KEEPING A HAND ON THE BUTT OF THE WEBLEY IN HIS BELT, Aown pushed open the door to the inner sanctum with a toe and stepped aside to let the American journalist past. Sweeney discovered the Rabbi swaying back and forth in his chair in the windowless room illuminated by the naked bulb hanging from the braided electric cord. Puffing on one of his thick Farids, the Doctor hauled the leather hood off of Apfulbaum’s head. The Fiddler on the Roof looked as if he had aged twenty years since Sweeney had last set eyes on him; his hair had thinned and started to turn gray, his eyes had enormous bags under them, on the back of his hands the wrinkled skin seemed to hang in folds off the bones. His voice rising and falling like a tired tide, Apfulbaum prayed under his breath as he worked a set of silver worry beads through his skeletal fingers.
The Doctor tugged gently on the slit sleeve of the Rabbi’s rumpled suit jacket. “You have a visitor, Isaac,” he announced, settling onto a chair facing the prisoner, motioning Sweeney to the stool that Aown was dragging in from the other room.
The Rabbi’s prayer trailed off. “Are we night or are we day?”
“You know very well, ya’ani, that I always come to you at night.”
Apfulbaum opened one eye and squinted at Sweeney without bringing him into focus. “So who is this visitor?” he asked huskily.
“It’s me, Rabbi. Max Sweeney. I interviewed you the day you went to Yad Mordechai, just before—”
The Rabbi’s other eye flicked open. “Say it, say it. Just before my convoy stopped to lend benzene to some stinking haredim. You probably think the episode slipped my mind but it hasn’t. It’s still fresh in my memory—I can hear the tall Jew speaking Hebrew with a funny accent, I can feel the hypodermic needle pricking my arm.” Apfulbaum angled his head in the direction of his secretary’s chair. “Damn it, Efrayim, I specifically told you I wasn’t going to grant him a second interview until I saw what he’d written about me in the first.” The Rabbi snorted in displeasure. “You’re going to have to shape up or ship out, Efrayim.”
The Doctor cleared his throat. “I’m afraid Efrayim has … shipped out.”
“Efrayim’s shipped out,” the Rabbi repeated dully. He ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. “So where has my amanuensis shipped out to?”
“With any luck, heaven.”
Sweeney scratched the Doctor’s answer in his copy book before glancing at the empty chair. The sight of the strips of cloth that had bound the secretary’s ankles to its thick wooden legs turned his stomach. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up. He swallowed hard and breathed deeply through his mouth.
Apfulbaum wrestled with the meaning of the Doctor’s words. “Efrayim’s gone to heaven?”
“There is a time for dying, ya’ani,” the Doctor reminded him.
The Rabbi’s brow filled with creases, his eyes bulged in their sockets. “Ah, I see. Why didn’t come right out and say it without beating around the burning bush? You excarnated Efrayim!” When the Doctor remained silent, Apfulbaum, shaking his head in agitation, began forcing the worry beads through his fingers. “I’m not surprised. A deadline’s a deadline. Question of maintaining one’s credibility. So poor Efrayim has shipped out. Which means I’m next in line for excarnation. Ha! I’m ready when you are! Contrary to the conventional wisdom on the subject, people who are dying want to talk about their deaths. Everyone avoids the subject out of embarrassment. But you and I, we’re way past mundane things like embarrassment. Talk to me about my death, Ishmael. Tell me how you’re going to excarnate me.”
“Let’s not cross bridges—”
Sweeney was amazed to see that the prisoner seemed to have turned the tables on his kidnapper. It was the prisoner who was eager, and Abu Bakr who hung back, obviously ill at ease.
“Knock off the clichés about crossing bridges,” the Rabbi burst out angrily. Then he shouted, “I want you to describe my excarnation.” He calmed down and elevated a quivering chin and spit whispered words through clenched teeth. “Give me details, for God’s sake!”
The Doctor scraped his chair closer to the Rabbi. “I do it myself,” he confided.
The Rabbi sighed. “I’m relieved it will be you and not some dirty Palestinian.”
“I can say, speaking from a medical point of view, that if it comes to that—I hope with all my heart it will not, but if it does—the end will be utterly painless. I insert a small caliber bullet into the lowest part of the brain stem, which regulates the beating of the heart and the breathing. Death is instantaneous.”
“You’re not trying to comfort me? You’re not saying that so I won’t lose my nerve?”
“Allah is my witness, Isaac. I give you my word as a Muslim.”
Apfulbaum accepted this with a nod. Turning to Sweeney, he said impatiently, “I’m going to tell you something. Hang on my every word. You can take notes but remember to spell Apfulbaum with an f after the p. As long as you spell my name correctly, resurrection is guaranteed or I get my money back. Here it is: in another incarnation I could have liked this guy. He’s one of the chosen; he’s one of us.”
Sweeney looked up, bewildered. “I don’t follow—”
“What Isaac is trying to tell you,” the Doctor picked up where the Rabbi had left off, “is that a sort of affinity has developed between us during the long and difficult hours we have spent together.”
“It’s not the usual bull shit of the kidnappee falling head over heels in love with the kidnapper,” the Rabbi explained quickly. “Nothing as banal as that.”
“It is simpler,” the Doctor said, “and at the same time more complex.”
“On this disputed land,” Apfulbaum continued, “we have discovered a common ground besides the no-man’s land of English.”
“Common ground?” Sweeney asked, totally mystified.
“Looking back,” the Rabbi rambled on, “I can see it was more or less inevitable. I mean, there is an abundance of superficial affinities. We’re both circumcised. We both write from right to left—”
“Without vowels,” the Doctor interjected.
“Without vowels,” Apfulbaum repeated. “We both refuse to eat pork. We both pray to the same God at frequent intervals during the day, me three times, Ishmael here, five. We both believe that holy scripture is the word of God. But that only scratches the surface.”
“There is much more to this affinity than meets the eye,” the Doctor agreed. “The quintessence of the Jewish faith is Deuteronomy 6, the shema, which is recited in the morning and evening liturgy.” He removed his spectacles and massaged his eyes with his thumb and third finger as he murmured, “‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ Did I get that right, Isaac?”
“The essence of Islamic faith,” explained the Rabbi, his tongue tripping over the words as they spilled through his dry lips, “is the recitation of the shahada, the witnessing; the testimony that begins with ‘la ilaha illa ‘llah, no god exists but God.’” Apfulbaum would have come flailing out of his chair if his ankles had not been lashed to it. “For God’s sake, do I have to write it on the wall in capital letters? You have to be blind to not see it. We’re both children of Abraham.”
“This being the case,” Sweeney said, “how can you bring yourself to kill him? And how can you, Rabbi, bring yourself to be excarnated without hating the person who excarnates you?”
Rolling his head from side to side, the Rabbi snickered. The Doctor chuckled. Soon they were both shaking with quiet laughter.
The Doctor was the first to catch his breath. “He does not comprehend,” he told the Rabbi, “what you and I comprehend, Isaac—that killing people is not that far removed from curing them. Death and life are two sides of the same coin.” He turned back to Sweeney. “To be absolutely frank, I hope with all my heart that the Jews will give me something—anything!—so that I will not be obliged to go through with my threat and excarnate Isaac here who, like Ibrahim, is a man of pure faith, and no idolater.”
“Thank you for that,” Apfulbaum said with great modesty. “For my part, I hope with all my heart that the Israeli government will refuse to negotiate and oblige Ishmael to excarnate me. Thanks to Ishmael, I have come to see myself as the modern incarnation of what our biblical Isaiah referred to as the Suffering Servant, someone who is fated to suffer for the sins of his people and thereby expiate these sins. If the Jews are destined to be a light unto the nations, I am destined to be a light unto the Jews. Dead, I will become a symbol for those who are against abandoning the land God promised to Abraham and his seed. My tomb will become a place of pilgrimage, a rallying point in the struggle against the Arabs. After my death—because of my death!—our Jewish settlements will continue to grow, the way the fingernails of a corpse grow after death.”
“Fingernails do not grow after death, ya’ani. The skin recedes, giving the impression that fingernails grow.”
“Oh. Still, you see what I mean?”
“I do. I do.”
“You’re both off your rockers,” Sweeney moaned.
The Rabbi’s feet danced in their bonds. “They said I was off my rocker when I talked fourteen families into leaving Brooklyn and setting up shop in some derelict trailers on a craggy hill overlooking Hebron. For two years we had to shit in a portable toilet! They said I was off my rocker when I figured out we could grow lettuce in flower pots during the seventh sabbatical year when the land, according to the Torah, is supposed to lie fallow. I caused the lettuce to be sprayed with insecticides, which excarnated the worms—we sold the lettuce in the Jerusalem shouk for a fortune to religious Jews who didn’t want to run the risk of eating non-kosher meat. The windfall from this put Beit Avram on the map, financially speaking.”
“Calm yourself, Isaac,” the Doctor pleaded. He reached for the Rabbi’s wrist and checked his pulse, which was racing. “I think we will cut this session short and give Isaac a rest. I do not like it when he gets too worked up.”
“No, no, Ishmael, I’ll simmer down, I swear it.”
The Doctor slipped the hood back over the Rabbi’s head. “Rest your eyes, ya’ani. Take a nap. We will come back in a while.” He shooed Sweeney out of the inner sanctum, but left the door ajar in case the Rabbi should call out to him. “He is quite a number, is he not?” he said. “Salt of the earth.”
“Can I quote you?” Sweeney asked sarcastically.
“Of course you can quote me.” The static-filled voices of Israeli soldiers reporting in from various corners of the West Bank burst over Petra’s radio. “For the sake of God, turn that down,” the Doctor barked at her. “Rabbi Apfulbaum is trying to sleep.”