by Paul Sussman
Again he hesitated, a curious sense of expectation swelling in the pit of his stomach; then, slowly, he started forward, walking the length of the synagogue until he was standing at the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine. A pair of curiously shaped brass lamps, almost as tall as he was, stood to either side, each with a long vertical stem from which six branches curved gracefully outwards and upwards, three on one side, three on the other, each crowned, as was the stem, with a flame-shaped light-bulb. Despite the magnificence of the building's other ornaments it was for some reason these lamps that most compelled his attention, that were somehow the focus of his sense of expectation. Stepping up to one of them, he reached out a hand and clasped it around the smooth stem.
'And you shall make a lampstand of pure gold, and there shall be six branches going out of its sides, and its cups, its capitals and its flowers shall be one piece with it.'
Khalifa wheeled round, startled. He had thought he was alone, had been certain he was alone. Now, however, he saw that away to his right, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the gallery, a man was sitting on one of the wooden benches that ran along the synagogue's walls. He was wearing a dark blue robe and skullcap that seemed to blend with the shadows – the reason, probably, why he hadn't noticed him before. As well as a long white beard that came down almost to the level of his chest, he had the most extraordinarily bright blue eyes, which seemed to glow in the darkness like stars against a night sky.
'It's called a menorah,' said the stranger, his voice soft, faintly musical.
'Sorry?'
'The lamp you are holding. It is called a menorah.'
Khalifa realized that his hand was still clasped around the light's spiralling stem. He withdrew it, embarrassed, as if he had been caught touching something he wasn't supposed to.
'I'm sorry,' he repeated. 'I shouldn't have . . .'
The stranger waved a hand, smiling.
'It is good that you are interested. Most people, they walk past without noticing. If you want to touch, please, be my guest.'
He remained where he was for a moment, staring at Khalifa – the detective had never seen such bright blue eyes – then got to his feet and walked over to him, his movements curiously fluid and effortless, almost as if he was floating. Although his hair and beard were white as ice, now that he was in the light Khalifa could see that his skin was smooth and taut, unlined, his body erect, so that it was impossible to guess his age. There was something faintly disconcerting about him. Not threatening, just . . . strange. Unworldly, as if he was not actually there in real time, but rather part of a dream.
'You are the . . . imam here?' asked the detective, his voice sounding strangely thick and unfamiliar, as though he was talking underwater.
'The rabbi?' Again the man smiled, his eyes lingering momentarily on the Horus-statue clasped in Khalifa's left fist. 'No, no. There has been no full-time rabbi here for over thirty years. I am simply a . . . caretaker. Just as my father was before me, and his father before him, and his before him. We . . . look after things.'
His tone was matter of fact, conversational. There was something about his choice of words, however, the way his gaze held and enveloped Khalifa, flooded right into him, that seemed to hint at some deeper meaning, some level of mutual understanding beyond what was being openly expressed. Although he had always been disdainful of those who believed in the paranormal – 'hunkum-funkum' as Professor al-Habibi called it – the detective could not escape a sudden, unsettling conviction that not only did the man know exactly who he was, but that he was in some indeterminable manner responsible for his presence here today. He shook his head, flummoxed, and moved backwards half a step. There was a long silence.
'It means something, the word "menorah"?' he asked eventually, trying to make conversation, to ease the air of intensity that seemed to have wrapped itself around them.
The stranger stared down at him – he was almost a head taller – then, with a faint, knowing smile, as if he had been expecting the question, turned towards the lamp, his sapphire eyes sparkling in the glare of its flame-shaped bulbs.
'It is the Hebrew for candelabrum,' he said quietly. 'The lamp of God. A symbol of very great power for my people. The symbol. The sign of signs.'
Far from easing the atmosphere, Khalifa sensed that his question had only served to thicken it. Despite that, despite himself, he couldn't help but be drawn in by the man's words, as if he was listening to some sort of incantation.
'It's . . . beautiful,' he mumbled, his gaze climbing up the lamp's stem and along the smooth, curving arc of its branches.
'In its own way,' said the man. 'Although like all reproductions it is but a shadow compared to the original – the first lamp, the true lamp, the lamp that the great goldsmith Bezalel made, way back in the mists of time, in the days of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt.' He touched his fingertips to the outermost of the lamp's curving arms. 'That was very beautiful,' he said, eyes flickering as though a pair of bright-blue butterflies had settled to either side of the bridge of his nose. 'Seven branches, capitals shaped like flowers, cups like almonds, the whole of it beaten from a single block of solid gold – the most beautiful thing that ever was. It stood in the desert tabernacle, and in the First Temple that Solomon built, and in the Second Temple too, until the Romans came and it was lost to the world. Almost two thousand years ago, that was. Whether it shall ever be seen again . . .' He shrugged. 'Who knows. Maybe one day.'
He was silent for a moment, gazing at the lamp, a strange, distant look in his eyes as if he was recalling times long past. Then he dropped his hand and turned back towards Khalifa.
