The Third Day by Chochana Boukhobza

Author:Chochana Boukhobza [Boukhobza, Chochana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

MEIR

“It’s such a pity!”

Through the open window, behind the closed shutters with their movable slits, the rumble of the buses rises and falls with the flow of traffic.

Every three minutes you can hear the whooshing of the bus doors opening at the station, the moaning of pistons, the purr of their accordion joints.

The poor soundproofing is clearly the only thing wrong with this brand new building in Rehavia. It has been built like a palace, with steel turrets, porches and garden plots, and it seems to have sprung from the pages of a picture book. As if the architect had wanted to convey something to those people who, like himself, had stayed behind in their childhood. An excellent design project, which had made a lot of money. All the flats had been sold off plan to the companies whose bronze plaques shone at the entrance to the stairwells. Everyone in Jerusalem rates it a prestigious address.

The room is vast, square; there is a heady scent of vanilla. The lawyer has furnished it tastefully: a bench decorated with cushions, an oak desk, two cane chairs. The dim light dissolving into the walls gives it a warm, intimate atmosphere. Only the background noise of the buses is nerve-wracking. But in the long run you get used to it and eventually you no longer hear it.

The lawyer straightens the box of pens on his desk, scratches his hand and neck then leans down to scratch his leg.

Meir Tropmann has a disease of the lymph which has made him monstrously obese. But his head, which has kept its proportions, is still handsome. Silky chestnut hair falling in waves on his forehead; eyebrows drawn as if with a brush; a small, pleasant mouth and a lively gaze in brown eyes rimmed with thick long lashes. When you see his head, you find yourself thinking that all it would take would be a sharp pin to deflate the black-clad balloon on which that head sits in order to recover the lawyer’s true body. Alas, his illness is incurable and will only get worse with time.

Tropmann knows his days are numbered. He lives with it.

His wife continues to love him, his two children are charming, his clients have remained loyal. The hideous fingers of disease have not affected his intelligence. And he has set out to prove there is no better lawyer, no better negotiator in the entire country. The two luxuriously framed photographs on the wall will certify his worth to anyone who, upon meeting him for the first time, might find him slumped in his armchair, dropsical and repugnant.

In one of the photographs he is in the Knesset shaking hands with Begin. In the other, he is at Camp David, in the foreground next to Shamir, who looks like a dwarf next to him. Tropmann led the team of jurists and finalized the text which was brought to the negotiating table.

“A pity for whom, Meir?” Elisheva says, ironically.

Meir Tropmann lifts a cup to his lips and takes a swallow of tea.

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