The stench was in the air for a whole week until the neighbors called the police.
One of them told the newspaper that at first they suspected that the source of the smell was the carcass of a cat stuck in the elevator shaft, but after the technician checked and found nothing and the stench only got worse, they feared that it might be Nahum, the neighbor from the second floor.
He was an unmarried bachelor who lived in an apartment with his mother until she passed away two years earlier.
The police found the body.
Cardiac Arrest.
42 years old. Samson called to tell me about it.
"It's because he saw her."
My interest in Israel started with the "Lonely Hearts Club of Israel".
Men who arrive at the port to watch the exciting encounters between the landers and their greeters.
Types lonelier than a coyote forgotten on the moon and howling at the earth.
Twenty years ago I was looking for a subject for a documentary film.
A policeman friend told me about an ambush in Netherberg for a drug dealer. For a week, the police watched the reception hall, and among other things, they caught a chubby guy, 30 or so years old, wearing a blue teddy bear coat, who comes to the port every evening.
Every now and then he would get up to examine the flight schedule, then return to lie down on the metal benches.
At about ten o'clock he would leave.
The guy didn't look like a masked security guard, nor like a criminal, but just to be sure, the cops detained him for questioning.
Scared to death by the situation, the guy, his name is Nahum, stammered something about his girlfriend who had to return from Europe.
He didn't know from where or when.
Eventually, an old security guard entered the room and recognized him as one of the mysterious types who arrive at the reception hall.
"Six", in police parlance.
I didn't make a film in the end, but five years later I got into Samson's taxi, for a ride that turned out to be very effective for my writing topics in retrospect.
Samson had a worn, gray face that matched the rear of his Skoda diesel, and he was as discreet as an earthquake.
On the other hand, he was a great source of wonderful and strange stories, most of which turned out to be peppered practicalities with a dubious connection to reality.
But sometimes he got diamonds.
The conversation focused on a detailed monologue about the injustices done to taxi drivers.
To change the subject, I asked him if he had heard about the shadow visitors of the National Security Agency. I told him about the incident in the police drug ambush. Boom. Not only did Samson know the phenomenon, he claimed to know Nahum. Since we had just arrived in Hafzi district, the story was interrupted by Ivo. But I had the business card.
A week later, I went with Shimshon to the old receptionist's hall in the National Bank of Israel. "Now look," he instructed me, pointing to several types standing in the crowd. "Pay attention to them," he said, "They're not really waiting for someone, they come to hang out here every night ".
They were all men.
An hour passed, an hour and a half, the flight schedules and the waiting crowd changed, but the same people remained.
For a while, some of them stood in front of the big TV screen broadcasting the departures from the customs lanes, their faces focused on the arrivals, as if they were anxiously awaiting the arrival of someone they hadn't seen in years.
Others even magnified and waved their hands in an imaginary manner.
It was one of the saddest, most ridiculous, wretched and funny sights I've ever seen.
Human, too human.
I felt that I had found a certain solution to the secret of the magic of the weekly visit, Meir Ariel's "Terminal Luminalet" came to life before my eyes.
Maybe they stop being lonely when they participate as spectators and witnesses to a great human emotion like a meeting in the reception hall.
My heart went out to them.
Samson pointed towards a couple of parents who were hugging a young man, with wild hair and a beard, who was carrying a mochileros backpack.
"Illustrate," he said, "the son doesn't know yet, but the father has a malignant tumor."
Then he shook his head towards a man and three children who were hugging a beautiful woman.
"She returned from a birthday trip to Paris," he stated, "her husband bought her the ticket as a gift. He doesn't know that she met her lover there."
Then we saw Nahum.
in a blue teddy coat.
"Here he is," said Samson and tried to persuade him to talk to us.
Nahum refused.
"He is persistent," Samson explained.
January 1998, while Nahum was going to work on the night shift, he met a girl on the bus from Petah Tikva to Tel Aviv.
It's always a woman, obviously, isn't it?
She came back from a party, her eyes burning.
She had a wild and dazzling beauty.
She sat in front of him in shorts and a thin sweater.
Nahum, wrapped in the blue teddy bear, saw her as a lie.
She hugged herself.
He offered the coat, she offered him water from a bottle.
Perhaps because of his innocence, his awkward delicacy, she liked him.
She didn't know he was a potential "six" and he didn't know she did ecstasy.
Nahum did not go to work that night.
The girl wanted to see the sea.
The rain stopped, and even though he was afraid, he went with her to the beach in Bograshov.
For the first time in his life he kissed.
They crouched in the sand wrapped in the blue teddy bear.
He felt things he had never felt before.
She wasn't ready to say her name, she just said that the next day she was flying on a trip, and if they were meant to meet again, she said, he should wait for her in exactly three months, on April 5, 1998 at six in the reception hall in the National Museum of Israel. At five in the morning she got into a taxi, Waved goodbye and disappeared.
Nahum stayed to wander the beach.
happy and sad
He forgot about work, about the fear of being punished for the plumbing.
A sweet feeling of helplessness mixed with elation filled him.
He counted the days, his body ached from exhaustion.
The night before, I didn't sleep.
In the afternoon he dressed in his best clothes and arrived in Netav at three, three hours before the scheduled time. He stood at four, looking intently at those coming. Five, half past five, and already six, his heart was talking with excitement. He did not see her. Not even at six thirty. And already seven, then eight thirty No trace. He caught the last bus home at ten. The next day Nahum showed up again at three. Waiting. Maybe she got the day wrong. Even on April 6th she didn't land, nor on the 7th nor the 8th. He kept coming. Maybe he got the month wrong. Always in a coat blue teddy bear
The daily visit to the airport.
In August 2011, while on vacation in the north, a used phone.
"He saw her and died," Samson summed up Nahum's death over the phone.
"Such a young man, all of 42, wasted away alone in an apartment. Only because of the smell he found out. Two months ago he stopped coming after seeing her."
"Who did he see?"
I asked.
"You're the girl from the bus."
"Enough, you're working on me", I smirked, "what do you say... she finally came back from abroad".
"No," Samson ruled, "she came to pick up her husband and daughter from a Bat Mitzvah trip or something. She stood a meter away from him, but he didn't approach. After two months, the heart went limp."
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