An Accidental Messiah

by Dan Sofer

  “Yes,” Yosef said. “But Maimonides agrees that the Messiah will rebuild the Temple.”

  The excitement in the room cooled considerably.

  “The Temple?” Irina asked.

  He swallowed hard. “A great synagogue on the Temple Mount. But with, um, sacrifices.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Animal sacrifices?”

  “Um, yes,” Yosef said. The idea of slaughtering bulls and sheep and sprinkling their blood on an altar made him queasy as well. Solomon’s Temple had held more romantic appeal as an abstract, distant symbol. “But according to one opinion,” he added quickly, “the Third Temple will involve flour offerings only.”

  The tension in the room eased.

  “Right,” Shmuel the cynic said, “all the Messiah has to do is convince the Waqf to hand over the Temple Mount and demolish the Dome of the Rock to make room for a synagogue. Piece of cake.”

  Moshe shrugged. “Anything else?”

  “The Messiah will bring peace to the land. ‘The lamb will lie down beside the lion.’”

  The heads of those present nodded slowly, a gesture that meant either full agreement or “keep dreaming, pal.”

  “Well,” Moshe said. “The Messiah’s got his work cut out for him.”

  “Isaac Gurion isn’t your messiah, Rabbi,” Shmuel said. “Have you seen the platform of his new party?”

  “I haven’t been following the elections,” Yosef admitted. From the looks on their faces, that went for the others too.

  “His Upward party is playing the anti-religious card. Conscription for the ultra-Orthodox. No more stipends. Hard to see him building a synagogue on the Temple Mount.”

  Moshe said, “Then the religious parties can’t steal him from us, as they did Malkior.”

  Irina laughed. So did Yosef, although that truth hurt as well. Partnering with evangelical Christians was bad enough; now the Dry Bones Society was joining the list of an anti-religious political party too.

  “Messiah or not,” Moshe concluded, “he’s the only game in town. Who’s in favor?”

  Despite his misgivings, Yosef raised his hand and the motion passed unanimously.

  “Shmuel, we’ll need another press conference. Irina, please handle the logistics. I’ll call Gurion. I suppose I’ll need to write another speech.”

  As the team scattered to their tasks, Yosef remained in his seat.

  First Rev. Adams, now Moshe. Everyone was asking Yosef about the Messiah.

  A messiah is born in every generation, taught the Sages of Blessed Memory. He waits anxiously for the Redemption, when he will reveal his true identity to the world. Yosef could do with his guidance right now.

  He had expected the Messiah to be among the sages of the Great Council, but instead of welcoming the resurrection as the first stage of the budding redemption, the council had, quite literally, demonized the resurrected Israelis. But didn’t the redeemer always arise in unexpected circumstances? Ruth, King David’s ancestor, was a Moabite convert, and Perez, an even earlier forebear, was conceived thanks to the illicit pairing of Judah with Tamar, his former daughter-in-law. Perhaps Christian charities and anti-religious parties were suitable partners in the messianic enterprise after all.

  “Yosef, are you OK?”

  Moshe glanced at him from behind his desk, his phone at the ready.

  “I wish the Messiah would reveal himself already.”

  Moshe smiled. “He’s out there somewhere.”

  Yosef nodded, and made for the call center. He needed to order more chairs and bunk beds for the dormitories, and to review the new schedules that Samira had prepared for the volunteers on cemetery watch.

  He glanced out the window of the call center at the foot traffic on Jaffa Street. He’s out there somewhere. The thought gave him some comfort. Somewhere in the Holy City, the Hidden Messiah waited with formidable patience. Waited for what exactly—a phone call from Elijah?

  Yosef peered at the cubicles of the call center and an idea popped into his mind. If the Messiah was truly out there, Yosef might be able to find him.

  CHAPTER 20

  Noga pushed through the glass doors of the Frank Sinatra cafeteria at the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, and hoped that she was wrong. Terribly wrong.

