While I was canvassing the building, I saw that Daniel hadn't cleaned the mud in the lobby and stairs. Maybe he would get to it later. Or maybe, in washing Moria's apartment, he was repaying a debt for his dead son the only way he knew how. Either way, I felt good about leaving Moria's apartment as clean as she'd left it when she died.
I almost didn't find the hotel. A scrawny building, it stood near the middle of Yehudit Street, about a ten-minute walk from Moria's apartment, and sported a faded sign that blended almost perfectly with the hotel's facade—both were streaked and smudged with all manner of black and gray. Inside, there was a poorly lit lobby that smelled of damp. The walls looked as though they'd last been painted during the Crusades. Incongruously, an ornate metal light fixture dangled from the ceiling, suggesting a long-forgotten glory, though only one of the sockets housed a bulb. The man behind the counter was fifty-something, with sallow skin, a bald dome of a head, and rheumy, bulging eyes. He eyeballed me over a newspaper he'd been reading, taking in the bag I was carrying, but did not utter a word of greeting.
I told him I needed a room.
He quoted a nightly rate that struck me as only mildly exorbitant. After a bit of haggling, I gave him some money, and he handed me a key. The creased leather key fob bore the number 9 and a name: Hotel Shalem. The clerk pointed a bony finger at the stairs. "Third floor. Second door on the left."
There were five doors in total. Two on either side of the corridor and one at the end. The two doors on the right had brass room numbers. The two on the left had only faint outlines where numbers had once hung. The door at the end had neither. I pushed it open and discovered a bathroom. Basic, Daniel had said, and he'd been right. One bathroom to a floor.
My room was small and cramped. There was a chair and a dresser. No closet. Just a coat hanger with one broken hook. The bed was a single and set very low. I tested the mattress and found it sagging and lumpy but adequate. The bedclothes looked clean, but their color had dwindled with age and repeated washings. The scent of cigarettes of lodgers both recent and ancient clung to the walls and furniture and the air itself like barnacles to an unattended ship.
The window resisted my efforts to open it, but finally yielded with a grating squeak, rising halfway before getting stuck. A minute of futile heaving later, I gave up, sitting on the bed before the half-open window, a cold wind rushing into the room, coiling its chilly fingers around me.
I took out the gun and the two magazines and weighed them in my hands and in my mind. Should I take them with me or leave them here? I could stick them in my bag, but I didn't trust the hotel keeper to not go through my stuff. Then again, I did not like walking around with a gun for no reason.
Too bad there wasn't a handy bedside cabinet with a hole in the wall behind it.
I settled on pulling out the bottom dresser drawer, stashing the weapon and magazines in the small space beneath it, and then sliding the drawer back into place. Not as good a hiding spot as Moria's, but I figured it was safe enough for the time being.
I wanted to keep the window open as far as it would go to air out the room, but if it started raining again, I might return to find everything drenched. I left it open a crack and headed out.
My stomach was grumbling. It was past noon, and I hadn't eaten since early that morning. I ducked into a café on the corner that had pictures of the Old City on its walls. I ordered bean soup and bread. The soup was hot and salty, the bread dark brown and rough. I tore up the latter and dunked its pieces into the former and started eating with relish.
It was the sort of simple fare that most Israeli eateries served. Plain ingredients. Nothing fancy or elaborate. Food designed to fill one's belly rather than excite one's taste buds. Israel's strict rationing policy made it difficult to produce dishes with loftier aspirations. I wondered if in Germany, with its economic miracle, people were eating better. I had a feeling they were.
My stomach full, I ventured back onto the street. I'd asked for directions at the café, and I followed them on foot, treading sidewalks in which water pooled in cracks and depressions, walking past leafless trees shivering in the wind and shops with wet awnings. Many of the buildings here were made of local limestone, coarse and pitted, each stone as unique as a man's face, with its distinct set of grooves, furrows, pocks, and bumps. As though each stone had a personal life story. As if their past had marked them with age spots and worry lines.
This section of Jerusalem, the western, Jewish part, was less than a century old, not much older than Tel Aviv, and parts of it were not older at all. Yet these streets felt markedly different from Tel Aviv's, tenser and wary.
It might have been due to the fact that Jerusalem perched on a mountain, while Tel Aviv lounged by the sea. Or perhaps it was because, generally, Tel Aviv was a hot and sunny place, while Jerusalem was colder and rainier.
But it seemed to me that the difference lay elsewhere. While Tel Aviv looked only to the future, here the streets and buildings were burdened with a heavy history, stooped under a ponderous mythical importance. Tel Aviv was a Jewish, Hebrew city and always had been. Jerusalem was holy for three major religions and had switched hands repeatedly over the millennia.
