by Batya Gur
“You were the last person to see Zahara Bashari alive,” he said to her after introducing himself by name and rank.
“Why do you think so?” she asked in a low, quiet voice. “I haven’t seen her for more than a week.”
“Her mother said that she had gone to see you in Tel Aviv the night she disappeared.”
“Maybe that’s what Zahara told her mother, but she didn’t come to my place, and we hadn’t made up to meet or anything.”
“So you only saw her a week ago? When exactly?”
“Last Thursday.”
“Where?”
“Here, in Jerusalem.”
“Did you speak to her after that?”
“Almost every day, on the phone.”
“When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“A few days ago. I can’t remember exactly. Maybe on Sunday.” She tugged at her nose, rummaged in her large cloth bag, took out a tissue and brought it to her nose.
“You were close,” noted Michael.
“Very. Like sisters,” she said, and suddenly buried her face in her hands, and her words grew slower and blurred: “I can’t believe it yet. I can’t believe this has happened. She had so many plans. You have no idea . . .”
She turned her back to him, and her shoulders shook.
“And when you hadn’t heard from her since Sunday . . .”
“I looked for her. I called her at work, and on her mobile, but I couldn’t get hold of her. I didn’t want to call her at home, at her parents’ house, because . . .” She glanced at the inside of the house.
“Had it ever happened before that she told her parents she was going to see you when she never intended to?”
“Usually we coordinated it.”
“What do you mean? That you gave her an alibi for someone? What did she have to hide?”
“You couldn’t call it an alibi. It was just because of her parents, so that they wouldn’t worry, if she went out somewhere that . . . so as not to get into conflicts with them. But a lot of times we really did meet in Tel Aviv, and we’d go out, and then she’d sleep over at my place. And sometimes she’d come straight after work and—”
The car that came down the narrow street squealed to a stop and made the dog bark again from the opposite sidewalk. Balilty rested his hands on the steering wheel and regarded Michael and Orly Shushan through the open car window. Next to him sat an army officer in a dusty green uniform with a black beret stuck through the epaulette of his shirt. The man got quickly out of the car, pushed the gate open and ran up the path to Michael.
“Let him go in,” called Balilty as he locked the car. “He’s the youngest brother. He’s . . . like the father, doesn’t say a word. Not a word.” Balilty looked at the street. “But here comes the other one. How much do you want to bet that here comes the older brother. Look, do you see the—” Even before he could complete the sentence the gate was again flung open so it hit the fence. The man who rushed in, short of breath and very pale, moved along the path at a clumsy run. He pushed the intelligence officer out of his way and burst into the house.
Chapter 6
Netanel Bashari’s hands shook as he leaned over the lighter that Michael was holding. “Forgive me,” he said as he drew on the cigarette Michael had offered him. “I have to sit down.” For a moment he wavered on his feet and almost fell onto the narrow bed in his sister’s room. Michael sat at the desk and drew invisible lines with his finger on the Formica surface. He looked at the golden flakes sprinkled over it, and from them lifted his gaze to Netanel Bashari, who was taller than his parents and very much resembled his mother in his long, narrow face. His sharply etched, narrow lips gave his face a stern expression. Behind the thick lenses of his silver-rimmed glasses his eyes blinked ceaselessly, and when they opened they revealed the frozen gaze of a person in shock.
“If you’re asking me what I’m feeling right now,” he told Michael, and fixed his eyes on the window that looked out into the backyard, “I can’t tell you anything. I think it’s the shock. I just can’t take it in—Zahara is the most vivid creature I’ve ever known. If you’d ask me to describe her, the first thing I’d mention would be how alive she was. You don’t see vivacity like that every day. She was just so alive. I can’t think of her as . . .”
He lowered his head and his shoulders trembled, and when he raised his head the lines of his face were still frozen in astonishment. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe it. At two o’clock, at two o’clock I was supposed . . . We’d made up to meet at the synagogue . . . I hadn’t seen her this week . . . Who could have . . . Are you sure it has nothing to do with the security situation? How should I know? All those Palestinians are roaming around here and hating us all the time. There wasn’t a person in the world who hated her . . . Who could have murdered . . . Zahara . . .”
Suddenly he straightened up and pressed his lips together. He was silent for a moment. “I promise you that if you don’t find the person who has done this”—his voice resonated—“I will hunt him down myself, and I will find him, I swear.”
Gradually it emerged that he had seen Zahara at the university a week earlier, after Yom Kippur. They’d had lunch together at the Mount Scopus campus. She had come to have him help her find historical documents about the Yemenites who had worked at Moshav Kinneret; that’s what her business at the university had been about. A stray smile crossed Netanel’s face as he quoted her argument that “if they’re talking about the right of return for the Palestinians, you could also talk about the Yemenites’ right of return to the settlement from which they were expelled in 1930.”
She had seemed fine to him, as usual, nothing out of the ordinary. Pale? No, not at all. She looked wonderful, though a bit impassioned about the Kinneret affair, and he’d tried to calm her down. “She was thinking of setting up a small community museum for the culture and history of the Jews of Yemen, and apparently had obtained a bit of funding. That was the last thing we talked about—we argued,” he said wonderingly. “Had I known that this was the last time . . . But how could I have known that? How can anyone know?”