  In 2002, Arab terrorists detonated a bomb in the crowded cafeteria during summer examination season, killing six women and three men, and injuring a hundred. The materials in Noga’s bag were explosive in a different sense, but soon they would shake up the entire Middle East.

  She scanned the faces of the students who held trays while they waited in the buffet line, but she found no sign of her lunch date. No surprises there; Noga had arrived ten minutes early.

  Finding a quiet spot at the end of the cafeteria, she laid her shoulder bag on the table and watched the younger students. She had come a long way since her lonely campus years. Finally, she had completed her research and found a guy. She loved her life. Contentment fluttered within reach. But the data in her bag threatened to crush that life underfoot.

  The doors of the cafeteria opened and a couple of students entered. The guy with messy hair laughed as he spoke to a girl with glasses and shoulder-length curls. They collected trays and got in line.

  Acid churned in Noga’s stomach and she couldn’t think of food. She had hardly eaten last night during her celebratory dinner with Eli at 1868, a gourmet restaurant on King David Street. She had not told him about the anomaly in her research results. Information could be dangerous in the wrong hands and she did not want to trigger a relapse.

  That’s why I landed up here, in the hospital, Eli had told her in the secret garden. To meet you! The man who had spoken was not the Eli she loved, but the madman she had fled. He had claimed that Noga was part of God’s grand plan for the End of Days. Now the data in her bag seemed to support those grandiose claims and Noga did not want to add fuel to that fire.

  But how else could she explain the data? Empirical facts didn’t lie. She had pored over the results, trying to find her mistake. If she could only convince herself that she was wrong, then her new, perfect life would survive another day.

  A woman in a white blouse and practical brown trousers sat down beside her. “Noga, dear.” Hannah dropped her satchel on the third seat and reached out her hand.

  That was Hannah. Never a kiss or a hug, only the formality bred from years of competing in a male-dominated academia. No makeup either, only cold hard facts and a dab of old perfume.

  “I’m starved,” Hannah said. “Let’s get some food.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll pass.”

  Hannah shrugged and joined the line. She returned with a tray of spaghetti bolognaise, a bottle of sparkling water, and a plastic saucer of red Jell-O for dessert.

  “And the winner is?” she said, and laughed. She sliced her pasta into neat parallel lines like a plowed field, and the sagging skin at her jaw trembled as she gobbled her food. “I remember the day I compiled the results of my doctoral thesis. Those days were different. No emails and attachments, just pages and pages of notes. Calculations by hand. We even did some of the testing on ourselves—don’t tell a soul. A drop of this here, a sprinkle of that there. Thank the gods for the lab. And computers!” She shoveled another mouthful of spaghetti. “But I won’t bore you with all that. Nu?” she prompted her student. “Does our Y-chromosomal Aaron exist?”

  “On the whole, yes. But I found something else. Something unexpected.”

  Hannah’s jowls wobbled, her fork suspended in the air. “Significant?”

  She meant statistical significance. “Yes.” Noga reached into her bag for the printouts and laid the sheets on the table.

  Hannah glanced at the line charts and squinted at the labels. She stopped chewing. Then she put down the cutlery and studied the pages in both hands.

  She gave Noga a sharp, suspicious look. “Is this some kind of prank?”

  “No, of course not. I found it hard to believe too. That’s why I wanted t
o check with you first.”

  Hannah stared at the sheets again. “Do you have the raw data with you?”

  Noga pulled out her laptop, nudged it from hibernation, and turned the screen to face her professor. Hannah jabbed at the mouse pad and scrolled through the rows of figures.

  Five torturous minutes later, Hannah pushed aside her half-eaten meal and sagged in her chair. Noga had never seen her mentor look so lost.

  “Gods, Noga,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”

  A pent-up breath burst through Noga’s lips. She had not misread the data. But if the results were accurate, they only raised more questions.

  “Hannah, how can this be?”

  “Beats me. But one thing’s for sure—this will change our world forever.”

