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* * *
—
On Wednesday, after the kids finish wrangling their lukewarm meatballs, I realize Raviv isn’t there. I never count them, even though Maor says we’re supposed to count them every hour. But when someone’s missing, I usually figure it out, so I ask Yuri, who says he saw a few kids go behind the gym. They’re not allowed to leave the classroom without permission, and by the time I get to the gym I’ve had time to think up the punishment I’ll give Raviv, feel sorry for him, and cancel it. Behind the gym, in the long-jump sand pit, I see Raviv crying, and not far away from him I see Liam, the meanest kid in my group, lying facedown in the sand while some fat redhead whose face I’ve seen before sits on top of him and punches him in the back. He’s punching the way a kid does: lots of anger, very little technique. Without even knowing how things got to this point, I’m with the redhead. I’ve felt like punching Liam myself a bunch of times. The kid doesn’t talk, he just gives orders, and even that he does in a shitty way. Every other line out of his mouth is about how he’s going to tell Mom, or the teacher, or the principal.
The redhead keeps pounding on Liam, and I know I should run over and separate them. The fact that they disappeared from the classroom is my screwup, and now I’m really going to get in trouble, especially with Liam’s mom being on the parent council. But as I watch the redhead railing on him, a little voice inside me tells me to wait a while longer, just till he lands one really good punch.
This has not been a good week. Not good at all. All that embarrassing waiting around for Akirov. I didn’t even try to bring a single girl home. This fight is without a doubt the highlight of my tedious week, and another few seconds of enjoyment aren’t going to hurt anyone. While I think all this, the redhead gets off Liam’s back, and just when I think the whole thing has played itself out, he takes a step back and slams his foot on Liam’s head. As I start running, I realize Raviv is on to me. He saw me watching the fight that whole time without doing anything. I sprint the few feet between me and the redhead as fast as I can, both because I’m stressed and to confuse Raviv a little, so he’ll think afterward that he must have been wrong: it wasn’t possible that I was standing there watching instead of breaking them up and that I took off so fast.
When I get to the redhead I shove him hard enough to move him off Liam and I yell, “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?” Then I bend over to check on Liam, and all that time out of the corner of my eye I can see Raviv watching me. Liam’s upper lip is bleeding and he looks unconscious. The redhead stands there wailing. He says Liam cheated him on Trashies and when he asked him to give back his cards, Liam told him he had poop-colored eyes and his dad was unemployed. From the way the redhead says it, I can tell he doesn’t even know what “unemployed” means. I try to talk to Liam and shake him gently, but he doesn’t respond, and I get really nervous. I tell the panicky redhead not to move and I run to the water fountain. On my way back I can hear Liam up and screaming, “You’re finished at this school, you fat-face loser! My mom’ll make sure of that!” Liam is sitting on the ground with his hands on his face, and the redhead stands next to him, shaking all over, really sobbing now. Suddenly Yuri turns up. I’d left the kids alone in the classroom and one of them found a lighter in my bag and set fire to a poster of Yitzhak Rabin in the hallway. Yuri’s account of how he put out the smoldering poster makes it sounds like, at the very least, he’d saved a baby from a burning house. I splash water on Liam’s face. He looks all right now and his lip is hardly bleeding anymore. The redhead keeps blubbering, but I’m not interested in him. What I am interested in is that snot-faced Raviv, who doesn’t take his eyes off me even after we go back into the classroom. I call Liam’s dad, who works as a land surveyor and is usually at home, and he gets there in five minutes. Liam screams that he took too long and he’s going to tell on him to Mom, and then he tells him about the redhead. He embellishes a lot, and says the redhead hit him on the head with a rock, but I don’t intervene. As long as he doesn’t start in on me, I figure I’m better off keeping quiet. Then the mom of the twins with the unibrows arrives. She has a South American accent. She had the twins through IVF and, judging by the way they turned out, she must have used a caveman’s sperm.
