The Liar Read online

  Lieutenant Colonel Arieh Maimon did not give his son the name Lavi. That decision was made by his wife, a beautiful young woman who admired her husband, the country, and her Pilates teacher, not necessarily in that order. Since she was especially fond of the name Lavi, her husband generously allowed her to make the choice. As the boy grew into a teenager, it was clear that he did not possess even a smidgen of his father’s predatory charm. If there was any connection between him and the world of large felines, it was only as a potential meal. In his son’s early years, the father still roared at him and pierced him with the same look that had once driven his soldiers and then his stock upward. But after a while he stopped doing even that. Lavi began to miss the loud reprimands, even the roars. Anything was better than the silence, the quiet that followed the disappointment.

  In the evening, as his mother made her ablutions in preparation for her Pilates class and his father purred contentedly in front of the TV, Lavi opened his bedroom window and looked down at the street. The urban river rushed by below him, gangs of teenagers on summer vacation bobbing and lurching in the current. Hearing their laughter, he asked himself whether they would keep laughing if his body landed beside them, a dull thud on the paving stones. Whether the girls would bend to help, run slim fingers over his short-cropped hair, the disappointing mane. Whether they would finally look at him—if not with compassion, then at least with interest—take out their mobile phones and snap a picture of the sprawled body, its arms embracing the street, arms that had never embraced a girl.

  And so, every evening the city adorned itself with the glitter of streetlights and Lavi Maimon stood at the window contemplating his death, thinking about the many faces that would look at him when he landed near the entrance to the ice-cream parlor. He would have tried his hand at that sort of flight a long time ago if the summer military operation on the southern border hadn’t begun, flooding the city with sirens and filling all the newspapers. To be buried somewhere on the back pages was not what he wanted. He preferred to wait for the fighting to end. And thank God, it never did: it stopped in the south only to begin again in the north. Lavi woke up every morning and saw that the newspaper was filled with the same stories that had filled its predecessor the day before. How would they find room for the story of his failed attempt to fly? So he postponed his death from day to day, and though the military operation cost many lives, it did at least save the life of one city boy.

  As Lavi groaned under the name of the lion crouching on his shoulders, Nofar Shalev also buckled under the burden of her name. Why in the world had she believed that here, in the ice-cream parlor of all places, she would finally blossom into a different Nofar? Every morning she stood behind the counter. Summer came to the city, had its merry, sweaty way with it, and now that autumn was approaching, everything had a facade of respectability once again. In another few days, Nofar would go back to school without a single exciting story from the ice-cream parlor in the city except for the ones she wrote in her notebook. How much she had hoped for a brazen love affair with a student, or a tourist, or a heavily pierced bad boy. When she returned to school, he would wait outside the gates for her, she would run to him, and everyone would see. Including Shir. And Yotam. Nofar had been prepared for anything but entering her senior year with empty hands, with fingers that had never touched a boy’s except to give him change. If only she had at least found a girlfriend here to replace Shir. Anything to be the entire focus, even for a moment, of someone’s gaze.

  On the fourth floor, Lavi Maimon stood looking down at the street. In the alley stood Nofar Shalev, her hands straightening her dress, neither one aware of the fact that they were not alone in suffering the humiliation of a name they could never live up to. It might have been easier if they had known that somewhere—on the other side of the planet, or four floors away—someone was enduring the same pain. Or it might not have been easier at all, just as someone with a toothache feels no relief at hearing the moans of the person sitting next to him in the dentist’s waiting room.

  Although Lavi Maimon and Nofar Shalev knew nothing about each other, they both sighed forlornly at precisely the same moment. The only difference between them was that Lavi continued to stand at the window while Nofar, suddenly realizing that she was late getting back from her break, rushed back inside. She ran, almost as if she knew that it wasn’t only to the ice-cream parlor that she was hurrying now, but to the moment when everything would change, to the fate that already awaited her on the other side of the counter.

