The Missing File Read online

  Ze’ev felt a burning desire to tell Michael that he was finally so close to writing—so close, and after so many years. He could picture Ofer’s face as he had seen it the last time, and had thought about how he would describe his features, the trace of a mustache, his embarrassed laughter. For three days now, he had known what he would write, but had yet to capture the precise words. They were still forming in his mind.

  “I think I’ll write this week,” Ze’ev said. “I believe I’ve found my topic—thanks to you.” But Michael was too cautious and remained silent, not asking him anything, so Ze’ev added, “And what about you? Are you writing anything at the moment?”

  They were stopped at a red light. Michael sighed. His long legs were a tight fit in the small car.

  “I always write. But I think it’s been months since I have produced something that I can stand behind and publish. That’s why I agreed to give the workshop. I am hoping it will help me with my own writing too.”

  Michael’s sigh and ensuing confession appeared to bring the two men in the car a little closer. Ze’ev had read his last book, published some two years earlier—initially in envy, sparked by the writer’s young age, and then in wonder and admiration. Michael had published three books, two collections of short stories and a short novel, and although they hadn’t sold all that well, they had won praise. Michael’s red T-shirt was giving off that same pungent smell that had come from the black sweatshirt the week before, and Ze’ev wondered if it was Michael’s body odor.

  “Do you go through some long periods when you don’t write?” Ze’ev asked, and Michael said, “I’m always writing something. But there are times when I don’t write anything worth reading.”

  “Who decides what is good or bad?”

  “I do.”

  Ze’ev laughed, but Michael remained stern-faced, as if there hadn’t been a hint of humor in his reply.

  “How in fact did you begin writing?” Ze’ev asked, and Michael said, “I don’t even remember. I do remember myself writing as a child in elementary school—sitting in class, not listening to a word the teacher was saying, and writing poems.”

  Ze’ev hated that sort of answer when it appeared in newspaper interviews with writers. He hadn’t allowed himself to miss a word the teachers said, and the thing he remembered best from elementary school was his fear that the teacher would call on him with a question.

  Michael turned the radio down. “Since when have you been writing?” he asked. “I somehow got the impression that you’re not a workshop kind of person, that you know pretty well what and how you want to write.”

  Ze’ev was stunned by Michael’s words. Had he managed to deceive him, to hide the truth from him, or had Michael, with his sensitivity, perceived something that Ze’ev wasn’t able to discern in himself, seen in him an inner truth whose existence he was too frightened to believe in?

  “I don’t write at all. Who told you I write?” Ze’ev asked jokingly, in an effort to conceal his emotions. “Truth be told, I joined the workshop purely by chance. I hadn’t planned on it. I was passing by the library, saw the notice, and decided to come in—not to learn how to write, but more to see what it’s all about and what others write about. I wasn’t sure about staying but was very impressed by what you said in the first lesson and got the sense that I’d have something to learn from you. And I think I have learned something already; I can feel it coming.”

  Ze’ev was on the verge of confessing at that point in their conversation. But then Michael seemed embarrassed, perhaps unsure about how to take the compliment, and silence fell again. They had reached the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, and Michael’s red eyes were peering through the window. “This is a pretty good neighborhood,” he said. “I’m thinking about moving here. The rent here is a lot lower than in our area,” and Ze’ev immediately blurted, “Yeah, prices in Tel Aviv are crazy.”

  The intimate moment passed.

  “We’re thinking about moving too,” Ze’ev continued. “Our landlord wants to raise the rent, and we need a larger apartment in any case—with a room for the kid. It’s tough these days to rent an apartment in Tel Aviv on the salary of two teachers.”

  “Where will you move to?”

  “Holon, perhaps. Although we’re a little hesitant to do so. It would be very hard for us to leave Tel Aviv—for me, at least.”

  “I’d move to Holon,” Michael said. “It seems like the right place.”

  “The right place?” Ze’ev asked, surprised.

  “The right place to live and write in. I’m sick of writing about Tel Aviv. I think I’m looking for a way to write more simply, and perhaps to write simply, one needs to live a simple life among simple people. I’m sick of overly sophisticated literature. But I’m not sure, maybe it’s naive of me to talk like this.”

  It was Ze’ev’s turn to feel Michael’s sting. “You really do hate literature, don’t you?” he said.

  “No, no. Oh God, I get the sense I have been horribly misunderstood today. Perhaps I came in feeling on edge and that’s what you’ve picked up on. I’m going to have to correct that impression at the next meeting. I’m simply trying to help you to free yourselves from worrying about what is literature and what isn’t, and to express what you have inside you in your writing. The most powerful text ever written—in my opinion, at least—wasn’t composed as a literary text. Do you know Kafka’s Letter to His Father?”

  Ze’ev was afraid to admit he had never read the letter, and even more so to claim he had read it and then get caught in a lie. Had Michael asked him the question because he had already placed him in the category of those simple people who lived simple lives? He could have said something nonspecific, like “I read it ages ago; I don’t remember it word for word”—but decided to say he hadn’t.

