Haji Ibrahim wept in an upstairs room near the Souq al-Lahamin: the meat market in the Old City’s Muslim quarter. Some tears were outrage at what the Israelis were doing to his people and to the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary—the Arabic name for the Temple Mount. Some would have flowed anyway; one thing the Israelis were doing was firing tear gas to bring the rioters outside under control.
His refuge was supposed to be airtight. Lots of things that were supposed to be something didn’t live up to the promise. This was one; gas leaked into the room.
So the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was crying, too. Haji Jamal Ashrawi was close to seventy, with bushy sideburns and thick glasses that magnified his eyes. He wagged a forefinger at Ibrahim. “Do you see?” he demanded, his accent Egyptian. “Do you see? You spend all these years kissing the dogs’ behinds, and they pay you back this way. God is just, for you deserve it.”
“Easy for you to say.” The director of the Waqf tried not to get angry, but he did. “You never had responsibility. If we talked to the Zionists as you speak to the faithful, do you know what would have happened?”
“They would have respected and feared you,” Ashrawi said. “They understand nothing but a clenched fist.”
“Ha!” Ibrahim laughed bitterly. Ashrawi looked shocked—when had anyone last laughed at him? Too long ago, Ibrahim thought. “They would have booted the Waqf out of the Haram al-Sharif and taken it over for themselves.”
“And it would have been war with the Muslim world!” Haji Jamal exclaimed.
“That wouldn’t have helped the Noble Sanctuary,” Ibrahim said. “How many plots have the Jews made to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa? Israeli authorities stopped them. We didn’t. We couldn’t. If the authorities stood back, that would all be gone, and the Jews would build their miserable Third Temple.”
“Not one Temple was ever there before, let alone two,” Ashrawi said. “Besides, they are going to do it anyway.”
“God prevent it!” Ibrahim said. But the talk he’d had with Colonel Shragai made him fear the Grand Mufti was right. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have kindled the unrest in Jerusalem.
“God will do as He wills,” Jamal Ashrawi said. “Don’t you see? The Final Days draw near. The prophet Jesus, peace be upon Him, and the Mahdi will put down the False Prophet’s army. The prophet and the Mahdi will kill every pig there is and break every cross, and Islam will be the only faith in the world.”
“So may it be.” Ibrahim didn’t like the way Ashrawi preached in ordinary conversation. Did the Grand Mufti think him ignorant? Ibrahim was too caught up in the flow of events to worry about the Final Days, but he knew what would happen then.
Was that time near? Till the dirty bomb went off, Ibrahim wouldn’t have believed it. Now…Who could say? Events were taking on their own momentum—or God’s.
Outside, in the souq, somebody fired an AK-47. That buda-buda-buda was unmistakable. Harsher Israeli Galils returned fire. A bullet punched a hole in the wall. Somebody shrieked, whether in Arabic or Hebrew Ibrahim couldn’t tell—pain had its own vocabulary.
The Souq al-Lahamin usually displayed meat, from chops to sheep’s heads with staring eyes. Now there was torn human flesh down there, human blood on the cobbles.
“Send the Zionists to hell,” the Grand Mufti said. “Let Satan give them filth to eat and fire to drink.”
“What if that’s one of ours crying out?” Ibrahim asked.
“Then he rises to Paradise, like the martyrs who died to strike the infidels in Tel Aviv,” Ashrawi replied. “He rises to Paradise, and he shall have joy in the rivers of milk and wine, in the arms of the houris there, and in the presence of God forever.”
“May it be so,” Ibrahim said.
Someone banged on the front door. A frightened teenager rushed in. “The Israelis!” he exclaimed. The bangs got louder and more insistent. The soldiers would break in whether anyone let them in or not.
“Time to go,” Ashrawi said. He and the teenager and Ibrahim hurried away. There was another way out, one Islam’s enemies wouldn’t find soon enough. This struggle had gone on a long time. The Israelis had made their preparations, the Palestinians theirs. The duel wouldn’t end…until the Final Days, Haji Ibrahim thought as he hurried down a narrow, dark, dusty stairway.
