Birthright

by Alan Gold

For the second time in recent days, a blinding pain shot from his left to his right temple the moment he struggled to open his eyes. He closed his eyes again, but the pain stayed with him.

  He tried to lift his head above the pillow, but his neck was too stiff. Then he tried to feel the rest of his body, moving his fingers, his toes, flexing his knees, lifting his arms above the blanket. When he’d finished, he realized that not only was he still alive, but he was safe and secure, despite his nightmares about a flock of huge black vultures tearing his flesh with their beaks.

  Shalman opened his eyes slowly and looked around the room. He didn’t recognize the furniture, the bedding, or the walls or ceiling. He tried to glance out the window, but the glare from the daylight hurt too much.

  Cautiously, he maneuvered his body out of bed and saw that he was wearing only his underpants. He stood on shaky legs and looked around for his clothes, but they were nowhere to be seen. Sliding his hands along the wall for support, he walked cautiously to the door. His legs were barely responsive, and he teetered like a ninety-year-old man.

  When he opened the door, he saw that it certainly wasn’t a Jewish home. It had cushions against walls instead of chairs, and the table, made of some sort of dark wood, was still laden with food from a previous meal. In the corner, at a bare kitchen sink, stood a woman dressed in traditional Arab clothes, her head covered in a scarf, her back to him. Desperately, he tried to place himself within this landscape and recall how he got here, but it was too foreign. He was on the verge of panic. Why couldn’t he remember?

  The woman heard him enter the room and turned. In Arabic, she said curtly, “So, you’re awake. Well, now you can get dressed and leave my house. Enough.”

  His voice rasping, Shalman asked in Hebrew, “Who are you? Where am I? What’s happened?”

  The woman put down the cabbage she was washing under the single tap, dried her hands on a towel, and walked over to him. There was no warmth in her face, no empathy. She continued to speak to him in Arabic. “My son found you nearly dead. Now you’re alive, so it’s time to leave.”

  Switching to his less than articulate Arabic, Shalman mumbled, “My head hurts.”

  The woman went back to her work in the kitchen but continued to talk to the room. “I didn’t want you in my home, but Awad doesn’t allow you to be sent away. My husband has the mind of a goat. He insisted that we put you into our bed. Awad and I have been sleeping here,” she said angrily, pointing at the cushions on the floor. “Our mullah came to see you and looked at your wound. I cleaned it, and you have a big bump on your head. But your skull isn’t broken. So now you can walk and you can leave, and that will be that.”

  Shalman waited for a pause in the woman’s monologue. “Might I have a drink of water? I’m very thirsty . . .” Aware that he was standing in his underwear, he added, “And my clothes?”

  She handed him a glass of water. “Your clothes are washed,” she said. She wiped her hands, went outside, and returned with them. “Now you get dressed and go. Before my husband returns.”

  “I’m sorry that you and your husband had to sleep elsewhere.”

  He took the clothes and walked slowly and painfully back to the bedroom. He was desperate to wash and brush his teeth, but as he was struggling to put on his trousers, he felt faint again. The room spun, and he sat heavily on the bed.

  He may have blacked out. He didn’t know. But a disturbance outside woke him. He had half put on his trousers and was sprawled out over the bed.

  The door opened and Mustafa was standing there beside an older, diminutive man with a week’s growth of beard, who was obviously Mustafa’s father. They looked at him and said nothing but turned, and the older man said to his wife, “You will not send him away, Rabiyah. The man can barely dress himself. What’s wrong with you, woman?” Awad said softly to Shalman, “You speak Arabic?”

  “A little,” answered Shalman.

  “Then understand, until you are recovered, my home is your home. This is the way of my people.” The man touched his hand to his heart. Raising his voice so that his wife could hear him clearly in the next room, he added, “Our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, ‘Feed with food the needy wretch, the orphan, and the prisoner.’ ”

  Then he walked out of the room.

  Memory was returning. Shalman remembered Mustafa as the young man with the donkey who’d rescued him.

  “Which one am I?” asked Shalman, putting his hand to his aching head once more.

