by Batya Gur
“I’ve been roaming around here tonight, going over things, after I raked over that Avital,” continued Balilty in a rush, as if he hadn’t heard the question, “and about half an hour ago I came into the building and who do I see next to the policeman on duty? Your boy.”
“Who?” asked Michael in alarm. “Yuval? At the building?”
“No, of course not Yuval. I’m talking about your farmer, the brilliant Sergeant Yair. He’s standing next to the duty officer and they’re talking about roses. At four-thirty in the morning they’re talking to me about roses and diseases of geraniums. Did you know that there is a terrible blight now of—what do you call it, boy?” Balilty went silent for a moment. Through the receiver came a muted voice in the background, and then the intelligence officer said: “That’s it. Pelargonium line pattern virus. Did you know that? I didn’t know either. In short, they’re talking about geranium viruses, and I’m standing there listening because Matty has a collection of flowerpots with geraniums and I thought maybe I’ll learn something here and . . . Never mind. In short, and who comes in? The girl’s mother with her big brother and his boyfriend, his boyfriend boyfriend, his significant other, a couple yet, and the boyfriend, his name is Peter O’Brian, an Australian, introduces himself and—”
“Danny,” warned Michael, “when are going to get to the point?”
“I’m telling you, no?” protested Balilty. “You’re always yelling that the details are important, and now all of a sudden you’re . . . . Never mind. Did you have fun?”
Michael cleared his throat.
“All right, nu. I realize you’re not alone. In any case this Peter is telling us that the girl has disappeared.”
“What girl?”
“The girl. Nu, Eli Bachar told me that you spoke to her on the sidewalk near the car, that you gave her your phone number. That little girl yesterday . . . Was it yesterday?”
“Yes, I remember. Where is she?”
“That’s what I’m telling you—she’s disappeared, and only because we happened to be standing by the duty officer and they came to report it immediately, I realized that it could be connected, and I wasn’t the only one who realized, our Buddha also realized and even said so to the duty officer. A bit phlegmatic, but he said so even though Drori is telling me now that there’s no connection.”
“Is Drori there?” Michael injected a note of amazement into his voice and wondered what the district commander was doing at night at the Russian Compound. “Now? At six A.M. on a holiday?”
“It’s because of the situation. I also didn’t believe it at first. I see him coming out of a room, at four A.M. on a holiday! Imagine! I say to him—Drori, what’s with you? You’ve gone and become a district commander and you’re working day and night, and he says to me: ‘Haven’t you heard? There have been disturbances in Beit Safafa, Jews throwing bottles at Arabs.’ And he also asked me where you were, like that in the same breath: ‘Where’s Chief Superintendent Ohayon at a time like this? I want the head of the investigations division to be here day and night when there are disturbances.’ Don’t worry,” added Balilty silkily. “We covered for you. Tell me, don’t you listen to the news? You needn’t bother—you won’t hear it on the radio. They’re not talking about it on the radio. In any case Drori said—”
“And the girl?” asked Michael.
“Drori says that it could be security-linked. He himself—imagine—stands there and asks this mother who doesn’t stop crying whether the girl had any friends from Beit Safafa and right away she yells at him—her daughter have Arab friends? Do you think she messes with Arabs?” Balilty lowered his voice and commented dramatically, “In fact, there is a connection here to Arabs, but it’s not for the telephone,” and in his regular voice he added: “So Drori says to her, Baka is close to Beit Safafa.”
“When did she disappear?” asked Michael.
“Come on in, talk to Eli. He’ll give you the details.”
“Where is he?” he heard Eli Bachar asking as Balilty handed him the phone. “Take it. Talk to him,” replied Balilty, and other voices were heard in the background. “Where are you?” asked Eli, and as Michael did not reply he said to him: “Okay, never mind. Do you remember Peter O’Brian, that Australian I introduced you to yesterday, across from the Basharis’ house? And there was a girl with him? She’s his boyfriend’s little sister. Nessia, she’s called.”
