by Batya Gur
“You don’t say!” marveled Balilty when Michael finished talking. “How can it be that . . . that there’s exactly a connection like this between . . . Do you think they took that other Zahara Bashari for . . . ? I don’t believe it,” and suddenly in a burst of renewed energy he urged again: “You have to talk to her, before anything else, listen to me,” and he nodded his head in the direction of Esther Hayoun. “Catch her while she’s alone—now’s the time. Her son, Yigal Hayoun, the queer? He went to look for the girl with his boyfriend, with Yair’s group; I hope they don’t go and drop him off on the street . . . Anyway, everyone’s gone off to eat,” he said with a gloomy look. “You can smell the food, from all the houses . . . Whoever isn’t searching is eating now. It’s already after three,” and in another burst of enthusiasm he hastened to say: “Catch her now. The mother. Don’t wait, before the Romanian neighbor woman comes back with her new round of lemonade.” Balilty stopped talking, and his nostrils expanded and his head turned toward one of the apartments above them. “Even though I stopped off at home and grabbed something, I’m still hungry.” He stuck out his nose and sniffed again.
“Tell me,” he said after some thought. “If they kidnapped their baby, the Basharis, and gave it up for adoption, they didn’t testify about this to the commission that investigated the kidnapping of the Yemenite children?”
“No,” said Michael. “They put it off. There was . . . They tried . . . Naeema Bashari tried . . . At first she thought not to go into it but afterward I think they intended . . .”
“But you asked Tzilla to get you the transcript from the commission, no?” said Balilty after a moment of silence.
“I haven’t had a chance to go over it,” Michael said, and he heard the embarrassment and apology in his own voice.
“But I, last night, when you were busy, I did have time,” Balilty said with a wink. “She’s already got part of the transcript, and I started to read it, not only because you’d asked but also because I had . . . Even before, I already told you that I had a feeling that it’s not so simple with this Rosenstein, that there’s something there . . . Did I say so or not?” And without waiting for a reply he went on: “There are terrible stories there! You just can’t believe it’s true, I’m telling you, you just can’t believe it. But you, you’d better go talk to her.” Michael shook himself and looked over at Esther Hayoun. “That one, for twenty-seven years she’s been working there, for Mrs. Rosenstein. I asked her when she came about the little girl, and right away she says to me: ‘Every day, except for Saturdays and holidays.’ Twenty-seven years, imagine. Six days a week. I sensed . . . I’m telling you, that one knows everything that needs to be known. But the problem is, even though she was muzzy, she didn’t want to talk to me. She knows something, but she doesn’t want to. Loyal to her boss and so on, but you’ll be able to get something out of her. You—that’s your field. Everyone’s good at something. I’m good at intelligence, that’s why I’m in intelligence. You’re good at questioning. You should have been a psychologist. Did you ever think about studying psychology at the university instead of law?” He twisted his lips into an angry expression and licked first his upper lip and then his lower. “You just went back to university without thinking about it, but you should have taken psychology from the beginning. What have you gotten out of your degree? So today you’re a lawyer. Really now—a beginning lawyer, how much money can he make? A psychologist—yes, now you’re going to need a lot of money, because of that house you bought as though you . . .”
Again Michael looked at Esther Hayoun, her dark, crooked fingers distractedly plucking fresh wild sorrel stalks and rolling them between her hands, knotting them together and unraveling them as if untangling yarn. Like a flock of hens the neighbor women scattered away from her, each to her own affairs, and suddenly she was left alone. He approached and stood beside her, casting a shadow on her with his body, and then he knelt low very close to her bandaged legs, smelling the smell of chlorine bleach and perspiration that rose from her, and in front of his eyes were the faded blue flowers on the fabric of her black dress.
She lifted small eyes to him, squinting because of the sun.
“Mrs. Hayoun,” he said quietly, “perhaps we can go inside and talk a bit. I want you to tell me more about Nessia.”
Without saying a word, she leaned on his arm and rose from the rush stool. Very slowly, with tiny steps, she walked in front of him to the apartment, the door of which was wide open. Her legs carried her heavy body with an effort. The hair on her frizzy head was untidy, and the locks escaping from the hairpins looked like an omen of chaos.
“This is her room,” she said in a cracked voice, pointing to the room near the front door. It was gloomy in the apartment, the gloom exacerbated by the dark gray floor tiles. Faded flowered sheets were spread on the couch in the living room.
“They’ve already checked there, in her room. They made a mess of everything,” she said, tapping her heavy thigh with her hand. “They took out all her clothes for that dog of theirs to smell. Do you want to check there too?” she asked, and held the door so it wouldn’t close. Again he glanced at the narrow bed, and at the exposed mattress, and at the rub ber sheet, and at the white sheets that had been pulled off it—you didn’t need to be a psychologist to understand that the girl wet her bed and that her life wasn’t easy—and at the squashed pillow in the corner of the bed. The contents of the closet were scattered at the foot of the bed and an emptied schoolbag lay between the heap of clothing and the pile of books and notebooks and the writing implements that had been dumped out of a pencil case. “I don’t know what this is,” said Esther Hayoun, as she bent down with an effort and picked up a purple brassiere. “This . . . She probably took it from someone for a Purim costume. She still doesn’t have . . . She still doesn’t need . . . ,” and she hobbled up quite close to him, clutching the collar of his windbreaker with both her hands, and then she encircled his arms with her chapped fingers. “You’re a good boy,” she whispered, and brought her forehead close to him. “I know. Not like . . . not like those policemen who make trouble for my son and because of them he doesn’t come near the house now, not like . . . your colleague there”—her head indicated the front yard. “He’s Kurdish, judging by his name, and Kurds I don’t trust, but you, you have a good face. You’ll bring me back my little girl.”
Gently Michael removed the chapped hands from his arms and held them for a moment.
“I can’t go out and look for her because of my legs,” Nessia’s mother said in a bitter, desperate voice, and dropped her hands to her sides, “because of the veins.”
“In work like yours, it’s the most difficult thing, the legs,” Michael said, and led her out of the girl’s room into the small living room. She pulled off the sheet that was protecting the sofa and indicated that he should sit down. “It’s because of the dog,” she said, and fingered the sheet a bit. “It leaves hair all over everything, and where is that dog now? What kind of dog doesn’t guard? From the beginning I knew it wasn’t worth anything.”
Michael asked for how long they’d had the dog.
“Three years, almost,” said Esther Hayoun after thinking a moment. “From when it was this big,” she added, moving her hands a small distance apart.
“It’s hard to keep a dog in such a small apartment,” said Michael, just to keep the conversation going.
“That dog,” Esther Hayoun said, and narrowed her thin, ruined lips in disgust. “If it wasn’t from Mrs. Rosenstein, I would never in my life have even taken it.”
“Did Mrs. Rosenstein give you the dog?” He again marveled at how simple remarks that were only intended to fill a silence suddenly opened something up.
“She’s a good woman, poor thing,” said Esther Hayoun in the way people speak about a helpless child. “It’s from their dog. It had puppies, maybe ten. Three of them died and one of them she gave to Nessia. A good woman, Mrs. Rosenstein, but not . . . not practical . . . She didn’t t
hink about. . . . What do we need a dog for in such a small apartment? And it doesn’t even guard anything. Yesterday she just took it down to go around the block and come back, and she didn’t come back. I waited for maybe an hour and she didn’t come back, and two hours later she still wasn’t back. I waited some more. What could I do? And the television was on and I fell asleep. And it was one o’clock at night when I saw she hadn’t come back and I phoned my son. He lives down the street here but there was only the answering machine. So I left a message. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I said, ‘Yigal, I don’t know what’s happened to the child. I’m worried that she hasn’t come home yet.’ I didn’t want to go to his place. I was afraid that if I left the house and Nessia came back . . . So I waited. What could I do then? He heard the message maybe two hours later. At three o’clock at night he came here with Peter. Do you know who Peter is? He’s a professor. He knows everything, so we looked around a bit and we called her name. We called her name everywhere, even though it was night, and finally we went to the police. As soon as it got light we went to the police. I didn’t want to have a dog but I thought, A girl with a dog, what could happen to her? Only it’s a toy dog and all it does is make noise. How did she let them do this to her? How? Tell me.” She suddenly encircled his arm. “You’re a good boy—tell me. Is she still alive, my daughter?”
Slowly and authoritatively, carefully choosing every word, he said to her: “I believe that she is alive,” and he stroked the hand that was grasping his arm.
“How many plagues of Egypt there are in our street . . . Yesterday Zahara, and today my Nessia . . . Zahara is also the child of her parents’ old age after three brothers . . . If only with her it isn’t like with Zahara, may she rest in peace, that she isn’t . . .”
“We are not certain that there is any connection between the cases,” said Michael, formulating a cautious statement he could stick by.
“I don’t know what to think anymore . . . ,” said Esther Hayoun hoarsely. “With all those Arabs roaming around the neighborhood, I said to Yigal . . . He has an Arab worker, a good boy, but an Arab. For some time I’ve been saying to him—”
“Nessia, she doesn’t have a lot of friends?” asked Michael.
“No,” said Esther Hayoun, massaging her swollen knees. “My sons, when they were little, there were always . . . The house was always . . . Friends, kids from the neighborhood, school, but Nessia, she . . .”
“She’s shy?” suggested Michael after a few seconds.
“Yes, shy,” agreed Esther Hayoun, and after a moment she squinted at him and sighed again. “And also, what can I tell you, she doesn’t . . . She’s alone a lot . . . I work all day and there are days when I . . . A girl needs to have her mother at home, with a hot meal and everything, but I . . . Every day I work . . .”
“She’s probably very attached to the dog,” said Michael, who was looking for a way to get back to talking about the Rosensteins.
“It eats from her plate and sleeps with her in her bed,” said Esther Hayoun, grimacing in disgust.
“But Nessia loves her, and a lonely little girl like you describe, it’s important that she . . . Does she also like Mrs. Rosenstein?”
“There isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t like Mrs. Rosenstein,” said Esther Hayoun decidedly. “Mrs. Rosenstein is the most . . . What can I tell you? . . . She puts her whole heart into . . . anyone who . . . How much she’s helped me!”
“Is the whole family there like that? Mr. Rosenstein too?”
“With him I don’t speak so much, he’s at work all day.”
“And their daughter?”
“Tali. She’s also very nice. Very, very nice.”
“But isn’t she living abroad?” asked Michael, as if he didn’t exactly know.
“Of course abroad. She lives in the United States and she has a house—a palace. I saw pictures of it,” said Esther Hayoun with evident pride. “Ever since she got married . . . Her husband is also a big businessman . . . For twenty years now . . . more than twenty years . . . There isn’t a year she doesn’t come, at the holidays and in the summer, and they also go there, every Passover and at Christmas. Only this year she didn’t come, because they didn’t let her.”
“Who didn’t let her?”
“Her parents. They were afraid because of the situation, and with the grandchildren . . .”
“Is she their only daughter?”
Esther Hayoun nodded and sighed. “Mrs. Rosenstein couldn’t have any more,” she whispered, as if sharing a secret. “And even this one with a lot of difficulty, we shouldn’t know from such problems. And Mrs. Rosenstein just loves children! That’s how it is.” She sighed. “Everyone has their own problems.”
“But didn’t you know her when the girl was a baby?” Michael said, and wondered whether he was getting close to where the door would close. He was still disturbed by the daughter’s appearance as described by Balilty.
“How could I have known her when she was a baby?” said Esther Hayoun dismissively. “I’ve seen pictures of her as a baby. Mrs. Rosenstein, when she’s missing Tali, invites me to look at the albums with her. There’s an album for every year of her life. They took so many pictures of that girl, bless her.” And she turned aside and spat, “Tfoo-tfoo,” to keep away evil spirits.
“Are there also pictures of Mrs. Rosenstein when she was a young woman?”
“Not from before they came here, only from afterward. She was so beautiful!”