  2

  Over the long days she spent behind the counter, Nofar had developed a habit—she looked into the customers’ faces and tried to guess which of them had come into the ice-cream parlor by accident and which were there by design. The accidental visitors were nicer: people strolling leisurely down the street, sailing along like fish until the ice-cream parlor’s welcoming sign appeared and reeled them in on its line. The ones who planned to be there were totally different, people for whom the ice-cream parlor served an actual purpose: compensation for a hard day’s work, the desire of a crushed heart. She saw it in their darting eyes, in their tight mouths that insisted on tasting more and more flavors, all of them unsatisfying. That kind of customer gulped down an ice-cream cone as if it were a headache pill: quickly, so it would have an immediate effect.

  Nofar could easily see that the customer now waiting at the counter belonged to the intentional group. It wasn’t a leisurely stroll that had led him there, but rather a disastrous day. She said good evening and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t reply. She asked what she could get for him, trying hard to smile even though she was exhausted from her dash across the alley and from the barrenness of the summer. The guy looked her over impatiently and grumbled that he’d been standing there for ten minutes already. How long did a person have to wait for service in this place?!

  That wasn’t accurate. He hadn’t been standing there for ten minutes. In fact, he’d been standing there for less than five. But during those five minutes, he’d received a text from his agent saying that the TV bigwigs had thought it over and decided they didn’t need another talent show. What his agent didn’t say was that even if the bigwigs had been convinced that they did need such a show, they still didn’t need the services of a singer whose glory days were behind him. Seven years behind him, to be precise. It was unbelievable how quickly seven years could pass. Only a minute ago he’d been riding high, his picture on the front pages of newspapers, one and a half million texts sent to him on that amazing night, an entire country sending him its love. Now he was here, in this pathetic ice-cream parlor standing in front of this pathetic girl who waited to hear what flavor he wanted, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of recognition on her face. She didn’t know who he was.

  Later, when the echoes of the scandal died down a bit, Avishai Milner would wonder whether it had all started at that moment. A girl looking at him with blank eyes from the other side of the counter, and in that blankness he lost his soul. There he was, sinking, drowning in the darkness of anonymity, in the abyss of ordinariness. Across the counter from the girl, Avishai Milner couldn’t breathe. With his last ounce of strength, he fought to remind himself that he wasn’t just another customer, he was Avi-shai! Mil-ner! That was how the presenter on the finale had introduced him, slicing his name as if it were hot, fresh bread, lengthening the syllables for the pleasure of the studio audience, Avi-shai! Mil-ner! And the viewers at home had applauded with one million votes. For the next several weeks his name was on everyone’s lips. Beautiful women swooped down on him in pubs and clubs, wanting to taste him, wanting to be tasted by him, and he made love to them, but even more to himself. He screwed Avishai Milner’s brains out, and every nymph who sighed A-vi-shai in his ear was merely echoing that unforgettable moment when his name had been announced, when the presenter had opened the envelope, looked at the name with his kind, generous eyes, and in front of the huge audience in the studio and at home, crowned the young small-town man
: Avi-shai! Mil-ner!

  There’s no way of knowing what went wrong after that. Avishai Milner was neither a better nor a worse singer than Eliran Vaknin, who had been crowned by the same presenter the previous year and appeared on all the top charts to this day. Nor was he less good-looking than Assi Sarig, who was crowned the following year and had already played a tormented doctor in a TV series, a tormented soldier in another TV series, and the tormented father of an autistic child in a soon-to-be-released feature film. The fact that there was no reason for it, no personality defect that could be blamed, no lesson to be learned—that was what tortured Avishai Milner more than anything. The total arbitrariness of his fall terrified him because it implied that his rise had also been arbitrary, not the product of his talent, but of a random set of circumstances.

