If someone had told me that I’d be in a secret club with a girl, I would have laughed in his face and think he had a screw loose. And if he had said that she would actually be part of a secret, I would have been rolling on the floor with a humongous stomachache and telling him to go take a long walk off a short pier. But no one ever told me anything like that and it was just my mouth that blurted out, “I think we need to decide who will be the leader of this group. I suggest …” I wanted to say “myself,” but before I could, “Aviva” slipped out. Reuven looked at me as if I was crazy, and just to avoid any doubt, shouted: “A girl? The leader of a secret club?! Are you totally nuts? Anyone who hears that will laugh at us!”
“Relax,” said Aviva. “No one will know. You’re forgetting that we are a secret club and that means that no one even knows we exist.” Reuven couldn’t argue with that. So he had no choice. He stared at me angrily and demanded that it remain a secret between us. I certainly understood his feelings and swore not to let anyone find out.
What I did find out was that Aviva was brilliant. She was always able to find a creative solution and knew how to make Reuven and me do what she wanted. In my case, that wasn’t very difficult. All she had to do was smile at me, and I was ready to lay the moon at her feet. I would even search the world for “bird honey” for her, which was a figure of speech my father had invented for the impossible demands Mom often made. Like, for instance, not to tell the whole world what was happening in our home.
“And that’s all you saw?” asked Reuven, and I told him that I didn’t see anything especially suspicious in that filthy, neglected apartment, but I didn’t have a chance to check everything because when I heard Aviva’s footsteps, I hid under the bed, on which some green rags had been tossed.
“I saw the rags too,” said Reuven.
“That wasn’t a rag. It was a woman’s green dress,” said Aviva.
“Very peculiar,” said Reuven, scratching the top of his head (this was a sign that something was really bothering him).
Reuven paused a moment and then told us that his mother knew all the people in the neighborhood and what was going on in everybody’s home. He made it sound as if she was not a gossip or anything, but that she was a double of Miss Marple—the detective in Agatha Christie’s books who was always listening for any speck of information.
“Just yesterday, out of the blue, I asked her if she knew an old man who lived on Olei Hagardom Street, and she told me that he had a wife but two years ago she disappeared—probably died—and since then he is a widower. So why would there suddenly be a woman’s dress on his bed?” asked Reuven, and Aviva and I were mystified in the face of this new, surprising information.
A mystery. At this point, the whole matter seemed as strange and indecipherable as ever. In the books it is so easy: you follow the spy, you find his hidden transmitter, his secret stuff and a couple of photographs of aircraft. Then the spy catches the detectives and imprisons them in a dark room. But there is some animal (a rat or a dog) that chews the ropes tying them up, and they escape just moments before the spy can transmit the information to the enemy or before he slaughters them with a jagged dagger. Meanwhile, others alert the police, and they all trap the spy at the last second, and they get to meet a grateful prime minister who awards them a medal for their bravery. In our case, however, we had discovered a spy, and what did he have in his room? Just a green dress that had belonged to some old lady who died a couple of years ago, and my mother’s suitcase.
But what was my mother’s suitcase doing at his place? I tried to work this out in my mind. These were the facts: Mom went to Germany for a week. During this week, the spy disappeared. She returned without a suitcase. The next day, the spy came back with her suitcase. Could he have stolen her suitcase? If so, how did he get to the airport and why specifically my mother’s suitcase? Where was his transmitter? And where was all the stuff we saw him stealing from the garbage cans at the army base? Also, he had to have a camera. Where was it? We would have to go back to his apartment and search more thoroughly. Maybe in the kitchen cabinets? Maybe under the floor? Maybe there was a secret door that we missed? But how could we get into his place now, when he is home and certainly more cautious after he had caught Aviva and nearly caught me?
We watched people walking along the streets; some were carrying shopping bags and some were carrying briefcases. They looked calm and serene. They had no inkling that a spy was living in the heart of their neighborhood, that a man in disguise was there passing on state secrets and would wreak havoc on us all if he wasn’t stopped in time. A little boy dressed as a Native American ran around, shooting arrows and waving a plastic silver-painted axe at us. I’d almost forgotten that tomorrow was Purim. I hadn’t even decided yet what my costume was going to be this year. Suddenly, I knew what we should do.
“Purim gifts!” I jumped up and screamed in excitement. In my excessive enthusiasm, I slipped and fell on my backside.