by Batya Gur
Clara Beinisch trembled. “This is nonsense you’re talking,” she repeated tremulously, “but I don’t understand about these things. Let his father come in. He understands these things, because of his clients. I’ve already heard that the income tax people can . . . Where’s Daddy, Yoram? Still sleeping?”
“We’re talking here about kidnapping and attempted murder, and not income tax,” said Michael.
“What murder?” demanded Clara Beinisch in astonishment. “You said that this girl is alive, no?”
“The murder of Zahara Bashari, the daughter of your neighbors on the other side,” explained Sergeant Yair.
In the doorway of the living room stood Efraim Beinisch, a cup of coffee in his hand. “What’s going on here?” he asked, and set the cup down on a shelf near the entrance to the room. “What’s going on, Clara?”
“But you’ve already spoken to us about that,” said Clara Beinisch without looking at her husband. “I told you yesterday already: I don’t wish a disaster like that even on my worst enemy, not even that family, but I have nothing to say about those people. They’re simply primitive, Asiatics. And all these years”—her voice broke now—“all these years I’ve hoped that they would understand and would . . . And my son, Yoram, I can say this to his face, even as a child he was as good as . . . Really, so good, and he tried to patch things up and he asked . . .” She lowered her head. “I told him then and I’m telling you now: You can’t change people. They don’t change. And it’s not by chance that with them in particular, there in particular—”
“Just a minute, Mrs. Beinisch. I want to understand,” said Sergeant Yair. “What are you saying? Are you saying that the whole family . . . that the neighbors themselves are to blame for Zahara Bashari’s murder? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Clara, Clara, calm down,” her husband said, and moved close to her. “She’s not very well,” he explained to Michael with a worried look.
“I’ll tell you what I’m saying,” said Clara Beinisch. She shook her husband’s hand off her arm and sat down. “You’re a young fellow, and maybe you don’t understand these things yet, but there are families in which it’s impossible that things . . . in which . . . It isn’t in every family that someone gets murdered . . . But in our neighborhood, on our street . . . not all the families . . . Sometimes there are . . . It’s a matter of blood . . . There’s good blood and bad blood . . . and the blacks . . .”
“Mother,” her son warned, and looked warily at Michael, “I’ve told you a thousand times not to talk like that.”
“Don’t you tell me. They understand what I’m saying.” A crease appeared between her plucked eyebrows. “Here in this country there are a lot of Asiatics and they—how can I put it?—they’re people who . . .” Her gaze moved from Michael’s face to Yair. “Where are your parents from?”
The sergeant smiled and said they were born in this country. “Third generation, from Metulla and Rosh Pina,” he said proudly.
“Never mind.” Clara Beinisch sighed and shook her head. “You’re too young to understand. Because in this street there a lot of Levantines—”
“Mother!” interrupted her son warningly.
“So what should I say? People from the eastern communities? Okay, so because of the people from the eastern communities, the level of this neighborhood and the street and . . . this whole country . . . You listen to what I’m saying to you. It’s not the standard we thought . . . we were used to . . .”
Michael regarded her with interest. After a moment of silence he said: “Without any connection to good blood and bad blood, Mrs. Beinisch, we will have to summon Yoram in for questioning, as well as you and your husband. This can be done with a lawyer or without one. Which do you prefer?”
Clara Beinisch looked at her son and at her husband. “We will wait until we speak to a lawyer,” she said finally, and laid her hand on her son’s arm. “We have a cousin who’s a lawyer, and he understands about these things. You can wait or you can go. You won’t take a boy from a good home in for questioning by force. We aren’t people like that . . .”
“Can you phone him now?” asked Michael.
“Of course we can,” she declared. “He’s family, isn’t he?”
“So is it possible to phone him and ask him to come here?”
“It’s possible,” she said and got up and headed for the corridor.
“No, Mrs. Beinisch,” said Michael, “you won’t have any private conversations with him now. Just tell him to come here.”
