by Alan Gold
“Understand me, son. If I give you an injection and you suffer an allergic reaction, it could be very dangerous for you. Now, Bilal, for your own sake, tell me: Are you allergic to antibiotics? Yes or no?”
“Why bother?” asked Dorit in Arabic. “If it kills him, it kills him. Seventy-two virgins! Inshallah! Right, kid?”
Suddenly confused, Bilal turned to the policewoman, then to the doctor. And he could feel fear rise inside him. How had it all gone so wrong? The imam’s plan had been meticulous. Before he set out, he’d been blessed. He’d been told that he was going to be a shahid and his rewards would be in the afterlife. But now he was in a Jew hospital surrounded by Jews speaking Arabic—his language—getting ready to use a knife. He’d been told they took organs to sell on the black market and used the blood of Arab children to make their bread. Or was it Christian blood? The morphine that the ambulance officer had given him had made him feel secure and happy until now. Suddenly fear was taking over.
“Fuck you!” he sneered at the two Jews in front of him.
Dorit shrugged and nodded to Yael. “I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be in the cafeteria. He’s going nowhere. Here are the keys to the handcuffs; just make sure that he’s properly anesthetized before you undo them.” She slipped them into the doctor’s gown pocket. Then she and the ambulance man left the cubicle.
Yael watched them go, then turned her attention to the kid.
“Okay, Bilal. As I said before, I’m Yael. I’m a trauma surgeon. You’re going into the theater now, and I’ll remove the bullets and stitch up the damage they’ve done. From the bleeding and your blood pressure, I think they’ve probably hit some minor arteries, but not major ones, so you’re lucky. We’ll take a blood sample, cross-match you for compatibility, and then tomorrow morning you’ll wake up feeling drowsy.”
Bilal turned his face away and clenched his eyes against the pain. Yael deftly inserted the needle and within moments his eyelids relaxed as he slipped back into unconsciousness. Yael continued to examine his wounds as the nurses swabbed and then inserted lines into his arm for the anesthetic and painkillers, and a tube into his penis to collect his urine. And as she looked carefully at the wound in his arm, Yael saw that Bilal’s left hand was tightly clamped. Now that he had drifted into narcotized sleep, she forced his hand open, concerned that it might be hiding some form of explosive. But it was just full of dust and debris, presumably from the tunnel where he’d exploded the detonator cap.
Yael picked up a metal bedpan and brushed the stones and dust from his hand. As the debris fell, she heard the clank of something solid hitting the metal bowl. Sifting through the debris, she found that it wasn’t a rock at all but some kind of colored stone, maybe marble, the size of a large pebble, with faded writing on it. She picked it up, dusted it, and held it close.
It was obviously old—very old. She blew on what she now observed was a semiprecious stone, possibly quartz or lapis. She took a bottle of distilled water and squeezed a thin jet of liquid over the face of the object, which revealed the glassy, iridescent original. The fluid exposed ancient words and symbols, but the comatose body of Bilal in front of her made her slip the stone into her pocket.
She noticed the theater nurse looking at her strangely. “What was that?” she asked.
Without consciously choosing to lie, Yael found herself answering, “What? Um, nothing.”
The nurse gave her a curious look, but Yael quickly returned her attention to Bilal. She knew the theater nurse was a stickler for rules but hoped that she wouldn’t question a senior surgeon.
As she set her hands to work checking Bilal’s vitals and intravenous line, she felt her ire rise once more. This kid had tried to kill innocent people praying at the Western Wall. Those people would have been Orthodox Jews, devout and dedicated. In truth, she didn’t have much time for ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Haredi, and she never prayed herself. God was a faraway and unprovable abstract idea to her scientific mind. Her culture and her country were Western and modern and she didn’t like the direction in which the hard-line ultra-religious Jews were dragging Israel. But that was politics, not blood and murder, and she bit her lip and concentrated on saving Bilal’s life.
