The Liar Read online

  “Nothing!” he shouted. “I didn’t do anything!” And the poor girl trembled in the kind embrace because she knew it was true. He hadn’t done anything to her. That dirty-mouthed customer hadn’t done anything to justify the presence of two traffic cops and an army captain. A citizen of the country was certainly permitted to skewer the heart of another citizen with his words. In another moment, she’d have to say that to the gentle-eyed girl soldier, to the audience looking at her with the sort of affection she had never before experienced. Everyone was so friendly, so interested—what would they say when they discovered that nothing had actually happened, that they had run all the way there for no reason? They would turn their backs on her instantly. The policemen would certainly rebuke her for causing such a fuss, and she would bow her head in submission, as she always did. Then she would return to the ice-cream parlor to serve the waiting customers, wipe the glass surface, and ask, “Cup or cone?” and “What can I get for you?”

  And in truth, she would have been willing to accept all that if Avishai Milner hadn’t opened his filthy mouth again. It seemed that he hadn’t vented all his fury. Or perhaps it had been recharged, like those almost dead phones that are suddenly revived by a newly found source of power. So it was with Avishai Milner. People’s glances replenished him. How much he had missed that audience, young and old, soldiers and policemen—as the presenter used to say, the entire country is here with us. Suddenly he was filled once again with the familiar, addictive feeling of being at the center of things, the object of frenzied public attention that exploded all around him. But the fact that the attention was negative—no one threw flowers to him, no one applauded him—shook him to the depths of his soul. The audience’s affection was lawfully his. He couldn’t let that hippo who had kept him waiting at the counter, who had dared to correct his language and had run off with his money, steal what was rightfully his.

  Once again, he snarled his nasty words at the girl, and words, like hot-air balloons, take off when the flame under them is lit: “You disgusting hippopotamus, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole,” and a host of other pejorative words and phrases. The girl’s eyes filled with tears. First he had insulted her when no one else was around, and now he was ridiculing her in front of everyone. In despair, she moved out of the pretty girl soldier’s embrace, began to cry in earnest, and covered her face with her hands. Beyond her hands rose a monumental brouhaha. Everyone was asking questions at once, but, deafened by her own sobs, Nofar didn’t hear, and it wasn’t her fault that observers took her sobbing as confirmation. They asked, “Did he touch you?” and the covered face trembled—that is, replied in the affirmative—and each additional sob was further confirmation, each additional sob was the next day’s headline. Suddenly, miraculously, the following story emerged from a neglected alley: refugee from reality TV accused of attempted rape of minor. And everyone looked at the newborn story and saw it was good.

  Alley cats stand up a few days after emerging from the womb. Foals manage to stand up about an hour after birth. Only human babies, slow creatures that they are, cannot stand on their own two feet until many months after they are born. In contrast to the slowness of the human newborn is the incredible speed of the human story: a person brings a story into the world, and if it contains a whiff of scandal, it immediately stands on its feet. One minute it clings to its creator, and the next it breaks into a run. The question is not where it has come from, but where it is going, and how far it will go before surrendering to the law of nature that halts all runners.

  The terrible story about the famous singer and the underage ice-cream server came into the world at 6:49 in the evening in the month of August. For a brief moment, the newborn story remained where it was and breathed the perfumed evening air, but then it was no longer willing to wait even one minute longer in the alley. It galloped far into the distance, and the alley, which had filled so quickly earlier, now emptied out with the same speed. The traffic cops and the firemen; the golden-haired girl soldier and her lover, the officer; and of course the proud parents—the once-famous singer and the minor from the ice-cream parlor—all went on their way. It was now impossible to know whether they were leading the story or the story was leading them, but either way, the alley was already too small for them. For their present size they needed a larger living space, such as, for example, the police station on the main street.

  4

  In the police station on the main street they gave her water and tea, then Coke as well. They cut her a slice of the honey cake one of the dispatchers had brought. They offered her a seat, and when her bottom touched the chair, Nofar sighed in relief. She had been standing on her feet without a break all summer. She stood when she served the customers who flowed into the ice-cream parlor, and when they left she hurried to clean the glass counter, but the moment it was shiny again the customers were back, and the cycle began again. Now, with her legs stretched out in front of her, a glass of cold Coke in her hand, its bubbles fizzing merrily, she was asked once again what had happened.

  The pleasant woman across from her leaned forward. She had beautiful, delicate hands with nails polished a lovely, subdued color so light it was almost transparent. The pleasant woman said her name was Dorit and that Nofar was probably finding it difficult to speak and answer questions. But in fact, it wasn’t difficult at all. It was harder when nobody asked you anything, when you spent an entire day, an entire week, an entire summer without speaking to anyone. The woman asked, Nofar replied, and it was all incredibly simple. All she had to do was repeat what had already been said, just like in a history exam. She was very good at memorizing. There was a reason she was an outstanding student. The words flowed effortlessly. The woman across from her had all the time in the world. Her kind eyes were fixed exclusively on her, no distractions, and, faced with such attentiveness, Nofar found herself opening up. The delivery nurse’s old prophecy was coming true: her body forgot its awkwardness. Her cheeks reddened. Fire ignited in her eyes. Her usually pale, stammering lips grew suddenly as red as a rose. A stranger who happened into the room and was asked to describe her by the way she spoke would undoubtedly say “blossoming.”