  A shiver ran down Noga’s spine. Change our world forever. She had heard those words before. The man who spoke them had ranted about the approaching Redemption and how she, Noga, had a role to play. But that man no longer existed. Noga had seen to that.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Do you mean to tell me,” said Fievel, the Russian with the tidy parting, greasy mustache, and old-fashioned accent, “that you speak into the little box, and your friend will hear you across the street?”

  Irina stood before a dozen students and held up her cellular phone for display. “Or on the other side of the world,” she said.

  “Without wires?” the man said. “Astonishing!”

  He used archaic Russian words and a peculiar sentence structure that Irina now associated with the late nineteenth century. Fievel had fled the pogroms that had swept over the Pale of Settlement after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II only to die of malaria in the swamps of Ottoman Palestine.

  Irina taught the course every morning in a classroom at the Absorption Center down the corridor from the Dry Bones Society. The number of participants grew each session, and many of the recent new arrivals spoke the old brand of Russian. Some had yet to change out of the white spa gowns issued to them by the DBS volunteers who picked them up at the cemeteries and street corners of Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safed. The newly resurrected were easy to spot.

  Irina couldn’t decide what surprised the arrivals more: their new lease on life or how drastically the world had changed. Modern technology seemed to them like black magic, and some of the poor souls had required a lot of convincing to get them to board the shuttle bus.

  The educational classes at the Society included Transportation (or “how to cross the street”), a crash course on Modern Hebrew, and her current class, Technology, during which Irina displayed the wonders of mobile phones, televisions, and computers. Most had trouble wrapping their minds around the Internet, a topic that she now left for her advanced course.

  “That’s all for today,” she declared. “Time for lunch.”

  They filed into the new mess hall. Savta Sarah stood beside the tables of steaming food, as the hungry students helped themselves to disposable plates and cutlery and piled on stuffed cabbage, meatballs, baked chicken, and, of course, goulash. The arrivals had no difficulty at all appreciating her cooking.

  They’d be OK, all of them. With time, they would adjust to their new world. They would learn a trade and make friends. Some would find love. And soon, if the merger with Gurion’s Upward party worked out, they would each receive a shiny new identity card as a graduation gift.

  Irina joined the line, filled her plate, and found an empty table.

  One poor soul would never graduate. Two months after Irina’s return, she still remembered nothing of her former life. She had stopped studying the eyes of strangers for that flash of recognition. With no history and no name, she’d remain in the limbo of the Absorption Center forever. Her past was a sealed tomb and so she looked to the future, but forging a future with no past felt like reaching for the heavens with no solid ground beneath her feet.

  Savta Sarah sat down at Irina’s table. As usual she had not dished up for herself. “Nu? Any luck?”

  “Nope. I’m still Irina.”

  Moshe Karlin’s grandmother-in-law tutted. “Any boyfriends?” She had a way of getting to the point, and Irina liked her straightforward approach.

  She shook her head. During her first weeks, she had grown close to Moshe and even nursed the hope that they would become more than friends. But Moshe loved his wife and Irina had stood down. She wasn’t the kind to break up a family anyway; she’d have to build a life of her own. How? She had no idea. With luck, she’d find love the way that Moshe had with Galit—at first sight across a crowded room.

  “I could make a few inquiries for you,” Savta said. When Irina chuckled, she added, “I’ve made a few matches in my time. You’re a pretty young woman. You’ll be easy. Gita was a different story. Did I tell you how I set her up?”

  “No,” Irina said. She was about to find out.

  “Gita had buck teeth and a lazy eye. Her sister, Bluma, however, was a rare beauty. Their mother, my cousin, passed away when they were young girls—her health never recovered after the War.”

  The War, Irina had learned, was how Savta referred to the Holocaust.

  “Bluma would have no problem finding a man, but Gita, what would become of her? Doctor Schneider’s son was a decent young man and a medical student at the Hebrew University. So I made an appointment at Doctor Schneider’s visiting rooms and took along both Gita and her pretty sister. ‘Doctor Schneider,’ I said. ‘Your son is such a fine young man. Surely he would be interested in meeting one of my lovely nieces?’ I put Bluma up front. The doctor agreed to send his son over to our home the following evening. Bluma, regrettably, was not able to join us that day.” Savta winked. “She had an urgent meeting far away. But two weeks later, Gita and the young doctor-to-be were engaged.”