Ensuring that he was now prepped for surgery, she readied herself for scrubbing up and entering the theater. But before she left the prep room, she glanced out the window. She saw in the distance the panorama of the Old City, resplendent and eternal within its ancient stone walls. There was the Muslim golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock, built on top of where once stood the Jewish temples of Solomon and of Herod; there the Tower of David and there the gray-blue dome of the Christians’ Church of the Holy Sepulcher, beside the Via Dolorosa, route of the Jewish Christ’s last agony. Three of the holiest sites to the three great monotheistic religions, dedicated to peace and harmony and the love of the Almighty; yet the site of some of the greatest crimes of humanity committed by fervent men in the name of a peace-loving god.
And she looked at Bilal, the latest fanatic in the army of madmen who believed in their absolute right to kill all those who disagreed with them. It was her job as a secular, nonreligious Jew—a doctor trained to the highest levels of professionalism in one of the world’s greatest hospitals—to ensure that he didn’t die. She felt aware of the strangeness and stupidity of it all as she felt in her pocket for the key to his handcuffs. And as she did, her fingers found the semiprecious stone she’d retrieved from Bilal’s clenched fingers.
* * *
October 17, 2007
IN ANY OTHER CITY it would have caused people to turn and stare. But in Jerusalem it was part of the tapestry of Israel, a country where Jews of many different sects walked side by side with Christians of all colors and creeds representing a plethora of beliefs, watched by Muslims resolute in the belief that their version of the Prophet’s heritage was the truth. And all of these zealous believers were ignored by thousands of irreligious men and women wearing the latest fashions, speaking on their iPhones, or engaged in heated discussions about politics or current events.
So when a middle-aged man wearing a business suit and a white shirt open at the neck sat on a park bench with another man dressed like the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century denizen of the backstreets of a Polish village, in the uniform of the ultra-religious Jews known as Haredi, few turned and stared. Those who did were hardly surprised by the elderly rabbi’s clothes or by the other man’s strip of white hair that ran from his crown to the back of his head, surrounded by graying hair on his temple, making him look as though he had a skunk sitting on his head.
The two men nodded as they spoke, their heads close together to the point of almost touching, and from a distance it looked as though they were whispering in each other’s ears.
They were seated on a bench in the middle of Sacher Park, one of the most popular green spaces in Jerusalem. The park—a long and thin stretch of verdant sanctuary separating the suburbs of Nachlaot and Rechavia, and close to the center of government power in the Knesset and the Supreme Court—was a magnet for families, lovers, and workers on their lunchtime break.
But neither Eliahu Spitzer, dressed like a twenty-first-century business executive, nor Reb Shmuel Telushkin, in the black hat and frock coat of the ultra-religious Jew, was there because it was lunchtime, and certainly not because of any notion of passing the time of day. The two men, one in his late fifties and the elderly rabbi in his late seventies, were discussing the recent attempt to destroy the Western Wall, the Kotel of King Herod’s Temple, and Bilal’s failed attempt to kill a dozen Jews in particular.
“And?” asked the rabbi.
“Too early to say,” said Spitzer, deputy director of the Arab Affairs department for Israel’s internal security agency, Sherut haBitachon haKlali, or Shin Bet, as it was known to spy agencies throughout the world. Not many outside of Israel knew of Shin Bet, though its high-profile sister organization, Mossad, responsible for external security, was famous and feared by terrorists. But Isr
ael had just as many people wanting to kill Jews inside the country and its territories as it did in the rest of the world.
Spitzer unscrewed the cap on his bottle of water and swallowed a mouthful. The elderly rabbi watched him with careful eyes.
“But do you think he could have got through?” asked the old man.
Eliahu shook his head. “He wasn’t meant to. The police and the guards knew about him. The death of the guard was my miscalculation.”
The old rabbi sighed. “The boy remains alive.”
“True,” said Eliahu. “I had a man there to finish the task, but there was no opportunity.”
“This was not how it was meant to be.” The rabbi waggled a reproachful finger at Spitzer.
“The boy knows nothing.”