  “Maybe all three,” came Mustafa’s dry reply. “You feel like shit, don’t you?”

  Shalman nodded, lightning flaring up behind his eyes, and he lay back on the bed.

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “You’re Mustafa. You stopped me from being eaten alive by vultures. You have a donkey that stinks.”

  Mustafa grinned. “I’ll have him washed next time I rescue a Jew from certain death.”

  “Your mother really doesn’t want me to stay here. I’ll dress and go. I need to get home to my wife and daughter.”

  “And how will you walk the ten miles to Jerusalem? You can’t even walk to the kitchen. Don’t worry about my mother. She’s not prejudiced; she hates the Jews and the British equally.”

  This brought a smile to Shalman’s face despite the pain in his head.

  “There’s a car in the village that belongs to the headman,” continued Mustafa. “I can drive it. When you’re feeling better, maybe in a couple of days, I’ll drive you back to the outskirts of Jerusalem. Until then, rest. Go out in the garden. It’ll do you good.”

  “How long have I been here, unconscious?” Shalman asked weakly.

  Mustafa shrugged. “Three days.”

  Shalman thought immediately of Judit and Vered and how his wife must be worrying. “I have to get a message to my wife. She’ll be—”

  “I’ve already sent her a note. I told her you’d banged your head and we were looking after you.”

  Shalman frowned. “But how—”

  “Your wallet. It has your address. One of the men from our village was going to Jerusalem to buy from the market, and he took the message. Your wife insisted that she come to see you, take you back to Jerusalem, but my friend insisted that you couldn’t be moved and you had to stay. She said she’d send a doctor, but he assured her that you were all right, except for needing to rest. Look, Shalman, everything’s all right. Just lie down, shut up, and get better. Then we can get rid of you.”

  • • •

  An hour later, Shalman, his head still pounding, was dressed and sitting on a rough wooden seat in the garden of the house, feeling the sun on his face. Mustafa came up and sat down beside him, holding in his hands a Lee-Enfield rifle. The weapon was aged and worn, poorly maintained, and had taken more than a few bumps and scratches. It was a British military standard issue.

  “The sun heals better than any medicine,” Shalman said.

  Mustafa worked the bolt action of the rifle with his hand, attempting to loosen a jam in the mechanism, and swore under his breath.

  “Can I help?” asked Shalman. He knew the rifle well, having stolen many of them. In fact, it was these types of rifles and pistols, stolen by Dov on the kibbutz, that had led to his father being taken away, never to return.

  “You know something about guns?” asked Mustafa.

  “A little,” said Shalman. “May I?” He held out his hands for the rifle. Mustafa hesitated but then quickly unclipped the magazine from beneath the barrel and disarmed the rifle before letting Shalman take it. His moment of uncertainty didn’t go unnoticed. Mustafa held Shalman’s gaze.

  Shalman set to work on the rifle, stripping the bolt action out and dislodging the debris that clogged it.

  “Where did you get a British rifle?” asked Shalman, knowing full well the question was a loaded one.

  “How did you learn how to fix one?” asked Mustafa.

  The young men looked at each other. There was something in Mustafa’s face t
hat demanded complete honesty from Shalman.

  “Fighting the British,” he said.

  Mustafa simply nodded, taking the rifle back from Shalman’s hands. “And what of Arabs?”

  Shalman didn’t answer. Mustafa looked at the strange Jew and then shifted subjects. “There are many who fight the British. Not just here. Everywhere the British have gone. You have to wonder how many British weapons have shot bullets back at British soldiers over the years.”

  Shalman smiled. “Many.”

  “Yes . . . They fight the British in India, too. And in Africa. I hate the British. What right do they have to be on my land and tell me what to do?”

  Shalman looked at Mustafa curiously. “That’s how I feel. Funny you should talk about India. It looks as if the natives have beaten the British. A man called Gandhi. He’s led an entire nation in fighting the British, but he didn’t use guns or anything like that. He invented a method of fighting without violence called peaceful non-cooperation. He got the people to just sit down in the streets and refuse to cooperate. And the British army doesn’t know how to stop them.”

