Limassol Read Free Page B

“Take somebody from the Jewish branch, take somebody from the girls, I don’t have time for those literature lessons. I’m running around like a maniac, I haven’t taken a shower in two days, I smell worse than the detainees. Do me a favor, Haim, take me off it.”
    Haim growled that I was the only one who could do that job. Her story is complicated and only I could connect with her background; he couldn’t send any of the butchers to her, not even a girl. Besides, I write well. He likes to read the reports of my interrogations, I don’t write endless platitudes like the others. And I shouldn’t forget that, in my job interview, I told them I was taking a course in creative writing. “It couldn’t have sounded worse if you had said you shoot heroin,” laughed Haim. “I barely convinced them to accept you. They didn’t want such bohemians. They were afraid you were a spy from the press. Aren’t you sorry sometimes you didn’t become a writer?”
    I told Haim to leave me alone.
    â€œYou really could have been a writer,” he flattered me now. “You’ve got a discerning eye. The good ones really do use common sense, not force. That takes self-confidence, letting yourself be sensitive, not being swept up in bestiality. Looking at a human being, putting yourself into his head, not putting the bomb in him right away.”
    I tried to recall the series of detainees from recent days that I had interrogated, and no face was etched in my mind. “I’m losing that, Haim,” I said. “I’m also turning into a butcher. I don’t have time anymore to be sophisticated with them. You’ve got to work with force from the first moment. They don’t understand you when you’re sensitive. They also follow the rules of the game, expect humiliation, beating, pants full of shit, so they’ll be justified in talking. They hate us anyway, and they want to earn our hatred honestly. There’s too much in the pipeline, there’s never a lull. No time for conversations into the night, to give him a cigarette, to hear about his grandfather who escaped on a donkey in the Nakba to arrive slowly to his brother who blew himself up. Elegance is dead, Haim, it’s not like it was in your day.”
    Haim looked at me and seemed a little scared. I didn’t usually talk a lot. “You need rest,” he said to me distantly. “When was the last time you were home? When did you spend an evening with your wife?”
    â€œStop it, Haim,” I said. “You’re talking fantasies. I can’t stop the race now, Haim, I don’t have to tell you that. Even when I’m home, my mind is down there.”
    â€œYou’ve got to rest sometimes,” said Haim, with a worried look I had never seen before. “Clean your head, think of other things. At least on the Sabbath. And the holidays are coming. Forbidden to mix prayers with foreign thoughts, forbidden to talk about money. That’s why I returned to God. In time, you’ll discover the greatness in that. Be with your wife. Sit at the table with her. Have another kid, later you’ll be sorry you waited too long. Take a load off your shoulders, nothing will get away from you. And don’t beat up anybody. That will destroy you.”
    Haim’s look stayed with me for long hours and many days afterward, but that very evening, as I was getting ready to go home in time to give the child a bath, my cell phone began running hot with more reports about the guy who disappeared, wearing his nice belt, like a bridegroom on his wedding day. I immediately went where I had to go and at dawn I was hoarse from shouting. That night I wasn’t sensitive or elegant with anybody.
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    I got to the second meeting on time, shaved and clean, wearing Bermuda shorts, looking like someone who’d struck it rich in high tech and taken early retirement. I was slightly excited.