MARCELLUS GRATUS SECUNDUS lay facedown on a towel while a Nubian slave woman carefully scraped the dead skin and aromatic oil from his back, arms, buttocks, legs, and the soles of his feet. Once she had finished, she picked up a sponge from the bucket of warm water, wrung it out so that it was not more than damp, and wiped the noble Roman knight’s body from his balding head to his ankles. It was a delicious feeling, and Marcellus Gratus was aroused by the heat of her naked body so close to his and the way in which she paid attention to the small of his back, his bottom, and his thighs.
Marcellus Gratus glanced over to where his wife, Aurelia Juliana, lay facedown on a nearby couch, being scraped by a tall, muscular naked Nubian. He noted with a smile that her slave had been ordered to spend an extra amount of time in massaging her buttocks and all of her that lay within reach of his fingers. He also noted with some disquiet that her slave had the biggest male appendage he’d ever seen. Not even erect, it was twice the size of that which belonged to his employer. Noticing what he was looking at, his slave girl smiled and whispered in his ear, “I have had that thing inside me, master, and it hurt me. Very badly.”
Marcellus Gratus decided not to tell his wife; she could find out for herself. He looked around at his slave girl and saw that she was very beautiful, her shining black skin reflecting the light of the candle. If he had the time, he would enjoy her body before the evening meal, because he knew for certain that while he was engaged on official duties in this backward region of the empire, Aurelia Juliana would be taking full advantage of her Nubian.
He still didn’t understand why Rome needed to control this regressive part of the world. He’d advised senators that Rome should be looking toward Gaul and Britannia, which were rich in ores and minerals, in wood and tin and slaves. But because of the wealth of Egypt and the grain it produced for bread, the Romans looked south and east, and so Marcellus Gratus had been asked to come take charge of the provincial capital of Jerusalem.
He shuddered when he thought of where he was and how different this land was from the epicenter of Rome’s life and culture. Hundreds of years ago, the Jews had been exiled in Babylon but had returned to rebuild Jerusalem; then they’d been conquered by Alexander of the Greeks, at the same time as the Gauls again threatened Rome but were destroyed by the greatness of the Roman legions. And now he was in Jerusalem, the city that the Jews called their capital!
Marcellus Gratus Secundus could barely stop himself from laughing. Compared with Rome or Alexandria, Jerusalem was a hovel. Since the return of the Jews from their exile in Babylon, it had had many conquerors and kings. He’d been told the history since the Persians had released the Jews from their Babylonian exile, but it was all too complicated. Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, and that meant that Jerusalem and Judea came under his control; but the Greeks wanted to place one of their gods in the Jewish temple, and that had caused some war or other and the land fell to the Ptolemies. But they lost it, and it fell to the Seleucids and Antiochus the Great; but the Jews objected for some reason he couldn’t understand, and so they revolted and it fell to the Maccabees. But the offspring had quarreled and asked Rome to intervene, and now . . . oh, it was all too confusing, and he couldn’t be bothered remembering what had happened in the past. All he was concerned about was ruling for today, handing over tributes to the Senate in Rome, and returning to a higher office in a civilized land.
Shortly after Marcellus Gratus arrived in Judea with Aurelia Juliana, they had come to an easy accommodation with each other. In Rome, it would have been unthinkable for a knight to have indulged his carnal desires with a slave woman in the knowledge of his wife, and unimaginable for a male slave to have access to the body of a Roman matron of rank. These trysts were usually carried out in discreet lupanaria, where men and women clients entered the brothels through a series of guarded alleys to avoid a scandal. But in these far provinces, where the eyes of Rome couldn’t see and gossiping voices couldn’t be heard, things became much easier, and the desires of Marcellus and Aurelia were openly gratified as many times as they wished.
As his slave was rubbing down his body with a warm towel, Marcellus Gratus pondered, as he often did, the differences between this place, Judea, the most extreme region of the eastern Roman Empire, and Rome itself. This hot, fractious, empty, and miserable desert of a land held a few charms, but compared with Rome it was the land of the barbarians. The people were warlike and fanatical in their allegiance to their absurdly invisible god, simple in their needs, their cities little more than hovels, without any great civic buildings or baths or forums or temples; nor was there a single hippodrome of any decent size for the amusement of the soldiers, and the roads between places were nothing more than tracks hewn out of the ground by the feet of countless camels and asses.
Yet, there was a certain attraction to being here. In Rome he was a nobleman, a knight, and respected, but he was fairly low down in the imperial hierarchy and was rarely invited to the residence of Caesar. But things had changed for the better after he fought alongside Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius in Gaul. After the civil war in Rome, Marc Antony assumed control of the eastern empire and he had asked Marcellus Gratus to join him and assist in the administration of Judea.
In the two years since he’d been here in the hillside village of Jerusalem, he’d barely seen Marc Antony. The noble Roman spent all of his time in Egypt in the company of their queen, Cleopatra VII, who gave him ready access to her body, as she had done to Julius Caesar some years earlier. And knowing the Egyptians, she probably gave her body to her mother, brother, and father as well.
It was all very strange, and had it not been for Marcellus Gratus’s sense of duty and responsibility, without a firm ruler the place would have become lawless. But as de facto proconsul, Marcellus Gratus kept a firm hand on the different competing factions, the priesthood, the Israelite hotheads who wanted Rome to quit the province, those who wanted closer ties to Syria or to Egypt, and worst of all, the innumerable people who called themselves Messiahs, who seemed to be springing up all the while. Only last week he’d crucified three of them who had tried to foment a revolt among the Jews outside the temple, yelling and screaming that this god of theirs had spoken to them and told them to rise up against the Sadducees in the temple and to all go and live in the desert or something.
He’d been warned by other knights in Rome that Judea was a land full of madmen, religious zealots, hermits, and a strange people who revered only this single god called Adon or something, a god who was invisible yet was perpetually sitting down in the little temple they’d built to him on the top of one of the hills.
These madmen—and there were dozens of them—called themselves Messiahs, which apparently meant those who had been sent by their god, and all came with visions of some beauteous heaven and salvation and forgiveness of sins. They were of little account, often wandering in the desert, wearing just a loincloth, speaking to bushes and the stars, and rarely bothering anybody; he usually crucified those who gathered a following, which scared the rest of them into staying in the desert.
It was, indeed, a mysterious land, but fortunately they were ruled by a king who had grown up in Roman ways and was fluent in Latin as well as understood the imperial way of ruling. And he’d been told in a letter from Marc Antony that their king, Herod, was going to be conferred by the Roman Senate with the title King of the Jews.
When his black slave had finished toweling his front and back, he held her around her neck while she slipped one of his legs and then the other into his white linen subligaculum. On the formal occasions when he wore his toga, he didn’t bother with undergarments; but his meeting with King Herod wasn’t going to be formal, and so he would wear a simple tunic, which meant that his subligaculum was obligatory when he sat down.
His slave pulled the short tunic over his head, placed the gold seal of authority on his finger, combed his hair, and finished dressing him. Then she bowed deferentially and withdrew. He told his wife that he would be in the offices and walked out of the bathhouse, followed by his guards. He climbed the flight of steps, where two soldiers, standing guard, banged their hastae on the ground and stood rigidly at attention. The noise of the wooden spears hitting the marble floor told his amanuensis to open the doors and bow as he walked through.
“Excellency,” said Septimius Severus, his longtime secretary, “King Herod is expected. His advance guard has informed me that he will be here shortly.”
HEROD, KING OF THE north and south of Israel, lover, politician, and omnipotent ruler, son of Herod Antipater the Idumaean and Cyprus the Nabatean, beloved of the Roman conquerors but hated by the Jews of Israel, was overwhelmed with excitement. He had spent much of the morning standing on his golden chariot at the precipitous edge of the mountainside, looking at the city of Jerusalem. His troop of bodyguards, arrayed in lines behind him, was forced to stand in the blistering sun while the black silk parasol gave him shade. Now he was riding quickly toward the city for his interview with the proconsul, Marcellus Gratus, and could barely wait to show him his plans.
It had been so hot on the hill that he was sure the sun had burned the top of his balding head, despite the shade of the parasol. He’d wiped the sweat from his eyes, and although he didn’t know it, he and his guards were positioned at precisely the same spot on the Mount of Olives where, nearly a thousand years before him, King David had stood and surveyed the city, which was inhabited by the Jebusites, planning how to conquer it.
But today Herod’s eyes saw a very different city, white and gleaming, rich and renowned, proud and holy. His eyes narrowed in wonder as he surveyed the towering walls and the myriad buildings within: the homes of the populace, offices where the business of the nation of Israel was conducted on behalf of the Roman conquerors, shops that sold goods from all over the Roman world, and stalls that sold meat and drink, fruits and delicacies, herbs and spices.
Yet, the beauty of the city was marred when he looked farther up the hill. He shuddered when his eyes were lifted to the top of the mountain called Moriah and saw the temple dedicated to Adonai Elohim built five hundred years earlier by the Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon.
He’d been inside the temple many times and compared its sparseness and insignificance with the towering grandeur of the buildings of Rome, where he’d spent much time. His wife, Mariamne, had said that the Jews would love and revere him as their one and only true king if he were to knock down the meager structure the Jews called their temple and replace it with the mightiest temple imaginable, dedicated to their god Adonai Elohim, an edifice grander than the pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of Roman Mesopotamia.
Herod had spoken to the rabbis about his plans, and while many considered it blasphemy to pull down the sacred temple, others were excited by the idea of a great and grand temple. While he could have compelled them to do precisely as he told them, perhaps executing a few to convince those who opposed him, Mariamne persuaded him to compromise. He would allow them to continue to use their altar and sacrifice whatever animals they wanted, and he would pull down the old temple that had been built by Zerubbabel and Joshua, dismantling it stone by stone. Then he would flatten the top of the mountain and build a massive platform where the huge foundation stones could be laid.
He had the architect’s plans and couldn’t wait to show them to Marcellus Gratus. His horseman rode his chariot through the great archway that led to the upper reaches of Jerusalem, and people scattered out of the way as the noise of the wheels on the paving stones warned them of his approach. When he reached the gates of the huge home from where Marcellus Gratus administered the nation on behalf of Rome, he jumped down from the chariot, grabbed his plans, and walked quickly toward the atrium.
Marcellus Gratus’s secretary, Septimius Severus, saw him approach and ran to inform his master. “Shall I have him wait in the antechamber?” the servant asked.
The proconsul shook his head. “No, admit him. He’s a good friend of Rome, so we shouldn’t delay.”
Septimius Severus bowed politely and nodded to a guard who stood by a door at the far end of the office. In moments Herod walked in and smiled when he saw his friend. He raised his right arm stiffly, his fingers outstretched. It was a salute that also showed that he wore no weapons concealed in the arm sleeve of his tunic. Marcellus Gratus did the same, and they approached each other with a smile. They embraced and clasped each other’s wrists.
“So, my friend, what brings you to my quarters?” asked Marcellus Gratus.
“I’m here, friend, to inform you of a significant number of building projects I wish to undertake. I will be taxing my people heavily, so we can expect some trouble. I’ll also be importing architects from Greece, Rome, and Egypt, so they’ll need guarding and protection from a jealous population.”
“Three architects from three countries? That’s a big building.”
“Architects from three countries, not three architects. I’ll have thirty architects working on the different projects throughout the country.”
“By the gods, how many projects will you be undertaking?”
Herod smiled. He turned to his secretary and nodded. The man withdrew a dozen scrolls from his bag and began to unroll them on the table. As one, then another, then another were laid on top of one another, Marcellus Gratus shook his head in amazement.
“I intend to make my kingdom into a replica of Rome, but on the other side of the world. I will make my name live forever throughout the ages for the most beautiful and perfect of constructions. From this day until the end of time, people will look at our Roman Empire and see two great pillars on each side supporting the world. One pillar will be Rome with its Senate, its forums, its temples, its hippodromes, its baths, and its theaters. The other pillar, on the opposite side of the world, will be Israel, with the greatest buildings in the East, greater than Egypt’s pyramids or the Acropolis of Athens with its Parthenon and its caryatids.”
Marcellus Gratus smiled. “You still call this nation Israel; when will you Jews know that its name is Judea?”
“Don’t bother yourself with that. Instead, look at my plans, Marcellus Gratus, and tell me that they’re not the most exciting and splendid building programs you’ve ever seen.”
They walked to the table and Herod, like an excited schoolboy, said, “This is my plan for a new temple, right here in Jerusalem. I’ll have the priests build it of stone and they’ll do the woodwork as well, and it will be full of marble and gold.”
He pulled the plan for the temple away and revealed a plan for an entire city on the shores of the Mediterranean. “This port city will be called Caesarea Maritima in honor of our emperor and will house a huge theater, an amphitheater, a hippodrome, a vast temple dedicated to whichever god the emperor decides, and a palace for myself by the sea. We’ll dredge the harbor so that a hundred ships can dock there in safety.”
He pulled that plan aside and cast it on the floor, revealing a plan for a desert palace, which Marcellus Gratus read was called Masada. This looked like an outrageously complicated structure, hewn out of solid rock and built on many different levels; but before he was able to examine it properly, Herod revealed more plans.
“In Jericho, a horrible place on the edge of the desert and overlooking the Salt Sea, I’ll build a palace on both sides of the wadi, the dry riverbed, but they’ll be connected by a bridge, and there’ll be gardens and baths and halls for dining and entertainment.”
Another plan revealed the city of Jerusalem. “And here I’ll build a sewage system, which will carry the waste away and dump it into the valley beyond, as well as a water system that will supply the people with all the fresh water they need. And there’s the baths and a hippodrome here, and—”
“Stop!” said Marcellus Gratus. “Stop! Enough! By Jove, by all the gods in the heavens, this is madness. Insane. How will you ever be able to afford it? Where will the labor come from? Who will do the building, the construction, the stonecutting? Where will the rock and the wood come from? I’ve never seen so many plans in all my life. This will ruin Judea, Herod. Ruin the country. You’ll be king of a kingdom that is nothing but dirt and rubble.”
“No!” said Herod, laughing. “It’s time this nation had a strong ruler whose will is absolute. The people, the Jews, are stiff-backed and resentful. But when my buildings are complete and the people look on them in awe—when they see that travelers come from all over the empire just to gaze on these wonders—then they will truly say that Herod is a great king.”
Marcellus Gratus looked at the king of the Jews and wondered whether he was truly mad or a man of extraordinary vision. “There will be many who resent what you’re doing, who’ll fight you. There will be an uprising when your tax collectors whip the backs of people whose backs are already bent under the burden you’ve imposed on them.”
Again Herod burst out laughing. “Then my prisons will be full, my executioners busy, and my torturers exhausted.”
“Your people will hate you. Truly hate you. Is that what you want?”
Herod thought deeply, knowing that what Marcellus Gratus said was correct. Wherever he went in Israel, he could sense the hatred toward him of the people of the city and in the country, looking at him and sneering. He was as much a Jew as they were, yet because his family was from Idumaea and even though he was their rightful king, they still considered him a foreigner. He’d threatened, demanded, executed, and tortured enough of them to engender respect for him with the majority, but still he knew that they held him in contempt.
So his beloved Mariamne had persuaded him to build this new temple on the site of the worthless building that the prophets Haggai and Zachariah had overseen in ancient times. He’d been told by the rabbis that the temple, little more than a square building of stone with inconsequential ornaments inside, was erected and completed twenty years after the Jews were released from captivity by Cyrus the Great.
And he knew precisely how he’d do it. He would quarry the white Jerusalem blocks from a shaft he would build and burrow into the higher northern reaches of the mountain, close to the city and the site of the platform on which the new temple would be built. And as it was downhill from the quarry to that part of the city, the oxen wouldn’t have to struggle too much. His architects would ensure that the Sadducees did all the heavy building work, for the priests would have little to do once their temple was pulled down and before the new one was erected.
It would cost a fortune, of course, but he would raise taxes to pay for the artisans, the equipment, the architects, the masons, and all the others who would build it quickly and efficiently. He’d been told, according to the records kept in the Second Temple, that the money to build it was raised from the returning Jews of Babylon by a merchant named Reuven, but Herod would use no merchants or others to force the money out of the Jews’ pockets. He’d set his tax gatherers and collectors the task of raising the money, and if he had to break a few backs and put holes into a few skulls to ensure the cooperation of the populace, well, so be it.
YAEL WAS SWEATING despite the car’s air-conditioning. She got out of the driver’s seat and the dry, enveloping heat and sulfurous stench of the Dead Sea hit her like a slap in the face. She recalled the numbers of school visits she’d made to the area, especially the trip to King Herod’s winter palace at Masada. Living in Jerusalem, she was used to extremes of temperature, but the Dead Sea had an atmosphere all its own. The heat was so intense that it hurt her nostrils to breathe.
Yael hurried into the prison’s reception area where it was both shady and cooled by air-conditioning, and told them that she’d made an appointment as his doctor to see the prisoner on remand, Bilal haMitzri. She even carried a folder of papers for him to sign.
“Consent forms and such, so I can use his name in my paper about his medical condition.”
The prison officer raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Just covering my ass so he doesn’t sue me later,” said Yael as nonchalantly as she could muster. The officer waved her into the security room.
After she walked through an X-ray body scanner, had her bag thoroughly searched, and was examined in intimate places by a female security guard, she was allowed into the prison, leaving her bag and mobile phone in a locker.
Within a few minutes Bilal was led into the reception room by a massive Russian guard. The young man was surprised to see her.
“Dr. Yael. You’re here again,” Bilal said in Arabic.
Yael looked at the guard to see whether he understood, but it didn’t appear as though he did. But she had to test him out, and so she said in Arabic to Bilal, “My friend, I have something very serious to discuss with you and I don’t want anybody to understand what I’m going to say. Does the guard speak Arabic? For this is a very private message . . .”
“No, Doctor, I speak to him in bad Hebrew. His Hebrew is as bad as mine.”
She winked at Bilal and looked around the room to see whether there were any television cameras or recording equipment. Satisfied that there were none, in a conversational voice, looking at Bilal, she said in Arabic, “Hey, Russian guard. If you can hear me, your mother is a worthless slut and your sister is a cheap whore who sells her body to anyone with a credit card.”
Bilal looked at her in astonishment, but Yael saw that the guard didn’t even blink, let alone react to the gross insult.
“Bilal, listen to me very, very carefully and say nothing. Don’t react in any way. I have to get you out of here.”
Bilal’s eyes widened but he remained silent.
“You are in very great danger. The authorities will do little and too late. You must do exactly as I tell you. Do you understand?”
Bilal nodded slowly.
“I am going to give you three tablets. Take them, and they will make you sick, very sick, but only for a short while.”
Bilal sat back from the table and a flash of fear showed across his face. But Yael reached out across the table and touched his arm. In that moment she feared the guard’s attention would be drawn by such an action; she had very little time to make Bilal understand, but the guard was busy reading a paper.
Yael had compounded the tablets Bilal would have to take, doing it herself to avoid implicating any of the hospital pharmacists. She’d obtained the ingredients from the hospital, but asking different pharmacists on different occasions meant that they wouldn’t put two and two together. And she’d checked, and double-checked, that Bilal’s weight, height, and age meant that he could take the overdose without any long-term effect. Remembering that she’d had an intimate search the last time she came to the prison, Yael had placed the three anticholinergic pills inside the gap where a wire of her underwire bra normally fitted. It was unlikely that a search would find them. And she’d ensured that the hospital pharmacy had a good supply of parasympathomimetic drugs to reverse his illness when he was brought into the hospital.
“The doctor here at the prison will think you have been poisoned, but he won’t know how to treat you and he’ll call for an ambulance. You’ll be taken to my hospital.”
Bilal’s eyes darted back and forth but he didn’t move and Yael prayed that he was comprehending what she was saying and not planning to call for help.
“When you get there, I’ll be waiting for you. And I’ll give you a . . . um . . .” Yael’s Arabic failed her and she struggled for the word. “I’ll give you—”
“Antidote,” Bilal said softly. A palpable relief welled up inside Yael as he confirmed he’d understood the plan after she’d explained it as quickly as she could.
“So you understand what I’m saying to you?”
Bilal frowned but nodded.
“We can’t trust anybody. Not any Palestinian, not any Israeli. Nobody. This is the only way. You have to trust me . . .”
Yael heard herself say this last word and thought to herself how absurd it all seemed. Why should he trust her? Only because he had no other choice.
“So you are getting me out. Yes? But why? What can I do outside? Escape to another country? What do you want me to do?”
“The reason you have to leave here is to save your life. Your imam and the man with white hair are plotting to kill you. When you’re out, we will trap them and expose them. We don’t know how yet, but we will. But if you stay here, Bilal, you’ll die.”
“Why not tell the governor? If you tell him, maybe this time he will believe me. Maybe he will save me.”
“We don’t know who will come after you, Bilal. That’s why you have to become very sick immediately, and we’ll get you out of this place.”
Bilal looked deep into Yael’s eyes and said, “When I’m better, can I return to my home and my father and mother?”
She shook her head, feeling sorry for him. “No, Bilal. There’s no way I can get you home. You have to pay for your crime.” His face was stony and silent. “But we can make things better for you. For your family . . .” Yael felt as if she were lying, but her seemingly honest response, free of false promises, gave him confidence.
“Give me the tablets,” he said.
She looked over at the guard, who had turned to glance in their direction. “Not yet, not until he looks away. Just keep talking. I’ll keep my eye on him and the moment he’s not looking directly at us, I’ll slip them to you. Put them in your trouser pocket. Take them tomorrow morning immediately after breakfast. Don’t take them when you get to your cell because the guards might not look in for hours. If you take them with lots of people around, you’ll suddenly feel horribly ill. They’ll get immediate help. Do you understand?”
Bilal nodded.
“You cannot trust anyone, Bilal. Neither of us can . . .”
AT HALF PAST TWELVE on the following afternoon, two things happened in nearby parts of Jerusalem. The first was a prison van driven at breakneck speed toward the hospital. The governor had radioed ahead to police headquarters requesting a police escort for a van carrying a dangerously sick prisoner. They were to meet the van as soon as it had climbed out of the valley of the Dead Sea, and lead the way through Jerusalem’s frenetic traffic to the city’s main hospital’s accident and emergency facilities.
And at precisely twelve thirty in the afternoon, just two and a half miles from the emergency department where a nervous Yael worked and waited, a worried Yaniv Grossman walked into the offices of the ultrasecretive Shin Bet and asked to speak to Deputy Director Eliahu Spitzer.
The prison van screeched to a halt, and nurses and paramedics, already alerted, ran out with a gurney, an oxygen cylinder, and a crash cart. Bilal’s comatose body, still twitching and as cold and pallid as death, was carried to the gurney and he was wheeled inside.
The Palestinian surgeon, Mahmud, stood waiting. He had known Bilal was coming and knew this was now his part to play.
Yael had been nervous, almost shaking, when she drew him aside and asked him if he’d be willing to assist her in saving Bilal’s life. He agreed, although she could sense there was great reluctance. She told him what she wanted him to do. He could tell from the rhythm of her voice that her speech had been prepared, rehearsed. She had no idea how he’d respond and she was desperate.
Mahmud had tried so hard to fit into hospital work life while knowing full well that he might always be an outsider. He ignored the jokes and offhand comments, the passive but invasive prejudices that were normalized around him. And he tolerated the angry looks from his own people who saw him as a traitor. This was the burden he carried. And to shoulder the load, Mahmud had ardently sought to give no quarter, provide no space for the criticism or the glares or the mistrust. He worked longer, he worked harder. He smiled more and laughed more and let nothing be taken as offense. This was his defense mechanism, and it gave him place and purpose and solace within the fraught state of being an Arab-Israeli caught between two worlds.
But when Yael Cohen asked him to help Bilal escape from the hospital, escape from imprisonment for murder, Mahmud knew that if he assisted, then nothing would ever be the same again. There were no normal circumstances that would have made him agree to assist a terrorist—Jew or Muslim—escape from lawful custody; but Yael had explained very dramatically that the boy was a political prisoner, and that her own life was in danger. Reluctantly, he’d agreed to assist. No longer passive or apolitical, this would now be the moment when he crossed a line.
As he stood and watched the gurney carrying the comatose body of Bilal toward him, he was still not sure why he had agreed to help Yael. A dormant loyalty to his people’s cause? The righting of an injustice? No, these were not things that compelled Mahmud. What compelled him was the notion that in another time and another place, it could have been him, not Bilal, on the gurney, a gullible young Palestinian seduced into committing an atrocity and now paying for it with his life.
Bilal’s body was drawn up in front of him and he reached for the clipboard notes from the prison doctor, seeing that adrenaline had been administered two hours earlier. Mahmud squeezed only half of the syringe into the boy’s arm, running alongside the gurney as it was wheeled into the emergency cubicle that had been made ready.
