Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Sit down, sit down,” Netanel Bashari said to Michael from the sofa, where he was sitting next to his father. “You can take the armchair, or that tall chair there, and we don’t need to sit on the floor, either, because the holiday overrides mourning observances.”

  Michael sat down on the only wooden chair in the room and cautiously fingered the small recording device he had tucked into the pocket of his windbreaker. He folded up the windbreaker and laid it across his knees and then looked at Naeema Bashari, who was rocking back and forth in the rocking chair, staring at the floor and biting her lower lip. In her hands she held a half-full glass of water.

  On the sofa, between his two sons, who hadn’t shaved because of the mourning and whose faces were covered with dark bristles, sat Ezra Bashari, holding a small Psalter.

  “I . . . hmmm . . . I . . .” Michael cleared his throat and looked from the father to the mother to her sons. “I’ve come here to hear about . . . How shall I put it? In short, to hear about Big Zahara.”

  Naeema Bashari tensed and looked at him in suspicious alarm. Ezra Bashari coughed and touched the white stubble that had sprouted on his face.

  “If possible,” said Michael to Netanel courteously but authoritatively, “I would like to talk to your parents only, please.”

  “Why does he need them alone?” asked Bezalel Bashari, as he straightened the fold in his khaki shirt. He had not yet changed out of his uniform.

  “Go, go,” said Naeema Bashari suddenly to her sons. “It’s better that way. Go and come back later.” And as they showed no signs of leaving the room she added, “I’m not going to talk about this in your presence, Bezalel, and your father won’t either.”

  “I want to understand what this has to do with it,” Bezalel Bashari said, and crossed his arms on his chest. He stuck his legs out straight in front of him and dug his heels into the floor.

  “Didn’t you hear what he asked?” his father burst out. “Didn’t you hear that the gentleman wants to talk to us alone, and didn’t you hear your mother?”

  Bezalel Bashari shrank. He opened his mouth to speak but his elder brother looked at him and over his father’s head touched his shoulder. “Forget it, Bezalel. Forget it. Later you’ll understand. What’s the hurry? The main thing is that it might help find the . . . I don’t know how it can help, but . . .” He rose and signaled to his brother and waited by the door until Bezalel Bashari stood up, stretching his small body and protruding his chest. “What are you?” he asked Michael. “Are you Yemenite?”

  “No,” Michael said, and managed in time to hold back the word “unfortunately,” which might have sounded ironic. “I’m not Yemenite, but I came here at the age of three from Morocco,” he hastened to explain as though this could justify his existence.

  “Okay, you’re not an Ashkenazi, so in general, in principle, you can understand what all this is about,” Bezalel Bashari muttered, and moved toward the door, which his brother held open for him. “At least they didn’t send some pompous Ashkenazi,” Michael heard him saying outside the door a moment before it was closed, and also Netanel’s restraining murmur: “Cut that out now, Bezalel. Do me a favor. You’re talking like . . . ,” but Michael missed the end of the sentence.

  Very quietly, in short sentences, Michael told the couple what he had heard from Orly Shushan and explained the need to get to the bottom of the issue that had concerned Zahara before her death. “And especially something as loaded as this,” he said, and apologized for having to add to their pain by “reopening an old wound.”

  Naeema Bashari snorted and pursed her lips. “What’s old here?” she growled. “If you’ve lost a child, it doesn’t matter how many years have gone by. It’s not a wound that ever heals. It’s always there.”

  “But I understand that you don’t . . . don’t talk about . . . haven’t ever agreed to talk about this with your children,” said Michael, “and when Zahara wanted to know something about it, you got angry at her.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” said the mother dismissively. “That was because I wanted them not to have our pain. I wanted them to grow up free, without hatred. I can’t understand”—she sighed—“why Zahara went into all these things, which were none of her business at all. Her life could have been . . . better than ours . . . if only she hadn’t . . .” Suddenly she burst out crying, and as she sobbed she muttered vague phrases about “fate” and “blows,” and also mentioned Job and cried: “Why? Why did she have to meddle in that?”

