by Batya Gur
Nessia received Rosie from Mrs. Rosenstein, when their dog had puppies. Nessia had asked politely if the dog’s name was Miss Puppydog Rosenstein, and Mrs. Rosenstein said that was rather a long name for a small puppy so Nessia asked whether it would be all right if she called the puppy Rosie for short, and Mrs. Rosenstein had laughed and said: “There, you’ve already given her a beautiful name. That’s how you begin a relationship.” Mrs. Rosenstein was always kind to her, and when Nessia saw her looking at her with her head cocked to one side you could see that she didn’t think Nessia was fat or that she smelled bad or that there wasn’t a chance in the world that she would change.
“What am I going to do with a dog? Another mouth to feed!” her mother complained all the way home, but Nessia was happy. And Rosie didn’t look like she was homesick, as if she too had heard Mrs. Rosenstein explaining to her mother in the kitchen that it was a good thing for two women who live alone to have a dog at home, “and especially for a girl who is a little lonely and for when you’re not at home.”
“Ashkenazim,” huffed her mother on the way home. “They keep dogs. We don’t keep animals. It’s not our custom.” And to Mrs. Rosenstein she said: “There’s no need, really, and also I’m afraid of dogs and they dirty the house and they bring diseases.”
The dog was so small that even her mother wasn’t afraid of it, but when she heard that it wasn’t housebroken yet and would pee and make in the house, she said: “Only if you clean up.” And really only Nessia cleaned up after the dog, smacking her on the nose with a towel when it was necessary, and giving her a reward from her meatballs when she was good, and seeing that she didn’t chew shoes and socks, as Mrs. Rosenstein had warned her she would. And she put Rosie to bed next to her own bed, and on the first nights she would get up to check whether she was breathing or dead. Slowly the dog grew and you could already put a collar on her and fill her dish with Dogli, and when she reached her final size she looked just like Mrs. Rosenstein’s dog, although Rosie wasn’t a thoroughbred poodle. If Nessia touched her and didn’t hurry to wash her hands, and especially if she hugged her and kissed her, her mother would immediately yell: “Just don’t come near me with all her germs. Disgusting!” But Nessia did not stop kissing and hugging her, because she simply loved Rosie. And every night before she went to sleep she would talk to Rosie, and once she even showed her the treasure box.
Now Nessia’s right foot was marching along the curb and her left foot was dragging behind in the street as if she had developed a severe limp. It wasn’t at all easy to stay at the edge of the sidewalk, because Rosie was pulling with all her might toward the bushes. So the two of them walked and passed the synagogue on Shimshon Street just in time to see Mr. Avital drive away in his new car, about which Yasmin had related proudly that it was the first Rover anyone had bought in Jerusalem (but she never said anything about her big sister in the institution for retarded people). When he disappeared around the corner and the two of them got close to Linda’s house, she saw Zahara’s oldest brother standing in front of the brown gate looking from side to side, and Rosie pulled her toward him, as if he were holding a juicy bone or a slice of salami for her. With all her might Nessia held on to the leash and waited in the yard of the synagogue, distracting the dog with clucks and caresses so that she would not reveal that they had seen him going into Linda’s house, and on the eve of the holiday.
Then Rosie pulled her up Shimshon Street to Bethlehem Road, and they walked peacefully together along the street past the grocery store that hadn’t yet closed and past the “Closed” sign that was hanging on the glass door of the butcher’s, who never agreed to give credit. With all her might she had to pull Rosie away from there, until the smells faded, and then she started walking in front of her again in the direction of the haunted house at the corner of Bethlehem Street and Railroad Street. Now it was Rosie who was pulling, barking at the back of the house, entirely ignoring the pear tree planted in front that was shedding orange-red leaves that were all piled up against the wall around the house. It had a large gate in its center, black and always shut, and on the street in front of it stood a police car.
