Stockholm by Noa Yedlin

Author:Noa Yedlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

14

Amos looked at the clock: ten forty. Maybe he should phone Yehuda to find out how things were going, whether they’d finished with the van, when they were getting back. There wasn’t much time left. Moving a body was not something you did under pressure. On the other hand, it wasn’t something you did not under pressure either—it just wasn’t something you did, period. But suddenly he completely believed in it. They were too successful, too businesslike, too rational to fail. Strangely, they were too square to fail at moving a body.

Varda texted him: “Going to bed.” What did she think they were doing exactly, all Saturday long at Avishay’s? Fortunately, she wasn’t particularly interested and so he didn’t particularly lie. But he had lied, of course: Avishay had been dead for three days and he hadn’t told her.

On Wednesday she had her bar exam, and what she needed was a quiet house, without kids or grandkids, and preferably without Amos. Without distractions. But as the days went by, and the more he repeated the reason over and over again to his friends, the feebler it seemed, so much so that he could barely remember it at all, even though it used to be true; of that, he was sure.

Still, he didn’t tell her, and not only because he needed the excuse to protect their house—their lives—from a corpse. Why was it, then? He wasn’t sure. He felt like someone who’d wandered away from his personality these past few days, or maybe it was the opposite: he had been fully exposed, wearing a cancerous outburst of qualities on his face. If he told Varda the truth, she would have to live with a leper.

* * *

At the age of sixty-two, five days after retiring from her job as a human resources manager at Sano, Varda had informed Amos that she was going to law school. He thought she was joking. Why had she retired when she was still young and in excellent health, if not to enjoy life a little, before the cancer, before the Alzheimer’s? And law? Where had that come from? He’d known her for forty years, she’d never taken an interest in law. She said, “I’ve always had a strong sense of justice,” but Amos had no idea what she was talking about: Varda liked to have fun, she liked to party. Unlike his friends, she knew how to enjoy herself without any complications. Justice had never bothered her, and that was one thing, but a judge? Because now that’s what Varda wanted to be. A judge had more influence, she explained, and when Amos asked, “On what? What does she have more influence on?” Varda replied, “On the world,” and Amos missed his human resources manager, even though she was sitting on the other side of the table.

She’d been in great spirits when she first retired. She had endless plans, and not a single one of them included justice. In fact, most were based on that vague injustice that enabled one to live a good life—meaning, money.

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