“But the phone is out there,” she said angrily and suspiciously, and pointed to the corridor. “There’s one in the hall and there’s one in the kitchen.”
“So if you don’t mind . . .” Michael said, and got up and followed her out, and behind him came Efraim Beinisch.
Chapter 13
I want to tell you a little story,” said Emmanuel Shorer, holding the narrow glass in front of his face and trying to catch the waiter’s eye. “Whenever you don’t need anything they’re all over you and asking if everything’s okay, and when you do need something—it’s just then that they don’t see you,” he said with a laugh, and beckoned. The proprietor, who looked at them from behind the counter, hastened over to them.
“More grappa?” he asked, and Shorer nodded yes. “And the lady, too?” asked the proprietor. His thick beard jiggled as he spoke.
“Just coffee for me,” replied Ada with a smile.
“For me, too,” Michael said, and rubbed the back of his neck, which had been bothering him for the past few hours.
“Look at this place,” said Shorer, gazing at this surroundings. “Twelve o’clock at night and it’s completely dead. Two months ago you’d come in here after midnight and there wouldn’t be a place to sit. Never mind two months ago, a month ago even. They won’t last much longer with this intifada.”
“The city’s completely dead,” agreed Ada. “It’s never happened to me before that I got here at ten o’clock, and during the intermediate days of the holiday, and there was room. And by the window yet.”
“You have to know that Emmanuel Shorer has connections,” said Michael, “and there’s not a restaurant in Jerusalem that doesn’t—”
“I got here before him,” said Ada. “Imagine, I got a table by the window without connections and without anything.” Her smile somewhat blurred the tension he had seen in her eyes when he arrived at the restaurant an hour late and found Shorer sitting across from her, plunging a knife into a huge steak and looking at Ada as if expecting her to answer a question he had asked. He beckoned to Michael, who stood in the doorway
looking at the two of them, but Ada had not yet noticed him, and her lips trembled in the attempt to answer Shorer’s question. But from where he was standing, Michael had already discerned a film of disappointment on his close friend’s face and understood that his appearance had truncated a kind of test that Shorer had been giving Ada. Michael had no doubt that she was glad to see him when she turned toward him, and even though she said lightly, “There’s nothing left that your friend doesn’t know about me—had you come half an hour later we would have gotten to age three,” her voice sounded a bit tense. Now, when they were on dessert, he thought that she was more relaxed than she had been, and she even looked at Shorer from time to time with a smile, but her look was guarded, as if before an invasion.
“There are places that I don’t care if they shut down, like those restaurants in Baka and the German Colony, glatt kosher or vegetarian for American tourists with yarmulkes,” grumbled Shorer, “but this place . . . I feel bad about it. I also feel bad about . . . Do you remember Meir’s restaurant in the building with the curse on it in the market?”
“Closed,” Michael said, and pushed his plate aside, wondering how it had emptied so quickly. “Two years ago.”
“Too bad,” said Shorer. “Meir also knew what to do with a piece of meat. When we were young,” he explained to Ada, “a few years ago, we would sit there after w
e’d solved something, but now we don’t deserve it, because from what I’m hearing we haven’t exactly solved anything, hah?” And at the sight of Michael’s expression he hastened to say: “But you’ve made progress, you’ve made good progress. You’ve got three suspects now, and every one of them is a story in and of itself. You never know from where salvation will come. That’s really something, that story with Avital, really something. Maybe total bluff, hah?” The last question was directed to Ada.
“Are you asking me?” She blushed. “I . . . I don’t have any problem with a story like that. I definitely believe that a young girl would tell intimate things like that to an older man who gives her . . . who gives her sympathy, just because he’s a stranger.”
“No,” corrected Shorer, “it’s not because of the sympathy and the strangeness. It’s first of all because he saw her. You might say he caught her red-handed.”
“If you see a girl in the lobby of a hotel in Netanya does that mean you’ve ‘caught her red-handed’?” insisted Ada.