Mahmud trusted Yael Cohen. He trusted her as a surgeon; he trusted her words. He knew if he was caught as part of this criminal deception against the State of Israel, the authorities would be merciless; but he also knew from Yael how endangered this young man’s life was in the prison, and so he’d agreed to join with her in effecting his escape. So for him this would be no political statement or act of irrationality; it would be the act of a doctor saving the life of a patient.
He examined Bilal’s pupils, listened to his heart, searched his lips and mouth for the typical discoloration of orally administered poisons, and looked over his entire body with care and precision while he instructed the ward nurse to take samples of blood and have them sent up to the pathology laboratory immediately for fluid, electrolyte, and other tissue analysis. He also wrote and signed forms for an MRI, chest X-ray, EEG, and nuclear medicine to identify what was happening in the patient’s internal organs. While these were being prepared in other parts of the hospital, he stuck receptors all over Bilal’s body for an ECG to monitor his heart.
Mahmud knew full well what was happening to Bilal and didn’t need the battery of tests he had just ordered to bring him back to consciousness. But he played the part he knew he needed to play, to make the ruse plausible and his involvement invisible. It strangely ran against his instincts as a doctor to pretend at being unable to heal when the power to save was right before him.
He said to the nurse, “This is the kid who had the angiomyolipoma.” The nurse looked at him blankly. “Dr. Cohen’s patient.” Still the nurse registered nothing. Finally Mahmud said, “The terrorist who tried to blow up the temple wall.” The nurse suddenly nodded in recognition. “We need to prep him for an exploratory op.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the test results?” said the nurse.
“I really don’t want to wait and have him bleed out internally. Dr. Cohen will want to operate immediately. You know what she’s like.”
The nurse gave a curt nod and for a second Mahmud doubted whether he had been convincing enough. But he was given no time to ponder as Bilal was set in motion again toward the surgical ward. There, Mahmud knew, Yael would be waiting.
YANIV GROSSMAN WAITED for a response from the man who sat opposite him. But instead of reacting, Eliahu Spitzer simply stared back at Yaniv, the slightest trace of a whimsical smile on his face. Yaniv was tense before going in, but Eliahu’s cold and calculating manner unnerved him even more as the great gamble played out in front of him.
It was an odd situation for Yaniv. Professionally, he was always calm and in control when he was reporting on television or interviewing a recalcitrant subject. He was known internationally for his incisive yet polite demeanor interviewing politicians or reporting from battle zones. His tall body and intelligent approach gave viewers confidence, and his ruggedly handsome face attracted a bevy of Israeli girls who were regular followers on ANBN’s Facebook page.
But sitting opposite the Shin Bet operative in his private office, the reporter’s eyes darting nervously from the view of the Old City through his window, to the ornaments on his desk, to Eliahu sitting smugly and comfortably in his chair, Yaniv was a picture of uneasy anxiety.
“And why should I do what you ask, Mr. Grossman?” Eliahu said quietly.
“Because I can help you put an end to this Bilal problem,” he said.
“And what problem precisely is that? And why do you think that I have a problem?”
“He’s identified you as the man he saw in an intimate conversation with the imam of Bayt al Gizah, and it won’t be long before the police work out that he’s the brains behind what Bilal tried to do.”
The ghost of a smile now broadened to a grin masquerading as a sneer. “I speak to many Palestinians, some imams, some mullahs, some governors, some mayors, and some street sweepers. Why is it unusual for me to have had a meeting with this imam?”
“Why did you try to kill me?”
“Me?”
“A motorbike delivering a car bomb in traffic? We’ve seen that move before.”
“To kill an Iranian nuclear scientist, perhaps, but not a reporter. That would be a waste of resources,” said Spitzer, masking a grin. “And not Shin Bet’s resources either. That’s the sort of thing that Mossad does, quietly and efficiently. It sends a rather strong message.”
“But I know that you organized it because you think I’m a threat. And I’ve been around long enough to know how deadly Shin Bet is. So I’m not here to play hero and I don’t want to die. I want to do a deal.”
“I deal with Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Not respected American broadcasters, Mr. Grossman, even if one has become an Israeli citizen. I think you’ve come to the wrong department. If you want to do a deal, go to the Tax Office.”
“I’ll give you Bilal if you promise to leave me alone.”
For the first time since Yaniv had entered his office, Spitzer frowned. “Give him up? He’s in prison, awaiting trial. In a couple of months he’ll be an anonymous nonentity in a prison cell and he’ll be there for the rest of his life.”
“Is he still in prison?” said Yaniv, hoping for some reaction to play across Spitzer’s face. But the Shin Bet officer said nothing and gave nothing away. Yaniv knew—or at least hoped—his words must have had an effect.
“Very soon you’ll get a call telling you he’s gone. I’m the only one who knows where he is. And I’m offering Bilal in exchange for my life. I know you could have me killed whenever you want to, but I reckon that with Bilal alive, it’s the only bargaining chip I have to save my skin.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I think you should leave or I might have to call the police.” The irony of a Shin Bet commander calling regular cops was not lost on Yaniv.
“You know you won’t do that. If I’m arrested, the wives of two Shin Bet operatives you had murdered will testify; I’ll testify; Bilal will testify; there’ll be so much mud thrown at you on every TV station you can name. It likely won’t stick, but it’ll make one hell of a mess and you’ll feel like you’re walking through a swamp. All I’m asking is a fair swap. My life for some miserable terrorist . . .”
ABRAHAM BEN ZAKKAI decided to take the high road to avoid the suffocating reek of sulfur, the noxious fumes of death and decay that suffused the entire area. He dismounted from his donkey as the track started to become steeper, and pulled on the rope to lead the overburdened animal up the narrow path, full of white rocks that were stained with yellow ghosts from the destruction by God of Sodom and Gomorrah. The burning sun forced him to stop at regular intervals, exhausted from pulling the donkey when it refused to continue upward in places where the path was precipitous.
Finding a rock ledge shaded from the scorching intensity of the sun, he took two mouthfuls of water from his flask and fed his donkey from the bag of oats.
Abraham ben Zakkai looked down at the evil sea, indistinct now in the heat of the midday sun, swathed in a heavy gray-white mist that blunted the shore and made the distant Mountains of Moab invisible. Of all the places in Israel where he hated going the most, the Yam haMelach was at the top of his list. He didn’t like going to the hills of Galilee, either, because of the madmen, murderers, and robbers who seemed to infest the area, but he would happily be there right now, with its cool glades and abundant waters, rather than in this furnace, which God had abandoned when he destroyed the evil cities that once lived by its shore.
Being a man educated in many languages, he mused on the names used by travelers for the Dead Sea. The Jews, of course, called it Yam haMelach, the Sea of Salt; the Bedouin called it al-Bahr al-Mayyit, or the Dead Sea, a name Abraham thought appropriate; the ancient Greeks who visited the area called it He Thalassa Asphaltites, or the Asphaltite Sea, but later changed it to He Nekra Thalassa, taking up the Arab description of death; and the recently arrived Roman conquerors knew it as Mare Mortum, also the Dead Sea. He smiled when he thought of the Romans. Militaristic and practical, but not a creative idea in their brains.
Abraham visited the shores of the Dead Sea once a year, for five days at a time. He lived in the open air, lit fires from dead wood and branches to cook his food and frighten away the lions and other large beasts that inhabited the area, and spent his days collecting the leaves and branches of the tamarisk tree, which grew in abundance in the salty soils and crags of the wadis surrounding the Dead Sea. The tamarisk tree’s bark was invaluable for curing warts and headaches, and a distillation made by boiling it with a pinch of yellow sulfur was a certain way of curing diseases of the eye.
Abraham had learned his skills as a doctor from his beloved and revered father, Zakkai ben Jonathan, whose knowledge had been gleaned from a long line of healers, herbalists, rabbis, and priests. Though his father was long dead, his reputation would never be forgotten. Indeed, when Abraham ben Zakkai was descending and then living for the five days in the Dead Sea area, he would begin and end each day with a prayer to his father, begging God to allow him to have the same skills and enjoy the same reputation throughout the land as the father, and the father before him.
After sipping his carefully measured drink from the flask of water, Abraham pulled his donkey upward along the path. There was still half a day of climbing before they reached the top and could travel along better roads toward Jericho and then rest for a day before finally returning home to Jerusalem. Always assuming, of course, that he didn’t meet a Roman patrol that would haul him into prison to question him about why he was traveling. It had happened twice before, and had cost him his entire supply of gathered herbs and spices as well as the free treatment of the illnesses from which the Roman soldiers seemed to be suffering.
But this time he made it back to Jerusalem without incident, and two days after he’d returned home and enjoyed the company of his family, he was summoned to the house of a rich merchant who lived much higher up the hill, closer to the temple. The merchant, Samuel, was known to be a friend of the Romans, and so, while he would give the same attention to Samuel’s servant girl who was suffering from fever as he’d give to any other Jew, he would also be cautious in what he would say to people. In Roman Jerusalem these days, any loose mouth could see its owner end up crucified.
The house was large and imposing. It had acquired the trappings of the Romans, with large marble columns on either side of the wooden front doors, a fountain in the courtyard, and niches for candles in the wall. Having lived and studied in Rome, Abraham was only too aware that such niches normally supported idols of gods such as Jupiter, Janus, Diana, and Minerva. But interestingly, Samuel the merchant had also erected a niche and small shrine for the household gods, or lares, spirits who were supposed to bring comfort and safety to houses that worshipped them. Abraham smiled. He wondered whether there was any trait of Jewishness inside Samuel’s body or whether, like King Herod, he was more Roman than the Romans.
Abraham knocked diffidently on the door and, within moments, a large black Nubian slave opened it. He looked with disdain at Abraham and said in a supercilious voice, bordering on insolence, “People of trade do not come to my master’s front door. Round the back with you.”
He was about to close the door when Abraham said, “That lesion on your neck. An unguent of pine tar, bark from the almond tree, and a tincture of sulfur, the yellow powder I get from the Dead Sea, will help. If you’ll let me in, I’ll give you some.”
The servant frowned and put his hand to his neck where he felt the painful sore caused by a boil that hadn’t healed. He opened the door and nodded to Abraham. “You are a doctor?”
“I’m here to cure your servant, Leah. She has a fever.” He dug into his sack, took out an ointment, and gave it to the Nubian. “Wash the lesion with water that has been boiled. That’s most important. Not water from the well. Wash it with soap and try to clean out all of the pus. Then spread this unguent liberally over the lesion and the surrounding skin. Do the same thing again the following day, and each day that follows until it’s healed.” The Nubian looked at him skeptically. “If you don’t, then the poisons from the lesion may enter your body, and you will die in agony in a month.”
Shocked, the servant led him into the house and to where the food was prepared and washing was done. In a side room where four or five of the serving girls slept on the rush mats on the floor, a young woman lay, her face burning, her bare arms wet with sweat; she was panting and gasping and lay with her body in a fetal position.
“Leah? I’m Abraham ben Zakkai. I’m a doctor. Your master, Samuel, sent for me.”
But the girl either couldn’t hear, or was in such mortal agony that she wasn’t listening.
Abraham felt her forehead. It was scorching hot. He realized immediately that her body’s humors were out of alignment. He searched his memory for what Hippocrates had written about the humors and the seasons. It was summer, and so this was supposed to match the season of yellow bile, but it was obviously her blood that was in disarray, yet that was supposed to happen in the spring.
He examined her, and from the look of the girl the black and yellow bile were in order but the blood and phlegm were out of their natural orientation. He glanced up at the people gathered to see what he was doing. He had to go beyond Hippocrates and make his own judgment.
“Her blood is too hot and it is causing problems for the phlegm, which is why she has problems breathing. Bring me cold water so that I can cool down her skin, which will cool her blood. Then take this potion of roots and barks and dilute it in the same amount of water. Get her to sip it slowly—very slowly—for the rest of the day. That will bring down the fever that is racking her body.”
They stood there staring at him. “Go!” he ordered.
When he’d ensured that her body was cooled by the water and that the cold, wet towels on her forehead, chest, stomach, and legs were changed regularly for fresh wet towels, he followed the Nubian servant into the master’s area of the house. He waited in an antechamber until the master was ready to see him. The noise from the adjoining room was loud: men laughing. Abraham watched as the door was opened and three men, Roman soldiers of elevated rank, walked out into the corridor and toward the front door, followed by a tall, swarthy man in rich merchant’s clothes. One of the soldiers peered into the antechamber and saw Abraham sitting there. He didn’t smile but merely looked away. It was obvious that Abraham’s crude clothes and hat identified him as a Jew not worth knowing.
When the three soldiers had left, Samuel the merchant walked back, and his Nubian servant whispered into his ear. Samuel nodded, looked at Abraham, and said curtly, “Come.”
Abraham followed Samuel into his sumptuous office. It was lined with pillars, scrolls, ledgers, tables, and chairs. On the wall were marble busts of Roman gods and dead Roman emperors and figurines of beautiful women in scanty clothing. So different from Abraham’s simple yet homely house.
“My servant tells me that you have not just cured Leah but that your salve has already made his lesion feel better. You’re a good doctor.”
Abraham shrugged. “I use the knowledge I’ve gained by studying in Greece and Rome. I also use local herbs and remedies, which seem to work well.”
Samuel nodded. He picked up a small cloth bag and weighed it roughly in his hand. He threw it to Abraham. “Here: it’s more than you expect, but you’ve saved the lives of two of my servants, so it’s what you deserve.”
Abraham put the bag into the pocket of his tunic. “You care about your servants? I thought that friends of Rome adopted Rome’s attitude toward us.”
“I’m a friend of Rome, Doctor, but also a Jew. I treat life as sacred, whether it’s a Roman’s life or the life of a servant.”
“Yet, you sit here with Romans clasping your hands as your friends while Israel’s back is crushed under their heel. How can you do this, Samuel the merchant; you, a Jew?”
Samuel looked at him scornfully. “You continue to treat your patients, Doctor, and I assure you I won’t interfere. Let me deal with my business with the Romans, and don’t you interfere with me. You are no longer required in my house. Go!”
He sat down at his table and started to read a scroll. Abraham knew that the interview was over. He left Samuel’s house and walked down the hill to his home. But Abraham didn’t notice as he left Samuel’s compound that a man was standing in the shadows, observing him leave. The man was dressed in the clothes of an Israelite and could have been a farmer, a craftsman, or one of the growing numbers of men whose lives had been destroyed by the Romans and who now idled away their time betting on the throwing of bones or robbing merchants who came to trade in Jerusalem’s marketplaces.
The man waited until Abraham had walked beyond the walls of Samuel’s compound before he ran quickly through the shadows and entered the house. He didn’t knock, nor did he wait for servants to open the door. Nobody knew he was there. As he walked softly into the vestibule, he felt underneath his robes for the handle of his dagger, the essential uniform of the Sicarii, the group of Zealots, determined at any cost to rid Israel of the Romans. And as one of the Jews who’d been Jerusalem’s most important merchants trading with the Romans, Samuel was the man he’d come to see.
Softly, slowly, cautiously, he listened outside Samuel’s office for the sound of conversation, but there was silence. All he heard was the noise of vellum scrolls being moved around. He pushed the door open so that he could see into the room, and was relieved that Samuel was sitting at his desk reading, his back to the door.
The man crept from the doorway, as silently as a stalking lioness, until he could hear Samuel’s breathing. It was then that the merchant sensed that somebody else was in the room. He turned suddenly and stood in shock when he saw that a man had crept up behind him, an arm’s length away. His chair nearly fell onto the floor as he turned to face the man.
They clung together, embracing.
“By the Lord our God, Jonathan, you frightened me. Why creep up on me like a thief in the night?” said Samuel.
“What should I do, friend—announce myself at your door for all to hear?”
“Sit, refresh yourself,” said Samuel, pouring him a glass of wine. “How was the assault in the Galilee?”
Jonathan looked downcast. “We lost six good men and several have been wounded. But the Romans have a bloody nose. We must have killed fifty. When I left, they were sending out waves of troops into the hills to try to find where we were hiding, but we know the paths and the caves as well as we know our wives’ bodies, and they returned to their barricades empty-handed. The more wounds we inflict on them, the more weapons we steal from them, the angrier they become—and angry men don’t fight as well as men who are calm and determined.”
Samuel smiled and said, “I’m sorry some of ours died, but I had some generals here before, and they’re becoming increasingly worried by what you and the other Zealots are doing. They’ve even given your men a name. They’ve called you after your daggers; no longer are you robbers or brigands, but you’re now officially Iscariots. How do you like being Jonathan the Iscariot?”
The Zealot smiled, and shrugged. “I’m a Zealot, and proud of it.”
They drank their wine, and Samuel said quietly, “I think I’ve found the man for you. He treated some members of my household and is skilled in the arts of healing. He’s been trained in Rome and Greece, and so he probably speaks the Roman tongue better than me. He’s what we’ve been looking for.”
Jonathan the Zealot nodded. “Will he come willingly? Is he a patriot?”
“He has no love of Rome. Whether he’ll follow you or whether he’ll need to be dragged is something you’ll have to determine.”
YAEL WAITED for Mahmud to arrive with the unconscious Bilal. She ordered the prison guard to stand outside the doors to the private room. In the corridor, the guard pulled over a chair and sat reading the afternoon newspaper.
Within moments Mahmud arrived and dismissed the emergency porter with thanks. He pushed Bilal into the room, his hand resting on one arm of the youth’s prostrate body. For what seemed a long moment, once the door was closed and they were alone in the room, they looked at each other. Silently they acknowledged what they were doing, the roles they were playing, and the consequences that might come for them both.
Then Yael quickly bent over Bilal’s body. He was still involuntarily shaking and looked pallid and horribly unhealthy. Now that they were alone, she gave him an intravenous injection of the parasympathomimetic drug physostigmine to reverse the disastrous effects of the anticholinergic drug she’d given him in prison.
Within ten minutes he had stopped shaking, color was beginning to return to his cheeks, his body was beginning to warm, and when he looked at her, he remembered who she was.
His voice was raspingly dry, but he said, “I thought I was going to die.”
She put her finger to her lips and whispered into his ear, “Shush, Bilal. I don’t want people to think that you’re getting better, or they’ll take you back to prison. My friend here will take you away to safety.” She didn’t know why, but for reassurance she whispered into his ear, “My friend is a Palestinian.”
Bilal’s eyes darted to Mahmud standing on the opposite side of the bed. Mahmud smiled.
“Is the guard on the door?” Bilal whispered.
She nodded.
“Then how?”
She smiled and said, “You’ll see.”
She gave him a reassuring squeeze on the arm, but she was feeling anything but reassured herself. This would be the end of her career if it was ever found out what she’d done. Career? She smiled strangely to herself. It would be the end of her freedom. She’d be in prison for years. And she’d drag a thoroughly good man, Mahmud, into prison as well.
Suddenly she felt her iPhone tremble in silence in her pocket, delivering a message. It was a simple communication of one word: “Now.”
She bent over Bilal and whispered into his ear, “I’m sorry about this, Bilal, but I’m going to give you another injection that will put you to sleep. I swear it won’t hurt.”
He trusted her and he nodded. She pulled a small case from her pocket, unzipped it, took out a syringe, and rubbed his arm with alcohol. Then she pushed the needle into his arm.
Yael walked smartly out of the room and to the nurses’ station. “Can you prepare Theater G? I have to do an exploratory on that Palestinian kid. I think his kidneys are in meltdown. Ask the theater nurse to get a team together.”
She walked back to the guard on Bilal’s door, who was still reading the paper. “I think that he’s suffering from a secondary rupture to the angiomyolipoma that we treated him for before he went to your prison. If I’m right, he’s got a massive bleed into his abdomen. He’ll die of septicemia unless I stop the blood and the poisons bleeding into his body from the rupture. Are you okay to stay here? I can’t allow you into the theater.”
The guard nodded. “Sure. I can’t stand the sight of blood. Hospitals make me ill.”
She smiled. “This man will wheel him down to the theater.” She gestured to Mahmud.
The guard looked at him, then at Bilal’s door. “May I?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He opened the door and saw that Bilal was in bed, asleep, and looking terrible. “I’ll go to the canteen and have lunch, if that’s okay with you.”
“He’ll be at least five hours in surgery.”
The guard nodded. She smiled as he left the floor to go to the cafeteria.
When the guard was gone, Mahmud seized the trolley and pushed open the door, maneuvering Bilal out of the ward to the elevators. Within another two minutes the elevator descended to the basement of the hospital, where an ambulance was waiting for them. Mahmud pushed the gurney with Bilal lying comatose past a dozen people, who barely glanced at them. He and Yael had a story ready, which they’d rehearsed before Bilal had arrived, and which Mahmud would deliver in a heavy Arabic accent; he’d tell anybody who asked that he was taking the patient for treatment to a specialist decontamination unit in Shaare Zedek Hospital, as the doctors thought he might have been poisoned by radioactive polonium.
But nobody stopped him, and he wheeled the lad out of the rear entrance and straight into the back of a waiting private ambulance. Mahmud secured Bilal’s trolley, then dashed to the front seat and started the large gurgling engine.
Mahmud drove out of the hospital grounds at a modest pace, mentally willing the large ambulance to be as inconspicuous as possible. He looked in the rearview mirror to survey the open chamber of the ambulance and could see Bilal’s dark features. He lay there with his eyes closed. Nothing would be the same after this and as Mahmud steered the vehicle out of Jerusalem and set course for Peki’in, he wondered what the fate of this young man he was risking so much for would be.
WHEN YAEL ARRIVED at the theater, scrubbed and ready for the operation, she pushed open the heavy overlapping polyethylene doors, entered, and looked at the operating table.
“Where is he?” she asked quizzically.
“I was hoping you could answer that,” said her anesthetist. “We’ve been waiting for him.”
“Has anybody phoned the ward?” she asked.
“Sure. They said he’d been brought down half an hour ago. We’ve been to the other theaters and he’s not in any of them,” said the nurse. “We phoned the porters and they said they’d been given no instructions to collect a patient from Surgical. What the hell’s going on, Yael? Who is this patient?”
“It’s Bilal, the kid with gunshot wounds; the kid who was brought from prison . . .” She suddenly became silent and looked concerned. “Jesus,” she said urgently.
The entire operating room suddenly became very still and quiet. All eyes were on her as she stood in the middle of the room in her operating scrubs, thinking deeply to herself, trying to work out something seemingly impossible. She looked back at everybody; she frowned; they could see that her mind was in a state of disbelief.
“Call Security,” she barked. “Jesus, the little bastard’s escaped . . .”
And she hoped that her reaction was convincing.
FUAD AND MARYAM knew that Bilal had been taken to the Jerusalem Hospital. The prison authorities had contacted them and informed them that their son was very sick. Maryam, especially, had been hysterical and demanded that they go to Jerusalem, but Fuad insisted that they wait.
So when the letter was delivered anonymously, it came as a hideous shock. And the note about Bilal’s death, delivered to his parents the previous day, had been the height of cruelty for its inhuman brevity. In fact, Yael could think of nothing more painful and punishing than to send a note to parents telling them that their son was dead. Worse still for his mother and father were the details Yaniv had typed: that Bilal had been executed by the Islamic Resistance in Palestine for his treachery. But in a supreme irony, right at this moment, Bilal’s death would be the only thing that would keep all three of them alive.
Fuad and Maryam were in a state of confusion. One day their son was so sick he was being rushed to the hospital; the next day they received a letter telling them that he’d been executed as a traitor by men of their faith. With Fuad and Maryam bereft and incapable of understanding, the imam took over that moment of their lives and arranged for the funeral.
Yael had never before been to an Islamic house in mourning. As the day began, she’d done her best to ensure that she wasn’t followed and went shopping in the Arab shuk, where she bought a black hijab and a long dark-blue Arabic gown. She booked a taxi to drive her to the village of Bayt al Gizah, and while waiting she put on the clothes, which instantly changed her from being a modern Israeli to an Arab woman.
Yael lowered the hijab over her brow and draped it across her face, watching in the mirror as her identity slipped away. How much her world had changed. Would anything ever be the same again? She looked at her hands, picturing the blood flowing through veins and capillaries, blood she shared with the young man the letter had pronounced dead; he was a terrorist, and yet he was a man she had broken the law to save.
Everything she thought she was, and where she had come from—everything that once was certain—was now sand shifting under her feet. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her new self. Those people who had once seemed so foreign and so far away were now a part of her as she would be judged by anybody seeing her as a part of them. And she was afraid.
The taxi driver, not used to leaving the Jewish western part of Jerusalem, found it difficult to reach Bilal’s parents’ house but eventually got there. One glance told her that it had changed even in the few days since she’d last visited—as had the neighborhood. When she was there the first time, eyes were everywhere, watching her, following her, boring into her in suspicion, focusing their anger on her. This time there were no eyes. People on the street didn’t even look at her. As a Jewish doctor, she was an alien in this village; now, dressed as an Arab, she was no longer “the Other.”