Ibrahim uneasily remembered the Grand Mufti’s words. How far off were those days? Maybe they lay closer than the head of the Waqf had believed.
* * *
—
A plump, pale, middle-aged woman in a wide-brimmed hat got out of a little Nissan at the administration building in Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah. If she wasn’t a tourist, Yitzhak Avigad had never seen one. Sure enough, she nodded to him and said, “Shalom! Sorry—that’s most of my Hebrew. D’you speak English?”
She sounded sure he would. And he nodded back. “Yes. What is it?” Then, sharply: “Did the guards check you?” She looked harmless. She sounded American. But you never could tell.
“Heavens to Betsy, I should say so!” she exclaimed. “Went over the car like you wouldn’t believe, and this girl patted me down.” She blushed. “I told ’em I was on Professor Louvish’s dig at the Mount of Olives, and dang if they didn’t call him and try and make me out a liar.”
If she was working with Yoram Louvish, she wouldn’t blow anything up. Heavens to Betsy? Dang? Yitzhak knew the expressions, but sure didn’t hear them much. “Who are you?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
“My name’s Barbara Taylor, but everybody calls me Barb,” she said. “And I came down here because I wanted to see the red heifer.”
“Oh,” Yitzhak said heavily. Would this place turn into a tourist Mecca—he winced at the comparison—despite everything? “Why is that?”
“Because the Last Days are coming. The Antichrist and the Tribulation and all.” She sounded surprised he needed to ask. “But the heifer’s here now. It’s like it’s part of prophecy you can reach out and touch, or look at, anyway.”
“Oh,” Yitzhak said again, this time with only apprehension in his voice. The last thing he wanted—well, this side of a car bomb—was swarms of born-agains (she couldn’t be anything else) descending on Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah.
His first impulse was to tell her to get lost. But, standing there toasting in the sun, she was plainly less dangerous than the cats that prowled around the kibbutz. Dumpy and ditzy as she was, she brought out a soft streak he hadn’t known he had.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “All right?” Barb Taylor nodded. He went on, “You can see Rosie—Shoshanah, we’re calling her—if you promise you won’t tell anybody—anybody—you did. We don’t want her on display.”
“Cross my heart,” Barb said at once, and damned if she didn’t sketch a cross there. “What I promise, I deliver, too.”
Yitzhak believed her. He’d got to know enough people with beliefs like hers to see most of them were uncommonly reliable. If they said they would do something, they meant it. “Come on,” he told her. “The heifer’s in the barn.”
She came. She was pathetically eager. People stared as she went by. A few folks on the kibbutz were almost as fair, but her skin wasn’t what set her apart. The eagerness did. It shone from her—like shook foil, Yitzhak thought, recalling the line from some English poet but unable to remember which one.
“This is so exciting!” She leaned forward as she walked—the barn, or the heifer, might have been pulling her like a lodestone.
“Don’t expect anything special,” Yitzhak warned. “Rosie looks like, acts like, well, a cow. She is.”
“But she’s not any old cow,” Barb Taylor answered. “She’s the cow God sent so the Temple could rise again.” She beamed at Yitzhak, as if sure they knew the same thing.
He said, “Well, yes,” but he wasn’t so sure. Yes, God had sent the red heifer. What would happen afterwards…Jews thought one t
hing, Christians another, and Muslims something else. Each group was the hero in its own story, and the villain in the outsiders’. But we’re right, Yitzhak thought as they reached the barn.
Barb Taylor wrinkled her nose. If Yitzhak hadn’t guessed she was a city woman, that would have told him. He preferred barnyard smells to smoke and diesel fumes. No accounting for taste, though.
“She’s in this stall,” Yitzhak said, leading Barb past a man shoveling what would become fertilizer but was now definitely and unmistakably cowshit.
“She’s so beautiful!” the American gasped.
Yitzhak thought Shoshanah was beautiful, too, but not like that. Barb Taylor saw the Second Coming in a cow’s hindquarters and switching tail. To the Israeli, she was a means to an end: sanctifying the priests who’d serve the Third Temple. To Barb, she was—what? A harbinger. Yitzhak hadn’t thought he knew that English word, but it seemed to fit.
