Legends

“In other words, it’s a matter of instinct.”

“Survival instinct, developed over two thousand years.” The rabbi pitched the two valises into the back of the pickup. “So be my guest and climb in,” he ordered. “I’ll take you to Ya’ara’s apartment. We’ll get there before the girls and cook up water for tea, and light a memorial candle for her father—the canary told me about the death in the family, too, but I thought it would be better if Stella broke the bad news to her sister. Ask me nicely and I’ll tell you what I know about the missing husband.”

The rabbi threw the pickup into gear and, his sidecurls flying, gunned it up the hill, past the settlement post office, past the shopping center teeming with women in ankle length skirts and small boys wearing knitted yarmulke. Ya’ara, it turned out, lived in a small two-room apartment on the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings with a view of Hebron. “When her husband abandoned her, she had no resources of her own so our synagogue took her under its wing,” the rabbi explained. He searched through a ring of keys until he came to the right one and unlocked the door. The furnishings were Spartan. There was a narrow cot in one room, with a cracked mirror bordered with plastic sea shells over it and a wooden crate turned upside down serving as a night table. A folding bridge table covered with a square of oil cloth, a motley assortment of folding chairs with a small black-and-white television set on one of them, were scattered around what served as a living room. On the sill of a waist-high bookcase separating the living room from the tiny kitchen alcove were three flower pots containing plastic geraniums. Martin opened the door to the small bathroom. Women’s cotton underwear and several pairs of long woolen stockings hung from a cord stretched over the bathtub. Ben Zion noticed Martin’s expression as he returned to the living room. “We bought the furniture from Arabs whose houses were bulldozed between us and Hebron so we could walk to the Cave of Machpela safely.”

Martin strolled over to the window, raised the shade and looked out at the tangle of streets and buildings that made up Hebron. “What’s the Cave of Machpela?” he called over his shoulder.

The rabbi was in the kitchen alcove, attempting to light the gas burner with a match to boil water in a kettle. “Am I hearing you correctly? What’s the Cave of Machpela? It’s nothing less than the second holiest place for Jews on the planet earth, ranking immediately behind the Temple Mount or what’s left of it, the Wailing Wall. Hebron—which in biblical times was also called Kiryat Arba—is where the Patriarch Abraham bought his first dunams of land in Canaan. The Cave is where Abraham is buried; his sons Isaac and Jacob, his wife, Sarah, too. It is also holy to the Palestinians, who coopted our Abraham to be one of their prophets; they built a mosque on the spot and we are obliged to take turns praying at the cave.” Lighting a burner, the rabbi slid the kettle over the grill. Shaking his head in disbelief, he struck another match and lit a yortseit candle for the dead and carried it back into the room. “What is the Cave of Machpela?” he asked rhetorically, setting the candle on the table. “Even a shagetz ought to know the answer to that one. We always stroll down to the cave on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath in at this holy site. You and Stella are welcome to join us—that way you can tell the Shabak you actually did some sightseeing.”

Martin decided there’d been enough small talk. “What about Samat?”

Rabbi Ben Zion covered his mouth to smother a belch. “What about Samat?” he repeated.

“Did he run off with another woman?”

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Brooklyn detective who thinks men only leave their wives for other ladies. Samat didn’t need to quit his wife to have another lady—he rented all the ladies his libido desired. When he disappeared in his Honda for two, three days running, where do you think he went? It’s an open secret where he went. He went where a lot of men go when they want ladies to do things their wives won’t do. In Jaffa, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, there are what my mother, may she rest in peace, used to call houses of ill repute where you can get your ashes hauled by ladies who don’t mind being naked with a man, who, for a price, are willing to do anything to satisfy a client.” The rabbi waved a hand in the general direction of the Mediterranean coast. “Samat had sexual appetites, you could see it in his eyes, you could tell it from the way he looked at his sister-in-law Estelle when she visited Kiryat Arba. Samat also had his share of obsessions that weren’t carnal. What I’m saying is, he had other axes to grind besides sex.”