She walked up the pathway and saw that the door was open. Inside were dozens of people—men, women, and children—sitting cross-legged on the floor, some on mats, some on the bare wood. There was a low moan, almost a hum, coming from the crowd. The men were dressed in dark shirts and black trousers, the women in black robes. Almost all of the women, except for the young girls, were wearing either a hijab or the full niqab. Their eyes looked at her but didn’t register anything. She was invisible to them.
She entered the house and made her way down the front hallway to the inner rooms, where Fuad was seated on a low stool surrounded by dozens of men; close to him was the imam, who glanced up momentarily but then looked down again when he saw that Yael was only a woman.
She continued farther into the house to where the women, in another adjoining room, were sitting on the floor surrounding Maryam. Though it might be culturally insensitive, she wanted to pay her respects to both parents. They thought their Bilal was dead; she knew he wasn’t, yet she had to pretend, to try to ease their grief.
Yael knew that she couldn’t enter the room of the men, so she entered the room of the women, and some of them looked at her and then back at Maryam. Bilal’s mother looked older, thinner, and more haggard than the sprightly woman Yael had first met only days before. Maryam’s eyes were red from crying, her cheeks rough, and she had the hollow, withdrawn look of a mother who was bereft and uncomprehending.
Yael bent down to kiss her and pay her respects, but when their eyes met, Maryam looked shocked. Yael put her fingers to her lips and Maryam nodded. But before their embrace ended, Maryam held Yael around the neck and whispered, “Those who ordered Bilal to be taken from the hospital and killed him—they are in this house. It is they who have killed him. You know this. The imam . . . Fuad has to sit with him because we are in mourning, but my husband’s anger is so great that I fear for us. Fuad is so hurt that he’s threatened to go to the Jews and tell them. But that will mean our deaths. When the mourners leave, we will be alone. I beg you to help me.”
Yael so desperately wanted to tell her that her beloved Bilal wasn’t dead, but she knew that to do so would be a catastrophe. She kept reminding herself of the absurdity: the only way to keep him alive was to convince people he was dead.
“How can I help you, Maryam? What can I do?” she whispered. She looked into Maryam’s bloodshot eyes and felt a pang of distress. How much more suffering could this poor woman take?
“We must leave here,” Maryam whispered, her voice even lower so that nobody could overhear. “We must leave Bayt al Gizah. Since this imam, he is poisoning the minds of the boys. He is dividing our village. If Fuad does what he wants to do, the imam will have him killed. I’m certain. I have now lost two of my sons because of him. Bilal is dead and my other son is in prison. I can’t lose any more children, nor Fuad. Please help me.”
“Do you want me to help you move to another village?”
“No. The imam is no fool. He will follow us. We must move to Haifa or Tel Aviv and begin our lives again to save our family.”
Yael nodded. “I can help you. I can talk to people.”
Maryam pulled Yael even closer to her, so that their cheeks were touching, the old lady’s lips almost kissing Yael’s ear. “No. We must leave this village and nobody must know where we have gone. And to be accepted by the Jews, we must show them my family’s Jewish blood. My Fuad, he’s a good Muslim, but we can be saved only if we are embraced by you Jews. Your people have to protect us?” It came as a question but Yael had no answer for their fate. Her mind was fixed only in the present.
Maryam fought back tears. “Help us, Dr. Yael. If we are Jews, then my family can live in Israel? Please, I beg you. Please. Help us.”
The other women were looking at the two and wondering about their long embrace. Yael straightened up and said softly, “May the blessings of our Lord Allah be upon you and this house, and may your pain and suffering be at an end.”
She left the room and looked in at the men, who were gathered around Fuad on the floor, chanting a low invocation. The imam sitting next to Fuad glanced up again and looked at her as she passed the doorway. Stupidly, because of his indifference, this time she didn’t avert her eyes but instead stared directly at him. He didn’t seem to notice her and glanced down again. Even when she was dressed as an Arab, she was invisible, like so many women in Arabic societies.
As Yael walked to the front door, she passed mourners sitting in the corridor on cushions, just as mourners sat in Jewish houses when somebody had died. Had it not been for the dress of the women and the language they were using, this could just as easily have been a Jewish household sitting shiva for a dead loved one.
Outside, little children were playing catch in the garden. One wore an American Aerosmith T-shirt, another wore one sporting Bart Simpson, and a third wore one that proclaimed he was a follower of the Chicago Bulls. She walked around the corner to where her taxi was parked and instructed the driver to take her back to her apartment. As she left the village, she thought about how universal what she’d just seen was. The kids with their American T-shirts, a mother with a young baby, pulling faces and making the kid giggle, and parents grieving for the death of their son.
YAEL UNDRESSED, put her Arabic clothes in the closet, and was about to return to the familiarity of jeans and a knit top when there was a knock on her door. Her heart beat faster, as if there were an Angel of Death waiting for her. Yaniv had begged her to leave the country or at least move to a hotel, but she’d determined that she’d stay. She had to see this through to the end or there would never be an end. Yet, now, unprotected and alone in her apartment before she drove to Peki’in, the knock on the door presaged immediate danger.
She did up the buttons of her top and walked to the door. Hers was a security apartment, so it was likely to be a neighbor, but she opened the door with fear in her heart. Standing there were two people in police uniforms, a man and a woman. Their uniforms and badges had enabled them to gain access to the building.
Surprised, she said softly, “Yes?”
“Dr. Cohen,” said the young woman, “may we come in?”
“Sure, but let me check your IDs.”
The two police showed her their identification. Yael nodded and let them into the living room of her apartment. Her heart was beating rapidly, and she knew she must show no signs of guilt. This had to be about Bilal and the escape. Dear God, she thought, how had they found out?
“Would you like to sit down?” the woman asked her. “I’m afraid that we have some very bad news for you.”
“Tell me what’s happened.”
“Please, Doctor, sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down,” she said tersely. “What’s happened?”
And the young officer told her that some days ago, a car had crashed through the barrier of the road leading from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. Before rescue services could get to it, the gas tank, which was rusted and old, had ruptured and burst into flames when it hit the hot exhaust pipe. The car and the single driver had been consumed by fire, and it had taken some time to examine the few remaining recovered documents and trace the owner because he’d forgotten to register the car with the authorities. Unfortunately, the dead body belonged to her grandfather, Professor Shalman Etzion. They were terribly sorry. Could they make her a cup of coffee? Did she have any relatives or friends she could call? Was there anything they could do for her? Would she be able to come to the morgue and identify the documents, as the body was too badly burned to be identifiable?
When they’d gone, she sat in an armchair overlooking the city of Jerusalem. There in the distance was the Knesset and beyond it the museum and her childhood. It was a place of love and sanctuary for her, an anchor in her life where there were marvelous and incredible things and staff who were overjoyed at her inquisitiveness and kept slipping candy into her pocket, all presided over by a loving, kindly, gentle, white-haired, doting grandfather.
Too shocked to cry, she just stared into space, wondering what was happening in her life. She picked up her cell phone and phoned Yaniv. It had been disconnected. Then she remembered that he’d bought new SIM cards for them both. She opened her purse where she’d written his new details and dialed his number. He answered immediately.
Before she could tell him about Shalman, he burst out, “Thank God you’ve phoned. I’m in the village—have you got the phone? Bilal’s phone—”
“My grandfather is dead, Yaniv.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“He died in a car accident.”
The tears that she’d suppressed earlier now came to her eyes as her voice became broken and meandering. “He was a good driver. He’s never had an accident in his life. What’s happening to me, Yaniv? Is it because of me? I don’t know who I am anymore.”
She burst into tears.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Abraham ben Zakkai was returning home from a visit to the distant sea where he had treated a number of people in the village of Jaffa. Exhausted, Abraham pulled his donkey into his home, far below the shadow cast by the massive walls of the temple built by the late and detested King Herod.
Abraham took time to stable his donkey, feed it, and ensure it had enough to drink before he walked toward his house. From the gate he could see long lines of Jews sauntering to the archway that led up a long flight of stairs to the entrance of the temple courtyards. And as was their habit, there were Roman guards standing around, watching the Jews, ensuring that no weapons were carried up to the temple. The only knives the Romans allowed into the temple forecourt were those wielded by the priests when they slaughtered sacrificial animals brought to them by the populace.
Abraham was exhausted from the long and enervating journey, but he knew that his second responsibility, after caring for his donkey, was to visit the temple and give thanks to God the Almighty, Adonai Elohim in heaven, for his safe return and his ability to heal the sick of the land. For years, ever since he was a boy watching his father, Zakkai, tending to all Israelites, from desperately frightened pregnant women to children with hideous diseases to men injured in the fields, he had been gifted by God with the skills to ease people’s pains. He had learned his father’s and his grandfather’s skills with plants and herbs and spices. And because his father had sent him to Greece and to Rome, where the greatest doctors of the day lived, there were many in Judea now saying that Abraham ben Zakkai was the greatest of all the healers, whose family, it was said, could be traced back to the priests in the time of King David and King Solomon of Israel.
Abraham was exhausted and desperate to see his wife and children, whom he missed fiercely, and so he walked from the nearby stables to his house, deciding to beg the Lord God’s forgiveness later in the evening for not visiting His temple immediately. The street was already dark, and the lights from the temple cast garish shadows on the walls. He kissed his fingers and blew the kiss into the air, something he’d learned from his late mother, who was always frightened of the dark and of shadows and was worried about devils and demons and especially about Satan, the fallen Angel of God. She and her generation of women thought that if they blew their kiss into the air, God would be touched by their action and protect them.
He smiled at himself. He, a doctor, a man of learning and scientia, a man who spoke Hebrew, Latin, Koine, and Greek, and could even converse with the wandering nomads of the desert in their Arab language, blew kisses in the air. He was a man who had trained under some of the greatest doctors in Athens and Rome, in Alexandria and Ephesus; yet, for all that, for all his travels and learning, he was still his mother’s son and followed her ancient ways. For how could he do otherwise?
As he approached his home, some of the shadows in the spaces between the street and his door began to move. He thought it was an odd effect of the fires from the temple forecourt, until one of the shadows suddenly became a man. He stepped out in front of Abraham, followed by two others, then two more. The five men, dressed in the clothes of farmers or citizens of some poor village in the hills, stood between him and his home. They were robbers. Abraham was suddenly frightened.
“I have little money on me, brothers, but you’re welcome to what I have,” he said, trying not to sound nervous.
“Are you Abraham ben Zakkai, doctor and healer?” asked the first man. His accent wasn’t that of a peasant. It was cultured, as though he was a Jerusalemite.
“Yes. What do you want of me?”
“We have some friends who are sick. They need a doctor.”
Abraham sighed. “Brothers, I’ve just returned from the distant Great Sea and Jaffa. I’m exhausted. Aren’t there other doctors, healers, you could ask?”
“Not with your reputation.”
“Tomorrow, then . . . I’ll—”
“Now!” said the leader. The other men moved a step closer.
But Abraham wouldn’t be swayed. “No. I haven’t seen my wife and children in three weeks of traveling. I have rights. I’ve had an exhausting journey. I—”
The leader punched him hard in the stomach. Abraham doubled over and was about to fall to his knees, when the others held him under his arms and dragged him backward up the street. To stop him from screaming, one of the men stuffed a cloth into his mouth. He began to struggle but stopped when one of the men hit him hard on the back of the neck. The last thing he remembered was an explosion of light, as though Satan had come down and entered his head.
SAMUEL THE MERCHANT kissed his wife and children good-bye and told them that he’d be back in four weeks. His journey, he told them, would take him to Damascus, Baabek, and Tripoli, and then he would return by traveling southward to Sidon and then back again to Acco and Jaffa and then up the hill to Jerusalem and his beloved family.
He hated lying to his wife and children, but as a close friend and associate of the Romans, and as a man who used his position of trust to assist the conquerors, his entire life was composed of lies, evasions, and excuses; but as a patriot, a citizen of Israel, and a man who, like Janus, smiled with one face and frowned with the other, Samuel was of enormous value to the Zealots, a new and fervent group who were planning a final assault to drive the Romans out of Israel. So lying to his wife and children was as much for their protection as for his own. If they were ever questioned, they could in all honesty say that Samuel, their husband and father, was in the north of the country, buying goods with which to trade and bring back to Jerusalem.
He ordered his servants to prepare the wagon, team up the mules, and bring him the baskets of food that had been prepared in his kitchens. Then, despite the darkness of the streets and the moonless night, he whipped the flanks of the beasts and set off north out of Jerusalem. But Samuel hadn’t gone more than four streets before he checked that he wasn’t being followed, turned his mules, and headed off in a westerly direction toward the Mediterranean Sea, or Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea,” as the Romans patronizingly called it.
He had been traveling for some time, and was already well clear of the city of Jerusalem, when in the gloom of the night he saw figures ahead on the road. Only merchants and robbers used the roads at night, and not even the Romans, with all their legions and weapons, their war machines and the strength of their troops, dared to be on these roads at night for fear of attack by fanatics, anti-Romans, and madmen.
As he whipped the mules farther, to the point in the road where he’d agreed to rendezvous with the Zealot party, he vaguely saw five or six men. Nervous in case they were robbers, he drew nearer, his heart thumping, and held his breath. But then he recognized the shape of the leader, Jonathan ben Isaac.
“Samuel?”
“Of course it’s Samuel. Who do you think would be riding out on such a night? Julius Caesar? Do you have the doctor?”
Two of the men held a figure between them. He wasn’t struggling, but it was clear, even in the dark of the Jerusalem night, that the man was held captive. They hauled him over to the wagon and hoisted him up onto the bed. Samuel turned and saw that the doctor, who he remembered, had a cloth stuffed into his mouth and was unkempt and finding it difficult to breathe.
“For God’s sake, take that thing out of his mouth. He’s not a Roman. He’s one of us,” ordered Samuel.
“Not until we’re sufficiently distant from Jerusalem,” said Jonathan.
“He could scream with all his might and he wouldn’t be heard by the Romans. Most of them would be drunk by now, and the guards on the wall would think that it’s an animal howling. Now, take that damned thing away before he suffocates.”
One of the men looked at Jonathan, who nodded. He pulled the cloth out of Abraham’s mouth, ready to ram his hand down hard against his lips if the prisoner began to yell. But Abraham didn’t make a noise. Instead, he looked from one face to another. Then he turned to Samuel and said softly, “I know you, merchant. I treated your servants some time ago. Are you behind this?”
“You’re required by the army of Zealots,” said Samuel.
“The army of Zealots?”
“The Romans have to be removed from the land of Israel by force. We have thousands who’ll join us. Already throughout the country, there are hundreds who have left their homes and families, brave Jews, Israelites who would rather die than live in a world where we’re nothing but ants trodden into the ground by the Roman heel. Soon the Romans will feel the imprint of our boots on their backsides,” said Jonathan.
Abraham struggled to sit up. Jonathan cut the ropes tethering his arms but left his feet tied so he couldn’t run away. He sat on the bed of the wagon as Samuel whipped the mules into action.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
“Our band of fighters needs a doctor,” said Samuel.
“They’re wounded?” asked the doctor.
“Until now, those who were wounded were a burden, but now that you’re here, they can be saved,” Jonathan replied.
“Burden?” asked Abraham.
“We have to move swiftly for the safety of all. If a man is wounded and needs to be carried, it is better to slit his throat. We can’t carry him, and if he falls into Roman hands, he’ll be tortured. Better to end his life mercifully.”
Abraham looked at Jonathan, then at Samuel, in horror.
“Listen carefully to me, Doctor,” said Jonathan. “In a few days we’re planning a raid against a Roman armory in Jerusalem. Because they think that I’m their servant, they speak more openly in front of me than they should. This is where I learn information that I pass on to my brethren. This is a new armory that isn’t yet fully guarded, so we’re going to take their weaponry and use it against the Roman army, which will be marching south from Syria into the Galilee. There may be many wounded in the assault, and so you’ll be coming with us, to heal those who are able to return without being a burden.”
“So you’re deliberately provoking a counterattack by the Romans,” said Abraham. “Do you know how many of you will be slaughtered?”
Samuel turned and looked back at Abraham. “We’re provoking Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria, to bring his XII Fulminata legion south into Israel. While they’re marching through the valleys of the Galilee toward Jerusalem to put down our rebellion, we’ll attack them from the hills. We know the Galilee like the backs of our hands. We’ll attack and kill hundreds from our positions high in the hills, and when they start to counterattack, we’ll just disappear into caves and out of sight. We know the Roman army: their war machines can only move slowly through our valleys because there are only tracks—no roads—and that will make them vulnerable.”
“Are you so stupid, all of you, that you think the Senate in Rome will just meekly accept what you’re doing? They’ll send tens of thousands of their toughest soldiers against you. They’ll decimate our land. You’ll kill us all. You’ll make this into a land of widows and orphans, with rivers of tears. I beg you to stop this, to reconsider, to talk with the Romans instead of fighting them,” he said, his voice breaking with fatigue and emotion. “We’ve been conquered many times in our history, and God has always driven our enemy from our land—the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks. Now it’s the Romans, and soon they will realize the folly of conquering a people chosen by God Himself.
“But if we fight, if we show aggression, then they will retaliate a hundredfold. Have you not heard of the punishment of decimation, in which all of the villagers are treated like captives and lined up along the edge of a cliff, and every tenth man is pushed to his death? Will you be that tenth man, Samuel, or you, Jonathan? Or your children?”
“Many of us will die,” said Jonathan. “But the remainder will live free, in a free land, and be free to worship our God. But enough of this. We make camp in the clearing down there”—he pointed to a place below the level of the road where their fires wouldn’t be seen at night—“and in the middle of the night, we’ll return and kill as many Romans for their bows and arrows and spears as we can.”
His men cheered, but Abraham’s heart sank.
THE FOOD WAS BARELY EDIBLE, but it filled his stomach. Exhausted from his traveling, and now from being kidnapped and trussed up like a sheep, Abraham saw the men arm themselves with the evil Sicarii knives that bandits used, as well as bows, arrows, and swords. They’d re-bound him when they left the wagon to rest and make food, but as they left, Samuel the merchant cut his bonds and said, “You’re on your honor, Doctor, not to escape. For if you do, we’ll find you.”
Abraham rubbed his wrists to return them to life. He looked at Samuel and asked quietly, so that the others couldn’t hear, “Why are you involved with these Zealots, merchant? You live the life of an emperor, yet you risk everything by what you’re doing.”
Samuel looked at the Zealots sitting around the fire on the other side of the encampment, talking about tomorrow’s raid. Softly, he said to Abraham, “I come from a long line of merchants; my father and his father before him traded with pagans and devil worshippers, with idolaters and all sorts. Like you, Doctor, I treat well all people, regardless of who they are or what they think. And like you, I love my country and I worship my God just as fervently as does any priest in the temple. So because I straddle the world of the Roman conquerors as well as sit comfortably with my brothers in Israel, I’m able to glean information to which others aren’t privy.
“I’m no Zealot, Abraham, but I’m useful, and while I live this double life, I feel I’m serving my God and my people. Now, tomorrow, we have a long march to the armory, and neither of us will get any sleep. So I suggest that we rest as best we can.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY they followed ridges and escarpments, avoiding roads and settlements in order to reach their goal. It took the men a quarter of the night to reach the outskirts of Jerusalem, until they came up behind the new armory building where the weapons were stored. Jonathan, the leader, put his finger to his mouth, and all of his men stayed in their positions while he crept silently through the woody undergrowth to see how many men were guarding the gates. Worried that a twig might crack and alarm the guards, Jonathan watched every footfall in the moonlight, and silently but surely worked his way to the front of the building.
It was a full moon, and he could clearly see four men guarding the gate to the building, plus at least eight more who were sleeping under blankets around the dying embers of fires. Even the guards on the gates were sitting on low stools, holding on to their upright spears to stop themselves from falling asleep. But they were obviously tired, and in the still night air Jonathan could smell the heavy aroma of cheap Roman wine mixed with the stench of the burnt flesh of a pig. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
Walking more rapidly than before, he used his hands to signal to his men how they should position themselves and what resistance they might meet. Walking around the low mud-andstraw building, they formed the horns of the buffalo, a favorite Roman method of attack. There was no shout of “Attack!” and no order to shoot their weapons. Instead, silently two of the men crept forward and sliced the throats of Roman soldiers who were asleep. In the dark shadows cast by the glow of the dying fires, their movements went unnoticed by the drowsing guards who sat staring at the ground.
With growing confidence, another two men on the opposite side of the building quickly cut the throats of four other soldiers, three of whom died silently in their sleep without a struggle. But the fourth soldier was already half-awake, thinking of going for a piss, when he was held by the mouth as a Zealot tried to cut his throat with his knife. He struggled and managed to yell out. Instantly, the four guards on the gate stood and looked around. As they did so, four arrows hissed through the air, two missing but the other two hitting their targets in the chest and the groin. The two men who had been shot screamed in pain, and the other two guards threw down their spears and reached for their bows and arrows on the ground. One of the two was hit by another arrow in the head, the metal tip slicing through his eye socket and burying itself in his brain. The fourth managed to pick up his weapons, but before he could fire an arrow, one caught him in the arm. Shrieking in pain, he dropped his bow, and two more hit him in quick succession in the throat and the leg.
By this time, those guards who’d not yet been killed and had been asleep on the ground threw off their blankets and stood. But they weren’t able to reach for their weapons because the moment they were standing, they were attacked from behind by Jonathan’s foot soldiers, and stabbed in their backs, chests, and necks by the Zealots.
It had taken only a short while, yet suddenly where once there were the screams of death, now there was the silence of the grave. With no time to waste, Jonathan made the screech of a night owl, a signal for the man hidden in the trees to bring the donkey and the cart. They broke open the doors of the armory, and before the Romans of Jerusalem realized that they’d been robbed by Zealots, Jonathan and his men had disappeared into the night.
YAEL COHEN DIDN’T CRY as she drove north from Jerusalem to Peki’in. There were no more tears left, although she knew they would return. She’d traveled this road a number of times with Shalman, and now she saw his gentle face and heard his beautiful voice all around her. He seemed to fill the valleys and hills. She could remember his face only as a much younger man and, in her mind, she heard his gentle cajoling, his loving support, his tender reproofs. And she smiled at the memory of when he’d taken her around the museum and shown her off proudly to his colleagues, telling them that one day she’d be a great archaeologist.
His funeral would be in two days’ time, but no matter how much it hurt her, she couldn’t be there. His poor burnt body was being held by the police and the coroner pending its release, just in case evidence was brought to light that his death had been other than accidental.
She had to escape Jerusalem. The police had told her it was a tragic accident, an old man driving too fast and losing control on a bend. But too much had happened; she had seen too much in the past days. She knew the accident for what it was. She knew that somehow, inadvertently, she’d led the killers to him. And that she’d been the instrument of his death was a grief too shocking for her to contemplate. Instead, a hatred of this man began to grow in her breast—this spider in the center of the web he’d spun from his office in Shin Bet to ensnare the people she loved.
And now there was nobody. Not her mother or father, her grandparents, anybody. All dead. All gone. Now she was all alone as she drove slowly on side and minor roads toward the Galilean village of Peki’in. One of the roads north led her through a narrow ravine with steep walls, a two-lane track that meandered beside a little stream. On any other day she’d have pulled over and had a picnic lunch beside the brook, but not today.
She’d never driven north this way on her own, always using the main mountain or sea roads, and it gave her a chance to appreciate the precipitous hills and rock-strewn valley sides. But the landscape was of less interest to her than her feelings of isolation and distress that everybody around her was in mortal danger. Yaniv had been consoling about her grandfather, but there was nothing he could do, and he begged her to leave Jerusalem, ensure she wasn’t followed, and come to him as quickly as possible.
He wouldn’t tell her what he’d done, but he tried to convince her that he had a solution. She wasn’t in the mood to ask him what. She just wanted not to be alone. All her life, she’d been self-reliant; now she just wanted someone to make things right.
She continued to negotiate the narrow road.
SITTING IN HIS OFFICE, Eliahu Spitzer watched the tiny red dot travel along the spidery lines on his computer. The tracking device on the young doctor’s car showed that she was traveling north, then east, then west, and then north again. She was obviously trying to avoid being followed.
He smiled to himself. This naïve girl obviously had no knowledge of the craft of espionage. She had no idea about the way agencies such as his relied on satellites and sat-nav and GPS technology to peer down unseen into the darkest corners where their enemies thought that their nefarious activities could be conducted unobserved.
Eliahu opened his desk drawer and took out his prayer book. He thumbed through the pages until he found a suitable blessing for the bounty that the Lord God had provided. There was no blessing over cars, but this one would do. After all, what he was doing was thanking the Lord for delivering his enemy, just as Joshua must have thanked the Almighty for delivering Jericho and Ai.
When he’d finished the prayer, he looked again at the little red dot. She was driving north toward the Galilee. She was going there again; she was going to that tiny little village. He smiled. It would be a date with destiny.
