by Batya Gur
Michael looked at Ezra Bashari, whose fingers were straining to hold up his hanging head, so far apart that each looked separate from the others. When they had taken off the sheet at the Forensic Institute, disclosing the mane of hair and the smashed face, Ezra Bashari had collapsed to the floor and lost consciousness. Michael had looked at Tzilla, who called in Dr. Solomon right away.
“It’s our daughter,” whispered Naeema Bashari, and something beyond pain, a kind of great astonishment, was evident in her whisper. She had clasped the slender ankle of the naked body with a hand tipped by wide, bluish fingernails and indicated the birthmark that marred the smooth thigh, and the wail she emitted grew sharper and lengthened into a prolonged, monotone scream that only after many long minutes was ended and shattered into its sounds. Michael shut his eyes. Steel cabinet after steel cabinet was penetrated by her cries, wall after wall. They filled the long corridor and hovered over the office floor and the lecture rooms until they came back and etched themselves on the inside of his head; like when he was a boy and had swum out into the sea and a huge wave came and blinded him.
Tzilla had whispered to Dr. Solomon: “When you’re done here, give her something too,” and she tugged gently at Naeema Bashari while she was still screaming and shepherded her gently out of the morgue into the long corridor and from there into the pathologist’s office. A moment later Solomon came in with a hypodermic in his hand. “You have to give her something,” said Tzilla.
She grasped the mother’s thin arm as the pathologist muttered: “We’ll give you something to calm you down, Mrs. . . .” He looked at Tzilla with a questioning glance.
“Bashari,” whispered Tzilla.
“Now, now, Mrs. Bashari,” said the pathologist between her choking sobs. “This will make you feel better, for a while,” and he stuck the tip of the hypodermic in her arm. After a few minutes the wails changed to sobs, which she kept up until they got her back home.
“We have to deal with Daddy dear, I very sadly fear,” Dr. Solomon war bled, and hurried to the room to which they had taken the father. It took quite a while before they restored him to consciousness. “Where is Netanel?” he mumbled when he opened his eyes, and since then Ezra Bashari hadn’t said a word.
Thus the hours passed—Yair brought them a pitcher of water and glasses, and in the ashtray the cigarette butts marked the passage of time—until it was possible to begin the initial clarification, though not yet the investigation itself. It was Yair who encouraged Naeema Bashari to talk, in the police car on their way back from the Forensic Institute to Jerusalem. Between sobs she had muttered in confusion: “She went to her girlfriend’s, that’s what she’d done. She’d just gone to visit a friend . . . Our flower . . . That was our Zahara . . . A flower, like her name, Zahara. There’s no Zahara . . . She’s gone . . .”
Michael, from his seat next to Bachar, who drove in silence, couldn’t manage to hear what Sergeant Yair was asking her, and he only picked up fragments of her replies: “She was twenty-two and a half . . . Born on Shavuot . . . After three sons . . . We couldn’t believe it . . . The child of our old age.” Her voice grew fainter: “Until we managed . . . Until we had a bit . . . With our own ten fingers . . . By ourselves . . . With no help . . . And Zahara . . . A flower.” She choked. “Again . . . I didn’t watch . . . Me . . . because of me . . .”
At the entrance to Jerusalem her weeping grew louder and she beat her chest with her fists and cried out again: “I didn’t watch over her. I never told anyone . . . I didn’t call her brothers all those times she came in late. I didn’t even worry at first. We thought she had gone to her girlfriend’s in Tel Aviv. A girl she met in the army. We shouldn’t have let her serve in the army. If it hadn’t been for her brothers, she wouldn’t have gone. A girl from an observant family has nothing to do there. What would she do there? We could have kept her at home, and would anyone have said anything? But her brothers put it into her head.”