  “Maybe because there are children who can’t stand it when there are secrets in the family without figuring them out,” said Michael patiently. “Maybe, in fact, it was because she didn’t have a way into the whole affair, and maybe she wanted to get closer to you.”

  “No,” she said decidedly. “Maybe it was because of her pregnancy. Maybe it was . . . the thought of . . .”

  “I still can’t believe it,” muttered Ezra Bashari, “and I can’t see how a story from fifty years ago, our own personal business, could l have anything to do with . . . That little girl from across the street—do you think that’s also connected?”

  Michael spread out his fingers and said that it wasn’t yet possible to know whether there was any connection between Zahara’s death and Nessia’s disappearance, but the more he knew about the lives of the victims . . .

  “Fine, so he’s explained why,” said Naeema Bashari to her husband, and then to Michael: “Do you want to hear? Then I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you a story you won’t believe. You won’t believe that things like this happened here.”

  Michael wove his fingers together and touched the pocket of his windbreaker, where—he hoped—the tape recorder was running.

  “In 1949 we were in the transit camp near Aden when I gave birth to a baby girl,” said Naeema Bashari. “I was just a child myself. I’d already had another baby, who died, and I didn’t understand anything yet. I just knew that I had a living baby, and such a pretty one, with blue eyes.”

  “She did have blue eyes,” confirmed Ezra Bashari. “All our children were born with blue eyes. We didn’t know they could change later, because both of us were children ourselves.”

  “Her eyes wouldn’t have turned brown. They were a blue that doesn’t change,” insisted Naeema Bashari. Michael nodded as if in agreement and she continued: “They took us to a new immigrants’ camp at Kibbutz Ein Shemer. We were there for a week, maybe, and they put our baby in the communal infants’ house. They gave them medical examinations and all that, but they brought them back afterward. Every day they brought them back for nursing. And all of a sudden—one day they didn’t bring her back. The baby. She disappeared.” Naeema Bashari swallowed her saliva with an effort, and spoke again. “She was two months old. We called her Zahara, and she disappeared. One morning they told me that they’d taken her to the hospital. The evening before I had nursed her and she was perfectly healthy—a mother knows whether her baby is well or sick. And I’m telling you: She was well. And in the morning—they took her to the hospital. I went, I asked, they didn’t say anything. Not which hospital and not what she had.”

  “Later we heard that there was a polio epidemic. Everyone was very scared. If a child had a fever they were afraid that . . . ,” added her husband.

  “She didn’t have a fever,” said Naeema Bashari angrily. “I’m telling you—she didn’t have anything, and the polio . . . Back then there wasn’t . . . Only afterward . . . But what did I know? They sent me back and forth and I felt . . . Right away I felt that I would never see my daughter again.” She bit her lips and went silent.

  Michael waited.

  “A few days later, maybe a day or two—don’t think I’ve forgotten how much time went by; even then if you had asked how much time went by I wouldn’t have known, because the whole I time I’m wandering around like a madwoman, crying and screaming, and they give me a pill and say, ‘She’ll recover, she’ll recover,’ and me—what do I want? To see my baby. A mother can’t stand it
if they take her baby away from her just like that . . . And Jews yet . . .” She wiped away the tears that flowed from her eyes. “Suddenly, after a day or two, Ezra says to me, ‘They’re calling us over the public address system.’ There was a public address system at the transit camp,” she explained, “where they made all the announcements—if someone had arrived, if they wanted someone at the office, things like that—I hear the public address system. Ezra and I were standing there listening, and over the loudspeaker they announce: ‘Zahara Bashari has died . . .’”

  “Over the loudspeaker?” said Michael in astonishment.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” said Naeema Bashari quietly. “I didn’t believe it. I ran to them. I said where is she, I screamed that they should show her to me dead, that they should show me a body, a grave, something. But what could I do? They didn’t let me see any grave.”

  “Every day we asked, and every day they didn’t answer, but we didn’t give up. Four or five days later,” continued Ezra Bashari, since his wife had gone silent, “they called us urgently into a small room next to the main office. Both of us went.”

