by Kate Raphael
Rania opened the door next to Nadya’s, which held a crib and a small bed. The walls were painted with teddy bears. She shut the door and moved back toward the living room. She dredged her memories from the night before, trying to feel if anything was in a different place. She turned over objects on the mantle: a menorah, a misshapen clay an animal. When she touched the framed ketubah, the marriage contract between Nir and Chaya Gelenter, Benny spoke at her elbow.
“We don’t have permission to search the rest of the house.”
“Well, get permission,” she said.
“I have no grounds to ask.”
“Why are we tiptoeing around this guy?” she fumed. “His maid was found killed in a ditch, and he acts like it’s a minor inconvenience. He’s not telling us what he knows, and you know it too.”
Through an open door off the living room she glimpsed what was plainly Nir’s study. She charged in, before Benny could stop her. She looked around the study, taking in the shelves of leather-bound Hebrew books and the well-preserved antique writing desk. It was an Ottoman design she recognized. Probably stolen from some Palestinian family kicked out of their home in 1948. She sat in the deep leather chair and opened drawer after drawer. None of them were locked. Right there, in the middle drawer, underneath a small stack of bills, was what she was looking for. Not one but two passports, one green, one burgundy. One was for a Nadya Kim, born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1986. She flipped through the pages and found no visa stamp for Israel. The other bore the same photo, but was in the name of Alexandra Marininova, born in Odessa, Ukraine, nationality, Jewish. This one contained an A1 visa, permitting her to come and go and work in Israel for five years.
“Put it back,” Benny said from the doorway. “We don’t have a warrant.”
“You’re not even going to call Nir and ask why he has two different passports for the same girl and told us he didn’t even had one?”
“I can’t do that, because we had no right to look for it. You should have waited,” he said.
“Waited for what?” she wanted to know. “You’re not planning to do any investigation of this guy.”
“Don’t accuse me of not doing my job,” he said, ruffled now. “I told you, I’m one of the good guys.”
But he joined her at the desk, and copied down the details from both passports as she did. “I assume this is the real one,” he gestured with the green Uzbek passport. “But I’ll run them by both consulates just to be sure.”
She was deeply afraid he was going to tell her he would take the case from there. She didn’t want that. She wanted to solve the case, and not only for her own ego. She felt a connection with Nadya, a need to know who had done what to her. Her job was to protect the Palestinians, not to worry about some dead Eastern European prostitute, she reprimanded herself. True, but the job was not everything. She had come to this work because she cared about justice. She expected that a prostitute who had entered Israel illegally, living in the home of one of the most powerful men in Israel, was no more likely to receive justice from the Israeli authorities than a Palestinian. Though she knew little about Nadya, she felt her spirit in this house. She could almost feel the relief the young woman would have felt, to escape from her dangerous, shameful servitude in Eilat and come to live in this peaceful, prosperous home in a tightly protected enclave. Yet somehow it had been here that the ultimate danger had found her.
“We need to find this man she was arguing with,” she said to Benny as they climbed into his car.
“We?” he said with a little smile. “How do you propose to do that?”
Good question. “Talk to more people here,” she suggested. She had a sudden thought. “What about the Israeli woman who was in the fields that day? She might know something.”
“What woman?”
“The one Abu Anwar and the other women saw.”
“What are you talking about?”
They had been joking around, challenging each other without hostility, but now he was angry. She realized that she had never told him about her interviews with the women who were waiting that morning. When she and Benny had gone to talk to Abu Anwar, he hadn’t mentioned the young woman either. She had frankly forgotten about that, in all the excitement of discovering where Nadya worked.
“Several witnesses reported seeing an Israeli woman, in work clothes, walking in the area where the body was found,” she said.
“Where are these witnesses? I want to see them, now.” He started the car. “There’s a great falafel place in Azzawiya. We can stop there for lunch.”
“When were you there?” she wanted to know.
“Last summer, when they had those demonstrations against the Fence,” he said.
“I’m not going there with you.”
“Why not?”
Could he really be so dense? First, she could not eat alone in public with a man not her husband and not related to her. And second, she wouldn’t be seen in the villages socializing with an Israeli policeman.
“It’s haram,” she said. Shameful. “They must have food in Elkana.”
They went into a store and bought some bread, hummus, and cheese and ate it in the car. She and her friends sneered at Palestinians who spent money in Israeli settlements, but it was the lesser of evils right now. And anyway, Benny insisted on paying for all the food, and he spent money in settlements every day, so the tiny bit he spent on her was not going to make a difference. She was rationalizing, but her life was full of contradictions.
* * *
Benny drove through Deir Balut checkpoint into Azzawiya. As soon as they passed the checkpoint, Rania put on her jilbab and hijab.
Abu Anwar was out at his land, his daughter told them.
“Call him to come back,” Benny ordered.
Rania bristled at his tone and his taking command. He should let her take the lead here, with Palestinian women. She would be much more likely than he to get cooperation from them. But as she was thinking this, she heard the daughter on the phone, saying to someone, “Find him and tell him Yahud are here.”
