by Batya Gur
Ada took her hand off the gear stick and laid it on his arm. Through the open window he inhaled the cool, fresh air—it was already daylight and the blue sky hinted at a bright, clear sunny day—and he had a passing glimpse of the walls of the Old City that were suddenly visible beyond Independence Park once the Sheraton Plaza Hotel no longer blocked the view of them. The walls were pale blue in the early light, and splendid, and he mused on this city and how full sunlight would illuminate and reveal its misery: branches left over from roofing sukkahs tossed away on the sidewalks, empty beer bottles, crushed beverage cans, cigarette butts, old newspapers and the piles of garbage heaped up along King George Street and the Jaffa Road. Two Filipinos lounged on the steps of the bank at Zion Square.
“Disgusting,” Ada muttered, and stopped at the traffic light.
“What? Those Filipinos?”
“No. What Filipinos? They’re just unfortunate—they don’t have anywhere to go on their day off. What’s disgusting is this city, with all its filth. It’s all coming out now, and not just the garbage. Anyone who stays here—and, what’s more, buys a house—is crazy.”
“Here we are. You can drop me off here.” He indicated the lottery booth at the corner of Queen Heleni Street. “I can walk from here, and that way you’ll be able to keep on going straight and get back to bed.”
“I’m dropping you off where I want, if at all,” muttered Ada as she turned into the street, “and I’m not going back to any bed. I’ll also go to work, in solidarity, and you’re going to phone me and tell me exactly what happened to the little girl. Look at that dome,” she said, pointing at the Russian church and its towers, gleaming in the sun. “If you want a bit of beauty around here, you have to look upward, toward the sky, and not at the streets.”
“And for that very reason,” he said as the car stopped in the Russian Compound, “it’s better to build on the roof as well. So you can look up.”
“It’s just that there was a corpse there,” she reminded him again as he was about to open the car door.
“And because we found her,” said Michael patiently, “we got a reward. I did, anyway. And you did too, I think.”
“So you’re saying,” she called after him as he swung his legs out of the car, “that we’re living on her dead body?”
“Or the other way around,” he answered as he walked around the car and stood at her open window and caressed her arm. “Despite her dead body. And despite the fact that we’ll be that way too, in the end. Despite the dead.”
Chapter 9
Signs of the disturbance were already evident at the junction of Emek Refaim Street and Bethlehem Road. Two police cars blocked the intersection, and two policemen stopped every vehicle for inspection. It was only eight o’clock on the morning of a holiday, and there was already a long line of cars stretched beyond the roadblock. One of the policemen signaled to Michael’s car to stop. Balilty, who was still deep in his report on the questioning of the journalist that night and the difficulty he had in finding Moshe Avital, stuck his head out the window, intending to scold him, but the policeman had already hurried over to the car and said excitedly to Michael: “They’re waiting for you, sir, on Yiftah Street,” and respectfully he also turned to Balilty and said: “Sergeant Ben Yair asked me to tell you that you were right. They found something in that house there, just like you thought.”
“The little girl? Did they find the girl?” asked Balilty.
“No, not the girl,” said the policeman, “but they’ve found someone else: an Arab, I’ve understood—I don’t know the details. They just told me to tell you that they’re waiting for you to get there.”
So as not to disclose his anger at Balilty, Michael said nothing and kept a poker face. Only after they had driven away from the policeman did Balilty say to him apprehensively: “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but over there, behind the house on Bethlehem Street, on Mordechai Hayehudi Street, there’s an abandoned house. It used to be Labor Party offices. Do you know it?”
Michael waited for him to continue.
“So last night, in the middle of questioning Orly Shushan, I suddenly had this feeling . . . like a psychic attack. You know what I mean?” And without waiting for an answer he went on talking, thus making things easier for Michael, who had not yet decided how he was going to deal with this intelligence officer who was acting as though he was in charge of the case. “It was like I saw a picture, really like a dream. I seemed to see that little girl curled up there. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before; I’m not one of those psychics. You know what I mean?”