Also, Tel Aviv had not been besieged during Israel's War of Independence, while West Jerusalem had. The Arabs had blockaded it for months, leading to severe shortages of food, water, medicine. And while Tel Aviv had been bombed from the air a number of times, it had not suffered continuous barrages of artillery as had West Jerusalem.
But above all, Tel Aviv was whole and Jerusalem broken. The eastern part, including the Old City, was now separated from the Israeli section by barbed wire, walls, and barricades, and patrolled by Jordanian troops. The old Jewish Quarter was a Nazi dream come true—judenfrei, free of Jews, the entire Jewish population having been expelled by the Jordanians during the war. The holy sites of Jerusalem—the Temple Mount, the Western Wall—were forbidden to us Jews. The closest one could get to them was a vantage point on Mount Zion, close to the City Line, the name given to the armistice line that sliced Jerusalem in two. From there, one could gaze upon the Old City, but nothing more, similar to how Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, prohibited by God from entering Canaan, was allowed to gaze upon the Promised Land from Mount Nebo across the Jordan River. I doubted the sight alleviated his longing.
Here in Jerusalem, unlike Tel Aviv, the enemy was close, within range of small-arms fire. And indeed, on occasion, Jordanian soldiers fired into West Jerusalem, maiming or killing Israeli citizens. Here, the precariousness of Israel was emphasized, and the threat of war hung in the air like the blade of a guillotine. No wonder Jerusalem lacked Tel Aviv's vivaciousness, its convulsive energy. There was joy in the capital, yes, cinemas and cafés and culture and children and love. But all this goodness was marred by the knowledge that the divided city was a volatile tinderbox, and that the slightest spark could ignite a conflagration of fire and death.
And now this sense of vulnerability was augmented by the question of negotiations with Germany. A question that split Israeli society much like the city of Jerusalem was split. A split that had erupted into the skirmish between protesters and police, in which I had taken part.
It occurred to me then that the Jordanian troops manning the City Line must have heard the sounds of battle near the Knesset. What did they make of it? Did they smile, laugh, imagine the Jews killing each other, doing their dirty work for them? Did their fingers twitch for the triggers of their rifles as they grew excited thinking that a country thus divided would not be able to resist another attack?
Fury growled through my veins, and I found myself swearing profusely in Hungarian and Hebrew, words that would have made my mother spank me for my own good and my father shake his head in anguished disappointment.
I cursed Ben-Gurion for putting Israel in such a position, but I could not shake the biting guilt that assailed me as well. For had I not raised my hand against Israeli policemen? Had I not participated in the internecine skirmish near the Knesset?
Stopping to fire up a cigarette, I sucked in its smoke so violently that it scorched my throat. I coughed, my eyes tearing up, and I swore again, this time naming no one, but I had no illusion as to who was the target of my expletives.
I almost threw away the offending cigarette in anger, but a shrill internal voice stayed my hand, rebuking me for my intended wastefulness. Hadn't I lived through endless days when a cigarette was but a distant dream?
I put the cigarette back between my lips, and this time drew on it gently. Warmth spread through my chest, not taking the edge off my anger, but granting me sufficient distance from it in order to redirect its focus. Away from me and onto the unknown person who had driven Moria Gafni to suicide.
"Whoever you are," I murmured, "I'm coming for you."
I recognized Ariel Hospital from one of the pictures I'd seen in Moria's apartment. Four stories tall and made of fine Jerusalem stone now darkened by rain, with recessed arched windows dotting its front.
It had a low wrought-iron fence, and sculpted pillars divided its entrance into three archways. The lobby milled with people. Doctors and nurses and patients. Coughs and sneezes and chatter in Yiddish, Hebrew, and a bunch of other languages resounded throughout the large space. Underlying the wet human smell was the stringent odor of Lysol. I asked a blonde nurse where the Pediatric Ward was, followed her directions, and a few minutes later found myself standing before a counter, behind which sat a matronly nurse jotting in a file folder.
I waited for her to finish, but when a full minute passed, I cleared my throat loudly.
"What can I do for you?" she asked without raising her eyes from her scribbling.
I asked where I might find Naomi Hecht.
That made her look up. She did not seem impressed. "Nurse Hecht? Why?"
"I want to talk to her."
"Are you a family member of one of our patients?"
"No."
She pressed her lips together. "Then I don't see why you should be bothering her during her shift. Now, if you don't mind." She made a shooing gesture and resumed writing.
I leaned over the counter and waved my fingers through her gaze, forcing her eyes back to me. "I want to talk to her about Moria Gafni."
"Moria?"
