The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by D. A. Mishani

Author:D. A. Mishani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Part Two

The Killer

9

When they returned from the airport with Bojan and Anika Milanich, Avraham didn’t recognize his home. Throughout the apartment tablecloths that he didn’t know they had were spread out, on which were placed vases he had never before seen, with enormous flower bouquets. In the small office, which for three days would be transformed into her parents’ bedroom, Marianka had placed a small basket filled with grapefruits.

Avraham’s eyes were red because he hadn’t slept at night, but he saw Marianka’s excitement while they ate breakfast on the porch. His cell phone was sitting at his feet, on the floor, and he tried not to check too frequently if any new messages had been sent to him. Marianka told her parents that he was in the middle of a murder investigation, and her mother pretended to be interested in the case, but he couldn’t tell them much because he hadn’t revealed most of the details even to Marianka. And every time he looked away or went to the kitchen to help Marianka with the food, her parents whispered to each other in Slovenian.

And despite this, they did not succeed in hiding the point of the visit from him.

Bojan and Anika Milanich detested him, and he knew this well before then.

When they met during the summer that he spent with Marianka in Brussels they were still friendly, but when they heard about her plan to travel to him in Israel, the friendliness disappeared. She didn’t tell him everything they said, but Avraham felt their disgust with every look and every meeting. She spoke to them by phone once a week, usually on Sundays, and she told him that they had come to terms with her move, but he didn’t believe it. When he asked, “So how is it that they’re coming here suddenly?” she said, “In order to be with us—what do you mean? And also in order to get to know you.”

Why, if this was the case, were they sitting forlorn on the porch of his apartment and barely saying a word?

Anika Milanich didn’t touch the omelet that he and Marianka prepared and only drank coffee with milk. She was fifty-one years old and looked no more than forty. In Slovenia she was a teacher at a music academy, and in Brussels she gave private lessons on the piano. Her favorite composer was Chopin, and the pieces that she loved to play more than anything were the mazurkas. When Avraham was invited to their house for the first time, she asked him which mazurka was his favorite and he didn’t know what to say. She was tall and smartly dressed, and when no one was watching her smile twisted up into a grimace of disgust. Marianka told him once that one of her students at the academy became a world-renowned pianist and that her mother tried to set them up, even though he was gay. Bojan Milanich, holder of a black belt in karate and an instructor at a theological seminary, sat next to Anika and looked at the skies of Holon.

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