by Batya Gur
“Nothing. Nothing new,” he promised in a faint voice. “Is he still there?”
“He hasn’t budged,” said Tzilla. “With Yair, and I didn’t let Balilty . . . Tell me, what happened? Do you feel okay?”
“Perfectly fine,” he said to her, and even contorted his lips into what he hoped would look like a smile. “I’m just tired.”
“Maybe we’ll postpone it for a little . . . ?” She hesitated and nodded toward the closed door.
“Nonsense,” dismissed Michael. “We’re not postponing anything, I’m just wondering whether . . .” He looked around and thought about the other rooms. “Never mind,” he finally said. “I thought maybe we would sit in some other room, but . . . Maybe it’s best in the little room after all. There’s an informal atmosphere there and this might . . .”
“Where should I put this for you?” Tzilla debated, and moved her eyes from Michael to the miniature tape recorder she was holding. “I’ve already recorded the date and the time on it, but where should I put it? Have you got a shirt on under the sweater?”
“Just an undershirt,” apologized Michael, and suddenly he felt like a child under the efficiency of her fingers, which surrounded his waist. “In the belt of your jeans. There’s no alternative,” she said, and rolled up the bottom of the blue sweater. “Here. Like that, and there’s also another tape in the drawer. If he agrees, put that one on the table. You haven’t had anything to drink yet,” she scolded him. “Go ahead in and I’ll bring some coffee, or would you rather—”
“Bring it, bring it. Why not? Also for Mr. Efraim Beinisch, and bring some water, too. Never mind. All the bottles are stored in this . . .”
“Einat phoned again,” reported Tzilla as she touched the door handle.
“Nu? Has she regained consciousness?” he asked impatiently.
“Not really,” said Tzilla, “but it’s a matter of hours, the doctor said, and I thought I should go over there.”
“Not yet,” said Michael. “Wait for some progress. In any case no one is going to let you talk to her now.”
“I told you,” he heard Efraim Beinisch say as he opened the door. “I don’t tend the garden, only Mrs. Beinisch, my wife, and there’s a gardener . . .” He stopped speaking and stood up when the door opened and looked at Michael anxiously. On the table, between two bottles of mineral water and two colorful paper cups, beneath the old desk lamp with the cracked plastic shade, lay a large color photograph of a climbing rosebush. Packets of coffee and plastic spoons were in the open cardboard box under the table and a carton of bottled mineral water stood on the table, near the closed window. The lamp illuminated the surface of the table and picked it out of the dimness of the room. Faint autumn sunlight came in through the slits in the brown iron shutter. They sat next to each other, facing the table that stood next to the wall and concealed the bottom half of the window. On the wooden frame around the dusty, stained windowpane, traces of peeling green paint were still visible.
“Mr. Beinisch is not prepared to speak to anyone else, nor does he agree to our recording the conversation,” said Sergeant Yair with no preliminaries. He rose from his chair and buttoned the top button of the light blue shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows (“Did he always dress like that, or did he learn it from you?” Balilty’s scoffing voice echoed in Michael’s ears) and tucked the shirttails into his narrow black belt. “So in the meantime I’ve been asking him a few things about the antique rosebush. He says—Mr. Beinisch says—that to the best of his knowledge they never had a bush like that in their garden, and not in the garden next door, it seems to him, but he really isn’t knowledgeable about flowers.”
Efraim Beinisch said feebly: “I’m not knowledgeable, but there isn’t one.” He turned to Michael and explained apologetically: “I came here before six o’clock in the morning. I’ve been waiting for more than two hours, but I didn’t want . . . I don’t like to impose and they told me . . .”
Michael shook his head and Yair looked a question at him. Michael shook his head again. “So maybe I’ll go help Eli now with all the material—”
“No, no,” a tense Michael interrupted. “There’s no need. He’ll manage on his own. Ask Tzilla . . . She knows exactly what needs to be . . .” Yair nodded obediently and left the room.
