The heating stove was on. It hissed and whispered and emitted a faintly acrid smell. Above it, on a clothesline strung across the living room, pristine linen diapers hung to dry. The air was warm and damp and redolent of detergent and wet linen. Lillian, a wide-hipped woman with long raven hair, stood by a towering pot in the kitchen, using a long stick to rotate the additional diapers that were undergoing disinfection in its boiling water. More pots and pails and bowls were arrayed along one kitchen wall. All were full of water, a precaution against Jerusalem's frequent water outages.
Daniel set a teapot and glasses on the dining table. The teapot was beat-up metal. The glasses were narrow and had delicate artwork painted on them. Daniel caught me eying them and said, "They were my grandparents'. They brought them all the way here from Morocco in 1903."
He told me how his grandparents, spurred by religious fervor, had taken their six children on the perilous journey from Casablanca to Jerusalem. They traveled by boat, then camel, and finally mule-drawn wagons until they reached the Holy City. They went straight to the Temple Mount upon arrival. Daniel's father was ten when his own father broke into tears on the Mount, overcome by his proximity to where the two Jewish temples—the first destroyed by the Babylonians, the second by the Romans—had once stood.
"We've lived in Jerusalem ever since," Daniel said with evident pride.
From the kitchen, Lillian commented with a smile, "Daniel talks like his family has lived here since the time of King David, when in truth they're newcomers."
"Lillian's ancestors came here fifty years before mine," Daniel said.
"A full century next year," Lillian said, wiping her hands on her apron. "Long before anyone even dreamed up the word Zionism." With the stick, she fished out the pure and soggy diapers from the pot and set them to cool in a large basin. She entered the living room and plopped onto a chair with a sigh. Daniel poured us all tea.
I took a sip. The tea was hot and sugarless, but with a strong herbal taste that I liked. I could feel my bones thawing after the deep cold of Moria's apartment.
"Daniel told me you're a private investigator," Lillian said. Both she and her husband had Jerusalem accents, melodious and earthy with pronounced vowels.
"That's right. I'm trying to learn what I can about Moria."
"It was quite a shock," Lillian said. "I couldn't believe it when I heard she was dead. It still feels like a bad dream."
"How well did you know her?"
"Not as well as we thought, obviously. And not as well as we would have liked. We used to see much more of her, and during the past year we invited her to dinner a few times, but she always declined. I think she felt uncomfortable in our company."
"Why do you say that?"
Lillian exchanged a glance with her husband. Daniel drew a breath and said, "Because of our son. I think she found it hard to be around us."
"I don't understand."
Daniel started to talk, but his voice failed on the first syllable. His eyes welled up. Lillian squeezed his hand.
"Our son, Shimon," she said, "our firstborn, got sick two years ago when he was three and a half. He was hospitalized in Ariel Hospital, where Moria worked. That's where we met her for the first time. It was shortly before she moved into the building."
Daniel was looking to the side, and I followed his gaze to a photograph of Daniel, Lillian, and a smiling child of three sitting on Daniel's lap. The photo was black and white, but the smile on the big man's face was so bright, it shone like a sunrise. The boy looked full of life, oblivious to the disaster hurtling toward him, toward them all. Sometimes death doesn't creep up on you. Sometimes it pounces.
Lillian said, "All the nurses were dedicated, but none more than Moria. Our son loved her. His mood was always brightest when she was on shift. He got better after a while, and I allowed myself to hope, but then his condition deteriorated, and the doctor told us he needed to undergo surgery." She took a deep breath and added in a hollow voice, "Shimon died during the procedure."
Daniel clamped his eyes tight, but a couple of tears still managed to escape. He wiped his face with the back of his hand—big, clumsy swipes, as though trying to erase the pain and not just the wetness. I already liked him despite the manner in which our acquaintance had commenced, but now I felt toward him the sort of intimate kinship that only comes from shared pain. We had both lost young children.
Lillian clutched her husband's hand tighter, as though to keep him from falling, or perhaps to prevent herself from doing so. "He's with the angels," she said. "With God. Remember that."
Daniel nodded, but his balled fists indicated he was far from reconciled with the Almighty for depriving him of his son.
"Moria took it hard when Shimon died," Lillian said. "She came to the funeral, the only one from the hospital staff, and she wept openly. And once, about a month after his death, we ran into each other on the stairs, and tears sprang to her eyes the moment she saw me. Afterward, she was distant, even a bit cool toward us."
"Do you think she blamed herself for your son's death?"
"She had no reason to. None whatsoever."
Which meant very little. Guilt is an illogical beast. There's no rhyme or reason to when it rears its head or sinks its teeth. Moria might have taken the death of a patient too much to heart. She might even have found fault in her abilities, had viewed herself culpable. But I couldn't see that as the motivation for her suicide. It did not fit the content of her note.
"I think she was troubled about something," Lillian said.
"What makes you think that?"
"I used to hear her walking around in the middle of the night, back and forth. We can hear it when someone's walking upstairs. I think she had trouble sleeping."
Like me, I thought.
"I never heard any footsteps at night," Daniel said.
"Why would you?" Lillian gave her husband a smile of good-natured reproach. "You're either working or asleep. I'm the one who gets up at night to feed and change the baby. You don't even stir when she cries."
"Any idea what Moria was troubled about?" I asked.
Both of them said they didn't know.
"Did Moria have any visitors that you know of?"
"A couple of nurses from the hospital came by every once in a while," Lillian said. "Including the one who found the body."
"Naomi Hecht?"
"Yes, that's her. She used to come by pretty frequently. I hope she had time to make it up with Moria before... you know."
"She and Moria had a falling-out?"