The small tape recorder stood between them on a low, straw stool, and Michael watched one of the controls that jumped to the end of its range every time Netanel mentioned his sister, and then when he mentioned Linda. “She’ll be here in a little while, Linda,” he said. “Linda O’Brian. I think she was the last person to have spoken to her.”
Michael gave thanks to the invisible force that had kept Balilty out of the room. He could imagine what his reaction would have been had he heard Netanel mention her.
“Linda O’Brian? The real estate broker?”
“Yes. Why? Do you know her?” Netanel Bashari suddenly straightened up again. He was tenser, and a new shade of anxiety was evident in his face.
“By chance,” Michael said, and he recalled how she had turned her head away as she came up the ladder into the attic and had refrained from looking at Zahara’s body. Would she have recognized the dress or the shoes then, had she looked?
“She’ll be here in a moment,” repeated Netanel. “She lives nearby”—with his brown hand he indicated the corner of the street—“right across from our synagogue.” He breathed strenuously. ‘Everyone lives here. Bethlehem Road runs between the house where I was born and the house where I live.”
Distractedly, and only after Michael had asked him twice, Netanel Bashari explained how his sister had become friends with Linda, when she was about fourteen, and told Michael how he related to his sister as if she were his daughter because of the age gap between them. “I was already not living at home anymore when she was born,” said Netanel, “but because of my sense of family it was important for me to build a relationship with her. From childhood. When she was very small, I became attached to her. She’s very, very intelligent, Zahara, and I was sure that she would go to university after the army. I was in favor of her going into the army to get her out of the house, out of this
stagnation. I think she was very lonely with our elderly parents. There was a clear generation gap. Today my mother is a woman of sixty-nine, you have to realize, from the older generation, more like a grandmother. Because of this, Zahara . . . related to me like a father substitute. She’d always come to me with her difficulties and her problems, and also her good experiences. We thought of sending her to study in the United States, but lately she’s had this obsession . . . Okay, not an obsession, but she wanted to revive Yemenite vocal music. She dug up old Yemenite songs, and she learned a lot from my mother. She got it from her. She was supposed to be singing tonight, at eight . . . I was closer to her than any of us.” His voice cracked. “When I was born, Mother was eighteen, and then Eliyahu was born, and then a number of years later, almost a decade, Bezalel came, and Zahara was altogether a surprise, a miracle, a wonder, a replacement.”
“A replacement for what?” asked Michael.
“A replacement for . . . for . . . Never mind. It’s not relevant now.”
“Everything is relevant,” ruled Michael. “Believe me—everything’s relevant.”
“Ask my mother. I don’t want to go into it.”
“We will ask your mother later, but now we’re asking you.”
“Look,” said Netanel Bashari with an effort, “my parents . . . my mother . . . comes from the family of the last chief rabbi of Yemen, and she . . . She had already lost children . . .”
“‘Children?!’”
“I myself didn’t know . . . I only knew that she was thirteen when she was married off to my father, who was sixteen at the time I think, no more. Zahara . . .” He took a deep breath and sighed. “Zahara went into this, not me and not my brothers. She discovered the details. Not all, but some. Enough for her . . . Enough to upset my parents’ equilibrium that they’d . . . That they seemed . . .”
Michael asked, “What details?”
“Believe me,” pleaded Netanel Bashari. “It has nothing to do with anything. No connection. It’s something that happened more than fifty years ago. My mother’s a woman of sixty-nine, and why should we dig . . . I told Zahara this too—why should we dig? I asked her, I asked her to leave it alone, but Zahara . . . If she set her mind on something—”
“With us it’s different,” said Michael. “Only in retrospect is it possible to know whether something is pertinent or not. And in fact, as a historian, you should realize this. You know that like . . . If you go digging around in documents, you don’t always know what you are going to find. In fact, you can’t even know what might turn up and sometimes you find something completely unexpected which turns out to be the most important thing of all.”
“Yes.” Netanel Bashari sighed, and his eyes rested on Michael for a moment. “That’s true in principle, but I just don’t know whether . . . Zahara found out that mother had lost one baby in Yemen, and that afterward there was something else . . . But I don’t want to . . .” He straightened up in his chair and looked around and shook his head and said in a broken voice: “I can’t. I can’t.”
“It’s impossible to know now what’s pertinent and what’s not, and you do want us to solve the murder of your little sister,” Michael reminded him.
Netanel Bashari hung down his head, and without raising his eyes he said: “There are things in our family history that I don’t . . .” He straightened up and turned his head to the window and continued to speak without looking at Michael. “There are people, like those who went through the Holocaust, or from the second generation, who connect to the legend and get together once a week or I don’t know how often, and talk about their childhood and their parents, and relive all . . . all the . . . And there are others who don’t want to build themselves on the catastrophes of the past. They just don’t want to, they just don’t. Or else they can’t—it depends how you define it, and I—I don’t.”
Michael, observing his sagging head, commented that it was strange that a historian would prefer not to delve into the past, even a painful one.