  Mustafa stood and slung the rifle over his shoulder. “You Jews are killing the British to drive them out. Maybe if you just sat down in the streets, they’d leave sooner.”

  Mustafa turned to depart. Shalman caught his arm.

  “I never thanked you,” said Shalman. “I want to thank you.”

  Mustafa just shrugged again. He hesitated and then asked, “When the British are gone, will you fight us?”

  “We don’t want to. But if we have to . . .” replied Shalman.

  “Perhaps we should just lie down in the streets and refuse to move. How will your terrorists in the Irgun and your army, your Haganah, deal with millions of Arabs who won’t move?” asked Mustafa. He didn’t wait for an answer. He changed the topic. “What were you doing out there, anyway? In the hills. Alone.”

  Shalman let out a small laugh. “I was looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “History,” he said, and Mustafa looked at him more closely, evidently concerned that the blow to Shalman’s head may have affected his brain. “It’s a science called archaeology,” added Shalman. “Archaeology is when you study—”

  Mustafa cut him off. “I know what archaeology is.”

  Shalman apologized. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  “Not all Arabs are unread and ignorant, you know.” Mustafa grinned and both men smiled. He sat back down next to Shalman. “My father cannot read. Nor my mother. But I want to go to Lebanon, to university there.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked Shalman.

  Mustafa simply cast his arms wide to encompass the modest house and the impoverished village beyond. “There is no money here. To go to a university, you need money.”

  A moment of silence passed between the two young men, who in that moment seemed so alike yet so far apart. The silence was broken when Mustafa turned to Shalman. “Archaeology, you say? Let me show you something.”

  Minutes later, after leaving Shalman to go inside the house, Mustafa came back out and dropped three coins into Shalman’s open hand, a smile of pride on his face. The coins were Roman, ancient and worn but unmistakable.

  Shalman recognized one of the coins immediately and told Mustafa that he believed it was exceptionally rare. It was the Iudaea Capta coin, minted by the Romans after they had put down the Great Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E. With growing excitement, Shalman pointed out to Mustafa the figure of a woman in mourning sitting beneath a palm tree, and a man standing behind her with his hands bound behind his back.

  “Where did you find these?” he asked.

  Mustafa smiled. Shalman looked into the man’s eyes and saw a shadow of doubt and mistrust. Would he tell him?

  And then Mustafa said softly, “One thing at a time, Shalman. One thing at a time.”

  The House of Wisdom, Baghdad

  820 C.E. (188 years after the death of the prophet Mohammed)

  HIS ARRIVAL IN Bayt al Hikma, the House of Wisdom, caused not an eyebrow to be raised, not a glance to be directed his way. Zakki ben Jacob had traveled with his wife and four children from Jerusalem to the new city of Baghdad and expected some recognition, some welcome, perhaps even some excitement at his arrival. But as he stood at the doorway of the central library and surveyed the vast room, full of noise and argument, discord and debate, there wasn’t a murmur of interest in the new face standing at the threshold.

  Instead, the room resembled a huge cage of parrots, men crawling over the floor looking at unfurled scrolls, or sitting on cushions at low tables shouting at one another as they pointed at texts. Younger scholars rushed up and down ladders at their masters’ bidding, finding scrolls or codices or books or drawings that would disprove or validate a particular point of view.

  There was a rainbow of colors in their dress, clothes that showed the scholars came from Africa and Arabia and India and China. Amid the cacophony of noise and the kaleidoscope of color were some men who stood out because they were dressed in the earthen dark and dull cloaks and cowls of Christian monks. These men, Zakki guessed, had come from the countries far to the west and north of Baghdad—lands full of impassable forests still mired in the darkness of ignorance and chilled by the frosts of winter.

  Zakki ben Jacob was used to silence when he thought and read and studied in his own library in Jerusalem. But as he stood on the threshold of this monumental room, the rabid scholarship terrified him.

  Had he made a terrible mistake, accepting the invitation of Caliph Ja’far al-Ma’mun? Was he wrong to leave his comfortable home in Jerusalem to come to Baghdad?