A policeman was leaning on it, and irritated voices were heard squawking from the communications equipment inside. What were the police doing there? If they had been standing next to her apartment block, she would have understood. But here? When she was little, her brother Moshiko told her to go past policemen as if they didn’t exist, not to look at them, not to walk any faster or slower, to act absolutely normal. When he was still living at home, before he got in trouble—it wasn’t his fault, but because of those drug addicts he’d made friends with—he had explained to her that the cops always picked on people, that they liked to arrest people for no reason, for nothing. “It’s enough that they don’t like the way someone looks,” he explained, “or his friends. They don’t need any more than that.” And you had to choose your friends carefully—that’s what he told Nessia—because friends can bring you down without a second thought: All they care about is their own ass.
But Nessia in any case had no friends: There was no one to invite her to sleep over ever, and she also never invited anyone to her house. Her mother slept in the half-room next to the living room, and Nessia’s room was crowded with the desk and the bed and the wall closet. She had seen other children’s homes only at class parties on Friday nights, and only when they invited everyone, but she was never one of those who stayed till the end. The girls turned up their noses when they saw her and the boys didn’t see her at all. In gym class she never had a partner for exercises, until the teacher intervened and made someone be with her. And in the exercises themselves she always slowed them down or ruined them or simply gave off a bad smell—she herself didn’t sense that she smelled bad, but she saw that people kept away from her or breathed through their mouths or covered their noses with their hands. (Sometimes pee-pee escaped from her at night, and if her mother had already gone to work she was too lazy to take a shower, both because there was no hot water and because she liked the stickiness and found the familiar smell pleasant.)
And in any case Nessia knew—yes, this she simply knew—that she only looked this way from the outside. But inside, deep down, in her secret life, she was beautiful and tall and thin, yes—totally thin, and one day her body was going to look just like perfect Zahara’s. Because she, Zahara, was the child of her parents’ old age just like Nessia, and she also had three big brothers, and Nessia’s mother worked at Mrs. Rosenstein’s house, and Zahara worked at Mr. Rosenstein’s office, and it was obvious that these were signs of a common fate, and fate is fate, as her mother says, and no one can change what is written in the stars.
Only people who were looking from the outside, ordinary people who were always in a hurry to get somewhere, saw her eyes as small and nothing special; and the eyebrows above them as thick and joined; and her nose a red potato (“Of all things, this is what you had to inherit from your father? His nose?”). But under all this, like in the fairy tales, someone else was hiding, whose eyes were different and whose hair was different and whose body was different. This hidden person’s eyes were totally green or blue as the sky, and her hair was totally smooth and her body was small and sweet, with a thin waist you could encircle with a red belt like Zahara’s. No, not like Zahara’s. Because Zahara’s belt, which she tightens as much as possible, closes with a buckle and a hole and another hole until Zahara almost dies, like in Snow White. And then, maybe, if Zahara acted nice and asked forgiveness, Nessia would save her the way the dwarves saved Snow White. But first she would teach her a lesson.
Another police car blinked in front of her with a blue light, and Nessia, who knew that it was better to keep away from the police, began to pull the dog in the other direction. She pulled at the leash, with all her might, because Rosie was now insisting on chasing a black cat that crossed their path. When the policeman looked at her, she pretended she didn’t see him and ran after the dog to the wall around the nex
t house on Railroad Street.
Beyond the clipped hedge suddenly she saw two policemen standing up. “What do you say? Any chance here?” asked one of them, and knelt down again among the bushes. “You haven’t given up yet, have you?” asked the other. “They would never have left it here, so close. Tell me, has your sister had her baby yet?”
Nessia meant to keep going, but at the corner of Railroad Street and Yair Street she decided to go down in the direction of the train tracks. Near the barrier the dog pulled hard again, sniffing and eager, until Nessia stopped her with a tug on the leash by one of the houses so she could tie her shoelace that had come undone. With all her weight she stood on the taut leather leash while she tied a shoelace, and opposite her, on the other side of the small gate, not far from its hinges, she saw the handbag.
