She hesitated, looked at her watch again, and gave a quick nod. "All right. What do you wish to ask me?"
"Would you say you and Moria were close?"
"Yes," she said, "of course." But there was the briefest of hesitations. I recalled what Lillian Shukrun had told me, that she thought Moria and Naomi might have fallen out.
"How about shortly before her suicide?"
A pause before she spoke. "What brought about this strange question?"
I shrugged, doing my best to feign innocence. "I just figured Moria's frame of mind must have been different given the turmoil she must have been experiencing, and that it might have affected your friendship."
Naomi Hecht studied me with those hard eyes of hers. Gone was the tenderness she'd exhibited when she told me of the day she found Moria dead. Here was the woman I had met in the hospital, the one she'd been when we began our conversation here in Café Atara—all steel and sharp edges.
"No," she said in a flat, modulated tone. "Everything was as usual." But she fiddled with her wedding ring as she said it, twisting it around and around her finger, and I became convinced, for the first time in our conversation, that she was lying to me.
I couldn't say why, but her deceit filled me with a deep, heavy, strange sadness. I held my breath, hoping she'd have a change of heart and tell me the truth. But she didn't. Instead, she said, "Anything else, Mr. Lapid?" And in her voice was that old animosity again, the one she'd shed during the course of our conversation.
"Just one more thing: When was the last time you visited Moria's apartment?"
"When do you think? The day I found her body."
"Not since?"
"No. Not since."
I tried to read either truth or falsehood in her set features, but they gave away nothing.
I said, "That's all, Mrs. Hecht. You can go to your husband now."
She flinched, perhaps in surprise at my abrupt, dismissive tone. Looking down, she appeared to suddenly become aware of how she was fiddling with her ring. She yanked her hands off the table and jerked to a stand, the feet of her chair scraping on the floor. She drew a small coin purse from her bag, unclasped it, took out some money, and laid it on the table by her plate. There was no goodbye, just a final inscrutable look and then a turning of the heel and a quick, erect march to the door, where she snatched back her coat and umbrella. She left without putting on her coat, eager to be away. I watched her through the window until she vanished from view.
The waiter gave me the stink eye as he cleared the table. I could guess what was going through his mind. The way he saw it, I had made a woman cry, then said something that caused her to flee the café as though chased by a pack of wolves. Not only that, but I was such a boor that I did not even offer to pay for her food like a gentleman should. And all this after he had already become invested in the success of my romantic endeavors. Perhaps I had broken his professional heart.
As he was leaving with the laden tray, a grim-faced woman came in from the kitchen. "Have you heard?" she asked him in a somber voice.
"Heard what?"
"It's done. The Knesset voted in favor of negotiations with Germany."
The waiter's face locked itself into a grimace of pain and despair. "God damn them."
I couldn't breathe. There was a stillness in my chest, as though my heart had ceased beating. "Are you sure?" I asked, disbelieving despite all the signs, the predictions, the unequivocal manner in which this woman had delivered the news.
The woman nodded gravely. "Sixty-one in favor; fifty opposed."
"God damn them," the waiter said again and emitted an anguished cry. Tears leaped to his eyes, and he brought his hands up to stanch the flow, the tray tumbling from his grasp, the plates and cups that Naomi Hecht and I had used shattering on the floor in a loud, spraying crash.
The woman laid her hand on his forearm, murmured, "Don't, Yisrael."
The waiter turned away, cursing in Yiddish, and disappeared into the back. The woman turned to me and the other customers. She offered a wavering smile. "Anyone want anything? Anything at all, I'll get it for you."
No one spoke. Rain began falling again, fat drops sliding down the windowpanes. Another waiter hurried over, spoke in low tones to the woman, then went away and returned with a broom and pan. The news spread among the tables like a ghastly rumor. A few shook their heads, a couple muttered something I couldn't catch, but none reacted anywhere close to how the waiter had. No one cried their eyes out like I wanted to. No one shouted their throats raw like I wanted to. No one overturned a table like I wanted to or hurled a chair through the nearest window like I wanted to. And I did none of those things either, for I had already committed my futile act of mad outrage the other night, just a few hundred meters away outside the Knesset, and I'd paid a price for it. Most of these people, maybe all of them, hadn't.
Then it hit me, the awful certainty that for most people this moment, which to me felt like an irreparable rupture, would pass like any other, that life would continue on its inexorable course as it always did, no matter what happened or who suffered or what injustice was done.
In less than a minute, as though to validate my fear, the café came back to life, conversation resuming all around me. At a nearby table, a woman began telling her friend about a movie she'd seen the other night. Someone laughed. A man asked for tea, and the woman who'd brought the terrible news went to fetch him some. On the way back from delivering it, she passed by my table. "You need anything, mister?"
I slowly shook my head.
"You sure? How about a glass of water?" She leaned closer and added in a murmur, "You look like you could use it."
"No, thank you," I said, but the words came out in a croak. My mouth was as dry as an old grave, as hopelessness itself. I tried and failed to work saliva into it, involuntarily swallowing, hurting the inside of my throat as though I had swallowed a piece of rough tree bark. "Yes," I managed to say. "Please."
When she brought me the water, I downed the whole glass in a single swallow. "Thank you," I told her.
"It's a terrible thing." She shook her head and sighed. "A terrible thing."
I didn't answer. What answer was there to give?
She sighed again, a what-can-you-do sort of sigh, and in that small, defeated exhalation I heard the awful acceptance of the fact that life would proceed, that we would all be dragged, kicking and screaming or indifferent or in a sort of simmering resentment—it didn't really matter how—to the following moments and days and so on, pulled by our daily duties and obligations and the necessities of life. "Can I get you anything else?" she said.
"No. Just the check."
Out on the street, people hurried past, huddled into their coats. A wicked wind flapped coattails around, ripped umbrellas from cold hands, scattered paper and debris in all directions.
Conjured by the weather, and no doubt prodded by the recent news, a seven-year-old memory I thought I'd managed to suppress clawed up from the dark depths of my mind, and instantly my entire body felt as though it were encased in ice.
It was December 1944, and I was in Auschwitz, standing in roll call as heavy, relentless snow plummeted upon me and the other miserable creatures who were my fellow prisoners.