While they were still in the police car, Michael asked for the friend’s name and address. “I have it written down at home,” moaned Naeema Bashari then, and he repeated the request when they were sitting in the living room. “Orit . . . No, Orly. Orly Shushan. She’s a journalist, an important journalist. She works at Ma’ariv, I think, or at Yedioth. I don’t have her phone number,” she said weakly. “Whenever I asked her, she said to me—Zahara—‘What do you need it for? I’ll call you.’”
“Orly Shushan,” Michael repeated, and nodded.
“I know the name,” muttered Tzilla, and when she went out of the room she put her mobile phone to use. Her voice out in the corridor was audible, decisive and energetic as she imposed tasks on the intelligence department.
Through the window, the front garden was visible, and from above a dentate leaf spiraled downward, this way and that, and drifted away from the fig tree from which it had detached itself. There had been a tree just like it at Michael’s parents’ house in the moshav, and during her last years his mother used to sit beneath it at twilight, in the lounge chair he had brought her for her seventy-first birthday (“When am I going to sit in it? Do you think I have time just to sit around? You spoil me too much,” she grumbled when she got it, but happiness sparkled in her eyes). On the blue stripes of the lounge chair she stretched her skinny legs, in dark stockings, and she rested her hands in her lap. There, on the lounge chair in the shade of the fig tree, he had found her one Friday evening, her legs stretched out along the stripes but her hands dangling down by her side, with her fingers, which had turned blue, touching the ground as if she were trying to reach the row of radishes and aerate the soil there. Her head was hanging to one side, like when she dozed, and when he closed her eyes in the darkening twilight a large purple fig fell at her feet, and he said to himself, This is it. And in his increasing weakness he noticed the serenity that enveloped her broad face and dark skin, the feel of which he remembered from his childhood, and for a moment he thought he heard her voice murmuring, as she sometimes did, although maybe sarcastically, at that time of day: “Every man beneath his vine and every man beneath his fig tree.”
He looked at the window. Mrs. Bashari was sitting with her back to it, and his eyes paused on the five entrances to the apartment block across the narrow street. The smooth, white marblelike façade, which was supposed to conceal the gray concrete, was a later addition to the helter-skelter construction of the 1950s, when thousands of immigrants had come all at once from North Africa, among them his own family, which had left Casablanca. When his parents arrived on the shores of Israel—this is what they told him when he grew up—his father set down his little three-year-old son, and knelt and kissed the sand. He died two years later. “Your father was a Zionist. He took it in with his mother’s milk, from his great-grandfather,” his mother once said to him, a short time before she died. She never spoke much about her first years in Israel, but from time to time, especially when she looked at her surroundings and touched the trunk of the fig tree she had planted during the first years, she would recall how they had driven them in the middle of the night north to a place she had never heard of, a new moshav where the hastily built cabins had not yet been inhabited. “There wasn’t anything there,” she said on another occasion, with a half-smile, “just two iron beds with mattresses, and there we were with six children. With his own hands your father built this house, and every day he said that it was a mitzvah to build the Land of Israel, that God had commanded it. That’s why it hurt him more than it hurt me, the attitude. He couldn’t believe that Jews could behave that way toward other Jews.”
They had apparently added the white facing to the gray apartment blocks in the neighborhood rehabilitation program. Not only did it not make the ugliness disappear—it emphasized it. It would have been better to have left the original walls; the thought ran through his mind, astonishingly, as if all he cared about was the spoiling of the landscape. Maybe it was because of the apartment he had bought a few days ago, here in the neighborhood, two stree
ts away. It too was in the Arab style: high ceilings, window niches, a rounded façade beyond which there was a large room that looked out onto the street. (“Remember that it’s an illusion, this spaciousness,” Linda the real estate agent had warned him, and she counted the square floor tiles to calculate the exact dimensions of the room. “Because of the height of the ceiling it seems to you that the room is larger than it really is.”)