“What boyfriend?”
“Nu, I told you at the time. You said you remembered. The electrician, Yigal Hayoun, and she’s the little girl on the street you asked about Zahara . . .”
“Yes. Nu?”
“So a quarter of an hour ago they showed up here, without even phoning. Yair and Balilty called me. We didn’t want to disturb you if it wasn’t really necessary. Her mother came with this Peter O’Brian and his pal Yigal, and they told us the girl was gone. She hadn’t even slept in her bed. Vanished. Yair was sure that there’s a connection.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Don’t let Balilty tell you it was his idea. It was Yair’s idea. Right then he said so. What? Do you think the girl just went out to walk the dog and didn’t come back? Since last night? I saw that you left the car here. Do you want me to—”
“No, no. I’ll be right there,” Michael muttered, and looked questioningly at Ada, who was already standing by the bed and tying the sash of her blue bathrobe with a swift motion. He hung up the phone.
“What girl?” asked Ada. “Has something happened to a girl? Is it connected to . . .”
“A girl of ten and a half from the building across the street from the house. She’s disappeared,” Michael said, and headed for the bathroom. Ada followed him, her bare feet pattering on the floor tiles.
“Across from which house? My house? That I bought?” she asked with evident anxiety.
“No, across the street from the Basharis’ house. Since last night. She went out for a walk with her dog and didn’t come back,” said Michael as he washed his face. He wouldn’t have time to shave, he thought as he rubbed his chin. To his right he saw her face in the mirror as well.
“Another one.” She spread her fingers. “First that girl, Zahara, and now a child . . .”
“She’s disappeared. Children sometimes . . . Maybe she quarreled with her mother . . . Maybe she went to friends. I don’t know any details and it’s not at all certain that there’s any connection between the two cases,” but even he heard the hollow echo in what he had just said.
“Do you think that you’ll find her in an attic too?”
“I don’t think so, and I told you—maybe it isn’t even connected.”
Ada sat down on the edge of the bathtub. What he said hadn’t reassured her. Through the opening in her bathrobe she saw how she was breathing hard. “I have to give back that house,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bought it.”
Michael set down the towel and kneeled in front of her. “What are you talking about?! What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes were half shut. “People—they shouldn’t jump into things that are beyond what they deserve, beyond what’s written in their fate.”
He had already glimpsed this side of her, when she had spoken about the hand of fate, but nevertheless he was taken aback by the palpable presence of superstitions in a person like her. “Written where?” he asked quickly.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” mourned Ada as if she had not heard his question. “That house . . . I don’t deserve it, it’s not my fate. For years I’ve been looking at that house and knowing that it’s not for people like me. That it’s too beautiful, has too much presence, too much character, it’s too expensive. It’s not for me. It’s too much . . . And now, it’s a fact.”
“What’s a fact?” He sat down beside her on the edge of the bathtub and wrapped his arm around her, and when his hand touched her thin shoulder and her delicate collarbone he tried to hush the voice inside him that urged him to hurry up.
“It’s a fact that
the moment it’s mine, even before I’ve moved in,” she said as a bit of a wail crept into her voice, “first of all there’s the corpse and then there’s a child who . . . And why did I have to decide to build on the roof? To break through the floor and pour a new floor and put in walls and insulation—it’s beyond the budget that I . . . You know I can’t afford things like that and to mortgage my whole life like that at my age . . . And in the attic . . . I never should have touched the attic. It’s all because of greed. The house was greed, and the attic even more so.”
“You could see it the other way around,” said Michael.
“How? What other way around?”
He saw the face of four-year-old Yuval, standing devastated in front of the cage of hamsters they had been charged with feeding on a Saturday when the kindergarten was closed. “They’re dead, Daddy. They’re dead. I was sleeping and they . . . they were dying. I killed them. Ora the kindergarten teacher will be angry at me. Is my teacher gonna kill me?” Ada’s eyes hung on him like Yuval’s eyes, anxious and waiting for salvation that they didn’t believe in anymore.
