Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “In any case they didn’t have children. They lived downstairs for a long time. I was in first or second grade and they were still in the apartment downstairs, and from time to time there were arguments between my mother and her sister. She wanted her to take rent from them, but my mother would on no account agree. Every time she would say to my aunt, ‘Kindness to living things. It’s out of the question.’ And one day . . . One day a child appeared there. I remember that I came home from school, and there was a little boy there, a baby, but he could already walk and talk a little. A skinny baby with big blue eyes, and a kind of crest, like a rooster, a sort of blond curl in front. Legs like matchsticks, I remember. And I asked my mother whether he was their baby and she said, ‘They’re taking care of him for a while, until he can go back home.’ You were just born then,” he said, looking at Ada, “or in any case, he was just born but wasn’t in this country yet and you, too, if I know my arithmetic.”

  “She’s younger,” said Michael. “She was born in 1950.”

  “Really a baby, then,” Shorer said, laughing. “So you don’t know, but in the winter of 1950 there were terrible floods in Tel Aviv and the north. Everything was flooded, and the immigrant transit camps were also flooded, and they had to evacuate them. Jerusalem wasn’t under siege anymore, but there was the austerity regime and rationing, and it was impossible to get any normal food—that is, if you didn’t go to the black market. And because of the flooding, they sent the children from the immigrant camps away. They evacuated all the families from there and some of the children were separated from their parents. Places had to be found for them. They sent them to all kinds of foster homes to take care of them in the meantime and this little boy, this baby, and to this day I don’t know how or why, Moishele he was called, ended up with this couple. Damned if I know what their name was. I’ve forgotten completely and there’s no one left to ask . . . She was a good woman, my mother, there’s no doubt about that. I remember she would bring them the eggs that her sister would get for us, everything half and half, half for us and half for them. They took care of the child. We heard laughter from inside that apartment downstairs, and we didn’t have to be so quiet anymore and we could play hide-and-seek again around the house with the children from the neighborhood the way we could before they came. The woman would smile at me, and I remember how she would hold that baby. It was like . . . like everything had come right.

  “But then, before Purim—I remember that it was before Purim because my mother was sitting at the sewing machine making a pirate costume for me. Back then Purim was a big deal and they didn’t buy ready-made Purim costumes but made them from scratch. There was a competition at school, with prizes for the best costumes. Never mind—even you can remember things like that. And my father came in, pale and shaking, and looked at me for a moment, and sent me out to fetch something, I don’t remember what, from the grocery store maybe. They would always send me out like that when they wanted to talk. I knew right away that it was an excuse to get rid of me, so I stayed and hid behind the door but I didn’t take in much. They spoke Yiddish so I wouldn’t understand, and I only remember the word ‘Canada’ and then the noise of a chair falling. I went inside as if nothing had happened and no one asked me where the things from the grocery were. They had completely forgotten about it. My mother, she was a woman as soft as . . . as butter.” Shorer mused for a moment. “She was a woman who never raised her voice to anyone, and all her short life she just wanted people to have a good life. But really good. Not like in that Beinisch family, where it’s all just on the surface. She was a wonderful woman, really. She’d help anyone with no thought of return, and she really didn’t care where people came from—that is, to which community they belonged. My mother, of blessed memory, she was a saint. Suddenly I see her standing there, standing there by the sewing machine and saying, ‘Absolutely not. On no account, a promise is a promise . . .’ ‘But who’s going to stop them?’ my father asked her, as if there was no chance. He was also a good person,” Shorer hastened to add, “but with less . . . He didn’t have the strength my mother had. He also worked hard, but she . . . she was something special, also in that gentleness of hers . . . ,” Shorer said, and wiped his eyes on the cloth napkin. For a moment Michael was alarmed. When people who are closed and restrained by nature suddenly allow themselves to get so sentimental, he thought, who knows where it will lead, even here, in a French restaurant under soft yellow light, late at night, during the intermediate days of the Sukkot holiday.