“May I…touch her?” Barb asked.
No. The word automatically came to Yitzhak’s lips, but didn’t pass them. Rosie was a good-natured creature, and so, obviously, was Barb Taylor. “All right,” he said, “but only for a second.”
“Thank you!” she breathed.
He stepped into the stall and turned the red heifer away from the manger. He led her to the gate. “Go ahead,” he told Barb.
Eyes wide, the American woman stroked the heifer’s velvet muzzle. “Oh,” she said. She stared at her hand—she might have been a teenager who’d touched a rock star and was telling herself she’d never wash it again. Shoshanah snorted in mild confusion. People often perplexed her. Barb didn’t look perplexed—she looked exalted. “You don’t know what this means to me,” she told Yitzhak.
That might well be true. “Now it’s done,” Yitzhak said. He let the red heifer go back to her feed. Yitzhak left the stall and closed the gate. “You did what you came to do.”
“Yes. Thanks. You were very kind,” Barb said. No one had accused Yitzhak of that lately. The American woman started out. He followed. The kibbutznik shoveling shit gave them a curious look, but for a wonder kept quiet. Barb Taylor blinked in the sun outside. She might have been coming back to herself. “Touching history is wonderful—that’s why I enjoyed the dig with Professor Louvish so much. But touching prophecy’s even better. It’s touching history before the history happens.”
“I guess so.” Of course Yitzhak believed in prophecy—would he have put so much of his life into the Third Temple if he didn’t? But he thought about what the Scriptures said. To him, that was what led to understanding.
Not to Barb, not if he read her right. She grabbed an idea and hung on tight, and that was it. He thought that made her likely to be wrong, but he knew plenty of people, including some Jews, who would disagree.
She got back into the car. “Thanks again,” she said. “I’ll remember you in my prayers.”
“All right,” he replied. What else could you say? He figured God listened to goyim when He felt like it, but did He listen to foolish goyim? Rosie wasn’t the Golden Calf.
Barb drove off. By the way she shifted, Yitzhak could tell she was used to an automatic transmission. Most Americans were.
He shook his head, wryly amused. If God listened to foolish Jews, why wouldn’t He listen to foolish goyim sometimes, too?
* * *
—
“I want you to pray,” the Reverend Lester Stark said. “Pray for peace in the world, and especially in the Middle East.” He looked solemn. “Some ministers seem to pray for war, hoping war now will usher in the Antichrist and the Last Days. I don’t know how they can do that in good conscience. I’m sorry, friends, but I don’t.”
He thought some of his colleagues had embarrassed the whole Christian movement in the United States. When you said God struck down a fat old Israeli politician because he’d removed settlers from Palestinian land, who’d take you seriously? Nobody in his right mind, not so far as Stark could see. If the other minister was sincere…Even if he was, he was so far out in left field, he was up in the bleachers.
But Jesus said, Judge not, lest ye be judged. Sometimes Stark thought that required superhuman forbearance.
Sighing, he went on, “War will come, if that’s what God wants. But hoping for war, praying for war, seems to be doing the work of Satan and the Antichrist. If you have no peace at the bottom of your heart, how can you hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Pray for peace. Work for peace. If war comes anyhow, fight hard, fight clean, fight fair. And when it’s over, work for peace again.”
He looked out at the congregation. Some people were nodding. But he saw more frowns and scowls than usual. Some people wanted, needed, to hate their enemies. When someone they respected told them that wasn’t a good idea, they didn’t like it.
“Remember what the Book of Luke says in chapter 23, verse 46. Jesus was up on the cross then, His human flesh dying in such slow, painful agony that few people today can even imagine it. And what did He say? ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’
“Take that lesson to heart. It was the last one Jesus had for us before His Resurrection, and He gave up the ghost right afterwards. He was dying, and He still forgave. Now you, who I hope are blessed by good health and will remain so for many years, you could do worse than to think on that. Revenge and recrimination aren’t worth the torment they inflict on your soul.”