“Yes,” sighed Netanel. “Zahara said the same thing. She didn’t understand either.” And without raising his head he explained that to be a historian doesn’t mean being interested in every area of the past, and especially those areas to which one has a personal connection, because they confuse the vision. “Then you lose your objectivity,” he said.
It had been many years since Michael had been at that crossroads in his life when he’d succumbed to the lures proffered by Emmanuel Shorer and joined the investigations department and abandoned the academic world and his doctoral thesis. “So would it be correct to say that this is the reason you chose to specialize in Russian history,” he said questioningly, “so that you would be objective enough?”
“More or less,” mumbled Netanel Bashari. “That, and a conflation of circumstances: There was a job opening, and I admired my professor very much. I had already learned Russian for my BA, and I was good at it—I could excel. I didn’t feel that my ethnic origin limited me to . . .” Suddenly he sounded angry and fed up: “I hate extortionists and parasites and complainers and . . . I’m different.” He took a deep breath. “Most of all I hate it when members of the Yemenite community, as they call us, or even Moroccans, or in short Mizrahis, dig around the injustices that were done to them and then want to build themselves up on them. To get ahead in life on the basis of the discrimination there was in the past.”
For a moment Michael wondered whether to comment that there was a difference between advancement on the basis of discrimination and the examination of what had happened, but he let it be. Again he asked Netanel about his relationship with Zahara, and again he heard about the extraordinary closeness between them and about how there had been no tensions between them recently—that is, apart perhaps from a few insignificant differences over the meaning of “the Yemenite question.”
“Insignificant?” asked Michael.
“Look,” said Netanel Bashari, “she thought, and there are people who think that way, that when it comes to the Yemenites there has been a personal and collective insult to a whole community. Zahara argued, and she wasn’t the only one, that the case of Uzi Meshullam was an expression of this alienation with respect to the state. As a historian, I can understand how Uzi Meshullam can be defined . . . the phenomenon of Uzi Meshullam can be defined as a stage in the maturation of the Yemenite community. That is how Zahara saw it. She argued that I, like my parents’ generation that paid the price, that . . . that we, my parents and I, have a conciliatory character, and she . . . She wanted militancy and not conciliation. That’s it,” Netanel summed up, and pressed his lips together as if declaring that he had no intention of saying any more about it. “This really isn’t a subject for now.”
Nevertheless, it was possible to go into this subject more deeply and expand upon it a bit, mused Michael as he asked Netanel directly about his movements on the evening his sister was murdered. “On Tuesday, three and a half days ago,” he specified.
“Tuesday? Tuesday evening? Because in the morning I was at the university, and in the evening, from seven to nine I was at the synagogue for a committee meeting. They were planning the preparations for Simhat Torah.”
“And from nine?”
“”From nine?” Netanel Bashari knitted his eyebrows in an effort to remember, and his breathing became rapid and loud. “I was . . . I was at Linda O’Brian’s. Both of us are on the synagogue board of directors and usually after committee meetings we spend some time at her place—she lives nearby. Right opposite, on the corner of—”
A knock on the door cut him off. The door opened wide and Linda filled the entranceway, her mouth gaping open as if before a scream. “So it was Zahara? There, in the attic, was it Zahara?” she asked Michael, who regarded her agitated face. “If I had only looked, we would have known two days ago?” She sat down on the narrow bed next to Netanel and held his hand, and a wail burst from the depths of her chest. “Netanel, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to look there under the roo
f when they found her . . . It wasn’t intentional, I . . .”
Netanel extracted his hand. “What difference does it make, Linda? She was dead. What difference would it have made anyway? You told me how they found her. You wouldn’t have recognized her even if . . . You said they had smashed her face in . . . It is all so ironic.” He buried his head in his hands.
Only Linda’s sobs were heard in the room, until Netanel Bashari whispered: “It’s better that you not be here now.” He turned his head and without looking at her he muttered: “Hagar will probably be here soon, and the children and . . .”
Linda moved to the edge of the bed and hiccupped and went silent and did not sob any more. To Michael’s question as to when she had last seen Zahara, she replied that she had seen her about a week ago—and that yes, her face looked like it always did. She had always thought that Zahara trusted her; it had to be remembered that she had always been very secretive about personal matters. “She’s so secretive, it was only with me that she—not with anyone else . . .”
Michael asked Linda if Zahara had told her about the pregnancy.
To her right, on the narrow bed, Netanel froze. “It can’t be,” he muttered. “How could she be pregnant? She didn’t have a boyfriend.” Suddenly he laughed to himself. “I didn’t know she . . . Did you know?” he demanded sharply of Linda, and Michael noticed the intimacy in the way he addressed her, and put it together with the way Linda had held his hand earlier (but that was not proof of anything; she had also constantly touched him, Michael, when she took him around to apartments she was showing him) and the remark about the impending arrival of “Hagar and the children.”
“I had no idea,” said Linda, sounding a bit insulted. “I didn’t see anything different. She was . . . She popped over for lunch a week ago. She talked about apartments, about an apartment on Railroad Street, the apartment that belonged to . . . Never mind. I asked her whether . . . She didn’t say anything about being pregnant . . . It couldn’t be that she didn’t know . . . How long?”