by Naomi Ragen
Their eyes were big and round and questioning.
“Duvie told us that you just want us to help you against our mom!” Amalya declared hostilely, her sweet face distorted with hatred.
Well, this is going just great, Morris thought.
“Duvie is mistaken. I’m a mom, too. I would never do that,” Bina tried.
“How many children do you have?” Gabriel, the eleven-year-old, asked.
Bina took a deep breath, encouraged by the question’s neutrality. “I have two. Ronnie, who’s five, and Lilach, who’s two.”
“Do you play with them?” Shoshana asked suddenly, her small hand clutching Bina’s shoulder.
“All the time.”
“What kind of games?” Gabriel wanted to know.
“All kinds.”
“Taki? Three Sticks?”
“Sure. I’m very good at Taki. Not so much at Three Sticks. I usually wind up falling down.”
The younger children laughed, imagining her no doubt sprawled over the floor trying to jump over sticks.
“It’s lovely you’re laughing. You’re very good children,” she told them.
All of them suddenly went quiet, drinking in her words like milk.
“And I know you all want to help your mom. But if I was ever in trouble like your mom, I’d want my children to help the police.”
“Why is our mom in trouble?” Yossi asked, surprised.
Did they really not know? Bina wondered. “Because you children got hurt, and it’s a mom’s job to see that doesn’t happen.”
“But it wasn’t her fault! She never hit us,” Gabriel shouted.
“Yes, our mom loves us!” Amalya declared, and all the children nodded.
“Just, sometimes, she didn’t see, she went away…,” Shoshana said hesitantly.
“Didn’t see what?” Johnny pressed.
“Don’t talk, don’t talk!” Amalya reminded her.
“We’ll get punished!” Yossi agreed.
The children froze into silence.
“I know they hurt you, Shem Tov the Messiah, and Batlan, Goldschmidt, and Hod. They punished you. But you didn’t deserve it. You didn’t do anything bad. They were the bad ones,” Bina told them.
A thaw came over their faces.
“Who told you?” Gabriel asked, astounded.
“Eli told us. He told us everything…”
“He wasn’t supposed to!” Gabriel shouted. “He wasn’t supposed to talk. Never allowed to tell!”
“We can’t. Please don’t make us. We’ll get into a lot of trouble. You don’t know what it’s like!” Yossi begged.
“He’ll get really mad,” Shoshana said, her eyes filling with tears.
“Who, Shoshana?”
“The Messiah. Never allowed to tell. You get stuck in the suitcase.…”
“Shhh!” Amalya hissed. “Remember what Duvie said!”
The children went silent.
“What did Duvie say?” Bina probed gently.
“He said we will all have to live in Shem Tov’s house again, like before, and if we talk he’ll do more tikkunim!” Gabriel answered.
She saw the horror in the children’s eyes, the slight thawing disappearing at once and a new ice age brought on by acute terror taking its place.
“But he can’t hurt you anymore, the Messiah or his Hassidim,” she told them flatly.
It took them a few moments to drink that in.
“Why not?” Yossi finally asked, unconvinced.
She looked at Johnny and Morris. They nodded. “Because they are all in jail!”
Gabriel seemed aghast; then his face broke out into a radiant smile. He looked at the others: “The Messiah is in jail!”
“And Kuni Batlan, Shmaya Hod, and Yissaschar Goldschmidt? Are they also in jail?” Yossi pressed.
“Yes. Every single one of them are in jail!” Morris told them. “And you have the key to keep them there. Just tell us the truth, tell us what happened. They are saying they didn’t do anything to you … that they should be let out.”
“That’s a lie!” the children chorused fiercely. Suddenly and miraculously, a cacophony of childish voices competed with each other to supply the details the police so desperately needed.
“When we moved into Shem Tov’s house, everything changed,” Amalya began. “He said that we had ‘demons’ inside us and we needed tikkunim to get rid of them so we could be tzaddikim. At the beginning, he left Menchie alone. He was only a baby. But then Menchie hid our mother’s car keys so she couldn’t go out and leave us. That’s when Shem Tov started looking at him differently. He started beating him. Punched his face with a fist.”
