The Devil in Jerusalem (11 page)

“A normal child who touches fire runs away immediately!”

“That's true. It's amazing that he didn't…”

“What? That he didn't want to move away? Wow, you're trying to sell us that?”

Morris broke in: “Who are you protecting? The court will decide your punishment, but the person who did this must also be punished. You can't save them. We'll catch them. And in the meantime, your behavior is disgusting. And you pretend to be religious, God-fearing—”

“I'm not pretending!” Daniella shouted, standing up.

“Sit down! You know, a highly respected rabbi who saw you in your white clothes with the psalmbook in your hand said it was sickening,” Bina told her, something she'd read in the newspaper.

“Which rabbi?”

“Never mind. A well-respected Hassidic rabbi from Meah Shearim.”

Daniella sat down, her strength draining.

“She's not religious. No religious, God-fearing person hurts an innocent child or let's someone else do it while she watches. I feel like we're talking to a brick wall,” Bina said, thinking of the little boy with the horrible burns. She felt the bile rising in her throat. “Where are the handcuffs? Come, let's go back to your cell, Your Holiness. You're not going to see us for another eight days. Such a hypocrite!”

“We rolled out the red carpet for you to tell the truth. We couldn't have been kinder or more understanding. We don't want to see your act anymore,” Morris added.

“Your poor kids! You should burn in hell—you have it coming! I'm going to make sure you get yours: that you don't live to see the light of day again, let alone your children!” Bina suddenly shouted, standing up and leaning across the desk.

“Whoa!” Morris glanced at the other detective, who put a restraining arm around Bina's shoulder, steering her out the door.

Outside, she leaned against the wall, shaking. She felt defeated.

“Don't take it personally, Bina,” Morris comforted her. “Sometimes, it's like this. But usually, they are hard-boiled criminals, Mafia types, murderers. But a young mother? I've never seen anything like it.”

“So now what?” she asked him.

“Now we offer her a carrot. We let her meet her children. She's been demanding it all week.”

“You can't be serious. She could influence them, threaten them to keep quiet.”

“If she does, we'll know about it. We'll be watching and recording the whole thing. If she tries to shut them up, the judge will know about it.”

“Go back in and tell her,” Morris said to Bina.

“No, I've burnt my bridges.”

“Don't be naïve. She respects you now. She realizes she can't fool you. Go back in and offer her time with her children if she talks.”

Bina took a deep breath, opening the door.

Daniella looked up fearfully.

“I'm sorry I got carried away. It's just … the idea of anyone hurting children the way yours have been hurt. It makes me crazy.”

“When can I see them?”

“We'll arrange something. They are missing you terribly.”

Daniella's shoulders slumped, her back losing its defiance.

“My poor children…,” she said softly.

The sudden contradiction of this statement compared to this woman's heartless behavior was absolutely dumbfounding. Bina tried to decipher this creature in front of her. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle with tiny pieces when you had no picture to compare them to, no way of knowing how many pieces were missing or how the ones you had fit together. What she had so far showed her nothing comprehensible.

*   *   *

Two days later they brought Daniella back. Her children were waiting for her: fourteen-year-old Amalya, thirteen-year-old Duvie, twelve-year-old Yossi, eleven-year-old Gabriel, and seven-year-old Shoshana. They were in a bad way, divided up among several foster families, missing their parents and each other. But with both their parents under investigation, social services didn't have a better solution at the moment.

On the other side of a two-way mirror, Bina watched the drama unfold. An interrogation room's gray walls, and five children who cried when they saw each other, the older ones hugging the little ones. The door opened, and Daniella Goodman walked in, dressed in her now filthy white clothes. The children's sobs immediately rose into hysterics. They wailed, a white-hot sound that physically hurt Bina Tzedek's heart. She stared at the mother, who was facing away from her, appalled once more at her youth, her slenderness. Her body was erect, stiff, like a stone sculpture or some robot in a sci-fi thriller. She didn't try to hug her children or comfort them. She didn't ask them who was taking care of them, and if they were all right. When Daniella Goodman finally did begin to speak, Bina couldn't believe her ears.

