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| All I Ask |

All I Ask: Chapter 49

“Yonatan is perceptive. He sensed how much I want him to do things my way… and how much my feelings for him depend on that”

"Sandy, so good to see you again! And how are you, Mrs. Eliav? Please, come right in.” Matthew Fried, senior partner at Goldblum & Fried Accounting Services, was all smiles. He himself had stood waiting for the Eliavs at the entrance to the office’s outer corridor. Diana, his secretary, had bought nicer refreshments than usual and had set them up beautifully, complete with a small arrangement of purple and white tulips in a crystal vase. The members of the professional team were seated at their stations, ready to answer any question likely to come up in the course of the meeting. Even the lawyer was already sitting at the meeting table, waiting for Sandy and Marta.

“All right, let’s move on to my new investment,” said Sandy, after an hour of looking over the general state of his business affairs and tax liability, with illustrative charts. “As I wrote to Matthew, I’m preparing to buy a ground-floor commercial property here in Jerusalem, to be rented out to businesses.”

“Are you thinking of registering it in the name of one of your existing companies,” the accountant asked, “or will you open a new company?”

“That’s what I want to ask you,” said Sandy. “Which is better?”

The lawyer spoke up. “Each approach has its advantages. First of all, do you have co--investors, or will you be the sole owner of this property?”

“No co-investors, but I’ll be buying the commercial space along with some apartments on the floor above the shops. One apartment for us, and the others to rent out. It’s a very nice project, we both fell in love with it.”

“And what about your son, who’s getting married?” asked Matthew. He was a family friend as well as a business associate. “Are you buying an apartment for him?”

“Well, we wanted to, naturally,” said Marta. “We said to him, ‘Yonatan, we’re going out to see some building sites. Come with us, and we’ll invite your kallah, too, and we’ll pick out a beautiful apartment for you.’ We were thinking of Mishkenot Ha’uUmah for them, or one of the new projects on Rechov HanNeviim.”

“And then he put on this sad face,” Sandy continued. “I thought maybe those places weren’t frum enough for him and his kallah, so I said, ‘If you want a more chareidi neighborhood, we could look at the new projects in Romema. They have high-end apartments there, too.’”

“So you’re buying in Romema?”

“No,” said Marta, picking up the thread. “Yonatan seemed uncomfortable with that idea, too, and he told us, a bit awkwardly, that they were dreaming of a place in Nachlaot. That’s where he’s got his bachelor quarters now. Do you know that neighborhood? Old, small buildings, narrow alleys, gates painted blue, flowers out front planted in old shoes — that sort of thing. So I told him, ‘If you like that area, no problem. There’s a beautiful apartment tower right nearby.’ And then he looked really uncomfortable and said, ‘But Mum, we don’t want to live in a high-rise building. We want to live in a house, a little house in Nachlaot or Shaarei Chesed, in a narrow street without traffic, with bay windows, and flowers out front, and wrought-iron window bars. If necessary, I’ll renovate it.’”

 

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