by Batya Gur
“What? What was she wearing?”
“Wide black trousers and a black sweater,” replied Eli Bachar.
“Why did she buy sanitary napkins?” Michael asked Tzilla.
“Maybe she was spotting. Maybe her mother . . . checked the supply of napkins so she was acting . . . was pretending that everything was all right . . . that she had her period,” said Tzilla thoughtfully. “And maybe”—she suddenly sat up straight in her chair—“she was intending to end the pregnancy. I spoke to the gynecologist who signed the prescription for the pills. She had been his patient until about a year ago, and since then he hasn’t seen her. He said that she had been taking birth control pills since she was eighteen, and that even the first time she came to him she had been having full sexual relations. He can’t understand how she got pregnant, unless she stopped taking the pills. And he can’t understand that, either, because she was terribly afraid of getting pregnant. He remembers her very well,” explained Tzilla. “Apparently she really was something, that Zahara.”
“We saw that in the video, too,” said Balilty.
“From the age of eighteen? Full sexual relations? With whom?” demanded Michael.
“How should I know?” protested Balilty.
“Baka, the area of Bethlehem Road—how many secrets can you keep there?”
“Okay, I understand,” said Balilty in an insulted tone. “So it’ll take another day. Today’s already a holiday. No one is going to—”
“I want an answer to that simple question: Who was she sleeping with at the age of eighteen, and who got her pregnant? A girl whom everyone in the neighborhood knew—it’s not unattainable information.”
“At our moshav,” said Yair pensively, “there was this woman, like a nun. No one—her house was closed, she didn’t speak to anyone. And this is a moshav. Everyone knows everything, worse than a kibbutz, and all of a sudden she was pregnant, and no one dared to ask her. And she had a son and no one knew who the father was, and not even—”
“Not again!” protested Balilty. “What is this, Peyton Place?”
“I’m not saying it’s the same,” said Yair without looking at Balilty. “It’s not always that way, but if a woman wants to—she can hide things, especially if it’s a onetime thing.”
“What are you talking about, a onetime thing? What are you talking about?” fumed Balilty. “Birth control pills since the age of eighteen!”
“Who remembers what she did when she was eighteen? Maybe since then she didn’t—”
“And her mother doesn’t know anything about it,” murmured Tzilla.
“Okay, okay.” Balilty flung his arms up toward the ceiling. “I give up. It doesn’t matter. Let’s suppose you’re right. Let’s say there was a onetime thing and suddenly she’s pregnant—who did she go to the attic with? Huh? Forget the history. We’re talking about now. Do you intend to find out who the sonofabitch was, or not?”
Sergeant Yair looked at Balilty and said nothing.
“Right. Now he’s not saying anything,” said the intelligence officer triumphantly. “Shuts up like a . . .” He looked at Yair and smiled slyly. “Like a gecko.”
Chapter 7
There was just a baking pan left in the sink from all the cooking for the holiday, and now that she had completed all her other chores, Nessia was scrubbing it hard until it gleamed. Out the kitchen window to her right, it was not yet completely dark, but the apartment was already cold and she shivered as she examined the square enamel baking pan with bits of food that would have been stuck to it forever if she waited until after dinner. This pan, it was better to clean it really well, or otherwise her mother would dig it out of the cupboard and show her every spot. Again she scrubbed the last of the spots with steel wool, and then she rinsed off the crud that was clinging to the steel wool, and she dried the pan with the dish towel lengthwise and widthwise, until she could see her face reflected in it, round and blurred. She put the rubber stopper in the drain and sprayed bleach into it, and with Scotch-Brite she scrubbed the bottom of the sink and rinsed it twice, and when she shut the faucet she heard the whoosh of water being poured from the bucket—her mother had washed the floor in the bedroom—and wondered whether she would have a bit of time now to herself, before her mother gave her another chore. Through the window, in the dimness of the emptied street, she could still see one police car parked in front of the Basharis’ house. They won’t be sitting in the sukkah tonight, she thought, and she wiped her hands on the sides of her pants and headed with the stealthy steps of a cat toward the front door.
“Where are you going? Haven’t you showered yet?” Her mother’s voice sounded muffled. Maybe she had bent down and was cleaning under the bed. Even at that moment, when she was busy with the bucket and the rag, she heard every sound in the front of the apartment. Nessia had already opened the door, and when Rosie stood up and wagged her tail, she sat her back down quietly and said to the wall of the corridor: “I need some more decorations for the sukkah.”
“Leave that sukkah alone now. It’s always the sukkah. Have you finished the kitchen? And you still have to take your shower,” she heard her mother shout as she closed the door behind her and slipped down to the shelter. In its depths, among the treasures that had accumulated in the cardboard carton, she also kept the set of colors that she had found in the stationery store downtown. She still didn’t dare use them, because every time she touched the box she remembered how risky it had been to get them out of there, in front of the guard who stood at the door and didn’t take his eyes off her; only when he had been distracted for a moment had she stuck the box into her sweatpants. She was very scared then, when she walked out of the store and as she ran down the street in the direction of the bus stop, ignoring the irritation on the inside of her thighs the way she hid the sores that had developed there from her mother. Not for a moment did she look back. Now she intended to take out the gold felt pen and color the leaves that Peter had cut out for her that morning, to stick onto the blankets that formed the walls of the sukkah. All year long the naked skeleton of the sukkah stood there, and only on Sukkot was it wrapped in old blankets and white sheets that had yellowed with time.
