Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  It was then that Netanel noticed the luxuriance of her reddish curls, the blue glow in her eyes, her rounded limbs, the glimpse of her thighs revealed by the wide jalabiyya—the long garment resembling a tailored shirt that forgot to stop, usually worn by bedouin men. And all these were in addition to her generous warmth.

  One night, after he had seen her earlier that evening leaving Nissim’s grocery store on Bethlehem Road, and after he had played with his children and eaten with them and exchanged a few words with his wife as well, he had dreamt about her. In his dream, the grocery store was a broad expanse and in its center was a small pool or fountain or well or maybe a large container or even a barrel of the sort that was used during the siege of Jerusalem, and Linda stood there in her jalabiyya holding an overflowing pottery jug or pitcher of water. When he got close to her and touched her face, she smiled and tipped the vessel to his mouth.

  Netanel Bashari, who only rarely remembered his dreams, awoke with a great sense of clarity and realized that he had fallen in love. And when he wondered about how he had known to dream such a romantic biblical scene, he recalled how he himself had once defined Nissim’s grocery as the neighborhood well, around which the inhabitants of the neighborhood gathered and exchanged neighborhood or national news.

  Five years ago he had taken Linda to the old synagogue building to share his vision with her, and when she expressed delight in the classical symmetry of the square windows with the crumbling frames and the height of the ceiling and the original doors—”I’ve never noticed. It’s perfect Bauhaus”—he found himself caressing her smooth, milk-white arm, and then he confessed how attracted he was to her. That visit led to a prolonged relationship, and the guilt feelings it aroused in him were replaced by currents of fear every time he thought about the future and his increasing dependence on Linda. But because she did not pressure him to change his life, and asked nothing of him, he had no idea whether she was jealous of his wife and whether she wanted to be together with him. He often asked himself whether his sister realized the nature of their relationship, but Linda dismissed this question with a laugh, made a little speech in praise of discretion and asked about whether in fact he would like her to talk about him with Zahara.

  As he approached the synagogue gate, he saw that there was a cardboard sign hanging on it with two handwritten lines saying that due to the situation, the farmers’ market would be canceled and would not be held as planned in the space behind the synagogue. Maybe it was better—he continued to gaze at the sign—that Zahara not sing this evening. In any case, he knew many people would rather stay home because of the fear of terror attacks, and even those who came to services would be in a lousy mood. It would be better if she sang in a week’s time, at Simhat Torah, because maybe by then the situation would ease up and the disturbances would stop. The carob tree in the yard looked sick, but instead of the diagnosis made by Netta the gardener, who had volunteered to advise them, he now thought about the words “the plague of leprosy,” and upon hearing his voice in his head he got alarmed and entered the building.

  He stood before the holy ark and looked at the little bags of surprises for the children that had been placed in front of its doors, in anticipation of the last day of the Sukkot holiday week, Simhat Torah. This is how a life in which there is tradition and harmony should look, he reflected, a life that makes it possible to prepare little bags of surprises for the children in the synagogue, like at birthday parties, and place them at the foot of the holy ark with bright red apples and flags with which the children will march around the Torah scrolls. He bent down and picked up the flag on top of the pile, and distractedly he opened the cardboard window in the front of it and touched the sparkles of gold and silver that were revealed within. They were sprinkled over the face of a boy wearing a skullcap and holding a tiny Torah scroll, and for a moment Netanel wondered what this boy had to do with the children who would look at him, children who passionately collected Pokémon cards. Then he turned to the screen that separated the main hall from the women’s section and pulled back the lace curtain on which golden butterflies had been embroidered, that too by volunteers, and covered up the openings one by one. On Simhat Torah, he mused, the building will be full of people and the men will take the Torah scrolls out of the holy ark and dance with them in a circle and carry the children on their shoulders and the women will pull aside the curtains on their separate section and watch them with glowing faces.