  Avishai Milner received his agent’s text after long weeks of anticipation. Since submitting his proposal to the TV bigwigs, his days had been suffocating and his sleep sporadic. Like a wild bull, Fame had tossed him over its shoulder and then kicked him as he lay on the ground. He had to find a way to rise again. The longer the bigwigs took to give their answer, the more nerve-racking it was. The presenter came to him in his dreams and said that after the commercial they would sing a duet together, but to his horror he couldn’t remember the words and the microphone turned into a terrifying snake in his hand. In short, he really did deserve ice cream. But when he went into the ice-cream parlor, he found it empty. Outside, customers were sitting and eating happily, but behind the counter there was no one.

  Someone who receives bad news in the middle of an ice-cream parlor—what does he need? A steady hand offering him a variety of chocolate comforts. A smiling face waiting patiently for him to speak. Eyes that look into his and confirm that yes, despite everything, he still exists. But when Nofar returned to the counter, she didn’t recognize Avishai Milner, and although she did her best to smile, her smile couldn’t hide the sadness that popped out from beneath it, the way a too-small shirt she had once tried on couldn’t cover her embarrassed flesh. Avishai Milner didn’t know that the dress the girl was wearing belonged to her more beautiful sister. He didn’t know that she had made her way there every day that summer in the disappointed hope that she would be rescued from ordinariness. All he knew was that he’d already been waiting ten minutes to be served here. And that was inacceptable.

  “This is inacceptable,” Avishai Milner said to the girl standing opposite him, and to emphasize exactly how inacceptable it was he slammed his hand on the glass partition.

  “Unacceptable,” the girl said.

  “Excuse me?!”

  “The word is ‘unacceptable,’ not ‘inacceptable.’”

  As the oldest daughter of a language teacher, Nofar knew very well that people hated nothing more than having their words corrected. No one would open a friend’s mouth while he was eating, pull out the food, and demonstrate the right way to eat. And words, like food, belong to the tongue on which they rest. But then this customer had come into the ice-cream parlor and stood across the counter from Nofar. A nasty guy who banged on the glass partition, leaving another greasy handprint. But not to point out a flavor. The hand that slammed on the glass wasn’t pointing to the mango sorbet or French vanilla. The guy wasn’t making a choice, he was asserting control—he banged on the glass partition simply because he could.

  Nofar was seventeen years and two months old on that evening, and in all her days on earth it had never occurred to her to bang on a counter. That’s how it is. There are people who bang on counters and there are people who wait behind counters and ask, “What’ll you have?” But something burst inside her that evening. Yotam and Shir’s crew on the way to the movies. Her sister’s dress. The humiliation of that depressing summer. She didn’t need this guy’s complaints. But if he insisted on complaining, then he should use the proper language. Otherwise it was unacceptable.

  Avishai Milner looked in astonishment at the server who had corrected him. He’d never seen such chutzpah before. He had always considered himself a man of words. He’d written the lyrics to his songs himself. Now he mobilized all his skill to ram his words into the girl’s flesh. “You pie-faced moron! You stupid cow! You should tweeze your eyebrows before going out in public. And those pimples, didn’t anyone ever tell you not to squeeze them? You just need a few olives on your face and they can sell it as a pizza. But forget the face, what’s with that stomach of yours? Didn’t the owner of this place tell you that if you eat too much, you’ll look like a hippo? Who would ever want to fuck you, huh? I’ll take one scoop of cookie dough.” He handed her a 200-shekel note and Nofar, standing on the other side of the counter, automatically reached out to take it, like a chicken without a head that keeps running around for a few seconds. Her limbs repeated routine actions, taking a cone and scooping the ice cream into it, until the realization hit her that she had been decapitated, that the man had removed her head, her selfhood, and she threw down the cone and fled.