“You know very well,” said Michael, “that Zahara Bashari wasn’t murdered because you bought a house. You are perfectly aware that if she hadn’t been murdered in that house, it would have happened somewhere else. Whoever killed her didn’t know that it was you who had bought the house.”
“But he used that opening we made in the roof,” wailed Ada. “If only I hadn’t started with the roof . . .”
“Do you really think that because you made an opening in the roof . . . And anyway, there already was an opening to it, from outside the apartment, but never mind. Do you think that because of that they killed Zahara Bashari?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said in a strangled voice, holding back her tears.
“Do you think,” he said musingly, “that you’ve revived the myth about something evil hiding in the attic, like in a Gothic novel? Is that what you think?”
“All I know is that I shouldn’t have gone so . . . so far with . . .”
“With what? With the desire to have a house you would love? What is it, this house? You’d think you’ve bought a palace. It’s pretty, but there’s no need to exaggerate. It’s not even a house. It’s an apartment within a house . . . And anyway, if we’re talking seriously—can we talk seriously?”
She nodded and pulled her nose.
“Look, I’m not saying that the myth of the attic is nonsense. People think . . . not think . . . believe that under the ground, in the cellar, in shelters, behind the walls, in invisible places—that there’s chaos hiding, and if they open the cellar or the shelter or, worst of all, the attic, they will discover a dead body. Have you understood so far?”
“But this doesn’t comfort me. It’s a fact that I opened the attic and a body was discovered, no?”
“Okay,” said Michael. “It’s already been discovered. Get it? There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. The body has been found, and there isn’t another one there. And you don’t have a cellar. There isn’t any other ghost that’s hiding there. Yes or no?”
She kept silent and smiled limply. “It’s very nice that you’re reassuring me like this but it’s not really what—”
“So let’s make it even simpler. Even simplistic,” he said tolerantly. “From a different angle: If you hadn’t started with the roof, he would have murdered her downstairs, or in some other house. And anyway, if you hadn’t bought the house and touched the attic, and if you hadn’t come to check before the renovations, we wouldn’t have found Zahara Bashari. And if we hadn’t found her there, you and I wouldn’t have met after all those years and—”
“You see?!” she cried. “Everything here is chance! There’s nothing here that’s intentional. This whole encounter has been chance.”
“On the contrary,” said Michael, and instead of reminding her of what she herself had said about the hand of fate that had brought them together, he said: “It’s all the exact opposite of chance. You deserve this house, because you wanted it so badly. It will also suit you, and you are going to enjoy it very much. A person has to live in a place that he loves, so he’ll have a home, in the deep sense of the word. You bought the house because you decided to do something that you wanted, and a person who dares to do what he really wants—it also opens up other things to him, all kinds of things, that you wanted before and had already given up.”
“I forgot.” She hung her head. “You don’t believe in chance. Even when you were seventeen, you didn’t believe in it. You needed to . . .” She looked at him and stopped talking.
“What did I need?” Just because she had calmed down and had said those things with relative serenity, he was curious to know what she had intended.
“To go on to a Ph.D. in history,” said Ada. “To be a historian. For someone who doesn’t believe in chance that’s exactly . . . What are you working in the police force for? How can you live like that? Every time with all that blood and the horrible things. Well, I suppose you get used to it.”
“You don’t get used to it,” said Michael. “Who said you get used to it? On the contrary, you become more and more vulnerable to it. You yourself told me how life becomes more and more complicated. Didn’t you tell me that people don’t become immune to the evil they see all around?”
“Did I say that? When?”
“The night before last, in the café across from the post office. Before we left.”
“How can you remember?”
“I was there. When I’m really somewhere, I don’t forget a thing. You, you’d remember too if you weren’t so upset because of . . . because of the corpse and because of Balilty and the contractor and all that. But the fact that I do remember makes everything more disturbing. In work like this you witness evil and wickedness every day, and all the perversions of the human race. Especially if you have a memory, you find yourself wondering most of the time which is more common—evil or wickedness.”