  But Shorer just sighed and turned to Ada. “Ask him. A person can become an orphan at any age, and you’re still young and you don’t know, but the older you get the more you miss your dead parents, or your childhood . . . In the end it looks like the most important thing in life. But never mind, I’m rambling. She stood there, my mother, and said to him: ‘A promise is a promise. A deposit is a deposit,’ and she left the room and I followed her out, and I can still remember my father shouting after her: ‘Masha, Masha,’ but she didn’t stop. She went downstairs, and I followed her like a shadow but she didn’t even notice me. And she knocked on the door and without waiting for even a moment she flung it open. There was just one room in the downstairs apartment, where they slept and ate and everything, there was the kitchen in one corner and the shower in another corner, everything together, and that was also a miracle. There was an outhouse in the yard, shared by both families, and my father’s big plan was to build an indoor lavatory, but that’s already the subject of another story. Those were wonderful years,” Shorer said sadly, and smoothed his mustache with his hand. “We were poor and life was hard, but we had so many hopes and anyway we didn’t know any rich people. In the whole neighborhood there was maybe one car and even that was an old commercial van, but when everyone’s poor, it’s tolerable. In any case, she opened the door to the downstairs apartment, and she sees this couple, who hardly ever spoke or anything, standing there, and next to them are two of those brown suitcases that people used to have, bound with ropes and straps, and another bundle, and the woman is holding the baby. And the woman sees my mother standing in the doorway and starts to cry, and I mean really cry, hysterically. And she goes down on her knees, literally on her knees, with the baby in her arms, and she says all kinds of things to my mother in Yiddish, and my mother, who really was a softhearted person, she puts her two arms out, like this.” Shorer stretched his arms straight out as if pushing aside two sides of a doorframe. “She stands there in the doorway and doesn’t let them pass. And she doesn’t say a word and just shakes her head. And the man, the husband, looks at his wife and lifts her from the floor and he’s crying too. Like two children they were crying, only in adult voices, like I’ve never heard. And the woman grabs my mother by the apron and pulls her hand to her lips, to kiss, and keeps on crying all the time. My mother pats her head for a moment, like you pat a child, but then she immediately puts her hands back on the doorframe and says quietly: ‘Das kind bleibt dooh.’ I remember those words even though I didn’t understand them then, because she said them again and again. Only when I was older did I ask what that meant, and they told me, ‘The child stays here.’ And finally the woman put the baby into my mother’s arms. And she and her husband went out into the night, like thieves, and disappeared from our lives. Later I heard they had gone to Canada, and they had a small business there, and in the meantime both of them have died. They died too.”

  “And the little boy? The baby?” asked Ada.

  “He went back to his parents. The next morning they came to get him,” said Shorer, “but I’m telling you this story because people . . . There were terrible things then, conflicts that I don’t understand how . . . My mother never spoke about that couple, but afterward they rented out the downstairs apartment to some student, and then they did the big renovation and enlarged the house, so that the toilet was inside and the room downstairs became my parents’ bedroom. They gave me the good room upstairs. That is, not just me, but also my little sister
and my little brother. Nobody thought of a room for each child back then.”

  “And the couple? Did they have another child?” asked Ada.

  “I told you, they left the country. They went to Canada,” said Shorer tiredly. “When I was older, I once asked my mother. She never brought them up herself but she told me that they’d gone to Canada and started a small business there, a grocery store or something. I can’t remember what. But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime he got sick and died and she also died later.”

  “And they didn’t have another child?” insisted Ada.