“Of course I know what you mean,” replied Michael coldly. “You saw a picture. And did you hear voices?”
Balilty ignored the sarcasm. “I sent two people out there. What was there to lose? Just to be on the safe side,” he added in English. “Now did you hear what he just said?”
Michael stopped on Bethlehem Road before the turn into Yiftah Street. He pulled the hand brake and did not turn off the motor, but let it run a while longer until Balilty grew impatient. “Okay, there were too many things to bring you up to date on,” said Balilty. “I just didn’t get around to telling you. Don’t tell me you’re angry at me.”
“It’s not a question of anger,” replied Michael severely. “We’re organizing the search in a methodical way and then you go and do something in an arbitrary way at your own initiative, and behind the backs of Eli Bachar and Yair, and they’re responsible for the search. You know that Eli is very sensitive about these things, and I don’t need to explain to you that splitting authority just impedes the work. I’m not the one you should have reported to, but Eli Bachar and Yair, before you sent people out. And you should have left this for them to decide, so that they don’t send people to that house to search.”
“All right, I’m sorry,” said Balilty with unwonted humility and gloom. “I just had this feeling about this house. It’s been standing there for years, half crumbling, and I thought . . . Nu, I had a feeling.”
“I’m not making light of your feelings,” said Michael coldly, “but you’re ignoring other people’s feelings, and it poisons the atmosphere.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll fix it. I’ll make it up to them,” promised Balilty, but before Michael could manage to tell him that not everything can be fixed, he added, “Don’t turn into the street. It’s probably all jammed up there,” and pointed to an empty spot on the sidewalk between a truck and a utility pole at the corner of Bethlehem Road and Yiftah Street.
They got out of the car and Balilty ran forward down Yiftah Street. From the corner, Michael saw how the intelligence officer stopped next to one of the police cars that filled the small street and leaned over the driver’s window. When Balilty got there, he straightened up and let the policeman who was driving get out of the car and point to his booty in the backseat—a dark, skinny young fellow sitting hunched over. “We found him there. He says his name is Jalal ibn Mansour, sir, and that he’s from East Jerusalem and he has an Israeli identity card. Look,” the policeman said, and proffered the blue plastic cardholder.
Balilty grabbed the identity card. “A forgery,” he whispered to Michael, and handed him the ID card. “Forged papers. If he’s from Jerusalem, I’m from the moon. What do you want to bet that he doesn’t have a residence permit?”
“He slept in the backyard, at 8 Mordechai Hayehudi. There’s a kind of stone hut there. Maybe it was once a shed,” said the policeman to Michael. “In front there’s the house. It’s impossible to get into it because there’s this huge tree there that blocks the entry. The door has an iron bar across it, with a serious lock. He probably crawled in through the window, he’s so thin. Not into the house, to the hut nearby. There aren’t any Romanian workers there like you said, sir,” he said, turning to Balilty. “The neighbors told me that for several months now the house has been shut tight and the Romanians had been kicked out because they used to sit on the front porch and—”
“Clear out a m
inute,” said Balilty to the policeman who was sitting at the wheel. “We’ll question him here.”
“Where? In the car, sir?”
Michael crossed his arms and shook his head. He leaned into the back window and looked at the youngster, who shrank even more under his gaze. “Come on out,” Michael said to him, and the young man moved his body toward the back door, as if making an effort.
“Where are you going to talk to him?” muttered Balilty, who was standing behind Michael. “Are you going to take him in for questioning now? Maybe you should leave him and go to the Basharis. You wanted to talk to them about the business of the—”
“There’s no need for an interrogation room to find out his name and address and what he was doing there,” said Michael sternly, “and as long as I have anything to say about it, I’m not leaving you alone with any Palestinian.” Balilty kept his mouth shut.