“He told Batlan and Hod to do it, too!” Yossi added.
“He’d tie Menchie with chains,” Gabriel said eagerly. “He’d tie him to the chair and tie his hands behind him so he couldn’t move.”
“And then Kuni and Shmaya would punch him in the face and hit him with sticks,” Amalya continued. “They’d slap one cheek, sending his head flying in one direction, and then they’d slap the other cheek, and it would fly back. They’d do it again and again and again.…”
“They slapped him thousands of times until his face got all swollen and square,” Shoshana said, bursting into tears.
“His eyes were almost swollen shut,” said Yossi. “He could hardly see. You could just see his nose sticking out of his face.”
“Then they’d make fun of him,” Gabriel added, his voice full of righteous indignation. “They’d call him an ‘ugly mongoloid.’ Say he was retarded. They’d laugh. And when it was time for Menchie’s chalakah—”
“That’s when they’re three and they get their hair cut for the first time,” Bina whispered to Morris. “It’s a celebration. A party for the child.”
“—they took all of us to Meron to do it at the saint’s grave. They made Menchie run at night through the streets. And then, on the way home, we stopped near a forest. It was very dark. They took Menchie out of the car and drove off. They hid in the forest and made noises just to scare him.”
Bina closed her eyes, wondering how much more she could stand to hear. Morris nudged her. “Go on; you are doing great,” she told them.
“Hod and Batlan would hold him by the shoulders and shake him so hard, his head swung back and forth like a rag doll’s. A lot of the time, he’d faint, and they’d pour cold water on him to wake him up,” Amalya said with passion.
“All day long, the Messiah would make Menchie stand by him and jump up and down, up and down, for hours,” added Shoshana hoarsely, hiccuping.
“He’d tell Hod and Batlan to shove food into his mouth until he choked or threw up,” Amalya continued.
“And don’t forget to tell how they hit his fingers with the wooden kitchen hammer,” Yossie added urgently.
Amalya nodded. “They’d hit his fingernails until finally they just fell off.” She took a deep breath. “And once they shook him so hard they broke his arm and—”
“But they didn’t even take him to a doctor!” Gabriel interjected passionately.
“They’d just put on an elastic bandage,” Amalya confirmed bitterly. “They tied his arms behind him in the chair. He screamed and screamed for days until suddenly, he just stopped. After that, there was nothing they could do to make him scream,” Amalya said, choking up. “Nothing. The same thing happened to Eli. After a while, he just seemed not to feel anymore.”
Bina felt herself going faint. If only half of it were true! But as she looked into Amalya’s innocent young face, she knew deep in her heart, it was all true. Where would an innocent, good Beit Yaakov girl like Amalya, and the others, even little Shoshana, be able to imagine such cruelty if they hadn’t witnessed it? It was like the stories Holocaust survivors told about what had happened to them in the camps—acts so depraved only the sickest and most wicked of minds could have conceived of them, deeds so debased no decent person could imagine them.
But it was not without logic, she thought. In
a very sick way, it all made sense. Shem Tov, the psychopath, was able to seduce and terrify the others so that they feared, believed, and worshiped him. But not Menchie. He was too little to be affected by any of the magic tricks and charisma that had so mesmerized the adults and older children. With a toddler’s simple, true vision, he saw right through Shem Tov. And Shem Tov couldn’t stand that. With his impulsive, violent, psychopathic personality, he viewed Menchie, the three-year-old, as a threat, an adversary to be vanquished. And Eli’s only crime was looking too much like his father, the inconvenient husband Shem Tov hated for his good fortune and his gullibility.
“Are you all right? Do you want to take a break?” Morris whispered to her.
She shook her head. They mustn’t. Having broken the dam, they must soak up every last drop of the evidence flooding through that they’d waited so long to gather. Besides, if the children had the courage and strength to continue, she could do no less.
“Go on, kids. You are all doing great,” Johnny encouraged them.
“Yes, your mom would be so proud of all of you,” Bina agreed.