“Am I hearing her right?” she asked, turning to Morris, who was standing beside her.

He nodded. “She's saying the same thing, over and over and over: ‘Don't talk, don't talk, don't talk.…'”

Bina felt her face grow hot with fury. Not one hug. Not one word of comfort to those heartbroken children! She had to stay objective, she must, she told herself, trying to reason with some unreasoning impulse that wanted to smash Daniella Goodman's face in, to shake her until her pious white hair covering went flying across the room and her long-sleeved dress was stained with blood. She closed her eyes, wiping her forehead and trying to settle the turmoil that ripped through her bowels. This had touched some primitive, animalistic part of her, she realized. Something all creatures capable of having offspring must feel in the most primal way. I want revenge, she admitted to herself. I want to hurt her. And then that suddenly gave way to another primal emotion: fear. Who could stand up against such pain from her own children without trying to help them? It was inhuman.

The longer she watched Daniella Goodman standing stoically, allowing herself to be hugged, the greater her disgust for this woman grew. “Remember everything you were taught, children,” she told her screaming children without emotion.

“We miss you so much, Ima,” Amalya sobbed helplessly. “What's going to happen to us now?”

“The most important thing is to pray all the time,” Daniella told her. “Ask God to get me out of here. They're yelling at me, and cursing me, and saying terrible things to your mother. But I won't answer. I'll be strong. You also have to be strong.”

“Listen to her!” Bina fumed, feeling her face grow hot once more. “The only thing she is worried about is her own neck! She's telling them to keep their mouths shut! We need to end this!”

“Wait,” Morris said quietly.

The children's sobs increased. It came from a place so filled with agony and loss and pain, it made Bina feel as if she had never heard anyone cry before. What could these children have experienced in their short lives that had opened wounds that deep and full of suffering? she wondered, goose bumps covering her arms and the skin across her back. And how could their mother witness it now without collapsing in tears herself, spilling her guts, wanting to kill somebody?

Perhaps, after all, she truly was a monster. Or someone who had sold her soul to the devil.

“So, what do you think?” Bina asked Morris.

“I think we need to call in a child interrogator, the best one we have. We need to call in Johnny Mann.”

 

8

Three days after they returned from Joel and Esther's wedding, Daniella and Shlomie packed their things into a small moving van, piled into the little Fiat, and bid farewell to the Absorption Center. Weighted down with three children, pots and pans and paper diapers, the little Fiat moved heavily down the road toward the Dead Sea, past ancient Jericho, their ears popping as they reached almost a thousand feet below sea level.

Three-year-old Amalya was strapped into her car seat happily playing with her expensive new American Girl doll from Granny, while eighteen-month-old Duvie clasped the plastic steering wheel attached to his car seat, liberally pounding on the squeaky toy horn no matter how many times Daniella begged him to stop. Despite the racket, baby Yossi slept soundly in his expensive, super-safe baby car seat, also brought back from America, lulled by the engine's steady hum.

The air was dry, but the area around the old town of Jericho was bright with wildflowers and palm trees, their magnificent fronds swaying in the desert wind.

“An oasis in the desert!” Shlomie exclaimed. He had developed a sudden enthusiasm for the move, for their new life together. He was anxious to be more active in the world, to support his growing family, he told her, not for practical reasons but for spiritual ones. He'd decided that manual labor was a holy thing.

“Doesn't the prophet Isaiah tell us that it is God who teaches the farmers how to farm? Don't we read in the Psalms, ‘Happy are all who fear the Lord.… You shall enjoy the fruit of your labors'? The Torah condemns idleness
:
‘Through slothfulness the ceiling sags, through lazy hands the house caves in,' King Solomon wrote. And Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Shimon said, ‘Great is labor for it honors those who engage in it.' As it is written, ‘A pious person should never say: I will eat and drink and enjoy the good life and not exert myself and Heaven shall take pity on me.
'
A person must toil and work with his hands and then God sends His blessing!”