ABRAHAM BEN ZAKKAI hadn’t seen his wife and children in four months. He and the group to which he’d been forcibly enlisted had traveled along the mountainous route north from the outskirts of Jerusalem to Bethel and Mount Gerizim. They hid in the numerous crags and caves in the district of Mount Gilboa and Mount Tabor, raiding Roman encampments, stealing their weaponry, war machines, and animals, and after the raid, when they were being chased by Roman infantry, disappearing into the woods and mountainsides like early-morning mist on a hot day.
Though not a soldier, Abraham tended those who had been struck by spears or arrows and carried to safety by their comrades. He used his herbs and other medicines to cure men who suffered the ailments caused by being constantly outdoors, sleeping and eating in the wild, and living such a harsh life.
Samuel had anonymously sent Abraham’s wife a purse full of coins minted by the Roman procurator in Judea, Porcius Festus, as well as another purse containing silver shekels in case the Roman coins weren’t acceptable where she shopped for food and drink. She prayed that these amazing gifts came from her husband, even though she didn’t know if he was alive or where he was.
Knowing his wife had money and that she and their children wouldn’t starve was good news, but Abraham wanted to tell her that he was being held against his will, guarded every night to prevent him escaping, and forced to march with the army when it attacked the Roman foot patrols. But he couldn’t because he knew that were he to try to smuggle a letter to her, Jonathan would read it before it was sent.
Abraham woke early the next day knowing that another raid on a Roman patrol would be taking place shortly after morning prayers. He prepared his special fighting brew in a large pot of water gathered the previous evening from the river. Into the boiling pot he put herbs, spices, the stems of mountain flowers, honey, and what he told the men was a special ingredient that he refused to disclose, but which he assured them had been passed down to him from the acolytes of the great Greek doctors Androcydes, Eudoxus of Cnidus, and Hippocrates of Cos. In fact, it was a simple tincture of horseradish—bitter, pungent, and guaranteed to make strong men flinch. But the brew’s acrid unpleasantness made the men believe that it really gave them strength, and as long as they believed the medicine was doing them good, then it did them good. Even Jonathan said that since Abraham had joined the group, the men were now fighting with increased vigor and stamina.
As the men gathered up their weapons and prepared to walk from their cave hideouts in the mountains through ravines and escarpments—eventually arriving at the valley where they would wait silently on ledges for the Roman patrol of forty or fifty men to pass below them on the floor of the ravine—Jonathan sauntered over to Abraham, who was clearing away his equipment.
“Doctor, your medicine again has given me and my men the strength to continue our fight.”
Abraham shrugged. “That’s why you brought me here.”
“And to cure those who are sick.”
Abraham remained silent.
“Tell me, Doctor, have you taken any of your own medicine?”
“Why would I need to?” he asked.
“Because for months you’ve been attending to the health of the Zealot army, but you’ve not yet seen what the army does or how it does it. So today will be different, and you will need your strength.”
Abraham looked at him coldly. They had never liked each other, and although Abraham had kept his mouth shut since his abduction, it was obvious that he still considered himself an unwilling captive and not a participant in what the freedom fighters were hoping to achieve.
“You wish me to accompany you. But if you wish me to fight, you will be disappointed. I am a healer. A doctor. I cure people. I don’t kill them.”
Jonathan smiled. “I want you to observe. I don’t want you to participate. I want you to understand why we’re fighting and what it is that we’re fighting for.”
“Why do you assume that I don’t know that, Jonathan? I know what you’re doing. I disagree with the way you’re doing it.”
“And you think that meekly allowing the Roman heel to crush our necks is how our lives should be led?” he said aggressively.
“And how many of our men will die, how many women will be made widows and how many children will become orphans, while you and your army fight? Is there a better way to rid ourselves of the Romans? I don’t know, but I do know that violence will lead to more violence, which will lead to more horrors than you can contemplate. You haven’t, but I have seen Rome and some of its empire. Its strength is formidable. We aren’t even a consideration to Rome when its senate meets. Its emperors are increasingly unbalanced, and if we’re noticed by emperors as insane as Caligula and Nero, they’ll send armies to crush us as the Romans have crushed the Iceni of the Britons and the Gauls and the tribes of Germania, and then we Jews will be no more; we’ll be slaughtered by the thousands and exiled throughout all the countries in the world.”
“Nonsense,” said Jonathan quietly, hoping that his men couldn’t overhear what Abraham was saying. “We’ve beaten great armies before, and—”
“And look at the nations who sent their armies against us, Jonathan. Without any assistance from us, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Greeks are all gone or are in decline. If we wait, then Rome, too, will stumble and fall. All conquerors seem invincible at the time, Jonathan, but they all make the mistake of growing too quickly; they become arrogant and then their empire begins to fray at the edges like cheap cloth.”
Jonathan shook his head. “So instead of just waiting meekly like servants at a banquet for Rome to decay and decline, why don’t we give them a hand? Let’s prick them in their rear with our sharp needles. Let’s annoy them and irritate them with our daggers and spears. Don’t you understand, Abraham, that we want them to send an army to try to beat us into submission? This land isn’t Britain or Germania or Gaul, where the landscape is flat and smooth. Israel is a rugged land, completely unsuited to vast war machines. Our rocky hills and steep valleys will make their ballistae, catapults, and battering rams useless. They won’t be able to transport them, and so they’ll have to fight us with hand weapons. And there’s no stronger or more resolute army than ours when it comes to bows, arrows, spears, and slingshots, which we’ll rain down on them like crushing hail from our sky.”
Abraham sighed. He’d been in Rome during the reign of the emperor Claudius, when twenty thousand blue-skinned Britons had been hauled in chains through the streets toward the Senate building after a humiliating victory by the Roman armies. Their leader, sullen and resentful, was pulled by oxen in a cage on a cart. And Britain, Abraham had been told, was just as rugged as Israel.
How little the Jews knew of the rest of the world and what they were facing in fighting against the Romans. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks had produced great armies that they’d marched across the face of the world, but their men had fought as individuals. The Romans, though, had made war into an art as well as a science and were the most deadly force of men ever to have carried weapons into battle. The men were trained over years to fight as one, whether they were a century, a cohort, or a legion; when they went into battle, the soldiers fused together and formed the shape of a turtle with their shields, and when they fought against an enemy army, they used techniques like the buffalo, with the main body attacking the opposition head-on while the horns of the buffalo surrounded the flanks of the enemy and massacred them from the sides and back.
He drank some of the strengthening brew he’d made for the men, praying to Adonai Elohim that it might give him some fortitude. No matter how often he explained the Roman warfare techniques, Jonathan and those commanders around him told him that such weaponry or military tactics were useful in lands where there were open plains, but in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Galilee and Judea, such techniques could not easily be employed.
SARAH, WIFE OF ABRAHAM BEN Zakkai, walked awkwardly, nervously, to the door of the home of Samuel the merchant, high on the hill of Jerusalem. Her heart beating, she knocked on the door. It was opened by a huge black man, a Nubian, who looked down at Sarah and frowned.
“Yes?”
“I wish to speak with your master,” she said.
He smiled condescendingly and told her, “Servants use the entrance in the back of the house. This door is for—”
“I’m not a servant. I’m the wife of Abraham ben Zakkai, the doctor. I wish to—”
The moment Abraham’s name was mentioned, the servant beamed a huge smile and opened the door wide. “Please, lady, enter this house. You and your family are welcome here. Your wonderful husband saved my life and that of the woman who is now my wife. He is a marvelous doctor, your husband. I hope he’s well and prospering.”
She sighed and followed him into the bowels of the house, where he asked her politely to sit in an antechamber while he fetched his master.
Samuel appeared shortly after and looked at her in surprise. “Yes? You’re the wife of the doctor? What can I do for you?”
“Sir,” she said softly, “my husband, Abraham, is a good man. A loving husband and a father. He has been abducted. I don’t know who has him or whether he’s alive or dead. I haven’t seen him for four months and I’m in despair. Please, please, can you help me? My children are grieving and I have nobody else to turn to. You’re a friend of the Romans. Has he been abducted by them and sent to a prison? Has he been taken by this new group all Jerusalem is talking about? I’m desperate. Can you help me find him?”
Samuel looked disconsolate. “Lady, with all my heart, I’d love to help you, but I have no idea where he has gone. I’ve met him once, briefly, when he came to my home to cure my servants. He has probably been taken as a doctor by these Zealot people, as you suggested. But I will ask and make inquiries. I know where you live and so if I hear anything I’ll tell you immediately.”
He reached onto his table and picked up a purse of money. He held it out to her. “I’m sure you’ll need this . . .”
She smiled and shook her head. “Thank you, sir. You’re kind. But I want my husband, not money.”
She nodded in deference and made her exit. And he felt ashamed that he’d lied to such a good, loving, and honorable young woman.
SAMUEL THE MERCHANT left the camp and returned to Jerusalem to find out more information that could be of assistance to Jonathan and his men. So far, the raids that they’d undertaken had caused serious casualties among the Romans, but far more damaging than dead soldiers to the Roman commanders was the loss of face. Men died all the time in war, but for a legion to lose its eagles, for a cohort to lose its banner, was a loss of face that had to be corrected. And so, under orders from the Senate in Rome, measures were put in place that would see this nasty little rebellion quashed.
Jonathan and his men marched north and west from their secret camp to the ancient Jewish city of Sepphoris, which the Romans had renamed Diocaesarea when they built their fortress. The Zealots weren’t going into the city, for they’d be slaughtered by the soldiers, but were planning an attack on a platoon of about eighty men, which constituted a century, returning from a scouting mission and led by a particularly vicious centurion. The Jews would hide in the hills about four leagues from Sepphoris and then rain hail fire, stones, and weapons down onto the valley road. By the time the soldiers’ bodies were discovered, Jonathan and his Zealots would have disappeared into the hills, preparing for another strike in another part of the country.
Exhausted at the end of the two-day march over the trackless wastes of the Galilean hills and valleys, Abraham was grateful to be told to watch the massacre of the Romans from a safe place high on a hill. The Jewish Zealots positioned themselves halfway down the hill, concealed by trees, rock ledges, outcrops, and the mouths of the numerous caves. They lay flat on the earth, out of sight of the track that ran through the valley floor beside a thin stream, ready when the first arrow was let loose by Jonathan to send down their spears, rocks, and arrows in a deadly storm that would kill all the Romans in the century. The track led from the north to the south and eventually to the city of Sepphoris, and Jonathan had chosen a place of hiding that was just to the south of a bend in the arm of the valley. It meant that the Romans would march around the bend, blind to their assailants, and walk into the trap.
Abraham lay on the rock ledge high above the theater below him. He could clearly see some of the Zealots hiding and waiting, and from his vantage point he could see the road clearly. There were more than fifty Zealots assembled in the heat of the midday sun, like spiders lying in wait for flies to be snared by their web.
Time passed slowly as Abraham waited. He was both surprised and pleased that the Zealots far below him maintained their discipline, despite the boredom of waiting. On three occasions the men were roused by the noise of travelers walking toward Sepphoris. One was a goatherd urging his animals forward. The next interloper was a man on a donkey singing a song, oblivious to the dozens of deadly soldiers looking at him in amusement from their hideouts. And the third was a group of young girls giggling as they walked back to their homes in the city.
More time passed, and Abraham feared that they would have to spend the night in silence as they waited. Intelligence from a sympathizer in the city of Sepphoris informed Jonathan that the century would be returning this day after patrolling the central parts of the Galilee. They would be led by a burly and aggressive centurion by the name of Marcus Julius Tertius, hated for his brutality and feared by those under his command. Few would mourn his demise.
It was late in the afternoon, when the sun’s shadows were casting a darkening gloom over the valley floor, that the men became aware of the noise of animals and cart wheels and leather-clad feet marching beyond the bend in the road. Though not yet in sight, all became alert to the sounds on the compacted earth of the road. The sounds grew louder and louder and Abraham could see all of the Zealots, many now hidden by shadows, silently reaching for their spears, bows, arrows, and rocks. Suddenly the first of the century, led by a tall, heavyset Roman riding a horse, appeared around the bend of the valley. He was followed by rows of soldiers walking three abreast. In the middle of the century were four carts pulled by oxen, laden with food, weaponry, and tents. They were marching straight into Jonathan’s trap, and it was so obvious that they would soon be slaughtered. Despite their being Romans, Abraham said a brief prayer to the Almighty for their lives.
As the last of the men marched around the bend, the centurion Marcus Julius Tertius glanced around, held up his hand, and called for his men to halt. Abraham was surprised. They should have continued to march forward into the ambush, because where they had stopped was too distant for the Zealots’ weapons to harm the Romans. He, Jonathan, and the Zealot army wondered what they were doing.
Abraham watched in fascination as the centurion dismounted and led his horse to the water. He barked a command, and a dozen soldiers ran to the edge of the track where it rose up the hillside, standing there on guard while the other soldiers sat on the ground and rested, drinking from flasks and eating bread from their satchels.
The Zealots were forced to wait until the Romans had finished their rest period, frustrated that their battle had been delayed. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there was a piercing scream from halfway up the hillside. Horrified, Abraham turned quickly to see one of the Zealots farther up the hill behind him stand, clutching his shoulder. Then he staggered forward and fell over the edge of the cliff, plunging earthward. Another stood, clutching at his neck as though trying to remove a bee’s stinger. Frantic, the man twisted and turned and it was then that Abraham saw an arrow that had pierced the back of his neck; its point was sticking out of his throat. His eyes were wide in fear and pain as he struggled to do something, but it was immediately apparent to Abraham that the man was already as good as dead. From the wound, a fountain of blood gushed out of the man’s throat and mouth as he pitched forward, headfirst. He fell just beyond the ledge and crashed onto a rock below. There was a sickening thud as the man’s head was crushed, and as he fell farther, Abraham saw the streak of blood that colored the rock.
As the dead man cascaded downward, another scream came from behind a tree to his left; then another as the men to Abraham’s right and left tumbled down the steep hill toward the valley floor, each man pierced by an arrow or a spear. More men on the opposite side of the valley screamed and seemed to dive from their hiding places on the mountainside down to their deaths. Each was pierced in his leg or arm or back or head by a vile Roman weapon. Abraham held his breath in shock, not knowing what to do. He was well hidden, but any movement would lead to his certain exposure and death.
And then he heard a warlike scream in Latin: “Aperi portas Inferno!” He’d heard it once or twice before when he was in Rome. It meant “Open the gates of Hell!” The moment the words echoed off the walls of the valley, breaking the once-peaceful silence, a further swarm of arrows and spears fell from the heights of the hills down onto where the Zealots had positioned themselves. Abraham watched in dismay as the Jews tried to return the assault but instead were rewarded by a hail of arrows. Five, then ten, then thirty Zealots clutched their chests or throats or legs as the arrows and spears found their marks. All around him was the hideous whistle of arrows in flight and the sickening thwack of spears burrowing deep into chests and arms and legs.
The Zealots stood in panic from their hideouts, looking up to the tops of the hills as they tried to defend themselves from the deadly rain of a thousand arrows and spears. But they stood no chance. Hundreds of Roman soldiers had silently gathered on the hilltops in a deadly trap. Some of the Zealots managed to shoot arrows upward toward the Romans, but it was useless, and within the blink of an eye all of the Jews were slaughtered and falling down the hillside into the ravine below. Abraham cowered, terrified, unable to move a muscle. By the good graces of Adonai, he had hidden himself on a rock ledge out of sight of the valley floor, and because of the overhang of the cave’s entrance he was out of view of the soldiers on the tops of the mountains.
But he could see some of the Roman soldiers on the crest of the hillside, taking aim at the Jews as though they were killing cattle in a pen. He saw that all of the Roman soldiers in the valley had stood and were running forward. As they reached the Zealots who’d fallen down the hillside, they slit their throats to ensure that they were dead.
It was all over in what seemed like the time it takes to dress for morning prayers, but these poor patriots would never pray again. At the beginning, before the ambush, there was silence, but the moment it started, there were screams from the very depths of Gehenna; then, when the arrows and spears were in full flight, there was a cacophony of shouts and curses and threats and yelps and prayers for help. Then, just as suddenly, there was a mysterious and enveloping silence. And in the silence Abraham knew with certainty that there was death.
It was dark by the time the two centurions met, the burly one in the valley and the commander of the troops who had attacked the Zealots. They came together far below Abraham, beside the river, hugging and congratulating each other, laughing and joking about the success of their operation. And all the Romans formed up and marched out of the valley toward Sepphoris.
Abraham didn’t move; couldn’t move. He was the only survivor of the massacre. All the Zealots were dead and the Romans didn’t even bother to bury their bodies, leaving their corpses as a testament to Rome’s dominance and a lesson to any who thought to fight the might of their emperor.
And while Israel and its men were enslaved and killed by their conquerors, Abraham found that he was suddenly free to return to his comfortable life with his wife and children.
IT HAD BEEN THREE WEEKS since the Zealot group were slaughtered by the Romans. For them, it was a great victory, but it caused seething hatred and resentment among the Zealots in Jerusalem, who hid their activities by meeting in basements, outside of the walls in the many valleys that surrounded the city, and in eating places where the innkeepers served only those whom they recognized as being travelers or local Israelites—anybody but a Roman.
Samuel, who heard about the raid days after the bodies of Jonathan and his men became food for vultures and crows and lions, was bereft but had to pretend to look delighted when his Roman friends came to call. They gathered in his house, now one of the safest places for the nobility and senior echelons of the army to meet, and ate and drank and laughed uproariously as the Praefectus Alae, the Tribunus Cohortis, and the Praefectus Castrorum and their wives congratulated one another on their recent stunning victories. And Samuel and his wife, Lior, were forced to laugh and drink with them, agreeing that now that the Jews had been taught a severe lesson, perhaps they would behave like all enslaved peoples and respect their masters.
What none of Samuel’s guests realized, though, was that the massacre of Jonathan and his men was the turning point in what had, until then, been a minor insurrection. The way in which the bodies of the Zealots were treated—left to become food for wild animals instead of being given a Jewish burial—caused the restrained hatred for the Romans to flare up. Within two days of the news reaching Jerusalem, men, women, and children who had previously observed the curfew were now walking in the shadows of the streets, watching the Romans and how they deported themselves. And they saw how frequently Samuel the wealthy merchant celebrated the Romans’ success, how many important governors, senior soldiers, and their wives gathered at his house, and the noises of laughter that erupted out of the windows and over the walls.
The disgust of the people grew with the joyous banter of the Romans along the streets near the temple. And Samuel’s friendship was noticed by Zealots who were not privy to Samuel’s relationship with Jonathan.
One evening, when Samuel was out dining in the home of the Roman garrison commander, a party of Zealots burst their way into Samuel’s home. At first his Nubian slave put up a valiant fight, breaking the necks of two of the attackers; but he was soon forced to retreat from the door where he was trying to block their entrance and was speared to death outside his master’s office, where Samuel’s wife, Lior, their three daughters, and their two sons were standing in fear, listening to the melee outside.
Lior now realized that she had made a terrible mistake by entering this room for safety, because there was only one door, and if the intruders overcame the servants, she and her children had no way out. She enfolded as many of the younger ones as she could in her arms, and all hid beneath Samuel’s table.
“Children,” she whispered, trying to keep her voice from sounding as though she were panicking, “your father will be home very soon, and he’ll tell those horrible men to go away. But until your father returns, we have to remain here. The nasty men won’t dare to enter into your father’s office. He doesn’t allow you inside, and so they will know to stay away.”
But while she was trying to stop her two little girls from crying, the noise of shouting and cursing from the vestibule suddenly stopped. Her heart thumping as though it would burst out of her chest, Lior listened and prayed to God Almighty that the men had been sent away. But when she heard footsteps approaching the office’s door, she knew that her worst fears were about to be realized. The door burst open and four men suddenly entered the room.
“There they are,” said one of the men, pointing underneath Samuel’s table. “Out, Roman whore. You and your bastards.”
Her oldest son, Raphael, suddenly lost his temper and sprang to his feet. “You leave me and my family alone. Go away. You’re not allowed to be in here and we don’t like you.” He ran at the first man and started to bang him with his fists, but the Zealot grabbed the ten-year-old by the lapels of his tunic and lifted him off the floor.
“Brave little bastard, aren’t you?” he said with a malicious sneer. “Shame your mother’s a Roman prostitute and your father licks the Roman backside. But your whole family isn’t worth my shit, so you’ll die just like the rest of them.”
“No!” screamed Lior, and left her hysterical children under the table. She stood and ran to the man in order to save her Raphael. But as she ran across the room, a second man raised his dagger and plunged it into Lior’s breast as she opened her arms to rescue her son. Raphael shouted for his mother as the first Zealot dropped him on the ground and kicked him mercilessly in the head. He then stomped on his neck and heard a satisfying crunch, which told him instantly that he’d killed the boy.
The other children under the table were frenzied and kicking their legs in their hysteria. Two men walked over and with a couple of light stabs with their Sicarii knives ended the children’s hysteria. The men, satisfied that Samuel’s family were all dead, left the room to search the rest of the house and find where the cowardly merchant was hiding.
But the Zealots couldn’t find him, and so they rampaged through his whole house, killing all of his servants and scrawling in Hebrew on his pristine white plaster walls “So end the lives of those who lay with the Romans.” And just so the Romans would understand that Jewish traitors would be killed for helping the invaders, a man wrote the same message in Latin: “Et ita finis vite iaceret Romanorum.”
When the Zealots were certain that all of the merchant’s family and servants were no longer a threat to Israel, a neighbor, hiding and fearing for his own life, ran to fetch Samuel.
The merchant rushed home, crying and wailing and tearing his clothes while he cradled his dead wife and children. Through his tears and cries, he heard a faint voice calling, “Abba . . .”
He looked around and saw his eldest son, Raphael, had crawled behind a tapestry and was lying there, dying. The boy was white from loss of blood and shock, and the wounds in the hair of his head and on his neck showed that he’d been kicked viciously by somebody. Desperate to save the sole remaining member of his family, in a flood of tears Samuel carried the boy to the house of the doctor, who’d recently returned from the captivity of the Zealots to his wife.
Abraham ben Zakkai was in the middle of saying a silent thanksgiving prayer to Adonai Elohim for keeping his family safe while he was abducted by the Zealots when Sarah, his wife of fifteen years, entered the room carrying a bowl of meat stew. It was the third such stew that week, unusual in that the family rarely ate meat more than once a week, despite the fact that he was a doctor and was quite able to afford it more often. But as he said a b’rucha over the wine, sipped it, and handed the cup around to his wife and his children to share in the Lord’s blessing of the grape, he found his voice breaking. He was so relieved to be home, so relieved to see his beautiful family again, that for the third time that week he was moved to tears.
When all had drunk from the cup of wine, he said a b’rucha over the bread, which he tore into portions and handed around to his family standing beside the table. Then they all bowed their heads in their shared heritage of being Jews in Israel, even an Israel under the heel of the Romans, even an Israel being torn apart by the murderous Zealots. Silently, piously, each said his own invocation to Adonai Elohim for his own special needs, and when they’d finished their prayers they sat to eat. Since Sarah’s entrance, the small room had filled with the delicious aroma of the stew, the herbs and spices and the freshly baked bread, which the children would use to mop up the divine juices.
Sarah watched the way her husband was pondering his food, gazing down into the wooden bowl and stirring it with his spoon instead of eating it eagerly as their children were. Since Abraham had returned from his abduction by the Zealots, since the massacre of the patriots, she had become increasingly worried about her husband. He’d been distant and withdrawn since he wandered back to their home in the middle of the night, emaciated, exhausted, filthy, and appearing as though all life and spirit had been drained out of him. He kissed her and his children regularly, played with them, read biblical scrolls to them, but she knew him well enough to know that his heart wasn’t in it. It was as though he had returned the same man but with part of his soul missing.
When she was certain the children were fast asleep later that night, Sarah sat on the floor at his knee while he rested in his chair. “Abraham, tell me what’s wrong. Is it still the thought of those Jews killed by the Romans in the Galilee?”
He smiled and stroked her hair. Shaking his head, he said softly, “No. They’re in heaven. But I think of all the other Jewish souls who will soon be killed by the Romans. We’re a proud people. Just as we survived the Babylonians and the Greeks, so we will fight to survive the Romans. We’ve lived in this land since my namesake, Abraham, first agreed to a covenant with Almighty God that we would be a light unto all the nations in this darkest of all worlds; that the sign of our covenant would be to circumcise our sons.
“Yet, our pride will soon lead us into the greatest disaster ever to befall our people. I can feel it in my very bones. I fear for the end of my people.”
Sarah looked up at him in surprise and shock. “The end? Of us Jews? No, it can’t be.”
He sighed and continued to stroke her hair. “Darling wife, I can sense the disaster about to befall us. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for years, but one day soon. It depends on whether the emperor in power is insane or just simply evil. Since Augustus, they’ve all been mad. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and now Nero is emperor and as mad as they come. And from what merchants and travelers tell me, he’s so alienated the knights and senators of Rome that there’ll be a revolt against him.”
“But that’s good, husband. If he’s replaced . . .”
“He may be replaced by somebody even more insane.”