“Apparently Zahara Bashari didn’t have a criminal mind,” said Shorer with a smile. “There are people who . . . automatically have a guilty conscience. She thought that anyone who knows her and recognizes her in a hotel in Netanya would immediately know what she was doing there, and with whom.”
“If that’s the case,” argued Ada, “then why did she sit there in the lobby and tell him? After all, she wasn’t alone.”
“Ask him,” Shorer said, and looked at Michael. “Why did she tell him there in the hotel lobby?”
Michael shrugged. He and Eli Bachar had already dissected that today, and they would dissect it again tomorrow. “According to him, she was in fact there alone. The person who was supposed to have come hadn’t arrived and she . . . She already had a room there at the hotel, so she told him. He says. She didn’t talk about herself at all, but supposedly about a good friend of hers, and she was very vague about the man’s status. According to Avital, he wasn’t exactly married, the man, but he had all kinds of commitments, and he didn’t know anything about the pregnancy. Don’t forget, all that we have is Avital’s story, and insofar as we know now, he was the last person to have met Zahara on the day of the murder.”
“But he has an alibi for the cardinal hours,” noted Shorer. “Maybe you don’t like his alibi much, but he has one.”
“What was it Balilty said? That he should have the same number of years left to live as the number of alibis like that he’s heard,” said Michael. “Men who refuse to give details in order to protect a woman’s reputation? We must have had at least a hundred. Going by that, you’d think that everyone, all the time, is just having some affair with a married woman.”
“But in the end he did give you the details,” Shorer said, and drank down the last drop of grappa. “And the lady confirmed it. And he’s prepared—and I see this as the main thing—to take a DNA test without any lawyers or anything. And despite all this, you’re turning up your nose, as if the matter weren’t closed. You said that he’s a sympathetic person?”
“A real charmer, almost a professional. One of those people who know how to talk to anyone in the world. Women are crazy about him,” agreed Michael.
Shorer smiled and muttered under his thick mustache: “It takes one to know one.”
Michael ignored the remark. “And he doesn’t have an easy life, either, with that daughter of his, but never mind that. You wanted to tell me a little story,” he reminded Shorer.
“No, not just you. Both of you,” corrected Shorer. “It has to do with the case, but it’s . . . She can also do something with it. Maybe you’ll even make a documentary film about the Yemenite children?”
“I’m not sure that the Dutch are going to be interested in that,” said Ada to Shorer in an intimate tone, and for a moment her voice sounded as though they had known each other for years. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Shorer acting so affectionately with other women he had introduced to him, but just then the proprietor put a thin-necked bottle of grappa on the table, and with it three glasses.
“I only asked for one,” said Shorer in surprise.
“After you taste it, you’ll want more, and they will too,” promised the proprietor. “We’ll discuss it after you taste it.”
“Do you come here a lot?” asked Ada, and Shorer shrugged abashedly.
“Sometimes, when there’s something to celebrate.” He regarded Michael with satisfaction and poured from the bottle into the three glasses. “And we will now drink to your beautiful choice.” Michael obediently raised the glass and said nothing.
“He’s blushing,” Shorer said, laughing. “Look at him—he’s blushing!” he cried, and knocked with his glass on the table before he drank. “Extraordinary,” he confirmed. “This proprietor, I knew we could count on him, no?”
Michael drank and nodded his head in confirmation. A young waitress with an exposed waist and red eyelids set the coffee cups on the table, and before Shorer could take another sip Michael reminded him: “You promised a story.”
The waitress left and Shorer, who gazed for another moment after her exposed, receding waist, began to speak: “When I was about seven years old . . . Let me think a minute . . . Seven or eight, I think . . . It was in ’49, so I was seven,” he said wonderingly. He looked at Ada and said: “I’m already quite an old Jew, not like you two.”
“Really antique,” she murmured.
