happened there.”

“But how can you write such things without knowing what really happened?”

“Of course I can. It isn't a true-crime novel or a newspaper article. I'm not interested in what truly happened. What interests me are the emotional processes he underwent—or, rather, that I imagine he underwent—and that led to his disappearance.”

She went silent. This was not the reaction he had expected. He wondered if their conversation could be heard on the floor above them. She flipped back through some of the pages in the notebook, and reread the first letter.

“So, what have you got to say?” he asked quietly.

“That it frightens me.” There was no enthusiasm in her voice.

He tried to smile. “Frightening is good, right? That's what literature should be.”

“I don't know what literature should be.”

“The only question is how it affected you, from the point of view of the reading process. Were you focused? Did you want to read on, or did you get bored? Did you feel that there was an authentic voice of a teenager speaking to his parents?”

“I think so.”

“That's the important thing! I agree that I'm doing something a bit frightening here. Getting into the mind of a sixteen-year-old, and writing in the first person—which can be pretty dangerous for a writer. The question is whether I'm going in the right direction or not.”

She stubbornly refused to answer. “Why did you choose Ofer, of all people?” she asked.

“Because I know Ofer, and because I consider him to be an intriguing character. His story fascinates me. But, you realize, of course, that it's not just about Ofer, right? That there are other characters, other people, maybe even me, combined there in him?”

“Aren't you afraid that someone will read it and think you're mixed up in what happened to Ofer?”

“Are you serious? Of course not. Besides, I think I really was involved somehow in what's happened to him, even though we don't know what it is yet. I did have an influence on him and his life, and that's also why I feel close to the character and his story.”

He didn't know quite how to interpret the strange look she gave him.

She suddenly asked, “What did they say at the workshop?” and he said, “They haven't said anything yet. I haven't presented it. And I'm not sure I will, either. I may give it to Michael Rosen to read. But the truth is, I'm afraid to reveal the idea—I mean the idea itself, and the structure of the book. Just think about it; it's going to be a novel comprised entirely of a missing boy's letters to his parents. I don't think anything like that has ever been written—not in Hebrew, anyway.”