Pattern crimes

by William Bayer

  "You were right, you know?"

  "About what?" David asked.

  "Something you said to me last spring."

  "What was that?"

  "You said you felt that we were very much alike-that we both wanted to get to the bottom of things and neutralize the demons." Avraham paused. "I mocked you for saying it. Mocked you many times for the work you chose to do."

  "I remember…" Was the old man really going to apologize?

  "Now I know that you were right. Not only about our being alike, although I believe your observation there is most acute. I also think you were right for making the choice you did. Your work is immensely valuable, David. You do render the demons harmless."

  David was speechless. His father could have given him no greater gift than this: acknowledgment that he, the surviving son, had been passed the torch, and now was carrying it well.

  His eyes strayed to the photographs of his mother and Gideon. Avraham must have noticed because he suddenly began to speak of them.

  "She and I destroyed him," he said. "Instead of loving each other, as we did when you were young, we focused all our love on him. We struggled over him, and, in the end, I think we tore him apart."

  "Maybe it's time, father, for you to forgive yourself. All this tortured thinking-it can't do you any good."

  Avraham did not answer, but David thought he saw a subtle nod.

  To divert him David told him the latest news on the case: Ephraim Cohen's attempt, through his attorney, to have the videotaped confessions ruled inadmissible.

  "He wants a political trial so he can claim the role of victim. He'll depict me as his persecutor."

  "What will happen?"

  "He doesn't have a chance. Rafi's confession nails him and even Levin's disowned him now. There's a big shake-up going on inside Shin Bet. Lots of fancy talk about abuses of trust and power."

  "The others?"

  "Stone can't come back. He's persona non grata. No way to touch him-basically all he did was write a check. Gati's still away in France. I think it'll be a long time before we see him again. And Katzer is still raving and holding rallies. He predicts he'll be prime minister in six or seven years."

  "Unfortunately, a lot of people would like to see that happen. Katzer is our collective sickness, the dark side of everything we built. When people like him and Gati talk about Israel, they always end up discussing territory. They don't understand what Israel is. The territory here." Avraham pointed to his head.

  "There was a public brawl in Tel Aviv the other night. Katzer zealots battling Peace Now sympathizers. They smashed up a cafe on Dizengoff, toppled tables and broke a lot of mirrors."

  Avraham thought about that for a while, and then finally he nodded. "Perhaps instead of breaking the mirrors," he said, "they should look more closely at their reflected faces."

  Later, outside on narrow Hevrat Shas, David found himself surrounded by youngsters. They were pouring out of the yeshivas, young men and boys garbed in black, and they pressed against him as they passed. But strangely he found he was not annoyed. For the first time inmemory he did not recoil, nor wish to break loose from contact with these people, nor did he see, as he looked into their faces, suspicion or contempt, nor feel, on his own part, any of his usual distaste.

  A man his age, a rabbi, with milky skin and heavy spectacles and a thick black beard, nodded as he approached. David nodded back. Their eyes met, they smiled, and then David felt something pass between them, some fine, rare form of acknowledgment.

  He thought about it as he walked away, asked himself what it was. Recognition, he decided, recognition that although each had chosen a different path, an opposite way to live, still they were connected. And that although this meeting of their eyes would be broken off in a moment, still they were both men and Jews and thus tolerance and even love were possible.

  As he stood on the edge of Me'a Shearim, looking across the rubble-strewn lot that separated the ultra-orthodox quarter from the Christian churches and hospices and nunneries to the east, he was struck suddenly by an extraordinary change in the quality of the light. The western sky had luminesced, was now a soft dark violet. The sun, covered a few moments before by thick ribbons of clouds, had slipped and found a window; now a thin band of it, a bar of fire, burned out of the darker sky like a spotlight.

  Perhaps two or three times in his life David had seen light like this, slanting in from the west, flowing down upon Jerusalem. It was a hard strong focused light that hit the stones, then seemed to penetrate them, then etched long velvet shadows on the ground.

  The effect was magical. As David walked toward the Old City he stopped several times and stared. He saw other pedestrians doing the same, and drivers stopping their cars, then getting out so that they too might feel the radiance. Jerusalem was being transformed. Its beauty was being multiplied. And as each moment passed, and the sun slipped a little lower and its color deepened, all the stones of the city seemed to come alive. The shadows lengthened, and the lines and angles of buildings grew sharper and the curves of domes softer, and towers seemed to stand straighter and walls to enclose more warmly and steps to invite and arches to protect and doorways to beckon, and he thought: This is special. I must not forget this; I must remember this afternoon for the rest of my life.

  He decided to walk home. He entered the Old City by the Damascus Gate. There were mobs of people in the little square but very little noise. He was surprised. Where were the dissonance, cruel clash of languages, wails, usual sounds of torment and abuse? Instead a oneness of sound, almost mellifluous. He recognized it as harmony.

  Through the Moslem Quarter, across the Via Dolorosa, down El Wad, then through the long vaulted tunnel that led to the Western Wall. The palpable anger he usually sensed when he crossed these unmarked frontiers between the Quarters was not apparent to him tonight.