“But while he’s alive, Eliahu, he remains a threat to us.”
“It will be taken care of,” Spitzer told the rabbi, who simply shrugged and got slowly to his feet.
They parted, the rabbi to get a taxi back to Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox part of Jerusalem where he lived, Eliahu Spitzer to stroll back to his office ten blocks away.
He walked slower these days than before his massive heart attack three years earlier. Had he been less fit, there’s no doubt that the infarction would have killed him. But as a Shin Bet field operative, he was strong, healthy, and muscular. His problem was the fatty meats he ate and the diet of cigarettes smoked during a stress-laden day secretly convincing Palestinian youths to become covert Israeli agents.
The heart attack had been caught before it was catastrophic and the quintuple bypass saved his life. Few outside his circle of friends and family would have known of his brush with death; the only outward sign had been the stripe of white hair on top of his head, where once it had been gray and black.
As he approached the Knesset building, he shook his head in sadness. He’d once so admired Israeli democracy that he’d brought his fourteen-year-old daughter, Shoshanna, there so that he could explain the Byzantine ways of Israel’s parliament to her. As he walked past the building, the hideous memory train restarted. Kissing her good-bye at the bus stop, seeing her climb on board with her other excited friends contemplating a school trip to the Dead Sea and Masada, her angelic face in the window waving him and his wife good-bye, turning and heading toward their car to drive home, the massive explosion that had blown them off their feet and deafened them. The screams, feet pounding, parents hysterical, Eliahu trying to claw people out of the way to get to the bus—and the anger and hatred and sorrow and grief that became their lives forever after.
But it was a memory train that he had to drive, to control, or it would take control of him. So he did what his psychiatrist had trained him to do: he forced himself to think of Shoshanna as a child in their garden, digging with him as he planted a vegetable patch, and sitting on his knee, hugging him as he read her Dr. Seuss. And the train slowed and came to a halt as he smiled at the warmth of his beloved Shoshanna and walked past the walls where great Jewish temples had once stood, back to his office.
* * *
942 BCE, the month of Elul
THE SHUFFLE OF SANDALS on the stone behind him told the king that somebody was approaching. He knew who it was. There was no need for him even to turn. The smell of incense on the man’s tunic told him enough.
“Three years I’ve been waiting. Must I wait any longer?”
Azariah, the high priest, responded calmly, well used to such frustrated ranting from the king. “The king of Tyre has agreed to the supply of wood from Lebanon and craftsmen for the new temple, Your Majesty, but the old fox didn’t make their time of arrival known.”
Solomon’s eyes remained fixed on the mountain before him.
“Only the men of Jerusalem know how to cut the stone. Massive stones for my temple. But such work needs timber and labor. And so I am kept waiting.”
The king turned suddenly to face his priests. The lesser priest cast his eyes to the stone floor. The high priest looked steadily at Solomon.
“God and his temple are kept waiting for want of trees,” Solomon sighed. Then he cursed under his breath. He looked out into the distance, away from the sight of the proposed temple. Watchmen had been standing on the tops of five mountains running into the distant northwest toward Lebanon, armed with polished discs of metal to reflect the sun’s rays one to the other and send a warning, long in advance, of the arrival of the woodworkers from Sidon and Tyre, with their tools and implements and the vast amount of cedar he would need for the construction.
Solomon closed his eyes and imagined he could already hear the sounds of construction: of the cutting of the wood with saws and adzes; of the chipping of the stone blocks to ensure a precise fit, one abutting the other; of the polishing and sanding of the roughness so that it was perfect.
“The delay is costing me a fortune. Every day, every week, every year the temple remains unfinished means I am a lesser king in the eyes of those on our borders. We lose trade, respect, and money.”
