by Batya Gur
She replied to him with a smile, over the carton they had brought from the shelter, a cardboard box that had once held a television, and wiped her eyes. “This girl, Nessia—and what a name they gave her, Nessia—is just . . . I also stole things when I was a girl. Not so much, but I did take things, so that no one saw . . . Did anybody really need this? You see her whole fantasy life inside this box here, with the purple and the gold, and the panties and the bra and this wallet.”
“She didn’t use them,” Michael commented, and removed his arm from her shoulders. “Everything’s brand-new. I don’t entirely understand it, why she didn’t—”
“Of course she didn’t use them,” interrupted Tzilla. “If she were . . . How could she? Not a thing here, not a thing, do you hear me?! Nothing here fit her life, or her measurements. These aren’t things that a person steals in order to use. It’s just to have something, a box like this of pretty things . . . A treasure.”
“Where’s Eli?” asked Michael after Tzilla had recovered herself and closed the carton, folding over the cardboard flap that had begun to grow ragged.
“Didn’t you send him over to the Criminal Identification lab? I thought that he was sitting with them there all day. That’s what he told me . . .” She looked at him worriedly. “And when I phoned him, his mobile wasn’t on, so I thought they were in the middle of something. Didn’t you send him there?”
“I-I . . . ,” stuttered Michael, who had not seen Eli since the moment he’d left the special investigations team meeting while they were talking about the newspaper article. “That is, I asked him to do something, but I thought that . . .” He was embarrassed for a moment, because he worked with both of them and he loved them both, and now he felt that he was required to support the cover story that a husband had told his wife. Not only had he not sent Eli to the Criminal Identification lab, but he also had no idea where he was.
“Well,” said Tzilla, “it’s been hours. I thought he was waiting . . . He said something about the DNA and I thought . . . I thought he would come back to question Netanel Bashari, but in the end you were the one who . . . He doesn’t even know yet what a scene there was. Wasn’t that something?” she said, and sighed. “Did you see what a scandal there was? And like that, in front of everyone, with no shame, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t have done that,” she said. She pulled her sharp nose and examined a loose button on her striped blouse.
Michael began to examine closely the memo that was on his desk, lowering his eyes so they would not disclose the lie he had told for Eli’s sake, even though there was no reason to think that another woman was involved in his disappearance. In his mind’s eye he could still see his evasive look as he replayed portions of what Hagar Bashari had said. Some of them were shouted—“Five years! My God, five years and I had no idea!”—and others slipped out between clenched teeth—“That whore, just because she . . . goes around like that . . . with all her . . . Making eyes at all her clients, an ‘agent’ they call her . . . And it’s a sure thing that Zahara knew, a sure thing! She’s her friend . . .” And there were things that were said quietly, after her husband had left the room. And while Netanel Bashari was still sitting there opposite her, defending himself by clasping his fingers together and at the same time abandoning himself entirely to her outburst, the red marks of her fingers still visible on his cheek, Hagar said: “It’s all because of that synagogue and all that politicking, all those people . . . ‘Community life,’ they call it, a ‘community’ . . . Maybe I should just be thankful that there was only one woman?”
It all began at a meeting at the synagogue, where Michael had intended to go down into the basement with Netanel Bashari to look at the objects his sister had collected there and try to learn something from them about the slips of paper that were found in the Beinisches’ garden. When he and Tzilla arrived there, the synagogue gate was locked, and no one answered when they rang the doorbell. Several minutes later, after they had given up, Tzilla said, “Here they are,” and before he could wonder aloud about the plural, he saw Netanel and discovered that he had not come to the meeting alone. His wife, Hagar, walked next to him with bustling steps and demanded to know from the person responsible for the investigation in person, and in the presence of witnesses (“Will Tzilla suffice as witnesses?” Michael asked half-sarcastically), where exactly her husband had been while they had been looking for him all those hours on the eve of the holiday and the night Zahara was murdered. Michael had no intention of answering this, but Netanel, though he had begged them to keep his secret, had already caved in to her demand like someone who in an instant forswears all lies and deceptions.
“At first he said he was at the university and out shopping,” said Hagar, “and yesterday he suddenly told me that he had been with Linda O’Brian, so I want to know: Is that true? Was he with Linda? I’d rather know and not be told lies, because I can’t stand lies . . . And he, the good citizen of the community, Mister Civic Responsibility.” At these words her voice shook. “So he was with Linda?”
After he looked at Netanel Bashari for a moment, Michael opened his hands to the sides instead of replying, and then Hagar asked the predictable questions and her husband, with restraint but firmly, answered each of them in turn (“Did you have a thing with her?” “Yes, if you want to call it that.” “How long?” “Nearly a year.” “Nearly a year?!” “What can I do? I fell in love. I couldn’t control it.”). Then Hagar began to shout and in the big hall of the synagogue, where they were sitting on the benches, her reproaches echoed. For lying to her, for exploiting her and for the opportunism that had guided him all his life, for the inferiority complexes of people from the eastern Jewish ethnic groups that were the only reason he had married her, because she was Ashkenazi. She cursed the neighborhood and that real estate agent whose behavior with her clients everyone knew about and she went on to curse the community synagogue that was the only reason—“a brothel disguised as a members’ club”—all this had happened. There was no other way he could have met so many “Americans and French people and white Europeans,” and even whites who listened to him the way he likes, because all that interested him was captivating the Ashkenazim, especially the Ashkenazi women, even if they were just aging whores like that one.