  Of all the Jewish holidays, Simhat Torah was his favorite, perhaps because of that memory of his father carrying him on his shoulders and the memory of the painted cardboard flag he waved with the apple stuck on top of its stick. He also remembered the sweet taste of the autumn air during Sukkot, when they’d race home from the synagogue and he and his little brothers would carry pots and copper bowls out to the sukkah, which would be filled with the scent of the etrog, the large yellow citron used in the holiday ritual (every year his father would take him to the market to choose strictly kosher citrons). Their grandmother would hobble after them, leaning on her cane and supervising so that they would not drop anything, neither they nor their mother, who carried out the delicacy most beloved of everyone—orange quinces cooked in sugar.

  When he went back to the top of Naftali Street, he smelled the pungent, disturbing scent of the blossoming carob trees he remembered from his childhood, and at the corner of Railroad Street he gazed again at the brown gate in the stone wall and looked at his watch, wondering whether to knock on Linda’s door (he used his key only when he knew she was alone) and ask her if she knew where Zahara was. But Moshe Avital’s silver Rover was still parked in front of the gate, and because he did not want to look like a suspicious lover, he also refrained from calling her on the phone. And he didn’t want to call his parents, either, to ask about his sister, because a question like that would just make them worry, and anyway, he had left his mobile phone at home. Thus he found himself walking up Shimshon Street to Bethlehem Road, and then he went into the neighborhood butcher’s shop when he remembered that he had promised to buy the meat for the holiday meal Hagar was planning.

  Straightaway Moshe, the senior butcher, announced that the shop was closed and hurried to lock the door behind Netanel. “We also have to get ready for the holiday,” he muttered heavily to the large refrigerator. A thick gold bracelet gleamed on the wrist of the younger brother, who was brandishing a butcher’s knife over a leg of lamb while waiting for the customer opposite him to nod in agreement. Then, with a practiced motion he began to cut the meat, and the client turned around to see who had come in. Seeing Netanel, he hurried to turn his face away. Neither did Netanel look directly at Beinisch. On the contrary—he felt an urge to walk out of the store. Nevertheless he stayed there, and from the corner of his eye he saw how Beinisch was watching the younger butcher’s hand as with a swift moment he removed the layer of fat from the meat, and between cut and cut he criticized the way Israel was perceived internationally and those people at the Foreign Ministry to whom it never occurred to present the state in a positive light, and that after all the restraint toward the Palestinians’ provocations.

  “Take Arafat,” Joseph the butcher said, and pushed aside the pieces of white fat. “Look at how they’re exploiting that picture of the boy that was shot. Believe me, they’re sending their children out to get killed only so they can film it and broadcast the pictures to the whole world. I’m leaving a bit of fat on for you, otherwise the meat will come out dry and Mrs. Clara will kill me.”

  “Do whatever you think is best,” Beinisch said to him. “I rely on you.”

  Netanel, who had turned his face away from the glass counter, minutely inspected the large, gleaming refrigerator. The mere thought of the Beinisches was enough to arouse paralyzing rage in him and now, as he stood so close to the man who had caused him and his family such prolonged anguish, even the air that he breathed in his presence became bitter and dry. He was just a neighbor, but neighbors who embittered a person’s lif
e with everyday trivia—what could be done about them, apart from setting their house on fire?

  Years ago, when he was still serving in the army and was a young officer and proud of his rank, he tried to talk to Mr. Beinisch and reach a truce with him, if not a comprehensive peace, to make life easier for both families. But Mr. Beinisch, whose small, light eyes darted here and there in his large, fat, freckled face (back then his head was still covered with red hair), would not look at Netanel, and as he fiddled with the ends of his light blue tie he rejected the suggestion to even commit himself to a truce: “We aren’t doing anything. Talk to your mother. She’s the one you have to talk to.” Even his uniform and the rank of first lieutenant that Netanel had earned had not diminished by one whit the sense of superiority Netanel saw in every one of Mr. Beinisch’s looks.

