Limassol Read Online Free PDF

up people sitting around us, so the bomb squad wouldn’t have to scrape them off the walls at the end of the evening. A few heads turned to us from the next table, as if I had hit her, at the very least.
    â€œI want to go.” Sigi picked up her bag and stood up. I tried to grab her hand, to prevent her, delay her, as if that was the last chance, I even muttered an apology. “Leave me alone,” she said. I heard the loathing. I knew it was too late.
    We went out into the street separately. She walked ahead quickly. I chased her in damp mists, covered with the sweat of a panicked animal. “You can’t walk alone like that at night,” I said. “Wait a minute, I’ll take you.”
    â€œI’m alone all the time,” she said. “For years I’ve been alone.” A cab stopped for her and she got in.
    â€œDon’t go!” I shouted. “Stop right now.” The driver turned his head to me indifferently. I didn’t have the power to stop anything here. Sigi quietly told him to go.
    I sat in the car in the parking lot, in the dark, and put my head down on the steering wheel. I didn’t have the strength to move. I called and she didn’t answer. Across from me, under the street lamps, relaxed and satisfied couples passed by, all the weekend pleasures in store for them. I desperately sought faces to talk with. After a lot of calls, she answered. “I’m at home,” she said quietly. “The babysitter says the child vomited all evening. Got to go now.”
    Â 
    I drove south beneath the orange lights of the freeway. The window was open and the wind whipped hard. I turned on the blue siren on the roof, went through red lights, hurried to get there. Somebody was waiting for me to visit him.
    The night guard at the installation knew me, opened the gate, said good evening, asked if I had seen the championship game, they tied with Slovakia, apparently didn’t get to the world championship this time either. I bummed a cigarette from him and parked the car inside, next to the iron gate of the interrogation building. I stood outside and smoked. Above me, beams from the spotlights notched the dark. The air smelled salty. Maybe I’d take the child to the sea at Ashkelon, they say the sea is much cleaner there than in Tel Aviv.
    I punched in the code and the gate of the installation buzzed open. The British had erected the building in straight, functional lines, with thick concrete walls and big cellars. We made the renovations demanded by technological advances. There was always a smell of shit in the air, despite the disinfectants. I went down the steps until I found the young interrogator who had destroyed my marriage.
    â€œI’m sorry I bothered you on your night off,” he greeted me. “But you wanted me to keep you up to date. I couldn’t get anywhere with him. He’s stubborn as a mule.” He had the face of a mechanical engineer, that interrogator, without a trace of sophistication; he didn’t have a drop of the poet in him.
    â€œWhere is he now?”
    â€œI sent him to the cell, he’s sitting there on a stool.”
    â€œAsk them to bring him,” I said.
    The cells were on the bottommost floor, the one the young people call “hell.” For twelve years I had been in that business, and hadn’t gone down there myself even once. A few soldiers with a low IQ did the hauling for us, and between one thing and another, would lie outside the interrogation rooms like bored Rottweilers, waiting to be called.
    In the interrogation room, there was a standard metal desk, a chair for the detainee, a light with a shade full of insect cadavers. Tape recorders were concealed in the wall; there was no window and the air-conditioner was old and rattled. Sometimes you turned it off to hear what the detainee was saying. A single faded poster of wild animals of the Land of Israel was hung on the wall; nobody had the