In the Basharis’ living room, the original floor tiles were preserved, and around the pale blue mat the arabesques painted on them were visible. In the center of the mat stood a low coffee table on thin legs, and Ezra Bashari rested his arms on the glass surface. Pale heavy curtains were drawn back on either side of the large window, and on the background of the window Naeema Bashari rocked back and forth, back and forth. The rocking chair she sat in was covered in a coarse fabric and moved back and forth in the rhythm of her quiet sobs.
Tzilla returned to the room. “There’s no answer yet from Netanel Bashari,” she whispered to Michael. “No one is answering there and I didn’t want to leave a message.” Michael looked at his watch and scowled skeptically.
“What can I do?” she asked. “It will take her two hours to get here. That’s what she said. She doesn’t have a car and we have no one to send to bring her. She’s in Rishon LeZion now, interviewing some fortune-teller, a woman who reads coffee grinds.”
In the apartment block opposite them, over the railing of the balcony on the second floor, a rug with a Persian pattern was spread. A woman with her head wrapped in a colorful kerchief was thwacking it with a yellow straw carpet-beater, and when she tired she leaned on the railing and looked around. Against the stone wall beneath her slouched a fat little girl in a blue sweat suit that wasn’t her size anymore. The leather leash she was holding sank into the flesh of her hands, and at the other end of the leash a small poodle struggled and pulled in the opposite direction.
“I think we have something for you,” said the duty sergeant on the morning of the eve of the holiday. Early in the morning Mr. and Mrs. Bashari had come in to report their daughter’s disappearance, and after he had listened to their description of her, he looked at the photograph the mother had placed before him and felt immediately—this is what he whispered to Michael on the internal phone—“This is the one you found.”
In Michael’s office, with trembling hands Naeema Bashari undid the folds in the faded plastic bag in which she kept her identity card and handed it to Danny Balilty, who a moment earlier, when they came in, had moved away from the door and stopped, for the moment, his harangue about apartments. Quietly, Balilty seated himself on the low steel cupboard and took the photograph she handed him: a dark girl in a white dress, with straight black hair down to her shoulders, high cheekbones, narrowed eyes and a broad smile that made dimples appear in her cheeks. Then he looked at the identity card and when he straightened up, his belly stuck out and the bottom button of his ironed pink shirt threatened to burst. Across his face spread a kind of grimace that Michael knew very well—sarcastic and victorious scorn—and his small eyes narrowed even more.
“Did you see the address?” Balilty handed the photograph and the blue identity card to Michael. Michael glanced at the card and concealed his astonishment with an equable shrug of his shoulders. “Two streets away from you,” whispered Balilty. “Two streets away from where you bought!”
“Will wonders never cease,” Michael said with extreme indifference, and handed the identity card back to Naeema Bashari. She wrapped the plastic bag around and around the identity card, pushed it to the bottom of her handbag and looked at them expectantly. Michael continued to examine the broadly smiling girl, considering her features beyond the smile.
“We wanted to come with our son, Netanel,” said the mother. “He’s a professor at the university and he understands about . . . He is more knowledgeable . . . But we couldn’t find him. All our sons—we couldn’t reach any of them,” she explained. “My daughter-in-law . . . I phoned my daughter-in-law yesterday. She hadn’t seen her, and she also said that my son, Netanel, hadn’t seen Zahara for several days, but she was actually just . . . She had people there, so she wasn’t paying much attention, and we . . .”
When Michael asked them to accompany him to the Forensic Institute, Ezra Bashari blanched. With slender fingers he pushed his tie aside and extracted a tiny book from the inner pocket of his jacket, and after he licked his forefinger with his tongue, he began to page through it and mutter.
“I would like my son, Netanel, to come with us,” said the mother, and Michael dialed at her request, first his home and then his mobile, and finally his office at the university.
“There’s no alternative,” he said to Naeema Bashari. “We tried, but it’s impossible to get hold of him or your daughter-in-law.”