Jews. Not police. If she were here by herself, or with another Palestinian officer, what would the daughter have said then? The Palestinian police did not try to instill fear in the people. The people knew they were here to help. A good relationship to have, but not necessarily one that would impress an Israeli policeman.
Abu Anwar’s wife made coffee, and they drank it silently in the living room while they waited. Abu Anwar arrived, dirty from the land, and went to wash up and change before coming to sit with them. He was unsure which language to speak, Hebrew or Arabic, and settled for a mind-rattling mixture of the two, switching back and forth sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Rania started to ask him about the woman he saw, but Benny insisted on going back over everything, how he found the body, how he fell down, why he didn’t report it right away, and then they got to the Israeli woman he saw. He gave the same description he had given before, straight dark skirt and white blouse, scarf over her dark hair, late twenties to early thirties, attractive. Benny took out his book of photos and pointed out a few of them to Abu Anwar. He asked him to say which looked the most like the woman he saw. He insisted he couldn’t really remember. But Benny persisted, and Abu Anwar pointed to one of the photos and said, maybe more like this one. Why that one? Benny wanted to know. Abu Anwar said the shape of her face, it was like this. Was he sure? Benny asked. More like that one than this one? indicating one with a rounder face; the one Abu Anwar had picked was more heart-shaped. No, like this, Abu Anwar said. Could he remember anything else about her? Did she walk fast or slowly? Not fast or slow, Abu Anwar said. Sure about that? Not fast or slow, he repeated. Did the woman look at him? He couldn’t tell, she had on dark glasses. He didn’t think so.
Rania called Salma and reported to Benny that she was at the health center in Rafat, the next village over from Azzawiya, ten minutes by car.
“But there is no reason to go there,” she said. “Salma didn’t eve
n mention the woman to me. Only Um Raad did.”
“You said the women were together.” He beetled his eyes at her, as if daring her to contradict herself now.
“Yes, when I saw them, they were all together.”
“So they are sitting there together, bored out of their minds while the army keeps them from crossing, and you think one of them sees something that strikes her as unusual, and doesn’t point it out to the others?”
Rania had to admit it was unlikely. They headed into Rafat. On their way into the little town, about half the size of its neighbors, Benny pointed to a massive pile of dirt and rock, the remains of a substantial compound.
“You know what that is?” he demanded.
“Of course,” she replied calmly.
“The home of Yahya Ayyash,” he continued. “The Engineer.”
“Yes,” she said. Yahya Ayyash was the most famous son of these parts. He had used his engineering training to develop low-tech bombs for Hamas, bombs which had killed ninety Israeli citizens from 1991 to 1996, when he himself was assassinated. After he was killed, the Israeli army had come to Rafat, where he had not lived for years, and demolished his family’s home.
“Why haven’t they rebuilt it?” Benny asked Rania now.
“How should I know? I don’t live in Rafat, I live in Mas’ha. There’s the health center.”
Salma rushed them into the back after only a few seconds in the large waiting room, but it was enough for Benny’s presence to send the toddlers burrowing into their mothers’ skirts. In the little white examination room, with its shelves sparsely stocked with bandages and analgesics, Benny stood back while Rania asked Salma why she had not said anything about the Israeli woman. Was he testing her, to see if she would be as ruthless in questioning Palestinian women as she had been with Nir Gelenter? Or was he maybe unsure himself about how to question a Palestinian village woman? She decided to believe the latter. She carefully translated Salma’s answers into English for him. Salma had forgotten about the Israeli woman, she said. She had been stuck at the roadblock for hours. She had noticed dozens of people. The woman hadn’t made a big impression on her.
Rania showed her the photos Benny produced. Salma picked out the same one as Abu Anwar. The only time Benny talked was to ask Salma if she thought the woman was older or younger than her, and if she had seen clothes like she was wearing in any stores in the villages or in Nablus. Salma said yes, in Nablus, you could buy clothes like that.
“The woman’s not Israeli, she’s Palestinian,” Benny announced as they descended the health center steps. Rania was shocked. She had not considered that, but now he said it, it made perfect sense.
“Why do you say that?”
“The woman in the photo that they picked out was Palestinian, not Israeli. Besides, an Israeli woman would have had no reason to be walking through the fields; she would take a bus or get a ride straight out of the settlement. So she must be a Palestinian trying to look like an Israeli in order to go to work in Israel.”
“But an Israeli woman who had something to do with killing Nadya might have been in the fields.”
“This woman had nothing to do with Nadya,” he asserted.
“How do you know?”
“She wasn’t walking fast or slow,” he said. “She was proceeding normally. People who have just killed someone don’t do that.”
“Well, that doesn’t help us much,” she said. He was obviously much more experienced in this kind of investigation than she, and that annoyed her. Why shouldn’t he be? Israelis had all kinds of gruesome murders, drugs, crime that Palestinian villages never imagined.
“It helps a lot,” he said confidently.
“Oh? We’re going to wander into every village in the north asking for women who work in Israel? We will be doing that until we are grandparents.”
“Why do you think she is not from around here?”
“She is not from Mas’ha, or I would know her,” she said. “If she were from Biddia or Deir Balut, one of the others would have known her. And women in Azzawiya and Rafat, well, they do not go to work in Israel. She is more likely from Qalqilya or Nablus.”
