Birthright

by Alan Gold

  It was only then that Nimrod saw the face of the savior who wielded the stone that had killed the Arab. Over him, the light of the moon and stars gave just enough illumination to show the face of Simeon.

  “You should be glad I never obey doctors’ orders.”

  But Nimrod’s mind raced to the fate of the duke, and he scrambled over to the body of his master lying flat on the ground, his nearly severed limb still pumping blood.

  The duke’s eyes focused on the faces of Nimrod and Simeon as they knelt over him. As a doctor, Nimrod knew that the end would come as soon as the duke’s life force drained into the earth of Jerusalem. There was nothing he could do as a physician. The wound was of an enormity that defied any medicine or surgery.

  Neither Simeon nor Nimrod knew what to say. The duke gazed at them for what seemed like a long stretch of silence, then his eyes focused not on their faces but something behind them. The two Jews turned to see what their lord was staring at.

  They saw nothing at first but soon saw what the duke was focusing on. High on the hill, the city of Jerusalem was beginning to glow golden as the very first rays of dawn lit the minarets and crucifixes and the tops of the white walls.

  “I see the bones . . .”

  The words of the duke, whispered before too much of his blood had coursed from his body, made Simeon and Nimrod turn away from the splendor of the city.

  “I see the bones. All of them. All around me . . .”

  Nimrod placed a hand on the duke’s chest but could find no words.

  “I see the bones of all who have died. All who have fought and died.”

  The duke’s eyes found Nimrod clearly for the last time and held him fast.

  “I’m sorry . . . Tell the bones I’m sorry . . .”

  And the duke died in the shadow of the walls of the city he’d come to relieve.

  Nimrod felt a great desire to sit with the lord he’d known so well and for so long. To simply sit and wait for the sun to warm the dead man’s face, so that his journey into eternity was lit. But a voice calling out dragged the two men from the moment.

  The voice was that of Michel Roux, unmistakable and distinct. Simeon grabbed at Nimrod’s clothes and hauled him to his feet.

  “Come on, we have to go,” Simeon said in a harsh whisper.

  But Nimrod resisted. “Where? Where shall we go? We have nowhere to go and no one to trust!”

  In that moment Simeon found a sense of faith that had long been absent in him. “I’d rather die inside the walls of the holy city with my people than out here with these dogs of Crusaders. For surely we will both be dead by morning, either at the hands of Roux or by a sword from those within the walls. Come with me, Doctor.” Simeon pulled Nimrod up and forced him to follow. “We have to get to the tunnel!”

  They scurried toward the walls, Nimrod wondering what tunnel the man was talking about. They ran into the early-morning gloom with the voice of Michel Roux behind them, baying for their blood.

  • • •

  Nimrod followed, too exhausted to ask Simeon to explain, the wound delivered by the Saracen beginning to hurt viciously. He pressed his hand to his side, holding in the blood that was leaking from the wound, but he could feel his head growing light. He leaned on Simeon’s arm as they scrambled around the edge of the white stone walls and through the low tangled bushes and stunted trees that grew in the shadow of the city.

  Was Simeon seeking something from memory or instinct? Nimrod could not tell. But the wiry man moved with purpose and focus, searching for signs that Nimrod could not see. Finally, Simeon stopped when they were well clear of the evil Roux. “There has long been rumor in my family of a tunnel into the city, an ancient watercourse,” he said breathlessly. “This ancient tunnel was supposed to be used by the inhabitants. Some say my family had a hand in it, but who knows? Yet our connection has come down through generations of my family. They spoke of a watercourse built in the time of King Solomon. Few know of it, other than us Jews, and perhaps the Muslims.”

  Nimrod reached into his tunic to touch the medallion around his neck. Simeon saw the hesitation and his gaze moved to Nimrod’s other hand grasping at his side, saw the blood seeping between his fingers. Nimrod wanted to say that such a story had been told from father to son in his own family for generation upon generation, but he was weak from the wound and found talking difficult.