The darkness of the room and the thick, oppressive air in fact suited him at that moment. A kind of paralyzing obstinacy led him to sit beside Efraim Beinisch, with his back to the window, and with all the oppressiveness and discomfort that were obvious on the man’s face. The accountant kept patting the sleeves of his suit jacket as if trying to rid them of invisible dust. Side by side they sat, with the table in front of them and their backs to the window like two schoolchildren. “They told me that you wanted privacy,” Michael explained, and turned his chair toward Beinisch.
“Privacy, yes,” Efraim Beinisch muttered, and ran his large white fingers through his hair. The light of the desk lamp gave a gray tone to the yellowish color of his hair, a remnant of its former red. He laid his hands on his knees and leaned forward, and Michael looked at the large brown birthmark on his right hand and the freckles that ran to his knuckle, where his wedding band gleamed. He was touched by something about this hand, with its freckled, wrinkled skin and the small age spots that were scattered among the wrinkles, and the way he twisted the wedding band and irritated the flesh that swelled around it.
“Has something happened?” asked Michael, and he himself was sur prised by the note of patient pity in his voice as he asked the question.
Efraim Beinisch wiped his round face, which was gleaming in the light of the desk lamp. Then he turned his head toward the window, as if listening to the sounds of thunder outside, and he sat up straight in his chair and asked: “What was that? Did you hear that? Is that thunder or shooting?”
“I think it’s thunder. They said it would rain today,” said Michael reassuringly. “Look, here comes the lightning.”
“No, all last night there were . . . Where we are we hear everything that happens in Gilo,” Efraim Beinisch said, and examined his hands. “But that’s only at night.”
Michael said nothing.
“These aren’t good times,” Efraim Beinisch said, and cleared his throat. “There’s no quiet. Difficult times . . .” He stopped speaking and looked toward the closed window, touched his Adam’s apple, ran his fingers around his thick neck and touched the knot of his blue tie.
“Mr. Beinisch.” Michael sighed after a long moment of silence. “You came here because you wanted to tell me something.”
“Yes, yes,” said Efraim Beinisch in a thick voice, “but it’s difficult. This is difficult for me.”
“It’s difficult for you to talk?”
“Not to talk,” said Efraim Beinisch. “Talking isn’t difficult. It’s what to say that’s difficult,” he explained, and lightly tapped his knee before grasping both sides of the chair with his hand.
“Does it have to with Yoram?” guessed Michael.
Efraim Beinisch nodded his head. In the light of the lamp Michael noticed the nervous blinking of his eyes as he stood halfway up and took a packet of paper tissues out of the back pocket of his trousers. “My wife, she puts them here,” he apologized, and blew his nose noisily.
Michael crossed his arms on his chest. “Have you found out something new?” he asked gently. “Something about Yoram?”
Efraim Beinisch opened his mouth, but didn’t utter a sound. For a moment he looked like a large fish out of water, and finally he shook his head as if giving up and took a small package wrapped in newsprint out of the inner pocket of his jacket. He unfolded the paper and pushed it aside and examined, as if seeing it for the first time in his life, the small notebook bound in brown leather. He looked at it, and looked some more, before he handed it to Michael.
Michael felt the soft leather and undid the yellow cord that held it together. He got closer to the desk lamp, set the notebook down under it and paged through it slowly, r
eading what was written on the first pages, and then he ruffled quickly through the pages, stopping at a page that was completely covered in big round letters that said: “To lift all kind of spells: Write on a parchment that has been ritually purified: May it be Your will, the Holy Name, Lord of Israel, that You lift from the bearer of this amulet all manner of spells, be they in writing or be they spoken . . .”
He turned and looked at Efraim Beinisch. “Where did you find this, Mr. Beinisch?” he asked, and tried to make his question sound matter-of-fact and to ignore the throbbing that had grown stronger in his temples.
Efraim Beinisch shook his head a few times and looked down. In a broken voice he said: “It’s this. Because of this I wanted . . . God . . . In Yoram’s room, in the sock drawer.”
“Is it his, this notebook?” asked Michael, and he was immediately concerned lest his playing innocent was too artificial and caused Beinisch to immediately clam up.
“I wish it were,” said Efraim Beinisch. “I wish it were. God help me, it’s the girl’s.”
“The girl’s?” asked Michael. “Which girl?”