  The sky was darker now, deep purple like wine, but the sun, nearly red, still burned through hard and strong. The floodlights had not yet been turned on, but the glowing Wall beckoned to him. He gazed at it, then drawn by some instinct he did not understand, approached, picked up a cardboard yarmulke at the barrier, set it on his head, and strode closer, paused, then moved directly to the stones.

  Religious men stood around him; the air vibrated with their prayers. And the rough surface of the rocks vibrated too, dancing before the dying sun. The crevices, crowded with petitions, crushed one upon the other, seemed to devour the light. Just in front of him was darkness; he reached forward, touched the place, placed his palm against it. It was his own shadow he was touching and the stone that held it felt warm. Another connection, he thought. It was as if, finally, he had touched the city's heart.

  Later he stood in the center of the plaza and gazed at the buildings all around. The golden dome of the Dome of the Rock caught the dying fire, held it a while, and glowed. Beside the shelter on the top tier above the rabbinical tunnel he made out soldiers, and, on a ledge within the Mount, several men, garbed in cloaks, staring down. He turned, looked up at the apartments just behind, found Gati's great window, and saw that it was black. It was from here the general would have viewed his spectacle of destruction: the bomb floating down to meet the Dome, the explosion, the fire, and then the beginning of the Holy War. Except that Gati hadn't cared about Armageddon, or the rebuilding of the Temple, or even recapture of the "high ground," the Temple Mount. What he had wanted was a provocation that would ignite a War of Wars. His dream was of a final decisive war of conquest, in which all Arabs would finally be driven from the land, and the borders of the Jewish State would become those of the biblical "Greater Israel."

  A mad scheme. It would never have worked, and it would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Three fanatics, each with his own horrible agenda, conspiring together in a van…

  He left the plaza, ascended into the Jewish Quarter. Here, on this cool autumn night, the narrow pedestrian streets were still. He passed a soldier in battle dress, submachine gun hanging from hi
s shoulder, kissing his girl in a quiet corner.

  Lights burned in apartments. He peered in and saw families, people talking, children playing, women preparing meals. These domestic scenes filled him with a great longing to be home.

  He rushed through the maze of alleys, then out through the Zion Gate. Descending Mount Zion, there came a point when he caught sight of his own apartment across the valley of Hinnom. His window was lit, which meant that Anna was home. He strode faster, and, on the descent, began to run. The air, scented with an intermingling of pine and rosemary, parted easily before him. He was barely winded when, a quarter hour later, he arrived in Abu Tor.

  En Rogel: a special street of old Arab houses and new apartment buildings and gentle dogs that communicated with savage barks. Hinnom was all blackness now. The Arab town of Shiloah sparkled in the east. The Jerusalem of Gold Folklore Club was empty, and the street lamps projected shadows upon the cars parked along the curb.

  The moment he entered number sixteen he heard the music. Faintly at first, as he passed the doors of apartments where people were listening to radios and TV news, then more clearly on the second floor. He thought: It the sonata. She finally gotten herself a record. But as he climbed to the third floor he realized this wasn't true. There was no piano part, which meant that the music was live. But played by whom? Could another cellist be working with Anna now?

  Whoever this cellist was, he was playing the sonata well, David thought. Playing it very well. He paused outside the door and listened. Then he thought: Is it possible? Could it be?

  He opened the door quietly. Anna was perched on her stool facing the window. Her back was to him, her body was swaying; the music swelled up and filled the room.

  She was playing, and when she sensed his presence she turned to him. He saw the triumph on her face. And then he realized that even as he had entered the building he had known that the music could not have been played by anybody else.

  He walked to the couch, sat down, and listened. Her eyes glistened with pleasure and a glow of conquest reddened her cheeks. She bowed and swayed and her expression said everything. She had it now-every phrase, every nuance. She'd mastered it. Now the music was hers.

  Later he thought: Perhaps now too this city belongs to me.

  It was past midnight. Anna was asleep. The sound of her breathing filled the room. David sat before the large window staring out at Jerusalem. The buildings were the same-the hills, the lights, the shadows and silhouettes. On a thousand clear nights like this he had gazed upon them. But now, on this particular night, at last he was seeing them whole.

  It was the pattern of Jerusalem finally revealed, the pattern he had been seeking and which until now he had not permitted himself to see. He recalled the events of the afternoon: the way the light had struck and made perfect all the domes and minarets, the look of sad pride in his father's eyes, the nod of shared acknowledgment with the rabbi, and the satisfaction on Anna's face when he had come upon her at the moment of her conquest. He knew that each of these events was a part of some inexpressible whole, and that his embracing of this whole meant that at last his fractured world had cohered.

  Staring out at the moonlit city he trembled at the lucid power of this vision. It was as if, until this moment, there had been no design. But now, like iron filings suddenly organized in the presence of a magnet, everything, every person and place he knew, came together in a pattern demarcated by the city spread below.

  It was a beautiful pattern, moral too: Everything was connected, every life touched every life, and he himself was part of all of it.

  As he gazed out marveling, he knew that this vision was one he would not forget. And he knew too that if one day he confronted chaos again, worked a case again that would perplex, obsess, and taunt, he would be able to look back upon this night, recall that he had seen the pattern, and then his world would become orderly again.

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