by Nathan Erez
In Omar’s days, Jerusalem’s lot improved tremendously. Omar destroyed nothing. He even permitted seventy Jewish families from Tiberias to settle in Jerusalem when they wished to, a decision which was praised by the Jews and condemned by the Christians.
The fate of Alexandria was different. Its library contained 700,000 books, or more properly, scrolls, for in those days there was no such thing as bound books with writing on both sides of the page. By all accounts, this was the largest, most comprehensive, and most famous library in the ancient world. Anyone who came to Alexandria was searched. If it was found that he had a scroll with him that did not exist in the library, it was confiscated and copied. The copy would be given to the owner, while the original would become part of the library. Most of the books in the library were in Greek, but there were books in other languages as well. The library did not merely collect books - the first translation of the Bible was undertaken under the patronage of the library’s wardens. The library also conducted many studies. One of its librarians was the first person to attempt to establish the size of the earth. Even though his calculations were wrong, they were relied upon by Christopher Columbus when he tried to persuade the King of Spain to underwrite his voyage. The library collected scrolls for about a thousand years, from Ptolemy I through the Roman governors and then the Byzantines.
Omar, who was evidently illiterate, was not impressed: “If whatever is found in these books is in the holy Koran, there is no need for them, and all we need is the Koran. If what is found in them is not in the holy Koran, there is certainly no need for them. In any event, the scrolls are to be burned.”
His orders were heeded and executed almost in full. For six months, hundreds of bathhouses in Alexandria were heated by the scrolls, which were used as fuel for their ovens. These included scrolls on mathematics and medicine, maps and drawings, letters and poetry. Hundreds of thousands of items went up in smoke. A thousand years of man’s quest for knowledge were destroyed in this unmitigated act of vandalism. However, the one minor consolation was that, as is so often true with any bureaucracy, the bureaucracy here was not overly efficient. Not everything went up in flames. A number of scrolls somehow survived the conflagration. For reasons unknown to us, one of the copies of the present scroll was not destroyed and was hidden in a silver sphere. The silver sphere was transported to Damascus, along with other valuables, and was added to the treasury of the Ummayah Khalifate, which then ruled the city.
The Ummayah Khalifate did not rule there for long. In 747 C.E., a freed Persian slave revolted against the khalif and installed his own family, the Abassids, as rulers.
The first Abassid ruler carried out a number of standard Middle Eastern practices to assure his rule. First, he had the freed Persian slave and a number of other radicals executed. Second, he strengthened his army, and third, he proclaimed Baghdad his new capital and transferred all the treasures he had looted from his predecessors to that city. Included in this was the silver sphere, which had been taken from the treasury in Damascus.
The khalifates were replaced by independent rulers, but Baghdad remained the cultural and social center of the entire Middle East. In its days of glory the population of Baghdad was in the millions, and it was known for its fabulous wealth. One of the khalifs had no fewer than four thousand concubines, while another had a carpet made which measured four hundred meters on each side, and was woven with gold, silver, and silk threads and embedded with rubies and diamonds. It was this legendary city that was ruled by Harun al-Rashid, he of the 1001 nights.
Baghdad’s luster was destroyed in a single month. In the 1250s, the Mongol tribes united under Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan. The bearded, long-haired Mongol warriors rampaged through what is now Iran, moving westward. Within a few months they had crossed rivers and trampled, smashed and destroyed anyone who tried to impede their progress. Even the Assassins, in their mountain strongholds, were unable to hold them back. In January 1258, the Mongols advanced on Baghdad. The last khalif begged for fair terms of surrender or for mercy, but his request was rejected out of hand by the Mongols. On February 20, the city was taken by storm. It was burned to the ground, and all its wealth plundered. The emir and his entire family were executed. All the inhabitants of the city, numbering about a million at the time, were either slaughtered or sold into slavery. The fabled palaces were looted, the libraries destroyed, and all the houses torched. Whatever Omar had done to the library in Alexandria was amply repaid by what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
Among all the booty was the silver sphere. It was brought to Beijing, where Kublai Khan had established his new capital. Together with silver jewelry, gold platters, and dazzling silk paintings, the globe remained in its new abode for more than 700 years. Untouched, it survived rulers and dynasties. At first it was the Mongol dynasty, followed by the Ming and finally the Manchurian. In the Forbidden City, the beautiful sphere intrigued weak emperors, plotting eunuchs, and sly women of the court. However, its tranquility eventually came to an end.