Eventually it’s just me and Raviv. I let him play on my iPhone, even though I never do that, and while he annihilates entire species on a game I downloaded a few days ago, I try to talk to him about what happened. “It’s not okay that you and Liam ran away from class without permission,” I tell him, but I say it pretty gently, like a kind mother, so he’ll know I’m not against him but at the same time he’ll understand I have something on him. “I won’t tell your mom,” I continue, “but I want you to promise not to do that again.”
And this kid, without even looking up from the phone, says, “I saw you.”
“Saw me what?” I ask, like I have no clue what he’s talking about.
“I saw you while Gavri was beating up Liam. You were smiling.”
“No I wasn’t. I wasn’t smiling. I ran. I ran as fast as I could to break it up.”
But Raviv isn’t with me anymore, he’s in the game. Shooting lasers at anything that moves.
When his mom gets there, I don’t call her out for being late like I usually do. I just tell her, “You have a really good kid. He’s a sweetheart.” Right next to him, so he can hear.
* * *
—
In the five minutes it takes me to get to the promenade, I have two unanswered calls and a text message from Maor. The message is blank. The fucker was too lazy to write anything, but he wanted me to see it and call him back. I debate whether to have a smoke first and then call him, or the other way around. The pro of smoking first is that the reefer will soften the discussion, envelop the whole unpleasantness in styrofoam and bubble wrap. The con is that I’ll need to be sharp with him. I’ll have to answer fast, maybe make up a lie or two right on the spot. I go with the second option and call him cold sober.
Maor yells at me: Liam’s mother called and vowed to get all the other parents on board and make sure he loses the program next year. She’s been compiling a list of complaints on him all year and she’s going to make everything public, including the fact that the lunches are sometimes served frozen. Maor says that if she pulls it off, this whole episode could cost him two hundred thousand shekels and it’s all my fault. Her kid won’t be at school tomorrow because he has a concussion, and Maor wants me to go visit him before work and take him some candy or a toy, and suck up to his mom so she’ll get off his case. The whole phone call is a total drag. He repeats everything ten times. I wish I’d smoked first. Before he hangs up he threatens me again. He says if they take away his license, he’ll sue me. I tell him to calm down and I promise to go over tomorrow and kiss the mom’s ass. By the time the call is done I’ve missed the sunset. I sit there in the dark, staring out at the sea, fully sober. Once the sun has set, there’s nothing in that spot apart from ugly tourists and lousy music from the restaurants on the beach. And the next day I have to set my alarm clock and get up early so I’ll have time to buy a gift for my least-favorite kid in the world. This week started off lousy and it’s only gone downhill.
“I thought you left after sunset.” I hear her voice and I feel—or at least imagine—her breath on the back of my neck.
“Sunrise, sunset—I’ve been waiting for you since Sunday,” I reply with a smile, and then I get mad at myself because instead of saying something positive I managed to sound like a whiner and a doormat all at once.
“Sorry.” Akirov sits down next to me. “Work was a shit show this week. Not just work—life, too.”
I want to ask her what happened but I can sense she doesn’t want to talk about it. So instead of drilling on about it, I take out a joint. After one puff I pass it to her and she sucks it up like a junkie. “I’ve been thinking about this drag for five days,” she says, smiling, and hands it back to me.
I don’t take it. “You smoke it,” I tell her, “smoke it to death.” She hesitates for a second and then takes another toke. “Tough week?” I ask. She nods and sniffles. I’m not sure if she has a cold or if she’s trying not to cry. “My week wasn’t so hot, either,” I say. “It’s bad for us to not see each other for so long. It throws a wrench in our karma.”
She smiles. “Listen, I want to ask you for a favor . . .” She digs through her bag while she talks, and I try to guess what she could possibly want from me. “I want to hire you.” She takes out her wallet.
“As what?” I give her a big grin. “Your bodyguard? Babysitter for your kid? Personal chef?”
“I don’t have a kid,” she says with a sigh, “I’m not into food, and I’m pretty good at taking care of myself. I want to hire you to keep doing exactly what you do: come here every day at sunset, and wait for me if I’m late. Not long. An hour at most. And then smoke with me.” While she talks, she counts out the money. “Here.” She hands me a stack of hundreds. “There’s two thousand here. Two thousand for three weeks. What do you say?”