  Because of that conversation, Netanel hit his little sister for the only time in his life; the thought of those blows, which Zahara often mentioned in their conversations, and sometimes even in jest, now—a whole hour after their appointment that had not been kept—made him feel strangely ashamed. At the time, he had already been an MA student and Zahara was two or three. He found her one afternoon in the wooden shed behind the house, yelling and playing inside a large wooden crate with Yoram Beinisch, the neighbors’ son. He could not understand how the two tots—only their heads, the dark one and the light, peeked out of the crate, and their eyes glistened with fear when he looked in and saw that they had taken their clothes off—had dared to disobey the prohibition imposed on them by both families: not to speak to each other. Now, as he recalled how he had pulled Yoram Beinisch out of the crate and thrown him into the next yard like a naked kitten and then immediately pulled Zahara out and smacked her, he was attacked by discomfort. His sister had not run into the house to complain to their mother, but stayed standing at the door of the shed crying quietly to herself for a few minutes before she asked: “What have you done to Yoram? Did you kill him?”

  The Beinisches had bought the empty part of the two-family house in 1958, the year Netanel was born, and even as a child he was aware of the scornful looks of the couple, who were still childless then, every time they passed him in the yard. (During the first years, before they had split its area between them, the yard had not been divided by a stone wall.) Mr. Beinisch had no respect for the seniority of the Basharis, who had been living in the house since 1948. The Beinisches had paid full price for the house, had not had any discount at all—so said Mr. Beinisch in that single conversation Netanel had forced on him—whereas the Basharis were “living here only because they were sent there from the transit camp in Rosh Ha’ayin.”

  In 1948, when the Arabs had abandoned their homes in the neighborhood, Netanel’s grandfather and grandmother had been transferred there from the transit camp with his parents, who lived with them, and with other immigrants from Iraq, Morocco and Romania, and housed in the buildings that had been abandoned. For several years it had been possible to buy the houses for pennies, as the Beinisches did—“right at the last moment,” as Netanel’s father often said bitterly—before the prices began to rise and before anyone imagined that this would ever become a prestigious neighborhood. Netanel’s parents had believed that the neighbors would eventually become human beings, if only they had a child, but even after their only son Yoram was born (a year before Zahara) the quarrels between the two households did not end. They reached their height when Mrs. Beinisch accused his mother: “By us, we know how to think about the future. Anyone can make babies like an animal. That’s the way they are. That’s the way they brought them from the caves. They brought them down from the trees. Asiatics. If she did not”—Clara Beinisch never addressed his mother directly, but always addressed some invisible audience—“have all those children, then she would not need more space.” Netanel’s mother never forgave her for those remarks, and kept quoting them to her children and forbade them with vows and threats of excommunication ever to speak with the people who lived in the house next door, to go past it or even to look at it from their yard or through the windows.

  Until his own children were born, Netanel Bashari had not known real worry. But from the moment his first child was born and even when the four of them had grown up, and especially now, when two of his sons were serving in the army, he was in a constant state of disquiet, and only on Friday evenings when all of them gathered for the family meal and he counted up his little tribe with his eyes, only then was he calm for a moment, until he thought about his sister and his brothers and also Linda, or any other people who were important in his life and whose whereabouts he did not know. Now, as he left the butcher shop—Moshe had opened the door for him and locked it quickly before another client could come in—Netanel listened anxiously to the thunder that rumbled in the distance. For a moment he thought it was the thunder of shooting, but immediately afterward the sky clouded over and became heavy and low to the tops of the tall cypresses, and a bleak mood came over him. A line of cars stretched in front of the shops on Bethlehem Street. In another hour the holiday would begin and the rain would get into the sukkahs and interfere with their meal.

  At the entrance to the grocery store, Nissim stood rubbing his hands together and looking gleefully at the sky. The narcissi in the garden had already begun to come out, he informed Netanel: “Like clockwork, they are.” If only the rains weren’t late again, he added, like last year, the cyclamens would also begin to do their work.

  “Jews,” said Netanel to him. “They’re never satisfied. Give them rain, and they’ll say it’s too soon, it comes into our sukkahs. Don’t give them rain, and they’ll start wailing about drought.”