In the days of Emperor Pu-Yi, the last emperor of China, many items of the royal palace vanished in a mysterious fashion. Often they disappeared along with the people who had been entrusted to guard them. The silver sphere somehow found its way to Hong Kong, where it was to be melted down for its silver content. However, the silversmith realized that it was hollow, and somehow, miraculously, the scroll was found before the sphere was placed in the furnace. The silversmith had a Jewish friend who bought the manuscript for a princely sum, and thus the scroll wound up in the colony’s Sephardic synagogue.
Elijah slept through most of the flight back to Israel, in spite of attempts on the part of the cabin crew to ply him with all the goodies they had on hand for their privileged first class passengers. He arrived home, smiled wanly at his wife and daughters, dutifully handed over the gifts he had bought at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport before taking off for Hong Kong, and fell asleep for another day and a half.
He awoke at 3:00 am and decided to make himself a cup of tea and read about the different conquests of Jerusalem. This time, his choice of a conquest was not random. In order to better understand what had happened to the scroll he needed to learn more about Khalif Omar; it was his way of trying to come to terms with the fact that he had survived an attempt on his life. He still believed, naively, that in books he would find the answers to all the important questions in his life. He pulled out one volume about conquests, and before settling down to read, sent an email to Mei-Ling with a short question: “What can you tell me about Kim?” He eagerly awaited her answer.
He knew little about Omar’s conquests, because basically, Jerusalem had enjoyed a period of calm during Omar’s time. He eventually got around to pouring the hot water over the teabag but forgot to take out the teabag before drinking. When he finally did try to remove the teabag, only the label came out, while the teabag itself settled at the bottom of the cup. However, so preoccupied was he that he also forgot to take out the spoon.
He remembered the fate of the library in Alexandria and thanked the god of bureaucracy, through whose divine intervention, together with that of weary officials and corrupt military men who were not above accepting bribes, the scroll had survived. Elijah also found a reference in a scientific work to the silver sphere. He even found a photograph of it, before the silversmith in China had mangled it in preparation for the furnace. And he recalled with satisfaction the privilege of handling the scroll that had been contained in the ball. Meanwhile, he absent-mindedly reached for the teacup, picked it up, and the spoon hit him straight in the eye. Instinctively he recoiled, and in the process the tea splashed all over the book he had been reading. As the teabag had remained in the cup all along, the tea was very strong, and he was afraid that the dark stain now spreading over the page he had been reading would make it illegible.
Elijah ran to the kitchen, making such a din in the process that Orna cried out anxiously. He returned with a towel to sop up the tea and enable him to read the
part of the page that concerned him. The sphere itself depicted the world and the stars around it, and had traveled from Alexandria to Baghdad. It had remained there until the Mongol hordes ransacked the city and carried off all its wealth. It did not require a great historian to know that the devastation of Baghdad was so great in that single month that the city has simply never recovered from it, even though more than 700 years have elapsed since that time.
Elijah closed his eyes and dozed off. He dreamed he had sprouted wings and was flying in the general direction of Beijing. Mei-Ling joined him as he flew over Hong Kong, but they suddenly found themselves flying over Jerusalem. “Why Jerusalem?” he asked himself. He looked down upon the Temple Mount, as Mei-Ling flew alongside him. Mei-Ling suddenly shoved him, and he plummeted down to the ground.