“And that’s what is causing you such sadness. I see it in your eyes, your heart, even when you look at me and the children.”
“Sarah, my wife. When Father Abraham made his covenant, he couldn’t have foretold that a people like the Romans would arise out of nowhere and in the space of a few lifetimes control the entire world. Their power is nothing short of awesome.”
Sarah smiled and said softly, “They can’t kill a whole nation, Abraham.”
“Can’t they? That’s what the Britons and the Germans and the Gauls thought.”
“Is there nothing we can do?” she asked, but before he could answer, there was the slightest tap on the wooden door. It was barely audible, yet the house was quiet and both Sarah and Abraham gazed at each other in concern. Sarah rose to answer the door, but Abraham held her back. “Protect the children. If it’s trouble, escape out the back of the house.”
He opened the door a fraction and was surprised to see Samuel leaning on the doorpost in a state of exhaustion. Abraham immediately grew furious on seeing this man, the very merchant who’d trapped him, kidnapped him, and sent him for three months to the camp of the Zealots.
“You!” said Abraham. “How dare you come here! After what you did to me, you dare to come here, to my house?”
But the merchant was close to dropping in exhaustion. Instead of listening, he turned and lifted up a huge bundle of clothes off the floor. He was barely able to carry it, and Abraham was stunned when an arm sagged out of the bundle. He rushed forward and helped Samuel inside with the injured boy.
“My son,” he gasped. “The Zealots. They thought—”
He sank to the floor in exhaustion from carrying his son such a distance.
Abraham immediately said to Sarah, “Water. Boiling water. Quickly. And my bag with my medicines.”
It was fortunate that the lad was unconscious, because when Abraham cleansed the wounds and sewed them together with stitches, had the boy been awake, he’d have been screaming with pain. Abraham covered the stitches with the yellow sulfur powder from the Dead Sea and a salve to protect the wound. As it was, if the boy recovered and didn’t gain an infection in the wounds and if the bleeding stopped of its own accord, then the pain he’d experience from the operations would still be almost unbearable for one so young. Abraham would give him medicines to dull the pain, but he didn’t envy the young man.
“What happened?” he asked Samuel. The merchant was now sitting on a chair, refreshed by the hot lemon water that Sarah had given him. Samuel told him in simple, direct terms.
“But why would the Zealots . . .”
“My activities as a friend of the Zealots have been known to very few. Jonathan kept me very secret because my information was so valuable. So the others must have looked at me reveling with the enemy and thought I was a traitor to the Jews. The Zealots are going around killing everybody who they see as a friend of the Romans. And the Romans won’t tolerate this. They’ll bring in a dozen centuries and scour the city. It’ll be mass murder tonight and tomorrow and . . . I’ve been speaking with the head of their army and he told me that they’re prepared to kill every Israelite to quell this rebellion.”
“You fool of a man. You’ve brought this on your own head. You’ve created this,” Abraham said, pointing to the bandaged, unconscious body of Samuel’s son Raphael. “His blood is on your hands. Not the hands of the Romans. You’ve brought this pain on our people. And now, because of what you’ve done, we have to leave. All of us. Once the Romans begin to torture people, they will come to my house and arrest me and my family because for the past three months I’ve been with the Zealots. They’ll never believe I was forced. We have to leave. All of us. Now. Tonight.”
“But my son? My Raphael? Can he travel? My wife and my children. I have to bury them.” Samuel was ashen-faced.
“We must look after the living and the sick,” said Abraham. “We’ll pray for the souls of your wife and children. But now we must leave. All of us. Raphael is young and strong. He will survive.”
Samuel was disconsolate. “But the Romans are on all the gates. There’s a general alarm. All soldiers are out of their barracks and searching the streets for the Zealots who are doing these things.”
Abraham nodded. “There is a way. My father knew of it, as did my grandfather. In the days of King David of blessed memory, a tunnel was dug. It leads from the top of the hill on which the temple is built down into the very depths of the valley. Some old rabbis know of it, but few others. We can escape through there.”
YAEL PARKED THE CAR in a tiny stone garage beneath a hillside shop, some distance from the house where Yaniv had secreted Bilal away. The house itself seemed almost derelict, with large cracks in the strangely leaning wall that made it seem as if it might topple over at any minute.
With her headscarf on, Yael walked the road from the hillside shop that meandered beneath the massive carob tree that for thousands of years had spread itself by new roots and growth over almost an entire hillside. Hidden within the hillside was the cave where Orthodox and spiritual Jews believed that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son, Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon, had spent thirteen years hiding from the Romans, living only off the fruit of the carob tree and water from the spring that still flowed into the center of the village. During their isolation from the ravages of the Roman destruction of Israel, the two rabbis supposedly wrote one of the great books of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, a central work in the Kabbalah, the body of Jewish spirituality.
Below where she walked on the steep hillside was the ancient synagogue of Peki’in, the oldest continuously used synagogue in the world. Yet, despite the important Jewish history that infused Peki’in, only a few elderly Jews still lived there, some of them claiming to trace their ancestry back to the priests of the temple of King Solomon.
But Jewish history and traditions were the last things on her mind as she walked as inconspicuously as possible toward the house. Yaniv was looking out of the window, and when he saw her, he immediately came out to meet her. Neither said anything as she stood in front of him. But then, much to her surprise, he opened his arms and embraced her. She’d never been so close to him before, but she felt the comfort of his muscular body.
“I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry” was all he said. “I know how much you loved your zaida. It was a terrible thing that happened.”
“It was them, wasn’t it?” she said. It wasn’t a question. “They killed him because of me.”
Yaniv didn’t answer but led her gently away from the street and up the hill to the shop and the small, disheveled house.
“Keep to the shadows when you walk down these narrow alleys,” Yaniv said. “Try not to expose yourself by walking in the middle of the street.”
She turned back to him. It was good not to think about her grandfather for a while. “Why? Snipers?”
“No, satellites.”
“Israeli satellites look at the borders, not tiny villages.”
“Spitzer has the power to point them anywhere he wants.”
She didn’t ask any other questions until they came to their house, but made sure she walked in the shadows.
When they entered the house, Yaniv bowed his head under the low lintel and walked into the room where Bilal was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The moment he saw them—saw Yael in Arabic dress and headscarf—he sat bolt upright. He looked as if he wanted to ask a thousand questions. Instead he stayed silent, just staring at Yael and Yaniv.
“Your parents have been told you’re dead, Bilal,” said Yael calmly.
Bilal gasped and for a moment Yael feared the young man’s reaction. “It was the only way to be sure they remain safe, and that we can protect you.”
“My mother . . .” Bilal began to ask, but couldn’t finish the question.
“You’re her son. She weeps like any mother would.”
Bilal took the news with a resigned nod as if it were strangely comforting.
Yaniv cut in, “And as expected, your imam was there. He must know you’re not dead, so there’s no doubt he’ll question Hassan about where you are.”
“But Hassan knows where I am,” said Bilal, close to a whisper. “I told him. So if he tells the imam . . .”
“And that’s what we want. That will bring them here.”
Beneath the head covering, Yael suddenly shuddered. What was she doing here? She was a doctor, not a secret agent. But if Bilal or Yaniv noticed, they said nothing.
“And the Jew? The Shin Bet man? With the white hair? What of him?” asked Bilal.
Yaniv hesitated to respond.
“He will come after me,” said the young Palestinian, fear suddenly inflecting his voice. “He will find me and kill me.”
“No, Bilal,” Yael said, trying to reassure him. “We won’t let that happen. The one thing he fears is exposure, and he knows that if he comes here, he’ll be exposed. Once we’ve dealt with the imam, we’ll deal with him.” But not even Yael thought that her answer was convincing. They were amateurs in this deadly game. Spitzer could hire any assassin he wanted, without even filling in any paperwork; the imam, too, could get anybody to come in his place. Both of these men could be sitting behind their desks in comfort while their minions did the deed. The risks she, Yaniv, and Bilal were taking were huge. But what choice did she and Yaniv have?
Bilal lay back down heavily on the bed. He was thinking about his future, if there was a future for him. “And when I am put back into prison, I will be killed by other prisoners. I am a dead man.” He closed his eyes.
Yael turned to Yaniv. “Can you give us a minute alone?”
Yaniv nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Yael turned to Bilal, and said, “There’s something else we have to talk about, Bilal. If we come out of this alive, you’ll still go to prison. You have to, and I can’t change that; nobody can change what you did.” Bilal gave the smallest of nods. “But there is something . . .” She hesitated, trying to find the right words. “There’s something I have to tell you. It’s going to come as a shock, but it’s something you have to know. And once you know it, Bilal, it’ll make your life much easier.”
She hesitated, and saw the questioning look in his eyes. “Bilal, do you remember when I’d just operated on you in the Jerusalem hospital, and I was asking you all those questions about where you were born, about your mother and father and your relatives?”
“Well, the reason was that your blood is very similar to mine. So close that we could be relatives, brother and sister, from way back in history. I went to see your mother, and she told me something . . . something about you and where you’re from. She told me about her religion today and about the religion her ancestors followed. Bilal, what I’m trying to tell you is that . . .”
ABRAHAM LED THE WAY on his donkey and was followed by his wife, Sarah, and his children riding their mounts. Samuel rode on his donkey behind the youngest member of Abraham’s family, pleased to be in their company, glad that they’d reached an understanding. Raphael, though in great pain, was healing well, and Abraham was pleased that his wounds didn’t seem to have become hot through infection.
Though Abraham still harbored anger at the way he’d been abducted from his home and forced to join the Zealots, in the intervening traumatic period the disaster that was being wrought in Jerusalem was so overwhelming that any personal animosity was subsumed by the ordeals all Jews were suffering.
Because of Raphael, their progress was slow, and so they were often overtaken by people on horseback fleeing the havoc the Romans were wreaking. Some would spend the evening around the campfire that Abraham and Samuel made and tell their tales of the misadventure befalling Jerusalem.
For two months, they said, General Titus and his second in command, Tiberius Julius Alexander, had laid siege to the city, starving the inhabitants. First to die were the children, then the elderly, then the women. Those who managed to escape through holes in the walls or in the underground tunnel told of men eating the dead bodies of their neighbors.
And the Romans were employing ballistae to hurl rocks the size of a large dog over the walls of the city. Not only were countless men and women killed in the carnage, but most buildings were badly damaged or destroyed. There were almost no streets that weren’t strewn with blood and bile and limbs and torsos.
One morning, after one of the Jerusalemites fleeing had ridden off to escape to a distant land, Samuel was approached by his son, Raphael.
“Father, I was awake when that man was telling you about the Romans. I heard what he said. When my wounds are healed, when I’m better, I’m going to become a Zealot and fight the Romans. I’m going to become one of the Sicarii.”
Samuel looked at his beloved son, not yet old enough to be a bar mitzvah, and smiled. He was young enough for Samuel to indulge him in his fantasy. “Good, Raphael. Then you will have to be called Raphael Iscariot, so the Romans won’t know whether you’re one of us or one of them.”
They both laughed, and Abraham turned and observed them, wondering what the father and son had to be amused about.
Their progress toward the Galilee had been long and slow. At each village and town, Abraham had earned money as a doctor, and the others had lived quietly so as not to cause people to talk, until it was time for them to move on. After many weeks on the road, they were in sight of the safety of the hills and valleys of the Galilee.
They rode in silence, thinking about the Jerusalem they’d left behind. Abraham’s children, initially in a state of shock, had grown accustomed to spending just a few weeks in a new place and then moving on. The children normally laughed, but they felt the seriousness of the adults, and their voices were stilled.
No matter how Abraham and his wife tried to normalize the children’s lives, they often talked about those days in Jerusalem as they’d gathered themselves to leave. They’d left before the mayhem, but they imagined the stench of death; the screaming and terror of people being hacked to death in the streets of the city morning, noon, and night; and the heart-wrenching sound of the massive stones of the temple and other buildings being torn apart and crashing to the ground. Though far away, in their despair, they imagined that they could smell the burning—burning flesh, burning wood, even burning stone. When he closed his eyes in an attempt to sleep, Abraham saw Jerusalem aflame, its once pristine blue sky now a jaundiced yellow from smoke and fire.
To cheer them as they trudged out of Jerusalem, Abraham had told the children that they were going to a new life, a better life, and so they had to give new names to their donkeys. His son Joshua called his Nero, and his daughter Maryam called hers Caligula, but Abraham, though laughing, told them never ever to use those names in public or disclose their names if they were stopped by a Roman patrol. And when they saw how serious their father was, the children’s laughter stopped.
Travelers who met them on the road continued to speak of patrols of Roman soldiers who slaughtered almost anybody they came across. It was no longer the Jerusalem of David or Solomon, of Ezra and Nehemiah, of the Hasmoneans or of Herod the Great. It was the Jerusalem of the Romans, a destructive plague on the world who had turned a wondrous city into a pile of stones, broken bodies, and streets knee-deep in the blood of countless tens of thousands of men, women, and children. The cadavers of Jews were strewn everywhere, torn apart by sword and axe. Heads, arms, legs, and torsos were left lying about like food thrown to dogs. Where a road had to be cleared so that General Titus’s troops could move from one part of the city to the next, they’d piled the trunks and limbs and heads one on top of the other beside the walls of houses, in gullies, at the bottoms of wells, in drains, beside the blackened walls of the ruins of the temple—everywhere.
Now in the Galilee, even Sarah began to feel some sense of safety. As night fell, Abraham, who was more accustomed to the country and its terrain than the urbane and sophisticated Samuel, found a path leading up the hillside toward a series of caves that appeared as they climbed higher and higher. Samuel was astounded by Abraham’s connection with the land, seeming to know what was around bends in the road or what landscape was available to them, though invisible from where they rode beside the river. Yet, to Abraham, who’d traveled these paths for many years since returning from his training as a doctor in Rome, the sudden appearance of invisible caves was not surprising; the entire area of the Galilee was rich with such features.
That evening they made a fire deep in one of the larger caves. They’d first checked carefully that the cave wasn’t home to some large beast that wouldn’t welcome their sudden arrival. Then Abraham sent his children out to find a quantity of large sticks and, if they could manage, even larger branches. Well inside the cave, Abraham said a blessing and struck a flint four times. Each time, sparks fell onto the tinder-dry leaves. Once these were alight, despite the irritation that he knew the smoke would cause until the cold night air sucked it out, he blew gently on the nascent flame until the entire interior of the cave was warm and cheerful. The children made fun of the shadows of the rocks and outcrops on the walls of the cave while Sarah prepared the food for the night. Abraham walked out of the cave’s mouth and checked that the fire couldn’t be seen from down below. The smoke against the night sky would look like a fast-moving cloud to a platoon of soldiers beside the river, looking up.
The little party of escapees from Jerusalem traveled northward from cave to cave, riding their donkeys toward the part of the Galilee where they were certain the Romans were few in number. In this part of Israel, there were not many large towns, especially inland, and so it was less and less likely that General Titus would waste valuable troops or war equipment on villages without a significant population. The only cities of any size north of Jerusalem were Jericho, Emmaus, Shechem, Scythopolis, and Sepphoris, so it wasn’t difficult to blend into life in a village.
“Where are we now?” asked Samuel as they entered a valley that seemed to stretch ahead as far as the eye could see.
Abraham sighed. “Samuel, every time we round a bend or see a mountain, you ask the same question. ‘Where are we now?’ I don’t know. I once traveled in an area close to here because of an old lady who makes wonderful potions from the olive that grows in abundance in this area, but it was many years ago and I only remember the name of her village. It’s called Peki’in. I’m hoping that if we climb over that hill over there,” he said, pointing to an imposing ridge to their right, “we’ll find the village. The lady was kind to me and gave me a lot of her medicines without asking for payment. I used them for curing skin diseases, ailments of the head, and even scrofula, though I also added sulfur from the Dead Sea. It seemed to work. I would like to see this woman again if she’s still alive, for she might give me more of her potions and then I can treat the sick in this area if we settle here. She’s a good woman, but she wouldn’t tell me how she prepared the olive oils. She said that if they were for the benefit of Israelites, then she was obeying the will of God, but that God had shown her the way, and she wouldn’t show anybody else.”
“And this village, Peki’in,” said Samuel, “is it a nice village?”
Sarah smiled and turned around to face Samuel as her donkey trod the uneven path. “What do you hope to find there, Samuel? A Roman theater? A Roman bath? Shops that sell the latest style of toga?”
The children burst out laughing. Even Samuel, normally dour, chuckled. But Abraham unexpectedly held up his hand for silence. The others instantly obeyed.
“Off the track. Immediately. I heard the neigh of a horse. Romans. Hide! Quick, ride toward that copse of trees,” he ordered.
Suddenly terrified, the children pulled the reins and turned their donkeys’ heads toward the distant mountains. The copse of trees that their father had spoken of was near the foot of the hill, a long distance away. Between them and the trees was a stretch of open field. Riding across such a field would make them immediately visible, and the slow-moving mounts felt no urgency to trot faster, nor did they have a horse’s ability to gallop.
Abraham turned to ensure that his family and Samuel were riding as quickly as they could toward the foothills. But when he looked backward, he saw a century of Romans running across the valley floor. Had they not turned off the path, they would have met the troops head-on. But regardless, Abraham knew that the centurion and his second-in-command, the only troops who were mounted, might see them. Abraham had to distract them, to make the soldiers on horseback look elsewhere and give his family a chance to reach the trees and hide in the undergrowth. So he made an immediate decision. He called to his beloved Sarah, “Head toward the trees. I will return and distract them.”
“No,” said Sarah. “We will hide in the trees—all of us.”
“Sarah, go now. There is no time. I have to return. I have to distract them. They’re too close. Save the children. I beg of you.”
Without another word, Abraham turned his donkey; but before he rode off, he quickly took two stone tablets out of the baskets strapped to the sides of the animal. He handed them to Samuel, saying, “I took these from the temple before we descended into the tunnel. Do not sell these, merchant. They are our devotion to Adonai. Treat them well and give them a good place to rest, now that their home in Jerusalem has been destroyed.”
Samuel took them and nodded to Abraham, who rode back to the path they had taken. Sarah, too, began to turn her mount, but Samuel put his hands on the reins and said firmly, “No! Your husband is right. He will be fine. He is a clever man and will know how to deal with them, for like me he speaks their language. But we must protect the children.”
He pulled at her donkey’s reins and forced Sarah and the children to follow him quickly, Sarah constantly turning to try to see what was happening, far away now, in the path across the valley.
It took Abraham moments to return to the path and continue northward as though nothing had happened. Abraham’s heart was beating wildly. He’d met many Romans in the years since he’d returned from studying the arts of healing and medicine, and rarely had spoken more than a few curt sentences. Now he would have to use their accursed language to save his family—and himself. When the centurion on horseback was just coming into view, Abraham began to sing a song he’d learned years earlier in Rome. At the top of his voice, he sang in Latin,
“Julius was the first of his gens, a noble gentleman
Augustus followed after him, with Livia in command
Then came Tiberius, slayer of many
Though Livia ruled the land,
Not even Sejenus could save Tiberius,
Killed by Caligula, mad as a snake,
Dressed in his little boots
But who will mourn for Claudius,
Yes, who will mourn for Claudius
And who will mourn for Rome . . . ?”
He sang it so loudly that it almost filled the entire valley. He was halfway through the second verse, outlining Caligula’s evil deeds, when he stopped singing and brought his donkey to a halt on the path, waiting for the centurion to ride up to him.
“Greetings, noble centurion,” he said in a voice that was loud and firm and, he hoped, confident. “I am Abraham, a friend of Rome and personal physician to the General Titus in Jerusalem. And who might you be?”
The moment the centurion heard the name of the commander of all the forces in Israel, he became cautious. “Antonius Marcus Spurio, centurion of X Fretensis. We’re on our way to Sepphoris.”
By the time he’d told Abraham who he was, his troops had run up to where the centurion had stopped and stood there, panting and puffing, desperate for a drink after their exertion but knowing that regulations didn’t permit food or water between rest periods. The men bent over double, trying to catch their breath, supporting themselves on their spears.
“Where are you going, Abraham the doctor?” asked the centurion.
“I’m going to Caesarea Phillippi on the coast, to gather those herbs and spices that grow in abundance there, in order to cure those ailments that plague our beloved commander.”
The centurion took a flask from a pocket in his cape and looked suspiciously at Abraham. “And what ailments are those, Doctor?” he asked, a note of distrust creeping into his voice.
Abraham smiled and said in a lower voice, “A doctor doesn’t discuss with others what ails his patient.”
“Some years ago, Doctor, I attended the General Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus in Jerusalem. This was at the time when he was still pleasuring the Jewish queen, Berenice, and I was his cupbearer in services to the god Jupiter. I spoke to him once or twice, and I learned of his ailments. What particular ailments that he suffers are you treating our commander for?”
Abraham began to sweat, but it was nothing to do with the heat of the day. “Centurion,” he said, trying not to show panic in his voice but rather composure, “I have sworn by the Hippocratic oath when I learned my trade of medicine in Rome. It says in part: ‘What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.’ So I will not discuss the ailments that our commander suffers with you or anybody else.”
Abraham looked sternly up at the centurion from his lowly vantage point on his donkey. The Roman officer nodded but continued to look closely at Abraham.
“You speak Latin with a Jewish accent. You’re not dressed like a noble Roman. You’re dressed like a farmer and you’re riding a donkey. So I’m thinking to myself that you’re a Jew.”
Abraham shrugged. “Yes, I’m a Jew. But a Jew who knows how to sniff the winds of fortune, and my nose tells me that fortune lies with the Romans and not with the Jews.”
But the centurion wasn’t persuaded. As they rode south, he and his men had killed many a Jew fleeing from Jerusalem. So he asked, “Why is a Jew allowed to treat our commander? We have Roman doctors with us.”
“Because, centurion, your Roman doctors, no matter how skilled, do not know the plants that grow in this land, nor the herbs that I brew to relieve General Titus’s suffering.”
“And what herbs are these?”
“Herbs that grow on the coastal fringes of our land. We have in our land many things that are unique to this area. Your emperors wear togas fringed with the color purple. This is obtained from the crushed shells of the murex sea snail, found only on our northern shores. And there are herbs that grow nowhere else, which cure aches in the head, inflammations of the guts, and eruptions on the skin,” he said. But he could hear that his voice was becoming more and more infused with the panic that was rising inside him.
The centurion sneered. “Jew,” he said menacingly, “I have your life in my hands. I could have you killed like I’d swat a fly, throw your body into those trees over there, and nobody would miss you. Why should I believe that you’re my commander’s physician when you’ll tell me nothing except that you’re a doctor? I’ve spent the past four months killing any Jew I came across. You claim to be my commander’s friend, yet where are your fine clothes and where are your horse and servants? So I’m wondering, Jew, what kind of a healer are you who touches the sacred body of General Titus Flavius Vespasianus? You could be one of these Zealots or a common thief or murderer. Which is why I command you to tell me what ailments my commander suffers, or I’ll skewer your body like I skewer a pig before I roast it. If you value your life, Jew, you’ll forget this oath and tell me. And remember that I know my commander and what ails him.”
Abraham knew he couldn’t ride away, as he’d be run down by the centurion. Nor could he talk his way out of this hideous situation. He needed to play for time to allow his wife and children to hide in the copse of trees.
“I will tell you this, centurion, to save my worthless life, but understand that in doing so I am betraying a sacred oath, and for this sin I will have to suffer the punishment of fasting for three days. Your general,” Abraham said imperiously, trying to sound as arrogant as possible, praying that his imagination had some basis in reality, “is suffering from marsh effluvia, which he contracted when he was tribune with the army in Germania. The effects are still with him, and at night he suffers pains in the gut, foul wind, and ulcerations on his foot, possibly by inadvertently stepping into some foul miasma in Britannia when he went to reinforce your legions fighting Queen Boudicca of the Iceni.”
Abraham held his breath while still staring in anger at the centurion, high up on his horse. If he’d chosen the wrong diseases, his next breath would be his last. If he’d chosen correctly, the centurion could just as easily force him back to Jerusalem and certain death. He looked steadily into the centurion’s eyes but couldn’t read the man’s mind. All the centurion did was stare down at him as though Abraham were a dog obstructing his path.
From far away, in the copse of trees, Sarah sat on her donkey, watching Abraham speaking to the Roman commander. She couldn’t hear what was said but held her breath in terror for her husband’s safety. For without him, how would they survive in this village of Peki’in? And for his part, Samuel lay on the grasses between the trees, peering at the distant scene of Abraham speaking to the Romans. Why had he done it? Why risk his life? Why hadn’t he tried to escape with his family? Was it an act of martyrdom?
ABU AHMED BIN HAMBAL bin Abdullah bin Mohammed, the imam of the village of Bayt al Gizah, sat quietly listening to the voice on the other end of the telephone. Had he not secretly met this man more than a dozen times, he would never have recognized the voice as belonging to Eliahu Spitzer, one of the most senior spies for the State of Israel. This voice sounded more like a geriatric Mickey Mouse as it was disguised through a series of filters and was beamed by covert microwave transmission signals to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit twenty-seven thousand miles above the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea; a satellite that had been decommissioned by the Israeli government a decade earlier and was no longer monitored. The voice was calm and controlled.
