"Yet you admire her."
"Of course. She is brilliant."
It was easy to believe that as well. Ofra eyed her watch and rose to her feet. "Time's up, Mr. Lapid. I must insist that you leave now."
I stood, and she began urging me toward the door. "Just one more question," I said. "When you auditioned for the theater, there were three people who decided to hire you. Dahlia and Isser Rotner were two. Who was the third?"
She paused, and something shifted in her face, softening the lines and edges. "Eliezer Dattner. He started the theater with Dahlia and Isser."
"What happened to him?" I asked. Because he hadn't been interviewed by Meltzer.
She swallowed hard and lowered her eyes. "He's dead. He was shot by an Arab in 1939, during the Arab Revolt."
"And afterward Dahlia and Isser ran the theater together?"
"Yes." She opened the door, and I stepped out onto the landing and turned back to face her. She raised her eyes and I was startled by the hard coldness in them. "And now Isser runs it all by himself," she said, and then shut the door in my face.
16
From Ofra Wexler's apartment, it was a short walk south to Trumpeldor Street and then east to the cemetery.
Trumpeldor Cemetery had been opened in 1902, seven years before the establishment of Tel Aviv itself. Only it had a different name then, but I do not know what it was. Yosef Trumpeldor, the legendary soldier, would fall to an Arab bullet eighteen years later in Tel Hai, in the northern tip of Israel. His dying words, "Never mind, it's good to die for one's country," would immortalize him as a paragon of Zionist devotion and self-sacrifice and ensure his name would be forever spoken with reverential adoration. The street bordering the cemetery to the south would be named after him, and with it, the cemetery itself.
Initially, the cemetery served as a burial site for the Jews of Jaffa, who at the time were being ravaged by an outbreak of cholera. Those Jews would carry their dead north across the barren plains upon which Tel Aviv would soon rise and inter them here, far removed from any residence.
That soon changed as Tel Aviv expanded rapidly, sending its tendrils in every direction, so that Trumpeldor Cemetery was now enveloped by residential streets. Consequently, the cemetery itself was relatively small and saw few new burials. Nowadays, the deceased residents of Tel Aviv were mostly buried in cemeteries further afield, such as those in Nahalat Yitzhak to the east and Kiryat Shaul to the north.
The cemetery was surrounded by a stone wall, six to nine feet in height, and had three gates, all facing south along Trumpeldor Street. The western gate was locked. The main gate—the middle one—stood open. I stepped through it and onto the grounds. Then stood a moment, gazing around me.
Spread before me was a sea of headstones jutting up in irregular shapes, looking like a miniature skyline of some American city one could see in the movies. There were no people about, though the tightly arrayed graves might have easily concealed a mourner or two.
To my right, extending along the entrance path, was a communal grave of Jews who had been murdered in the Jaffa Riots of 1921. Behind that stretched two other such graves. The first of the victims of the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. And the second, set against the southern wall, of those slaughtered during the Arab riots of 1929, in which local Arabs committed widespread atrocities against Jews, and in which several Jewish communities—such as those in Gaza, Jenin, and Nablus—were evacuated by the British and ceased to exist.
I stood quite still and ran my eyes over the names of the dead. All had been murdered for being Jewish. All had died as part of the terrible conflict that had raged between Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate of Palestine. One could look upon these tombstones and hope that such mass killings were a thing of the past now that we Jews had a country and an army to protect us, but I did not believe it. Our struggle for life and liberty on this tiny patch of land was far from over.
Walking on, I retraced the steps taken by Pinchas Sheftel on that fateful day five years ago, venturing to the western section of the cemetery. Here, some of the more famous residents of old Tel Aviv were buried, the men and women who had breathed life into this first modern Hebrew metropolis and imbued it with purpose and culture and meaning. The people whose names now adorned street signs throughout the city.
There was the large blocky headstone of Haim Nahman Bialik, the famous poet, and adjacent to it, the much smaller stone of his wife, Manya. Behind those towered a pinkish monolith bearing the name Ahad Ha'am, the influential Zionist intellectual and essayist. And near both lay the remains of Zionist leader Haim Arlozorov, who was shot to death on the beach of Tel Aviv in 1933 by unknown assassins.
A few steps to the north stood the mausoleum of Max Nordau, close confidant of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism. And a few meters north of that rested Shaul Tchernichovsky, renowned poet and pediatrician.
And in between Nordau and Tchernichovsky was the spot in which a young woman after which no street would ever be named was killed. The scene of the murder of Anna Hartman. The grave of Mayor and Mrs. Dizengoff.
The grave was far from a simple one. The couple had been accorded a grander final resting place than any other inhabitant of the cemetery.
It was also elevated from the ground, as befitted their high status. Five wide stairs climbed to a rectangular stone platform enclosed by walls on three sides. Upon the platform squatted a flat tombstone, roughly six feet long and two and a half feet wide. The tombstone itself was free of inscription. The names of the deceased and the Jewish dates of their birth and death were stamped in large letters on the rear wall, so they could be read from afar.
The sun shone directly into my eyes as I gazed at the names, and I realized that the grave itself faced east.
Was this done on purpose? To emulate the direction in which a Jew would face as he said his prayers, toward Jerusalem? Perhaps Mayor Dizengoff had wished it so.
Fronting the grave was a small open paved area, a unique luxury in the cramped and crowded cemetery. Here, I supposed, people would gather in relative comfort during memorials.
Moving slowly, as though this were still a fresh crime scene, I crossed this paved forecourt, mounted the stairs, and climbed to the platform, my eyes scanning every inch of stone around me.
Whatever I had hoped to find after all this time was gone. There was no blood. No trace of the violence committed here. No sign of the young life cut short. No sense of wrongness. There was just the dusty, featureless stone of the stairs, the platform, and the tombstone itself.
I squatted next to the tombstone and ran my hand over its surface, as though by touch I could somehow coax from the stone a detailed witness account of the tragic events of that night. The stone was smooth and warm, pleasant if one forgot that it had once borne the body of a murdered woman. Here, precisely where my palm now rested, Anna's body had lain. Here her blood had oozed from the hole in her chest. Here her life had drained out of her.
Did a part of her life, along with some of her blood, seep into the stone? Was a piece of her still here? The hair on my forearms rose with the thought. Careful, Adam. Don't wander about. Stay focused.
I rose to my full height, brushed dust off my hand, and descended the stairs. I made a slow circuit of the murder scene, finding more street names etched into headstones, but nothing that related to the case. Back in the open area before the Dizengoffs' grave, I took a careful look around. The headstones surrounding me ranged in style and size and grandeur. Some were simple flat stones laid at ground level, the writing on them faded. Others stood erect as obelisks, reaching up to the heavens. Some bore nothing but the names of the deceased, while others were etched with beautiful poetic inscriptions, some biblical and others that originated in the shattered heart of a mournful loved one.