“The girl. The girl that . . . Nessia. It’s hers. Don’t you see that it’s a child’s handwriting? It says here . . .” He rifled through the notebook quickly to the last page. “Here we are. ‘Peter brought a golden ball to decorate the sukkah’ . . .”
“And this was in Yoram’s room?” asked Michael carefully, restraining his voice so as not to frighten Efraim Beinisch, who could just stop talking and walk away the same way he had suddenly appeared of his own free will.
“In the sock drawer, and that’s the truth,” Efraim Beinisch said, and laid his hands on his knees and examined them with interest.
And instead of proceeding as if tiptoeing on eggshells, instead of listening to that anxiety, Michael gently set the brown notebook aside on the corner of the table, laid a hand on Efraim Beinisch’s arm and said simply: “You searched his room.”
“I . . . I looked through his things . . . God, God in heaven.” Efraim Beinisch sighed.
“Before our search?” Michael asked, and watched him nod limply. “You looked through his room before our people searched there?”
“I . . . I don’t know why,” said Efraim Beinisch, and he raised his round face, which had turned yellow. “I know that he . . . that he tells lies, and I thought . . . But he wasn’t . . . He . . . I knew he had gone out that night. I thought then that . . .”
“What did you think?” Michael asked, and poured some water into the pink paper cup—how odd it was, suddenly, this bright pink—and handed it to Efraim Beinisch, who didn’t move. “Drink, drink,” he urged, and he watched the man slowly lift his head, shaking it from side to side and extending a trembling hand toward the cup and bringing it to his twitching lips. The sounds of his swallowing were heard in the silence of the room, and then came the rumble of approaching thunder.
Efraim Beinisch wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “God,” he said, “his mother doesn’t know I found anything. I didn’t say anything to her. She would die if she . . . I’m dying myself.”
Quickly, so as not to lose the moment, Michael brought the conversation back to the place it had stopped. “You thought he went out to have a good time the night the girl disappeared?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” explained Efraim Beinisch. “Sometimes you don’t want to think. You don’t want to see what you’re seeing.”
“But you searched his room,” Michael reminded him, “without anyone knowing. So you did want to know.”
“I had no alternative,” Efraim Beinisch said, and looked at him with supplicating expectancy. “I had no alternative. Sometimes there’s no alternative, and you have to know the truth.”
“Yes,” said Michael. “Sometimes there’s no alternative.”
“Especially,” said Efraim Beinisch, “if you know you’ve raised . . . that your child, your only son . . . your only son, whom you love, the son you thought was . . . everything . . . And you discover that . . . that he’s rotten.” The last word echoed in the room, and Efraim Beinisch sat up straight in his chair. “Rotten,” he repeated. “Completely rotten. Only God knows how. Like an apple that’s red and beautiful on the outside. On the outside, like a red apple, bright, and inside—a worm. All rotten. In fact . . . sick. Very sick.”
At that moment there was a knock on the door and it immediately opened and Tzilla stood there, bending over the threshold to pick up a cup of coffee she had set down to free her hand to knock. Michael rose and hurried over to her, took the two glass mugs from her and murmured, “Thanks, and do not disturb,” then pushed the door closed with his shoulder before she could say another word and carried the two cups to the table. Then he dug into his pants pocket, took out the packet of crushed cigarettes and offered one to Efraim Beinisch, who looked at him in confusion, raised his head and with a resigned expression put the cigarette between his lips and waited for Michael to light it.
“I haven’t smoked for thirty years,” he said. “Blood pressure. But now nothing matters anymore.” He looked at the cup of coffee as if astonished. “I don’t drink coffee, either. My wife doesn’t let me . . . ,” and he immediately took a long, noisy sip.
“Mr. Beinisch,” said Michael without taking his eyes off the other man, who had leaned his elbows on the table, one hand encircling the cup of coffee and the other holding the cigarette, from which gray smoke curled, thickening between the two men. Beinisch’s watery eyes followed the spiral of smoke, which first curled upward alone and then joined the other and thickened into a cloud above the cracked lamp.
“Do you think Yoram abducted the girl?” asked Michael.
Without taking his eyes off the cloud of smoke, Efraim Beinisch nodded.
“Why do you think he abducted her?”