  “No,” said Shorer. “I asked, and my mother said; ‘No, there were no children. By the time they’d adjusted to the new reality in Canada, without any help and alone, they weren’t of the right age anymore.’ And why am I telling you all this?” he said to Michael. “So that you’ll understand that I have some sympathy for this couple, attorney Rosenstein and his wife, and so that you should know that things like that happened then. It’s not that they just went and kidnapped Yemenite babies to make servants of them. These were people who couldn’t have children of their own and they . . . I’m not saying it was a good thing to do, or that it was legitimate, but in all the messy chaos that there was in this country then and all that . . . Nothing surprises me, so I’m not saying—”

  “But now they’re suspected of murder,” Michael reminded him. “I explained to you all the . . . We think that this whole business about the apartment for Zahara was hush money. We really do think that she had threatened him, and that afterward he decided to . . . If not himself, then he sent someone . . . although the pregnancy isn’t . . . This doesn’t explain the pregnancy. But maybe the two things aren’t connected. And apart from that, I don’t understand. Do you really think it’s forgivable to take a child from a family only because you’re miserable because you don’t have any children? Do you really think that there’s any justification for such things? What’s got into you?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Shorer. “Maybe because I drank all that wine and the grappa, or because I see that at long last you . . .”—he nodded at Ada—“and because we’re getting old and I’m about to retire. All these things make you sentimental. And I’m telling you this, even though you’re maybe the most sentimental creature I’ve ever met, really”—Shorer giggled a moment—“but nevertheless I feel that you don’t have enough pity on them. And also because you don’t have enough evidence that they or he initiated the murder of the Bashari girl. But I haven’t even seen them and . . .” He paused and beckoned to the waitress to bring the bill.

  Ada looked at Michael, and he spread his hands and said: “Forget it. He’ll just say that it’s his turn. I know this scenario.”

  “It really is my turn,” said Shorer. “Last time we ate at the Tel Aviv port you paid. And anyway”—he looked at Ada, “you’ve given me pleasure.” He rested his eyes on her for another moment, but when he turned to Michael his face grew a bit grave: “It’s only a pity that . . . How’s the boy?”

  Michael almost began to report on how Sergeant Yair was, but then he realized that Shorer meant his son, Yuval. “Fine. He’s in great shape—studying a lot, working, things like that.”

  “He’s already become a man,” Shorer said, and looked distractedly at the bill the waitress had put in front of him and at the ring in her navel, “especially since he’s been living with that girl. What’s her name?” he asked. “Ayala?”

  “Ofra.” Michael smiled. “You’re in the right direction. Both names mean Bambi.”

  “And you? Why are you smoking? At your age you should stop,” Shorer muttered, and put a credit card down on the bill. “Look, I stopped and I’m still alive. It’s all a matter of willpower. Don’t you want to live?”

  Michael smiled and said nothing.

  “Nu, okay,” muttered Shorer. “You can’t do everything at once, buy a home for the first time in the middle of your life and also all of a sudden, at long last—” He looked at Ada and grinned under his thick mustache. “It’s late, but not too late,” he said, and stroked her hand. “I, if you’ll excuse me, am a good judge of people. And my only complaint after I’ve gotten to know you a bit is, Where have you been all these years?”

  “Oh, that,” said Ada with a smile, and she pushed back her chair before she rose. “You should ask him that, not me.”

  “She says I didn’t want her,” explained Michael. Now the three of them were standing by the table.

  “It isn’t that he didn’t want you,” Shorer said, and looked at the banknotes he put on the table next to the signed credit slip. “He wanted you, but he just didn’t know that he did.”

  “She says that it’s the same thing,” explained Michael, and Shorer looked at Ada for another moment and smiled.

  “She’s right,” said Shorer on the way to the parking lot, “and you should listen to what she’s telling you.” They stopped next to the big, dusty Toyota. “You really should,” Shorer said to Michael and kissed Ada’s cheek. “And now get some sleep before you swoop down on the lawyer and that Beinisch. Nothing’s going to run away; the dead are already dead and you’ve already saved the little girl.”

  Chapter 14

  It happened every time he had to face grown men who were obviously strangers to weeping—men whose faces crack and whose entire stance suddenly collapses. The sound of the continuing sniffles and sobs and the way attorney Rosenstein was blowing his nose made him feel embarrassment and pity.

