Bloodline (35 page)

Carefully she opened the folds of the letter. The once-white pages were tinged with brown from age, but the writing in black ink, although faded, was still clearly visible.

Her heart was pounding as she looked at the lettering. It wasn't Arabic; it was written in the Latin alphabet. And German. But it also had overtones of Yiddish. Yael read the first few lines, and tried hard to remember either the German she'd heard from her father's mother or the Yiddish her
bubbeh
had spoken when she didn't want Yael or her brother to know what she was
saying. And she especially remembered her grandmother, an elegant and sophisticated Russian lady, who would never use bad language in English yet would swear like a trooper in Yiddish.

Yael read first the Germanic Yiddish:

Um meine liebste Tochter,

Ich schreibe diesen leter Ihnen in der Hoffnung dass . . .

Quickly, she translated the German into her own language of Ivrit, modern Hebrew. She would read and translate the rest of the letter when she was safely at home:

To my dearest daughter,

I write this letter to you in the hope that . . . 

Yael looked up through the windshield into the distance. There was Jerusalem, shining a blistering white in the afternoon sun, the burnished dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque burning brilliantly like a gold candle on a huge white birthday cake. Then she looked down again at the letter. How was it that over a hundred years ago, probably even a century and a half ago, a mother had written a letter to her daughter in Yiddish and the descendant was today a Palestinian woman, the mother of an imprisoned terrorist?

YAEL'S MIND
was a sprawling chaos of revelations. Her world had been rocked and the daily grind of surgery and hospital corridors that had been her norm for so long seemed the life of a different person right now.

Yaniv's claims about this Shin Bet operative; the imam being in league with the fanatical Neturei Karta; Bilal possibly being a Jew because of his matriarchal bloodline, a line passed down
from mother to mother since . . . since . . . maybe from the time when the prophets were wandering the land, warning of doom and gloom . . . It was all too much.

She had checked in for the night to a tiny hotel in the center of the city. She feared going back to her apartment. If Hassan could find her in Peki'in, then they, whoever their agents were, could certainly find where she lived. Going to Bilal's family home had been reckless but necessary; although she felt like hunted prey, she was still a doctor, a human being, and her responsibilities had dominated. So she drove straight into the city, stayed where there were the most people in the most public space, and found a random hotel—the kind of hotel that took cash and didn't ask for names.

With blinds closed and door locked she sat at a small desk and struggled to read the letter Maryam had given her in the desperate hope it might save her son from prison. Its chances of changing anything about Bilal's fate were virtually nonexistent, but the letter haunted her nonetheless.

She stared at the strange blend of languages and phrases trying to translate, but she was defeated by the German language. Sleeping fitfully, she waited until morning, when she switched on her cell phone. She knew it was early, but she knew that the person she was dialing was at his office at six in the morning without fail.

“Yes?” he said.

“Shalman, hi, it's Yael.”

“
Bubbeleh,
darling, how are you? So what's new? You're calling—you hardly ever call. It's so early. Is everything all right? Why so early? Are you okay? Of course you're okay, because if you weren't okay, you'd have said something. You want me. Good! What? Anything,
bubbeleh
. Tell Shalman.”

She knew that the first few moments of their conversation would be like this: questions, guilt; he was like a Jewish mother except that he was her Jewish grandfather. And she loved him so much for all his quirky ways.

“I have something I want to show you.”

“Oh my God! Not another artifact! One is a gift, two is showing off!”

“No, nothing like that. Well, not quite. It's a letter. In German. I need you to help me. It's not something that I can translate because I need to understand the nuances.”

“Translations, anybody. Nuances, come see me.” He put down the phone.

Half an hour later, she was sitting opposite him, drinking coffee and eating a doughnut while he read the letter, making careful notes. When he'd finished it, he put down his pen, and Yael said, “Well, what do—”

But he held up his hand, turned the letter over, and began from the beginning. “For a translation, I read once. For nuances, twice, sometimes three times.”