Daniella, who didn't know what to make of this recent conversion, said nothing. She was relieved but skeptical. Shlomie was always developing new philosophies and enthusiasms. They seldom lasted very long, replaced by others that he advocated with equal conviction.

As for herself, she was just trying to keep her head above water. The nausea from her fourth pregnancy was making her feel tired and wretched. Taking care of three children, two of them essentially babies, was exhausting. She worried how she would manage with yet another one. Shlomie would just have to pitch in more. I have to talk to him, to make him, she thought. But every time she was determined to have it out, something stopped her. She didn't want to be negative, not now when he'd agreed to cooperate, to move out to this new community, to start a new job. She didn't want to be the nagging, complaining wife. She wanted to be a woman of valor, the kind Jewish lore praised as the ideal of womanhood, a woman who both knitted woolen clothes to keep her family warm while also trading goods to support and feed them. She wanted to be worthy of her new, exalted pioneer status in the Holy Land. Most of all, after what she saw as all her failures, she wanted to succeed at something. She couldn't stand the idea of yet another downfall.

They pulled to a full stop in front of a massive iron security gate.

“Now what?”

She squinted at the gate. “They've posted a number to call,” she said patiently, lifting the crying baby out of his car seat and pulling out a breast heavy with milk. Gently, she pressed the infant to her breast, inhaling sharply as his eager mouth latched on to the nipple, tender from the new pregnancy. With her other hand, she took out her cell phone and dialed. “Here, Shlomie, it's ringing.” She handed it to him.

“Hello? Hello? We're the Goodmans, your new neighbors,” Shlomie said brightly, smiling and nodding as he listened.

The gate slowly pulled back.

“Such nice, friendly people! He said to follow the signs that point to the office. Someone is waiting there for us.”

They inched along like sightseers, charmed by the small, private homes surrounded by blooming gardens. There were playgrounds filled with small children, and large grassy communal areas. A sudden hope blossomed in her heart.

Perhaps, after all, this would work out.

A young couple who introduced themselves as Yochanon and Essie Meyers were waiting for them outside a small caravan with a hand-printed sign in Hebrew that said,
OFFICE.
The woman was dressed religious pioneer-style: a long, blue cotton skirt and a long-sleeved white shirt, her hair covered with an elaborate headdress of bright turquoise. No one else in the country dressed exactly like that. No one else in the world, Daniella thought with a touch of pride that she would soon be joining this unique fellowship. The young man had a warm smile beneath a bushy beard. He wore jeans and a work shirt and the colorful knitted skullcap favored by modern Orthodox Jews. His hands looked brown and work roughened, nothing like the hands of Orthodox Jews with whom she was familiar back in Pittsburgh.

“
Baruchim Haba'im
! Welcome! How was your trip down?”

“Very nice, very nice,” Shlomie said, extending his hand through the window and shaking the other man's warmly, preparing for a long chat. From the back of the car, Duvie's whining and Amalya's demands rose.

“Oh, poor things!” Essie sympathized, bending down and looking into the car, as her husband moved away. “Such a long drive from Jerusalem. Here, let me get them something.” Ignoring Daniella's polite protestations, she disappeared back inside the office, soon returning with ice pops.

“It'll turn their tongues and lips blue, but they'll be happy, I guarantee,” she said, handing one to Amalya and one to Duvie, both of whom eagerly grasped the icy treat.

The women smiled at each other with instant connection.

“When are you due?” Daniella asked Essie.

“In two months,” she answered, smiling.

“I've got another seven.”

“That means you'll be pregnant through the summer,” Essie commiserated. “It's really hot here, but we all get used to it, and the houses are air-conditioned. The upside is that it never really gets cold down here. I wouldn't want to give birth in December in New York!” She laughed. “
B'sha'ah tovah
.”

“Thank you. The same to you,” Daniella blessed her. In a good hour.

“Well, I guess you'd like to get settled? Please follow us in your car,” Essie said briskly to Daniella's relief, walking away and taking her husband with her, leaving Shlomie no one with whom to shmooze. Daniella watched them as they climbed into an old pickup that had seen better days.