  His wife, Dorit, had been vehemently against it. Their life had been comfortable and rewarding in Jerusalem, and they had been able to visit the monuments built for their ancient ancestors who were said to have been priests in King Solomon’s great temple. Similarly, his children had been against going; the world they knew was in Jerusalem, not far from there, to the southeast within the Islamic caliphate.

  But the emissary had been so seductive, offering Zakki so much, that he’d felt compelled to agree almost on the spot. Dorit had been furious, telling him that he could earn a good living in Jerusalem, so why would he want to leave? Dorit didn’t understand that the offer from the caliph had been far more than material; it was a chance to be a part of unfathomable intellectual stimulation among the greatest scholars of the age.

  And now here he was, one of Jerusalem’s most revered doctors and philosophers, a mathematician and astrologer, a man recognized in all of the streets of his homeland, standing at the gateway to the greatest institute of learning in the world, and being completely ignored.

  For the first time since he’d become a doctor, Zakki ben Jacob felt uncomfortable among his peers. Here it was as though he were a void, a phantasm, a djinn without form or substance. Ill at ease, he reached up to his throat and gripped the pendant hanging around his neck. It was a glorious pendant hanging by a thick golden chain. Made of ancient metal, it was a copy of a seal created by the tunnel builder Matanyahu of the time of King Solomon. It was his good-luck charm, a link to Zakki’s ancient lineage, so it was his strength in times of uncertainty.

  Grasping the seal in his left hand, Zakki coughed. Nobody looked up; all were too busy with the particular tasks they had set themselves. He coughed louder, and several men finally turned their eyes to him, frowned, and returned to their texts.

  Resigned that he couldn’t turn back to Jerusalem, Zakki picked up his traveling bag and walked into the room, peering over the shoulders of the scholars hunched at tables, looking down at the floor where elderly men were stretched out comparing the text of one scroll against another, or translating from Greek into Arabic and Latin. He continued to walk around the hall until he came to a table where three men were seated. It was as though he were standing in the middle of a howling desert wind, unable to think, to make out any coherence in all the cacophony.

  Then he heard word
s that stimulated his ears, words in a language native to him.

  He stood for a moment at the table and listened to the men speaking in heated voices, their hands animated as they pointed at the texts in front of them. The words they used were desperate attempts to pronounce the Hebrew language from a scroll. But they were using the language so wrongly.

  “Brothers, may I be of assistance?” he asked in a loud voice, summoning confidence.

  One of the elderly men looked up at him. “Is the language of the Jews your native tongue?” he asked in Arabic.

  Zakki smiled and showed the man the ancient seal hanging around his neck. All could see that though the Hebrew was from an ancient era, it was clearly the language they were trying to translate.

  “I speak Hebrew, and it’s my native tongue. I also speak Latin and Greek and Aramaic. My name is—”

  All of the scholars put their fingers to their lips, demanding his silence. Zakki was confused but cut off his words at the gestures.

  “Brother, we are all here scholars of many different disciplines. Those who have been summoned have come in response to the hadith of their holy book, the Koran, which says that the ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr. That, brother, is why you have no name in this House of Wisdom. We are known only by our relationship of brother.

  “Some of us are students of medicine, some of optics, some of astronomy, some mathematics and al chemica, and so on and so forth. In our homes, we are well known and respected. And we are all revered here for our knowledge. But in this place, brother, we are all of the same height; only our books are elevated onto a table. None of us is greater, better, or more than the other. Only knowledge and scholarship are elevated, not the scholar. That is why, in the House of Wisdom, we keep our names to ourselves.”

  To Zakki, the words were like poetry: noble, powerful, and intoxicating.

  “What is your field of study, brother? Is it language? Can you help us translate these ancient writings of the Greek philosophers Thales and Anaxamander into Hebrew?”

  “Perhaps,” Zakki said, “but my work is that of a doctor and philosopher. I’ve trained in Rome and Alexandria, like my father before me, and his father before him unto the hundredth generation when, it is told, we were priests and healers in the Temple of Solomon.”