When he finished this time, he looked up at her and smiled. “From where did this come?”

“From the mother of a patient I'm looking after.”

“Some in low Yiddish, some in an attempt at high German. The person who wrote this wasn't very clever or educated, so Goethe or Hegel she's not; this was written by a mother to her daughter. She's obviously trying to impress her with her use of words, yet often she uses confusing phrases and more sophisticated words in the wrong context.

“This letter was written as an explanation for a daughter, almost an
apologia
, by a lady named Malka; in Hebrew, of course, it means queen, but she didn't call herself by her German name, which would have been Konigin. That would have sounded stupid. It was written to her daughter but she didn't call the girl by name.”

“Okay, you lost me,” Yael said in protest at the incoherent explanation.

“
Bubbeleh
, it speaks about a time and a place far in the past, when manners were more particular, behavior more austere, and
honor the axis around which families revolved. From what she says, Malka's mother had done something to disgrace her family, leaving Malka and her descendants with a permanent stain on their characters, their bloodline. We're talking here about unmarried sex and pregnancy, the sort of thing that caused girls to be thrown out of the family home. The letter speaks of her mother, who left Circassia and came to live in the port city of Odessa and from there migrated to Germany and settled in Berlin.

“But the main thrust of the letter is to tell her about Malka's own birth, her mother, and her situation. Malka's mother, living in a village in Circassia, had had an affair with a man visiting the area. She'd fallen pregnant out of wedlock and disgraced the family. But she was lucky because the man didn't abandon her. No, he was a gentleman, and when she was forced out of her home by her family, the two fled to Berlin, where they lived in the Jewish community.”

Shalman looked up and smiled at Yael. “Very sexy lady, this one, and they chose Berlin because it's cosmopolitan and bohemian, and more likely to accept couples living together.”

“Circassia? Tell me about Circassia.”

“It's on the shores of the Black Sea, underneath Russia. Back in those days, in the middle of the 1800s, the Muslims were slaughtered by the
mamzer
Russians who wanted the farmland for themselves, and the government in Moscow ordered ethnic cleansing of the nation. All this was about the time that the distant relative of the woman who gave you this letter had the affair with the man and fell pregnant.”

He continued. “The letter goes on to say that in Berlin this Malka woman grew up as a German, but anti-Semitism in Europe and wars with France forced the family to move to Palestine and build a home there. They lived in a small town in the Galilee called Peki'in because Malka's father had a business relationship with olive oil producers in Peki'in. It's a very detailed letter . . .”

Yael looked at him in amazement. Peki'in—it was all starting to fit together.

“And the reason that this Malka person wrote the letter to her daughter was because the young woman was about to marry, and the mother wanted her to know the truth about her family history. She begged her daughter to persuade her future husband to leave Berlin and to come to Peki'in and live . . .” He searched the letter for the precise phrase: “ ‘in peace and harmony and safety among the new immigrants in a land full of potential.'

“Malka tried to convince her daughter that it would be a wonderful new life—and that, my love, is where the letter ends. Is that helpful?”

Yael stood, walked around his massive desk, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek and the forehead. She sat on his desk just as she'd done a thousand times when she was a little girl. He looked up at her knowing that something was on her mind.

“Nu?”

She shrugged.

“You have that look.”

“Look?”

He smiled. “
Bubbeleh
, all your life I've read your mind through the expressions on your face. Tell Shalman . . .”

She picked up a photo from his desk. It was one of a very few of her grandmother Judit. She was a tiny figure in the distance, sitting in a circle with a group of other men and women dressed in 1940s flared trousers, a knit top, and a cardigan. Frustratingly, it was in black-and-white, so Yael could only guess at the colors. She hoped that they were a dark blue. She loved dark blue and wondered whether that had been Judit's favorite color too.