  That was her mother’s word: blossoming. When Nofar completed primary school, her mother promised she would blossom in middle school, and when she completed seventh grade, her mother said that the transition to middle school was always difficult, but now, in the eighth grade, she would really, really blossom. And so she moved from class to class, dragging behind her a trail of buds that would open any minute now. How strange it was to discover that the change that had been so late in coming when she entered middle school, even when she began high school, occurred one evening in a small room in a police station—and the more she spoke, the more she blossomed.

  Finally she stopped, though she could have kept going if she had wanted to. Dorit, the detective with the pleasant face and delicate hands, said, “You’re a very brave girl.”

  In a side room on the police station’s second floor, Avishai Milner banged on the wooden table. “I’m telling you I didn’t touch her!” The two detectives sitting across from him were not especially impressed by the banging, and even less impressed was the wooden table. It had already been pounded on so much in its life, sometimes by suspects, sometimes by detectives, that it had long since lost hope of being rescued. Its production-line brothers had been placed in public libraries and post offices, and one of them had even risen to the census bureau office, but fate had doomed this table to be shipped to the police station on the main street. Now Avishai Milner banged the table in fury once again. Because it was unbelievable—an hour ago he had left his house, headed for the ice-cream parlor, and now he was looking at the street through a barred window. That enraged him so much that he had no choice but to bang on the table, proclaiming over and over again that it was unbelievable!

  The gray-haired detective glanced at his watch. Through the barred window, he heard the groan of the city engulfed by its pe
rfumes. People who hate the city criticize it for being nothing but a mixture of honking horns and soot, but on the days before the New Year’s holiday, countless perfume bottles in a rainbow of colors are opened all at once in shops in an intoxicating urban flowering. The detective’s nose, the nose of a seasoned hunting dog, recognized his wife’s singular fragrance in the profusion of scents rising from the street. He wanted to leap out of his chair and hurry outside to her, but first of all he needed the truth. Without it, this day’s work would not come to an end. So he looked hard at the suspect and said, “I remember you. My wife voted for you in the finals.”

  Avishai Milner softened instantly. Like the cookies that people dunk in their coffee cups, he couldn’t withstand the heat that enveloped him. This man knew him. His wife had voted for him in the finals. For that dear woman, he was still Avi-shai! Mil-ner! The gray-haired detective continued to ask him questions and he replied willingly, almost enthusiastically now, just as he used to reply to reporters’ questions in the past. He no longer saw a reason to bang on the wooden table. A meeting with old fans should take place in a congenial atmosphere. He leaned back. Relaxed. Gave an occasional bright smile. When the question about touching the pathetic ice-cream server inappropriately was asked again, he allowed himself to reply jokingly, “Yeah, right, I’m completely into pimply-faced sixteen-year-old girls.” That was enough for the gray-haired detective. His partner asked a few more questions, and the suspect replied with the same sarcasm. But sarcasm is a dangerous ally, much like the perfumed notepaper young girls buy: after a while the fragrance evaporates and only the paper remains. And in truth, in only a few hours the sarcasm had evaporated and only the confession remained.

  In the first-floor interrogation room sat Nofar Shalev, growing increasingly bewildered. In the second-floor interrogation room sat Avishai Milner, spinning the web in which he would entrap himself, like a spider that has lost its mind. Standing outside the police station was the deaf-mute from the square, trying to decide whether to go inside. He especially liked these pre-holiday days because, during the rest of the year, he had to work very hard to make a living. He didn’t play a musical instrument as well as the Russian woman at the mall entrance, and he didn’t have white hair to help him as did his colleague from the bustling street. White hair reminds hurrying people of their aging relatives. People in a hurry who think of their grandfather grow sad, and since they don’t like to be sad, they buy deliverance with a coin. With his black hair, the deaf-mute never reminded anyone of their grandfather, which is why he barely eked out a living.

  When the deaf-mute had first arrived in the square, he was afraid he would be found out. He thought it would be very unpleasant if someone discovered he wasn’t a deaf-mute. He thought, What if someone asks me how to get somewhere and I answer by mistake, or someone just says hello to me? But after a while he noticed that no one asked him how to get somewhere, and of course no one ever just said hello, so the deaf-mute gradually forgot how to speak. That frightened him so much that he decided he had to begin speaking again. In many ways it was like riding a bike again after twenty years, and though everyone always says that you never forget how to ride a bike, anyone who has tried knows that your body might have a vague memory of the bike, but it remembers the fear of falling much more clearly. In the end, he succeeded. When a man hurrying by handed him a coin, the deaf-mute opened his mouth and said thank you. But the man was in so much of a rush that he didn’t hear the words, and the deaf-mute remained standing there with the coin and the words all that evening. And so the deaf-mute from the square became mute once again. This time for real.