“Are there, say, any pictures from the pregnancy?”
“Why are you asking that?” she suddenly demanded, and angrily she said: “There aren’t any pictures from Haifa, just from Jerusalem. They were all lost in a flood in their apartment, and after that they moved to Jerusalem, and of all their mementos—nothing was left.”
For a moment, a silence hung in the air between them.
“Does this have anything to do with my Nessia?” she said, suddenly waking up. She tilted her face toward him, knotted her eyebrows, looked at him with yellow suspicion and said: “Because if it doesn’t, why are you asking?”
“There’s no resemblance,” admitted Michael, “between the daughter and the parents, don’t you see?”
“So what if there’s no resemblance,” she dismissed angrily. “That doesn’t mean anything. When I first knew her, Tali was a big girl, after the army, and at first I worried that she wouldn’t get married . . . She’s not so . . . She doesn’t resemble her mother . . . And now, look how she’s fixed up.”
“Her mother is a beautiful woman,” commented Michael.
“Mrs. Rosenstein? Like . . . like a queen, and if you could have seen her when she was younger, she had such blonde hair. Golden. Golden.”
“And the daughter, Tali, doesn’t resemble her father, either?” tried Michael.
“Tell me,” said Esther Hayoun, narrowing her eyes suspiciously, “What’s on your mind? What are you looking for? Is this connected to Nessia or not?”
“We don’t know yet,” he admitted, “but maybe it’s connected to the sad affair of Zahara Bashari.”
“How? How is it connected?” demanded Esther Hayoun.
“I’m just trying to find out whether Tali is their biological daughter,” replied Michael dully, as if apologetically.
“What are you talking about?!” she cried. “If you could see the way she loves them—so what if she doesn’t resemble them? Nessia also doesn’t resemble . . . Nessia doesn’t resemble her father at all, or me. Everyone . . .” Her voice broke.
He was afraid she was going to burst into tears, but her suspicious, narrow eyes hung on him resentfully. “Why aren’t you searching for her, for my Nessia?” she said accusingly. “Why are you bothering with all that? It’s a waste of time. It’s all probably because of him.” With her head, she indicated the door as if Balilty were on the other side of it. “He’s making things up. Doesn’t everyone have enough troubles without all that?”
“Mrs. Hayoun,” sai
d Michael after he took two deep breaths, “I’ll tell you the truth, but you will have to keep it a secret—can I trust you?”
She nodded without saying a word and pursed her lips. She clasped her gnarled hands under her heavy bosom in a demonstrative gesture of knowing that there was no point to what she was about to hear.
“We suspect that the . . . that Nessia’s disappearance really does have something to do with the case of Zahara Bashari,” he said slowly, and watched her face turn white.
“I knew it,” moaned Esther Hayoun. “I knew it right from the first. Right from the first I knew it. Are you telling me that she . . . that she’s also like Zahara?”
“No, no, no,” said Michael quickly. “I’m sure she’s not. I hope . . . I’m sure we’ll find her alive and unharmed, but we thought that maybe Zahara Bashari’s murder is somehow connected to a Yemenite baby who disappeared fifty-two years ago, a baby girl who was . . . who we think was maybe . . .” At the sight of her eyes, which were glued to him, he hastened to reassure her and said: “Mr. and Mrs. Rosenstein didn’t know about Nessia. They haven’t done anything, heaven forbid,” he said as he saw her eyes open wider in fear and her lips tremble. “Understand,” he pleaded, and laid his hand on her arm, “we don’t want to hurt them or do them any harm. All we want to know is whether it has any connection to the fact that Zahara Bashari was murdered and also to Nessia’s disappearance.”
“You,” said Ester Hayoun, sitting straight up and removing his hand from her arm. “I’ll tell you what—you find Nessia for me and then I’ll tell you what I know. If you don’t find her for me, I’m not saying a word.”
“Mrs. Hayoun,” he said authoritatively, “I promise you—” The beeper in his shirt pocket went off. He looked at the display and at the words written there: “Urgent. Call Tzilla.”