She also intended to take another peek into the gray handbag. Nessia was not stupid: If they murdered Zahara, they would be looking for the handbag, and they could even come to search their shelter, so she had to find a new place to hide all her treasures, and especially the gray handbag. She knew that she should give it to the police, or at least to the tall man—he wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he was also a policeman, the commander of them all—who spoke especially to her, her, out of everyone else, and asked her to help him. It was strange that such an important man, of whom everyone asked permission, nevertheless had such sad eyes and hardly smiled at all; he looked to her like someone from a movie, and so was she, for a moment, when he told her to contact him if she remembered anything. Thanks to him, in her own eyes she was tall and slender like a movie star, someone who acted in Walker or even Beverly Hills, but she couldn’t part with the purse. It was too beautiful, and she would never have another one like it, or in any case until the spell came true.
On television, she had once seen how thieves take the money and throw away the wallet. Maybe she could do the opposite. Take the wallet and throw away—no, not throw away, give back—the money; but she also didn’t want to part from the money. She kept all the bills in a plastic bag inside her underpants, because never in her life would she have so much money again. And she also didn’t want to part from the little lipstick, or from the bottle of perfume and the mascara and all the other things, which were hers now. And what good would it do them if she gave them back? What they needed was the papers, the notes and the little diary and the identity card and the plastic cards, and anyway they were of no use to her. So it would be enough to give them back, and she should just do it quickly, before they come around to search in the shelter.
But how could she give them back? They would ask
her where all the things came from and they would even think that she was the one who had stolen them, and this time she really hadn’t stolen, she had found. How could she give the tall, sad man the papers, without him knowing that they came from her? A wave of heat flashed through her belly as she thought about this. And the scary notes she found there, with all those words she didn’t understand, what would they do with them? Again her belly fluttered. It can wait in the meantime, maybe until after dinner, when she goes out with Rosie for a short walk. This is what she decided as she pushed open the heavy iron door and stood in the doorway. But if they come here, she said to herself, and they look hard, in any case she would be in big trouble.
Just as she was about to enter the thick darkness inside the shelter, she heard the door of their apartment opening and her mother’s voice, high and shrill: “Nessia, Nessia, where are you?” And something in this shout, which she hadn’t expected at all, caused her to leave the door of the shelter and rush up the stairs and stand breathless in front of her mother and say only: “I went to look for . . .” But her mother only wanted her to shower and get dressed in her holiday clothes before Yigal and Peter came. Afterward, Nessia consoled herself, after dinner and after Mother falls asleep, she would be able to sneak down to the shelter again and make sure that no one had touched the gray handbag. And the leaves that she wanted to color with the gold felt pen, they could also wait until tomorrow. After all, the holiday lasted for a whole week.
And at that very moment, shortly after the holiday began, after the building at the Russian Compound had quieted down a bit and from the window on the second floor the light cast by the streetlamp was etched on the asphalt beneath it—at that very moment Michael Ohayon was drumming his fingers on his desk, because the investigation wasn’t making any progress and he hadn’t been able to extract anything from his interlocutor. Orly Shushan’s protruding brown eyes were fixed on him as before, full of expression; had he been asked to define that expression Michael would have hesitated between strained persistence and admiration. There were moments when it was possible to think she was mocking him. In any case, she looked away from him because of the exaggerated unhappiness she was demonstrating as she reminded him how she had tried to interview him for a profile right at the beginning of her career as a journalist and how he had rebuffed her outright then. He himself remembered neither the attempts nor the rebuff, and now as she sat there opposite him in the investigation—Tzilla had refused to leave him alone with “that journalist everyone knows is a barracuda”—Michael interrupted the flow of her speech and turned on the tape recorder. Tzilla sat opposite the corner of the desk, the yellow pad in front of her and her hand poised to write.
In reply to his question, Orly Shushan recounted her first, “fateful” meeting with Zahara Bashari. It was evident that this was not the first time she had told this story; how, when she had been an education officer in the career army at the girls’ boot camp and was walking past the showers, she had suddenly heard that deep, dark, exciting voice from the gut singing that passage from the Song of Songs, “My love is gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices,” and how she had stood there, enchanted by the voice and by the song that she hadn’t heard since she was a girl, and how, after a moment, she had gone into the showers and among the girls from the A Platoon she had seen “this girl, drying her hair on an army towel and without moving and without any mannerisms, still half-wet and with all the girls standing there and listening to her, from inside the showers or on those benches they stand on to get dressed, and that was a picture it is impossible to forget.” Orly Shushan peeked at the yellow writing pad as Tzilla turned a page that had been filled. “And immediately I summoned her to my office and—how shall I put this?” She looked around as if searching for words it was obvious she was going to find and that had served her not once and not twice but many times when she had told this story. “I fell completely in love with her.”