It was like a handbag from a dream. She had never seen one like it, not with anyone and not in any store in the mall or anywhere else. She had once found a dressy handbag, made of beads, waiting just for her at the fair that was held once a month, but this one, so soft and gray and fine, looked like a handbag that wasn’t from here. From abroad. This was a quality handbag, or as the grown-ups said, “Elegant.” Between the bars of the gate she touched it with her fingers and knew that it was real leather, and she thought about Yoram Beinisch’s fiancée with her five suitcases and her yellow handbag and her white hair that her mother called platinum. (“Too much peroxide,” she said. “She wants to hide the roots,” Mrs. Jesselson said, and blew her nose noisily. “To each his own. By us, we like blonde.”) The handbag was neither too large nor too small: You could, for example, even fit a dog’s leash or a lady’s powder compact into it, you could hang it on your shoulder with the thin gold chain that dangled from it and you could hold it under your arm like maybe Zahara would have done.
She stretched her arm between the bars of the gate and got hold of the chain and she knew that this handbag was the beginning of the mira cle. She pulled it carefully under the gate and glanced at the windows of the house and then right and then left and back at the street. A car was driving down the street, two couples were walking opposite and a thin woman stopped and set down the plastic shopping bags she was carrying and wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. A tall boy was bouncing a basketball on the sidewalk and didn’t look up. The policemen—they worried her more than anyone else—weren’t looking in her direction, neither the short one nor his friend, as she put the golden chain inside the handbag, folded it and stuck it under the waistband of her sweatpants.
Later, when she was alone, she would check out every compartment and pocket and find all the treasures inside it. Meanwhile, she felt the nice leather on her body, the soft touch of real leather, calfskin or kidskin or deerskin or maybe even suede, which was the skin of the rarest and most expensive kind of animal. She had once seen a similar handbag at Mrs. Rosenstein’s, but bigger, and blue, and when she’d felt it her mother got alarmed and scolded: “Don’t touch that. You have dirty hands and you’ll leave marks. That—you couldn’t buy a new one like it with a month’s salary.” And Nessia had shrunk back, not because of the dirt but because she realized that her mother would never have a handbag like that. And now she had one, and no one saw. She pulled the edges of her shirt down over the lump it made on her front to hide it and then she was dragged after Rosie, whose nose had scented a new smell. Nessia too was impatient: Now she had to wait until she was alone in her bed, until she heard her mother’s breathing, and only then would she get up and discover what was inside.
Mother was still standing in front of the burner and stirring the soup, and its smell filled the space of the kitchen: vegetable soup and meat with bones that Peter loved. He never refused a second helping of it. Even Mother liked Peter. On every visit to Israel he would stay at Yigal’s, and join him when he came to visit, and Mother would say afterward: “He’s a good influence on Yigal. It’s enough for Peter to come and he calms down.” And he also calmed Mother, because he knew how to speak to her about everything: about how to treat her varicose veins, about how the Moroccans cooked couscous and how the Kurds fried kubbeh and even where it was cheaper, at the Mahaneh Yehuda market or the Bukharans’ market or the Hypermarket. And when they visited together, those angry looks that Yigal would give Nessia on other occasions disappeared.
Every holiday eve, Mrs. Rosenstein let her mother leave early, so that she would have enough time to cook, and Nessia would have to help her clean the kitchen again—the sink and the countertop and the floor—but before they did that her mother wouldn’t pay any attention to her. Like now, for example, as she stood at the entrance to the kitchen—”Go make some more decorations for the sukkah if you don’t have anything to do,” said her mother without turning around to look at her. But for Nessia, that little sukkah standing in the corner of the living room wasn’t for the likes of her. It was made out of the carton from a microwave oven and it was baby stuff. Dragging her feet, she went to her room, as if she were planning to get a paper chain from there or some paper and markers, and she was careful not to reveal even her profile to her mother, in case she saw her plans (and first she argued a little, like before shower time: She always argued then, even if in the end she would wet only her face and the back of her knees, and especially the floor rag).
Rosie lay at the foot of the bed on her little carpet. She opened one eye and glanced at Nessia and closed it again and went back to sleep and growled in her dream.
First of all, even before she opened a single zipper, she found a little silver velvet wallet inside the handbag, with a bunch of shekel notes. Nessia had never seen so much money all at once. She counted it twice, to make sure: One thousand five hundred and thirty seven shekels plus change, all folded up very small in the velvet wallet. Then there was all the makeup—in a tiny golden cylinder gleamed dark red lipstick, and next to it there was a little compact of green eye shadow and gold mascara for the eyelashes and also a tiny bottle of perfume, and in a clear plastic case with a zipper there were cards and papers, and in the pocket in front there were also a bunch of keys and a comb and a pale blue paper tissue (even that was delicate and soft, so that it was a shame to use it).