This couple resembled each other in their slenderness, their low, bent stature and their alarmed expressions (“We’ve never been to the police before,” said Naeema Bashari when she entered the room and when she got into the car and when she got out of it), and they even resembled each other in their delicate, miniature facial features. They made him think about his mother. Their two slim bodies leaned forward and they obediently answered every question. Their frightened, serious faces, the unreserved trust they placed in the duty sergeant and Michael and even Balilty—all these reminded him of his mother sitting in offices of the municipal council and waiting there submissively for the permit to enclose the porch.
They covered the distance between Jerusalem and the Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv in silence. Ezra Bashari’s mutterings and sighs and his fast leafing through the thin pages of his Psalter were also audible in the front seat. On the way back he didn’t read any more Psalms.
When they returned to Jerusalem and the police car drove past the street where the apartment he had bought was, Michael glanced surreptitiously at the corner house, because he had not yet got used to the idea that he would be living there, behind the windows and the closed shutters on the second floor. Since he had left his parents’ home, when he was sent at the age of twelve to the boarding school for gifted children in Jerusalem, none of the places he had lived had been home. Even the walls of his parents’ house, when he went back there for the first Passover vacation, had radiated strangeness and alienation. The steel springs of his narrow childhood bed creaked when he tried to find his old place in it. The father of his ex-wife, Niva, had bought them an apartment. She, the mother of his only son, had furnished it in consultation with her parents, and there too he never felt at home. And ever since he left (“Sucker,” said Balilty years later; “You could have got half of it; it was also registered in your name”), he had been living in rented apartments and saw them only as way stations.
“This is where the neighborhood begins,” said Eli Bachar when they came to the intersection. The Basharis were silent in their seats. “If you take a right it’s Emek Refaim and the German Colony, and if you take a left it’s Bethlehem Road, the main street of Baka, and that’s where we’re going.” Sergeant Yair was not familiar with this part of Jerusalem, and through Eli Bachar’s voice flitted the tone of a tired cabdriver trying to sound authoritative.
“I’ve never been here before,” remarked Sergeant Yair as they got out of the car, with Tzilla supporting the Basharis. “I’ve passed through but I’ve never . . . What kind of people live here?”
“What do you mean ‘what kind of people’?” wondered Eli Bachar.
“What kind of people—from which community? This city is divided into neighborhoods and—”
“There’s everything here,” said Eli Bachar. “All kinds. There are Moroccans from the 1950s, who were evacuated from the transit camp in Talpiot. Ask him”—he indicated Michael, who had already got out of the car—“and there are even some Arabs who stayed after 1948, and there are a few Greeks who have kept their houses since then. And there are rich American and French Jews who have been coming here since 1967. There are shopkeepers from the Mahaneh
Yehuda market and there are yuppies. There’s everything here. University professors and criminals and lawyers. Whatever you want—you’ve got it here. Romanians, German Jews, Peace Now, ultra-Orthodox from Shas and also from America. Even Bulgarians.”
“Why ‘even’?”
“There aren’t many Bulgarians in Jerusalem,” explained Eli Bachar. “They went to the coastal plain, to Jaffa. But some of them do live here.”
“The houses are pretty, but it’s far, isn’t it?”
“Far from what?” asked Eli Bachar.
“Far from downtown, from work, from the—”
“What are you talking about?” said Eli Bachar. “Do you know how much a house costs here? This is a central neighborhood, one of the most important in Jerusalem, even if it’s at the edge. That’s the way it is with this city.” He sighed as he slammed the car door shut. “The center is dead and everything important is at the margins. Look, have a look at the shops on Emek Refaim and Bethlehem Road. There’s everything here. You can never leave here for an entire year and get along without ever going downtown, even without a mall.” He hastened his pace and touched Michael’s arm. “Isn’t that so?”
“Not now, Eli,” answered Michael. “Later. We have to go in and start. They’re waiting. And you—” he watched Tzilla and the Basharis as they walked slowly up the path to the house—“you’re going back to the office.”