“And you want me to do what, precisely?” asked Abu Ahmed.
“We’ve tracked the woman’s car to the Galilee, to the village of Peki’in. It shouldn’t be difficult to find, even for you. Your people will be invisible in that part of Israel. Apparently he’s already dead, so killing a dead man shouldn’t be beyond your capabilities.”
The imam ignored the sarcasm. “And the girl doctor? And her reporter boyfriend?”
“The reporter came to see me a few days ago. He told me some ridiculous story, pretending to be trying to save his own life. It was so transparent, I felt insulted. Obviously he was trying to flush me out. So he has to go. And the woman, yes: she has to go as well. But tell your operative to leave the man to me. Solving three problems on the same day, and at the same time, will raise too many questions. Anyway, the man isn’t as much of a danger. He’s a coward and will do anything to save his skin. I’ll find him and make his death look like an accident, and such accidents must be made plausible.”
“And does your friend Rabbi Telushkin know about this? Does he know that you’re killing your own people?” asked the imam.
“I really don’t think that you have the right to talk to me about internecine murders. How many Sunni have been killed by Shi’ites, and vice versa? Our objective is the same: to destroy this false government in Jerusalem. But the outcome, I promise you, will be very different. In order to bring about the return of the Messiah—our Messiah—we have to rid ourselves of those who stand in our way. It’s for the greater good.”
The imam knew all about the useful idiots of Neturei Karta, of course: how they wanted the same result as he did—the destruction of the Jewish state. The imam wanted it replaced by an Islamic theocracy and governed by Allah’s law, sharia; the Neturei Karta wanted the state to be destroyed so that it could be born again by the arrival of the Messiah and then Judaism would spread through the world. An absurdly shared goal.
“When will you do your deed?” he asked the Shin Bet officer.
“My actions won’t interfere with whatever plans you might have. I have no doubt that you’ll go to the village to ensure that all is done correctly. So, then, go to Peki’in and do what must be done. Tomorrow, if you can arrange your side of the events, I’ll start to organize mine. Do we have a deal?”
“We have a deal. And once this mess is behind us, what then?”
“Our plans remain the same. War and God make for strange bedfellows.”
The imam laughed somewhat caustically. “And what if my god wins over your god?”
“You may have forgotten,” said Eliahu, “but our gods are the same.”
The imam laughed. “You Jews are a peculiar people. Anyway, I will succeed in my mission. In a small village like Peki’in, these people will not be hard to find.”
Eliahu disconnected the phone and listened carefully for almost a minute. If anybody, somehow, was eavesdropping, he’d know it soon enough. A click, a heavy breath, or something. No matter how sophisticated the equipment, experienced men like him could always tell when there was a third party on the line. But when he was satisfied that his was the only ear still listening, he put the cell phone back on his desk and took out his prayer book from his drawer.
He flipped through the pages, looking for a suitable b’rucha said by an Orthodox Jew. He said a b’rucha for when an Orthodox Jew sees something hideous and evil in the sight of God. That, he thought, should do. Now it was time to tie up all the loose ends. And there was only one man who could ensure Neturei Karta’s separation from the incident so that it didn’t come home to bite, to ensure that the job was done right, and that man was himself.
IN ANOTHER TIME, another place, a different life, Yael might well have fantasized about sharing a bed with Yaniv Grossman. But this was neither the time nor the place and it certainly wasn’t a fantasy. The twisted knots of fear still cramped her belly, especially now as she lay on a creaking bed in an airless room. The window overlooked the backyard but the curtains were drawn tight, closed to the world.
The whole house was tiny and cramped. Bilal lay next door, alone in a bedroom that must have felt little different than the prison cell from which he’d escaped. The only other bedroom of the house was slightly larger but nonetheless confined. There was no choice but for her and Yaniv to share the rusted metal bed with its wafer-thin mattress.
He’d stood in the doorway with a strange boyish nervousness she had never seen before. In all her tension, she found it endearing.
“I can sleep on the—”
“Floor?” Yael said. “There isn’t any floor.”
And indeed there wasn’t. The extent of the bed filled the tiny room, leaving only the slimmest space for the door to open.
Yael rolled over onto her side and closed her eyes. Moments later the bed screeched its disapproval as the weight of Yaniv’s tall, muscular body unfurled beside her.
She lay there for half an hour, feeling the heat from his body under the sheets, yet no hormones raced, her heart rate stayed the same, and she closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep. There was silence and stillness until Yael heard herself speak.
“You’re using him as bait,” she said softly. She and Yaniv lay facing away from each other, back to back.
“It’s the only way,” Yaniv replied without moving to face her, his voice low and matching hers.
“Only way to what?” It was a genuine question.
“To save us. To save him,” Yaniv replied.
“Is that what you want? To save us? Or is it just the story you want? The headline?”
Yaniv shuffled on the bed and Yael knew her barb had stung.
“Is that all you think of me?” Yaniv asked after a moment’s pause. “After they tried to kill me? After they killed your grandfather? After they tried to kill Bilal? Is that who you think I am?”
“I don’t know who you are,” Yael said, pulling any air of accusation from her voice. “You’re not Israeli. You’re not from here. I see you watching this country like a tourist and I wonder what you care about. Do you really care about me, or Bilal?”
Yaniv answered her question without answering her question. “I became an Israeli citizen because I love this country. I care about the story because the story matters. And Bilal’s story is the only reason we’re still alive. We tripped over an ant’s nest, Yael, and there’s no going back. We’ll never be safe until Spitzer is gone, this imam is gone . . . We either expose them or we kill them . . . and neither of us is a killer.”
“And if they come armed? If they’re wielding guns? We’re not police. Shouldn’t we call somebody?”
“It will be okay” was all Yaniv said, but he knew that Yael didn’t believe him.
“And what about Bilal?” asked Yael softly.
Yaniv didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t. The reality was that both of them were tyros, two people totally out of their depth. She was a doctor, he was a reporter, and they were playing at being secret agents, in competition with one of the deadliest men in Israel. She had no idea what was going to happen if or when the imam or the Shin Bet guy came to Peki’in. They’d set a trap, but what was the bait? Was it her, or Bilal, or Yaniv? And if they were tethered goats waiting for these predators to come and get them, who was going to stop the hunters?
Yael realized with a shock that she was nervous. She was rarely nervous, hadn’t been really nervous since she was a child, and that was when her busy parents had left her and her brother alone in the house or when she was somewhere strange and she was alone.
But she was in bed with Yaniv and wanted to reach out so that he could hold her, reassure her.
She moved toward the center of the bed, closer to him, wanting to hold him, touch him, gain strength from the strength of his body. She was enveloped by his warmth. It was so different from all the other times she’d been physically close to him. She never wanted to be another Yaniv conquest, so she’d kept him at bay. Now she desired him; now she wanted him to hug her, hold her tightly, enfold her. She reached out and touched his shoulder, stroked his arm, and pulled him closer to her.
Yaniv turned and suddenly they were facing each other, their faces visible in the moonlight that had insinuated itself into the bedroom through the thin drapes. Yael pulled him closer to her and kissed him tenderly on the lips. He barely responded, as though it were an inappropriate move on her part. She knew that she was an Israeli beauty and had never had trouble attracting men before. Yet, she felt as though he was deliberately distancing himself from her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked softly.
“Not here. Not now,” he answered, his voice quiet and sleepy.
“I thought you liked me . . .”
“I do. I adore you. I can’t stop thinking about you. But if we’re going to make love, I want the first time to be tender and special—not somewhere like this where we’re both frightened and anxious. I don’t want this to be our first memory.”
She kissed him again, realizing that he was right. Wrong time, wrong place, but at least now she was certain he was the right man. What an irony! For the first time in her life, she’d found the right man, and tomorrow they could both be murdered. Well, she thought, that’s Israel.
She smiled. They drifted into sleep holding each other.
AS HE ENTERED THE HOUSE, bending to avoid the low lintel, he smiled. It would soon be the Sabbath, and even though the sun was still hot and he was sweating from walking up the hill, the aromas of Sarah’s cooking thrilled his senses. All day he’d been overseeing the work of his servants in the oil presses that he’d built in the olive groves near the village of Peki’in. Since arriving nearly two years earlier, he’d first become a buyer and seller of the olive oils that some of the village farmers produced, then he’d arranged to press them under large round stones in a small workshop he’d created, and now he was selling his oils to villages and towns as far as seven days’ traveling distance from where he lived. The money he’d so far earned from the ripe crops had enabled him to pay for the construction of a house at the top of the hill where the breeze cooled the summer, close to the widow Sarah and her children.
Though Peki’in wasn’t Jerusalem, a blackened ruin of a city where the streets were still stained red by the blood of the martyred Jews, he had established a comfortable life in the village, and each day, after his work was done, he’d visit the widow Sarah and her children, to whom he’d become attached.
By Jewish levirate law, according to the book of Deuteronomy, Sarah should have married one of Abraham’s brothers; but all of them had been murdered, victims of the Roman massacre of Jerusalem, and the law of levirate couldn’t apply. So while not a blood relative of Abraham’s, Samuel had stepped up to the mark as the closest man to her and was providing her with food and shelter, aid and assistance. There was even talk in the village that one day they would marry. She was still young enough to bear his children, something that he craved so that sons other than Raphael would carry on his family name, but she was still grieving for her beloved Abraham.
There were those in the village who said that she’d mourned enough. King Solomon the Wise had once said that mourners should not be encompassed by grief and should enjoy the fruits of life. In Jewish law, the prescribed time for grieving for a husband was just the length of time for the moon to wax and wane until the next time it waxed. Yet, she had been grieving for Abraham for two years, wearing the clothes of a widow, torn at the breast, as Jacob had rent his clothes for Joseph, and King David had torn his when Saul died. It was Sarah’s outward expression that showed the villagers that she was incomplete without her Abraham. It was also a warning to the younger men of the village—or the widowers from other villages looking for the comfort of a wife and housekeeper—that she was not to be theirs.
Samuel the merchant and his son, Raphael, were the only ones who seemed to be close to her, and though her neighbors had been watching closely, he arrived at her house as the sun was low on the horizon, and without fail he left her house when the moon was high in the sky. He’d never been known to stay for the length of the night, so Sarah’s purity had never been questioned.
Not that she was the subject of gossip. She was a good woman, loving to her children and helpful to the elderly and the lame, always carrying their bags and foodstuffs to their doors as they wended their way home. But there was something morose about Sarah. She laughed with the women as they gathered in the center of the village where the water bubbled out of the ground in order to do their washing. But while others’ laughter was full-bodied, hers was restrained, almost apologetic.
Samuel loved her for her modesty, her delicacy, and her insights. And he loved her children for their liveliness and good humor. The children had adapted to their new surroundings with ease. Though they said they missed the size and busyness and excitement of Jerusalem, they had acclimatized to life in the little village quite well and were often heard in the upper parts of the village shouting and yelling at each other, or playing in the caves near a young and healthy carob tree that was often bursting with fruit.
Samuel entered the home of Sarah and her children, and she turned as he crossed the threshold and smiled at him. She was at the fire, stirring the evening meal. The smell of freshly cooked barley bread and the aromas of mutton, grapes, garlic, and pomegranate in the stew smelled delicious.
“Welcome, Samuel. May the good grace of our Adonai Elohim be with you and make your night safe.”
“And may you remain as lovely and comforting and safe as always, dear Sarah.”
“How is Raphael today?” she asked.
Samuel smiled. “He’s well. He’s keeping the company of a young girl, Zipporah, who lives in the lower part of the village. Her mother works for me, and I know her. She’s a lovely girl; her hips will bear him many children and already her breasts are large and they will fill with milk.”
Sarah smiled, but deep down she’d hoped that Raphael, who’d grown into a delightful young lad of fourteen, would be interested in her daughter, Leah, even though she was only eleven. Apparently it wasn’t to be.
As he sat at the table, she brought over a bowl of fresh water from the nearby well, a cup to enable him to pour the water over his hands so that he could say the proper blessing, and a clean towel. As he was saying his b’rucha she poured a cup of wine and gave it to him with a platter of olives, figs, and pistachio nuts.
But instead of returning to the fire to continue stirring the evening’s stew, she sat and looked at him, picking up a fig and eating it. It was unusual, because she generally allowed him to sit alone while she continued with the cooking and the housework. Samuel looked at her questioningly.
“My friend,” she said, “you are aware, as am I and my children, that when Abraham of blessed memory was taken by the Romans two years ago as we were riding to this village, his body was never recovered. We have assumed his death, but he has no grave.”
“Of course,” said Samuel.
She swallowed nervously, as though she were unburdening herself. “Well, since we’ve arrived here in Peki’in, you have begun to rebuild your life as a merchant, and from what you’ve told me, you are doing well. Not as well as your life in Jerusalem, but the Roman invaders have taken all of that away from us.”
He nodded, wondering what was to come next. He began to wonder whether she would suggest that they marry. It was unheard-of for a woman to ask a man, but who knew what would happen in these terrible times for the Israelite people? Samuel realized that he wasn’t breathing, rapt in the moment.
“And so I was wondering, dear friend, whether you would join with me in building a memorial to my dead husband.”
He had been so wrong in his assumptions, and felt shame at thinking in that way. “But without his body . . .”
She shook her head. “No, not a grave. A memorial. Not one like the Romans with their arches or columns, but a building. A synagogue. The synagogue we have here in Peki’in is so small and unfriendly. But a town like this needs a beautiful synagogue, a bet ha-knesset, a meetinghouse, now that the temple in Jerusalem has been torn down. For without a beautiful synagogue, where is our Lord Adonai Elohim to reside? And the synagogue could be built on the site of the current small building, but be a beautiful building, full of light and color and drawings, with niches for our sacred vessels and our menorah to celebrate the victory of the Maccabees. And on the wall we will hang the two plaques that we’ve carried from the temple in Jerusalem, as a permanent memorial to what the Jewish people once were.
“What do you say, Samuel? I don’t know what the cost would be, but would you do it for my Abraham? If so, if you did this wondrous thing for him, and for me and my children, then I could put him to rest and move ahead with my life.”
He sipped the wine, and looked at her deep-brown eyes. Her face was lovely, framed in a red scarf with wisps of her black hair caressing her cheeks. He had admired her when they first came to Peki’in; then he had revered her for her goodness and patience; and now he realized that he loved her, loved her with all his heart—that he wanted nothing more than to marry her and for them to have their own children, as companions for him in his old age, and for her children and his son, Raphael, when he and Sarah joined Abraham in the heavens.
Since the Zealots had murdered his wife and children before the destruction of Jerusalem, he had often thought of asking Sarah to marry him, but two things prevented it. The first was his betrayal of his dead wife and the second was because he didn’t think that Sarah had accepted Abraham’s death.
So he’d eschewed his personal comforts in Peki’in for the joy of remaking his fortune as a merchant. In Jerusalem, he’d risked his wife and family living such a fraught life as a spy for the Zealots. But now he realized that he wanted nothing more than a quiet and peaceful life with Sarah, to share her bed, know her body, love and revere and worship her as he worshipped Adonai Elohim.
And if the price he’d have to pay was to build a synagogue in Peki’in to the memory of her first husband, well, so be it.
IN THE MORNING Yael put on a warm winter jacket when she got out of bed. The house seemed cold. Even though it often snowed in Jerusalem in the winter, her apartment was heated and air-conditioned and the ambient temperature rarely varied. To go to work, she would get into a climate-controlled car and drive to a climate-controlled hospital.
So being in a simple stone house on a hill in the Galilee, she was closer to nature than she’d been in years, and for a moment enjoyed the sensation of leaving the warm bed and feeling the chilly bite of the air.
She walked out of their tiny bedroom and down the short hall to where Bilal slept. In her mind she played out what else she could possibly say to him about who he was—who she was—now that he’d been told the truth.
The revelation she had laid before him the previous night had caused a mix of emotions. At first his reaction had been one of shock, then denial; then, when she explained about the letter and his mother’s need for absolute secrecy, Bilal began to understand the implications. He said very little but his silence belied a mind in turmoil that struggled to reconcile the life he had led, the identity that had been built up based on hate, and the reality of the world he was in right now. A life that had Yael the Jew, who had saved his life, sitting in front of him and connected to him by blood.
When he finally spoke, his question was strikingly practical. “If I’m now a Jew, will I be treated differently?”
At first Yael had not known how to respond. In her mind’s eye she saw Jerusalem, a city divided. She saw his village and she thought of her own upbringing, her own home. Their worlds could not be further apart.
“Yes,” she had said. There could be no other answer.
Bilal had looked down at his very own body as though it were now foreign to him as Yael had pressed forward with the raw truth.
“Your mother believes that if you are known as a Jew, you will be freed or sent to a better prison. That you will be safe.”
“Will I?” he asked.
“Who you are, what your bloodline is . . . this doesn’t change what you did, Bilal. You killed a man.”
“So my mother gave up this terrible secret for nothing.”
“She believes it will save you. And she needs to believe that. She has nothing else to hope for.”
Bilal stared hard into her eyes, boring down into her soul. “And you, Dr. Yael? Who are you?” Bilal spread open his hands. “If I have your blood, then you have mine . . .”
In that moment the night before, the labels, the divisions, between Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew, seemed so utterly incomprehensible to her. Artificial barricades that had wrought such destruction seemed washed away. Now, in the cold of a Galilee morning, their harsh reality lay just beyond the door. In the gunsights of two men who fanatically followed the extremism of their faiths.
WHEN YAEL KNOCKED at Bilal’s bedroom, there was no answer.
She turned the handle and found that she couldn’t open the door, as if something were jamming it. She pushed and called out his name. She pushed again, harder, and it still resisted. But the timber was old, rot had taken its toll, and with a further shove the door swung inward with a creak.
The window was wide-open; two of the horizontal iron bars that had sealed the portal had been removed by deep cuts made into the wooden frame. Bilal was gone.
“Yaniv!” Yael shouted, and he came running, looking into the empty room.
“Shit!”
He dashed back to quickly put on his shirt and trousers. Yael followed. In the hallway Yaniv reached into the small table for his watch and phone. In shock, he realized the phone was missing.
“Jesus!” he said. “The little bastard’s stolen my phone.”
“The one with the video on it?” asked Yael.
“No. No SIM card. His can’t make calls. He’s taken mine. He’s phoning somebody . . . the little backstabbing bastard. He’s phoned the fucking imam . . .”
BILAL COULD ALMOST HAVE HEARD Yael and Yaniv starting to search for him from where he was. He was just two streets away, hiding in a corner of the courtyard outside the ancient synagogue, where he and Hassan had planned to meet. He looked at the time on Yaniv’s phone and realized that the imam was probably on his way, as he’d arranged. With trembling hands he phoned Hassan’s number.
“Where are you, brother?” he asked.
“Close to the village. Where are you?”
“Ten minutes,” said Hassan.
Bilal waited in the shade of a corner of the wall. He hadn’t slept all night. If what Dr. Yael said about him being a Jew was true, then who was he? All his life he’d grown up to believe in Allah and that Mohammed was his prophet. But now, if his blood was different from that of his friends, if he wasn’t the same inside as he’d always been, what did it mean? Was he still Bilal haMitzri, Bilal the Egyptian? Why was he the Egyptian? What did that make him? Was Allah still his god? Had his life been a lie?
Bilal examined his hands, his arms. They were the same as yesterday morning, but last night they became the hands and arms of a Jew. But they couldn’t be. It was impossible.
It was all too much. He needed to talk to somebody. But who? Who could he speak with that wasn’t trying to kill him? Not the imam, who wanted him dead; not the Jews, who wanted him imprisoned. Dr. Cohen? Could he trust her? Hassan, his brother? Only Hassan could help him . . .
ELIAHU SPITZER WATCHED as the kid, Bilal, who had become such a problem, slunk down the narrow streets of the village. The boy wasn’t entirely stupid, staying out of the open, but he was easy to track from the clear vantage point on the hill where Spitzer had positioned himself. His high-powered field glasses gave him a clear view of almost the entire village.
Eliahu hadn’t known where the boy was in the village. Going from door to door wasn’t an option, and there were no informers in the Druze village that could be relied upon. But the Shin Bet officer didn’t need such ham-fisted searching. He only had to sit in his hiding place and wait.
He removed the tiny electronic speaker from his ear and slipped it into a pocket. He had earlier been listening to the voice of a young Arab man, apparently named Hassan, and the more familiar mutterings of the imam, Abu Ahmed bin Hambal, as they drove toward the village. The car the imam and Hassan had taken had been easy to bug and from his position he had only needed to wait for their arrival, which he knew would draw Bilal out.
SAMUEL THE MERCHANT stood in awe and looked at the doors of his synagogue.
His synagogue.
It wasn’t the Peki’in synagogue, or Abraham’s synagogue, but his synagogue.
Not, of course, that he would ever use this name to his wife, Sarah, or to their newly born baby boy whom they had named Abraham in memory of his mother’s first husband, a man the child would never know. But as he’d paid for the stone and the timber, the stonemasons and the carpenters, the artisans and the other craftsmen, he felt entitled, when he was alone and provided he said it silently to himself, to call it “Samuel’s synagogue.”
It was finished, complete. The final stones had been laid, the women of the village had put in a special effort to sweep the floor and polish the new pure silver seven-branched menorah he’d bought from a craftsman’s shop in distant Acre, and now he was making a final inspection before its consecration in the morning by the learned and blessed Rabbi Gamliel of Yavne, leader of those Jews who had not fled from Israel to other lands after the destruction of the temple. Rabbi Gamliel was also the head of the Great Sanhedrin of Israel, the body of lawmakers and adjudicators that had re-formed since the obliteration of the city of Jerusalem.
Such great rabbis rarely left their schools, but Samuel had known Gamliel from his days in Jerusalem when he was a friend to the Romans and a spy for the Zealots. Gamliel was one of the few who stood up for Samuel when he was accused of being a traitor to the Jews by those citizens who were ignorant of his role as a spy. And so, when Samuel had sent word to Gamliel that the synagogue he’d financed was about to be opened, Gamliel asked whether he could consecrate it.
The moment Samuel told his wife, Sarah, who would be visiting the village the following day and officiating at the very first community ceremony and prayers in the synagogue, she looked at him in amazement and then threw her arms around him.
“Truly, Samuel, when I was married to Abraham, I didn’t think there could be a better husband in the world than him. But in this past year as my husband, and in the two years before that as the friend who supported me and my children when we were at our lowest ebb, you have risen in my eyes to be a dear friend and a true love. While nobody can replace Abraham, you have become my husband and father to my children, and now that we have our own son, Abraham, we are a family.”
In the first several months of building, Sarah had visited the synagogue many times a week, both as a woman standing on the periphery, watching the men working on the stones and the woodwork, and as a worker, assisting the men in carrying panniers of dirt and stones to be thrown into the bottom of the valley. But as the frame of the building was completed and the men cut and shaved wood and began to carve sacred images into the stones, Sarah visited less and less. Samuel thought it was because she was bored, but her reality was very different from his. As the building became more and more complete, it became less Abraham’s memorial, and more and more Samuel’s donation to the village. She felt guilty for thinking these thoughts, as though the sacred memory of her blessed doctor husband had somehow become lost in the act of building his memorial: the flesh and blood of her first husband was replaced by the physical beauty of the building, the carvings and the ornaments. In ten years or a thousand years, who would remember Abraham the Healer when they were praying to Adonai Elohim? All they would see was a beauteous building, its purpose forgotten, its value vested in its silver and gold, not in the man whose memory it served.
She had said this to Samuel over breakfast on the day he inspected the synagogue to ensure that all was right for the visit of Rabbi Gamliel. Samuel listened attentively and said gently to his wife, “Dearest love, Abraham will live on in your heart and in the hearts of those children who you and he shared. And our love will live on through our own child, our own Abraham, whose blood is yours and mine, and who I’m sure will grow up to be a healer like your first husband.”
She smiled and said, “But from the way he grasps my breast when I feed him, I think he will be more merchant than doctor, for no matter how much he drinks, he never seems to be satisfied.”
Samuel smiled as he thought back to their conversation. He sat on a bench in the middle of the synagogue feeling the coolness that the stone building afforded. He looked around and saw in delight the niches where ancient columns from the Jerusalem temple had been saved and now stood. He saw the two stone plaques that Abraham had retrieved from the temple after the Romans had thrown the huge building blocks into the nearby streets, pulling it down and leaving one of the world’s greatest buildings in rubble.
He knew that his modest building could never begin to equate to the palatial temple that King Herod had constructed or the magnificent edifice that King Solomon had created a thousand years before; but his building was a temple nonetheless, and he loved every stone, every ornament, every niche.
