Free Limassol by Yishai Sarid Page A

I asked him in amazement. “That was her condition. Otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed.”
    Haim looked at the pictures spread out on the desk. “Be careful not to get too close,” he said suddenly. His voice sounded as if it came from underground. “Keep your soul, your lust, out of it.”
    â€œYou always say to work with the soul,” I told him. “That it’s impossible to carry out a mission when we’re remote. That the separation between body and soul is artificial, the invention of freethinkers.”
    â€œWith the Arabs we don’t have a problem,” Haim stretched the bum leg out in front of him. “We’re so angry at them we don’t have any trouble being brutal. Look what happened to you. You’ll never forgive them for fucking up your illusion of peace. When you came to work here, you had a bumper sticker with white clouds in the blue sky and angels hovering among them. Every morning, I’d check in the parking lot to see if you had taken it off. Believe me, the morning I saw the bumper sticker had been peeled off I was awfully sorry for you. Look at her,” he pointed to the big black and white picture printed with the forgotten interview, “is she still so beautiful?”
    â€œYes,” I nodded.
    Haim hesitated, and said he felt uneasy, that he had a bad feeling. “But I can’t replace you now,” he muttered to himself. “You’re the only one suited to this assignment. Did you call the advisor?” He meant the psychologist the service recommended to workers who went nuts.
    â€œI’ll call,” I promised.
    â€œYou’ve got to meet him,” said Haim. “That’s what I promised them for not suspending you.” Haim stood up slowly and went back to tend to his important matters.
    After the gorgeous picture of the pregnancy, Daphna appeared only at the edges of photos of others. The baby was born at the end of the glory years, when the media traces she left began to fade. To remain famous, you’ve got to work at it every single day, and to the credit of Daphna and Ignats, let it be said that they apparently stopped trying. I Googled them and found a few items about Avital Ignats, his return to religion; then he vanished. The two films he made could be gotten at any video store.
    I spent a lot of time at home in those days. In the evening, I jogged around the neighborhood and did another few kilometers on the shoulder of the freeway. I ate the schnitzel and rice my mother-in-law made. I helped Sigi bathe the child. I read books before going to sleep.
    â€œI have to give them an answer about Boston,” Sigi kept saying over and over.
    I tried to get close to her, to calm down, to be gentle, but she only wanted to hear that we were going. Boston was waiting, Boston wouldn’t wait. Finally I blew up and roared, on one damn night of a heat wave, that I wasn’t going, I didn’t give in.
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    A-frame wooden houses were built on the Caesarea dunes. They were too small to live in year round because they had only a lower floor and a triangular roof. In the seventies they were sold as vacation houses on the European model for wealthy city-dwellers from Tel Aviv and Haifa. But the really rich bought villas with swimming pools, a few kilometers from there, and the A-frames were abandoned in time and became deserted wooden skeletons. The sand slowly enveloped them.
    The sea was stormy when I arrived. Waves came from afar and broke on the shore. I tripped on tangled fleshy leaves and gigantic ants’ nests. Daphna had indicated the A-frame inspired by French summer houses she had bought with Ignats with ready cash when they returned to Israel. There was no sign on the door and an old bike missing a wheel stood outside. The wooden door was worm-eaten and my knocking wasn’t answered. In the picture she showed me, the child was sitting in a plastic wading pool on a green lawn, which