“I know more about some Palestinian's grandmother than I do about my own
bubbeh
. She was always a presence in the house when I was growing up, even though she died before I was born. Yet, whenever I asked my mom or you about her, I felt that you were always dodging the issue, as though there were things you
didn't want me to know. Why was that? Why won't you tell me about her, what she was like as a young woman, what she liked to eat, her favorite colors, what she did when she first came here from Russia, when you and she—”

“Hoo, ha—so many questions,” said Shalman. “Your grandmother,
aleha ha-shalom,
was a wonderful woman. A queen among women. Gentle, loving, kind. She lived a life. In those days, darling, we young people were fighting for our country, our family, ourselves. Judit gave birth to your beloved mother and those few years we had together as a family were the best of my life . . . our lives. When she came from Russia, from St. Petersburg, she was—”

“St. Petersburg? But I thought she was from Moscow,” Yael interrupted.

Shalman nodded, wondering if he'd inadvertently gone too far. There was so much which he couldn't tell Yael, so much that, even after sixty years, had to stay hidden. “Yes, Moscow. I don't know why I said St. Petersburg. But when she came to Israel, we lived a life worth living. But all these questions. So long ago. They were hard times. We fought the British and the Arabs and the United Nations. It hurts me to think about it. But now isn't the time. I have a meeting soon, and I have to prepare. One day,
bubbeleh
, I'll tell you more. Today isn't the day.”

Shalman waved her away with grandfatherly affection and went back to his work.

Yael kissed him on the cheek and the forehead and walked out. She so badly wanted to tell him of the danger she was in—she so urgently wanted to share her fears with him—but she knew him so well, and predicted that his reaction would be one of panic, hysteria. He'd call the police, Mossad, the prime minister . . . everybody. And she had to keep an atmosphere of calm and confidentiality until she and Yaniv had sorted things through. Love him as she did, Shalman was the very last person in whom she could confide.

As she left his office, he watched her disappear, and spent long moments looking at the closed door. Suddenly overcome by emotions he thought he'd buried forty years ago, he felt himself on the verge of tears. He picked up the picture Yael had been looking at and studied the indistinct face of his wife, Judit. He bit his lip to stop himself from sobbing.

“Why?” he asked himself, suddenly realizing that he had spoken aloud into an empty room. Even after all these years, he was still overwhelmed by the fury.

“Why?”

He replaced the photograph and stared out of the window, consumed with grief and anger and disgust. “Why?” he asked himself again. They could have had such a wonderful life together. They could have been a family like other families; but something had happened to her in Russia, in St. Petersburg, that she'd never told him about. And from the moment he'd met her, when they were both working for the terrorist band Lehi, he knew that there was more to his long-dead wife . . . Something much deeper, and darker.

He sighed and looked again at the photo, shaking his head. It was all so long ago, longer than a lifetime, but it was still raw. And he was still bitter.

From where he was sitting, he couldn't see a man staring at him through a pair of high-powered binoculars from a distant rooftop. He'd been watching Yael's and Shalman's every action on the explicit instructions of Eliahu Spitzer, who had ordered him to follow Yael, see what she did and to whom she spoke, and report back to him in person, keeping no written record.

Y
ANIV
G
ROSSMAN WAS CONSUMED
by the story. The linkage between Spitzer and the imam and Rabbi Shmuel Telushkin from Neturei Karta was something he could almost taste. And
the key to it was Bilal. Yaniv didn't yet have the meat of the story but he knew it was close. Yael would lead him there, perhaps once she'd retrieved Bilal's phone, and whatever evidence it might still contain. All she had to do was to go to the property office in the hospital, tell them that she wanted pills from Bilal's clothing, and put the phone in her pocket.

Even as he thought the words to himself, he felt embarrassment.
Yael would lead him there.
He was a reporter, somebody whose job relied on contacts, often manipulating them to give him detailed and underlying facts. Sometimes—no, often—the people whom he secretly interviewed put themselves and their livelihoods in danger. The only promise he could ever make to them for the risks they took on his behalf was confidentiality and anonymity. He'd go to prison before he'd reveal the name of a source.