The Jerusalem Diamond by Noah Gordon

Author:Noah Gordon [Gordon, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Barcelona eBooks
Published: 1979-05-14T23:00:00+00:00

Part III

SEEKING

15

MEA SHE’ARIM

A woman answered the phone in Leslau’s office and told him the professor wasn’t in.

“I must talk with him. This is Harry Hopeman.”

“Harry who?”

“Hopeman.”

“Ah, kayn.” Obviously the name meant nothing to her.

“Can he be reached at another number?”

“He doesn’t have a telephone at home.”

“He’s working at home? Give me the address, please.”

There was a pause.

“I assure you, he’ll consider it important.”

“Rohov Chevrat Tehillim,” she said reluctantly. “Number Twenty-eight.”

“Thank you. What part of the city is that?”

“It is in Mea She’arim,” she said.

More than a century ago, a group of Lithuanian and Polish Hasids broke away from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Outside the Old City they built a walled neighborhood said to contain exactly one hundred dwelling units, so that it came to be known as “the hundred gates” or Mea She’arim. Today most of the original wall is gone. Overpopulated by generations to whom birth control was a sin, Mea She’arim has become a teeming slum and spilled across its boundaries and around it have grown similar neighborhoods of pietists.

As Harry searched for Chevrat Tehillim, the Street of the Psalm Society, examples of religious guardianship were in plain evidence. On a wall a large sign, printed in English, Hebrew and Yiddish, proclaimed:

JEWISH DAUGHTER!

THE TORAH OBLIGATES YOU

TO DRESS WITH MODESTY.

WE DO NOT TOLERATE

PEOPLE PASSING

THROUGH OUR STREETS

IMMODESTLY DRESSED.

—Committee for Guarding Modesty

On the next block another multilingual sign attacked the Israeli government for allowing human bodies, created by the Most High, to be desecrated by autopsies and post mortems.

There were no street signs. One street looked like every other, crooked stone buildings with shops on the ground floor below storeys of apartments. Harry looked around helplessly. Two boys played a furious game of tag, their earlocks flapping wildly as they ran. A young woman walked past him burdened with a bundle of wash, but she avoided his eyes. In the shade of a nearby building sat an old man in a black caftan and a streimel. He gave good directions, but when Harry finally found Chevrat Tehillim, the buildings were unnumbered.

He entered a shop that sold religious objects, intending only to ask for directions, but his eyes were captured by some beautifully embroidered skullcaps and he spent a few minutes choosing several for Jeff’s bar mitzvah. The proprietor told him Number Twenty-eight was the building next to the shop. “Who is it you want there?”

“Professor Leslau.”

The man looked at him curiously. “On the third floor. The apartment on the left.”

The stairway of Number Twenty-eight was narrow and dark. Somebody had been cooking fish. When he reached the door to the left of the third stairwell he knocked, seeing no doorbell. There was a long silence; just as he knocked for the second time, a woman’s voice asked who was there.

“I must see Professor Leslau.”

A moment later Leslau stood at the open door. “Hopeman. How did you know to find me here?”

Harry told him about the man in the store.

“He told you this apartment?” Leslau’s lips thinned. “The dirty bastard.”

Behind him Harry saw the woman, perhaps in her forties.

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