He knew the layout of the man’s house and he suspected that Neal was taking the stairs in the center of the house that led to the basement. But why? His floor plans told him that the basement had no windows, and Neal had a large office upstairs.

Shahim could not help but be curious what the man was doing down there.

Chapter 42: Sowing the Seed

The street in Tel Aviv was filled. The large crowd of people in the local market milled and moved like water gently washing between rocks on a calm shore, ebbing and flowing, filling every space, dotted with pockets of movement and rest like the eddies and currents of a stream. Ayala was in her old neighborhood. She had spent so many years here as a child that she could taste the place, like a long forgotten recipe, or the smell of a loved one. She had been born a Yemenite, daughter of a long line of pioneers who had settled this part of Tel Aviv long before it was Tel Aviv. Kerem HaTeimanim had always been a relatively observant neighborhood compared to the more secular districts that now surrounded it. This orthodoxy had been the cause of her mother and her being forced to leave the area when they were younger, and later the source of a teenage Ayala’s rebelliousness.

Her father had died in a car accident when Ayala was six, leaving her mother to depend on Ayala’s grandparents for support. Ayala’s mother shared her fiercely independent nature, and she had railed against this dependence, eventually spurning tradition and taking work in the Kirya, an area of government buildings just across the then burgeoning city of Tel Aviv.

Three years after Ayala’s father had died, in the summer of 1964, her mother met and fell in love with an Arab working for the Israeli government, in and of itself a great controversy, both then and now. They had kept it a secret for many months, but secrets are hard to keep in a tight-knit community like the Yemenites of Kerem HaT. When Ayala’s mother had been discovered, rage had spread throughout the neighborhood in a matter of days, shaming her family and friends.

She had been faced with a choice: stay with a family who was ashamed of her, and face curfew and moral outrage from everyone she knew, or take her now nine-year-old daughter Ayala with her and leave, going to the man she loved, surely the only way she would ever be able to see him again.