Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

The lawyer went back downstairs, cradling his wife’s attaché case and her telephone. There was no chance that she would wake up at night, and even if she did she’d never look for her bag or her phone. She was a woman who constantly misplaced her things, running around the house looking for her bag only to remember that she had left it in the car, or worse, at work. The telephone was even more elusive and on most mornings she had to hunt it down by calling it from the landline.

The lawyer took her appointment book out of the bag, a thin blue notebook embossed with the seal of the union of social workers in Israel, given to their members as an annual Rosh Hashanah present. He flipped it open, looking for a sample of her handwriting, hoping, in a dimly lit part of his brain, that he had only imagined the similarity. He reread the note and felt a sharp pain at the sight of the words, I waited for you, but you didn’t come. . The appointment book was filled with telephone numbers, random notes, and what looked like patients’ names. He slid the book back into the attaché case and found a bunch of loose paper, notes that she had kept, most of them old. Why does she keep these things? he wondered, angered again at her disorder. He examined the notes, hoping to find something suspicious, a smoking gun. But what exactly did he think he’d discover? Another love letter? A doodle of an arrow-pierced heart with her and her lover’s names? Every sentence, every line, roused his suspicion, but he did not find any hard evidence in his wife’s briefcase. He then looked through the main compartment of her bag, where he found patient files and academic articles.

The lawyer decided to comb through her cell phone, too. First, he checked the in-box, where he found several unfamiliar names, and even though the names were mostly female, or at least listed as such, and the messages seemed benign, he wrote them down. The lawyer knew that he no longer had the privilege of assuming that everything was as it seemed. The note itself already proved how devious she was: she had neither addressed nor signed her proclamation of love. Only now did he realize that the woman he had always believed to be disorganized and blundering was actually a cautious and deliberate plotter who left no trail. By the time he went through her sent messages, the lawyer no longer expected to find any incriminating evidence, and, in fact, most of the messages he saw had been sent to him, undoubtedly because she had erased the rest, knowing that the day would come when her husband’s suspicions would be aroused.

The lawyer shut off her phone — which was listed under his name, for tax purposes — and decided to order an itemized bill from the phone company. He’d go over the statements, looking for long calls and unidentified numbers.

The act of investigation took the edge off the lawyer’s pain. Now that he was involved in the assembly of evidence, the betrayal was just another case, details that had to be amassed and marshaled to form a convincing argument, but that sense of relief faded when he opened a pocket in his wife’s briefcase and found her compact. He felt his jaw lock. She, who always ridiculed women who spent hours in front of the mirror, carried a compact to work. Just like the women he eyed during his daily commute, the ones who applied their makeup at red lights, and he thought of her flipping down the sun visor on the car he’d bought

for her, examining her face in the small mirror, pulling out her compact, pursing her lips, putting on lipstick, tousling her hair, consulting with the mirror again, and then painting her eyelashes, powdering her nose. The whore. The bitch.

Why didn’t she wear makeup at home? Why did she criticize those women and then do the exact same thing? At least they were open about their vanity. They did not hide their daily routines from their husbands. And it turned out that she, who complained mightily before every event that demanded makeup, hid a compact in her own bag, and not just any old compact, but one that he had bought for her several years earlier, because the lawyer liked women who wore makeup and had hoped that his wife would follow their example, arousing, in that way, his dwindling passion. And she, ever so cruelly, kept from him what she happily gave to others. He envisioned her in the bathroom at work, taking off her makeup before coming home to him, even though he was never around when she returned.

Again the lawyer was furious. Again he felt the same quickening of his heartbeat, the same desire to slit her throat, to tear open the veins of her neck. With trembling hands he lit another cigarette, trying to make order of his thoughts. After all, he had a plan, and an alternate plan. He was a criminal lawyer and though he had never handled any divorce cases, he knew the difference between Israeli family court and Sharia court. He knew that whoever filed first decided where the case would be held, and he knew, as did every Muslim man, that he would be better off in the Sharia courts, where a man, if he can prove his wife’s infidelity, can strip her of everything she has. What’s more, barring any unusual circumstances, the kids stay with the father. If he was able to prove to the judges that she had cheated on him, she’d never see her kids again. The letter he’d found was insufficient, but he’d find other evidence, incontrovertible, and as soon as he did, he’d rush to the Sharia court in east Jerusalem. In the meantime, she had to remain completely unaware. She could not have even the slightest sense of his suspicions, because if she realized what he was up to and filed first — in an Israeli family court — she’d get it all: alimony, the house, the kids.

The lawyer put out the cigarette. He took a piece of paper with his wife’s handwriting in Arabic and the incriminating note and placed them in his briefcase, clicking the combination lock shut. She can’t have the slightest indication, he thought, and immediately shoved the damned Kreutzer Sonata back into the briefcase, too. He padded out of the study and climbed the stairs, putting her phone back in its place and her bag by the foot of the bed. He listened to his son’s breathing and cast an involuntary glance at his wife, saw her sleeping on her side, her legs bare to the thigh, and felt a surge of passion that he had been sure he had long since lost.

ALARM

The lawyer left the house at five in the morning. He wasn’t sure if he wanted his wife to be aware of this or not, but still he slammed the door behind him. On the one hand, he’d already decided that he should act as though all was normal. On the other hand, he wanted to vent, to express his rage, for her to know just how much he hated her. Walking toward his car, he hoped that she had been jolted awake, that she was in the process of fumbling toward the door and would come chasing after him, wondering why he had decided to leave so early. That didn’t happen. Instead, he sat down in the cold driver’s seat, started the car, and pressed hard on the accelerator, hoping the growl of the engine would wake her. Maybe it did, and maybe she had decided it was best not to pursue him and not to ask too many questions. It was rare for him to go into the office on a Friday and rarer still for him to go in this early. Throughout the commute to work he waited for her call, eager to hear the tremor of worry in her voice, but his phone did not ring.

He parked in the usual spot. The lot was empty and the guard had not yet arrived. He walked down the steps to King George Street. A police car, lights flickering in silence, coasted down the empty street and a municipal sanitation crew picked up the stray garbage. Cartons of bread and boxes of vegetables were stacked against closed restaurant doors. Weekend editions of the papers, lashed into knee-high cubes, waited outside convenience stores. Milk crates were parked in front of cafés. The scene was pleasing to the lawyer, who walked down the street in a short-sleeved shirt holding a black leather attaché case in his right hand, the morning chill toying with the hair on his arms, and he shivered once in pleasure.