  Simeon continued. “They say of this tunnel that it runs beneath the walls of the city, carrying water to the pools below. If we climb up from the pools of Siloam, pray God Almighty that what is told in my family is correct, we will come into the heart of the city.”

  Was Simeon saying this to keep up Nimrod’s spirits as he died? Or did the merchant truly know how to find the ancient tunnel? As Nimrod held the metal seal at his neck, he remembered the words written in ancient Hebrew. He knew by heart the name Matanyahu and the story handed down in his family of a builder who worked in the time of King Solomon. And Nimrod remembered the words inscribed on the seal:

  I, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, have built this tunnel for the glory of my King, Solomon the Wise, in the Twenty-second year of his reign.

  • • •

  When the siege engines made by the Genoese sailors in Joppa arrived and began assaulting the walls, new life was breathed into the Crusader campaign. The cheers of the soldiers could be heard throughout the valleys and over the hills as the siege weapons hurled massive rocks over the towers along with the bodies of the recently killed Saracens. Not only did these dead bodies flying over the ramparts cause horror and panic, they were a marvelous weapon for spreading disease and destroying morale.

  The noise of the melee above was lost on Nimrod and Simeon as they made their way, slowly and painfully, up the ancient tunnel. They had found the entrance to the watercourse covered by a thousand years of rock slides, dirt, fallen debris, and dead vegetation, but Simeon had been right. From the pools of Siloam, the watercourse became clear when they pulled away the vegetation where the ground was wet. They slowly, painfully climbed the black and slippery tunnel up toward the center of the city.

  Nimrod and Simeon were repeating precisely what Abram had done in the time of the Romans when he returned the seal made by Matanyahu, along with the woman who would become his wife, Ruth, daughter of Eli and Naomi of the Tribe of Judah.

  With a millennium separating their ascent into the tunnel, the ancestor and the descendant slipped on the same ground covered in black moss and squeezed through gaps in the rock that were little wider than their bodies.

  As they ascended to a larger and more open space, they felt like they’d climbed from the bottom to the top of a mountain, but in reality they had no idea how far up the city of Jerusalem they had ascended. Nimrod was growing weaker by the hour, and the blood loss, though largely stanched, had caused him to feel faint almost every step of the way.

  Nimrod and Simeon, like Abram and Ruth, eventually rounded what appeared to be a bend in the tunnel and, out of the deadened silence punctuated only by footfalls and breathing, heard a noise.

  But unlike the noise of the pagan conquerors walking the streets of Aelia Capitolina when Rome commanded the city, the noise that Nimrod and Simeon heard was the wailing of Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. With the arrival of the siege engines, the inhabitants of Jerusalem understood that these were their last days and were praying together to their one God. Even the Christians believed, despite the flags with the cross of Jesus clearly displayed, that these were the end times, and chanted a prayer to save them from the onslaught.

  It was only when Nimrod and Simeon, dirty, wet, cold, and aching from the climb, came to the underside of the pavement on which thousands of feet scurried above that they realized their way was barred.

  The ancient water causeway had been blocked four hundred years earlier by the caliph Abd al-Malik when he’d ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock Mosque. He’d made access to the water into a well, and the sides were so narrow, stee
p, and slippery that they were impossible for Nimrod and Simeon to climb.

  And so, as the tens of thousands of citizens of Jerusalem were wailing in fear of the assault and the destruction of their city, just the thickness of a pavement and a depth of rock separated the two men from their besieged brethren. Nimrod and Simeon sat in the dark.

  “We should return to the valley floor,” said Simeon, already turning to negotiate the way down. But Nimrod’s strength had left him. His hand was still pressed to his side, but the blood, once crimson between his fingers, was now black and dry and spent. His limbs were numb and thoughts drifted toward sleep. He could go no farther.

  “No,” he said in little more than a whisper.

