The Devil in Jerusalem (19 page)

“What about our friends? Yochanon, Essie?”

He rubbed his hands together. “I have something to tell you.”

She got up. “Not now!” she hissed, glancing meaningfully at their children, then heading to the crib to take care of Shoshana. The baby was soaked through. Daniella took off her soiled clothes, wrapping her in a towel and hurrying into the bathroom to give her a quick, warm bath in the sink. After she'd been dried, diapered, and put into clean, warm clothes, Daniella carried her into the living room.

Exhausted, Daniella sat down on the couch to nurse the baby.

The other children crowded around.

“No one will play with us anymore!”

“They say Aba is a
mazik
!”

“Why not? Who says?” she answered in confusion, her head spinning.

“Children, please!” Shlomie said. “Ima is feeding the baby.”

“I have presents for all of you!” she remembered, grateful for the distraction. “Duvie, go get Ima's green suitcase.”

He ran, rolling it into the room.

“Now unzip it!”

It looked like some scene from a Christmas card, she thought, taking in her children's looks of delighted expectation. The suitcase brimmed over with wrapped packages.

“All the blue packages are for Duvie, the pink for Amalya, the green for Yossi, and the orange for Gabriel.”

The children scrambled, tearing the packages out of each other's hands, gathering them in a pile, then sitting down to rip them open.

Their cries of happiness were deafening.

Shlomie stood by silently, his hands in his pockets, watching them with a pasted-on smile.

“Children, take your new toys to your rooms. Aba and Ima need some quiet, okay?”

Obediently, they took their loot and disappeared. Only Gabriel sat on the floor close to her, refusing to budge.

“Talk, Shlomie. I'm just about ready to have a heart attack.”

He shuffled his feet, one hand rubbing the back of his head, the other clutching his skullcap.

“I meant to do a good deed; the neighbors have been so helpful.…”

“What did you do, Shlomie?” she asked levelly.

Just then Gabriel began to cry. “Amalya, come get Gabriel,” she shouted, patting him on the head. Amalya dutifully picked him up, shaking a toy tiger in his face.

They were both silent, waiting for the children to leave before resuming.

“Well, I'll start at the beginning. Marwan's wife had a baby.”

Her head ached. “What?”

He seemed surprised at her impatience. “His wife, she had a baby,” he repeated.

“I heard you. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because he didn't come in to work for two days. And I don't know how it happened, but the plants didn't get enough water and some of them died.”

She looked down at Shoshana. She had Shlomie's eyes, those beautiful blue eyes. “I'm listening.”

“So, I bought some seedlings to replace them. The nursery man said they were the finest quality.…” He stopped. “They weren't. They were infected.”

“What does this have to do with all our friends being angry at us?”

“I bought some extra, to give out. To thank our friends for all their help. I meant well.”

She felt nausea rising up from the core of her being. She quickly shoved the baby into his arms and fled to the bathroom. Her stomach was empty. She heaved green bile. She washed out her mouth, cupping cool water and drenching her eyes and face. There was no clean towel, so she wiped her face with the hem of her skirt.

“How bad is it?” she asked, taking the crying Shoshana and putting her over her shoulder, patting her gently.

He stuttered. “Now everybody's greenhouse is infected. Their plants are all dying, and they all blame me.”

“All of our friends?”

He nodded.

She covered her face with her hands.

“They say they will have to throw out everything and start from scratch, that they'll lose the entire growing season.” He was shaking.

“Well, Mustapha will just have to pay the damages. They were his plants!”

Mustapha Quadri, a devout Muslim who lived in Jericho, had been Yahalom's sole supplier of plants for years.

“Well, it's a little more complicated than that.” Shlomie shook his head sorrowfully. “You see, someone from kollel said it wasn't right that we were helping to support our enemies. He said his father had a friend who knew a devout religious Jew with a nursery in Ashkelon who would sell seedlings to me at a very reasonable price.…”

She looked around at the walls of her almost-brand-new home, the place they had built in the Holy Land, surrounded by friends. They had been accepted, taken care of, loved. And they had returned evil for good.