“Don’t laugh,” he said to her, and pulled the ends of his white mustache. “We’re from different generations, he and I”—he indicated Michael with his glass—“and that’s why he has respect for me, right?”
Michael smiled and nodded with exaggerated obedience. “Yes, sir,” he murmured, and asked himself whether he could dare to define the easy sense of serenity he had been feeling for this whole past hour—especially from the moment he had come in and seen the two of them deep in lively conversation, and heard Ada laugh—as happiness.
“In any case, I was apparently seven years old. I remember it as if it were today. We were already living in Jerusalem, in a house near the Mandelbaum Gate, a small house, just two rooms, but below it there was a . . . kind of a one-room apartment. Not a basement, a semibasement, with windows right above the ground, and my mother didn’t want to rent it out. There were always new immigrants who had just arrived then, so she’d let them live there for a while until they got fixed up. At that time there were already all kinds of Holocaust refugees in the country, every one of them with a story no one wanted to hear. I can remember them. Some of them lived downstairs. First there was this young fellow, alone, I think he was from Sudan. He had very dark skin and he would bring me transparent marbles from the printing press where he worked. He was a print worker and his fingernails were always black . . . And then a family lived there with a fat little girl, about my age, but she didn’t speak to me, the girl, and to this day I don’t know why. And finally, in ’49, a couple came. And about them I remember that my mother told me they came from ‘there’—that’s how they spoke in those days. They didn’t say ‘refugees’ or ‘Holocaust,’” he explained to Ada, who was looking at him hypnotized, as though she was hearing something completely new. “In any case, I remember how she told me, my mother, to behave nicely with them and not to play near the apartment downstairs. And I liked to play right under the stairs, and not just me, all the kids in the neighborhood . . . Then there were really neighborhoods, with children who played together, and not like now when I see how my daughter drives her little boy to his friends’ houses and to after-school classes like in America . . .”
He emptied the glass in a single gulp and poured himself another, looking at them questioningly. Michael covered the glass in front of him with his hand and Ada shook her head. “I remember I was afraid of them,” Shorer said, and examined the bottle. “They were . . . like rabbits . . . All the time they would look at you like who knew what you were going to do to them. Apparently they were quite a young couple, but they look
ed old to me, very old and also . . . they were so pale and white, as if they’d been dipped in flour . . . In those days they didn’t tell us things much. They never said anything explicit—you know how it is. . . . But there were words in the air: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, ghetto, ‘Hitler may his name be eradicated’ and then they’d spit, ‘there,’ bunker, Mengele. Mengele was the scariest name, because after you heard them say ‘They were with Mengele,’ there would be a silence. And sometimes when they said ‘Mengele’ I would hear my mother sigh. Groan, really. We, the children, would spy on our parents, listen to them talk without them knowing, so as to understand something, to put together some story, and something would remain of it—after all, with the help of their imagination children fill in the missing details. ‘There’ was a kind of place, a different place.”
He smiled a sad and pensive smile. “And I would hear my mother saying about them, that couple, how awful it was that they were so sad and lonely, and my father would say that eventually they’d have children and a family. He was always optimistic, except during his last years, and my mother would say to him, ‘Not a chance. What are you talking about? She was with Mengele. She doesn’t have anything inside.’ To this day I remember those words: ‘She doesn’t have anything inside.’ I had nightmares because of them. I thought . . . I imagined that she had nothing under her skin, not that I knew what there was supposed to be there in the belly . . .” Shorer paused and looked at his glass and tilted it and then swirled it.
“That’s really how it is. That’s the way children’s imaginations work,” said Ada to break the silence, and Shorer set the glass down and nodded.
“Okay, nu, give me a cigarette,” he said to Michael. “Just one, after the meal . . . ,” he apologized, and leaned over the lighter. “At least not like you, one after the other,” he grumbled. “Don’t you have any influence on him?” Ada smiled and fingered the lapel of her blouse as if to rub out an invisible stain.