Then Netanel rose from the bench and with a sealed face and complete serenity said to her: “Listen, Hagar, for years I’ve been hearing that nonsense from you and I haven’t said a word. You should know by now that there is nothing that disgusts me more than the exploitation of ethnic oppression, and you can’t say that I’m some archetype of the screwed oriental Jew. You yourself have heard me get angry at Zahara about these things exactly. So now you’re transferring them to me? I have enough screwed-up things about myself, from here till doomsday, and I really don’t need any help from anyone. What I do need . . . Never mind, you wouldn’t understand anyway if you haven’t got it into your head after all these years.” He pushed the bench back hard and stood up. “Excuse me,” he blurted to Michael and Tzilla, who for the past few minutes had kept her eyes glued to the heavy, closed wooden door, until Netanel Bashari walked out and it slammed behind him.
Against their will, for a long time after his departure they listened to accusations and curses, insult and anger, and when Michael tried to rise from his seat and gestured toward his watch for Tzilla’s benefit, Hagar looked at him pleadingly and into the synagogue’s silence, which had returned for a moment, she said in a voice from which all the strength had drained out: “What is going happen? What am I going to do now? What does he think I’m going to do? He’s the only person who’s close to me . . . I don’t have other friends. I don’t have . . . Even this synagogue, they don’t appreciate me, and if it weren’t for him they wouldn’t even have . . . They accept me only because of Netanel, and now what does he think I am going to do? Do you think he will leave me?” She asked this in a childish, pleading tone, and because of that it was hard for Michael to find an answer.
It was Tzill
a who answered in his stead: “That’s not at all certain. Men have crises sometimes, midlife crises, and afterward they come back home with their tails between their legs.”
And then, on the synagogue bench, in the dimness that held the scents of paper and havdalah spices for the end of the Sabbath and apples for the holiday, Hagar Bashari wept bitter tears of insult, like a child who suddenly discovers the injustices of the world and is amazed by them. Weeping silently, she rose and walked toward the large door, and only there got a grip on herself. “I don’t intend to give up so fast,” she said to the carved squares of wood on the door. “I’m going to fight for my love. I’m going to fight for it,” she said, and went out, and the door remained wide open.
“She’s going to fight for her love, did you hear?” said Tzilla. “Is it possible to fight for love?”
Michael looked at her and tried to discern traces of ridicule on her face, but she was serious and thoughtful. “Maybe it’s possible to fight, but it doesn’t have much connection to love,” he said to her after a moment. “It even seems to me like a total contradiction—how can you fight for a thing like that? It’s something that comes like a gift or a miracle. Either it’s there or it isn’t.”
Tzilla looked into the mirror of the powder compact she pulled out of her bag. “In your opinion, does she love him? Are we going and leaving the building open like this?” And after she wrinkled her nose and patted her face a few times and returned the compact to her bag and they had gone out and slammed the door behind them, she replied herself to her first question.
He was looking at the small house across the street, and at the brown gate and at the big pile of trash that had accumulated on the crumbling wooden bars of the railroad tracks, and she said: “It’s impossible to know. In a situation like this you can’t distinguish between love and insult and habit. That’s my opinion, and you know what I would do in her place? If I were to catch Eli in . . . in a lie like that? I would just get up and leave without a lot of talk. I know what people say, ‘Don’t judge until you’ve . . .’ and thank God, I’m not in her place yet, but I wouldn’t stay even for a moment. Without scenes and without any explanations.”
The water that flowed over his head and his back and his closed eyes was no longer as hot as it had been. He was attacked by a sudden chill, and he shivered and turned the water off.
“Are you alive in there?” asked Ada outside the closed door. She opened the door with a strained smile and he saw her through the steam. “You’ve made a little inferno for yourself here,” she commented as she waved her hands about and tried to dispel the steam that surrounded him, “and you’ve been scalded by the water.” She pulled him gently into the bedroom.
In total darkness, from within a heavy fog of drowsiness or dream, he suddenly heard Ada’s voice very close to his ear. “It’s your beeper going off,” she whispered to him. “It isn’t stopping. Here it is—I’ve brought it to you so you can see.”
And from within the total darkness he asked, “Who is it?” and he still wasn’t sure whether they were really having this conversation, in this bedroom where he had dropped his clothes on a small straw chair, or whether he was just dreaming it inside his head.
“Should I look?” she asked, and turned on the night-light. Even its soft yellow light hurt his eyes.