  “Okay, that’s excellent,” Michael said, “I’ll bring it to class next time—just an excerpt, though, because it’s pretty long. And there’s even a new translation. It’s a letter Kafka wrote to his father in 1920, I believe; or it might’ve been 1919. Anyway, it was written a few years before he died, and his father never received it. Think about it: one of the greatest literary texts in history wasn’t composed as a piece of literature but as a letter intended for a single reader, who never even read it. It blows me away every time I think about it. That’s how I’d like to write, as if my text is addressed to a single specific reader whom I wish to terrify. It begins with the words ‘You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you.’ Wonderful, isn’t it?”

  And just then, the first words appeared. And the idea, which still, that afternoon, had yet to express itself, like a baby learning to speak, suddenly came together in lucid sentences that needed only to be put down on the page.

  The hours that followed were very different from those just before and after the call to the police on Friday. This time, there was no panic or confusion in his actions. He acted with a sense of inner peace. There wasn’t a hint of the fear that had gripped him yesterday afternoon, and that hadn’t completely abated when he woke in the small hours of the morning and sat in the living room, enveloped in silence. Everything felt right, just as he had imagined the writing would be.

  Ze’ev didn’t drive straight home after dropping Michael off. He called Michal to ask if it would be okay if he were a little late. He told her he wanted to catch a movie, and only then remembered the English film he had seen that morning and thought he would be able to tell her about it without lying. He found a window seat at a café in Masaryk Square and ordered a cup of herbal tea.

  And there, in his black notebook, the first words were written, as if on their own:

  Father and Mother,

  I know you’ve been looking for me for a few days now, but I suggest you stop looking because you won’t find me, and neither will the police, not even with tracker dogs.

  The notices you posted in the stree
ts say I disappeared on Wednesday morning, but all three of us know that isn’t true. We all know that I disappeared long before then, without you even noticing, because you didn’t pay attention, and that I didn’t disappear in a single day either, but it was a gradual process of disappearing, at the end of which you thought I was still at home only because you never even tried to look.

  I ask myself why are you looking for me now? Why now have you gone to the police? Why didn’t you do so in the months and years in which the writing was on the wall? I used to think it’s because you were too caught up with yourselves and your lives, but that was a passing, childish thought, because I realized that the real reason was simply that it was hard for you to get close. Because all people are scared of truly seeing what others go through, and what your child goes through, in particular—especially when he is different, different from you, someone you can’t understand, a strange bird.

  I know this letter will cause you pain, but maybe I want you to hurt like I did. You could have prevented it but you didn’t. You remembered me when it was too late.

  You must be asking yourselves where I am now and where am I writing from—and I can only say that I am writing from somewhere far away, somewhere all good.

  No longer yours,

  Ofer

  Ze’ev sat at the café and read through the letter several times. He wasn’t filled with a sense of joy or satisfaction, only hunger for precision, hunger to find the right words and to erase the wrong ones. He added and deleted sentences, weeding out anything in the letter that a boy of Ofer’s age wouldn’t write, anything that wouldn’t ring true as Ofer’s voice.

  “How are you feeling?” Michal asked him when he returned home.

  “Great,” he replied.

  They sat together in the living room and Michal cut up a melon, the first of the summer.

  He told her about the English film, and she told him about her day at school and the evening with Elie, who had been crankier than usual and hadn’t stopped whimpering and looking for his father. At half past eleven Michal said she was going to sleep and asked if he was coming to bed. “Not yet,” he said. “I think I want to write something.” He smiled, and Michal looked at him in surprise.

  “It’s about time,” she said.

  Ze’ev sat down at the desk on the enclosed balcony, but only after peeking into the bedroom to make sure Michal was asleep did he remove from his bag the surgical gloves he had bought at a drugstore on the way home, and also a sheet of blank paper from a new ream for the printer. He slowly copied the text he had written at the café, rounding and spacing his usually dense and sharp-edged script. He left out the words “in which the writing was on the wall,” because they seemed too clichéd, and also the expression “a strange bird,” which Ofer surely wouldn’t have been familiar with. He added “To be continued” at the bottom of the letter, underneath “Ofer,” and then folded the page using a ruler and slipped it into a medium-size brown envelope.

  When he came in earlier, Ze’ev had noticed that Michal had already emptied their mailbox, and now he went to the letter basket in the kitchen to fish out an unopened electricity bill. In his other hand, he carried a garbage bag—a good explanation for the gloves, if anyone happened to see and ask, which of course no one did. He put the bill into their mailbox and then took it out again, in the same movement stuffing the brown envelope into the Sharabis’ mailbox.

  The edge of the envelope jutted out. It couldn’t be missed.

  He removed the gloves and put them into the garbage bag, which he then threw into the large communal bin. He then went back to the balcony and sat down at the desk again. The shutters were open and the computer was on. Strangely, he remained at ease. The sharp anticipation he felt was both his and not his, all at the same time.

  The chances of seeing anyone entering or leaving the building at that time of the night were slim, but he was too keyed up to go to sleep. Was this similar to the feeling of a young writer waiting to see his first story appear in the morning newspaper? It suddenly dawned on Ze’ev that someone from the building could go downstairs to the mailboxes and remove the letter without him seeing. He grabbed the keys to his bike and went down to look for something in the compartment under the seat. The envelope was in its place.

