HIS FINGER CARESSING THE COLD TRIGGER OF THE AK-47, AOWN drropped to one knee at the top of the narrow staircase. He had been through every nook and cranny of the building, in the pitch darkness, many times, and knew it as he knew the alleyways of Abu Dis, the Palestinian suburb of East Jerusalem in which he’d been raised. He bent forward and listened to the hollow emptiness of the bathhouse below. In his mind’s eye, he tried to imagine what paradise would be like. Would the beautiful gardens, where the tears of his mother were transformed into roses and jasmine, have different flowers at different seasons? Would the flowing rivers dry up like wadis in the summer? Would there be different seasons? Would the sky cloud over? Would there be thunderstorms or never ending sunshine? If never ending sunshine, would the heavenly mansion of perpetual bliss have a roof? Would his skin turn black like an African’s? He himself loved the way dogs curled their tails between their hind legs and cringed under beds at each bolt of lightning, and the damp breath of the cool air on his cheek after a summer thunderstorm. The eternal life that awaited him, so promised the mujaddid, Abu Bakr, would clearly not disappoint him. The more so if he were to die a martyr. But if there were no bone-dry summers, and no thunderstorms …
Aown’s eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. Hugging the wall he started down the narrow flight of stairs. Several of them creaked under his feet. He stopped half way down to listen again. Somewhere in the labyrinth of cubicles a rat scuffed over the cracked tiles of the floors. A shutter slapped lightly against an inside wall. Could it be that the American journalist had somehow led the Jews to the bathhouse? The fact that the Doctor, whom Aown considered infallible, had sent him to scout meant that it was a genuine possibility. He must be careful not to jump at shadows, lest he alarm the people in the neighborhood and give away the location of the safe-house. But he would fire off all thirty rounds in the clip at the first human body that stirred. Stealing down the steps, crouched low, swinging his AK-47 in a wide arc at each doorway, Aown began working his way through the maze of tiled baths. He lingered at the top of one of the two wide staircases leading to the ground floor and listened. He could almost make out the evening breeze whispering through the warren of corridors and changing rooms under his feet.
Peering into the dark emptiness, Aown started down the stairs. One by one he explored the changing rooms, with their doors hanging half off their hinges, their ceramic hooks long since pried from the walls by souvenir hunters scavenging through the abandoned building. Turning down one corridor, he could make out the high double door of the enormous reception room looming ahead. Sinking onto one knee with his back to the wall on the corridor-side of the double door, he peered into the darkness and listened again, then wheeled around the corner and lunged across the threshold into the room, landing on a small mountain of soft coarse fabric that had not been there the last time he had passed. Climbing to his feet, he kicked at the fabric with his shoe and groped for a shred of logic to explain its presence. Who would have stored cloth in the bathhouse, where anyone could sneak in and steal it? As his thoughts raced, a ghost-like luminous streak floated out of the darkness in front of him. In the blink of an eye the shadow transformed itself into a goggled human figure and a long soot-blackened grooved commando blade slipped between Aown’s scapula and rib, severing the pulmonary artery of his heart. There was no pain, only a sudden and total loss of muscle strength as hands reached out of the blackness to lower him noiselessly to the ground. Aown actually felt his spirit floating free of his body as many feet raced past him. As the blackness turned into blinding brilliance, the answer came to him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it before? Not a phrase, not a word in the holy Qur’an was there by chance. The angel Jibril had not whispered into the Messenger’s ear the words Garden of Eden, but Gardens. Which surely meant there was one Garden with never ending sunshine, and another for those, like Aown, who loved the crack of summer lightning and the damp breath of the cool air on their cheeks after a thunderstorm.