The bus to Jerusalem was half full, but the closed windows conspired with the passengers' wet clothes to create a stifling, humid atmosphere. I cracked open a window and let the cold wind whip at my face, but was soon called into order by a heavyset woman wearing about seven layers of clothing. In a cutting tone, she commanded me to shut the window. It was freezing outside, or hadn't I noticed? I thought about regaling her with tales of December 1944 in Auschwitz, for the purpose of educating her on what being exposed in freezing weather truly felt like, but instead I demurred, shutting the window. I had fought with too many people over the past few days.
As all across Israel, the main topic of conversation on the bus was the proposed negotiations with Germany. Against my wishes, I caught snatches of talk throughout the ride to the capital.
The Knesset had resumed its debate yesterday and was scheduled to vote on the matter today. The papers predicted that the government would prevail. The police had cordoned off a large area around the Knesset as a precaution against further disturbances, none of which had materialized. Most of the rioters were still imprisoned. One of the passengers declared his hope that they'd never be released. Another told him to shut his mouth. It might have come to blows were it not for the heavyset woman, who ordered the pair to keep quiet. They were hurting her sensitive ears. Cowed by her imperiousness, the two did just that. I was beginning to like her.
The day was gray and gloomy. Rain pummeled the bus as it trundled up the twisting mountain road to Jerusalem, but it petered out as we entered the city. The bus rumbled past the Institute for the Blind and Shaare Zedek Hospital and curled along Jaffa Street before wheeling into the Central Bus Station, where I disembarked. A blustery wind stabbed cold bayonets through my coat as I showed a harried ticket clerk the address where Moria Gafni had lived and perished. He told me which line to take, and I spent ten miserable minutes waiting on a hard bench, hunched inside my raised collar, for an inner-city bus to arrive.
The bus had started its life as a truck and had since been fitted with benches that looked grossly uncomfortable. Not that I got to test any of them. There were too many people for that. Clutching a leather strap that dangled from an overhead bar, I swayed with the motion of the bus as it cut a winding path through a succession of streets, some not much wider than alleyways, before finally depositing me in front of a stationery store in the northern neighborhood of Kerem Avraham. I followed the directions the clerk had given me, and five minutes later I found myself outside a sad-looking three-story building near the center of Amos Street.
It had been a house once upon a time, but it had since been sliced and diced into apartments, two on each floor. Rain and damp had left their mark on the exterior, and someone with large feet and a disdain for cleanliness had tracked mud across the tiny lobby and up the staircase. It didn't take much to reason out the whereabouts of the culprit—the mud trail ended at a door on the second floor—but I figured the landlord or other tenants could deal with it if they wished. I had more serious business to attend to.
I climbed to the third floor and, using the key Mr. Gafni had given me, entered the apartment where Moria Gafni had slipped from life into eternal sleep.
It was a small place: two narrow rooms laid in a line, so that from the front doorway, I could see all the way to the back wall of Moria's bedroom. I pushed the door closed and stood for a moment, letting my senses do their work.
The first thing that struck me was the smell. Stuffy and musty, like a newly unearthed burial chamber. The windows, I thought, had been closed for over a month, probably since the body had been carted off.
But somebody had been here since, and recently. I could tell because the frame of the small mirror by the door carried a thin layer of dust, but the inner door handle was free of it. It was a good thing I hadn't touched it when I closed the door.
Whoever it was, they hadn't busted the lock. So either they'd picked it, or they'd had a key. I didn't think it was Mr. Gafni, but not because I trusted him to tell me the truth. The simple fact was that Gafni had no need to lie to me. He had every right to visit the apartment, and it wouldn't have seemed odd if he'd done so.
So it wasn't him. Then who? The person Moria wrote about in her note? And what had he or she come for?
Next I listened, but that taught me nothing. The only sounds originated from outside the apartment. The growl of a truck engine. A man on the street below hollering some unintelligible message. A gust vibrating the windowpanes. The apartment itself was as silent as the corpse that had recently lain in it.
On pegs by the door hung a woman's coat and a leather handbag, and I went through them both. The coat yielded nothing but a pair of knitted gloves and a woolen cap. The bag contained Moria's ID card, a pencil stub, a trifling amount of cash, a handkerchief, a receipt from Schwartz Department Store, a couple of hairpins, and a crumpled shopping list that looked weeks old and included the most mundane of products. In short, zilch.