“A needle in a haystack,” he said softly, more to himself than to her.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like looking for a particular cup of oil in Saudi Arabia,” he clarified. “We’ll start in this area.”
Rania didn’t want to canvass the Salfit villages with an Israeli policeman, looking for this girl. She tried to suggest that she would have better luck going alone, but he wasn’t having it. He didn’t trust her, she understood, because she hadn’t told him about the woman in the first place. Well, that was fair enough.
“I know what to do,” she said finally.
“What might that be?”
“We’ll go talk to the taxi drivers at Qarawa. No matter where in the north she is from, someone will know her.”
“Good idea,” Benny said.
His phone chirped. He turned away from her, talking into his hand.
“Something has come up,” he said when he hung up. “I need to go back to Ariel for a little while. Why don’t you come with me and have some tea, and then we can go see if we can find this girl coming home from work.”
Rania didn’t love the idea of hanging out at an Israeli settlement police station, but it would be ridiculous to go to Salfit if he couldn’t drive her; by the time she got there, she would have to turn around and leave again.
When she got out of the car, Benny glanced at her and she could tell he expected her to take off her hijab. She didn’t. The Israeli policewomen sitting at the desk eyed her suspiciously.
“Mah zeh?” one of them said to Benny. What is this? Not who, but what.
“Palestinian police,” he shrugged. No name. That was fine. She didn’t want to know their names, or for them to know hers.
The two young women—near twins with dark hair, dark circles drawn around their dark eyes, big chests peeking out of their blue uniform shirts— laughed at the idea of a Palestinian policewoman. Or maybe it was something about her as a policewoman that struck them as funny, she had no way of knowing. They treated her like something they found on the bottom of their shoes. She wanted to kick mud in their over-made-up faces, but instead she ignored them completely.
“There is an American here,” one of the women said to Benny. “The border police arrested her near the Machsom HaChayalim. They said she was interfering with them. This is her ID.”
She handed him a green beit hawwiya, and Benny opened it and said, “tsilum,” copy. Rania thought it must be Chloe. She didn’t suppose there was another American woman running around here with a copy of her ID in a hawiyya folder.
“I’ll talk to her in a few minutes,” Benny said. He installed Rania in his office, asked her if she wanted tea, coffee, or soda. She chose tea, and he brought it to her with a bowl of sugar.
“If you need to use the phone, press nine to get an outside line,” he said. “But if you’re calling a mobile it will cut you off after five minutes and you’ll have to call back. Cost savings,” he added with a wink.
Captain Mustafa was not in his office. She had to call his mobile phone three separate times before she was done telling him about the passports and the interviews. He grunted when she said that Benny refused to confront Nir Gelenter about why Nadya had two passports. He had more important things on his mind.
“Listen,” he said, when she was done. “There is a young man from Azzawiya who is wanted by the SHABAK, and he is missing. His name is Fareed Jaber Murad Haddad. The SHABAK want to talk to him about a terrorism case, and the muhabarat is cooperating with them. If you hear anything about him while you are in the villages, bring it to my attention right away.”
“Mmmm,” Rania said, careful not to agree directly. She didn’t know what she would do if she ended up with information like that. She had never had to deal with such a problem.
Benny was gone for about an hour. Wh
en he came back, he said he needed to make a few calls, would she mind waiting down the hall? He showed her into another office, where some women were working. They said nothing to her, nor she to them. She called Bassam and told him she would be late so he should feed Khaled. She felt like the Israeli police all stared at her when they heard her speaking Arabic on the phone, but she told herself she was being paranoid. She heard people in the hall speaking Arabic, so she peeked out. Ali was there, talking to Chloe. So she was right about the ID belonging to Chloe, who was now taking it back from Ali and promising to carry her passport on her all the time now. Rania doubted that would happen. She ducked back into the room before Chloe could spot her.
When Chloe was gone, Rania walked out into the hall to say hello to Ali. Benny had a booming voice, and she could hear him talking on the phone. “Fareed Jaber Murad Haddad,” she heard him say. She wondered if it could be a coincidence that this young man from Azzawiya was suddenly wanted, after Chloe, who was staying in Azzawiya, was in this police station all day. She thought the man Chloe had accompanied to the mayor’s house the other night was named Jaber, and Captain Mustafa had called him Abu Fareed. She didn’t like that she was thinking these things about Chloe, but really, what did she know about her? And wasn’t it a little strange for a lone American woman to be staying in a small village in the middle of Palestine? She should try to find out more about Chloe.
Benny emerged from his office, pulling on his jacket.
“Yalla.” Let’s go, he said.
He lurched ahead of her, bounding down the steps. She wasn’t going to trail after him like some medieval serf. Before he made it through the door, she stopped in her tracks. He stopped half in and half out of the door, turning to stare at her.
“What’s the matter?”
“People who are going somewhere together go together.”
He closed the door and walked back to the step where she stood, approaching with a little bow.
“Forgive me.” He matched his stride to hers then, careful not to gain one inch on her. Good. Let him learn.