The Dead Sister

"But in this case," Reuben went on, "what I hate more is the fact that no one will know the truth. That bothers me."

I told him it bothered me as well, though it barely did. Making the truth public was less important to me than bringing a killer to justice. That it was a justice administered by Ahmed Jamalka and not a black-robed judge in Tel Aviv bothered me even less.

Three days later, around ten o'clock in the morning, I bought that morning's issue of Davar from a kiosk on Rothschild Boulevard and sat reading it on a street bench around which pigeons scoured for bread crumbs.

There was a story on page 2 with the following headline: "A Police Shoot-out in the Galilee Leaves Two Men Dead and One Wounded."

The story described a police operation in an Arab village in the Galilee. The culprits were two brothers, Jalal and Kadir Jamalka. Both men were said to possess a lengthy career in crime, with sins ranging from petty theft to extortion and assault. Much worse was hinted at. The two brothers were also said to have fought against Israel in the War of Independence and to have continued their life of crime since the war had ended. Their brother was Ahmed Jamalka, the man who had stabbed to death police inspector Avi Rosen just a few days earlier in Tel Aviv and was believed to have fled the country to an enemy nation. The picture the report painted was crystal clear, these were not men anyone was supposed to mourn or pity.

According to the report, the police came into the village with warrants for the arrest of the two brothers, but they resisted arrest and attempted to escape while firing pistols at the police officers. The police fired back, and in the firefight, Jalal Jamalka was shot dead. Kadir Jamalka was injured and taken to a nearby hospital, where he died on the operating table. A police officer suffered light injuries and had already been released from hospital.

I sat back, lowered the paper, ran a hand through my hair and kneaded the muscles at the back of my neck. I took out another cigarette, one which I had rolled myself earlier that morning, filled with the tobacco Ahmed Jamalka had given me. As I inhaled the rich taste of the tobacco I thought of him, somewhere across the border, in Syria or Lebanon. Was he following the news from Israel? Was he aware of what had happened to his brothers? Did he realize that these would be the consequences of the revenge he had taken on Rosen?

Around two o'clock I called Sima Vaaknin. I had informed her a few days earlier that Buzaglo was dead and that she could return home. She was supposed to have been back a few hours now.

She told me that Buzaglo's men had trashed her apartment, left many of her clothes in shreds, broke plates and glasses, and used a knife to cut open the sofa.

I went to her apartment to help her clear the mess. It was an unpleasant sight, but we tidied things up quickly, putting all her broken and smashed belongings in the street. Her place looked emptier now, the living room and kitchen barren.

"I'm sorry about all this, Sima. I am responsible. Let me replace what you lost."

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It was time to buy new things anyway, and my vacation was a good one. As for money, I have enough to buy my own things." Our eyes met, and she said, "You know something odd, they didn't touch the bed."

She smiled at me, and I had to work hard to keep from smiling back. I felt the desire for her course through my body, and the guilt follow closely behind it like a bad aftertaste.

"I don't think so, Sima. It's not a good idea."

She shrugged. "Soon, though. You'll be back here soon."

Toward the end of the day, with the street outside turning darker and colder, I sat with Greta over coffee and told her the whole story, and unlike my talks with Ahmed and Talmon and Reuben, this time I left out no detail, including Sima Vaaknin.

"Do you think she was right?" Greta said.

"Who?"

"Sima Vaaknin, when she said you'd be back to see her soon."

I thought for a moment and then said truthfully, "I don't know. I hope not. I hope I can stay away."

Greta looked at me, and there was sadness in her eyes. "Why? Why hope for such a thing? Because of your guilt?"

"Yes. And because Sima Vaaknin is like a pool of honey—it's sweet and delicious, but you'd drown all the same."

A little later she said, "This police inspector, Rosen, do you think the truth about him will ever come out?"

"No. He'll go down as a hero, someone who gave up his life doing his job, another death in our struggle with the Arabs. That's how he'll be remembered."

"And the rest of them, the three men in Jaffa and the two Arabs in the north, how will they be remembered?"

"They won't," I said. "Like most men, they'll be forgotten by everyone except their families and close friends, and as soon as those people die as well, they'll be remembered by no one."

Which was better than many other people, I thought, the people who had gone into the camps and been turned to dust and ashes, them and their entire families beside them. For them there was no headstone with flowers adorning it. There was no one to say a prayer over them. There was no one to remember their names. They were extinguished and lost and gone.

And perhaps that was why I hoped I would not return to Sima Vaaknin's warm bed—because doing so, I felt, would dull the memory I held of my wife, would weaken the flame of her memory in my mind, the only place in which she was still alive.

A Note from the Author

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for reading The Dead Sister. I had a good time writing it, and I hope that you had a good time reading it.

The greatest pleasure I get as a writer is to hear from readers. So drop me an email at contact@jonathandunsky.com with any questions or feedback, or even just to say hi.

Before you go, I’d like to ask you to do a little favor for me. If had a good time reading The Dead Sister, please leave a review on its Amazon page. Good reviews help persuade new readers to give my books a try. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d share your experience of reading this book by leaving your review on Amazon. Thanks in advance.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to tell you a bit about how this story came to be.

I started writing The Dead Sister without having a complete plot in mind. I knew who my main character was going to be and I knew that he would be investigating the murder of a young Arab woman—a murder the police, for some reason, were reluctant to investigate vigorously.

What I did not know was everything else. I did not know who the killer would be, nor why the police would not investigate the case properly. I had no clue as to how Adam Lapid would discover who killed Maryam Jamalka.

I started writing that first scene in which Ahmed Jamalka hires Adam Lapid to discover who had murdered his sister, and the book went from there. Each day, I wrote a thousand words or more and slowly but surely, the story began to take shape. Somewhere in the middle of the process, I figured out who the killer would be. I did not know yet how Adam Lapid would figure out the same. So I wrote the ending and slowly filled in the middle. When all was done, of course, I had to tweak the ending quite a bit, but it was in this nonlinear manner that I wrote and finished the novel you just read.

I hope and plan to write more Adam Lapid novels in the future. For now, there are four: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, and A Debt of Death. All are available on Amazon. Check out the other novels if you haven’t done so already.

Here are the links to all the books: