Ever since the city’s establishment, one can find a close connection between Kfar Saba’s founders and early residents and the old trees planted all over town. Each tree has its own story, woven into the story of the city’s establishment.
(From the Kfar Saba Municipality website)
Introduction (December 2000)
“When I was seventeen I used to judge people according to Darwin’s theory of evolution. An ugly person was a stupid person. Personally, I have an aversion to Lior. I think he’s ugly. I disrespected him, and therefore had no qualms about attacking him.” He takes a drag off his cigarette, his lips sucking in the smoke of life that spreads through his blood. The accused of murder, they call him. The accused of the murder, Amitai Yonatan, is sitting in the interrogation room with cuffs around his wrists and a cigarette in his mouth. His long, straight body is clad in a blue sweatshirt, blue pants, and a furiously laced pair of New Balance sneakers. When he’s in the room, the space becomes devoid of any other person. He brings his cuffed hands to his handsome face and pulls the cigarette from his lips. He pulls the ashtray closer, pushes his chair closer to the table, and gets comfortable. No need to ask him any questions, you pack of illiterates, Amitai Yonatan will tell you everything.
“Before I did it I had a strong hatred of people. I was longing for the end of mankind.” The cigarette is sucked dry. Defeated, he tosses the butt into the ashtray. “Unfortunately, I can’t give you a motive. Unfortunately, that’s all gone. I’m twenty-one years old now, and I was a different person back then, a seventeen-year-old person.” Amitai Yonatan turns his head, his eyes no longer fixed on those of his interrogator, instead resting on the floor tiles. You can see his features for the first time. But even when you couldn’t see him well, even when his image blurred on the television screen, you could see how good-looking he is, what people call a handsome man.
A small mane of curls the color of sand, something to run your fingers through on a starry night, look into his eyes, and feel something. The eyes blue like clear, sad waters. He isn’t sad. He isn’t sad. Only his eyes look sad, he was born this way. The beard he’d grown on those soft cheeks is ridiculous, like a child wanting to be a grownup, like a child speaking the language of a grownup, like a girl who wears a black jacket to school.
“I don’t have any answers. Are there answers to anything in this life?” he asks the interrogator sitting across from him.
After that they take him to the eucalyptus thicket everyone knows, the one called Ussishkin Forest. He’s got no cigarettes left, he’s got no life left. He speaks word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable. He does it right. He’s an A student.
“Why did I murder him? Emotionally, why did I actually murder Lior? I didn’t like his eyes. He had the eyes of a bitch. Like I said, when I look at people, I judge them by the eyes. The face. Not their bodies; not whether they’re skinny or fat. Not their ethnicity. Not the way they talk. Actually, yes, the way they talk, too. Their face and the way they talk. Personally, as a person, I hated Lior. From the moment I stood here in the forest, looking at him, I couldn’t stand him.” He takes his eyes off the interrogator. Here in the forest there’s nothing to hang his gaze on. His New Balance are dug into the ground like an immovable object.
“On December 5th, 1996, eighteen-year-old Lior Oppenheim’s body was found. Oppenheim was about to enlist into an elite military unit. His body was found, slashed, in Ussishkin Forest, Kfar Saba.” The frame is cut, warps, evaporates, Amitai Yonatan is no longer inside it. Dafni isn’t sure if the problem is with her eyes or with the screen. She stretches her legs across the rug, straightens her skinny back, and leans. She turns off the television and goes to her room on the second floor of her house. It isn’t just a house. It’s a spacious villa with high ceilings and painted floor tiles across from an orange orchard. In the evening, when the wind blows, you can smell the fruit. She walks past her parents’ bedroom. Her mother’s in bed, also watching the news.
“I was sure Arabs did it. I couldn’t believe a Jew was capable of doing something like that,” says a common man, a man-on-the-street. Ronit Boshinsky’s eyes widen. They were narrowed before, sleepy. Now she’s awake, her body glued to the mattress. She thinks, This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Israel, movie-style murders. Anxiety joins fear. What about her daughters’ future? Dafni’s? Noa’s? She’s scared to death of someone hurting them, someone as handsome and well-spoken as this guy hurting her little girls. Her body sinks into the mattress with fear.
Dafni peeks into the bedroom but can only see her mother’s foot poking from underneath the blanket, glittery red nail polish.
In her bedroom she opens the shutters and window above her bed and lies down. On one side of her is a metal ashtray, on her stomach is a pack of Marlboro Lights. Her lips smoke and smoke, making her small lungs swell with white smoke, and her heart swells too. The last time she smoked this way, shamelessly, in her bedroom, was when her grandfather died. He died one day without any warning. Her parents asked her not to come to the funeral. They were afraid she’d make a scene, telling everyone. So her mother, her father, and her little sister all went to the funeral, and Dafni went nowhere. They told her to stay home and she obeyed and stayed, lying on her bed and smoking half a pack as if it were nothing. Now it’s about to rain and a cold gust of wind will blow through the window, giving her chills.