The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Author:Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

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Berman hired Uri that same week. It didn’t surprise me—in all the years Mikhael had worked there, he had never recommended anyone. Here and there, in rare cases, he passed on a CV, but always by e-mail and at a calculated distance so as not to undermine, even a little, the sanctity of the company’s professionalism. But this time, he himself went into Berman’s office to say he vouched for the guy. And when someone like Mikhael—impressive, businesslike, professional—knocks on the CEO’s door and says something like that, the result is predictable.

“This was really perfect timing,” Mikhael told me a few days after Uri was fast-tracked into the company. Orion had folded three and a half months ago, so there was no large gap in Uri’s CV. Anyone skimming it would see the same calendar year and not realize that the guy had been at home for almost four months. In Silicon Valley’s competitive job market, an unemployed programmer smells like a corpse rotting in the sun.

“Why couldn’t he find a job by himself?” I asked.

“I know that he and his wife split up and she went back to Israel not long after the company closed. Maybe he couldn’t decide whether to go back or stay here for a while.”

“His kids went back to Israel and he decided to stay here? How can he live like that?”

“There’s some kind of money problem,” Mikhael said. “They bought a house here before Orion closed down, and they couldn’t sell it. I’m not sure he can afford to go back to Israel in the near future. Just try to pay a mortgage in dollars when you’re earning shekels.”

The next day, even though I didn’t bring up the subject, he said, “The thing that’s great about Uri is that, instead of just sitting home in front of the computer, he started that class. You were right about him, he really is a good guy.”

I kept my misgivings to myself. I could have told Mikhael that I hadn’t liked the look on Uri’s face that night in the grove when he told the boys to hit each other. I could have talked about his knife, which the boys passed around with such reverence and safeguarded with almost religious adoration. I could have claimed that there was something odd about a person who chooses the motto “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first” as motivation for a class of teenage boys. But deep inside, I was angry at Uri for a different, simpler reason: my son had a new love.

It was actually Adam’s chess teacher from middle school who helped me tone down my anger. I met him standing in line at the pharmacy. Jacob asked if Adam still played chess, and I said no, he’d gotten hooked on a new self-defense course. To my surprise, he asked if the instructor was Uri Ziv. He knew Uri well because he’d taught Uri’s son chess a year earlier and also because he’d advised him about chessboards for the visually impaired.

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