  “Can’t you stop it?” asked the lawyer as he wept. “Or take out a restraining order?” His wrinkled hand dropped and tapped on the large pages that lay on the desk between them. “Doesn’t it interfere with the process of investigation, to publish it like this?”

  Michael looked at the upside-down headlines and listened to the lawyer’s plaints and arguments. When Rosenstein mentioned the state of his wife’s health and cursed journalists and especially “those girls who make trash out of everything, everything, a person’s life and also his death, like . . . like . . . What’s that animal called, like a coyote but not a coyote . . .”

  “Hyena,” said Michael finally, responding to the lawyer’s eyes.

  “That’s it, a hyena. They eat carcasses, or that bird . . . the buzzard, like a buzzard . . . ,” Rosenstein cried, and threatened that he himself, legally or physically, if necessary, would stop the publication of Orly Shushan’s article that was about to appear in the special holiday supplement for Simhat Torah. “How did you let her do this?!” he protested hoarsely. “How can you allow a thing like this?”

  Michael leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. Only when Rosenstein’s eyes hung on him in expectation of an answer did he stretch his hands out in front of himself resignedly and say that there was no information in the article that would interfere with the investigation, and that it wasn’t concern for the process of investigation that was shocking the lawyer but rather the mention of his private life and its revelation to the public eye. “And I can understand your pain. A person feels very bad when his life is exposed to the public like that,” he said to him, and puffed on the cigarette, “but with pain you can’t stop the world from going round. And, in a democratic state, a journalist or anyone else is allowed to publish an article about a young, talented and pretty girl who was murdered in such a horrible way.”

  “And are they also allowed to write about all the families she has some connection with?!” protested the lawyer.

  Michael shrugged and said: “Why not, if it’s relevant.”

  “And this is just the first article in a series!” Rosenstein cried, and buried his head in his hands. “Who knows what will come afterward? She’s planning three more!”

  “It says here,” observed Michael, turning the page toward him, “in the note at the end, that in the next articles there will be details about the hearing committee on the Yemenite children and . . . here, what they call ‘shocking revelations about the disappearances of the children and one
story of rescue.’ This already goes quite a distance from your story.”

  “All our lives we’ve tried to protect Tali and keep her away from the . . . ,” Rosenstein mourned, and blew his nose loudly on a plaid handkerchief he took out of the pocket of his gray jacket. Michael examined for a moment the worn sleeves of the pale blue shirt he had distractedly put on that morning, and reflected that the lawyer’s three-piece suit of pale gray fabric with fine silvery threads in the weave had not provided its owner the defense to which he was accustomed. This cloth and the soft black matte leather from which his shoes were made were signs of the luxuries in which a wealthy older man indulged. And all these items (“props,” Sergeant Yair had called them this morning, as he sniffed his wrist where various aftershaves had been sprayed one after the other and presented to his nose as if in an identification lineup) were aimed at providing defense against the mess and muddle the world would put in his way, but he never expected a mess like this; impotent and defenseless he faced Orly Shushan’s article, which revealed the lie with which he had protected his wife and his daughter. Balilty had been especially irritated by his shoes, which in fact emphasized the smallness of his feet in comparison to his rounded potbelly (“I don’t feel sorry for him, just his wife,” Balilty had grumbled several times).

  Against the background of the lawyer’s voice, who was now emotionally saying that his entire intention had been to “protect her from exactly things like this,” Michael again marveled at the competence of Balilty, who refused to say exactly how the article had come into his hands or to attribute any importance to this. “I have connections with someone who has access to the computer at the newspaper and . . . Never mind. What do you care where I get things for you? Don’t ask me about my sources. That’s what the journalists say, isn’t it?” Balilty said this as he was handing out a copy of the newspaper article to each of the members of the special investigation team, and when he got to Tzilla he asked: “She hasn’t woken up yet, the girl?”