“So, did you call this ‘devout Jew' where you bought the plants and tell him what he did to you and our friends? Did you demand he pay for the damages?” she asked forcefully, already knowing the answer. Inside, she felt half dead from weariness. It was the last straw.

“I tried many times, but he isn't picking up his phone. He's vanished.”

“Did you call the father of the man from kollel? Did you get in touch with the friend who recommended him?”

He shook his head. “It's not their fault. I don't want to embarrass them. That would be a sin.”

“And what you did to the people we know here in Yahalom, to Yochanon and Essie, that wasn't a sin? Never mind that we're ruined.… What are we going to do?”

“God help us!” he said fervently, his eyes brimming over with tears as he sat down on the floor next to her, patting Shoshana's small back. “I'm so sorry, Daniella. It's all my fault.” He wept.

Luftmensch
, she thought furiously, unmoved.

The children came bounding back into the room, their hands filled with dolls and other plastic treasures. At the sight of their father, they stopped dead and stared.

She looked at their stricken faces. He
was
their father. She reached out, patting him on the head. “It's all right, Shlomie. It's all right. God has preceded the blow with the remedy.”

Slowly, and with none of the joy she'd expected to feel, she proceeded to tell him about her grandmother's last will and testament.

 

15

Detective Tzedek pulled up to the parking lot of one of those massive, ugly apartment complexes built back in the sixties to house dirt-poor young couples and penniless immigrants. While it had undergone subsequent renovations by the slightly more affluent people who had purchased the apartments from their original owners, the building nevertheless remained an eyesore, with cheap add-on porches of clashing styles cluttered with old appliances and children's toys. The overall aesthetic effect was appalling.

There were so many entrances labeled with numbers and letters that she finally gave up and asked someone if they knew a Rabbanit Toledano. To her surprise, she was led immediately to the woman's door by the first person she asked, who waited patiently as she knocked.

A plump, short, older woman in a dark wig covered by a kerchief opened the door. She wore a shapeless flowered dress and orthopedic shoes. She smiled at both of them.

“She was looking for you,” the young man said.

“May God reward you for your kindness, Moshe,” Chana Toledano blessed him.

A joyous smile spread across the young man's face, as if he'd been told he'd won the lottery.

“And God bless you, Rabbanit Chana,” he thanked her, walking away beaming, satisfied.

Bina watched this display, her curiosity growing. “I'm Detective Tzedek of the Jerusalem Police. I spoke to you earlier?”

“Yes, please, come in, sit down.”

The house seemed like a clinic of some kind, the tiny living room cluttered with cheap folding chairs arranged in a neat circle.

“I knew you were coming so I sent everyone away. Otherwise, this room would be overflowing.”

“What is it you do, Rabbanit?”

“I have gotten the reputation of being a healer.” She shrugged modestly. “The truth is, I know a few homeopathic remedies my mother taught me and which seem to help people. But I always remind them, I'm not a doctor. They need to go to a doctor.”

They went into the kitchen, which was spotless. A stew boiling on the stovetop filled the small space with pungent odors of cumin and cinnamon.

“Can I offer you a drink?”

“Yes, thanks. I'd love a coffee.”

She made it Middle Eastern style, thick as mud, and poured it into tiny cups. It was delicious.

“I guess you know why I'm here.”

She nodded. “About the Goodman child, Eli; heaven have mercy on us! How is the child?”

“Thanks to you, he and his brother are in good medical hands. Eli is healing. But his brother…”

Her face went ashen. “I don't know anything about a brother.”

“His younger brother, Menchie. He's in a coma.”

The woman shook her head mournfully. “God watch over us. Such things among God-fearing Jews…”

“Apparently not,” Bina said softly, taking a deep breath. “I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course. Whatever I can do to help.”

“Can you start from the beginning?”

“It was about a month ago. Right before Rosh Chodesh. I don't know the secular date.”

“All right. Just tell me what happened.”