Some scowls turned to thoughtful frowns. Some frowns smoothed out. But not all. After the cameras went out, a man asked, “What about the Israelis? Don’t they have a right to get their own back after what those no-good…you-know-whats did to Tel Aviv?”
“That’s not easy to answer,” Stark said carefully. “Judaism does not follow the New Testament. There is a case for An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth in the Old Testament. Not all Jews live by that, but some do. If they judge it necessary to preserve their state from further attacks…You would have to be a bold man to tell them they were wrong.”
“You’ve got something there.” The man bobbed his head. “Thanks, Reverend.”
“You’re welcome.” Stark was unfailingly polite. His friends applauded him for that; it unnerved his foes. You couldn’t slam him as you could so many preachers who guided huge flocks on television. If you did, chances were you’d look petty yourself.
Even now, part of him wished he had an ordinary church with a congregation of ordinary size. You got to know people then, and know all their problems. Hearing about troubles by letters and e-mails and desperate phone calls wasn’t the same. If you knew people, you could—sometimes—deal with troubles before they got catastrophically bad.
But, even if the good he did was less concentrated this way, he did more when you added it up. He brought in more money for good works than he would have with an ordinary church and congregation. He had more overhead, too, but, again, what he accomplished justified it.
“Good sermon!” somebody called as he headed back toward privacy. “I hope people listen. We’d be better off if they did.”
“Thanks,” Lester Stark said. “They don’t have to listen to me, necessarily. They just need to listen, period. Plenty of people are saying sensible things. But if those in power don’t want to do sensible things…”
In that case, we get wars any which way. We get one step closer to the Last Days, to the Antichrist. One step closer, certainly, but how many remained? Some ministers were shouting that the Last Days were coming day after tomorrow, as if Armageddon were a summer blockbuster. There was a terrific way to look idiotic if you proved wrong. All the signs said soon, and Lester Stark had preached on that, but he was too cautious to think he knew the day or hour.
He prayed the Last Days were coming soon. But he recognized the difference between hoping and praying and knowing. And he was convinced some of his colleagues wouldn’t recognize that difference if it piddled against their leg.
“How do we get the Third Temple built, Reverend?” a woman asked.
Another question waiting to blow the Middle East sky-high. “We don’t,” Stark said, which was true, no matter how it disappointed this lady. He explained why, since she couldn’t see for herself: “The Jews do, when and as God moves them to. We encourage them and we support them with resources. We aren’t the only evangelical group that does. But the building is up to them.”
“Why don’t they get on with it, then?” By the way she said it, she thought they couldn’t find a contractor they liked.
“Political issues are involved, you know.” Stark wouldn’t have bet she did, but he always gave people the benefit of the doubt. That worked for him more often than against him.
The woman said, “Politics? After Tel Aviv?” So she had some idea of what was going on. No, you couldn’t tell ahead of time.
“Even after Tel Aviv. Deciding to rebuild the Temple is a mighty step. If Israel takes it, her neighbors won’t be happy with her.” Lester Stark discovered in himself a talent for understatement.
The woman only sniffed. “After Tel Aviv, why should she care?” Since a friend of Stark’s in the Reconstruction Alliance had sent him a text saying the same thing that morning, he could only spread his hands. The woman sniffed again, and walked away. Sometimes you just couldn’t make people happy.
* * *
—
Yoram Louvish inspected his troops. And that was what it amounted to, because everybody going under the Temple Mount carried a Galil. “Ready?” the Israeli archaeologist demanded. “Ready to learn if we can, and for trouble if that’s what happens?”
Beside Eric Katz, Orly said, “Yes!” without the least hesitation. Eric said, “Yes,” too—they would throw him out if he said no, and he did want to see what hid under there. Did he want it enough to shoot somebody for the privilege? He wasn’t so sure about that.
But the guys on the other side were willing—no, eager—to shoot Jewish archaeologists…or blow them up, or, if they could get hold of more powdered plutonium, to make them glow in the dark. If you didn’t stand up to those people, they won by default. If you did…maybe you had to shoot sometimes.
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