  3

  The pair of alley cats screeched a few mating calls and had renewed their recently interrupted copulation. But at that moment the ice-cream server burst into the alley and dashed past them, heading for the bathroom. Eyes blazing with anger, the long-tailed creatures observed the flight of the sobbing invader, but she was too agitated to notice them. The customer’s words still thundered in her ears. Tears rose in her throat. Her nose. Her eyes. To think that he had really said those things to her, that she had really stood there listening mutely and had almost served him ice cream. How pathetic she was. There was only one thing she wanted now: to disappear. The most terrible things she said to herself had just been said to her by a stranger: that she was ugly. Hairy. Pimply. Fat. That no one would ever want her. And though she was, in fact, quite nice-looking, the rejected little girl inside her was still certain that the customer at the counter had said aloud what everyone thought—the customers at the table, her classmates, her father, her mother, her sister. With her last ounce of strength, she looked for a place to hide, and the only one she could think of was the foul-smelling cubicle she had stepped out of a short time earlier. She was about to enter that tiled womb and squeeze between the garbage can and the raised toilet seat when, suddenly, a strong hand grasped her.

  In the weeks to come, Avishai Milner would be asked again and again what had made him follow that underage girl from the ice-cream parlor to the bathroom. He, for his part, would continue to insist that he wanted to demand change for the 200-shekel note he had given her and believed she took with her when she left. The simple facts would not help Avishai Milner: the girl had not taken the money, but had left it on the counter. Though he would steadfastly claim that he did not see the bill when he went out after her, that claim, like most of the facts in the incident, would be eclipsed by the enormous impact of the scream the girl emitted when Avishai Milner grabbed her.

  The cashier in the dress shop raised his head. The red-haired saleswoman stopped in the middle of folding a blouse. In the neglected alley, the pair of alley cats scurried off. And Lavi Maimon, sitting on his fourth-floor windowsill, realized that he would have to postpone his jump once again. Nofar Shalev looked at Avishai Milner, who had insulted her and was now clutching her hand, and screamed her heart out.

  Some changes occur slowly. Geological erosion, for example, sometimes goes on for tens of thousands of years. Water and wind do their job, and gradually, bit by bit, a mountain ridge becomes a valley, a sea turns into a desert. Time, like a giant anaconda, crawls along lazily, swallowing up the tallest mountains. Some changes erupt all at once, like a match bursting into flame, or the “let there be light” of creation. The change that happened to Nofar was apparently of the second kind. She had walked the earth for seventeen years and two months and had never thought to pound on counters, much less to scream in alleys. But now, in the presence of that man who had said those horrendous things to her, Nofar’s very soul shuddered. She ran out to the alley determined to disappear, but when th
e customer grabbed her hand she was suddenly overwhelmed by the opposite urge—to be heard. She screamed out the humiliation of the words he had hurled at her. She screamed out the humiliation of the words she had hurled at herself. She screamed out the disappointment of that summer and the summers before it. She screamed and screamed and screamed, and didn’t hear the police sirens arriving in response, or the fire engines that joined them, because so it goes—one jackal howls and one hundred jackals respond from the darkness. Nofar Shalev screamed and the city responded with screams of its own.

  The entire street hurried to see what was happening there, in that neglected alley, and since Nofar Shalev was the one it was happening to, everyone looked at her. The dreamy-eyed cashier. The red-haired saleswoman. Neighbors from their balconies. Two traffic cops. Even heavily pierced members of street gangs, the sort that never show an interest in other people and are never the object of other people’s interest, came to see what was happening. Nofar’s body was awash in the kind of light that radiates from fondly gazing eyes, and that light was now focused—wonder of wonders—on a girl who had never before attracted a lingering gaze. A pretty girl soldier, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail that burst from the rubber band like a fountain of light, held Nofar in a kind embrace and said “Everything’s fine” with such certainty that it seemed she had the authority to say those words, not only in her own name but in the name of the entire defense establishment. Nofar gave herself over to the warm embrace, feeling as if she had never been hugged that way before. The light fragrance of the perfume worn by the fairy godmother in uniform enveloped her, along with another more masculine scent, that of the officer who only a moment earlier on the street had encircled the girl soldier’s waist with his arm before hurrying with her to the alley when they heard the scream. As she held Nofar in her arms to comfort her, the officer and two traffic cops held Avishai Milner and demanded to know what he had done to the girl to frighten her so badly.