Efraim Beinisch looked at him silently.
“Do you think the girl knew something about him? That there’s anything . . . in the notebook?”
Efraim Beinisch lowered his eyes and coughed, but did not speak yet.
“Do you think he murdered Zahara Bashari?” asked Michael simply.
Heavy rain pattered on the iron shutter.
Efraim Beinisch wrapped his hand around the glass mug. “This is the end of us,” he murmured. “I thought that we would have quiet, that he would get married and go to America, that he would . . . But God didn’t want this. I’m not a religious man, Mr. Ohayon. You should be aware that I’m not a religious man. I finished with God . . . Anyone who was under communism in Hungary doesn’t . . . can’t . . . The Russians killed my whole family. My father died in a camp . . . Like the Nazis, but people don’t know . . . But now I’m asking, what more does He want? What did I do wrong? Where have I sinned? We just had one son. My wife couldn’t . . . and she didn’t want to, and we gave him everything, really everything, and here we are drinking coffee as if . . . ,” he muttered, “as if nothing has happened.”
“I can imagine how hard it was for you to come here,” said Michael.
“It was the most difficult decision I ever made in my life,” said Efraim Beinisch, “but I had no alternative. I’ll tell you the truth: I thought, either I put a bullet through my head or drive the car off a cliff, or else I do what needs to be done. I can put a bullet through my head later, too, but first I had to do what needed to be done.” His voice rose. “I’m not talking about the law, Mr. Ohayon. I don’t give a damn about the law. I’m talking about something bigger.”
“Do you think he had a relationship with Zahara Bashari?” probed Michael. “Do you think he is the father of her child?”
“Did he have a relationship?!” said Efraim Beinisch. “With him, it’s impossible to know anything. He doesn’t tell. Ever. Even when he was a child, Yoram never said anything. He just spoke about . . . peripheral things. I never understood what really happened. Even at school, when the teacher called us in, that they caught him, he said . . . he told stories . . .”
“What did
they catch him doing at school?” asked Michael.
“He . . .” Efraim Beinisch looked at him in embarrassment. “What does it matter now? But maybe you’re right. Maybe it is important. He . . . There was a girl at school. I don’t know exactly what . . . He captured a cat with its kittens and . . . he showed the girl . . . She watched how he killed the kittens, with a stone to their heads. The girl . . . She . . . Her mother . . . She had to be taken to a psychologist, but . . . it never happened again or, if you ask me, he learned how to conceal . . . he didn’t show anyone anything. His mother doesn’t allow it to be mentioned. We never talk about it anymore. At home she said to me, ‘What do you want from him? He’s just a child.’ So I let it drop. I’m to blame. I should have . . .” His voice faded and he looked with astonishment at the burning cigarette and dropped it into the pink paper cup.
“Did he have a relationship with Zahara?” asked Michael again.
“I . . .” Efraim Beinisch leaned forward and looked at Michael. “I don’t have . . . I didn’t have anything against those people, the Basharis. But understand, it was the women. It’s a women’s affair. When we first moved in there was a common entrance. There was a porch at the entry to the house with a window on the Basharis’ side. On the first day we came we said hello nicely and we introduced ourselves and everything. We shook hands and they said congratulations. But after a few days the problems started. You never know what the first thing was. My wife hung out her laundry in the yard, on the clothesline, and Naeema Bashari threw all the laundry next to the door. It was her clothesline. How could we have known? She didn’t come to talk, just threw down all the laundry. Then she threw things out of the window onto the entry porch, peels and garbage and . . .” He stopped speaking for a long moment and stared as though he were seeing scenes from the past. “Had it been just between me and Mr. Bashari, believe me, everything would have been sorted out long ago, but a quarrel between neighbors is a quarrel between women and it wasn’t possible to reason with Naeema Bashari. I could feel how she wanted to get rid of us in any way possible, no matter how—she just wanted us to go. I wanted to, I wanted to leave. But my wife . . . she didn’t want to give in. She wanted war. To win. To teach her a lesson. Like”—he nodded in the direction of the window—“like with the Arabs, but here it’s with women . . . Believe me, Mr. Ohayon, a quarrel between neighbors is a quarrel between women.”
