The Others, Sarah Blau [hardest books to read txt] 📗

I suddenly realize how cramped and shabby it is, filled with second-hand furniture from friends, bulky, heavy pieces that aren’t even remotely my taste. What’s more, it dawns on me how many times I’ve moved, always settling for the leftover furnishings of others, and that I don’t even know what my own style is. Or if I even have one.

“Fuck the costume,” I say.

“What did you say?” He’s surprised.

“Exactly what you heard,” I reply. “That’s it? This is how it’s going to be from now on? You’re the detective and I give you information, as if nothing happened between us?”

I have to keep myself from crying. Tears never did work in my favour. You’re a strong woman.

“Come on, Sheila.” He’s finally looking at me – the same scrutinizing gaze with which he just dissected the painting. Whatever he finds in my face makes him sit down on the couch and pull me towards him, but when I hold on to him and try to bury my face in the crook of his neck, he pushes me away.

“Look, I’m attracted to you,” he says, and my heart sinks. That’s the worst thing a man can say to a woman, because it always foreshadows a crash and burn. “But we both know it’s not that simple.”

Well, there you have it. Crash. Burn.

“We just got carried away… obviously, I don’t regret it.” He smiles, and it’s the same knowing smile he gave me a moment before he got out of bed, leaving you there bewildered and beguiled.

I don’t return the smile, even though I know I should. I should give him the widest, coldest smile I can muster. Don’t make a fuss, you’re not a child.

“Come on, Sheila, I’d be in serious trouble if they found out on the force, you know it’s tricky.”

Oh, so now it’s “tricky.” For a moment I think he’s going to suggest we “keep it under the radar,” and I can already feel myself recoiling with humiliation, but he doesn’t. He’s no fool, Micha. He’s a smart boy.

You see, I already know all there is to know about under-the-radar love stories.

I was twenty-five and he was thirty-seven, very charming, and very married. You naïve, silly girl! The affair lasted a few months and the only good thing that came out of it is that at twenty-five, I was safely and permanently out of danger of ever falling in love with a married man again. And the danger was real. These married men, secular or religious, are insatiable.

The tables have since turned, obviously. Today I’m the older woman, but these young men that I’m so partial to are not the least bit naïve.

And again my body aches with restlessness. I can’t keep sitting next to him like this, it’s making my bones hurt. I’m overwhelmed with a desperate need to busy my hands, to turn on faucets, fill bowls, smash plates into a thousand pieces! To roar into the wind! Anything but keep sitting here like a dummy on the couch.

I retreat to the kitchen to whip up something to eat: I’m thinking salad. Chop some white cabbage, sprinkle dried cranberries on top, and voila, a dash of elegant hosting! But the cranberries in the fridge are so old they’ve fused into a rock-hard mess. They look like a giant blood clot.

I return to the living room with a pile of sticky date-filled cookies and salty pretzels, which Micha probably won’t eat, but I enjoy placing them in front of him, on the small table.

“Looks good,” he says, picking up a cookie. He puts it in his mouth, starts chewing and keeps chewing for some time, as if the oral effort signifies a special peace offering.

“Yumm,” he says, and swallows with some difficulty. “Let’s talk business for a moment, Sheila. How could the killer have marked Naama as Michal, King David’s wife?”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “Maybe he put a crown on her head.”

“No, there was no crown.”

For a moment I wonder whether Michal committed suicide with her crown on. The queen will always be the one to lose her head.

“Enough with the games. What did you find out?”

“I’ll tell you what we found out,” he says, and swallows. “Turns out that black rope they kept mentioning wasn’t a rope at all. It was a tefillin set. Naama went and hanged herself with Avihu’s tefillin.”

My head is spinning.

I imagine the black leather straps cutting deep into her flesh, more painful than any rope. Especially for Naama with that delicate white neck of hers, women’s skin isn’t made for tefillin.

I remember the grey blob’s Bible lecture – the only one we attended before dropping his course, before becoming the Others – in which he mentioned that according to biblical exegesis, Michal, King David’s wife, used to lay tefillin – a strictly male business. I personally never felt the need to wind leather straps around my arm, but hey, to each her own. He then declared that certain Judaic authorities believed the core of her soul to be masculine, “and that’s why…” he stated with much fanfare, and the only time during the entire lecture that his grey cheeks looked almost rosy, “that’s why Michal didn’t have kids.”

The loud snort of disdain came from Naama.

“Do you understand what that means?” Micha asks, and for one crazy moment, I think he’s about to say Naama is the killer, that she’s the one murdering all the Others and gluing dolls to their hands, Naama roaring from inside her grave, Naama crying the lament of the empty womb, but that moment quickly passes, leaving me shuddering for an entirely different reason, because Micha looks at me and says, “It means it’s very possible that the first member of the Others was murdered sixteen years ago.”

20

THE FATHERS have eaten sour grapes. Micha’s tattooed arm is resting next to me on the couch.

I feel a strange dullness, as if this new information I’ve been given has somehow rearranged the