A couple of paces and I was smack in the middle of the living room. Not much had been squeezed into it, but enough to make the narrow space feel stifling. There was a couch that could sit two, a low bookcase, a pair of chairs and a square dining table by the window. The window had frilly white curtains that were pulled back and shutters that hung open. The view offered little in the way of beauty or inspiration—just more aging residential buildings, with slack empty clotheslines strung between them, under a dispiriting gray sky.
I turned my back on the drab panorama and faced the living room once more.
Everything appeared in order. The mysterious visitor had not looted the place. They had come looking for something specific, and they had either found it, or they could not bring themselves to toss the apartment. Or maybe they feared making a racket. I doubted the walls between the apartments were thick.
I went over to the bookcase. The books were perfectly aligned, none of the spines protruding, as though they'd been lined with a ruler. All the books were novels, all in Hebrew, mostly translated works by authors such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte and John Steinbeck. Serious stuff. Nothing as lowbrow as the Westerns and adventure novels that were the staples of my literary diet.
Gazing upward, I saw a few damp spots on the ceiling, along with several discolored patches where someone had lazily slapped paint over old ones. Cracks webbed from one corner, as though a giant spider had settled into the stone and was in the process of expanding its lair.
A squat heating stove stood by a wall, but, of course, no fire burned in its belly. The apartment was freezing, as though the walls were porous and winter had seeped in. I wondered how adequate the heating was, or if the apartment bled warmth as easily as it allowed in cold.
Shivering inside my coat, it struck me that, while Moria Gafni had lived better than many Israelis, she could have afforded finer accommodations with the help of her father. Yet she had chosen not to. Which indicated that she had been a proud woman.
The kitchen was the size of a wafer. The counters were clear, the sink clean, the drying board vacant. The trash can was empty. Was the garbage removed post-mortem, or had Moria done it prior to her death? Judging by the manner in which she'd arranged her books and the orderliness of her kitchen cupboards, I suspected she might have.
Back in the living room, I headed for a white door that opened onto a small bathroom. The water in the toilet, motionless for over a month, had grown a disgusting film of crud. Grimacing, I flushed the filth away, wincing at how loud the pipes groaned and belched.
The top shelf of the medicine cabinet contained toothpaste, a toothbrush, nail clippers, and makeup. The bottom shelf held headache pills you could buy in any pharmacy, a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine. No real medicine. The tub was on the smallish side. It might have fitted a teenager if she was petite and wasn't keen on stretching her legs. Looking at it, I realized I didn't know how tall Moria had been. I hadn't asked her father, and why would I? What possible bearing could it have on the investigation?
But now I was curious.
I exited the bathroom and entered the bedroom, heading straight for the single narrow closet. Its door was open, revealing just two shelves and a rack. Moria's clothes lay folded and piled in perfect order. Her dresses hung straight, including two nurse dress uniforms. I unhooked one of the nurse dresses and held it up before me, estimating Moria's height by its length. She'd been a short woman. Five one or maybe two. Just right for the small tub. And about the same height as the prime minister of Israel. Shaking my head, bemused by my rambling thoughts, I returned the dress to its hanger and closed the closet. Then I turned to study the rest of the bedroom.
Apart from the closet, there was a dresser; two paintings, neither of which would have made Van Gogh tremble with envy; and a bed, somewhere between a single and a double, set tight against the near wall. Attached to the wall at the corner of the room beside the bed was a small cabinet, its door closed. No sign of the pill bottles. Either the police had taken them, or someone had thrown them away.
A large depression dented the middle of the pillow. Made by Moria's head? The blanket was bunched up at the foot of the mattress, which was bare. Someone had removed the sheet. The mattress was white. Under the glare of the overhead light bulb, I could see the spiraling outlines of the springs enclosed within.
The bed stood a foot above the floor. I peered under it and found nothing but floor tiles. I went to the dresser next, crouched, and examined the knobs on each of the three drawers. No dust. The nameless visitor had opened these. Thinking that there might be fingerprints, I left the knobs untouched, gripping both sides of the drawers to tug them open.