The high priest suppressed a sneer. “The temple is for the glory of our god, Yahweh, Solomon. It will be built when I say it will be built, and not a moment before or after. And when it is built, my king, it will be on land that is clean for Jews to stand upon, pristine for the use of the Lord. It will be perfect. We will fire clay into beautiful tiles and they will line the inner sanctum in which will reside the most holy of holies, the Aron Kodesh, the Ark of the Covenant, the agreement made between Father Moses and his people in the Sinai. All of these things, my king, will come to pass when I say that the time is right. But one thing I tell you, Solomon, and that is that no Israelite will set foot on that terrible place until the men of Lebanon have pulled down the hated temple and I have cleansed it with our sacred rituals. Not one Israelite, Majesty!”
Solomon looked at his high priest in anger but knew that if he were to move against him, Azariah would bring the entire priesthood crashing down on his head, and then the people would revolt. So, despite his power, he felt at that moment like the most powerless of kings.
But how could he wait longer for what he most desired? For years the Ark had been a site of veneration and worship, but in a temporary house; now, soon, it would have its own home. Then the Lord God of Israel would have His own dwelling place, His Shekinah, and He would be pleased. And Solomon would be pleased and more trade would begin, and Solomon’s prestige would expand.
“I should just send my soldiers up to the mount and pull the foul thing down with ropes and iron,” Solomon said in anger and weariness.
“My lord, I will curse any Israelite who steps onto that land. You know this cannot be so,” said Azariah. “The sons of Zadok the Blessed have decreed the land profane. No Hebrew is to set foot on the mountain until strangers have destroyed its blasphemy—”
Solomon cut him off. “Stone by stone, pebble by pebble, until the mountain is again bare and naked before the eyes of the Lord. All I have to do is command, and it will be done!”
Azariah shook his head wearily. “That is not the way, my king. The ground must be cleansed. God has willed it so.”
“And it seems you have the monopoly on God’s will.”
But despite his rebuke that bordered on blasphemy, Solomon knew that the high priest was right: for though he was beloved by his people and admired for his wisdom, all of the Hebrew people would obey the high priest. The power of the priesthood’s curses for those who transgressed held more sway than all the whips and swords in Solomon’s army.
He had waited with growing impatience for years, and his many wives kept chastising him, reminding Solomon that he was the king, that all knelt before him, and that it was his right to order the priests to obey his commands. And the most vociferous of all, the wife who complained long and loud in his ear, was his lesser wife, Naamah the Ammonite. He had been pressured into marrying her by her father, Harun, the king of Ammon, who wanted a political alliance, and in the many years they’d been married, she had proven herself time and aga
in as a wildly seductive and adventurous woman. No matter how many women were available to him, somehow Naamah was always close to his bed when it was time for him to retire.
And it was Naamah, more than any other, who had urged him to pull down the pagan temple and rebuild it as God’s house, no matter what the cursed priests threatened. But Solomon was not that naïve.
Shaking off his thoughts, Solomon looked at the man who stood beside the high priest, a man named Ahimaaz. Why his daughter Basmath had married him, he couldn’t understand: the man was short of stature, had a ridiculous giggle, and rarely said anything interesting. The king seemed as though he were about to renew the discussion but stayed his words and dismissed the two priests; he would win no arguments with them today, and diminutive priests like Ahimaaz were not worth the expenditure of breath. Instead he returned to his brooding over the pagan temple, starkly outlined by the cold but brilliant moon.
* * *
AHIMAAZ AND AZARIAH, the two priestly brothers, walked in silence through the streets of the sleeping city. Ahimaaz, as a junior priest, would return to his modest house low down on the hill on which the city of Jerusalem was built, and Azariah, as high priest, would be headed to a palace just below that of King Solomon. But for now they walked together.
Ahimaaz had grown up in awe of the seeming brilliance, knowledge, and worldliness of his older brother. But as they walked he found himself questioning the wisdom of Azariah’s words.
He said softly, “Forgive me for saying this, Azariah, but I don’t think you should have spoken to Solomon like that. He will become annoyed and it could go against us.”
Azariah didn’t bother looking at Ahimaaz before saying, “And how would you have spoken to him?”
“I would have explained to him the reasons we’re not allowing anybody to build the temple until it’s been cleansed.”