  Savta chuckled at her own audacity.

  “Thanks, Savta. But I’m in no rush.”

  Savta shrugged and looked over her shoulder. Another group of hungry students had arrived in the dining hall, and she bustled off to feed them.

  Irina finished her meal and dropped the disposable plate in a large bin at the door.

  She had fifteen minutes until her next class, so she headed for the call center to contact the Ministry of the Interior and double-check the arrangements for Sunday. The press conference would be larger than the first and they still had to work out the finer details of how to determine the identities of people long dead. The paperwork would be a challenge.

  As she stepped into the corridor, she noticed a man standing outside the Dry Bones Society and staring at the lettering on the door. Tattoos covered his muscular arm—a circle of Russian characters around a Star of David—and his hair fell to his back in a loose ponytail. An unexpected thrill flared in her core. Now there was an interesting story waiting to be heard.

  He turned as she approached and held out her hand. “Dabro pah-zhah-lah-vaht,” she said. Welcome.

  He turned to her and his lips parted. His eyes widened and his skin turned as white as paper.

  “I’m Irina,” she said, when he didn’t respond. The newly resurrected often expressed shock and signs of disorientation, but she had yet to meet one with tattoos.

  The introduction seemed to break the spell. He shook her hand. His grip was strong but cold.

  “Are you OK?” she said.

  “Have we met before?” he asked.

  That thrill flared again. Not a spark of recognition—as far as she remembered, she had never met the man before—but perhaps something else? Like an electric current, Moshe had said of the moment he had first spotted Galit across a crowded Jerusalem nightclub. He had walked up to her and they had hit it off with an exchange of witty banter.

  Irina couldn’t think of anything witty to say now. The best she could come up with was, “Now we have.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Alex washed his face in the bathroom sink. His hands trembled. He had asked for the men’s room as soon as the girl led him into the Dry Bones Society. Otherwise, he would
have fallen apart.

  The girl lives!

  Months ago he had received a call with that information but he had not believed the report. Knowing what he knew—having done what he had—how could he? The informant had not lied. But how could this be?

  Mandrake had sent him to learn the magic tricks of this Dry Bones Society, and Alex had drawn the expected foregone conclusion. The dead never came back. These so-called resurrected people were collaborators in a large-scale hoax. But now the girl had turned everything he knew about the world on its head. This was no parlor trick.

  Irina was no lookalike, either, or secret identical twin. Alex knew people, what they were feeling and thinking, often better than they knew themselves. He used this sixth sense to great effect for the Organization and his special talent was why Mandrake had selected him to sniff out the Society. Alex had known the girl well—perhaps too well—and this Irina tilted her head the same way, spoke with the same voice, and bore the same beauty spot on the side of her neck. No. This was no sleight of hand.

  She remembers nothing. Not even her name. The informant had gotten that right as well. If she had remembered him, she would have fled the moment she had set eyes on him.

  Was she planning to avenge herself? Was she holding her cards close to her chest, drawing him into a trap? After what she had experienced, he wouldn’t blame her. But he dismissed the theory. Although he had almost fainted at the sight of her, the girl had seemed almost glad to meet him, and few people could control their visceral reactions so completely.

  No, only one explanation remained—she truly didn’t remember him. Good for her. But lost memories might resurface, and if they did…

  His shoulders twitched, and he doubled over. Thankfully, he had the bathroom to himself. He splashed water on his face again and stared at the tough guy in the mirror. Get a hold of yourself!

  He needed to go out there again, look her in the eye, and decide how much she really knew. If she remembered even a bit of her old life, he knew what Mandrake would command. Would he be able to go through that again? The first time had bent him, and driven him into semi-retirement. A second might break him for good.