  He surfed the Internet for a while, and ate the rest of the melon. Moments before turning off the computer, he heard a car pull up outside the building. The front passenger door opened, as well as the trunk, and a man stepped out.

  It was Ofer’s father.

  Ze’ev watched as the father removed a small suitcase from the trunk and then went around to the driver to shake his hand through the open car window. Carrying the suitcase, he then walked up the path to the building and disappeared into the stairwell.

  It was 1:30 a.m.

  7

  In hindsight, that was the day the investigation altered course.

  It hadn’t dawned on him at the time. A number of days went by before he realized that the case was moving in a direction he had never imagined it would take—and by then he was already in Brussels.

  Nevertheless, when he returned home, Monday evening, on foot, following the same path that linked Fichman Street to Kiryat Sharet, Avraham realized that Ofer was no longer a complete mystery to him. He could see Ofer’s face as it appeared in the photographs he was given, he could sense the sound of his voice, he could imagine his thoughts.

  It was 7:30 a.m. when he spoke by phone with Ofer’s father, who had landed at the airport after midnight, and asked him to come in for an interview. He then called Ze’ev Avni, the neighbor he had put off calling the day before. He had missed him by just a few minutes. Avni’s wife told him that he had already left for work, and she passed on her husband’s cell phone number. He tried calling but got no reply—as the wife had expected. She had told him that her husband was teaching for a few consecutive periods and would be able to take a call only during one of the short breaks between the lessons. Avraham didn’t leave a message.

  In the meantime he returned to the Kintiev case; he wanted to close it before sending it off to the district prosecutor. The day before, because the team meeting had left him paralyzed, and because Ilana had instructed him to focus on the missing-persons case, he had suspended the remainder of the Kintiev investigation; it wasn’t that urgent, anyway. On Wednesday, the prosecutor would file charges and request that Kintiev be remanded to custody until the end of the proceedings against him. He continued with his summaries of the statements and the rest of the evidence. The more he read the transcripts of the talks with Kintiev, the stranger they appeared. He decided to dedicate a separate section of his summary to Kintiev’s confessions regarding crimes that were not part of the case, the arson and the story about his attempt to electrocute an elderly family member in order to get control of her money, adding a note that this material should be passed on to the relevant Northern District police station for further investigation. Avraham’s attention was particularly drawn to an odd expression that Kintiev had repeated over and over again: “If you’re my friend.”

  “If you’re my friend, I speak to you.” “If you’re my friend, I help you end the investigation.” “If you’re my friend, I tell you things you don’t know.”

  Avraham had responded to these odd statements only once. “Yes, I’m your friend,” he had said, and Kintiev had laughed out loud, responding, “If you’re my friend, you let me go now and I come to your house.”

  He tried calling Ze’ev Avni again at 10:45 a.m.—and again got his voice mail.

  Eliyahu Ma’alul called when Ofer’s father was already sitting in his office.

  “Can it wait an hour or two?” he asked Ma’alul.

  “It’s better if it doesn’t.”

  Apologizing to Ofer’s father, Avraham left the room.

  As they had agreed, Ma’alul had returned that morning to the school to spe
ak with Ofer’s classmates and teachers. He had asked to use the guidance counselor’s room and questioned the students in her presence. He thought it might make them feel less insecure and encourage them to talk. “Certain students are more fearful of the familiar and very tangible authority of school figures than they are of the abstract authority of the police,” he explained.

  Ma’alul was breathing heavily, as if he were speaking while walking briskly. “You’ve got it wrong, Avi,” he said. “He didn’t run away, and he didn’t kill himself. I’m sure of it now.”

  When they had spoken the previous evening to prepare for the day’s course of action, Avraham had again tried to explain to him why he believed that Ofer’s disappearance had in all likelihood been voluntary.

  “Did you come up with anything?” he asked.

  “Not exactly . . . Actually, you know what? Maybe I did. On Friday evening, two days after his disappearance, Ofer had a date to see a movie with some girl. And as far as I’ve learned, this did not happen very often. Maybe never. A friend by the name of Yaniv Nesher told me. They’re in the same class, and I believe he’s Ofer’s closest friend—although I don’t know how much he really knows. On Sunday, three days before his disappearance, Ofer told him he was supposed to be going to a movie Friday evening with a girl he had met through him.”

  Avraham would hear the word “movie” later that day again—in a different context, and from someone else. He’d recall the movie that Ofer was planning to see on Friday evening and would make a connection between the two movies, between the two conversations.

  “What do you mean by ‘through him’?” he asked, and Ma’alul explained: “Through his sister. Ofer was at the friend’s house, to exchange some computer games, or maybe to play some, and the friend has a sister a year younger than them. The sister had a friend over, and she liked Ofer. Ofer was informed of this and got her number. Looks like it took him a while, but he called her last week. Never mind, the details don’t matter. What’s important is that they made a date to see a movie last Friday, two days after he disappeared.”