  Nissim smiled, and after a moment he looked at Netanel and said that for a while now he had been meaning to ask him, as a professor at the university, that is, whether he had noticed that there is always a connection between the political situation and the seasons of the year because he, Nissim, even though he is just the proprietor of a grocery store, has noticed that the wars always break out here in the summer or the fall. Even though this was an obvious fact, Netanel said that this was a significant and interesting observation.

  “Tell me,” Nissim suddenly said, “where’s your sister Zahara? I’ve been keeping this wine for her that she ordered for three days now. I brought it for her specially and I’ve been holding it since Tuesday and she hasn’t come for it.”

  “Haven’t you seen her today?” said Netanel in alarm.

  “Neither today nor yesterday. I thought maybe she’d gone away somewhere. Do you want to take it for her? Because if not, I do have someone to give it to, believe me. This is a Yarden Merlot from 1997. It won a prize, and if Yoram Beinisch just hears that I have some of this, he’ll take it on the spot.”

  “Give it to me. I’ll see her today,” Netanel said, and then, bottle in hand, he walked slowly down Bethlehem Road to his house.

  At the door, where a ceramic plaque bore their name as if they were still a happy family, he heard the phone ring, but by the time he had opened the door it had stopped. He put the package of meat in the refrigerator and paused for a moment in the kitchen, which smelled, as the whole house did, of chlorine bleach and other cleaning products that his wife bought on sale, and which filled the shelves in the laundry nook. The dining chairs were still turned upside down on the table to let the floor dry and the deaf-mute cleaning woman (a Peruvian who had settled in Israel without a work permit; Hagar said it was a good deed to employ her) was absorbed in scrubbing the kitchen sink.

  Only afterward did he blame the cleaning woman—he did not like to be in the house while she was working; he was bothered by her suspicious looks, as if she were afraid he would attack her—for his forgetfulness: He had not listened to the voice-mail messages and therefore they could not find him before the holiday began. On the way to his parents’ house to wish them a happy holiday he decided to go via Naftali Street past the synagogue, where no one was waiting for him, and the where sidewalk across the way was also e
mpty. Moshe Avital’s silver Rover was no longer parked by the brown gate, and he decided to drop in on Linda for a minute, and because she was so delighted at the sight of him, that minute stretched into two hours, during which no one knew where he was.

  Chapter 4

  Nessia gazed at the pattern of lines and squares in the narrow sidewalk beneath her feet. Rosie, sniffing excitedly, pulled her into the squares or toward the bushes, but Nessia was wary of the lines, as if they were part of a trap, and pulled the dog back to the edge of the sidewalk. For a girl like Nessia, whose body felt so heavy and whose inner thigh was itching and turning red and burning, it was hard to run after her dog twice a day: once early in the morning before school, and once in the evening before bed. Not that Nessia suffered from these walks; she liked them, and she knew very well that for Rosie they were the best parts of the day. But Rosie—couldn’t she at least show that she was happy? Say thank you that they were walking like that, so fast, and that Nessia was so patient, even when the leather leash cut into her hand? Two folds of flesh humped over the leash, because even her wrist was fat, and it might have been expected that Rosie would notice that for a change today she was having her walk in the afternoon. She could at least wag her tail or bark happily. Or something. But Rosie seemed to have been infected by Nessia: On her, too, you couldn’t see anything anymore. Rosie’s bark, when she bothered to bark, was always the same, and all she bothered to vary were her pulls on the leash, sometimes forward, sometimes to the side, sometimes insisting on this way, sometimes insisting on that.

  Today was a special day, and not only because it was the eve of a holiday, but also because of the troubles with the Arabs and the terrorists, because of whom she wasn’t allowed to go out after dark, even if she explained to her mother that the dog protected her (“That dog?” snorted her mother scornfully. “Could she protect anyone? That dog would sell her mother for a slice of salami.”). There wasn’t a chance that they’d let her go out after dark, even if there wasn’t a single Arab roaming the street (apart from Jalal, whom she met at the grocer’s, but Jalal didn’t count because he was Yigal’s friend).