“What do I say?” I repeat her question to buy time. “I say that I come here every sunset anyway, and smoking with you is more fun than smoking alone, so it’s great that you want to pay me for spending a pleasant fifteen minutes with you on the beach when you have time, but taking money for talking to a friend . . .”
“But that’s just it—we’re not friends. And three weeks from now I’m going to vanish from this place and you’ll never see me again. These three weeks are going to be the toughest ones of my life. The daily joint with you will help make them a little bit easier.” Her hand with the money is still held out. When she says we’re not friends, it hurts. It hurts because it’s true. I try to ignore it and focus only on the pragmatic stuff.
“If you want, I can buy you some weed for a couple of hundred shekels. At the rate you smoke, it’ll last you more than three weeks.”
“But I don’t want you to buy it for me. I want you to smoke it with me. I can’t keep weed around. I promised my husband I’d stop buying it.”
“You promised him you wouldn’t smoke,” I correct her.
“I know,” she says, and suddenly she starts crying, “But it’s different with you. Even if he finds out, it’ll be like I just met you on the street and you happened to be smoking so I had a drag, too. It’s not the same as buying . . .”
I take the money. I don’t want her to cry. “Okay, boss, we have a deal.” I give her a wink. “But the two grand only covers drugs. Sex and rock ’n’ roll are extra.”
She laughs, and the laughter and tears come out together. I don’t know what she’s going through, but it sounds like some serious drama, and even though there’s nothing going on between us, I really want to help her. “I only have one condition,” I add as I shove the money into my wallet, “I want you to tell me why you’re disappearing in three weeks. When you said that, the way you said it, it didn’t sound like a good kind of disappearance. And, speaking as . . . your employee, I have a right to know.”
“I’ll tell you,” she says, and wipes her face with her hand. “I promise. But not today.”
* * *
—
The alarm clock on my phone wakes me at eleven. I brush my teeth, shave, and roll a joint for the evening. I do everything fast. I still have to pick up something for Liam and go by his house, and I only have an hour and a half. It’s a good thing he lives near the school.
His mother opens the door wearing a pink tracksuit and a sour face. “I came to check on Liam,” I say, trying to sound like I care.
“It’s a pity you didn’t check on him yesterday, before he was brutally beaten,” she retorts in her low, sludgy voice. “I still don’t understand how a child can disappear from the classroom for almost an hour without anyone noticing.”
My instinct is to say something about how it’s easier to look after kids who respect other people than ones who keep lying and running away, but I remember my talk with Maor, so instead I explain apologetically that yesterday a child brought a lighter to school and tried to burn some posters in the hallway, and since I was busy taking care of this unusual incident, it took me a while to realize that Liam was gone. “I just want you to know, Mrs. Rosner, that I didn’t sleep all night because of what happened. It was a terrible mistake and I want to apologize to you.”
“I’m not the one you should apologize to,” she says in a voice that sounds slightly less furious. “I’m not the one who was beaten unconscious and is still suffering from aches all over my body. You should apologize to Liam.” She takes me to the little shit, who’s sitting up in his parents’ bed, watching a Japanese anime series—a soccer match between robots and aliens. Other than a slightly puffy lip, he looks totally fine. “Liam,” his mother says in a teacherly tone, “you have a visitor.”
“Not now,” Liam says without taking his eyes off the screen, “I’m in the middle.”
“He brought you a present,” she says, trying to tempt him. “Lego Space!”
“I hate Lego.”
“Hey, Liam,” I jump in, “I came to see how you’re feeling.”
“I’m in the middle,” he says, still not moving his eyes off the screen. “Did you get a gift receipt for the Lego?”
At the door, Liam’s mother thanks me for visiting and says she has a meeting with the principal and Maor tomorrow and that she’s not planning to let this slide. “Liam has three older brothers,” she says in a pathos-filled tone, “and as a parent, I have never come across such an extreme incident: a seven-year-old boy attacked with rocks and sticks without anyone intervening.”