“So why don’t you get out of it?” she asked him again, and this question he was not prepared to answer now.
“And how would I have met you?” Now he too smiled. “If I’d left the force a week ago, we wouldn’t have met this way.”
“That means that the house I bought, that I’d dreamed about all my life and also”—her arm encircled them both in the air—“this story, about us . . . both of them are like . . . stepping on corpses. Both of them. Both of them, and forgive the histrionics, are . . . covered in blood.”
“Tell me,” he said, annoyed, “did you kill someone to get to that house? Did I kill someone to get to you?”
“You . . . Don’t pretend that you don’t understand! It’s no trick to be rational about superstitions.”
“You’re the one who said that.” He rose from the edge of the bathtub, looked at his watch and moved toward the door.
“What did I say?” she asked in a small voice. She too stood up.
“Superstitions. You said it.” And he reminded her that he was in a hurry.
“I’ll take you,” she hastened to say, “and that way we’ll have a few more minutes together.” She moved closer to him. “In another minute, you’ll say something like ‘Women!’ Don’t bother. Do you think that I don’t know that I’m being superstitious?”
He gently removed her hands from his shoulders, and in the silence he could hear the water trickling from the faucet of the sink, until he shut it. “Are you going to put something on or are you going to take me there in your bathrobe? I just want you to know that both the house and the two of us are a reward . . . Yes, a reward for us being, when you get right down to it, within our limitations, not such bad people.”
The drive, which on a normal morning would have taken half an hour or more, took only ten minutes. They drove in silence. Because it was a holiday and early in the morning, the streets were empty and silent, but the holiday atmosphere had been spoiled and he automatically turned on the radio, to hear about the p
revious night’s shootings—“shooting incidents,” they said—and where people had been killed. Ever since the “pogrom” (which, to the distress of Balilty, who called him a traitor, is what Michael insisted on calling that Yom Kippur eve in Nazareth when Israeli Arabs were shot as a Jewish mob surged on them), he had listened with increasing anxiety to the news and had not let himself be distracted even when he had to get ready for work.
He felt almost weightless, as if during the night he had shed his skin. This wasn’t only because of the lovemaking, during which he’d allowed himself to revel in Ada, whose boyish body he had not actually known, though he felt as if he had known it all those years, every touch affording him both the pleasure of surprise and the pleasure of confirming what he seemed to have already known. He turned off the radio and regarded her profile, her pursed lips and the tiny creases at the corner of her mouth, the fine down above her upper lip and the tilted nose, and he was filled with joy. That face, with its severe and inward expression, tugged at his heart.
He had to summon up a different mode of being to get back to work and to the chubby little girl in the blue sweat suit and the dog, apparently a poodle, that had disappeared along with her. Nessia, that’s what the girl was called; even then he had felt that she knew more than she was saying, and apparently he had been right. And what she knew had hurt her. But he hadn’t thought about that in time. If at the time he had thought that she knew more, why hadn’t he seen to protecting her? Why hadn’t he sent a policeman there, or got her out of there? True, it’s impossible to protect everyone who might know something, but if the girl had really disappeared for reasons related to the case, then clearly it had to do with someone in the immediate environment, from the neighborhood or even from the street, someone from the inside—but what that “inside” was, he did not know.
And between the girl and Zahara’s smashed-in face there had been Ada and the honey scent and her tawny skin and her brown eyes that narrowed as if suspiciously, and her full, heavy breasts, so different from the budding breasts back then, and surprising on her thin, boyish body. All that might have strengthened someone who was deep in a murder investigation, but nevertheless, at the turn near Terra Sancta, he panicked at the thought that he might not be able to keep things separate. He feared that the total release he had allowed himself this time, unlike his usual pattern on the first night with a woman and even many nights thereafter, was tantamount to sloughing off all the demands of his profession.