The youngster stuck out his long legs and extricated his body. He was wearing dark and dusty gabardine trousers, a plaid flannel shirt and a short leather jacket. He gave off the sour, musty odor of someone who had slept all night in his clothes, and his face was covered with a dark two- or three-day stubble. But all these details—the odor, the stubble, the wrinkled clothes—could not disguise his good looks. Michael took in the long, slender face, the naked fear and the defeat in the deep, dark eyes. “How long were you there for?” he asked in Hebrew, and the youngster gave him a frightened look and said: “Me? Since Monday—three days, from Monday.”
“Why?” asked Michael. “What were you doing there?”
“I was sleeping there,” whispered the lad.
“People are looking,” warned Balilty. “We can’t just stand here.” Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw Peter O’Brian and Yigal Hayoun, Nessia’s elder brother, running up the street. Peter waved his arms at them. “Please,” said Balilty to Michael with evident frustration, “in a minute Bachar and your farm boy will come along and there’ll be a scene here. Instead of constructive questioning, we’ll be spending the time conciliating everyone.”
“Okay, come, take him over there,” said Michael, indicating the top of the street. “We’ll sit for a minute over there, in my car,” he explained to Balilty.
“Too late,” said the intelligence officer, with an anger in which a bit of “I told you so” was evident, as Yigal Hayoun and Peter O’Brian approached and signaled them to stop.
“Jalal,” called Yigal Hayoun, and laid his arms on the shoulders of the youngster, who lowered his glance. “I’ve been looking for you since yesterday. Where did you disappear to?”
Jalal shrugged helplessly.
“This is Jalal ibn Mansour,” said Yigal Hayoun. “He’s . . . ,” Yigal began, and looked aside. “He works with me. He’s my employee, a qualified assistant electrician. I’ve been teaching him the trade for two years. He’s all right.”
“We found him in the abandoned house on Mordechai Hayehudi. There’s a shed there that he lives in. If he’s all right and an employee of yours, then why was he hiding?” Balilty demanded to know, and his glance moved from Jalal’s tortured and anxious face to the round, flushed face of Yigal Hayoun. The intelligence officer’s small, light eyes narrowed in suspicion and perplexity.
Yigal Hayoun opened his mouth in order to say something, but Balilty did not let up: “Are you together?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he added: “So how come you didn’t know where he was? And why is he roaming around here without a permit? If he’s with you, then you’re also in trouble for covering up and collaboration and employing an individual who doesn’t have a permit to reside within the Green Line.”
“What are you talking about?” protested Yigal Hayoun. “He has an identity card. He’s an Israeli citizen. He lives in East Jerusalem.”
“Is this what you’re referring to?” Balilty asked, and indicated the blue plastic cardholder in Michael’s hand. “This is a fourth-rate forgery. Look how they stuck on the picture. Look, can you see the stamp? Is it touching the photograph?”
“I’m telling you that I know him,” protested Yigal Hayoun. “I’ll vouch for him.”
“Didn’t I tell you that there was a connection between the disappearance of this girl and Arabs? Did I or didn’t I?” whispered Balilty into Michael’s ear.
“I know him too,” intervened Peter. “Jalal is absolutely excellent,” he hastened to add, “and he hasn’t done anything wrong. This has nothing to do with . . . ,” he said, and waved his hands in the direction of the dozens of police, neighbors, civil defense volunteers and young people from the Scouts who had already clustered in front of the apartment block.
“Can we go in for a moment to see my mother and sort this whole thing out?” asked Yigal Hayoun, and with his head he indicated the entrance to the apartment block.
Balilty looked doubtfully at Michael. “We’ll go in,” decided Michael. “We’ll finish this up.”
In the front yard of the large apartment block stood the neighbor from the second floor, and in her hand she held a stool with a woven straw seat that she set down among the rampant weeds. “Sit, sit, Esther. If you don’t want to go inside, sit here a while,” she chirped in a loud, squeaky soprano voice as she sat Nessia’s mother down on the stool with a push on her shoulders, and even more loudly, as if to call attention to the kindness of her heart, she said: “Sit, sit a while. Give your feet a rest.”