  “You can. We can make it back. Once the Crusaders have taken the city, we will be outside the walls and can make our escape. They won’t notice us when they’re slaughtering the inhabitants.”

  But Simeon’s words were futile.

  Nimrod shook his head. “I die here, my friend.”

  • • •

  The siege assault took five days to drain the city of its strength. Flaming arrows set fire to rooftops and stables, dead bodies hurled through the air crashed through ceilings. Rocks exploded with the pounding of battering rams. Women and children sheltered from the nightmare as men died in the midst of it. With a final breach of the outer wall, the Crusaders streamed into the city.

  The Crusaders screamed “Hep, hep, hep, hoorah” as they cleaved every limb from every body in their path. The words meant Hierisolyma est perdita, “Jerusalem is lost,” an insult to all the inhabitants. The Christian men of God had ordered the Crusaders to shout it out as they entered the city. The charge and chant were led by Michel Roux, a man never driven by faith but by power and an unquenchable desire for riches. Roux led the charge with a fervor to rival any cleric, and his bloodlust fell like rain on his victims.

  Tens of thousands of men, women, and children were slaughtered in a single day, an orgy of killing, rape, and theft. Nobody was spared the most hideous of deaths; nor was anybody saved to become a slave. Even many Christians of Jerusalem, fighting alongside their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters to defend the city, were hacked to pieces.

  The destruction was total, and the impact of the pain on the city would course through its veins for centuries to come.

  By the time the end had come for Jerusalem, Simeon was well away from the city and leaving the Crusaders’ madness far behind him. He had sat with his friend Nimrod until the end. The man who had spared his life died in his arms.

  Before his final breath slipped away, the doctor had taken a small metal seal from around his neck and pressed it into the palm of the merchant.

  “Take this. It was born in this tunnel. But don’t let it die in this tunnel. Take it with you.”

  And with that, Simeon had left the secret tunnel beneath the walls of the ancient holy city, climbing back down the steep, slippery path to emerge into the sunlight.

  North Jerusalem

  Shabbat morning, May 15, 1948

  IMMANUEL BERIN LOOKED up from the table and tried to take in the scene so he could tell his grandchildren in years to come where he had been when the United Nations decided on the fate of Israel and its Jews. That is, if he married again when this madness was over, and if his wife was young enough to bear him a second family.

  But no matter who was gathered in the room around the radio, listening to Kol Yisrael rebroadcast the vote being taken at that moment two thousand miles north in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris by the General Assembly, two faces were missing, faces that he’d never see again.

  He was older than all of the others. He’d been through vastly more in his life than almost all of them, and had taken its vicissitudes in stride. In his life, he’d been to the heights and sunk to the depths. If Israel were granted nation status by the two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, all well and good; if not, then he would wait another year, and one year after that if necessary. But for these kids, it was life and death.

  He looked for the face of Judit Etzion, but she wasn’t there. He felt disgust when he tried to remember her face. He didn’t know where she was, nor where his men had dumped her body, never to be found, nor given a burial, nor marked with a gravestone. He’d specifically told them not to tell him, so that in years to come, he wouldn’t inadvertently travel there and remember her. He wanted to expunge her from his mind for all time. The others in the MGB death squads . . . well, they were just irrelevant, pawns in a geopolitical game. But Judit had a presence in his mind, in his actions, and even in the room, and he had to expunge her. She had reminded him so much of his wife, victim of the Nazis.

  And as Israel’s history was written, Judit would become one of Israel’s fallen heroines, remembered for the good deeds she’d done to secure the nation. Known only to a small number of Israelis for the hateful, traitorous, murderous things she’d committed as an agent of the Kremlin.

  He continued to be distressed by the absence of Ashira, so full of zeal and intelligence and potential to be a great Israeli in a new nation, murdered by Judit and her insane cabal for reasons he hadn’t been told and upon which he could only speculate.

  But all the others were there, except those who’d died in the course of the past year’s Arab uprising, or had been arrested by the British and incarcerated. Proud that he’d been able to bring so many through to see this day, Immanuel listened to the voice of the reporter.

