The Marsh Angel by Hagai Dagan (best thriller books to read .TXT) 📕

certain; I’ll be sitting on my balcony in the evening, drinking my whiskey, and the whole thing will come crashing down.

b. Skimmed Milk

In those years, Tamir would go on dates through online dating sites. His social circle had always been small, not to say non-existent, and it could hardly be said to have expanded over the years. The few friendships he maintained since his kibbutz days quickly dissipated, the loose ties he kept from his army days evaporated almost as soon as he discharged, and the feeble relations he struck during his university days blew away like dandelion seeds in the wind. He wondered what it was about him that prevented any relationship from sticking. Amalia introduced him to someone; Neta sent an email inquiring if he’d be interested in meeting a friend of hers. But these attempts were few and far between, before ultimately stopping altogether. Eventually, he had no choice but to turn to the internet.

Tamir would sit at night and scroll through profiles on websites like JDate and OkCupid. It was an amusing pastime— a little exciting at first, tedious and despairing later. Most profiles, despite being funneled through the websites’ rigorous vetting system, were insufferable. He was surprised to learn how hard it was to find someone original, interesting, or smart, and especially, how difficult it was to find someone reasonably articulate. He did not consider himself to be snobbish, but perusing these websites turned him into a snob. Countless women expressed themselves with abhorrent banality— loves the sea, the sun, movies, smiles, yoga, sunsets, nature walks, sing-alongs, plants, and cats. They listed their achievements like they were applying for a desk job at an insurance company. Many women wrote they were looking for someone with two feet on the ground. Tamir didn’t strike them as such a person. He asked himself whether he was in fact floating in the air. He certainly didn’t feel that way. Perhaps he did float once, on that one singular occasion when he took off from the bunker to the clouded night sky, answering a secret call, a radio check, hal tasma‘ni, Tamir, hal tasma‘ni, until he plunged, his wings scorched, and crashed, on that one cold morning by Hassan Bek Mosque.

On the rare occasion he did contact someone whose profile appealed to him, the whole thing tended to come crashing down fast, usually as early as the preliminary correspondence or phone call. The women would pick up on his reserved, critical, cynical tone, and bolt as fast as they could. On the even rarer occasions when things progressed to the point of an actual date, more often than not, they ended in disaster. Tamir discovered that he could be bristly, edgy, cold as ice. He was polite, but exuded an air of aloof aversion. Again and again, he tried to force himself to be attracted to a mixture of beauty and dullness, beauty and stupidity, beauty and banality. One time after another, he failed. It was as if beauty had been eroded, collapsing into a cruel superficiality, like an attractive coat of paint revealing a dilapidated wall underneath it. He tried to focus on lips, breasts, hair, even the curvature of arms, but to no avail. He needed a gaze, a pair of incandescent eyes reflecting a flame from the depths of the dark abyss, the eternal flame ignited at the dawn of time, the desert nights, the goddesses of destruction forged from fire and darkness. He found none of it. Only glazed, hollow stares.

Of course, there were others— witty, interesting, dark, educated, intelligent. Some of them were even good looking. But in these cases, an elusive and mysterious element factored in: compatibility. Something simply didn’t sit right, didn’t jell. Tamir had grown to believe that nothing would ever jell, as if something in the chemicals in charge of the cohesion process was inherently damaged. He found it hard to imagine himself ever sitting in front of someone and feeling that illusive sense of connection. He vaguely remembered feeling it in the past, but that memory had eroded over the years.

Then, on a somber spring evening, he came across Afik’s profile. The first thing to catch his attention was her name. At first, he thought he had accidentally stumbled upon a man’s profile. But no, it was a woman’s. As he always did, he first examined her profile picture. He saw an elegant face with an elliptical contour; soft, big eyes, faintly turned away from the camera; a reserved expression, a careful glance; a luscious pair of lips, the bottom lip lightly dragged under the bite of an ever so slightly protruding set of teeth. He thought about timid rabbits, about Watership Down, and felt he wanted to be a carrot. She wrote almost nothing about herself. She was doing a PhD in biochemistry at the Weizmann Institute and was interested in processes of cellular degradation. She was originally from a moshav,21 she wrote, and that she sometimes misses strolling through the apple orchard. That line struck a chord with Tamir.

They met in Siach Café in Sheinkin Street. Outside, it was too hot, too dusty; scents indicative of the forthcoming summer were carried through the air, scents of a city beginning to buckle under the weight of overbearing heat. The sulkiness of the owner and the introverted gloom of the few other customers, each receded into his own corner, befitted the nature of their meeting. Tamir spoke quite a lot, mainly to fill in the gaps in their conversation, while she mainly sat in silence. Her sentences were short and stunted. Her gaze was mostly lowered. There was something reserved, reluctant about her. But on the few occasions when she did raise her eyes to meet his, Tamir felt he saw something stirring in them, a secret, like books by Nietzsche concealed in a secret depression behind the Torah ark in an ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian yeshiva.

When they left the café, they looked helplessly at each other. Moonlight flowed from the