“I got a phone call from a woman I didn't know. That isn't so strange. I get a lot of phone calls from people I don't know who have heard of me and need help. But she wanted me not only to heal her boy but to take him in and keep him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her to first bring him over. God help me, I'll never forget it. Such a sight!”

She pulled out a small amulet that hung around her neck, kissing it three times.

“Can you describe what happened?”

“She was dressed like on Yom Kippur, God save us! All white. I never saw … anyway, she had a small boy with her—a beautiful boy, but so skinny! He could hardly walk. He was limping, limping so badly. At first, I thought maybe he broke something, fell down, hurt his ankle. You know small boys, always running, falling, God forbid, breaking bones. I told her to take him into my examining room and to take down his pants so I could see the legs.” She shifted uneasily in her chair. “God help me, I never saw such a thing! Like raw meat on the butcher's counter! No skin, no skin left at all, just covered with pus and redness and swelling. Somebody had tried to treat it but didn't know how. The wounds had been neglected for a long time, God help us. I'll tell you the truth. It made me cry just to look at them! I couldn't even think how much pain such a little child must be in from such a wound! But, God have mercy on us, he didn't cry. Not once. And the mother, she just looked at the wounds. Didn't wince, didn't say, ‘oy, my poor son,' didn't say anything you'd expect a mother with such a child to say. Just stared, like she was reading a recipe for challah. I can't tell you how much this bothered me.

“I asked, ‘How did this happen?' So she starts in with a story about a blanket next to a heater catching fire.…” The woman shook her head slowly. “Fairy tales. What she described, that kind of burn, it's like when you burn yourself on a havdalah candle, God watch over us. It's not so even. It's a red spot here, another spot there. A person moves around, tries to get away. What her boy had, it was like someone held a blowtorch to his poor little legs, the way you do to a stove when you
kasher
it for Passover.

“But I didn't press her, since I saw what I was dealing with. Instead, I asked her why she didn't take him to the hospital right away, why she waited until now. But instead of an answer, she gets up and says maybe this is not such a good idea, and she starts pulling up the child's pants, getting ready to leave.

“When I see this, I understand I can't let her leave with him—that if I don't try to help this child, no matter how he got the burns, no one will.”

“So you were suspicious even then?”

She cocked her head to one side and gave Bina a shrewd look. “I've seen things in my life. But what could I do? Besides, many devout Jews avoid hospitals.”

“Why is that?”

She shrugged. “They think that a God-fearing person would have more success interceding with God to heal their loved ones than a secular doctor. So in the end, I stopped asking questions. I took pity on the child and agreed to keep him and try to help him.”

Bina tried and failed to understand such thinking. “You took in a stranger's injured child?”

She shrugged. “God had sent this child to me. What else could I do? But I wasn't born yesterday. First I made her sign a paper saying in what condition she brought this child to me, and that it was her wish that I keep him and try to help him heal. Here is the paper. You see the signature, the date?” She handed Bina a handwritten letter that described Eli's wounds in great detail and ended with, “I ask Rabbanit Chana Toledano to care for my child.” It was signed “Daniella Goodman,” and dated three days before he'd been brought to the hospital.

Bina sank back into her chair, her spine tingling. “Why … why would you agree, Rabbanit Toledano?”

“I didn't want to. But I couldn't let her just drag the child out of here, could I? He could hardly walk, poor baby.”

“What happened?”

“She left and the child stayed. I expected him to struggle, to cry, to run after her. But he didn't do anything. He was like a toy, a doll. He didn't open his mouth.” She shook her head in wonder at the memory, as if it was still undigested. “I put some healing solution on the burns and waited to see what would happen in the morning. But the next day, I could see that it wasn't what he needed. The wounds were too deep and they'd been neglected for too long. He needed a doctor, maybe even a surgeon. I called the mother and asked her to send over the child's medical insurance card so I could take him to the hospital. But she refused. She told me that under no circumstances was I to take him to a doctor. God help me, I was shocked. I screamed at her that what she was doing was
rishut
, evil, satanic! She hung up on me.