He awoke in a cold sweat and got up feeling edgy; impatiently he waited for the sun to rise, so he could go to the Institute and demand an explanation. No one had told him that the large sums of money flowing into his bank account were meant to cover the seriously great risk to his life involved in taking this job. No one had offered him the option of deciding whether to sacrifice his life so that Orna and the girls could live comfortably for the rest of theirs.
It was 5:00 am, still too early to go to the Institute, and even if he did go - and of course he had the keys to let himself in - he would find no-one there. He checked his email and found Mei-Ling’s reply to his letter. She wrote: “Kim Su-Yan was born in South Korea. His mother was a teacher and a devout Buddhist, while his father was a bodybuilding instructor. His childhood was spent in army camps in communist North Korea. Those who knew him as a child remembered how, at the tender age of eight, he had fought full-grown soldiers with the tenacity and ferocity of a pit bull. He studied various styles of martial arts, and for twenty years had been involved in learning and teaching both ancient and modern methods of martial arts, an activity at which he spent twelve hours a day. He specialized in the flying kicks of Tae-Kwan-Do, the long throws in Judo, the twisting of the hands in Jiu-jitsu, the falls and rolls of Aikido, the head butting of Korean Pachigi, and others that I cannot even remember.
“The soldiers among whom he had grown up with had taught him to use various kinds of personal weapons, from the nunchaku sticks with their two wooden staffs joined by a chain, to modern-day police batons. His father had tried to temper Kim’s aggressive nature, forcing him to learn techniques that emphasized the more spiritual aspects of life. Thus he learned the techniques of the monks of Shaolin, which were based on the movements of animals in nature, the breathing exercises of the Yoga masters, and the exercises of the Tai-Chi elders.”
“Dear Mei-Ling,” he wrote back, “That was very impressive indeed. You have no idea how shaken up I am by what occurred, and now that I read about Kim’s background, I really mourn his loss keenly. Why was he the one to die?”
It took a mere seven minutes for Mei-Ling to answer him.
“Why him? You should know that this was implanted in his nature. By the age of twenty he was already acknowledged as the most skillful fighter in all Korea, and undoubtedly the most aggressive. In a meteoric and unparalleled ascent, he became chief instructor of the Special Forces unit directly responsible for the president’s safety. Kim’s superiors were extremely impressed with his technical ability, but were concerned that he sometimes reacted in a most unexpected manner. Even in a unit such as his, which had a very relaxed attitude toward military conventions and discipline, his behavior was exceptional. One night, after a session of binge drinking, Kim bet a number of other officers that he could kill a bull with a single kick. They all went out to a nearby village. Kim went into the first field where there was a herd of cows, located the lead bull, and with a single well-placed kick to its neck severed the beast’s main artery. Admittedly, the bull died on the spot, but the elderly couple to which it had belonged was not overly sporting about the matter and sent a sharply worded letter to the army officials and the president himself. This action of Kim’s was evidently the last straw, and the army sought a way to get rid of him.
“The opportunity came sooner than expected. The President of South Korea, General Hun-Park, made an official visit to Iran, where he met the Shah and his military officers. The Shah, who had heard of the fighting prowess of the Koreans, asked Park to send him a trained instructor to work with the Royal Iranian Guard, and Park promised to do so.
“Within a week, Kim found himself in Teheran, as chief martial arts instructor of the Lions’ Unit of the Royal Iranian Guard. The elite Lions’ Unit answered directly to the Iranian Minister of Defense, who was a Shah loyalist. Its primary responsibility was to quash any demonstrations against the regime, and not necessarily by educational methods. Kim found that living in Teheran could be quite pleasant. Far away from his father’s influence, he felt himself free to do whatever he wished. He earned a lot of money breaking up mass demonstrations against the Shah.
“Sincerely, Mei-Ling.”
Elijah wrote back: “Dear Mei-Ling: What a fascinating life. How did he survive? Sincerely, Elijah.”
