Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Tzilla nodded her head, which was leaning over the article, and muttered: “What a slut. Would you believe it? Look what it says about you here. Did you see it?”

  “I saw it,” confirmed Michael, “and I’ve also seen that there’s nothing that can be done about it. There’s no point in even applying to the court.” Opposite them, Yair was still sniffing the scent in one of the flasks that Alon from the Criminal Identification Unit had lined up along the office desk.

  “Have you got any Paco Rabanne?” Balilty asked Alon. “It’s the only aftershave that I . . . And not just me, my wife, too. The only one! The ultimate aftershave! Try it yourself,” he said scornfully to Yair, and winked at Alon, “and you’ll see how women throw themselves at your feet. You can even ask him—he has a doctorate in chemistry.”

  “Where did she get all this from? Who told her about the women? Who gave her the story about your ex-wife and about . . . even that business with Nita . . . and the story about her brother? Who told her?” asked Tzilla, and she looked at the other members of the special investigation team, expecting them to be as shocked as she was.

  “What do you want?” said Balilty. “What were you expecting? He didn’t give her what she wanted and she’s getting back at him. As someone a woman made eyes to and he ignored it, believe me he’s gotten off cheaply. I know what I’m talking about from experience—the revenge of a woman scorned is the worst. Everyone knows that.”

  The lawyer continued his lugubrious plaint about the lightness with which some people ruin a person’s life, and Michael thought about Eli Bachar’s strange silence at that moment when everyone was reading the article, and how he had lowered his eyes and avoided meeting Michael’s eyes or anyone else’s, and how he had left the room with a copy of the article and disappeared for quite a while.

  “We aren’t the way you think we are,” Rosenstein said, and folded the plaid handkerchief, “and what’s so awful is that not only is Zahara dead, but my wife, whom I’ve tried to spare . . . Zahara . . . I don’t know. She was examined a few years ago about this business of the family history, I don’t know why, but I think it’s connected with a boy, maybe an Ashkenazi boy who humiliated her . . .”

  Michael tensed. “So after all you do know something about a man in Zahara Bashari’s life.”

  “No, no, no. That’s a misunderstanding,” the lawyer hastened to say. “If I knew anything, believe me I would have told you. And you did ask everyone—no one knew, but I mean that people, if you look into it, and they have some ideology that they fight for—it always has something to do with something that happened to them personally. That’s what I think. That’s what I’ve learned over the years and now that I’ve seen this”—he pointed to the newsprint pages spread out on the desk between them—“it’s really . . .”

  Michael glanced again at the upside-down headline of the article. “In any case,” added the lawyer, “when she came here to work, Zahara, she was already completely into the ethnic thing and she never stopped going on about it, but up until a few months ago I never heard the story about her sister, the one who . . .” He paused, examined the sleeve of his suit jacket and pulled a loose silver gray thread at the cuff.

  “And really, it’s about time,” said Michael, “that you explain to me how exactly you found out the whole story, and how the purchase of the apartment came about.”

  The lawyer sat bolt upright in his chair. “It’s not like she writes here,” he said in disgust, and pushed aside the pages of the article. “It has nothing to do with the pregnancy, and I never slept with Zahara, even when . . . It just wasn’t in the cards, and I have no idea how she got to the information about our Tali because—”

  “I asked you how you found out about Big Zahara, and what the apartment has to do with it,” Michael reminded him.

  “A few months ago,” said Rosenstein, averting his glance, “in May, I think, one afternoon when we were alone at the office, she came into my room and closed the door behind her, and I didn’t understand what she wanted. And she asked me whether I had a few minutes and I said yes, I have all the time in the world for her, and when I looked at her face I saw right away that nothing good was going to come of this. But it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with us. I thought it had to do with her, with her life or her plans. I thought . . . Do you want to know the truth?”

  Michael nodded. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “I thought she was coming to tell me that she was leaving . . . that she’d found something else . . . If only that had been the case . . . ,” Rosenstein said, and paused.

  “But that wasn’t the case,” remarked Michael without taking his eyes off him, and the lawyer nodded and lowered his face and sighed.

  Without looking at Michael he said quickly: “Straight to the point, with no prologue, she said that she’d checked out our family’s whole past, including the fact that my wife had been . . . that my wife couldn’t have children. Tali wasn’t our natural daughter. Those were Zahara’s exact words, ‘not your natural daughter,’ and then I started to perspire and deny it, but she cut me off like a knife and said, ‘There’s no point. I have all the details and I also know that the baby whom that friend of yours brought you from the hospital is my big sister, and I can prove it.”

  “Of course it was a shock to hear all that,” commented Michael, because the lawyer had raised his head and was looking at him expectantly.

  “‘Shock’? ‘Shock’ is an understatement!” said Rosenstein, who had apparently heard sympathy in Michael’s words. “I mean, we didn’t know anything at all about the baby they brought us. We didn’t want to know—not who her parents were and not what had happened to her . . . And out of the blue Zahara tells me that I got her when she was two months old, that she was brought by the nurse who worked in the immigrants’ camp at Ein Shemer . . . She knew every detail. I have no idea how she found out, and believe me . . .”—he tugged at his large nose—“we didn’t even know where they had brought us the baby from. All that I wanted was for my wife to . . . I also wanted children but my wife, she . . . she would cry at night, and I saw that if I didn’t get her a baby then . . . And nowadays you can get babies from Brazil or from . . . But then you couldn’t buy a child like that, and I had connections. That nurse, she was from my city. I had smuggled her little brother out of the ghetto and I . . . Never mind. I got him through and I got him to the partisans, and his sister . . . She was . . . She felt, as they say, eternally indebted and she brought Tali right after I had spoken to her. I only mentioned it to her once, in a café in Haifa. I asked . . . I didn’t even ask her, I told her about it and just a month later she brought the baby with no questions asked and no papers. And so one day I could come home and put a baby in my wife’s arms and that saved her life, I’m telling you. It was a matter of life or death. We didn’t know, we didn’t want to know. You don’t think about the parents, it’s impossible—”

  “Even today,” said Michael, “you’re still ignoring the fact that so you—let’s say your wife, but also you—could be happy, you were willing to ruin the lives of other people, and you don’t even . . . ,” and he surprised himself with the anger that rang in his voice.

  Rosenstein tilted his head and examined Michael. “What is it you want? For me to be sorry? For me to have regrets? For me to ask for forgiveness?”

  Michael was silent.

  “Tell me,” said Rosenstein quietly. “It says here”—he tapped the article—“you have a child. It says you do. A son, right? Yours? Natural?” Michael nodded.

  “So how could you understand?” argued the lawyer, taking off his glasses and polishing them on the end of his silk tie. Without them, his expression looked blunt and impenetrable. “And anyway, how can a man in your position be so . . . so naïve?”

  “Naïve?” wondered Michael.

  “Don’t you know that if you want to live, you always live at the expense of somebody else?”

  “No. It might
come as a surprise to you, but I don’t know that,” said Michael. “That is, I’ve heard of extreme situations—people eat each other on a desert island, and during my lifetime I’ve met some murderers and liars and villains, things like that, but this ‘always’ of yours I don’t really know.” And after a moment’s thought he added: “And I have grave doubts as to whether your view of the world is correct. In any case, it’s not really an axiom,” he said dryly.

  “What are you talking about?!” the lawyer exclaimed, and put his glasses back on. “You’re an intelligent individual. I don’t need this paskustva, this filth”—he indicated the pages of the newspaper article—“to know that you’re an intelligent individual and—forgive me, maybe this isn’t going to sound good, but it’s the truth—you act like . . . like a European.”

  “What do mean?” asked Michael, stifling an ironic smile.

  “I must say . . . I . . . It came as a surprise to me when I read here that you came to this country from Morocco,” said Rosenstein. “I even thought it was a mistake, because you don’t behave like a Moroccan.” He looked at Michael with cunning satisfaction, as if certain that he had said things his interlocutor wanted to hear.

