Murder in Jerusalem by Batya Gur

that’s what she herself said to Shimshi when she caught him trying to slip out of the house at two in the morning without her noticing, thinking she’s some old lady who doesn’t hear well anymore. You’re an old man, she’d told him, you don’t have the strength for these kinds of wars anymore. That’s exactly why, he’d answered: because I’m old I have nothing to lose. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand him: and how she understood him. But when a guy like him, with his intelligence, someone who cared about his kids and grandkids, about little Dudy just one month away from his bar mitzvah; how could he have planned all that—fire and smoke, kidnapping the labor minister—without breathing a word of it to her? Only someone bent on self-destruction would kidnap the minister of labor and social affairs and set an ultimatum for blowing himself and everything else up. Here in her living room the girls are shouting. What are they shouting about? she wonders. Only God can help them now, only He knows what will happen.
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    In the backseat of the mobile communications van speeding toward the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road, Danny Benizri changed out of his blue shirt and into a black turtleneck he had in his bag, calculating that he had twenty minutes until he would be on the air again, twenty minutes until they would reach the tunnel. In those twenty minutes he would have to have a word with Tikvah, and calm his mother down. He knew he could not appear too elegant or self-satisfied; that would come off very badly on-screen if he were reporting from the field or even inside the tunnel, with all those explosives and everything. He was glad he had his khaki windbreaker along; it looked good, as though in the hustle-bustle of an emergency he had not had time to get it all together. Before he had even finished shoving his arm into his sleeve, his cell phone rang and he knew exactly what to expect. “What is it, Tikvah? What’s wrong?” he asked, feigning ignorance, because perhaps she had not heard the news yet and did not know what was happening. For a long moment he listened to the cries of Danny-I’m-so-frightened she managed to slip in between sobs, and then said, “Tikvah, calm down. First of all, calm down. Pretty soon the baby will start crying too. Oh, there, she’s started up, see what you’ve done? There’s nothing to be frightened about, you know Shimshi and his whole family, they won’t do a thing to me. Not to me or anybody else.”
    For a moment she stopped wailing, but she reminded him what Shimshi had said on television, how he had threatened to blow himself up with everyone.
    â€œSo he said he was going to blow himself up,” Danny said dismissively. “So what if that’s what he said. Haven’t you learned anything yet? It’s all for the purpose of attracting attention. Tell my mother, tell her…calm her down, tell her everything’s just…tell her not to…not to call me now.” Quickly, before she had time to start crying again, he asked about the vaccinations and the visit to the Mother & Child Clinic and the droplets of salt water that Tikvah had tried to drip into the baby’s nose on the recommendation of the pediatrician Tikvah adored and he could not stand. After that he looked at the rain-washed streets out the window of the van as it raced through the city. Who could have guessed that the morning would pass thus, beginning with talk about Tirzah’s death and ending with a mad dash to the bypass-road tunnel. Then again, the day was not over yet, nothing was over yet: at the entrance to the tunnel, not far from the parked police vans, black smoke was billowing from within, where Moshe Shimshi, in a gray woolen cap and blue dungarees, was waiting for him.
    Zohar, the military correspondent, moved aside, his mouth askew. “The asshole won’t let me in,”