Sitting alone in the middle of his synagogue made Samuel think about who he was and how he had come here. One year he was a wealthy merchant, friend of the imperial commanders, confidant of the Zealots, treading a dangerous path between the two. A year later he was doing everything in his power to earn a living from trading olive oil in a tiny village nobody in Jerusalem, even ruined Jerusalem, had heard of; and now he was making the village prosperous, he had a wife and a son, and he was sitting in the middle of the synagogue that he had founded.
How had he come to this? He knew that he was surrounded by all of the people, now dead, whose lives had gone to create him and his life. He thought of his father and his grandfather and all the unknown and unknowable generations back to the time of Solomon and David and Saul and Abraham. Had Father Abraham passed this way as he walked from his home of Ur in Mesopotamia toward Jerusalem with his son Isaac, instructed by Adonai Elohim to sacrifice the boy, only to be held back when the Angel of God told him not to slaughter the boy but instead to slaughter a ram? Had Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob or Moses or Aaron, known of Peki’in? Did they know of the wondrous olives that grew in the valleys and on the sides of the hills? Did they know how sweet the water was that bubbled up in the center of the village? Did they know how pure the air was, or how sweet the view was to the north of the mountains, sometimes capped in snow in a harsh winter?
He sat there thinking how wonderful the next day would be, how glorious for himself and Sarah, when Rabbi Gamliel arrived with his students and assistants, and the whole town gathered in the center to see him, to be blessed by him, and to listen to him say his blessings when he officiated at the first ceremony in the Peki’in synagogue.
And as he remained seated, Samuel smiled to himself. Only through the joining of himself, a merchant, with Sarah, the wife of the healer, had all this glory come about. Indeed, the Lord God did work in mysterious ways.
His thoughts were interrupted when the doors of the synagogue slowly creaked open . . .
BILAL LOOKED AT THE DOORS of the synagogue and wondered whether he should wait in the courtyard or open the doors and wait inside.
While he was thinking, a dusty old Toyota pickup rolled down the central narrow street of the village. Inside were two men, one young and fresh-faced, the other much older, wearing the clothes of a Muslim priest; Hassan and the imam rode in silence amid the noise of the engine.
Bilal heard the car draw near and stop. In the early morning the village was eerily quiet. The only noises were from farm animals in nearby fields and the barking of a distant dog.
The moment Bilal heard the car, he decided that he should meet them inside the synagogue. It would make his imam uncomfortable, but that was good. The young man stood from where he’d been crouching in the corner of the courtyard since escaping from the house and walked quickly toward the synagogue’s closed doors. He pushed them open and walked inside. He’d never been inside a Jewish religious building before, and it wasn’t what he expected. It was drab, old, with white plaster on the walls, and columns that looked as if they had come from ancient Rome, and above the door was an old, brown, faded handwritten part of some ancient scroll.
Heart pounding, he found a seat and waited for the arrival of Hassan and the imam. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the conversation last night with Dr. Yael. She’d told him so much and had undermined everything that he had ever known about himself. Yet, she’d also opened a door to hope, to a golden future. He felt like a pauper who’d suddenly seen the inside of a treasure house and been told that he could go in and take as much as he wanted.
He opened his eyes again and looked at the Jewish markings on the walls, at the ark at the front of the synagogue with its Hebrew writing on top, and at the prayer books. Was he really part of this? He’d grown up to believe that this was all evil, but . . .
Bilal’s thoughts were interrupted by a blinding light in the synagogue doorway. He looked over and saw the dark outlines of two men. One of them entered. The other stayed.
He heard his imam’s voice. “Bilal, my son, come outside. Come here into the light.”
“No, Imam, it’s better to meet here. Inside. Where we can’t be seen.”
He saw Hassan turn and hold out his hand for the imam, as though helping a crippled man to walk. Slowly, reluctantly, he saw the imam walk inside the doorway. They lingered at the entrance for a moment, looking into the small building, to adjust their eyes from the brilliance outside.
Bilal stood and bowed slightly as the imam walked over to him. As he neared, the imam looked around at the Jewish symbols adorning the walls, the star of the shield of David, the menorah, and the Ark of the Covenant at the front facing in the direction of Jerusalem.
The imam then turned his attention to Bilal. “My son,” he said as he walked toward the young man. He put his arms on the boy’s shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. “It is so good you are alive. Allah the merciful has given you a great blessing.”
Bilal said nothing as the imam stood face-to-face with him, still holding his shoulders. Not so long ago such an embrace would have overwhelmed him; it was all he’d ever hoped for. But now there was no similar feeling, no sense of confidence or pride.
The imam continued: “We should not be meeting here, my son, not in this unholy place. But because Allah has willed these Jews to free you, I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you in these times of your adversity. You were right to contact us. And now you can be safe. Now you can come home.”
Home . . . Bilal pondered the word and what it might mean now.
“We should leave here. We might be seen,” Hassan said, breaking the moment, his eyes darting nervously and refusing to look at Bilal.
Quietly, and looking at the floor, Bilal asked, “How do you know I’ll be safe, Imam? Where will you take me that’s safe? I can’t go back to my parents’ home, so where will I go? Egypt? Jordan? How will you get me out of the country?”
The questions took the imam by surprise and Hassan took a small step backward.
“You doubt and question me? You’ve sworn an oath in the name of Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him, that you would obey, not question. Why would you doubt me?”
Bilal didn’t answer but found himself staring at Hassan, and for the first time since he had arrived Hassan didn’t avert his gaze.
“What has happened to change you, my son? You forget yourself. Too long in the company of the infidel,” the imam said. His voice was quiet and confident.
Bilal’s eyes slowly left Hassan’s and he faced the imam.
“The doctor saved my life when the Jew soldiers shot me. She may be an infidel, but by custom, and all that you have taught me, is my life not now hers?”
“Bah!” The imam waved a dismissive hand at the suggestion. “You were not saved, Bilal. A martyr is not saved when his martyrdom fails because of the enemy.”
But Bilal was not deterred and a stoic tone rose in his throat. Hassan took a step back, frightened and confused by the Bilal in front of him, so unrecognizable from the childhood friend he knew.
“And she saved my life again when she helped me escape from the prison. There were people who would have killed me in the prison. Muslims! Muslims would have murdered me. Yet, she saved me.”
“What nonsense is this, Bilal?” The imam’s voice changed to anger. “What is making you say these things?”
“I have been told—”
“Who has told you? What have they said?” the imam snapped.
Imam Abu Ahmed bin Hambal stared deeply into the eyes of the boy who’d once been his acolyte, his willing puppet. In that moment he knew that the boy had changed irrevocably and had to be dealt with immediately. He had converted from being a shahid to being a traitor.
“Hassan, end this now,” demanded the imam in gruff and commanding tones, the voice of a man used to being obeyed.
Bilal turned his gaze to his friend and saw that Hassan showed no sign of surprise at the order from his imam. Yet, Hassan did not move.
“End it now!” bellowed the imam.
SAMUEL THE MERCHANT looked at the doors to the synagogue and was surprised to see his wife, Sarah, standing there, framed in the brilliant light. He couldn’t see her face, dark against the light, but he knew from her shape that it was her.
“Wife?”
“Samuel. I’ve come to spend some moments together with you, in the peace of the synagogue, and in the presence of Adonai Elohim, our God Almighty.”
He stood and reached out his hands toward her, but instead of taking them, she hugged him in a close and loving embrace. But when she looked closely at his face, she could see that he’d been crying.
“Husband. What’s wrong?” she said softly.
“Dearest wife. My lovely Sarah. There are things I must tell you. Things I have done in the past of which you don’t know. Things that touch upon my acts toward Abraham, your beloved husband, and you and your children.
“Sarah, years ago, when I was a friend of the Romans, I—”
But she put her fingers to his lips and stopped him from talking. “Samuel. Husband. There are things that happened in the past that we can’t alter. These are things that we have to live with. But we are today, and we will be tomorrow and next year. We have children who came to us from others, and now we have our own child. The past is the past, husband. We have started our lives again. Ours is the future. Don’t let the past damage what we have, what we’ve built.”
He looked at her with such love and tenderness, and tears rolled down his face.
She continued. “Samuel. Husband. When we first married, I was not in love with you. I was still in love with my beloved Abraham. You were a friend, and as a widow with two children, I needed the protection of a friend. You were good to me, and I know that for two or three weeks after we were married I didn’t share my body with you, and you never once demanded your rights. For that I was more than grateful. I knew from that simple gesture that you were a kind man and that your heart was fond and loving.
“And it was then that I opened my own heart to you and began to love you. Slowly at first, but more and more, and now, Samuel, now that you’ve paid for this beautiful synagogue in memory of Abraham, now that we ourselves have a glorious son called Abraham, I’ve come to tell you how much I love you and to thank you for being such a good and kind husband to me and a father to my children.”
He hugged her and realized there and then that all would be well for them. “Sarah, my dear wife. You know how much I love and admire you, and for you I have built this synagogue in memory of your first husband. May this building, dedicated to the One True God, be a sanctuary for all time, a place of peace and harmony and loving-kindness.”
Sarah nodded and said softly, “Amen.”
SPITZER LOOKED THROUGH the viewfinder on the rifle’s sight into the synagogue. He had a clear view and could easily kill the target now. He was settled in position, lying in a block of wasteland cordoned off from the road by rusted corrugated iron and elevated some three hundred yards from the Peki’in synagogue. Lying down on a blanket, staring through the high-intensity scope of his Israeli-made TEI M89SR sniper rifle, his view of the front half of the interior of the synagogue was more than adequate. Despite its use as a long-range killing weapon, the rifle was very short in length and easily slipped away into a sports bag. And this is exactly what Eliahu Spitzer would do when his task here was done.
Eliahu lifted the rifle’s silencer out of the case and screwed it to the end of the barrel so that neither sound nor muzzle flash would be emitted. Then he brought the rifle back to his shoulder. The crisp black crosshairs of his telescopic sight drifted slowly and incrementally across the space of the synagogue so far away before him. Through the tunnel-vision image ringed in black, Spitzer heard and felt his own breath. Just before he squeezed the trigger, he’d hold his breath. Years of training compelled him to slow his pulse and let his muscles press into the ground beneath him.
Opening his other eye briefly, he adjusted the dials on the scope and then returned to the tunnel vision of the crosshairs now drifting over the figures standing in conversation.
He saw the imam, his head uncovered, wearing his long robes in stark contrast to the ragged jeans and jackets of the younger men. He saw the one who must be Hassan standing close by and facing the third figure: Bilal.
Spitzer settled the gun sight, stopped its slow drift over the scene to come to a standstill over the head of Bilal. The crosshairs formed a perfect crucifix on the bridge of his nose.
Spitzer’s lungs filled very slowly with air.
WITH A SLOW, DELIBERATE HAND and eyes never leaving Bilal, Hassan took out a small pistol from inside his loose jacket. Bilal physically shrank in retreat, and yet, as he looked at his friend, there was no shock or surprise in his expression.
Hassan leveled the gun, and his hand shook but he quickly grasped the butt of the pistol with his other hand to steady it.
“Hassan. You’re my brother,” said Bilal, with pleading in his eyes.
“You betrayed us,” Hassan replied.
“No. We’ve all been betrayed,” said Bilal, his voice more resigned than afraid.
“I have to do what the imam tells me, Bilal. I swore an oath in the name of Allah.”
“Why?” asked Bilal. “Why?”
Hassan’s voice dried up and he couldn’t speak. The imam said menacingly, “Because you failed. We can have no patience with failures. You deserve to die because you put us at risk by your failure.”
The imam turned to Hassan with cold, piercing eyes. “Hassan, kill him!”
Suddenly they heard footsteps on the stones leading up to the door. The imam turned at the intrusion and Hassan’s eyes flashed in surprise, but he didn’t lower the pistol and Bilal was rooted to the spot.
Yael walked into the synagogue. She stared in shock at the three men standing there, but when she saw the gun, instinct made her try to stop what was happening.
“Bilal!” cried Yael.
For a long moment nobody said anything.
THE OPEN DOORS of the synagogue afforded Spitzer a perfect view of all of the players in the drama taking place. But then there was a flicker. Though the dark field of vision through the telescopic sight was constrained, showing little more than the head and shoulders of Bilal, the light in the room altered, causing the shadows over the young Palestinian’s face to shift.
With a tiny movement of his forearm, Spitzer lifted the sight away from Bilal to drift over the space of the synagogue. It was amazing how much of the interior of the room he could see. The imam and Hassan remained fixed to the spot, but their gaze was diverted elsewhere in the room. Eliahu continued to guide the scope upward toward the subject of their gaze until the face of Yael, like a deer in headlights, filled the sight and behind her, soon after, emerged the figure of Yaniv.
Eliahu lifted his left hand from the rifle and adjusted the telescopic sight to draw it back to a wider field of view so he could see everybody at once. The imam, Bilal, Hassan, Yael, and Yaniv Grossman, the journalist.
“My God, what an odd congregation in a synagogue,” said Spitzer out loud, a wry smile on his face as he reflected on the hopes that he and the imam shared for the dismantlement of Israel.
Eliahu Spitzer said a quick b’rucha under his breath as he rested the stock of the rifle against the side of his face. The task ahead seemed all too easy.
THE MOMENT YANIV followed Yael into the synagogue, he recognized the danger of their situation. He grasped her forearm and tried to drag her back through the door but she jerked free with a strength that surprised him.
She was pleading with Hassan and the imam. “What do you want with him? Let him go?!” To her own ears the words sounded petty and worthless.
“Hassan!” insisted the imam. But Hassan’s eyes flashed back and forth between Yael and Bilal, his hand trembling around the pistol in his grip.
“Don’t! Don’t do this!” Yael’s voice was desperate as she walked closer to the three men. “Hassan. Remember in the café? You told me you couldn’t kill me. Remember? Don’t do this to Bilal. He’s your best friend. Please.”
“Yael!” Yaniv was behind her, trying to pull her to safety.
“Hassan! Kill them. Shoot!” the imam demanded. But Hassan didn’t . . . couldn’t. Nor could he move as he and Bilal stared at each other, wide-eyed.
The imam let out a guttural grunt. He snatched the pistol from Hassan’s hand and pointed it at Yael.
Yael froze in sudden horror as she stared into the hollow barrel of the gun.
“You’re a priest. A man of God!” she gasped, her body rigid as stone.
“Jew! What do you know of God?”
In that instant a part of the imam’s head suddenly detached from his body and flew sideways toward the Ark of the Covenant. One second Yael was looking at the imam’s face, seeing him sneer with the pistol in his hand; the next she stared into part of his skull, his bloodied brain exploding and splattering against the synagogue’s walls. His brain liquefied like jelly and sprayed over the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Dollops of the imam’s brain hit Yaniv and Yael. Both of them looked on in astonishment.
There was no noise of a gunshot, just the clattering of the pistol to the floor and the strangely wet smack of the imam’s body crumpling to the floor. For a fraction of a moment nobody moved.
Then Hassan broke the stupefied silence as he fell to his knees in front of the near-headless body of his imam. He put his hand on the chest of the cleric as if feeling for a heartbeat. Yael looked on, her doctor’s mind unconsciously considering the absurdity of such a gesture. Then, still stunned and her head spinning, she saw Bilal crouch in front of his friend and grab Hassan’s wrist, trying to yank him back to his feet.
“Run, Hassan. Run!” Bilal cried as he hauled Hassan back to his feet. The two childhood friends stood staring at each other for a moment. Hassan then opened his mouth to speak but there was a small percussive thud. Instead of words, blood poured out of Hassan’s mouth as he slumped into Bilal’s arms.
Another bullet suddenly splintered the wood of a pew close to Yael and she flung herself sideways onto the floor. Her sudden drop in height meant the next bullet flew through the space where she had once been and exploded the plaster on the wall behind, mere inches from Yaniv, who in turn threw himself onto the floor.
Yael looked up and out through the open doors of the synagogue into the bright, glaring Israeli sun. For a moment she was dazed by the light, her eyes squinting. She heard the sound of running feet but whether it came from behind or in front of her she couldn’t say. Blinded and blinking, she pushed herself onto her knees as a shadow fell over her and the glaring light dimmed for a moment. Widespread arms wrapped around her and pushed her to the ground, knocking the air from her lungs in a squelching gasp as she heard again the same strange damp percussive thud as her head hit the floor. Feeling the weight on her, she opened her eyes to see Bilal’s face inches from her own.
His mouth was straight, not contorted. His eyes were open but not focused. The muscles around his brow and his jaw were slack, his lips close enough to kiss.
“No!” came a cry from somewhere that seemed far away. “Bilal?” Yael screamed.
The young man’s body slid sideways off her and his eyes dimmed in death as the bullet exploded in his back and shattered his heart.
When he had slid from her, she suddenly felt a searing pain in her body. Her head hurt from when it had hit the floor, but it was the radiating pain that coursed through her, from her shoulder and across her chest, that worried her. As a doctor, she tried to analyze why she was in pain. She put her hand to her chest and it came away bright red with blood. Her blood and Bilal’s blood, mixed together. The bullet that killed Bilal was now lodged in her.
Yael screamed. The high ceiling of the synagogue swirled above her. Two muscular arms slid under her shoulders and she felt herself drifting backward.
And then silence.
SPITZER LOOKED THROUGH the scope and realized that the scene was hopelessly compromised. He cursed under his breath. He hadn’t seen the doctor and the reporter coming, and five targets made for a much-too-complex kill zone. But he was a patient man; he knew for certain that three had been taken and the rest would have to wait for another day.
He picked up the spent shells from the rifle, carefully unscrewed the scope and silencer, and packed everything away into the small case. He stood, shook his blanket, which he’d dump into a trash can on the way back to Jerusalem, and paused for a moment, wondering. Unlike amateurs, who would run like scared rabbits from such a scene and be noticed by passersby, Eliahu was a professional. It would be hours before anybody came to where he was to examine a possible sniper’s location, and so he waited there for a few minutes, pondering his next move.
He then walked toward his car, threw everything into the trunk, and drove cautiously along the narrow, twisting streets out of the village. The image of the despoiled synagogue bothered him, but there was nothing he could do about that. He said another b’rucha as he drove along the road to Nahariya, then south to Jerusalem.
As he drove, in his mind’s eye he could see the face of Rabbi Telushkin, could feel the aging man’s comforting hand on his shoulder and hear his voice, which always seemed so lyrical that every sentence was a chanting prayer. The rabbi would be proud of the work he had done this day.
FEW PATIENTS WERE MORE used to hospitals and their routines than Yael Cohen. She knew most of the nurses in Nahariya’s main hospital and all of the doctors, and had walked this very ward a hundred times when she was a surgeon operating here.
After the massacre in the synagogue, she’d been brought by ambulance, unconscious, with a rising temperature from the infection that the lodged bullet was causing her. As a shooting casualty, she was immediately wheeled into the triage section and examined by an intern. But when a terrified and profoundly distressed Yaniv Grossman had explained who the patient was and her relationship to the hospital, a call had immediately been made to the hospital’s director, the thoracic surgeon Fadi Islam Suk.
Though he was in a meeting with a man from the Health Ministry, Fadi leapt from his seat and ran at full speed down the four flights of stairs to the emergency room. He strode into the cubicle where Yael was being examined and looked at her pale, almost lifeless face.
“Dear God,” he said, turning and barking instructions at the ward nurse. “Get Raoul the anesthetist to prep for surgery; get the operating theater ready—find one that’s sterilized. Now. Immediately.”
He turned to the intern and barked, “What’s happened to her? How did this happen?”
Standing just outside the drawn curtains, Yaniv entered and spoke to Fadi. He explained who he was and that Yael had been the victim of a sniper shooting in nearby Peki’in.
Fadi nodded. “Are you her brother? Who are you?”
“No . . . I’m just a . . .” But the Palestinian doctor didn’t let Yaniv finish.
“Okay, look, she’s been shot in the upper thorax but her blood pressure isn’t weak, which is a good thing; it means that no major blood vessels were hit. But I won’t know until we get her into surgery.”
Then Fadi took charge. Within half an hour of her arriving at the emergency room, the Palestinian surgeon was operating on Yael, tracing the path of the gunshot and opening only as much of her chest as he needed to to expose the bullet so that he could remove it. It had torn much of the surrounding muscle but hadn’t fractured any bones or severed any important blood vessels. Yael was young and strong and healthy; she could fight the infection. Fadi rarely prayed, but as his hands worked and the sweat beaded on his brow, he said a silent prayer to Allah beneath his surgical mask. And one to Yahweh just in case.
FOUR DAYS LATER, Yael was sitting up in bed, eating grapes and sipping pomegranate juice and, strangely, beginning to enjoy being a patient. Her private room was full of sunlight, a spectacular view over the Mediterranean, flowers, fruit, dozens of get-well cards, stuffed animals, and a pair of felt lungs inside a plastic rib cage, a joke from surgical coworkers in Jerusalem.
She’d been visited by colleagues and concerned friends. She’d been interviewed by the police, by Shin Bet, and by others who simply explained that they were from “the government.”
Her problem was that she had absolutely no memory of what had happened in Peki’in. The anesthetic, the shock, and hitting her head on the floor when she fell with Bilal on top of her had robbed her of the memory of two days of her life. She remembered going to Peki’in desperate to save poor, dead Bilal. She clearly remembered the drive and Yaniv. But from there her mind was a complete blank. She had no memory at all of the synagogue, the shooting, the imam, or the massacre. To her it was a complete blank, and no amount of thinking about it made any of the details reappear. As soon as she was feeling more like a human being, she’d ask Yaniv to remind her of the details.
THE TIME AND PLACE of the meeting were sent to Eliahu Spitzer’s phone by text message. He had wanted to go to the rabbi’s home, a place that felt like a sanctuary, in some ways more sacred than a synagogue to him. But the message was clear about the time and place, and Eliahu made his way slowly to Sacher Park by public transport and then walked the rest of the way.
Eliahu arrived as the sun was setting, bathing the Old City in warm light like rich honey. Christian domes and Islamic minarets were interspersed in amber shades amid clusters of mobile phone antennas and modern glass-and-chrome structures. In this light, at this quiet time of day, everything was beautiful. The bullets and the bombs and the blood that had been spilled here were purified by the sunset and, for fleeting moments, forgotten.
He gazed out across the open expanse to the clusters and strings of people moving through the park. The modern intersected with the ancient, both in the buildings of Jerusalem and its people: women in power suits, police officers in uniforms, youngsters drafted into the army using mobile phones in one hand and clutching high-powered rifles in the other, children in American T-shirts, Arabs in veils, and Orthodox Jews in black hats and frock coats.
Reb Shmuel Telushkin ambled up the path toward Eliahu, his gaze on no one and nothing in particular. Eliahu stood as his mentor and teacher approached, but the rabbi paid no mind and sat down on the end of the park bench without a word.
“How are you, Rabbi? I hope you’re well,” said Eliahu.
The rabbi drew a deep breath as he looked out across the park, but didn’t answer. Nor did he look at Eliahu.
“Your family?”
The rabbi gave a nod as his only response.
“Good,” answered Eliahu as a strange uneasiness spread over him.
The two men sat in silence for a long moment until the rabbi spoke with a voice so soft that Eliahu had to lean closer to hear.
“How many are dead?”
“Three,” replied Eliahu soberly.
“All of them Arabs?”
“Yes.”
“But there were others?” said the rabbi. “The girl . . . the doctor. And the American?”
Spitzer hesitated before answering. “Yes.”
“And what of them?” the rabbi asked in a tone that said he knew the answer already but that this, in true Jewish fashion, was to become a teaching moment.
Eliahu didn’t answer. He was not expecting to be questioned, and the interrogation took him by surprise. In his head he went through the responses he might give: that the two Jews who survived didn’t know anything; that they would be taken care of. But in the silence the rabbi turned to face him for the first time.
“What of them? Such a mess. This is not what should have been. When you came to us, I had such hopes. I thought that out of your tragedy . . . but it wasn’t to be.” The rabbi sighed.
Eliahu was starting to get annoyed. Where was the praise for what he had done for their cause? Where was the warm hand on his shoulder and the encouragement for what he must do next to prepare Israel for the Messiah?
“Nobody could have foreseen what—”
“God foresees! The Almighty knows everything! You may have been blind to the consequences, but because of your failure we are weaker today than before. Because of you!” The rabbi shook his head in dismay.
Eliahu was too stunned to speak. A grown and experienced soldier, a man who had seen more war than most, and suddenly he felt like a schoolboy being reprimanded.
The scolding continued. “Who is our puppet now, huh? Which Arabs can we call upon to place their bombs? Huh? When this false government”—he waved a hand in the direction of the Knesset—“starts to talk of a peace process once again, who will throw the stones? If there is peace, this false Israel becomes strong. But while there is violence it is weak; it can be torn down and God’s will be done.”
“There will be others. I can find another imam,” Eliahu said desperately.
“Bah!” spat the rabbi. “This failure cannot be endured.”
“What are you saying, Rabbi? What can I do?” begged Eliahu.
