Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Michael lit a cigarette and placed the porcelain ashtray on his covered knees.

  “So what you’re saying is that it’s the guy’s role to initiate and to run after the girl and court her and convince her and all that, right?”

  “Of course it’s the guy’s role.” Ada threw him a challenging look. For a moment he didn’t know whether she was being serious or teasing, having a bit of fun, and the dim light cast yellow shadows in her eyes when she said with great feeling: “What did you want? For me to run after you? You never tried again after the work camp. Every evening at the camp, a whole week. And after that—nothing.”

  Even though Michael could not recall that it had happened “every evening,” he didn’t want to pursue the argument there. Instead he remembered how he had asked about her when they went back to school at the beginning of twelfth grade, and how it turned out that she had left the boarding school. “You weren’t there anymore,” he said defensively. “After that you weren’t . . .” Suddenly it occurred to him to ask what he hadn’t asked at their previous meetings. “Why did you leave school?”

  Ada lowered her eyes. “My father was dying then,” she said quickly, as if it was hard for her to speak. “My mother needed . . . She couldn’t manage alone and I had to . . . I completed my matriculation exams afterward, before I . . . before I married Jedediah, and before we went to Peru. Why didn’t you look for me?”

  “I thought you had a boyfriend, that you weren’t interested,” he repeated, because he felt that this was what she really wanted to talk about and if they had this dialogue, he would also understand other things.

  Ada beat her hand on the down quilt, and he touched her arm to calm her down, but she still said angrily: “Who told you? Just on the basis of rumors? I never told you anything about him, and maybe I would have left him for you, if only you had looked for me. It’s very simple—you didn’t love me and you didn’t want to bother.”

  Michael laughed inwardly. This conversation, with its circles and repetitions, amused him, but there was great seriousness in its depths. “And you?” he challenged her. “If you wanted me so badly, why didn’t you look for me?”

  Like a little girl who is reminding someone of the rules of the game, Ada postulated: “It doesn’t work that way. I’m a girl, right? The guy has to chase around the whole world until he finds the girl, doesn’t he?”

  Now he answered her in total seriousness. “I can’t understand this. I can’t understand how an independent woman, a woman who has looked after a sick husband for years and all the household chores, a woman who has raised two wonderful children almost on her own, who has found herself professionally—how could she . . .” He sighed.

  She laid a hand on his cheek. “Are you having a hard time?” she said, laughing.

  “I’m asking myself,” he mused aloud, “whether it’s a result of the way you were brought up, or of Hollywood movies with all kinds of Humphrey Bogarts gazing slit-eyed at women in high heels with a seam up the back of their stockings, before they toss aside their fedoras and sweep them up in their arms. To see them in a silk slip.”

  “Satin,” she corrected.

  “Satin?”

  “The slip. That’s the sort of thing I do know.”

  “In any case, black.”

  “Okay, black. Pink is also a possibility.”

  He really did want to understand, once and for all, and with Ada it seemed as though he could get a real answer—what was at the basis of all those rules of the game that women had so often flung at him during the course of his life, saying that he wasn’t fulfilling his designated role. “I just want you to tell me where you got this fantastic theory about who has to make the first move,” he insisted.

  “It’s not fantastic. That’s just the way it is. And it’s that way for everyone—my mother and Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall. That’s my generation. That’s how it is in my generation. They tell me that nowadays young girls know how to make the first move. I’ve heard from all kinds of girls and young women, even my daughter, that now a girl can go up to a boy and ask him out . . . really start with him. They also aren’t getting married at the age of twenty and they aren’t in any hurry. But me—if someone doesn’t want me, don’t bother. And you—it’s undeniable. You didn’t want me.” She said these last words very decidedly, as if she would brook no argument. And for that very reason he found himself arguing.

  “Who called whom now?” he asked, childishly.

  “Okay, so you phoned me first,” she admitted limply, and as if submissively.

  “And who really extended himself,” he continued in the singsong he had learned from Solomon, “and in the middle of working on a complicated murder case found the time to meet you twice—in twenty-four hours? At his initiative. Who?”

  “Okay. You—I admit. I thought it was to talk and close information gaps. For that,” she said in an unconvincing tone, with a kind of coyness that amused him again. He laughed aloud, but at the same time he was angry.

  “Is that what you call it?” he demanded. “An ‘information gap’? Is that what it was? Do you think we could have been here now like this”—he waved his arm above their bodies and pulled at the blanket, which fell away—“without having spoken beforehand? Without knowing something about our lives . . .”

  “There are stories,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

  “What stories?” he insisted, and removed her face from his shoulders to look into her eyes, which were half-shut.

  “That two people,” said Ada dreamily, “without exchanging a single word, who . . . who want each other so badly that . . . without a lot of preliminaries and clarifications, even without knowing each other at all . . . are suddenly overwhelmed by wild passion and find themselves together in bed.”

  Michael laughed again, but this time it wasn’t happy laughter. He was suddenly alarmed lest she was expecting some sort of detached adventure with him. He himself heard the aggressiveness in his tone, but he was not prepared to allow any misunderstanding on the matter: “A one-night stand? Is that what you wanted?” he demanded angrily. Even though he knew that she hadn’t wanted that, he needed to hear it explicitly: “In any case, those people aren’t me.”