'In Babylon,' he said, 'that is what the prophecy tells us. In Babylon the true Menorah will be found, in the house of Abner. When the time is right.'
Again, for no reason he could explain, the detective was struck by an unsettling sense of subtext to the man's words, a feeling that, although he didn't fully understand what was being said, it was nonetheless in some way significant. He held the man's gaze for a moment, then looked away, eyes roving around the interior of the synagogue until they came to rest on a clock hanging above the entrance.
'Dammit!'
He was certain he had only been there for fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside. Yet according to the clock it was nearly five, which meant he had been in the synagogue for well over three hours. He checked his own watch, which confirmed the time, and with a bewildered shake of his head, said that he had to be going.
'I completely lost track of time.'
The man smiled. 'The menorah can have that effect. It is a very mysterious force.'
The two of them stared at each other – Khalifa experiencing a momentary, giddy sensation of falling, as if he was plummeting from a great height into a clear blue pool – then, with a nod, the detective stepped past the lamp and started back across the synagogue.
'Might I ask your name?' the man called after him when he was almost at the entrance.
Khalifa turned. 'Yusuf,' he replied. There was a beat, then, more out of politeness than genuine interest, he asked, 'Yours?'
The man smiled. 'I am Shomer Ha-Or. Just as my father was before me, and his father before him. I hope I will see you again, Yusuf. In fact, I know I will.'
Before the detective could ask what he meant by this the man waved and, again with that curious floating motion, walked back into the shadows at the side of the synagogue, disappearing from view as if he had stepped right out of this world.
JERUSALEM
The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, a nondescript cluster of yellow and white stone buildings shaded by trees and hemmed in by a low perimeter fence, sits on a steep rise at the north-western fringe of Jerusalem, at the point where the city's outskirts start to stutter and fragment, segueing into the bulging, pine-clad slopes of the Judean Hills. Ben-Roi arrived late in the afternoon and, after parking up outside the main gate, walked across to the security cabin and informed the guard inside that he had an appointment
to see one of the patients. A call was put through to another part of the compound, and three minutes later a plump, middle-aged woman in a white doctor's coat arrived, introducing herself as Dr Gilda Nissim and escorting him out of the cabin and up into the hospital grounds.
Coming here was, if not exactly an act of desperation for Ben-Roi, at least the last obvious line of enquiry left open to him at this juncture. Despite working right through the previous night and all that day he had singularly failed to establish any link whatsoever between Piet Jansen and Hannah Schlegel. Sure, he'd unearthed a few extra details about Schlegel's past: the precise dates of her internment in Auschwitz; the fact that she and her brother had been transported to the camp from Recebedou, a transit centre in southern France. But the information was way too fragmentary to formulate anything approaching a clear picture of the victim's life, let alone explain why Piet Jansen, or anyone else for that matter, should have wanted to murder her.
There had been just one faint glimmer of light and that had come from a visit to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, where Schlegel had been employed part-time as an archivist. According to one of her former colleagues her work there had involved basic filing, indexing and assistance with simple research queries – general stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. At the same time – and it was this that had given Ben-Roi pause – she had also, apparently, been engaged in some sort of private research of her own. Exactly what this research entailed the former colleague hadn't been able to say. He did think, however, that it was in some way connected with Dachau, since on a number of occasions he had come across Schlegel poring over records and survivor testimonies from that particular concentration camp. Mrs Weinberg, Schlegel's former neighbour, had also mentioned seeing her with files on Dachau, while Majdi, the guy who had burnt out her home, had described how the flat was full of papers and documents 'like some sort of archive'. There was, the detective felt certain, some significance to all of this, some way in which Schlegel's 'private research' tied in with her murder and with Piet Jansen. He had been unable to clarify the connection, however, and in the end had been forced to concede that, while it was clearly an important line of enquiry, it also seemed to be a hopeless one.
Which left him with Isaac Schlegel, the dead woman's twin brother. And from everything Ben-Roi had heard, he was a complete fruitcake.
'I've been told Mr Schlegel's pretty screwed up,' he said as he and Dr Nissim climbed through the hospital grounds, following a steep tarmaced road past scattered stone buildings interspersed with terraces of flowers and pine and cypress trees.
She shot him a faintly disapproving look.
'He's extremely disturbed, if that's what you mean,' she replied. 'He was already suffering from acute post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his wartime experiences, and then when his sister died . . . well, it pretty much pushed him over the edge. They were very close. I shouldn't expect too much from him. This way.'
They angled left around a fenced enclosure in which two overweight men in pyjamas were playing table-tennis before coming to a modern, single-storey, white-stone block with a sign outside announcing NORTH WING PSYCHOGERIATRIC CENTRE. She ushered him through the glass entrance and along a deserted, softly lit corridor, a vague smell of cleaning fluid and boiled vegetables in the air, everything silent aside from the hum of the air-conditioning and, from a room somewhere ahead of them, the muffled sound of a man's voice wailing, shouting something about Saul and Zedekiah and the Day of Judgement. Ben-Roi shot the doctor a glance.
'That's not . . . ?'
