I bought a new hat in a shop on King George Street, then made my way to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, where I waited twenty minutes for the bus to Jerusalem. On the bench next to me was a crumpled copy of yesterday's Ma'ariv. Going through it confirmed my worst fears. Ezriel Carlebach, editor-in-chief of Ma'ariv and possibly the most widely read columnist in Israel, and a man who publicly opposed talking to the Germans, wrote that if there had been waverers among Mapai and its coalition partners, the violence in Jerusalem had undoubtedly pushed them firmly into the aye camp. No self-respecting parliament would surrender to a violent mob. By their mutinous actions, Carlebach wrote, Herut followers had guaranteed that the government's proposal would pass in the Knesset.
With a curse, I crushed the newspaper into a ball and flung it into a nearby trash bin.
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.