The first drawer housed socks and underwear, all jumbled together as though someone had pawed through them. There were also a few wool stockings, which probably proved useful during the winter months. Nothing out of the ordinary apart from two pairs of silk stockings. These weren't cheap; one could sell these. The unknown visitor had either overlooked them or decided for some reason to leave them behind.
The second drawer held a large hairbrush, a pair of scissors, four squat candles, a book of matches, and two photo albums. The top one contained photos of the dead woman. There was Moria at one of the gates to the Old City, before Jerusalem had been carved in two, her arms spread wide as though to encompass the universe. There she was again, in a public garden I didn't recognize, leaning against a tree, her expression inscrutable. A third photo showed her in profile, staring off into the middle distance, her face serious and pensive. She had lost some of the adolescent freshness that I'd noticed in the photograph her father had given me, and in its place had gained a heavy dose of grown-up seriousness, as though a set of grim circumstances had plunged her deeper into adulthood than the mere passage of time could have done.
Other photos showed her at her job, wearing her white dress and nurse's cap—reading a thermometer, holding up a syringe with playful menace, standing at the entrance to the hospital where she had worked. There were other nurses around her in the last picture, and I went over each of their faces, committing them to memory.
The next several photos showed her in the company of either or both of two women, and I flipped back to the group photo, determining that indeed the two women were also nurses and had worked with Moria. Removing the photos from their mooring, I studied their backs, hoping to learn the two women's names, but they were blank. I returned all the photos but one into the album. The last, the one that showed Moria and her two friends most clearly, I slipped into my pocket.
The second album contained older photographs. There was Moria as a child of six or seven, her smile as big as the sky. There she was as a baby, lying on a blanket, staring up with huge eyes. There were many photos of Moria with an older woman who must have been her mother. Gafni had been right: the two looked very much alike.
Speaking of Gafni, he was nowhere to be found in the album. This was no accident. He had been excised from it. I could tell because some of the photos contained bits and pieces of him—a severed hand with his unmistakable porcine fingers, a shoe tip, a sliver of trouser leg, a slice of his bald head. The rest had been cut off and discarded. The little that remained could not be surgically removed without harming the image of Moria's mother in the process.
Running a fingertip along the cut edge of a photo, I wondered what had led Moria to perform this amputation on her recorded past. Could she not bear the sight of her father? Was it insufficient to sever all ties with him, and this was her attempt to expel him from her past and memory? Whatever had caused her to do this must have been terrible. No wonder Gafni wouldn't tell me about it. Gafni must have been unaware of the contents of this album. He wouldn't have left it in the apartment if he knew it existed.
In the third drawer, I found a notebook with a smooth brown cover. About half of the pages inside had been ripped out. Those remaining were blank. Was this where Moria had jotted her shopping lists? Where she had scribbled little reminders? Brushing my thumb over the surface of one of the surviving pages, it occurred to me that this was the same size and type of paper on which Moria had written her suicide note. I wished I had it with me to make sure, though the value of such certainty was unclear to me.
In addition to the notebook, the drawer held a framed diploma from the nursing school where Moria had studied, several pencils in varied stages of use, a number of empty envelopes, a strip of stamps with a few stamps missing, a sewing kit with an embroidered top, a few letters and memoranda from her workplace, and a pen. Scratching the pen across one of the envelopes left a zigzagging line of black. It might have been the pen Moria had used to write her suicide note. Had she returned it to the drawer before taking the pills? It seemed an odd thing to do just before killing herself.
Also in the drawer was a small box full of ticket stubs to various cinemas in Jerusalem—Eden, Smadar, Edison, Tel-Or, Zion, Orion. Staring at a fistful of stubs, I got an image of Moria Gafni sitting in a darkened cinema, her eyes bright, staring rapt at the flashing action on the screen. Moria, I decided, had relished the temporary escape movies offered and had wanted to cling to that feeling for as long as possible. As I allowed the stubs to flutter back down into the box, I couldn't help but think that eventually reality had proved so harsh that no escape, no matter how brief, remained possible.
Under the ticket stub box was a batch of thank-you notes written by formerly sick children and their parents. They painted a picture of a devoted nurse, kind and patient and helpful. Apparently, Moria had been good with the little ones, knew how to raise their spirits, to make them laugh despite their illnesses. She had given the children and their parents hope. What could have made a woman like that lose her own hope and choose to end everything?
