The Theatre - Kellerman, Jonathan

"An idiot helped me. Deaf kid name of Nasif, lives down there, with a widowed mother. I came across him yesterday and he seemed to recognize the picture, kept calling her a bad girl, but he was too stupid for me to believe it meant anything. Then the mother came out, showed no sign of recognition, and claimed the boy was talking nonsense. So I left and went to the Old City, did a little work in the Muslim Quarter. But it kept bothering me-I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen the girl at the pools. So I came back this morning and leaned on her for a while and finally she told me. After pleading with me not to let on that she'd talked-apparently the Rashmawis are a hotheaded bunch, old-fashioned. Father's the king; the kids stay under his thumb even after they marry. Fatma was the youngest and somewhat of a rebel-pop music, an eye for the boys. There were quarrels, the father and brothers beat her, and she ran away or was kicked out about two months ago-at least that's what Mrs. Nasif says. According to her, no one's seen Fatma since then and she claims no one has any idea where she went. But she may be lying, still holding back. She was frightened-the message between the lines was that the Rashmawis were capable of doing violence to the girl or anyone else who broke their rules."

Families, thought Daniel. The same old story? He found it hard to reconcile what had been done to Fatma Rashmawi with a family squabble. Still, the case was starting to take form. Names, places, the signposts of reality.

"I have an idea where she went," he said, and told Daoud the Turk's story about Saint Saviour's.

"Yes, that would make sense," said Daoud, green eyes sparkling from beneath thickened lids.

"You did excellent work," said Daniel. "Absolutely first-rate."

"Just following procedure," Daoud insisted, but he stood up straight, threw back his shoulders with pride.

A cock crowed and a warm breeze rustled the leaves of the olive trees. The ground was soft with fallen olives, the air marinated with the salt smell of rotting fruit.

Daniel looked up at the Rashmawi house.

"We'll go together and talk to them," he said. "But not right now. Drive over to Kishle and phone the others. Shmeltzer should be at French Hill, in Records. Tell him what we've learned and have him do background checks on the Rashmawis and any of their kin. Find out, also, if a file's ever been opened on Fatma. The Chinaman will probably be on beeper-have him come here and meet me. You go home, wash up, eat something, and come back at two. We'll proceed from there."

"Yes, sir," said Daoud, writing it all down.

The front door of the Rashmawi house opened and a young pregnant woman came out, carrying a rolled-up rug. A swarm of small children tumbled out behind her. The woman unfurled the rug, held it with one hand, and began beating it with a stick. The children danced around her as if she were a maypole, squealing with delight as they tried to grab hold of dissolving dust swirls.

"Anything else, Pakad?" asked Daoud.

"Nothing until two. Go home, spend some time with your family."

Daniel waited in the grove for the Chinaman to arrive, observing the comings and goings of the village, keeping one eye fixed upon the Rashmawi house. At twelve-thirty, a woman-not the rug beater-came out and purchased eggplant and tomatoes from a peddler who'd managed to wheel his cart to the upper level. By twelve thirty-nine she was back in the house. The kids ran in and out of the door, teasing and chasing each other. Other than that, no activity.

The case seemed to be drawing him back in time. This morning in the Katamonim, and now, Silwan.

He scanned the village, wondered which of the houses was the one where his great-grandfather-the man whose name hbe bore-had grown up. Strange, he'd heard so many stories about the old days but had never bothered to check.

Dinner table stories, recited like a liturgy. Of how hundreds of the Jews of San'a had fled the Yemenite capital, escaping from rising levels of Muslim persecution. Crossing the mountains and setting out in search of the Holy Land, Of how the first Daniel Sharavi had been one of them, arriving in Jerusalem in the summer of 1881, an undernourished ten-year-old in the company of his parents. Of how the Jews of San'a hadn't been welcomed with open arms.

The other residents of Jewish Jerusalem-the Sephardim and Ashkenazim-hadn't known what to make of these small, brown, kinky-haired people who stood at their doorsteps, near-naked and penniless but smiling. Speaking Hebrew with a strange accent and claiming to be Jews who had braved storm and pestilence, climbing mountains on foot, walking through the desert from Arabia, subsisting on seeds and honey.

Jerusalem, in those days, hadn't spread beyond the Old City walls-two square kilometers stuffed with ten thousand people, a third of them Jewish, almost all of them poor, living on donations from the Diaspora. Sanitation was primitive, raw sewage flowing through the streets, the cisterns polluted, epidemics of cholera and typhoid a way of life. The last thing the residents of the Jewish Quarter needed was a band of pretenders leeching off their beleaguered communities.

After much head scratching, a test of Jewishness had been devised, the leaders of the Yemenities whisked into synagogue and tested on the finer points of Scripture by Sephardic and Ashkenazic rabbis.

Great-great-grandfather Sa'adia, so the story went, had been the first to be quizzed. A goldsmith and teacher, a learned man with a fine, pure nature. When called upon, he'd begun reciting rapidly from the Book of Genesis, letter-perfect, without pause. Questions regarding the most obscure tractates of Talmud elicited an identical response-text and commentaries recited fluently, the finer points of jurisprudence explained concisely and clearly.

The rabbis excused Sa'adia and called upon another man, who performed similarly. As did the next man, and the next. Yemenite after Yemenite knew the Torah by heart. When questioned about this, the little brown people explained that books were scarce in San'a, forcing everyone to use his head. In many cases a single volume was shared around the table, with one person learning to read conventionally, another upside down, still others from the left or right side. Happily, they demonstrated those talents, and the rabbis observed, astonished. The issue of Jewishness was laid to rest, the new arrivals allowed to share the poverty of their brethren.

In the beginning they settled just outside the walls, in the spot called Silwan, near the Siloam Pool, working as masons and laborers, living in tents while they built stone houses, moving, over the years, back into the Old City, into the Jewish Quarter the Arabs called Al Sion, in order to be nearer to the Wailing Place, a stone's throw from the Tomb of David.

It was there, within the walls, that Daniel's grandfather and father had been born, and from where he himself had been carried off as an infant in '48, rescued by strangers, squalling in terror under the thunder of gunfire.

My origins, he thought, gazing out at the village. But he felt no pangs of nostalgia, saw only the origins of a dead girl.

Warm beer, thought the Chinaman, quickening his pace. He'd been prepared to report his information on the girl, thought he'd done a pretty good job for one night out, until the Arab had called and told him of the ID. Sharp guy, Daoud. Still, the boyfriend angle was a contribution.

The village had come alive, shutters spreading, doors nudged open, a buzz of mutters and whispers trailing the detectives' footsteps. The corneal glint of the curious sparkled from grated windows, receding into the shadows at the hint of eye contact with the strangers.

"Probably looks like a raid to them," said the Chinaman.

Neither Daniel nor Daoud responded. Both were concentrating on walking quickly enough to keep up with the big man's stride.