Amalya took a deep breath, continuing, “With Eli, Shem Tov appointed Goldschmidt to be responsible for him. Goldschmidt would just look at Shem Tov and he’d wink or nod his head, and Goldschmidt would start torturing him.”
“What, exactly, did you see him do to Eli?”
“They made Eli stand in the corner for hours and hours with his face to the wall and his hands up.”
“He was like a piece of furniture in the house,” Gabriel said.
“And when he was standing there, sometimes Shem Tov and Goldschmidt would kick him until he fell on the floor,” Yossi added. “Then they’d put him outside on the porch in the freezing cold rain and snow in his underpants. A lot of times, they’d force arak down his throat until he gagged or threw up. Sometimes…” He hesitated, looking significantly at Amalya, as if asking permission. She nodded. He took a deep breath. “They wouldn’t let Eli go to the bathroom so he made in his pants. Every time that happened, they’d beat him, then wash him off in ice cold water.”
“Hod made him eat the piss and doody,” Gabriel blurted out.
The other children went silent, nodding in horror at the memory.
Bina saw Johnny blanch.
Amalya took Shoshana into her arms, kissing the little girl’s lovely, bright curls. “They never let Eli eat. If the Messiah was in a good mood, he’d throw Eli some scraps from his plate. Once, he decided to do Eli a ‘favor’ and got Hod to force a lot of food into his mouth and pour arak down his throat. When he threw up, he told Goldschmidt to feed him his vomit.”
The children were all nodding in agreement, looking at each other. They seemed strangely relieved, as if they, too, were throwing up poison and were glad to have it out of their systems.
Morris shifted in his seat, his hands gripped in fists.
Amalya looked around questioningly.
“Go on.” Bina nodded to her encouragingly. “We are upset, but not at you, at how much you’ve all suffered. You were victims. You are all very brave.”
“Once, I heard a noise in one of the suitcases underneath the playpen in the children’s room. I opened it, and I found Eli, tied up like a chicken, a kippah shoved inside his mouth. I wanted to take him out, but they wouldn’t let me. The next day, I saw Eli walking with a limp,” Amalya said, almost choking on the words.
“The Messiah hated Eli even more than Menchie!” Yossie declared. “He made the rest of us keep away from him.”
Gabriel nodded. “He told us we should also hate him and called him Stinky.”
“He even said a few times that in the end, he’d kill him,” Amalya whispered, suddenly overcome. “I wanted to help Eli! I wanted to help Menchie, too, but they wouldn’t let me!” She sobbed as if her heart would break.
Bina put her arms around the girl. “You are helping them both right now, this very minute, Amalya. Remember that.”
“But you haven’t told us what he did to you, Amalya,” Johnny said gently. “Won’t you tell us about yourself?”
Her pretty face drained of color. “It was nothing like he did to Menchie and Eli. Sometimes, though, he’d hit my back with a whip. He said he liked the sound it made against me.” She closed her lips, trembling.
There was more, Bina felt. Much more. A beautiful fourteen-year-old girl in that house among those beastly men. But she didn’t press. Truthfully, she had heard all she could stand for one day. And it was certainly enough to issue an arrest warrant through Interpol to have Shem Tov extradited. But was it enough to get a conviction?
29
Detective Tzedek walked in through her front door, kicking off her shoes, then reaching for the remote. She just wanted there to be some normal voices in the room, something to drown out the incessant repetition of words and phrases going through her head along with unbearable, nightmarish images. She made herself a cup of hot green tea, sitting on the couch and staring at the screen without seeing or hearing anything.
This was taking over her life, she thought helplessly, spreading evil and darkness over all the good things she believed in: marriage, motherhood, faith. She picked up the phone and called her mother.
“I came home early. I’ll pick up the kids today.”
Both Ronnie and Lilach’s kindergarten and nursery school were in walking distance of Bina’s house, but it was her mother who usually picked them up, caring for them until Daniella got home from work.
“Hard day, honey?” her mother said with sympathy.
A child survivor of Auschwitz, her mother was one of the kindest people she knew. All that horror, all that evil, had just washed over her, never touching her essential being. Daniella often thought it strange that she, a second-generation survivor, probably felt more hatred for those responsible, people she would never forgive or forget. At a very young age, she told her mother that after the Holocaust every Jew needed a gun and to know how to use it. But her mother had simply smiled and shaken her head. “Not everyone,” her mother disagreed. “That is why we have Jewish soldiers and Jewish policemen,” she’d say. “Why we live in a Jewish country.” It was one of the reasons Bina had gone straight from the army to the police, starting out as a policewoman and working her way up to detective.
“How can you tell how hard my day was, Mom?”
“You never come home early.”
Bina smiled to herself as she hung up. No one knew her better than her mother. The bond between them was so strong, so intimate, so protective and caring. She’d never imagined the word “mother” could mean anything else, until now.
As she set out to fetch her children, she breathed deeply, exhaling her stress. It was a beautiful spring day in May, the smell of blooming jasmine and honeysuckle perfuming the streets of Talbiya. Once she retrieved her children, she walked along slowly, holding Ronnie by the hand and pushing Lilach in her stroller. Their childish voices rose and fell, tinkling with innocent laughter and incessant sweet chatter. They sang songs and told her stories about the pictures they had drawn and the new tunes they were learning for Shavuot, the harvest festival. Once home, they ate their usual pre-dinner snacks of fruit and cold chocolate milk. And when she bathed them that night, she took a long time drying off their childish bodies, unable to stop herself from kissing Lilach’s little chubby wrists and ankles over and over again, until the child finally wiggled out of her grasp, begging her to stop.
She had been brought up to believe in God. To believe in people. To believe that evil didn’t really exist, that it was simply an absence of good, the way darkness is an absence of light.
She couldn’t believe that anymore.
Evil was real, a force in the world. The Holocaust had proven that. A million and a half children tortured and murdered by mass killers who considered themselves idealists, pioneers, visionaries of a new master race. It had happened in her own century, not in the Middle Ages, at a time when people went to the movies and spoke on the tele
phone.
And now, terrorists claiming loyalty to Allah slaughtered and kidnapped children in schools, used them as human shields to hide rocket launchers, sanctioned the sexual abuse of little girls by old men, calling it “marriage.” The Internet was flooded with thousands of images of child pornography, each one a horrific murder of some innocent child’s soul. And these images were uploaded by people all over the world of every race and religion. It was a war against children, and many of the people involved called themselves religious idealists or strict fundamentalists.
Of one thing she had no doubt: if you hurt a child, you could not be a God-fearing person of any religion, certainly not of the Jewish religion. She took out a Bible, flipping through the pages. There it was, the passage she’d been looking for, Leviticus 18, verse 21: And you may not make any of your children go through the fire as an offering to Molech, and you may not put shame on the name of your God: I am the Lord. And those who did were to be ostracized, condemned, stoned.
She tried to imagine the Jews of biblical times, people who had seen and heard God in the desert, laying their precious babies on the outstretched arms of a cruel stone statue, watching as the fire in its belly consumed their children. It had happened around the corner from her, in the Valley of Hinnom, where people now picnicked. What irresistible force was it that could make a person go against everything decent, everything human, allowing him to hurt a child, his own child?
Perhaps it was the other side of the same yearning that urged him to connect to love, goodness, and the Divine? The devil, whoever he was, needed that yearning, needed that idealism to produce the opposite. Perhaps even a Shem Tov must have once sincerely hungered to reach God, a longing that had taken a 180-degree turn to the opposite. Certainly Daniella and Shlomie Goodman had been pursuing goodness when they had been seduced to pursue the opposite.
She went to her computer and Googled the word “devil.”
In kabbalah, he was called the Sitra Achra, literally, “the other side,” the side opposed to the sacred and divine, the side of impurity and darkness. In Islam, he was Shaytan, the “whisperer,” who speaks into the chests of men and women, urging them to commit sin. To Catholics he was the fallen angel, Lucifer, the great seducer, who destroys man’s desire to be good out of envy. The Hindus actually consecrated temples to the worship of Kali, the all-devouring, who delights in destruction, perdition, and murder in any form.