Limassol Read Free

liked to hear the speech of the target myself, to get close to him, to try to understand the human being. An older woman with a white braid, who looked like a librarian, brought me the tapes. She just sat herself down across from me. I usually worked with Arab prisoners and used monitors in Arabic; I wasn’t familiar with her internal branch.
    â€œInterrogators usually don’t want to hear the conversations themselves,” she said.
    â€œI guess I’m different,” I replied.
    â€œI hope you won’t give them to anyone,” she said with a stern expression.
    I raised my head from the papers of the night’s interrogation. A guy from Shechem had disappeared from home three days ago, and his father insisted in the interrogation that he didn’t know where he was. “Excuse me?” I stared at her.
    â€œMaybe that was unnecessary,” she tried to explain. “But working with Jews is different, altogether different. I took the liberty of saying that because this is the first time you’ve worked with our desk. Leaks are a great risk. You can’t know who knows that woman. Maybe somebody lived near her, maybe somebody was in the army with her, we can’t know. So we’re much stricter about procedures.”
    â€œCompletely unnecessary,” I said. “I didn’t start working here yesterday, and I won’t be taking the tapes anywhere.”
    â€œShe sounds like a terrific woman,” she muttered. “I once read her book. Not bad. At any rate,” and she stood up, “I’m sure you’ll be nice to her. Everything is here in the bag. Give it back to us when you’re done.”
    I won’t put her on a curved chair with her hands tied behind her, if that’s what you mean, I thought. Nor will I put a bag smelling of shit over her head.
    Late at night, after a whole day of meetings and evaluations of the attack that took place right under our noses, I dropped the tape in the recorder and listened with earphones. The conversations were continuous and brief. I could jump from one conversation to another, like songs on a CD.
    The first conversation was with a certain publisher; they called to ask what was happening with the book she was editing. It’s trash for servant girls, she said, and every page was torture for her. Finally she asked about her check, the publisher said there was a problem with an outstanding debt and a garnishment order on the money owed her, she had to take care of that so she could get the money. “What’s going on, Daphna?” asked the editor in chief. “How did all those debts get created?” “Drop it,” she told him. “You can’t help anyway.”
    Then she talked to a lawyer, who was impatient with her and not very pleasant, and kept saying he was very busy. She pleaded with him, was aggressive, asked when the trial was. The lawyer said they hadn’t yet gotten the review of the probation service, that Yotam hadn’t made it to a meeting with them. “That’s very bad,” he stressed. “The probation service is his only hope. You know he’s on probation—that judge will toss him in jail without batting an eyelid. I don’t think your son is built for jail. They’ll eat him alive there. You’ve got to talk to him, he needs to go to the probation officer, make a good impression, agree to go into a drug rehab program. Otherwise, neither I nor anybody else can help him. Now I’ve got to go, people are waiting for me.”
    My ears were burning. I still had to go to the Russian Compound that night to meet some interrogation subjects myself, I didn’t see when I’d have a chance to get home. Nevertheless, I played the next conversation.
    The man from Gaza spoke good Hebrew. In the conversation with him, Daphna was another woman, completely different: not desperate like the one who talked with the lawyer, not impatient and bitter