  “They gave me a bundle,” said Naeema Bashari, “a package inside a little crate. They said, ‘Here is your baby, dead, but don’t open it. Don’t open the bundle.’ That’s exactly what the nurse said. I look inside the crate—inside the bundle, with rags—and the nurse says to me, ‘See, Naeema? The baby is dead, but don’t open the bundle.’”

  “We were children. Maybe we didn’t understand what was going on,” said Ezra Bashari, “but we wanted to open it, because what if it was some other baby?”

  “I thought they could even have put a cat in there, so I started to open it,” his wife said in a choking voice, and laid her hand on her chest. “I’ve never talked about this before. I didn’t even tell the rabbi all the details,” she said to Michael. “This is hard for me.”

  “It’s a very hard story,” Michael confirmed in a weak voice. The shock had paralyzed his brain.

  “They said don’t open it but I opened it,” related Naeema Bashari in an expressionless voice. “I stood there in that little room, and I unrolled rag after rag. I had to see, do you understand me? Ezra was waiting outside. They didn’t let us come in together.”

  “She said, the nurse, ‘Let her be alone in her sorrow,’” interjected Ezra Bashari. “To this day I hear her voice ringing in my ears: ‘alone in her sorrow’! To leave her there alone . . .”

  “I’ve never forgiven him,” said Naeema Bashari. “I’ve never forgiven him that he did what they told him . . .”

  Ezra Bashari shrugged powerlessly and buried his face in his hands.

  “I stood there alone unrolling rag after rag,” she continued after a moment of silence, “and I got to the last rag. That’s where I got to.”

  Michael waited for her to continue.

  “There was no baby. Just rags.”

  “Really?!” asked Michael, and not because he had any doubt, but because the story was horrible.

  “Yes, really!” cried Naeema Bashari. “Of course really. What do think, that I could make up a thing like that? You would have thought that they would have at least put some other dead child in there. What did they think? That I was retarded? When I was standing there holding those rags I said, Well, good, at least the baby is alive, and all we have to do is find her.”

  “When she came out of that room,” intervened Ezra Bashari, “at first she didn’t say a word. Then she said, ‘They have to show us the grave.’ I went to them and demanded that they show us the grave, so we would have where to go to say kaddish, something. Even our patriarch Jacob, I said to them, when they showed him the coat of many colors, asked to see the grave. They said—impossible. Naeema said, ‘Why is it impossible?’ and they said, ‘Because we buried five babies in a common grave.’ That’s what they said, as if they couldn’t show us a common grave.

  “It was impossible to catch them. Even today I don’t know who they were. There was the camp manager and there was a nurse, but their names? So how were we going to look for the baby? We are shut up in an immigrants’ camp, no one understands our Hebrew, what were we? Children. And my parents . . . They were already completely shattered. Nobody could help us.”

  There was silence. Only the chirping of the blackbirds broke it. And this chirping, just because it was pretty and joyful, struck a false note in the room, and perhaps in order to blur it Ezra Bashari went on and said: “Then they transferred us to the transit camp in Jerusalem, in Talpiot. We were maybe the only Yemenites there, everyone else went to Rosh Ha’ayin. But we—we were sent to Talpiot. And afterward to this house, which they gave us because it was abandoned. In 1949, at the end of the year. All of a sudden they brought us here, they gave us a house, and afterward I thought it was so as to keep us quiet, so that we wouldn’t come with complaints.”

  “All those years we never spoke about this to anyone,” said Naeema Bashari. “We only began to talk about it years later. First I told my brother, and he spoke to Rabbi Halevi in Bnei Brak, and then I started to go to meetings in Rosh Ha’ayin. All of us who had babies taken from us would meet there, once every two weeks, sometimes once a month, and talk and talk. And Zahara—she sensed it. She noticed that I was disappearing without saying anything and she wanted to know why. It’s been quite a while since she . . . Some time ago she started to ask and . . . I got angry at her because I didn’t want her to . . . And in the end . . .”

  “But Bezalel also started up with this,” noted Ezra Bashari. “He also couldn’t leave it alone. The moment he sensed something—he fell on it, and we . . . I quarreled with him about it . . .” His voice was scratchy with misery and regret. “Especially a while ago, when he brought our immigration certificate, and the baby’s . . . And when I saw it, it went to my . . . I didn’t want him to . . .”