'Mr Schlegel?' She gave a humourless grunt. 'Don't worry. Isaac has many problems, but fantasizing that he's some Old Testament prophet isn't one of them. Besides, he's barely spoken a single word these last fifteen years.'
They stopped in front of a door near the far end of the corridor. Nissim gave a gentle knock, then opened it, putting her head through into the room beyond.
'Hello, Isaac,' she said, her tone soft, soothing. 'I've brought you a visitor. There's no need to be afraid. He's just going to ask you some questions. Is that OK?'
If there was any answer, Ben-Roi didn't hear it.
'You can have twenty minutes,' she said, withdrawing into the corridor. 'I'll come and fetch you when the time's up. And remember, this isn't a police station, so go easy on him. Yes?'
She held the detective's eye for a moment, then, with a curt nod, set off back the way they had come, her plimsolled feet squeaking on the smooth marble floor. Ben-Roi hesitated, uncertain what to expect, uncomfortable – he had always hated these sort of places, their blank, characterless sterility, the soporific atmosphere, as though the air itself was drugged – then stepped through the door and pushed it to behind him.
He was in a bright, sun-filled room, very sparse, with a bed, a table and, taped all over the walls, covering them from ceiling to floor like badly pasted wallpaper, dozens upon dozens of crayon drawings, very simple, like something you might find in a children's nursery. Schlegel was sitting opposite, in an armchair beside the window, a frail, haggard-looking man wearing pale green pyjamas and carpet slippers. He was staring fixedly at the rockery outside, a book clutched in his bony hands, its green cover creased and dog-eared.
'Mr Schlegel?'
The old man didn't respond. Ben-Roi hovered for a moment, then, picking up a wooden stool, crossed the room and sat down in front of him.
'Mr Schlegel,' he repeated, trying to keep his voice soft, unthreatening. 'My name is Arieh Ben-Roi. I'm with the Jerusalem Police. I wanted to ask you some questions. About your sister, Hannah.'
The man didn't even seem to register his presence, just continued staring out of the window, his eyes sunken and blank.
'I know this is difficult for you,' pressed the detective, 'but I need your help. I'm trying to catch the man who killed your sister, you see. Will you help me, Mr Schlegel? Will you answer some questions? Please?'
Nothing. No acknowledgement, no reaction, no answer, just that blank, catatonic stare, glazed and expressionless, like a fish gazing up from a monger's slab.
'Please, Mr Schlegel?'
Still nothing.
'Can you hear me, Mr Schlegel?'
Silence.
'Mr Schlegel?'
Silence.
'For fuck's sake.'
Ben-Roi brought his hands up and cracked the knuckles behind his head, at a loss. If he'd been interrogating a criminal suspect he would have pushed and harried, threatened, demanded information; but, like the doctor said, this wasn't a police station, and he couldn't employ police-station methods.
Several minutes passed, the two of them just sitting there in silence like a pair of chess players; then, accepting that conversation seemed to be futile, Ben-Roi stood up and wandered across the room, running his eyes back and forth over the crayon drawings taped to the walls. There must have been close on a hundred of the things, and initially he didn't take much notice what each one was specifically depicting, just glanced this way and that, not particularly interested, assuming them to be no more than the random outpourings of a damaged mind. Only gradually did it dawn on him that, childish as they were, clumsy-handed scrawls that any five-year-old could have produced, the pictures were perhaps not quite as disconnected as he had at first thought. On the contrary, taken together they actually seemed to form some sort of meandering, mural-like narrative.
He slowed his eyes, focusing on a drawing beside the door. There was a boat with a funnel, undulating blue lines denoting waves, and, standing on the boat's prow, two stick-like figures with joined hands. The next two pictures depicted almost exactly the same scene, but then came one in which the two figures, still hand in hand, seemed to be suspended in mid-air in front of the prow, as if jumping into the sea. He recalled the story Mrs Weinberg had told about how Schlegel and her brother had been forced to swim ashore after the boat in which they had travelled to Palestine had been turned back at Haifa by the British, and with a sudden electric jolt he realized it was ex
actly this scene that the picture was showing.
'It's his life,' he whispered to himself.
He wheeled round.
'It's your life, isn't it? It's the story of your life.'
He spun round again and picked up the narrative, following it first forward through time, then back, slowly revolving as his eyes hopped from picture to picture, up and down and around the walls, piecing together the story.
Many of the images corresponded with things he had already found out about Hannah Schlegel's life. On the wall above the bed, for instance, among the last pictures in the collection, were three depicting a small stick figure being beaten on the head by another, much larger figure, against a yellow, desertlike background – presumably a reference to her murder in Egypt. Likewise, a whole block of pictures around the door, more than twenty of them in total, all in black or grey, were unambiguous portrayals of the horrors of Auschwitz – a smoking chimney, loops of barbed wire, six bodies hanging from a gibbet and, horrific in its simplicity, two stick figures strapped onto beds, zig-zags of red-crayoned blood issuing from their groins, slashes of black bursting from their mouths in what Ben-Roi took to be a depiction of agonized wailing.