When Orly Shushan left the army she knew she would not return to her parents’ home in the Kiryat Menachem neighborhood of Jerusalem (“They, my parents, are from a different generation. They came here from Morocco, at the beginning of the 1950s, and straightaway they were sent to a public housing project in Kiryat Menachem.”) And there, in the small apartment (“five children and the parents in two and a half rooms”), is where she spent her childhood. “I’m the child of their old age, like Zahara and like you,” she hastened to add, and her eyes fixed on Michael and opened wide and bulged even more. “Because of this I so much wanted to write about you. I felt . . . I felt that perhaps there was a kindred spirit here. I wanted . . . I wanted to show how even from there, from children of immigrants from North Africa, stars can emerge—”
Tzilla quietly cleared her throat, but Michael was in no need of her warning; a wave of disgust rose in him because of the counterfeit shared fate she was forcing on him, and he didn’t say a single word in response, but insisted on continuing his questions about the nature of her relationship with Zahara. With that same devoted look, Orly Shushan talked instead about her path as a reporter—first writing for a local newspaper, and very quickly (“It’s unbelievable how quickly. After four months they called me in and made me the offer”) for a national newspaper, and how at such a young age she had become a star journalist because of the profiles she succeeded in writing, and how meanwhile Zahara had completed her military service, but did not move to Tel Aviv as she had dreamed.
“I did. I have an apartment on Melchett Street. I had enough of this choking Jerusalem. I wouldn’t come back here for any price.”
“Why not?” injected Michael.
“Isn’t it obvious? Everyone is fleeing this city . . .”
“No,” he corrected, “not everyone. Why didn’t Zahara move to Tel Aviv as she had dreamed?”
“Oh, that. For all kinds of reasons. First of all she didn’t have the money, and she also knew that it would break her parents, and she found a job right away in Jerusalem. Anyway, she also has Linda here, who helped her, a good friend of her oldest brother, and also . . .” She began and stopped.
“Also what?” insisted Michael.
“It was like . . . like she wanted to move to Tel Aviv like everyone else, but there was something that kept her here, something . . . something that . . . I don’t know, but right away I understood that all the talk about Tel Aviv was just talk, not serious.”
“A man maybe?”
“You mean someone specific in Jerusalem? No. I’d know, wouldn’t I? Because I knew about everything she had going and . . .”
“But you didn’t know who she was seeing?”
“That’s just the thing.” She breathed deeply. “I didn’t. That is, she wasn’t seeing people. She didn’t want to. I thought that she . . . and I also asked her, ‘What’s with you?’ I said to her, ‘Do you just want to sit around like this and be an old maid?’”
“And what did she say?”
“She? She didn’t answer. She laughed. At first I thought she had something going either with someone who was married or something else, I don’t know what. In any case, she had some secret.”
He spent some time on the standard questions: What exactly happened the last time they met, what had Zahara been wearing and did she look as usual; whether there was anyone who hated Zahara (“Zahara? It’s obvious you didn’t know her. She was so incredible, an in-CRED-ible person. Anyone who saw her just had to love her. There’s no one who didn’t!”); and whether she had any idea who could have caused Zahara to go of her own free will to that attic, among the water tanks.
“Of her own free will? Are you sure? Didn’t they murder her first and then bring her up there?”
Michael shook his head and said that she had gone up the ladder of her own free will. An expression of disbelief appeared on the reporter’s face, and she said: “I think that she never went all the way with anyone . . . I thought that she was a virgin. People came on to her all the time and she . . . nothing.”
&nb
sp; “Are you sure? That there wasn’t anyone?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“She’d definitely been with at least one man,” said Michael in a matter-of-fact way as he followed the body that tensed and the eyes that narrowed. “This emerged without a doubt from the pathological examination.”
“Listen,” said the journalist in an annoyed tone of voice. “You can see that I don’t know anything about this, and I also don’t believe it. I don’t care about a ‘pathological examination,’ I simply don’t believe it. Zahara told me everything. I knew about everyone who tried to come on to her. There were so many. Believe me, there’s nothing that—”
“Start counting,” said Michael.
“Counting? Counting what?” “Counting everyone who came on to her. Name them.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not like that. I didn’t always know who . . . Sometimes at a café, sometimes at a pub, in the ticket line for a movie, once near the video store. Who didn’t? The guy from the video store and the pizza delivery boy—no one could remain indifferent to that beauty of hers, but I’m telling you, she didn’t go out with anyone, anyone! It was as if . . . Now that you’re asking, I think that she acted like someone, like . . . as though she was being faithful to someone, but I had no idea! I hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on in her head!”
“Being faithful?”
“Yes. As if . . . How can I put it? As if she had . . . as though she was waiting for someone who was a prisoner.”
Tzilla, who raised her head from the yellow writing pad, looked at Orly inquiringly. Her long silver earrings tinkled delicately as she shook her head and said quietly: “A week or two ago in the weekend magazine you interviewed the wife of that officer who’s being held prisoner by the Hezbollah, didn’t you?”
“Yes, three weeks ago, but what’s that got to do with it?”