  She was insulted. “Never in my life,” said Ada heatedly, “have I heard that someone seriously tells someone else that he . . . sort of wants her, but not right away, that she should wait a month or two because he’s busy in the near future, that now they have to wait until he . . . until he hasn’t got other things on his mind. I was sure that it was just talk, that you didn’t know how to get out of it or something.”

  Michael was not sorry that he had been cautious in their two previous conversations. He also didn’t really understand why she was insulted, because he felt that the delay was a sign of the seriousness of his intentions and the possibility that they would be together. He didn’t want to begin another relationship with a woman when his mind was on something else. Had it not been for the eve of the holiday and had she not shown up like that at the Russian Compound, he would really have preferred to have waited until he could give her his full attention. “First of all, you see that we did not wait a month or two. And apart from that, look at us now—is this just talk?! I wanted it more than you, and that’s a fact. And anyway, you were the one who didn’t want this.”

  Now there was a switch, and she immediately retorted: “But who waited for whom for over an hour? And on the eve of a holiday? And stuck in that cubbyhole at the Russian Compound and in addition to everything else asking favors of that fascist bastard, whatsisname, Balilty?”

  “What can I do?” protested Michael. “I’m in the middle of investigating a murder! And I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else.”

  “There are always reasons.” Her fingers, which were fluttering gently on his chest, rose into the air and brushed away the perfect smoke ring he had sent to hover between them. “Reasons are no excuse.”

&
nbsp; She had no way of knowing his work habits, he told himself, and it was necessary to explain to her explicitly: “I know myself. I already know that when I’m at work I sink into it entirely and there’s nothing other than work . . . and anyway, that’s the way it is.”

  “And what about me?” she charged. “Don’t I work? Aren’t I in the middle of a huge project and . . . ? I told you, I saw . . . It seemed to me like you were listening . . .”

  ‘“It seemed to you’?! Are you saying that I was just pretending to listen?”

  “Sorry. I know you were listening.”

  “So what’s going on? Are you being coquettish? Do you think this is charming?”

  “I think,” she said in a conciliatory tone, “that it’s because I was insulted, because after I tell you that next week I have to go to Brussels and Amsterdam and meet with all the organizations that are funding the film, you keep on telling me about your work as if it were an act of God or something.”

  “Tell me”—he shrugged—“what are we talking about here? Who wants this more?”

  “No. Yes. That too,” said Ada, confused, “but also all those thirty years. Look what a waste. In another minute we die. We could have . . .”

  Michael sighed. “Those thirty years” had been the main topic that had engaged them in the two meetings that had preceded this evening. From the first moments there had been an argument between them. Ada never stopped thinking about the missed opportunity, and because of it she had asked him several times about women in his past and the reasons he was living alone. Nevertheless, he was willing to talk about this again. “You’re the one who believes in fate,” he said to her. “The fact is that we couldn’t.”

  “Because of you.” She pinched his thigh.

  “So I’m to understand that I’m to blame for everything?” he said half-questioningly, and kissed the palm of her hand.

  She folded her fingers over his touch and passed her other hand over his face and his forehead and raked through his hair. “Only you.”

  From within her hand he breathed as he recited again: “Because I didn’t look for you and I didn’t chase you and I didn’t stand in the doorway and toss my fedora?”

  With utter seriousness and without a hint of blame she replied: “Because you didn’t even think about me.”

  And that, thought Michael, was unfortunately the absolute truth, although not precisely accurate. He hadn’t thought about her in the way she meant, not in the sense of “what if”—not about her body the way it is today and not about that face of hers that he could hold like this in his two hands and that was looking at him now—but she had been part of his hoard of memories. And from time to time he would remember her, for example in the spring when the citrus blossomed, or when he thought about women he had kissed. Now, looking straight into her face, which was raised to him, he heard himself saying: “Who says? Who says I didn’t think about you?”

  “Even worse,” said Ada dismissively. “You thought and you didn’t do a thing about it. Shame on you.”

  Without thinking, Michael said: “I’m a passive person.”

  First she laughed—and her laughter, which reverberated in the room, warm and deep and full of gaiety, instantly melted his uncertainty about whether she had understood what he had said. And then she thought a moment and said, “Yes, in fact that could be true, even with all your stories about women. I remember how you got married. She wanted to, and you got married.”

  “How do you know?” he wondered.

  “I was told. There was someone who told me,” Ada said, and twisted her lower lip, a gesture that reinforced the childish expression that on the face of another woman her age might have been ridiculous, but was suited to that small face, the tilted nose and even the crease between her eyebrows. “I looked into it. And anyway, I also understood from what you told me yesterday. Sometimes I also understand what isn’t said explicitly.”

  Instead of asking who had told her, he pulled her toward him. “Do you want me to compensate you now for all the time that you supposedly took an interest in me and I supposedly didn’t take an interest in you?”