“Nothing. You can do nothing.” The rabbi stood.
“The doctor and her boyfriend, they know nothing. They have nothing to hurt us.”
“There is too much attention around them. Too much attention on you. You have failed, and exposed yourself by your failure. It is a matter of time before your Shin Bet brothers come for you.”
“Rabbi. Please.”
“There is nothing you can do. We have no place for you.”
And with that, the rabbi walked away into the sinking sun and fading light.
UNUSUALLY FOR A MAN whose life had been dedicated to action, Eliahu Spitzer sat in his office for much of the evening, incapable of moving. He had intended to return home but he was fixed to his chair, his mind in turmoil, ever since returning from his meeting with Reb Telushkin in the park.
He looked around his familiar office: the television, the bookshelf, the photographs on the wall of him smiling and shaking hands with prime ministers, presidents, and heads of foreign delegations. He looked at his desk; there were no papers or files, just a photograph, a computer screen, and a keyboard. Typical of his orderly life, no mess, no fuss, everything in its precise place. It was his Germanic background: everything had to be precisely so.
He couldn’t stand the offices of his colleagues, where coffee cups and books and documents obscured the tops of their desks. All that was allowed on top of his desk, aside from the screen and the keyboard, was a photograph of his beloved dead daughter, Shoshanna, when she was just nine years old, smiling at him from the distant past, dressed in a swimsuit, standing on a sandy beach against a blue sea and sky. It was a vacation they’d taken when he’d been posted to America. Where was it? Oh, yes, Florida. She was smiling back at him. Those were halcyon days of innocence and happiness. He would give anything just to hold her again, just to have her young, innocent arms draped around his neck, telling him she loved him and that he was the best daddy in the entire world.
He found himself immensely tired—so exhausted that he could easily drop off to sleep in his chair. All this duplicity, lying, cunning, and subterfuge had drained him of everything, including his own self. But his energy had come from his cause: to create a land of chaos so that the Messiah, the Jewish Messiah, would know that he had to come again and save his people and Israel. None of his former friends or his family understood or even knew of his mission; he’d only seen his Shoshanna, so young and happy in that brilliant light, beckoning him to come to her. He thought he could bring her back when the Messiah returned.
But Reb Telushkin had cut him dead. All the struggles, all the cunning. Why should he continue with it? Why struggle when it was so easy to close his eyes and sleep? And in sleep, in sleeping forever, he’d see his Shoshanna again. Hold her, hug her, protect her.
And he closed his eyes, and in the blackness he saw again the brilliant white light. Framed in the center of the light was the distant face of his Shoshanna. He would do anything to hold her again, his precious, beautiful daughter. Eliahu said a b’rucha over his girl, as though this were the anniversary of the day she was murdered.
“Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say Amen.”
He opened his eyes, suddenly feeling calm and rested. Knotted muscles uncoiled. Now he knew what he would do. He should have done it years ago, but it wasn’t too late. In fact, this was the best time to do it. He opened his desk drawer, took out his prayer book, and opened it to Hallel, the Praise of God. When he’d finished saying the prayer, he took out a revolver from the back of his drawer, said another quick b’rucha, this one for the rest of his family, and put the barrel in his mouth.
The last word he said before he pulled the trigger was his daughter’s name.
Shoshanna.
IT WAS A BLISTERINGLY HOT Sabbath day. Others hoped that their one day free of work would reward them with prayer and that after the worship they could return to their homes from the synagogue in Peki’in to benefit from the occasional breeze that might blow up from the olive groves below. Then they could rest.
But Abram ben Yitzhak, grandson of the beloved builder of the synagogue—Samuel the olive merchant—and his good wife, Sarah, had a duty to perform and until it was done, he would earn neither respite nor a cool breeze.
Today was the anniversary of his grandfather Samuel’s death all those years ago, and so it was Abram’s duty to visit the cemetery and say prayers. The young lad remembered his grandfather with enormous fondness; remembered how he would sit beside him in the synagogue and Grandfather Samuel would explain the meaning of every stone, every column, every artifact, and why he had the builders place them there. His favorite moments were when Grandfather Samuel told him of the way he’d escaped the Romans when they’d destroyed Jerusalem, of Samuel’s bravery on the journey, of the way he’d saved the life of Grandmother Sarah and her family, of how he’d tricked the Roman centurion when he’d boldly faced him on the road north by sending Grandmother Sarah to hide in the woods, and of how he’d entered the village of Peki’in to crowds lining the streets and thinking that he was the king of Israel.
But those days were long gone. The Romans now owned all of Israel and the surrounding nations, their legions were everywhere, Jews were servants in their own land, and anybody who opposed their Roman rulers was crucified along the roadside. Many of the Jews of Israel, especially those who had somehow survived the siege of Jerusalem, had been expelled, sent to other countries as slaves. But those who remained had learned to live their lives in isolation, and the village of Peki’in was rarely bothered by centurions or their troops, who generally marched north and south along the coast road and the Highway of the Kings.
And so life in Peki’in continued as it had always continued: growing olives in the valley, making pottery, and supplying other villages with herbs and spices, which grew in abundance on the rugged hills.
Abram had lived in Peki’in all his life, and in the past years had tended to his family’s graves now that his father Yitzhak was bedridden. Unusually, Grandfather Samuel had written before his death that he wanted his bones to be dug up after two years, when his flesh had been eaten by worms, and placed in a limestone ossuary, a practice that had not been undertaken for at least two lifetimes. He had learned of the technique because he’d lived for many years in Jerusalem, where the cemeteries were full of such bone boxes, as the villagers crudely called them. When his testament had become known two years earlier, there was disquiet in the village, but the rabbi of the synagogue had decreed that there was no part of Jewish law that forbade it, nor did Roman law in Judea deny the right of a Jew to an ossuary, and so it had been done.
Now, as Abram left the small but beautiful synagogue, he kissed the two stones that his grandfather had taken from the destroyed temple in Jerusalem built by King Herod, a curse on his name and may his evil children piss on his grave, and walked the half a league to the village cemetery up on the hill. He found his grandfather’s grave and said the memorial prayer, said a prayer for his Grandmother Sarah, placed fruit and bread on both graves, and left the cemetery by a different road. Instead of returning to the village, Abram sat on a rock and scrutinized the surrounding countryside. Satisfied that there were no Romans, no spies looking at his activities, and no villagers to notice what he was doing, Abram walked along a shepherd’s track to the upper hills above Peki’in.
He continued to stop and sit on rocks with a commanding view of the village and its roadways, checking, always checking, that nobody was watching him. Only four people in the village knew who was living in the cave he was about to enter. If word spread and the information came to the ears of the Romans, then not only would the two blessed men be crucified but the entire village would suffer decimation, in which one in ten of the residents would be hauled out of the square and whipped, have his eyes gouged out, and then be nailed upside down on a cross of wood as a Roman lesson to all who dared to disobey.
After Abraham climbed a narrow rocky track that led to the top of the mighty hill, the mouth of the cave came into sight. Panting from exertion, Abram stood beside the low-lying limbs of a carob tree and rested. Above the screams of two ospreys circling high in the sky searching for prey, he heard the voices of two men, one older than the other, in heated argument. He smiled and continued to listen to the frenzied words, the fury of one, the denial of the other. Abram could have spent the day just listening to them arguing. The anger, the indignation, the vehemence, the wounded pride, the treachery, the forgiveness, the love, the concern—it was a school for adults, an energetic and animated search for the truth, which he loved listening to.
“Fool of a son,” said the father. “How could your mother have given birth to such a blockhead? Don’t you understand the beauty of what I’m describing? How could you argue for such a simplistic form of the Divine when you just have to look around you and—”
“Father,” interrupted the son, shouting over the other’s voice, “my love for you knows no bounds, but your portrayal of the Shekinah shows me that your eyes are dim and your mind needs rest. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meetings because the cloud had settled upon it. And the cloud was the Glory of the Lord. It is the very nature of—”
“Idiot! Imbecile! This shows you have no understanding of the word ‘cloud.’ What it means is . . .”
And so they continued, and Abram would have listened for much longer had it not been the Sabbath and his mother expecting him home from synagogue and the cemetery. He coughed and called out the code. The interruption immediately made the men stop speaking. From the mouth of the cave, a tentative voice said softly, “Abram?”
In a low, gravelly voice, the boy said mischievously, “It is Yahweh, the Shekinah, Adonai, the Cloud and Spirit of our people Israel.”
A man walked out of the cave, beaming with joy. “Abram,” said the older of the two men, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who had lived there for the past twelve years. He opened his arms, and Abram walked gleefully forward and hugged the scholar. “How are you, my lovely child?” he asked.
Abram was about to answer, when Rabbi Shimon’s son, Rabbi Eleazar, walked out, smiled when he saw his father and the young boy, and joined in the hug.
Eagerly, Abram said, “I’ve brought you food and—”
“Wait,” said Rabbi Eleazar, “let us thank the Lord God Almighty that you are safe and that you have been spared to visit us again.”
And the three of them prayed. When they’d finished thanking the Almighty for His many blessings, the two rabbis eagerly waited for Abram to open the sack he was carrying, and gazed ravenously at the food. His mother, one of the few who knew of the rabbis in the cave, had packed cheese and bread, fish caught from the sea the previous day, and pastes of olive and herbs.
Eleazar thanked the Almighty that for at least a few days they wouldn’t have to eat the fruit of the nearby carob tree, which, though delicious, was boring after days of eating nothing else. They went into the cave and sat on wooden stools, which Abram had brought to them when his father had become bedridden from a farming accident and handed over the care of the rabbis to his trust.
Yitzhak had first hidden the rabbis when they escaped the vengeance of the Roman commanders in Jerusalem. It was an incident that had become Jewish folklore: Rabbi Shimon was debating the effect of the conquerors on the land when he openly criticized the Romans for constructing marketplaces, baths, forums, roads, and bridges not for the benefit of those who had been conquered but for their own benefit. He mused about the reasons why conquerors rape and pillage a land instead of bringing the benefits of their civilization to those people now under their control. Overheard by a Jewish spy who reported his words to a centurion, Rabbi Shimon was condemned to death, but he escaped to the uncharted wastes of the Galilee with his son. They were taken in by Abram’s father and given safety in a distant cave far above the village in the mountains, where they’d lived for year after year.
Abram sat with his friends, the rabbis, and refused their offer of food. “My mother prepared this for you, and I can eat freely when I go home this afternoon,” he said.
The rabbis nodded and continued eating the bread, saying separate blessings over each different part of the meal.
“Rabbi,” said Abram.
“Yes?” they both said at once, the son smiling and nodding in deference to the father.
“Yes, Abram, what is it?” asked Rabbi Shimon as he stuffed another piece of sheep’s cheese into his mouth.
“There’s talk of another uprising against the Romans. Another Zealot uprising. If there is one, should I join in?”
Rabbi Shimon reeled in horror. “God forbid, my child. Don’t talk that way. Don’t think that way. The last time there was an uprising against the Romans, they crucified Zealots by the thousands, called our land Judea, and even then took away our name, Israel, the name that our forefather was given when he changed his name from Jacob. It means triumphant with God, but God’s home has now been destroyed. And to further humiliate us, the devils now call our beloved nation Philistia, mocking us by calling us after King David’s mortal enemies, the Philistines. And Jerusalem, our precious Jerusalem, was destroyed. And look at it now. A foul Roman city they call Aelia Capitolina with pigs roaming the street and with temples and idols where their gods Jupiter and Mars and Venus are worshipped.
“No, Abram, God’s eyes are closed when He looks at the Israel of King David and the prophets. He smiles on our brothers, who have been exiled to distant lands, but He doesn’t smile on us, and if we do anything to further anger the Romans, they’ll bring legion after legion to our hills and valleys and then there will be nobody left. We’ll be crucified or exiled. And only God Almighty knows which is the worse fate for the Jews.”
Abram shook his head. He was only fourteen years of age, a man by Jewish custom and tradition, but he was still loath to argue with such a renowned figure as Rabbi Shimon. “But, Rabbi, when the emperor Hadrian visited Jerusalem a few years ago, he promised to rebuild the temple. Isn’t that good?”
Rabbi Eleazar interrupted. “He will rebuild the temple, but he’s announced that the new building will be dedicated to their god Jupiter. And don’t forget Hadrian’s ban on circumcision, the act of commitment of Jews to our Lord God. No, Abram, we are a defeated people, and you must not—”
“But what about Simon bar Kokhba? Even Rabbi Akiva has called him a messiah. He will rise up and defeat the Romans and save us all. Won’t he?” the boy said plaintively.
The two rabbis looked at Abram’s eager face, a young Jewish boy hoping for an end to the misery of the Romans, a boy just wanting to be free of the chains that bound him into servitude.
Rabbi Shimon sighed, smiled at the lad, and nodded. “Perhaps Bar Kokhba will gather our people together and fight the Romans. And please God Almighty that if he does rise up, that he wins, because if he loses, then the Romans will be merciless. They’ll exile every Jew and the land will be empty and desolate of people, our fields sowed with salt, our woods burned. Then where will we go?”
Abram looked at Rabbi Shimon, his face creased with a frown.
“But these things probably won’t happen, my dear. God will protect us. Those who were sent into exile will return. It may take a hundred years, a thousand years, maybe more, but they will return. Meanwhile, those of us who remain in Israel will keep the flame of Judaism alive, just like the Maccabees kept their flame alive in the time of the Greeks. Who knows what plans the Almighty has in store for us?”
Now the father and son looked at each other. Abram wondered what they were thinking.
“Abram, my child. As you know, my son and I are unable to leave this cave. And it is very likely that most of the Jews who live in Israel will be expelled should there be another onslaught by the Romans. Many will tell you that it is not going to happen, but God has spoken to us and has told us to prepare the Jewish people for a long and sorry separation from our land.”
Abram began to argue, but the elderly rabbi held up his hand. He reached into his robes and took out a piece of stone. It was beautiful, made perhaps of alabaster or white onyx. Looking at it closely, it had very odd Hebrew writing on it, writing such as Abram hadn’t seen before.
“My child, this tablet was put inside a tunnel that runs from the floor of the Kidron Valley to the top of the mountain, where the Romans now live. The top of this tunnel comes out at the very foot of the temple. It was placed there in the time of King Solomon and was removed by those Jews who were exiled to Babylon in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar. They returned it and replaced it, Abram, but when we were forced to leave Jerusalem, my son, Rabbi Eleazar, though but a child, risked his life to retrieve it. We didn’t know then what would happen to us Jews, but it now looks as though there will be no Jews living here when the Romans are done with us.”
The old rabbi didn’t know how to make the request he had in mind, and he looked at his son, tears filling his eyes. But suddenly Abram said, “Why don’t I go to Jerusalem and put it back? Then, if all the Jews leave Israel, at least the Lord God Adonai Elohim will know that we used to be here.”
The boy’s eager and innocent face, completely unaware of the dangers that faced him on the incredible journey he was offering to undertake, made the old rabbi cry. He hugged the boy and kissed his head.
“And,” said Abram excitedly, “when I get to Jerusalem, I’ll hide the tablet in a crack in the wall and cover it with mud so that no Roman will find it. Of course, Adonai will know where it is, because He sees everything.”
Rabbi Eleazar said softly, “Let us pray, Abram, for God’s love and mercy to save our people, Israel. Let us pray that we are not exiled as we were in the time of the Babylonians. Let us pray for your safe return from this journey.”
They walked to the precipitous edge, surveyed the village of Peki’in far below them, and prayed together. In the center of the village was the square, populated by many people walking about on a Sabbath afternoon, sitting on stools shaded by cloths from the midday sun, and enjoying the weekly luxury of not working. In the middle of the village square, a spring, which slaked the thirst of the rabbis in the cave before it descended back into the mountain, ran out and cascaded down the ruts it had cut into the rock over countless millennia. Not far from the square was the roof of the synagogue where the villagers had just been praying, a prayer house built by Abram’s grandfather to the memory of a good doctor, long forgotten.
It was a building of love and peace and harmony, where the Jews gathered every evening and many mornings before work to pray to the Lord God Almighty.
Rabbi Shimon sighed as he looked down at the amity and accord of the village. Perhaps this is what God wanted for His people Israel. Jerusalem had been nothing but a thousand-year dream, one that would be inhabited by the Romans for another thousand years. And when their empire came to an end and died, as had the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek empires, Jerusalem would be inhabited by another invader. Or maybe the Jews who had been exiled would return and rebuild the temple. Who knew?
But in the meantime the Jews of Peki’in, and those Jews adjusting to their new lives in distant lands, would carry the Temple of Jerusalem in their hearts. And a part of the Temple of Jerusalem would be in every synagogue where they gathered: to pray, to do, to be.
YANIV FELT HIDEOUSLY uncomfortable in the synagogue. He didn’t want to return to Peki’in, to relive the horror, to remember the smell of bullets and hatred and death. But Yael had insisted. She had to reclaim her memory of that terrible day, and no matter how much Yaniv told her of what had happened, no matter that he related the incidents minute by minute, it didn’t satisfy her. She had to return to recall, to re-create, to reexperience, to fix the day in her mind: the time between arriving in Peki’in and waking up in the hospital to the sound of beeping monitors and the expectant faces of nurses and doctors.
They walked into the synagogue and Yael’s gaze was immediately drawn to the blood on the floor. After the police and forensic experts had departed the place and the synagogue was no longer a crime scene, attempts by caretakers and cleaners to remove the stains had been valiant but ultimately unsuccessful. Where once bright red blood had pumped from the still-beating hearts of three men mortally wounded, now the luminous sheen had become a dark brown ominous stain. It was as though the lives of three vital men had oozed through the floorboards and drained into the ground, invisible, veiled, and eternal.
She looked at the stains and wondered whether the good or the evil had leached out of their bodies into the ground. Troubled, Yael reached for Yaniv’s hand and their fingers intertwined not in affection but for protection.
“Bilal was there.” He nodded toward a stain on the floor where once a congregant’s bench had sat. “Over there”—he nodded to a spot nearby—“was where Hassan fell. And there”—he nodded again, this time toward the front of the synagogue—“was where the imam’s body ended up. For some reason, when he fell, he seemed to fall furthest from you.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the stains, knowing that once they were parts of human beings. She felt absolutely no emotion. She was a doctor and very used to blood, and in the years since she’d become a surgeon, she’d trained herself not to feel revulsion, empathy, or compassion. She would just get on with her job of saving lives. But this was different. This was a wooden floor, blemished and inanimate, and despite what her intellect told her, she couldn’t feel any association with pain or grief or loss.
Yet, she couldn’t take her eyes off the stain on the wooden floor where Bilal’s blood had been spilled. His blood; her blood. They’d come from the same bloodline. Perhaps their lines had been joined when the Muslims were exiled from Circassia in the middle of the nineteenth century; perhaps when the Jews were expelled from Israel by the Romans in the first century. It was a history she’d never be able to uncover. But in the end, what did it matter? What difference did it make that she was a Jew living in Israel and Bilal had been an Arab living in the same country but wanted to call it Palestine. What did it matter? They were all human beings. And trace everybody’s ancestry back a couple of million years and they all had the same mother, a four-foot-nothing apelike creature living in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. What did it all matter in the end?
She turned to Yaniv and said softly, “Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, they were standing on the ledge outside the cave, high above the village of Peki’in, where legend had it that a famous rabbi and his son had hidden for fourteen years from the Roman invaders. In that time they were supposed to have eaten from the fruit of the massive carob tree that had spread over the entire hillside, and drunk water from a spring inside the cave; but a landslide sometime in history had closed off the cave and all that remained was the entrance.
Yael and Yaniv sat on a bench that the local authorities had placed nearby for the thousands of religious tourists who came to say prayers at Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s cave.
“Well?” said Yaniv. He sounded diffident, almost reluctant to ask.
She shook her head. “Nothing. There’s no memory. I just can’t picture a thing. I remember the synagogue because I’ve been there before, but I have no memory at all of Bilal and Hassan and the imam being there. It’s as if my mind is a slate and somebody has rubbed out the words.”
Yaniv nodded and, deep in thought, continued to look over the town. The terra-cotta roofs, the bright café awnings, the cars negotiating the narrow lanes—it was like a picture postcard. Yet, just weeks ago, half a mile away, a murderer called Eliahu Spitzer, a willing servant of a crazed ultra-religious Jewish sect called Neturei Karta, had killed three people and almost succeeded in killing Yael and him. And, of course, it had all been hushed up by the government, who’d told him that if he had hard, concrete evidence to show them of Neturei Karta’s involvement in the murders or the plots to bring down the government, then show them; if not, keep schtum and don’t cause trouble between the secular and the religious communities. And in return for them not making waves, no charges would be brought against either Yael or him for abducting Bilal from lawful custody.
So Eliahu’s suicide had been put down to grief. The murders of the imam, Bilal, and Hassan, for want of evidence, had been earmarked as the work of a new and violent Islamic terrorist group. And the wounding of Yael had been an accident of proximity: wrong place at the wrong time. A senior executive of Shin Bet had visited the mosque in Bayt al Gizah and spoken to the community leaders, telling them that the imam’s coterie of young terrorists would be disbanded immediately or certain young people would be arrested. It was all so neat.
Yaniv felt Yael’s closeness, her warmth, and thanked God that she was alive and well and that her wound would heal and leave her with only a small scar on her chest. He reached over and kissed her on the neck, then the cheek. With a shock, he realized that he’d never kissed her before. Not properly. She had beautiful skin.
But she didn’t seem to notice. She was miles away in thought. He heard her exhale long and hard, as if she were venting her body of the last evil breath, the last evil thought, before returning to her peaceful world of trauma surgery, where she was in charge and nobody except for the fortunes of nature was ordering her about.
As though she were talking to herself, she asked softly, “One thing I still don’t understand. How did Spitzer know that we’d be in the synagogue? Why did he come up from Jerusalem? Who told him?”
Yaniv thought hard how to respond. Just as softly as Yael had asked, he replied, “Perhaps the imam, and Spitzer used it as an opportunity to take him out. Perhaps it was Hassan playing a double game. Or perhaps he followed one of us using satellite tracking and blew away the only people who could connect him to the attempt to destroy the temple and expose him as a member of Neturei Karta.”
He instantly regretted saying it. Her mind was dazed, and he knew he shouldn’t be specific. He held his breath, hoping that his answer would be the end of her questions.
She rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm protectively around her waist. It was so peaceful up here. Below her in the valley was laid out a history of people wrought in the landscape, in the streams and rivers, in caves and villages. A history of rulers and religion, of power and corruption. Of love and loss and hope.
People had survived here when war, disaster, and persecution were bent on destroying them. People had been trapped here when their neighbors refused to harbor them. People had fled here when they had nowhere else to go.
And yet, despite all the blood that had stained the soil in the valley below her, to Yael it seemed so very peaceful.
“This is the only country in the world that has more trees at the end of the year than it does at the beginning,” Yael said softly, almost to herself. Yaniv’s only response was to smile and draw her closer.
Looking down at the peaceful village of Peki’in, she thought for a moment how pleasant it would be to live in a tiny community and do menial work close to nature and to whatever passed in her mind for a deity.
Just weeks ago evil had visited that village, pierced the sanctity of its synagogue with bullet holes, and spilled blood in the place where men, women, and children worshipped an invisible deity. An imam corrupting a boy to strap a bomb to his body; a rabbi manipulating the pain of a soldier to make him a weapon.
To some, such acts would encourage and inspire; to others they would create outrage, fear, and distrust. As for Yael, she might never remember how Bilal shielded her from the bullets, never remember the sacrifice she would not be able to repay. But she remembered Bilal, his face and the bloodline connection she was yet to understand. Rather than despair, she felt a strange kind of calm. That bloodline was a part of the country in which she stood.
When she was a child, Yael’s family had taken a vacation to America. They had traveled through the great national parks and in South Dakota she had visited the huge carved mountain memorial of the Native American chief Crazy Horse. His immortal words had stayed with her all these years: “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” Yet, it was only now, as she gazed out over the valley, that she understood what they meant. The country wasn’t hers; she didn’t own it. She belonged to it. The land owned her and all who lived here—it always had and always would. And it would never let her go.
She turned to Yaniv and said quietly, “I wonder when . . . when in our family history Bilal and I became joined?”
He didn’t answer. It would always remain one of the hidden secrets of human history. Just like the seal that Bilal had discovered when he accidentally blew the detonator in the tunnel and brought a small part of the roof down. Her late grandfather Shalman had been thrilled by the discovery, but for Yael and for Yaniv it was one of the mysteries of a life that other people had once lived. Unknowable, undiscoverable, and eternal. And now, regardless of the fate of the people who had made it and then discovered it millennia later, the seal would sit for all time on a museum shelf, behind glass, looked at by countless generations of people. And in the end, what did it all matter?
She nuzzled further into his neck, feeling warm and secure. As the sun began to set over the distant Mediterranean, they stood and slowly walked back to their car.
And then they drove back to Jerusalem.