  “The baby’s immigration certificate?” asked Michael in a broken voice. “There’s an immigration certificate?”

  “Yes. It says there”—Ezra Bashari snorted bitterly—“Zohar, male, died in Ein Shemer, and the date—March 13, 1949. They couldn’t even write the name properly, ‘Zohar’ instead of ‘Zahara.’ From that alone you can see the scorn.”

  “But he didn’t find a death certificate then,” his wife reminded him. “He said there wasn’t a death certificate.”

  “Instead of a death certificate they pulled an entry from the computer that ID card number so and so—the baby had an ID number—left the country in 1963. Can you understand that?”

  “No, I can’t understand it,” said Michael.

  “My son Netanel,” explained Ezra Bashari, “looked into it and found that in that year they did a census, and whoever left the country was spit out by the computer. That’s the only explanation he found for that. There is no other. That was the year they did a big cover-up of all the cases, before anyone began to yell.”

  “But in the end it didn’t help,” said Naeema Bashari bitterly. “It didn’t help because these deeds come out from underground, and if it also has anything to do with Zahara’s . . .” She shrugged and went silent.

  “Justice will win out,” said Ezra Bashari.

  “Did she talk about this with her brothers?” asked Michael.

  “I don’t know,” said Naeema Bashari. “We don’t talk about it at home, just that one time when Bezalel came with the certificates and the paper from the computer . . . And his father was so angry that he never . . .”

  “You have to talk to him yourselves,” said her husband. “You can ask the boys, and Yermiyahu, too, our second son. He’ll be arriving tonight.”

  “Perhaps now I could . . .” Michael hesitated, and vaguely indicated the door.

  “Perhaps. Why not?” said Ezra Bashari. “They’ll talk to you.”

  But the moment he rose from the chair, carefully holding the windbreaker with the tape recorder hidden in it, his beeper went off and in the message on the screen he saw that Balilty was looking for him. “Call. Urgent,”
the message said.

  Chapter 10

  They shouldn’t have agreed to let Michael’s office at the Russian Compound become the search headquarters, at least not as long as Moshe Avital is sitting there in the corridor on the wooden bench and sighing every time she opens the door or steps out. This room is too central, and phone calls keep coming in that have nothing to do with the search, and everyone thinks they can come in and shoot the breeze. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to ignore Moshe Avital’s soft brown eyes hanging on her face as if she and only she could help him, and those lips of his, that droop like a small child’s, when she says to him: “Not yet.” Or: “There’s nothing to be done in the meantime. You’ll have to wait a bit longer, until Chief Superintendent Ohayon returns.” Or: “Those are the instructions I received. I can’t let you leave.” He looks like an ugly duckling in that soft yellow sweater, and with his short legs. There’s no question about it: Handsome he isn’t. They could kill her but she couldn’t understand how he had acquired the reputation of a Don Juan, with that peculiar face of his, and with his pointy skull, top and bottom, and with that non-chin of his. But then, he is fixing his eyes on her as if she were a good fairy or something, as if she were the only person in the world who interested him, and somehow it is working on her, even if she knows that that’s the way he talks to every woman. It’s a fact that she isn’t yelling at him.

  The door to Michael’s office is wide open and from the corridor she hears the transmitter beeping and the telephone ringing and she rushes in to answer in time, and so it happens that Moshe Avital is hanging around at the door, waiting, and he hears Yair on the loudspeaker. “We’re done with Yiftah Street. Eli is going down to Yael Street and we’re splitting up.”

  “Roger,” she says, and with the green felt pen she draws an arrow in the direction of Yael Street on the enlarged map of Baka that is spread out on the desk, and she has the red felt pen handy to draw the second arrow that will show the route of Yair’s group. And the whole time she can feel Moshe Avital’s moist brown eyes hanging on her, waiting, and she can’t even close the door in his face now, while with the one hand she’s holding the telephone receiver and with the other holding the felt pen over the map.