  While the meeting was called to order by the session’s chair at the UN, at another radio in a corner of the room, one of the young men shouted with glee, “Hey, the USA has just recognized Israel. The White House put out a statement by President Truman that says the Yanks have been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel . . . you hear that? . . . the State of Israel.”

  The room erupted into cheers. Only Immanuel Berin knew what was behind Truman’s move—the president’s friendship with Eddie Jacobson, a former partner of Truman’s in a clothing store, who was still a close friend. The U.S. Department of State was against granting nationhood to Israel for fear of the war that would follow, as well as Russian intervention, but a phone call and a meeting with Jacobson, who had introduced Truman to Chaim Weizmann, changed the president’s mind. Immanuel smiled and wondered whether other nations had been created through friendships, happenstance, and sheer mazel.

  While waiting for the chairman of the General Assembly to begin the voting process, Immanuel spoke to the young men and women around him. “Last night, the British army lowered its last flag to end its mandate over Palestine. The last British troops are leaving today. Six months ago, the United Nations voted for the partition of this land into the State of Israel and an independent, secure nation for the Arabs of Palestine. We Jews received far less land, fewer natural resources, and a more fractured nation than we prayed for in all the years of our exile. Our birthright has been stripped from us. Yet we accepted the decision of the UN. The Arabs, given preferential treatment by the UN, have rejected out of hand what they were offered. For six months, they’ve been waging a civil war against us. But all that has been little more than a guerrilla conflict compared with what’s over the hill.

  “If the vote in the UN in just a few minutes is two thirds in our favor, then while we Jews are cheering our freedom, the tanks, artillery, and soldiers of five Arab countries will be coming over the hills, invading our borders, destroying our villages, killing our population in their efforts to eradicate this land and make it free of Jews—what the Nazis called Judenrein. Armies and air forces, some British-trained and equipped by Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq will invade our sovereign nation.

  “Yet we sit here, knowing what’s going to happen in a few hours, and pray for Russia to vote with the United States and other countries so that we can be free citizens in our own land. So should the vote go our way, brothers and sister
s, let us celebrate the moment but gird our loins for the fight ahead.”

  He glanced around and saw every boy and girl, man and woman, staring at him. He tried to read their faces but couldn’t differentiate between hope and despair. These kids knew nothing about the way Moscow had managed to assassinate so many good Jews in Palestine. Yet there was every indication that they’d vote for the creation of Israel. But he was only a psychiatrist! How could he possibly understand the Russian mind or the sort of deal that Golda Meir had made in Moscow?

  Immanuel turned up the volume, and they all listened to the chairman of the General Assembly begin the process of voting. Three lists were made on three sheets of paper: one for yes, one for no, and one for abstentions. Nobody was certain until the vote came to the Soviet Union whether they had succeeded or not. When Andrei Gromyko voted with a simple yes, the room erupted into hysterical cheers.

  Immanuel held up his hand for silence. There were other nations to vote. When the voting had finished, the men who had made ticks on the paper added them up quickly and compared notes. One, a farmer from the Galilee village of Peki’in, shouted out, “Two thirds. Two thirds. We’ve done it.”

  Nobody heard the chairman of the General Assembly of the United Nations in distant Paris announce the creation of the world’s newest nation. The cheering and hugging and kissing in the room in Jerusalem was cacophonous.

  And nor did anybody celebrating in the room hear the throaty roar of the engines of Arab tanks, Jeeps, planes, and troop carriers roaring into life on the northern, eastern, and southern borders of the State of Israel.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  A hill overlooking Ras Abu Yussuf

  The State of Israel

  June 19, 1949

  SHALMAN ETZION HANDED his two-year-old daughter, Vered, a honey biscuit and a half-filled bottle of milk. She thanked him. He loved her thin, piping voice and blew her a kiss, which she returned with determination.