  Now, standing in front of the police station, the deaf-mute recalled what he had seen in the alley. How surprised he had been when, pissing contentedly in a far corner of the yard, he was interrupted by the sounds of running and sobbing. A young girl in a blue dress was heading straight toward him, but, blinded by tears, she didn’t notice him urinating in the bushes. A moment later a furious-looking man arrived. Then everything happened with dizzying speed. The alley filled with a huge crowd of people. The man spewed the venom he spewed, the girl said what she said, and then everyone went off to the police station. No one noticed the sole witness. But the deaf-mute knew: the traffic cops had come for nothing. The pretty girl soldier and her lover, the officer, had come for nothing. Because the only thing that had happened in the alley was an inconsequential act of cruelty, death on a small scale—one person stepping on another.

  Now the deaf-mute sat down on the wooden bench on the street corner and remembered the tortured face of the young girl. Then he thought of the scandal and laughed to himself. No one else knew but him. And if, until that moment, he had been forced into being a deaf-mute, silent simply because no one bothered to listen to him, now he became mute by choice, his mouth shut in defiance. Bats hovered above him in the branches of the ficus tree like ministering angels. He was filled with a rare sense of joy. If he wished to, he would speak. If he wished to, he would remain silent. The young girl’s life was in his hands, and she didn’t even know it.

  5

  Night flowed onto the city in a large wave of darkness and washed the streets, submerging the city dwellers on its way. First it closed the eyes of the children. Then it put their parents to sleep. In the bars, the last of the revelers clung to the shoals for several more hours before they too dropped off. One by one, eyelids fell, until there remained only the glow of the streetlights’ constant stare and the red eyes of the all-night kiosk owners. The city slept like a large woman sprawled on her back, the darkness kind to her, concealing her wrinkles. A large, old city is like a large, old woman—easy to love in the dark, difficult in the light. Later the night ebbed, darkness retreated slowly, and the noise of garbage trucks thundered through the streets. Quiet and agile, the workers leaped down to collect the bins—like egrets on a hippopotamus’s back, they foraged through the city’s folds of fat to clean it.

  In those early-morning hours, Nofar was still asleep in her bed. And truth be told, she slept quite soundly. On those bleak summer nights, the black TV screen had been a constant, loyal companion, lessening her loneliness with police investigations of rapes in San Francisco, murders in New York, and elaborate combinations of both—rape followed by murder, murder followed by rape, mostly in Chicago. In her teenage years, TV was for her what her teddy bear had been in her childhood—a shield against the terror of the night, a fortification against loneliness. But that night she did not reach for the remote. What was the point of watching other people’s stories when she finally had a story of her own? It was that sense of fullness, the clear knowledge that her life was no less interesting than the lives of the characters in the box, that enabled her to sleep so peacefully.

  When the next day finally arrived, the ice-cream server opened her eyes and saw that everything was as it had been. The sun still rose in the east. Her sister was still prettier than she was. But the story appeared on the fourth page of the newspaper, with a prominent reference to it on the front page in letters as red as raspberry sorbet. “Famous singer suspected of attempted rape of minor.” From behind her cornflakes her mother shot her a worried look. Late the previous night Ronit had been summoned to the station and informed of what had happened. She had cried a little, hugged a lot, demanded justice. When Ronit was a child, a neighbor had thrust his hand under her skirt, and to this day she remembered the paralysis that had seized her body. The previous night she had asked Ami to drive home from the police station so she could sit beside Nofar in the back seat. She held her daughter’s hand the entire time, something Ronit hadn’t done since Nofar was a child. The next morning, she looked searchingly at her—had the trauma left scars? But Nofar ate more heartily than usual and said that she had to go to work.

  “Are you sure? After the…”

  “Yes,” Nofar replied, “I’m sure.”

  On her way to the bus stop, the bus passed her. And she, instead of accepting her fate submissively and waiting pa
tiently for another forty minutes, raised her arm in a gesture of entreaty. There are people who can stop the entire world with the wave of a hand. Maya, for example. If her younger sister were to order the earth to stop spinning in its orbit, it would undoubtedly obey. And now, to Nofar’s great surprise, the driver stopped for her thirty feet from the bus stop. To her ears, the rattle of the motor had the catchiest beat she had ever heard. Any moment now the passengers might stand up from their threadbare seats and start dancing. With the greatest of ease, the bearded ultra-Orthodox man and the eighty-year-old woman would move to the rhythm, the soldier and the girl reading Psalms would begin to boogie. Even if she got tired momentarily from standing throughout the long ride, a quick glance at the local paper was enough to reenergize her. Because her story was printed on the fourth page. Just one look at it filled her with secret pride. She could barely stop herself from ripping the paper out of someone’s hands, leaping onto a seat, and shouting, “Me! That’s me!”

  It was finally time to ring the bell, and she stepped off the bus to the accompaniment of a cheery ding-dong. On her way to the ice-cream parlor she passed two kiosks and one supermarket, and from all of them the newspaper winked at her like an old friend. What a beautiful day it was. How beautiful the people were, and the billboards and the laundry that waved like flags from apartment balconies.