Elijah did not feel comfortable typing in English, and limited himself to a short message.
“The seven good years ended when Khomeini took over. All the Shah’s guards were suddenly considered to be enemies of the people and had to hide underground. Four hundred members of the Revolutionary Guards searched for Kim, who was listed as ‘the slant-eyed devil’. With the help of Jewish-American businessmen, Kim was spirited away to Japan on a forged passport; fortunately for him, the Iranian border guards were unable to distinguish between Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and all other Asians. They had not the slightest suspicion that the bespectacled Japanese gentleman in a business suit and tie was the same one who had physically beaten them in hundreds of protest rallies and demonstrations. His remarkable escape, given the massive manhunt that had been launched to catch him, merely added to his legend.
“However, after the freedom to which he had become accustomed in Teheran, Kim found it impossible to adjust to military life in Korea. He moved to Los Angeles and opened a martial arts academy under the traditional name of Dojo. His school became known because of the great number of injuries suffered by his students. His students remember the frequent wail of ambulance sirens, more than once a night. To receive a black belt, the initiate had to snap four blocks of wood with his feet, three with his hands, and two with his head. He had to jump from a ladder to the ground and fall on his back, with only his feet and hands absorbing the fall. In spite of his extreme demands - and probably even to a certain extent because of them - Kim won the adulation of his students. The feeling was that for anyone who had received a black belt from Kim’s Dojo, nothing in the world could present a greater challenge and everything else could only be much easier. If you’re interested in more details, you can check out a US site about karate and the martial arts, where you can read all about him. Write me. In friendship, Mei-Ling.”
Elijah thanked her and tried various search engines until he found the site to which Mei-Ling referred. One of the articles on Kim was very interesting, and Elijah printed it out.
“Kim Su-Yan - A Legend in his Time,” he read.
“From his balcony on the third floor of an apartment block in Los Angeles, Kim often leaps into the adjoining swimming pool. We should stress the word ‘leaps’ rather than ‘dives,’ because the pool is not directly adjacent to the building. When he leaps, he must move off a number of feet from his building so that he can land in the pool. Otherwise, he would fall to his death on the concrete deck surrounding the pool.
“Kim Su-Yan is an honest man with principles. He attributes this to the pedantic upbringing he received from his mother. Thus, for example, he has never been late for a scheduled class and has never expelled a student for failing to pay the fees. Kim seldom makes any promises, but those he makes, he never breaks. To date, there has never been a recorded instance of Kim harming someone who trusted him. His license was revoked bec
ause a death took place in his Dojo. All his students are invited to sign up here in protest against that revocation. We intend to fight it!”
This article was signed by three of his students.
Elijah’s belief that Norman was backed by big money was clearly reinforced by what he had just found out about Kim. The same source that financed the Institute must have been the one to arrange for Kim’s escape from Teheran, although Elijah could not quite figure out the connection between the two. He guessed that Norman had known about the scroll in Hong Kong and thought that Kim would be able to get it for him.
“Then why did he have to send me?” Elijah asked himself. “Ostensibly it was to have me check the authenticity of the scroll and that it was worth its asking price. Now I’m not even sure if he wants to buy it. The photocopy should be enough for his purposes, as I saw when he showed me the first photocopy. Norman is interested only in finding the clues in the seven different manuscripts. All the hints together are supposed to lead him to the end of his search, at the point where I put all the clues together and come up with the complete sentence.”
Elijah rushed to the university. At the Faculty of Computer Sciences he found a lab assistant and asked him to download the photos he had taken with the flashlight-camera. The young man had never seen such a gadget, and for two hours he sweated at connecting it to a computer, using the cable that came with it. He worked silently, and Elijah did not try to disturb him with any idle prattle, lest he ruin the young man's concentration. Eventually, the lab assistant got the hang of it and the first photograph appeared on the screen. While the edges were somewhat blurred, the seventh line had come through crystal-clear. Now he could read it:
