"Was this the first time she called since you started working here?" I asked.
"Yes. Unless she called on my lunch break."
"I wonder why she called Mr. Strauss today of all days."
"Perhaps to ask him for something. Mr. Strauss is a very generous man."
"Is he now?"
"Yes. He gave me this." She displayed her left wrist, from which dangled the silver bracelet I had noticed last time. "Isn't it beautiful?"
I agreed that it was.
"He said it was a gift for all the good work I've been doing. I was stunned."
She was a slim woman, with a heart-shaped face and soft dark hair. Her eyes were large and brown and guileless. Her mouth was full and lush. She really was lovely. Not exquisitely beautiful as Esther was, but attractive, in an innocent, youthful way. Fresh, inexperienced. Maybe that was why she didn't know men were not in the habit of giving silver bracelets to pretty women thirty years younger than themselves without aiming to get something in return.
"Is this your first job?" I asked.
She said that it was.
"He must like you a lot," I said, noting the slight flush that crept up her neck. Apparently she hadn't considered how odd it was for a law firm to hire an inexperienced secretary, no matter how good at typing she was.
I heard the door at my back swing open, followed by the hard, clipped voice of Mr. Strauss.
"I thought I told you to get out."
Dana tensed, eying me warily. I winked at her before turning to her boss.
"I was just admiring Dana's bracelet," I said, and walked out.
I took an inner-city bus downtown to the central depot and there boarded another bus to the coastal town of Netanya, some thirty kilometers north of Tel Aviv. The bus, painted red and nearly full, was twenty minutes late in departing and another forty in arriving at its destination. Along the way I was treated to the sight of rolling sand dunes, dense groves of bananas and oranges, and copses of pine and ficus trees. Looking at these divergent landscapes—arid sand to one side of the road and fertile cropland to the other—it occurred to me that this was a fair representation of Israel as a whole: a small country in which existed diverse climates and religions and ethnicities, all in close proximity to and without clear borders between one another.
The bus dropped me off at Zion Square in the center of Netanya. Along the square and the many streets that branched from it were small shops selling a large assortment of goods. Outside the shops, on stools and chairs, sat shopkeepers drinking coffee from small glasses, chatting with each other in loud voices.
At a kiosk, I bought a bottle of soda and asked for directions. The directions proved accurate ten minutes later when I found myself looking at the home of Yael and Moshe Klinger. It was a medium-sized house, one story with red shingles and a white fence framing a well-tended courtyard. Flower beds bloomed under the windows, and mowed grass flanked the cobbled walkway that led from the street to the front door. There was something distinctly European about this small garden. Someone had put a lot of effort into cultivating it.
Taking in the scent of flowers and watered earth, I knocked on the door and waited. The pear-shaped woman who opened it had fiery red hair knotted at the back of her head and sensible brown eyes set in a square, freckled face. She wore a red apron over a white housedress and was clutching a wooden stirring spoon. Flour feathered her apron and more of it was smudged above her right eyebrow.
"You got some flour there," I said, "over your eye."
She blinked and wiped her forehead with her palm, an action that served only to add more flour to her skin. She laughed when I told her so.
"I was baking," she explained unnecessarily, as the enticing smell of baking dough wafting from inside the house told the tale well enough. "I don't believe I know you."
I gave her my name and said I was there to see her and her husband, Moshe, and that I'd got their address from Mira Roth. This elicited a slight frown and a shifting of her feet. For a second, she seemed unsure of what she ought to do, but then she made up her mind and invited me in, telling me she was expecting her husband shortly.
She showed me to the living room, where I sat on a padded armchair next to which stood a tall Zenith radio. She excused herself, saying she needed to wash her hands. In the backyard, two girls, eight or nine, were playing with a white ball and a black puppy. The girls, I noticed, were identical twins. For a second, the image of my two daughters wavered before my eyes, and I felt my throat constrict.
