Like a mad fool I rushed off to the airport, hoping to find him there.

That man we’d come upon one day, the one whose horrible moustache we mocked, told me he had just seen him hailing a taxi. And that he’d had a large suitcase with him.

I was immediately suspicious when this man claimed to be a relative, which is how he presented himself to me. He was too polite. He said he felt badly for me, because he had seen me on this street before, gazing long and hard up at that window as I walked by. Whatever – I didn’t think this was the moment to get into any of the details. Without delay, I flagged down a taxi. I went straight to the departure gates where flights to his country leave from. I waited for hours, like an idiot.

Because…how could I have possibly found him? How could I have believed that impostor on the street? What did he have to gain by lying to me like that? People here are strange. The men are riddled with complexes. They’re sick.

I would walk down his street, passing his home, more than once a week. Sometimes the light was on in his room, and then I would sit in the café opposite, with the prostitutes and the pimps, waiting for him to come down to buy something, or just to go for a walk, and then I would make something up. Well, hello, what a coincidence!

Other times I kept watch, studying the curtains, looking for a woman’s shadow, one of his many lovers. My basic and most powerful motive was punishment. Getting my revenge. But I wanted to find the right way to do it. An instrument worthy of my hard anger. I needed to come up with a manner of revenge that would be truly painful for him, carving out a hole in his life that he would never be able to overlook, or fill.

I could not satisfy my thirst. In the last few weeks, his window was always dark. I asked his neighbour, the plump prostitute whom I guessed he frequented, and she said she hadn’t seen him for a while.

This man was a truly harmful being. Causing pain was in his nature. He was broke and had nothing to lose. He was arrogant and full of himself; he was backward in his ideas and pretentious in his claims, violent with people but always quick to break into tears. As soon as he reckoned I had fallen for him – fallen in love or at least fallen into his bed – the torment began. What he inflicted on me was planned out and methodical. By torturing me, he was trying, most likely, to make me more attached to him, more dependent. That was his sick logic.

In the end I loathed him, and I found all his complexes and problems repulsive. It seems they were all products of a miserable childhood in an ailing country, things he’d carried with him his whole life. His loneliness, the desolation that was primed to play on my sense of sympathy, became an instrument of relentless torment boring into my head. I never saw him in the company of even one friend, never saw him with a relative, and as far as I could tell, he’d never had a lover who stayed with him for more than a week.

Resentment, hatred and some lingering sympathy – together they drove out the all-consuming passion that destroyed years of my life. A combination of anger and pity filled the space my passion had occupied, and then the pity vanished. Revenge was all I could think about. That is what would bring me back to life. The life he had denied me. It would bring me back to men. To love, to sex. I felt as though he had squeezed out all the juices of my soul, that I could never again feel attractive, never again be someone a man might desire. How could that man want me so madly and then, the very same evening, shed me so completely? I would tell myself that it was because he loved me so intensely that he wanted to put me to the test like this. He wanted to make me his patient Job, to treat me as the Lord treated Job, out of His abiding love. He singled out Job to reward him for the goodness of his heart. God said to Job: You are the one, the only one, to deserve everything that I will do to you. I choose you, in your purity, singling you out from all of humanity, for a special, limitless torment. But you will be free! You are not bound by the wager I have made on your love for Me. I will leave it to you to choose whether or not the bet is lost. However, the story will never be over unless and until I win the bet… Ah, the wisdom of proverbs, legends and fables, the stories we tell.

He chose me, in my purity, for his torture. Other women he had been with he abandoned, allowing them to go away whole, in peace, with a fond farewell, probably expressing some humility and gratitude. Except me…except me. It is almost as though he had to keep bringing me back, as if he were sentenced or condemned to retrieve me from wherever I had managed to flee – if I managed it, that is. He would search high and low for me, bringing me back only to fling me further away.

What obsesses me now is my stupidity. Why did I keep going back to him, and how could I have been led on so blindly by his promise to keep me and take care of me, to make amends, compensating me for my strong powers of endurance, my ability to hide the ulcerations in my heart, my failure to make him take responsibility for my affliction, my illness. Because it got to the point where I became as sick as he was, and it was the same kind of sick. It was too much, I couldn’t bear it. The route I had to take to get to him was now so terrible, so ugly, that I no longer wanted to arrive. I no longer wanted his passion. I no longer wanted Job’s prophesying. All I wanted was to wallow in my own open wounds, and I didn’t want to see them close up. Sickened as I was, I could control my passion for him. And as long as I knew him, the passion consumed me; it didn’t leave me any room for healing – nothing to give me the strength to reject this sickness.

He disappeared. I had believed that love made all masks fall, that love was the truth, as they taught me through the words of the Messiah. But it seems to me now that one enormous mask covers the body of the world; or that the world is only a massive accumulation of masks over masks, with nothing beneath them in the end. And that I am blind.

I sit down in an out-of-the-way bank of seats to hide the streaks of tears on my face from passers-by. But what I want to do is to scream at them. What is the problem? What’s the matter with my crying? Why should there be anything strange about it? Aren’t airports places made for saying goodbye? For tears?

I blow my nose and take a deep breath. If my father were alive, I would have gone to him. My father was the only man anywhere to whom I could have asked my questions: where did that man disappear to? How could he leave me without a word? What did he want from me?

What did he want?

Father, help me. Were his loneliness and alienation my doing? What did I not attempt for his sake? Why did my heart attach itself so strongly to him? Alone, and knowing he was far away, sometimes, suddenly, I have felt his head next to mine. In the bus, for instance. Then I’d start shivering and it would always end in a bout of tears. Why? Why have I found myself fixating on some man, any man, who looks just slightly like him from the back, and then following him for hours when I know perfectly well that it isn’t him there ahead of me? Did he ever love me, for even a day? A moment? In the café, in the street, in his bed? Is it just that I reminded him of some woman he did love, and he saw her in me? Or was I like his mother, whom I imagine he really did despise, so deeply that he never allowed even one question on anything that was remotely connected to her?

But mightn’t his disappearance be against his will? Did he have enemies I didn’t know existed? It seems very unlikely that he would have returned to his country without saying a single word about it, not ever, even as a remote possibility. Especially once he was working on getting back his passport. That’s what I believe. Because, in the end, we had become friends. Or at least we would have…

Did he get his passport back? I’m not certain. He told me a lot of lies. Yes, he lied to me so often. I moved through his sets of lies as though I were moving through a rainstorm and trying to dodge every raindrop. There were so many lies that I couldn’t even remember to ask myself, between one lie and another, whether there was any speck of truth in what he was saying. The next lie would be upon me before I had taken in the last one. It got to the point where I was convincing myself that all the energy he poured into constructing these huge edifices of falsehood, with such careful engineering, was proof of how much he loved me. The love of weak, empty, failed people.

I go back to my ghosts. I think about how he tamed me the way animal trainers at the circus tame bears. And about how I accepted it. I took it all, without even demanding or expecting a single cube of sugar. Then he trained me up with obstacle races. Every time I jumped over a barrier he piled on ten more. And I went along with it. I took it all, even though I had nothing to show for it, not even a tin-plate medal! Maybe in his sick mind he truly believed it gave me pleasure. A kind of delectable masochism. Maybe he was right. Maybe he saw in me something I couldn’t see in myself. If it weren’t so, then why did I take it?

It was as if I opened my thighs and my heart to the wind, to a ghost, to the shadow of a man. The longer he looked at me, the more transparent I seemed to become, the more absent to his eyes. When he slept with me, it was like he was consuming me, a ripe and tasty piece of fruit, and then he tossed me away like the pit that was left behind, like the fruit’s rotting remains, already poisonous. What did I have that he loved, and what did he hate? Was he afraid of me? Did he have secrets, dangerous ones?

Did he go to another woman, one who loved him more than I did? Then why would he hide her when he knew that I would not have put any obstacles in his way? What right would I have had? Because he had long let me know that I had no rights over him, and I accepted that. And I consented to humiliations much more painful than this. I wanted him to feel reassured. For his sake I turned into a different woman. I put up uncomplainingly with things no woman from his country would endure. Maybe I should have done the opposite of that. Or maybe the important thing was that I not resemble them. I don’t know. I no longer know anything.

I no longer know anything but this consuming hate. Nothing but the violence of my desire for revenge. To the point of murder. To kill him with my own hands.

I must go back and search for that man with the moustache. Although, even if I were to stumble across him, I wouldn’t believe a single word of whatever it was he’d tell me.

How could he let go of me like that? How could he leave me?