  “That too. But right now I want you to explain to me how come . . . how come it’s so . . .”

  “Good?”

  “That too. Yes. Good. That I can understand, maybe. But how come it’s so . . . so right. ‘Right.’ That’s the word.”

  “Trust,” he said without thinking, and he wondered at the word that had escaped him unexamined. “And don’t ask me to explain,” he added, “because I don’t have any explanations, I just feel it, from you to me and from me to you.”

  “Trust,” she echoed, insulted. “What is this, friendship? Labor relations? And what about passion? And what about . . . falling in love?”

  “It’s the same thing,” said Michael quickly. “As far as I’m concerned, at least, and as far as you’re concerned.” He hoped that she had understood what he meant. He hoped that he had succeeded in saying succinctly something about how each of them had been through all kinds of experiences and had been burnt, and how both of them were now in a place where there was no longer any need for games of love and falling in love, and how because they had known each other when they were young, and had touched each other even before they knew what life was about and the circuitous paths each of them would follow—how because of all this, intimacy like this could exist between them, which wasn’t possible between strangers.

  “The same thing?” asked Ada in astonishment and protest. “Trust and falling in love are the same thing?! Not at all. Those are two completely opposite things. When you fall in love there’s . . . It’s sex, it’s a war, there’s no trust. When you fall in love you’re afraid the whole time, and now I’m . . . I’m not . . . not afraid—in any case, not of that. I know you won’t do anything bad to me, and there won’t be games, so is this falling in love?”

  “I don’t know. If you call falling in love what happened between that man with the black fedora and the woman in the black slip, then maybe there it’s a contradiction because they . . . they were looking for something altogether different . . .”

  “Yes?” she asked argumentatively, almost threateningly. “Explain to me what they’re looking for?”

  “Them?” dismissed Michael, and with utter frankness and without a moment’s hesitation he revealed to her the thoughts that he had formulated over the years he had known women: “They’re looking for the kind of excitement that . . . Technicolor excitement. They don’t have any real interest at all in each other. They are falling in love with the story, with what is happening to them. With the reflection of themselves in the other. They have no real interest except in the excitement, in the war, in winning, in keeping the other person in their pocket.”

  “Whereas we?” She lay on her side, and her dark eyes widened expectantly.

  “Whereas we . . .” For a moment he found it hard to speak. If she didn’t get what he was going to say to her now, maybe she wasn’t who he thought she was, who he wanted her to be. “We really see each other. We’ve found, both you and I, something else, from the beautiful side of ourselves. The side that hasn’t been spoiled yet. I’ve found it in you and you’ve found it in me.”

  Though he had upset her, he was relieved when she said, half-insulted: “I haven’t even told you yet . . . I haven’t even told you yet that I . . . We aren’t talking about love here at all. You don’t even want to know . . . You aren’t asking whether I . . .”

  “What needs to be asked here?” The small face resting on his chest rose and fell with his breathing. “I saw you and I heard you. Look at us. Is there anything to ask here? I know that you love me, I simply know it. And you also know it.”

  “I . . . I don’t, I don’t know anything if I’m not told,” she said, and moved her head from his hands.

  “You do. You most definitely do,” he said to her, and did not wonder at his own certainty anymore. He added: “You just don’t want to give up the backdrop, the piano f
rom Casablanca and the slips, but that’s all nonsense.”

  She buried her head in his arm and murmured: “If that’s nonsense, why don’t you just give it to me?”

  “No way. I can’t stand those things.”

  “Can’t stand them?!” she exclaimed. “But all those years, I know about all kinds of . . . And I’m sure there were . . . flowers and candles and slips and everything . . . and that there were married women, on the side, hotels and all that. So what was all that?”

  “There were,” said Michael, swallowing his saliva with effort. There was no point in the whole thing if he didn’t tell her the whole truth: “But I want it this way, like now, with friendship. That’s what I’ve always really wanted.”

  “And is this at all possible . . . Trust?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Trust and understanding and partnership and . . . Okay, love. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “So where was this all those thirty years?”

  “Oho. So you want to begin at the beginning again?” He rolled his eyes demonstratively. “Can’t people get any sleep around here?”

  “Usually by six in the morning no one is sleeping,” she teased him, “but I’ll give you a break if . . .”

  From the small armchair in the corner of the bedroom, where he had put his clothes, came a sharp beep that was not muffled by the fabric.

  “What’s that?” Ada asked, and sat up.

  “That? That’s a beeper.”

  “They’re calling you? Before six o’clock in the morning? On a holiday?”

  “The world is now demanding its pound of flesh—I’m in the middle of a case,” he said, and was already pulling on his blue jeans and looking at his beeper. “I have to make a phone call.”

  “‘Urgent’?” said Balilty. “Of course it’s urgent. Do you think I would bother you if it wasn’t? Never mind. In short, two things. A: There’s a new lead, but it can wait a minute, and B: The girl has disappeared.”

  “What girl?” asked Michael. He held the telephone receiver pressed between his shoulder and his ear as he picked his white shirt up off the carpet near the legs of the armchair and pulled out the sleeves.