On the illuminated face of the beeper, which she had brought from the chair to the bed, he saw the number of Balilty’s mobile phone and next to it the world “Urgent.”
In the dimness of early morning he sat in the intelligence officer’s car and listened. The garbage truck rumbled forward from the end of the street and stopped and went on and stopped again in front of the next building. In the chill between night and morning, Balilty was running the motor in order to warm the car. A police car drove by, slowed down for a moment and immediately moved on. And when the windshield was all steamed up, Balilty lifted his hand to wipe away the steam with an energetic motion, but there was no vitality in his voice when he said: “So it’s like this. I’m not going into all the details, just the main points.” Nevertheless he went into all the details and one after the other he set them out for Michael after he again wiped off the windshield with his hand. “I didn’t want to call you directly to her house,” he began. “I said I’ll give him at least an hour or two. I wouldn’t have woken you up like that at five-thirty. I have a heart, don’t I?”
Michael said nothing.
“It’s a small city. Everyone knows everyone else, even though it has grown so much and all that. In any case, I go over to my sister-in-law’s—Matty’s sister? At twelve o’clock at night she has a flood in her house. Not at eleven, not at ten, but at exactly twelve midnight, by the clock. So I go over to her place because she’s by herself, and you know how it is . . . And I’m fiddling with the pipe there, and you should know that you are going to have to replace all the plumbing if you don’t want troubles like that, because here the pipes rot within a few years. The water’s too hard . . .”
As in a dream Michael heard Balilty’s prolonged chatter about the plumbing in his sister-in-law’s house and the experience he has with all kinds of plumbing and what happens when there are rotten pipes under the sink and under the tile floor. And he didn’t let up or slow down his talking, which Michael supposed was going to lead to something that would better remain unsaid at this hour, and which he also knew he would have to reply to.
“So she’s standing there and handing me the pipe—a person needs a helper in a complicated job like this, and she doesn’t have another piece of pipe and anyway, where would she get one?” said Balilty. “And suddenly she says to me, right in the middle of the job, ‘Tell me, that Eli Bachar who works with you, isn’t he married?’ and I look at her and I say to her, ‘Married? Of course he’s married, with two children. What happened? Do you have the hots for him?’ And she gets annoyed with me, not because she doesn’t have the hots for him—she does if you ask me and that’s really why she got annoyed—but she says to me, ‘What are you talking about? You always think I’m looking,’ and believe me, her whole life she’s been looking for someone and hasn’t found anyone. She has requirements, that one! Oho, what requirements she has. You might think she was the Princess of Kamchatka. Big deal, she was the most popular girl in her class, and that’s only according to what she herself says and in any case there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, believe me. ‘So why are you asking?’ I ask her, and she says, looking down at me—my head was under the sink, you should understand—and she says, ‘I saw him in Simha’s café a few days ago, with a girl. And Simha told me that she doesn’t look like much, just some girl, but she’s not just some girl. Simha says she’s an important journalist and she’d seen her once on television. Just looking at her, she doesn’t look like anyone special, just some girl, but Simha says that if it wasn’t for her she would have gone broke a long time ago and it’s only thanks to her that the café caught on. Ever since she did an article about her, people are just standing in line to get in in the evening. You remember, we sat there once. She has a poppy seed cake that . . .”
Michael buried his head in his hands. More than insult, he felt the strength of the exhaustion that silently called him to lay his head on his arm, lean on the door and close his eyes. But he rubbed his cheeks and his forehead and sat up straight and said: “I don’t get it.”
“You think you know a person and suddenly it turns out that he surprises you. Apparently he had a big grudge against you,” said Balilty, and his voice rang out like Job’s companions, the self-righteous and annoying tone of which he still remembered from high school, in the voice of the Bible teacher who made them learn whole portions of these people’s speeches by heart.
“You’re not saying anything,” said Balilty. “I know you. It’s probably the shock. You’re in shock, aren’t you? That’s how it is. You think someone is a good guy and he likes you and then . . .”
Michael looked around and said nothing. Opposite
the street, which had emptied and was quiet, he saw the face of the Bible teacher, a completely secular man who one day began to wear a skullcap—they said he suffered from battle trauma—and after the summer vacation came back with a fringed garment dangling out from under his shirt, left the school and moved to a Jewish settlement near Hebron and started to study in a yeshiva. He saw his face and heard his voice echoing in the classroom even before the skullcap and the fringes, and the words of the prophet Jeremiah that the teacher repeated with total identification—“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”—until Michael sat up straight in the passenger seat and looked at the round face of Balilty, who moistened his lips and loudly cracked the knuckles of his hands over the steering wheel. “I have to talk to him first,” Michael finally said. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“Yes,” agreed Balilty. “I’m also sure. But I’m also sure that our explanations are different. I’m thinking it’s revenge, and you . . . I have no idea how you can straighten this out in your mind, but remember that there isn’t a single bad word about you in that article. He only said good things about you, and maybe there’s no need to make a fuss about a thing like this.”