I realize the last thing I should do is get into an argument with her, so I just nod. I tell her that if I were a parent I would react exactly the same way. “You have a lovely boy, Mrs. Rosner, and, thank God, he came through this whole thing without serious harm. That’s what really matters.” Walking down the steps, I text Maor to say I made the visit and the mom is still pissed, but I’m confident she’ll calm down before the meeting. He doesn’t answer, which is a good sign. When Maor texts or calls, it’s always bad.
The afternoon at work goes by without incident, but it’s tense. All the parents who come to pick up their kids throw out something: they’re worried, this is not okay. They’re not blaming me personally, but they’re unhappy with the program and the school. The twins’ mother says that in Buenos Aires they’d have at least two counselors for this number of children. Noya’s father, who is an officer in the navy and always wears his uniform when he comes to pick her up, says it all starts with education at home. I murmur agreement with everything they say, and try to look contrite. There’s obviously going to be loads of yelling and threats at the meeting tomorrow, but if I know this school, nothing serious will come of it. They’ll suspend the redhead for a few days, they may even expel him if his parents are weak or suckers, but it looks like I’ll survive—as long as Raviv doesn’t talk.
Raviv and I are the last ones there, as usual. I tell him I downloaded an upgrade for the game he likes and ask if he wants to play. He smiles and holds out his hand for my phone. Before I give it to him, I explain that it’s fine with me for him to play, but it has to be a secret, because if he tells the other kids they’ll want to play, too, and I can’t let everyone do it. Raviv thinks for a moment and then nods. I give him the iPhone and he starts the game. While he plays, I ask him if he’s good at keeping secrets. He doesn’t answer. I don’t know if it’s because of the question or because he’s absorbed in the game. After a few seconds the iPhone makes a happy tune—he must have leveled up.
“Way to go! You’re really good at this!” I exclaim.
“Why did you smile while Liam was getting beaten up?” He doesn’t even look up from the screen when he asks me that.
Now it’s my turn to keep quiet. My instinct tells me to make something up. My instinc
t always tells me to make something up. But just like with Akirov, I ignore it. “I did it because I don’t like him,” I finally say. “Lots of times he’s done bad things that I thought he should be punished for and he always gets away with it, and when I saw Gavri hitting him—I know this isn’t a nice thing to say, but I was glad.”
Raviv looks up and stares at me. The game keeps running and I hear him getting eliminated, but he doesn’t seem to care. “What did he do? What things did he do that you thought he should be punished for?”
“Lots of things. But mostly it bothers me that he picks on the weak kids.”
Raviv wipes his nose with the back of his hand without taking his eyes off me. “But he’s not the only one who picks on weak kids.” He doesn’t say it, but we both know he means me.
“That’s true, and it’s a horrible thing to do.”
“Then why do you do it?” He doesn’t look angry at all, just curious.
I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe because most of the time I feel weak myself, and when I pick on someone, I feel stronger.”
Raviv nods. He seems to understand me.
* * *
—
It’s cold on the promenade that evening, and there’s a gusty wind. The sky is completely black and it looks like it’s about to storm. I huddle in my coat and wait for Akirov. It’s my first day as her employee. She’s late, but not by very much. She’s wearing a wool hat. I don’t usually like girls with hats—it always makes them look like a character on a kids’ show. But on her the hat sits really well. It brings out the green in her eyes.
It’s too windy to light up, so I suggest we find a lobby somewhere. While we smoke together in the doorway of a decrepit building on HaYarkon Street, it starts raining, and I think about my bike getting wet on the promenade. “What a crappy day,” I say, and she nods, as though something that belongs to her is also getting wet out there. I tell her about my day, and the whole story with Liam and his mother. She asks if I like my job. I think for a moment—no one’s ever asked me that. “I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘like,’” I finally answer, “but I definitely prefer it to working with adults. With kids, you can take a bite out of their sandwich or you can tickle them. With adults it’s more complicated.”