How could anyone lose a handbag like that? Once, she had seen on television how they gave a reward to someone who had given back something that was lost, and for a moment she imagined how she would bring the handbag back to the well-dressed woman who had lost it—someone like Mrs. Rosenstein or Yoram Beinisch’s American fiancée—and how the lady would hug her and give her a reward for being so honest. And the lady would be so impressed with her that maybe she would even ask Mother if she could borrow her daughter for a while, and raise her in her home. Why not? And she would take trips abroad with her. A woman with a handbag like this definitely traveled a lot, and she definitely had a big house like in Beverly Hills.
There were plastic cards inside the wallet, and even before she saw that “Visa” and “MasterCard” were written on them she knew that they were credit cards. (Her mother didn’t have any—she didn’t believe in them—but her brother had some.) And there was also an identity card, in a little blue plastic folder with such a blurred colored photograph that you couldn’t really see the features. Only after she read the name did her hands begin to tremble. From the wrists down to the fingertips her hands shook; her eyes opened wide and she actually felt them gape open. She had never held any object that was so precious, and she had never found—really, really found—just ordinary things. And how could she not return it now? After she had read the name, explicitly, and she already knew whose it was? Yes, of all the people who could have lost it, even if she had never seen it swinging against her thigh up the street. She remembered Zahara’s black handbag well, and also the jeans bag, and the brown bag with the buckles, but not this one. And on the other hand, it wasn’t by chance that she had found this particular handbag and everything in it—she had really found it, and hadn’t waited for some saleslady to turn away—and this was fate. And absolut
ely positively, if no one else had found it before her. Wasn’t that another sign? It was. Zahara’s identity card and the slips of paper—she could make a bonfire of them all. Of course it would burn. Yes, and the ashes, if she buried them—wouldn’t they be more effective than sticking pins in a doll? Of course they would. With a decisive hand she stuck the handbag and all its contents under her mattress. After the holidays, she would decide what to do. Meanwhile, it would all stay with her.
Chapter 5
I told him so,” burst out Naeema Bashari, choking between sobs, and she looked at her husband, who sat shriveled in the center of the low sofa that had been reupholstered for the last holidays. He clutched his head in his hands, as though if he let go it would fall off and break the glass surface of the coffee table, where his eyes were fixed on the shadow of his reflection. “I told him so: We have to watch over the girl, we have to . . . That she’s . . . That she’s too . . . too pretty . . . That she trusts everyone . . . That she cares about everyone . . .”
“You waited for two days until you contacted us,” said Michael, and now, after having spent hours with them, he felt for the first time that it was possible to get on with the investigation. He said nothing explicit about it, but just nodded his head at Sergeant Yair, who was sitting on the corner of the sofa in the Basharis’ living room, very close to Ezra Bashari, his fingers tight on the tiny recorder he had hidden under his thin windbreaker, as if that would improve the reception. Rays of sunlight drew a circle of pale autumnal afternoon light around the large brass bowl under the window, and when they touched the leaves of the philodendron inside it, a reddish hue mixed into the bright green. Because of the sun’s rays, Tzilla Bachar blinked in the rattan armchair in the corner of the room, before she began to write down every word.
“We didn’t know, we had no idea. Even when they told us to come and identify her,” wailed Naeema Bashari. She stuck her fingers into her kinky gray hair, and for a moment Michael was alarmed that she was about to pull out the locks of hair she was grasping, and beat her breast as she had at the morgue, but she just took off her glasses. With her shortsighted yellowish-brown gaze she looked straight into Michael’s eyes and hugged her body in her thin arms. “We thought—I don’t know, she hadn’t come back yet from Tel Aviv. We thought that she was still at her girlfriend’s house. She’d said she might only come back just before the holiday began. We couldn’t believe it. You don’t think about things like that with a girl who never got in trouble, who only . . . If you had known her . . .”