THE SKINNY BEDOUIN BOY WHO DELIVERED TRAYS FILLED WITH almond biscuits and tiny cups of Turkish coffee for the café on Christian Quarter Road brought the sealed envelope to Abdullah, the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque, minutes after the second prayer of the day. Abdullah was an old Christian Arab and wise in the ways of the souk. He glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then fitted on his reading glasses and examined the envelope. He deciphered written Arabic only with difficulty, but managed to make out the words “Tayzir” and “florist” printed in ink on the coarse paper.
“Who gave this to you?” Abdullah asked the boy.
“A woman.”
“What woman?”
“Her head was covered with a chador. I could see that her hair under the chador was long and black. She spoke our language. She gave me a shekel, she promised you would give me another when I delivered the envelope.”
“You lie like a rug,” Abdullah said with a guttural laugh. “She gave you half a shekel and said I would give you half a shekel.”
The boy tossed his thin shoulders sullenly.
Abdullah reached into the deep pocket of his apron, retrieved a coin and dropped it into the boy’s palm. The boy pocketed the money and darted off down the street past the four Palestinian laborers prying up flagstones to lay telephone cables.
Abdullah made his way to the back of his shop and tugged the rope of the dumbwaiter on which his wife lowered fruit juice and his medicine, and his midday meal. Two flights up a small bell attached to the rope sounded. “Is that you who rings, Abdullah?” his wife called down the shaft.
“You may hang out my green shirt to dry,” Abdullah shouted up.
The shoemaker’s wife climbed to the roof and fastened with clothespins the bright green shirt to the line stretched between the television antenna and the old chimney that had been sealed off since the Turkish occupation. If she wondered why she was hanging a shirt that was not wet to dry in the sun, she never posed the question. For forty-two years, she had been following her husband’s instructions without asking questions; she was not going to start now.
An hour went by, then a second. Customers came and went. Several Armenian priests wandered past the shop talking among themselves in a language that struck Abdullah as exceedingly strange. A group of Italian tourists followed a short Christian Arab, wearing a fez and holding high a large red umbrella, toward Christian Quarter Road and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When several of the woman lagged behind to window shop in front of a jewelry store across from Abdullah’s, the guide came scurrying back to get them. Snapping at their heels like a sheep dog, he herded them away from the window, raised aloft his emblem of authority and started off again in the direction of the church. Curiously, the four Palestinians laying telephone cables did not break for the mid-day meal, a fact that registered in Abdullah’s consciousness at roughly the same moment the young Palestinian Abdullah knew only as Tayzir came sauntering down from Christian Quarter Road to pick up the message that had been left at the shoemaker’s shop.
Pushing himself off the work bench, the old shoemaker reached for his wooden crutch and limped to the doorway. “No! No!” he called, pointing with his crutch toward the Palestinian laborers just as two of them leaped from the trench they were digging to fling Yussuf violently against a wall. In an instant they had slipped handcuffs on his wrists and taped shut his mouth. The other Palestinians drew pistols from their overalls and blocked off each end of the narrow street. A group of Japanese tourists gaped in astonishment as one of the laborers whipped out a small radio and barked into it. Seconds later an Arab taxi careened around the corner and screeched to a stop next to where the two Palestinians were pinning Yussuf to the side of a building. The taxi’s rear doors were flung open, Yussuf was bundled onto the floor in the back of the car and covered with a Bedouin rug. The two Palestinians with drawn pistols backed toward the taxi. One of them pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and scrawled something on a wall, then leaped into the taxi as it sped off through the narrow streets of the Old City in the direction of Herod’s Gate and the Arab quarter of Jerusalem.