  “Really?” said Michael coldly. Now he also chided himself for the feeling of insult that had surprised him. “How exactly does a Moroccan behave?”

  Rosenstein hesitated. “More like . . . How can I put it? . . . Like someone who comes from a position of inferiority, sort of . . . more wildly . . .”

  “And a European?” asked Michael. “How does a European behave? He makes use of the head nurse? For example?”

  The lawyer was silent for a moment, but immediately gathered his wits and said quietly: “Look, for a long time I’d been talking to you like a lawyer to a police officer, but for hours now . . . I’ve realized that you’re not . . . that I can talk to you straight from the heart, and believe me, I haven’t got anything against oriental Jews, Moroccans or Yemenites or . . . whatever. But if we’re really talking, just like there are jokes about Poles . . . there’s no need to be bitter if there are also . . . The Moroccans, all the oriental Jews cry about how we discriminated against them—you might think that we ourselves were living in paradise. It was the oriental Jews who lived peacefully in their diaspora and we . . .”

  Michael expected the obvious mention of the Holocaust, but the lawyer leaned over and pulled Orly Shushan’s article toward him and pointed with his finger to the middle of the page. “She writes here,” he said heatedly, “that you were married to a Polish girl—by the way, I think I knew her father. He was a well-known lawyer, a bailiff, if I’m not mistaken, one of the first in the country, right? That is to say, an Ashkenazi woman, and it also says here that you are known, that a known attribute of yours, is that you prefer Ashkenazi women, so I understand that you . . . All right, never mind. I see that you’re getting angry.”

  “Let’s go back for a moment to the matter of living at the expense of someone else,” said Michael. “I want to understand this exactly. Because according to what you say, it’s not just a matter of extreme circumstances, and not a matter of ethical questions in the philosophical sense, but you’re talking in a practical, everyday sense. And going by what you say it’s also permissible, as you see it, to murder, say, a young girl who threatens your domestic harmony, or your wife’s health or your only daughter’s happiness or . . . These are sufficient reasons to—”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” interrupted the lawyer. “What I mean is that . . . It’s like . . .” His face suddenly lit up. “Have you read Altneuland?”

  “Altneuland?” Michael was astonished. “Herzl’s book?”

  “Yes, Yes. It was years ago . . . I noticed that he . . . Why do you think he didn’t mention the Arabs at all? He dreams about the state and he describes it . . . describes Palestine . . . as if there are no Arabs. Why?” Behind the lenses of his glasses his small eyes, which didn’t expect an answer, sparkled and took pleasure in the possibility of explaining. “Because if he had taken them into account, he would have really had to have taken them into account. Do you see what I mean?”

  Michael did not reply.

  “And then maybe there would never have been a Jewish state, right? Because if a person wants to live,” Rosenstein summed up, “then how can I put it? If you’re doing something big, taking a big step in life . . . at the crucial moments of life you can’t take into account . . . Believe me . . . I’ve seen it, I was there . . . and I’m not talking about the Germans, that’s obvious and well-known. It’s trivial to say that the Germans were monsters . . . I’m talking about what the Jews did to each other in order to stay alive and these . . . these are people who . . . you can’t judge . . .” A desperate, pleading note entered his voice. “Like Herzl couldn’t think about the Arabs, I can’t . . . That is to say, the Yemenites . . .” His voice grew stronger, and fervently he added: “You yourself said: In your work you see it all the time . . .”

  “What I see,” said Michael, “is that there’s always a choice. This is what I believe, and I have proof. Not everyone is prepared to eat another person in order to survive on a raft or a desert island. You have to take into account that there are some people who would prefer to be eaten.”

  The lawyer examined his fingers. “In all my life, I’ve never met many people like that,” he said finally. “Very few cases . . . On one hand . . . Maybe my wife, if she knew how the child came to us . . . But the fact is,” he said triumphantly, “she never asked how. She held the baby tight in her arms and didn’t ask a thing. And Tali, she didn’t even look like . . . She had blue eyes and fair skin, but afterward . . . And believe me, Lydia Abramov, that nurse, was a good woman. She didn’t—”

  “She’s no longer alive,” noted Michael. “She died eight years ago, in Petach Tikva.”

  “She had Parkinson’s,” said the lawyer matter-of-factly. “No one needed to kill her.”

  “It’s interesting that you’re bringing up the subject at your own initiative,” remarked Michael.

  “I was being sarcastic,” explained Rosenstein apologetically, “before you start investigating whether I also murdered her in order to shut her up, the way you say I—”

  “She testified about the Yemenite children before she died,” noted Michael, “and her testimony—there was no remorse in it. All she said was, ‘We did the best we could in the conditions that prevailed.’ I remember her exact words. She just explained how because of the panic about the polio epidemic every baby who had a high fever was hospitalized immediately, and at the commission of inquiry she had the feeling that they had done the right thing. And I also noticed how she described there the way the Yemenite parents didn’t come to look for their children for weeks . . . ‘As if they didn’t care,’ she said. She didn’t know details . . . couldn’t remember . . . And she also claimed that there were lots of children who disappeared, all kinds, who were hospitalized and never went back to their parents. Ashkenazi children too. From Romania, from the whole world, not just Yemenite children. There was . . . There was a story there about some woman, a millionaire from WIZO in England, who came to Israel and got a child from Romanian parents and took her back with her to England. This particular story Lydia Abramov remembered very well.”

  “We didn’t know anything,” insisted the lawyer. “We didn’t know she was a Yemenite baby. Had I known from the beginning, maybe . . .” He stopped.

  “Yes? Maybe what?” demanded Michael.

  “Maybe we would never have taken her, because . . . Don’t jump as though I were some racist. I have nothing against Yemenites, I’m simply a practical person and I didn’t want people to know . . . It’s . . . She doesn’t look like she’s her mother’s daughter. Had I known in advance, maybe I . . .” He drew the chair closer to the desk and leaned forward, as if about to share a secret. “You must understand, we didn’t tell Tali that she was adopted. We didn’t say a thing to anyone. We moved to Jerusalem and we closed everything down in Haifa. Ma
ybe someone suspected, and once she even asked, Tali, but I said, ‘No. Of course not.’ I’ve been told that there’s an age when children think they are adopted, and I was afraid . . . I was afraid that someone had said something to her—this is a small country where everyone knows everyone else.” He turned his face away and brought his forefinger to his eye, pushing it under a lens of his glasses.

  “Let’s get back to Zahara,” said Michael as if making a suggestion. “So she came into your office and . . . ? Did she say, for example, where she had obtained the information?”

  “I have no idea how she found out,” answered Rosenstein bitterly. “She came in and threw a cardboard file down on the desk, with copies from the Interior Ministry of a death certificate and a birth certificate and she said that her sister was . . . that Tali was . . . born . . . and I looked at the birth certificate. It said Zahara’s parents’ baby girl was born in . . . April? And we got Tali in January, and I say to her, ‘Zahara, Tali was born in January,’ and she says, ‘You can’t prove it. Everyone there faked things. Look, it says “Zohar” in the certificate and not “Zahara,” so why shouldn’t they be wrong about the dates?’ And I said, ‘Zahara, sweetie, there’s a difference between a two-month-old baby and a five-month-old baby,’ but that didn’t convince her. ‘No, there are all kinds of babies,’ that’s what she said, ‘and you got her from the immigrants’ camp at Ein Shemer, and isn’t it true that she had blue eyes?’”

  Michael supported his chin on his hand and in a very low voice asked the lawyer what he thought Zahara wanted. Justice? Revenge?

  “I really don’t know,” answered the lawyer miserably. “I even asked her. I said, ‘Zahara, what will you do with this information after fifty years? You’ll just ruin everyone’s life and what good will it do you if . . .’ But she was like a person with an idée fixe, and she kept saying ‘to bring the truth to light, to reveal the truth. You won’t go on living here quietly with grandchildren and all the . . . when my parents are broken like that . . .’”