Esther Hayoun sat obediently on the straw stool, and with half-closed eyes continued to look at the policemen who filled the yards and the entrances to the building. Between her dark fingers, crooked from years of using cleaning materials and wringing out rags, she now rolled the soft stalks of dew-dampened wild sorrel she’d plucked out of the earth. “They haven’t found her,” Michael heard her say to her son as they approached. “They haven’t found her.”
“They’ll find her, Mother,” Yigal Hayoun promised, and ran his hand over the stubble of his beard and his thinning hair. “You’ll see. They’ll find her.”
Inside the apartment, in the tiny hall, stood three policemen. One of them ushered Michael toward the girl’s room. “The dog handler is there with his dog now. They’re letting it smell all her things.” Michael peeked inside. All the doors of the large wardrobe were open, and its contents—starched white sheets several decades old, faded towels, shoes and winter clothes—had been taken out and strewn on and beside the bed. They had removed the mattress and leaned it against the wall, and a brown rubber sheet was folded at the foot of the bed.
“Here,” Balilty said, and indicated the little niche that served as the mother’s bedroom. “Can we go in there?” One of the policemen nodded his head “Why not?” and Balilty went in, followed by Michael, Jalal, Peter and Yigal.
“There isn’t room here for five,” said Yigal. “We won’t have a breath of air like this. You can wait outside, Peter.” And Peter, whose face went purple, obeyed without a word.
Balilty shut the door and motioned to Yigal and Jalal to sit down on the double bed. Michael leaned against the wall and breathed in the oppressive air, heavy with smells of mildew and perspiration. Breathing was an effort.
“This document is a forgery,” said Michael after a moment of silence, “and you,” he added, turning to Jalal, “were in an abandoned house and not at the address that’s listed here. Here it says you live in East Jerusalem, at 15 Haroun Al Rashid Street. Why do you need to sleep in an abandoned house on Mordechai Hayehudi Street in Baka?”
Jalal said nothing. Michael, who was standing so he saw the young man’s profile, looked at its fine lines, the delicate curve of the nose, the lips and the bristles around them that emphasized their fullness. He looked to be in his early twenties, younger than his son, and when he turned his face toward Michael, Jalal’s eyes were moist with tears. He lowered his dark, long-lashed eyelids and examined his dusty shoes. “I . . . ,” said Jalal, and looked pleadingly at Yigal Hayoun.
“Look, friends,” said Yigal Hayoun—he pinched his b
ulbous nose and crossed his arms on his little potbelly—“the facts are simple. Jalal works with me and lives with me but now, because of Peter . . . When Peter comes to visit, there’s no room for him at my place, quite simply. And we haven’t had time to make any other arrangements for him.”
“Why doesn’t he go to 15 Haroun Al Rashid?” hectored Balilty. “He has a home, he has an address.”
“That’s where his family lives—his parents and his brothers and his sisters. It’s not comfortable there. It’s crowded. He doesn’t have his own place,” argued Yigal Hayoun.
“Look,” said Balilty, “I don’t want to go into your personal affairs now, but this identity card is forged, and if you don’t say here and now where he’s really from—”
“From Ramallah,” the young man cried, and burst into tears. “I’m from Ramallah.”
“Okeydokey,” drawled Balilty with forced serenity, “so now we know. From Ramallah, without a residence permit. How long has he been in Jerusalem without a residence permit?”
“Nothing, maybe a few months . . . Maybe three months,” ventured Yigal Hayoun.
“Two years,” Jalal said, and lapsed into sobs. “Two years. Really. No more. I’m telling you the truth now, but I haven’t done anything. I swear I haven’t done anything. Just a bit of work with Yigal.”
“You sent him to the abandoned house because Peter came and there wasn’t room for both of them. Is that right?” Michael asked Yigal Hayoun.